A plot of land that’s already zoned for the heaviest of industrial activities, is across the street from a dump, 3 miles from an airport, 16 miles from a nuclear generating station, and in a region with good climate, and no water crunch is a pretty good place for a data center.
Facts don’t matter, it’s a religious fight. Even if you provide numbers specific to the local area there’s no way to pierce the rhetoric.
Too much land? I added up lol the land used by the 10+ golf courses in the area. Dwarfs the proposal.
Too much water? I called the head of the parks department and asked them how much water the golf courses that they operate use each year. Massive.
Regional electricity costs going up? Our nuclear generating station already sells 80-85% of all power generated wholesale to other markets.
Data centers are loud? I measured the noise outside of my house. I live on a busy street. It was much louder than the viral videos going around Facebook with titles like “Data center noise from my porch SCARY MUST WATCH”.
I don’t know about all proposed data centers everywhere, but the one they’re eyeing to build in my backyard is fine by me.
I lived in Northern Virginia for years. Data centers are everywhere.
It’s really hard to explain that centers aren’t bad and are actually far more efficient than the alternatives. Just don’t run them on coal, natural gas, or the souls of orphans. And don’t rely exclusively on evaporative cooling if it’s in the desert.
They’re having fun treating tech people like villains. It was the same or worse with bankers back in 2008-2010. Anything I have to say, any data provided, any comparisons made, are biassed because I “use data centers”. When I explain that they use data centers as well, I get the finger.
When I talked to an anti data center family member who runs a local Facebook news group (5,000+ subscribers) they just kept sending me Google AI summaries as counter points… My god. I don’t even use gen AI.
People want to enjoy the benefits of progress and data centers while still being loudly “moral”. All of this on TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube. How many data centers are involved to get a post from poster to viewer? 2? 3? 8?
This isn't about efficiency, power, water, or fire. AT ALL.
Massive amounts of people have their jobs and livelihood threatened. The datacenters, which are enabling that, are being deployed in their neighborhoods while everyone in that neighborhood goes jobless. There is no plan of relief in the form of better economic policy, UBI, less taxation of actual humans, or anything else. That is the real crux of what is being fought.
I think it’s a topic that’s scary to many and this datacenter-to-be, or the local banker, just happens to be what they can easily protest.
Literally anything that they could build there other than a data center would have a greater negative impact on the environment and a far less positive economic impact.
I could build a concrete crushing plant there.
No, I feel a great deal of empathy for and solidarity with my neighbors. Enough that I’ll argue for acting in our self-interest even if it’s unpopular.
And what do you do when your neighbors are being mislead? When their fears, anxieties, and hardships are being exploited by demagogues attempting to consolidate their power by whipping them up into an unthinking emotional frenzy?
For this region, for this site, the property tax boon from a data center would far outweigh any negative impacts and any other industrial activity would be more harmful to the environment and less beneficial to the community.
I’m one person. I vote yes. Everyone gets a vote as well. I’m going to make my case.
All for rezoning golf courses too
Oh, and datacenters alone shouldn't even make electricity more expensive, because rates are regulated. The state regulators have to approve rate raises. Now, are the regulators a bunch of stooges captured by the utilities who always do their bidding? Probably! But that's a good reason to throw your corrupt state politicians out of office and hopefully run them out of town on a rail -- not to protest datacenters.
Is this supposed to scare me or something? I can't even fathom the actual point you are trying to make if it doesn't involve me having an emotional response to this statement.
the people who make this true are the same people who oppose the data centers. if they just let people build solar and data centers neither of those things would be true.
in b4 the 'apples and oranges' cope
I’m putting things into perspective for people who are terrified that the last drops of their potable water and going to be used to generate a meme video.
The data center in question in Utah was marketed as a 9GW full build out natural gas facility more than twice the electrical generation of the ENTIRE STATE.
People believing they are entitled to dictate what other people do with their property, or believing they should have some say in the "character" of their neighborhood that involves non-public land just doesnt make any sense to me.
