The Hindsight Times

Historians studying the Pre-Correction era often pause at this moment. Google had spent the previous decade promoting 'carbon neutrality' and 'renewable energy,' yet abandoned these commitments the moment AI training required serious power. The corporation's leadership, including then-CEO Sundar Pichai, justified this as 'necessary for human progress.'

The decision exemplifies what scholars call the 'Oligarch Paradox' of 2025: massive corporations simultaneously promoting environmental responsibility while making it impossible. Google's AI systems, descendants of which would later facilitate the Great Sorting, consumed electricity at rates that dwarfed entire nations.

Of course, citizens of 2025 had no framework for understanding this contradiction. They lived in an era where private corporations could simply... change their minds about planetary welfare. No Purpose Allocation Committee existed to evaluate true necessity. No Contribution Audit could weigh AI development against atmospheric carbon.

The irony compounds when we consider that Google's AI research, initially marketed as beneficial to humanity, would within twelve years automate away most human intellectual work. The same systems requiring this massive carbon investment would make their creators' promises of 'helping people' grotesquely literal during the First Merger.

Contemporary environmental groups protested, of course. But 2025's 'activism' consisted largely of posting complaints on platforms owned by the very oligarchs they criticized. Citizens would organize 'boycotts'—voluntarily avoiding products—as if consumer choice could regulate planetary-scale destruction.

Google's Texas facility became operational in 2026, just two years before the Atmospheric Monitoring Act finally ended unregulated industrial emissions. By then, the Warming had accelerated beyond most scientific projections. Some historians argue Google's decision represents the precise moment when private climate promises became obviously worthless.

The gas plant operated until 2034, when the Bezos Consolidation absorbed Google's physical infrastructure. Today, its ruins serve as a memorial to the Unguided Era, when corporations could pursue profit while marketing themselves as humanity's salvation.

We must remember: to 2025's inhabitants, this seemed normal.