“What is it? It’s it.” — from “Epic,” by Faith No More (1989)

Aside from the digital voting machine that swallowed my paper ballot, my trip to the polls Tuesday couldn’t have been more analog.

I stepped out the front door into a glorious, sunny spring morning, filled my nostrils with an invigorating bouquet of allergens and drove to Eagle McClure Hose Company on scenic Milwaukee Avenue in my beloved Old Forge.

I parked and strolled past neighbors and strangers advocating for candidates, politely declining campaign nail files and other outdated tokens of retail politics. I even had a pleasant exchange with electoral allergen Frank Scavo, the borough’s resident Jan. 6 insurrectionist. Frank apparently saw no irony in appearing at a place where votes are cast, counted and respected as the will of the people.

Incredibly, Frank was on the ballot as a candidate for the state Republican Committee. I am not making that up.

I asked Frank if he thought he qualified for a cut of Trump’s stupendously corrupt $1.8 billion slush fund for domestic terrorists who stormed the Capitol.

“I sure hope so,” he replied, referring to the rewards for seditious, mob criminality as reparations.

As far as I know, Frank didn’t beat any cops or smear his feces on the walls of American democracy’s most sacred shrine, so he’s probably at the back of the line.

There was no line at the polls. I was voter 33 at around 10:30 a.m. I signed my name with a pen in the paper registrar’s book and blackened a handful of ovals with old-fashioned ink.

I fed the machine my ballot, thanked the poll workers for their invaluable service to Our Republic and went on with my day. From my doorstep to the firehouse and back, the process took about half an hour and a bunch of human beings to get done. (Yes, that includes Frank. I hate what he did, but he’s a fellow child of God.)

More than any other issues, Tuesday’s election was dominated by invasive data center development and the broader, mostly negative future impacts of artificial intelligence on humans. The process itself proved that for all of technology’s advances, there is no substitute for human input.

No AI agent could have completed or experienced my trip to the polls, even if you put it inside a robotic body. I’m a human being. It’s an it, and that’s it. AI is an imitation of humanity, not the inevitable replacement the tech billionaires are so poorly selling as both the key to a limitless future and the end of civilization as we know it.

The unintended result is a renewed, rising respect and overdue celebration of humanity as an irreplaceable, endlessly redeemable resource, warts and all. Humans who seem incapable of agreeing on anything else are banding together to battle invasive data center development and push back against the bunk that humans are an antiquated, analog impediment to “progress.”

Since at least the invention of the wheel, it’s been universally understood that technology should serve humanity. The tech “broligarchs” aren’t shy about their plans to flip that script. They can’t do it without human cooperation.

I opined against electronic voting machines when they were pitched in the early aughts as a cutting-edge technological revolution for representative democracy. I endorsed the continued use of paper ballots as a backup for fear that the machines could be rigged, and that even if they couldn’t be, doubts about their security could be exploited and weaponized to undermine the results of free and fair elections.

Imagine that.

As I left the firehouse Tuesday, Frank and I traded parting barbs before he uttered something stunning:

“You’re on the right side on these data centers,” he said.

Must’ve been the human in him talking.

CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, is fiercely pro-human. How about you? Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook; and @chriskellyink on Bluesky.