Why do people think that because they have a house somewhere they should get the ability to freeze an entire town in time and disallow anyone to build anything. Seriously, where did this mindset come from?
Just because I own the land does not mean I can open an abattoir next to an elementary school.
Using land in different ways results in externalities that affect those around it.
The people of a community should have some right to protect themselves from those externalities. How that happens in practice is a deeply flawed, messy, ugly process, but collectively deciding where to draw the line is part of living together as a community.
BTW, no one I know gives a shit about the energy consumption or water usage. They absolutely want to know if these datacenters will bring jobs to their area. So far Altman, Ellison, O'Leary, Amodei, Pichai, and Zuckerberg have refused to answer that question.
[0] All except Jensen who has been really trying to explain the benefits of AI and has said these massive layoffs are a huge mistake.
They do when the knowledge of the resource consumption is paired with "Which will directly lead to your electric/gas bill going up."
People are also paying attention to the fact that the politicians aren't paying attention to the people. Nobody is even trying to sell the benefits of a datacenter in people's backyard. Instead, politicians are bending over backwards to eliminate any possible benefit by giving these datacenters permanent tax breaks.
When you have politicians clearly bought by businessmen who don't care about the communities that elected them. It's a bit of a no brainer that they'd be voted out.
* The lack of care of governments of the people's will: they're opposed nearly everywhere but city governments get them done anyway, oftentimes while ignoring more important local problems
* The intrusion of the wealthy/big tech into people's lives. Large tech companies tend to be like insurance companies: they just appear out of the ether of daily life, and make your life worse.
* The ongoing selling out of America to the wealthy: the rich can do, buy, or build whatever they want. Regular people have to just deal with it.
I'm just saying a lot of these I expect we're going to start seeing more direct opposition to from local activists. And a lot of these areas have high rates of gun ownership.
I don't really agree with that. Like I agree with you that these things represent a lot of things people hate. But what they are also matters.
Amazon warehouses represent pretty much all the same things here, but people don't get mad at them because what they are is storage for products and jobs for the local community. They are things that get people their orders faster. While there are protests to Amazon warehouses, it's not to the level of data centers.
I'd argue that it's uniquely what these things are on top of what they represent. They are giant sucks of power/gas which raises local prices and spews out pollution. And their benefit to a local community is basically nothing. ChatGPT isn't appreciably better because of a gargantuan noisy pollution spewing data center next door. And that's assuming the residents use or appreciate ChatGPT.
ALL PROGRAMMERS and VIBE CODERS should use AI against itself ... vibe code systems that forces AI to pay all of us humans for our content! Without our content AI is irrelevant! Why are we giving our content/souls to it freely now so it thrives and we do not??
It's a "no." Why does anyone expect an explicit, vocalized response? It's "no" until they provide proof and guarantees otherwise. You don't need to hear them say "there are no jobs" to act as if (rather, to know) there are no jobs.
The answer to that is so obviously "no" that I wonder how much attention they've been paying.
The sheer sense of scale on this particular project is mind-boggling.
> 9 gigawatts of power—more electricity than the entire state of Utah currently uses
In a community where conservation is at the forefront of everyone's minds, planning something that big is like a slap in the face.
I'll second this observation, as well as add that apart from AI slop most people around here associate the data center push with the sudden proliferation of Flock cameras at every major intersection and along every highway. Provo defeated a major data center project that was going into an empty industrial park, arguably the kind of place that would fit that sort of development. The actual cost-benefit calculation for most people is heavily weighted towards the negative and this should not continue to surprise people. The perceived downside with no upside is just going to get worse if the government gatekeeps the most useful models.
Why worry about marginal data center costs if there is UBI? Why aren't more people demanding UBI instead of demonizing data centers? The corpus they are trained on belongs to humanity. It's humanity's data. The gains belong to all of us. Is it just American hatred of anything that seems socialist? Imagine if in the the optimistic sci fi stories someone interrupted to complain they wanted to unplug the AI so they could be the one to fill out the spreadsheets.
Like who wants to have to work at a desk anyway? Isn't there more than enough excess in this economy for all of us? Why use government to turn off the spigot rather than redirect the flow?
Losing your job means losing your livelihood and often your life for the vast majority of people.
That's not even getting into any loss of purpose or identity it might cause people. For better or for worse, working and jobs are a major part of the social fabric of society, and it would take a non-insignificant amount of time for that to change. Trying to abruptly shift that would not go well.
If you are trying to take on the hyperscalers why not push for UBI vs trying to stop the buildout? Is the former really that much more difficult than the latter? Is it even good policy beyond not wanting something in your own backyard?
I don't see why you think that. Its something that:
1) These CEOs and people with power want
2) The populace has some degree of control over, since its local politics vs national.
That makes it an attractive way to push back against powerful people that they see as operating in bad faith. It seems like their chances here are much better than trying to go directly to congress and advocating for UBI.
You have control over who you vote for. Congress is not elected nationally. Sorry I just don't see how your points make sense. You might have better success of pushing the data centers off to your neighbor. But this doesn't stop the buildout, it only gives certain neighborhoods temporary protection while economic conditions for most continue to deteriorate. Aka a false sense of security and therefore a bad idea.
> This doesn't make sense. The reason Congress is difficult is because of those same powerful people.
Its much easier to put someone who is aligned with your values into a local political position than congress. And its much more likely that your neighbors will vote in a way that aligns with your interests. And you won't get overridden by a congressman from several states away that has different incentives.
Yes, people building data centers can just shop for a new location. But resistance to data centers appears to be pretty correlated with living in communities that are good places to data center, at least anecdotally.
The world I'm looking in is one where citizens pushing back locally has seemed to get at least some measure of success, albeit spotty, whereas attempts to lobby Congress about AI has been screaming into the void. Frankly, I think your position here is completely divorced from what is actually happening in reality.
It's a bad idea. The few communities that succeed are still going to suffer the macro consequences of data centers being built in the next town over.
If there were serious macro consequences then maybe it would be an issue but from the point of view of the communities -- there aren't. Data centers don't bring a lot of permanent employment and tend to be given tax breaks. They are skeptical that data centers are the boon that these people claim they are -- and they are right to be so since people pushing these data centers have been wildly untrustworthy at best.
Saying "You can't stop it so you might as well get on board and hope that in the future you can convince shareholders/billionaires/US Congress to give you a pittance of UBI" is going to go over like a lead brick. There's no reason to trust that UBI will come if you give up any leverage you have, even if it is a minuscule amount of leverage.
I'm really not trying to be rude, but have you followed US politics or history at all? Is this a serious question? Yes, it is incomprehensibly harder to fundamentally change the fabric and structure of society, especially in a way that involves giving "free" money to people, than it is to prevent something from being built.
Trying to control something by merely protecting your own backyard never works. America has reinvented its own social contract many times, it's why we are still here 250 years later. What side would you have been on in the lead up to the civil war? The nothing ever happens side? Or civil rights? Or the New Deal? The world wars?
America has changed profoundly since the founding. Yes change is hard. So is a nation surviving for 250 years. The point is why politically agitate for a mid outcome. American politics is frequently defined by its aspirational nature. Have you read the founding documents? I mean I don't mean to be rude.
At least in the US, the public simply does not trust that the United States government will consider such a thing. They won't even consider universal healthcare. No-one is going to go "OK we trust you, you can build your data-centers now and we'll talk about UBI once you've 'disrupted' our jobs."
Yes, a bunch of CEOs are making the rounds talking about it, but talk is cheap. Even if that talk is directed at congress. Have any of them even cleared the flow bar of funding research into how it'd work and what the policy would look like?
Step 1: tax the living bejeebers out of the companies, executives, and boards talking about replacing people with AI
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Utter utopia
Not everything is Venezuela or the Soviet Union.
It doesn't have to be. Social cohesion and not having to work are already major benefits.
UBI is already premised on the fact that top earners will have to give something up if UBI is going to make sense. I've been relatively blessed, but I know no one's future is guaranteed. Thinking one has to only best accrue their own pile in a world of disruption doesn't make sense. Eventually the Bastille gets stormed. Why not get ahead of it and avoid the terror? Why burn the data center?
Is that what you’re also looking at? Or objecting to the rewards rightly earned for bringing such advances to so many people’s lives?
The wealthy always skew the rules to favor themselves, e.g. US capital gains being taxed at a lower rate than labor. The global standard of living has been going up but could be even higher if wealth was distributed more justly.
the environmental impacts is the only thing people actually care about, you are quite off base here. noise, proximity to housing, water usage, energy prices going up in the area. this is the core issue. not "will ai replace my job"
UBI is going to get us a lot more artists of all kinds.
I think the tech bros want to replace artists also
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bezos-water-consumption-ai...
> people on UBI are also rather useless
The point of life is not “that you be useful to the wealthy”.
It's complete speculation! It's the new gold rush and everyone wants a data center. Most of these data centers might not even be built! And the ones that are, might never make any profit.
All of this would go away overnight if we taxed carbon.
Do you trust these tech bros to be truthful?
> Just south of the Tennessee-Mississippi state line sits dozens of unpermitted gas turbines that power xAI’s Colossus 2 data center while releasing smog-forming pollution, soot, and hazardous chemicals like formaldehyde. The tech company set up the de facto power plant with no permits, no public input, and no notice to nearby communities that will have to deal with the consequences.
https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...
being the key phrase. Until we get to that long term, the less price sensitve buyer can buy up all available goods.
for example, all of the gas turbines needed to generate electricity.
so it is impossible to invest in capacity for non-datacenter uses, because the raw ingredients have already been bought up by the data centers.
effectively, at current rate of investment, > 90% of investment into new power generation goes to data centers. That doesn't leave much for any kind of other economic growth, since all of our economic growth depends on electricity.
And I suppose that depends on whether I die first from not having access to healthcare after AI takes my job.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.06.25329104v...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11326321/
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.24047
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.24047
And more just a Google search away.
And unfortunately, these aren't actual examples of medical progress being made. AI in some capacity is absolutely going to be helpful for medical research, but I'm still very skeptical LLMs are what is going to do it. I also do not think all the other BS coming with the current LLM wave outweighs the benefits. I think the reaction would be much different if these things weren't conflated, and if the focus of AI was towards things like medical research. As it stands, it comes off more as a coping mechanism / excuse that I do not think is convincing for most people when they see the majority of AI is used for garbage (to put it lightly).
Why not both? Why not both technological progress hand in hand with progress in human rights?
They tell us that any slowdown to progress is evil, that they are justified in their crimes because in "the future" all will be fine and dandy.
And what a beautiful future they are bringing us, with the destruction of post WW2 prosperity, increasing wealth inequality, etc etc.
Future Illinois data center tax breaks on hold - https://www.illinoistimes.com/news/future-data-center-tax-br... - June 25th, 2026
State Data Center Policy Shifts as Governors Impose New Restrictions - https://www.multistate.us/insider/2026/6/22/state-data-cente... - June 22nd, 2026
Gov. JB Pritzker suspends tax breaks for data centers, urges more discussion - https://capitolnewsillinois.com/news/gov-jb-pritzker-to-susp... - June 5th, 2026
Which States Are Banning Data Centers? - https://www.ncsl.org/fiscal/which-states-are-banning-data-ce... - June 2nd, 2026
US tax incentives for data centers by state - https://knowledge.sdialliance.org/8d367baa340046029912b1e04c...
Tax Incentives for Data Centers 50 State Survey - https://hbfiles.blob.core.windows.net/webfiles/TaxIncentives... [pdf]
I’m an AI hater and the way you describe your uses sounds cool to me and like what I imagined when I was an AI optimist in the early days. The problem is that most of what it produces is still slop, the images, videos, music, and code it generates are definitely impressive but there’s something qualitatively worse about them that I can only describe as a lack of soul. Over time in a codebase, these tools create a complete mess of complexity. Those AI generated Coca Cola ads were terrible, it was just a series of cool shots with no story. The music sounds good and interesting but it’s just missing something. The writing is technically good but the voice sounds inauthentic and there’s never anything that unique or insightful in it.
I think it’ll get better though and we’ll find ways to collaborate with it that make the most of the human and AI abilities, but it seems so overhyped right now.
Right, everyone can. So now your film-making vision is simply one infinitesimally small slice of the pie that every viewer is eating. Yes, you can make a movie by yourself. Likely no one will watch it because they're too busy watching other movies made just as cheaply but by companies with marketing budgets.
> I am getting so much more work done that I'm launching easily three times what I did prior to AI tooling.
Great. Have you ever once in your life had a real conversation with a normal person where they expressed, "Man, you know what? I wish I had way more apps on my phone."
Like, yes, there is demand for software that fills unique niches, but really we are reaching saturation.
> When we have at-home Michelin star robot chefs
Eating the world's best meal, alone, while staring at your phone.
> where our cars can drive us to the beach overnight so we wake up to sunrise on the coast
This part sounds nice. Hopefully you can find parking.
> where I can have an idea for a new take on a music player tagging algorithm and just build that without it consuming weeks of my time.
Except you don't have a music player to put that algorithm in because all of the music players are closed source. You can write an open source one (or contribute to an existing one), but those all require local libraries of music, which almost no one has. Because it's not about the software, it's about the access to content.
But, really, why even bother tagging music in the first place? Just treat the tags as prompts and generate an infinite stream of music catered exactly to your mood, on demand.
I get where you're coming from. AI is a massive force multiplier for producing content. But content isn't the point of life.
The future that AI builds is one of perfect solitary meaningless hedonism. Every itch scratched, every base desire satisfied. But there is a hollow void at the center of that. Even a pet dog will lose its mind when given endless food, treats, and toys if it doesn't have an actual person to play with, and I'd like to believe we are somewhat more cognitively sophisticated than dogs.
Think back on the best meals you've ever had. I've had some very good ones. Some were memorable because of the quality of the food. But the memories of meals I hold most dear were dinners I made myself for family, not-very-good cookies my young daughter baked for me, meals shared with friends while travelling, crappy hot dogs cooked over a campfire.
It's human connection that brings us the most lasting joy, and AI is antithetical to it.
One of the supposed benefits of true self driving cars is that you never have to find parking near where you're going ever again. Get out, send your car off to park somewhere 5 miles away.
AI is orthogonal to human connection. people like people
No two things are truly orthogonal when you have to spend time to use either of them. An hour conversing with ChatGPT is an hour of your life unavailable for talking to a human.
Even if you use these tools to create something amazing, what keeps hundreds of variations "inspired by, but totally not copied" of your creative work from popping up? As these models get cheaper and more powerful, this issue will only get worse and worse.
it is a bad argument. more accessible tools consistently lead to more creation in a positive way
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/24/ai-coding-a...
https://mimetiq.substack.com/p/the-tokenmaxxing-hangover
https://fortune.com/2026/05/28/tokenmaxxing-is-dead-companie...
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/ai-spending-roi-enterprise-...
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/big-techs-27-trill...
Released only 10 months later, a tiny open-weights model outperforms what was once SOTA. Fable and 5.6 Sol will be outperformed by laptop-class models next year.
https://www.bok.or.kr/eng/bbs/B0000354/view.do?nttId=1009840...
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/9/ai-intensifies-work/
AI Doesn't Reduce Work–It Intensifies It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46955703 - February 2026 (306 comments)
https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies...
AI Doesn't Reduce Work–It Intensifies It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945755 - February 2026 (172 comments)
AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45337253 - September 2025 (171 comments)
Seven Myths about AI and Productivity: What the Evidence Really Says - https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2025/10/seven-myths-about-ai-and-pr... - October 16th, 2025 ("Despite widespread enthusiasm for generative AI, empirical evidence reveals inconsistent productivity impacts contradicting popular assumptions. Based on recent meta-analyses and systematic reviews, we debunk seven pervasive myths about AI's workplace benefits. AI's productivity gains are highly context-dependent, varying significantly by user skill level and task complexity. Contrary to expectations, human-AI collaboration often underperforms either agent working independently, except in creative tasks. While AI can accelerate individual work, meta-analytic evidence finds no robust relationship between AI adoption and aggregate productivity gains. We call for research on context-specific organizational deployment strategies to capture genuine value.")
The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025 - https://www.artificialintelligence-news.com/wp-content/uploa... - July 2025
("extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence")
Beyond data and vibes though, I can't think of a single technology in human history that had a forced adoption quite like AI does. To the point where it should be pretty obvious to all of us that a large group of people are going to push back and be unhappy that it's disrupting their work. That doesn't mean that the people who actually like the technology wont find more productivity with it though. It's just when measured against a sea of forced adopters you'll never find a general uplifting trend. People typically don't like change.
I can afford the hardware I already have. And I can run jobs on it as I see fit. Sure, its slower than the corpo LLMs, but we're already seeing lying, silent downgrading, and advertisements, even when paying for tokens.
When your systems goes tits up or priced out, mine will still work.
God forbid people have concerns over companies out in the open talking about replacing their jobs with AI.
We frankly deserve it.
You won't have any jobs in that scenario either.
The difference is that I have more faith in China to prevent mass unemployment than I do in the US.
I wouldn't. They'll just handle it differently than we would in the US.
https://tradingeconomics.com/china/unemployment-rate - It's around 5% per this (and some other sources I found, just linking the one). The population being around 1.4 billion people, that means around 70 million unemployed. That is already mass unemployment despite having a low rate of unemployment across their national population. And that's before getting to their youth unemployment rate which is around 15%, which sets them up poorly for the future.
Allegedly.
Another groups claims false flag operation. Ain't it great?
But I absolutely believe that social media's agenda is a directed agenda.
> At the local level, the fallout was just as direct. “Do I think that the data center vote cost me the election? Yes I do,” former Box Elder County Commissioner Lee Perry said after conceding his primary race, after voting to advance the same project.
It's really no surprise at all voters hate data centers, no matter how useful they think AI might be.
But I don't think the rhetoric will end any time soon. The people saying it seem to really believe it.
this is one of the core flaws in democracy, while the popularity contest generally curbs blatant abuse (also note how even that fails miserably when the electorate groups start to hate each other), the vast majority of people have no real way to judge the impacts of non-trivial decisions and judgement doesn't even need to come with certainty, just knowing which risks are worth it. voters will never get it right.
and in the information age, democratic sabotage is many times easier than informing a public that in most cases has no interest in being informed when the group think/herd instincts are triggered.
i suspect democracy only worked well thus far because it was never truly real. media was always concentrated and there were no non-democratic peers. this is no longer the case. when the media was concentrated democracy was just an emergent properly of media dynamics. now its chaotic and subject to external perturbation.
Jump today most countries stable enough to build infrastructure are democracies and the white collar people you are demonizing do vote and that immense investment in infrastructure is not really easy to relocate.
Imagine if every AI company was a small local business run by middle class folks and there were thousands of these little companies. The total amount of data centers, water, and energy consumption is the same.
I don't think people would be anywhere near as mad then. There are still other societal externalities around AI to get mad about, sure.
But I think one of the biggest drivers of rage around AI is inequality. It's not about what is being consumed to produce AI, it's about the tiny fraction of soulless billionaire elites that benefit from it. It's about a small number of fantastically rich assholes who keep taking more and more and more while there is less and less left for everyone else.
The rage that Luigi Mangione felt is the same rage these voters feel and I believe has the same root cause. That rage won't go away if AI gets more energy efficient or stops using water.
Luigi is an interesting case because he is not who you think he is. He is definitely not a luddite or populist. I know this because I read a social deep dive on him. His interests, the books he read, the accounts he followed all point to a level of sophistication that indicates he was well above the simplistic "us vs them" Marxist framework.
I also disagree with your overall point here: its not (just) about inequality. AI benefits everyone while also benefitting the billionaires - even disproportionately. What one should definitely acknowledge is that AI is raising the floor and is not _taking_ something from poor people and giving it to the billionaires which is again applying the Marxist framework. What is true is that, even if people are overall benefitting from AI, they are feeling powerless and sense a lack of agency where they see a big societal change happening in front of their eyes and they don't have any say in it. Having no say is kinda the default so you see the backlash from the educated elites who always thought they had a voice - until the AI technology boom came.
Source?
Also, you seem to be (probably intentionally) mixing up who's an elite and who's not. The people controlling and profiting from AI companies and their ilk are elites. The average person who's livelihood is at risk is not an elite, not matter how much you may try to spin it.
All the technological innovations since humanity has had this characteristic and I don't see why AI would be different.
> Also, you seem to be (probably intentionally) mixing up who's an elite and who's not
I think it is convenient to put oneself in the non-elite bucket to justify anger at the "true" elites - the ones just above you. This is actually a well studied phenomena and almost all revolutions followed the same pattern. As an example, Soviet revolution was largely coordinated by the intellectual elite by overthrowing the Tsar who was the literal elite.
Then you should have no problem pointing to concrete examples of how it's actually improved life for the average person.
> I think it is convenient to put oneself in the non-elite bucket to justify anger at the "true" elites - the ones just above you. This is actually a well studied phenomena and almost all revolutions followed the same pattern. As an example, Soviet revolution was largely coordinated by the intellectual elite by overthrowing the Tsar who was the literal elite.
If you want to describe anyone with any education as an "elite", go ahead, but it's not convincing and is pretty anti-intellectual.
I sure am glad I'm apparently an elite and didn't know it, though! Who knew being an elite means you're barely able to make rent, will never be able to afford having children, have to forgo medical care due to the costs involved, and would be homeless within a few months if you got laid off?
As a side note, I wish we could muster this kind of vigor for just about any other type of public infrastructure project… nuclear/wind/solar power, fiberoptic internet, public high speed rail, new cities built around human-centric principles… you know, the things that the better part of the population stands to benefit from so at least the initial unrest is somewhat justified.
It doesn’t make any sense to me as the externalities are future not current and at no other point in time has the public cared about the future without first seeing concrete examples of harm. That hasn’t happened yet for data centers nor AI. It’s all “if, maybe, sometime in the future”
People will claim real harms but the connections are spotty at best. So it feels like people are stirring the pot. like if not Russia or China then just influencers doing it for rage bait for likes and subscribes
I’m not saying they are wrong, I can’t predict the future, I’m only saying it feels unusual for the reasons mentioned above
That and the other issues aside, I think AI companies have done this to themselves. They've gone around talking about replacing all human labor and becoming the companies that control robot god's that swallow the entire economy and put everyone out of work and might destroy man kind. Well saying that is gonna make people hate them and that will find an outlet somewhere
When things are stagnant, we gradually optimize our lives towards a low energy state and overfit to our exact circumstances. When a change in circumstances reveals past optimizations to be wasted work, it kick-starts the four stages of grief over the loss of that low energy state.
The question is do we want to be a Petrostate or an Electrostate
https://youtu.be/gLnxzkiB-GI?is=CHj3J-ARp0iBq_NB (Adam Tooze prezi)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
2020 - 79 : 20 (renewables : fossil fuel)
2026 - 57 : 42
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2026/04/03/americans-shi...
No other technology gets as much hatred as AI is getting as the public see that as a threat to their own jobs.
Of course techies here are having trouble understanding this backlash. Maybe they should read up a bit on the Unabomber Manifesto to draw parallels on the motivations of the awful attacks against CEOs recently.
Just like crypto, you cannot use it to solve social problems with technical solutions. The same goes for AI as it still requires humans and trust to use it effectively.
The more AI data centers get built, the more it is hated and the worse society gets with this loss of trust as more people read about more mass layoffs.
It did not feel organic at all. It's to the point now where that initial seeding of ideas has gained legitimate traction, but the initial burst of anti-datacenter content was wild to see in real time.
Regardless of what they are used for, we do not need more "data centers." This is true even outside of AI.
Putting so much of us into "the cloud" is generally harmful; encouraging people to learn about, and to do more "computing" at home -- on local machines they, or someone who cares about them, control, is better.
Neo-luddites are usually the educated elite and genealogy is from old green or left politics but includes nationalists and social conservatives.
I think media is broadly failing to recognise this new clan.
You are again doing the thing I flagged in my original comment - the left right or progressive/conservative axis is not useful anymore. As an example: a lot of tech CEO's were originally against Trump but ended up caving precisely because the left became anti-technology broadly.
From experience and anecdotes, tech and AI optimism cross cuts into the old axis. Examples
1. third world countries are way more optimistic about AI than first world
2. many celebs (for the lack of better word) are pro AI - look at Redis, Django, NodeJS, Github
3. the existence of Effective Altruism itself should prove that this axis is useless - EA was largely leftist and support democrats while also being "pro" AI like Anthropic is mostly made from the EA cult
The nomenclature also doesn't make sense to me. Why would conservatives not conserve but rather push for progress? What are conservatives conserving instead? The academic consensus is that technology determines the societal culture and if conservatives wanted to conserve anything, they would conserve technology first wouldn't they?
And ironically, your comment and views are themselves extremely simplistic. New technology is not inherently progress. Being opposed to specific applications or misuse or consequences of a type of technology is not the same as being broadly anti-technology. A "populist narrative" is an incredibly vague oversimplification, and an ironic thing to complain about in a comment that only serves to spread the pro-elite and anti-human narrative the AI corporations are currently pushing.
> And ironically, your comment and views are themselves extremely simplistic. New technology is not inherently progress. Being opposed to specific applications or misuse or consequences of a type of technology is not the same as being broadly anti-technology. A "populist narrative" is an incredibly vague oversimplification, and an ironic thing to complain about in a comment that only serves to spread the pro-elite and anti-human narrative the AI corporations are currently pushing.
Thanks for proving my point, you are emphasising the exact divide I was trying to show originally. You may try to twist the rhetoric to show that you are for slow and cautionary progress of tech. That's sensible and I don't mean to claim neo-luddites would outright deny progress itself.
> This is because there's a new political divide that makes the old left vs right obsolete: it is neo-luddites vs tech optimists.
The proposed site is twice the size of Manhattan, NY and sized for 9GW of energy which is more than the entire state uses yearly. We literally do not have the water to support a data center that huge.
They just enacted a fireworks ban because the weather people just had to create a whole new category for how dry and dangerous it is. Air quality is a constant problem because all the pollution from regions West of Utah collect right against the mountains. A few years ago we woke up to what looked like heavy fog, but it was smoke --from Siberia.
"We get a ton of money, you get increased natural gas emissions, increased unemployment, your electric bill is going up... oh and guess who's bailing us out when the bubble bursts?" Pretty rotten deal!
Did you even read the article? This is proposed to be larger than Manhattan. The amount of power will almost certainly burden Utahs grid in ways that locals will be on the hook for. So much of this build out will be the typical "privatize gains, socialize losses" playbook that yes it is an important political issue, and yes you have to "look at this spec" to understand just how insane some of these project proposals are.
This pretty much spells out exactly my big problem with datacenters. I don't care if you build a huge datacenter several miles away from my home. What I do care about is utilities cranking up the price 3x because of "capacity issues" afterwards because said datacenter now uses more power than the entire district I live in
What's not to like?