I feel like another part of the panic though, is people's fears about A.I. It has been stealing jobs and causing problems for artists. Maybe not on the scale that most people think, but it is happening. And its also causing problems with learning in schools (I am married to a teacher and good friends with another so I see this through their struggles with it). So part of the equation here is that real people ARE being affected in a negative way, and lots of people see data centers as expanding a thing that has taken something meaningful away from them or a loved one.
I think that your other points on the matter are most likely true (I intend to research this myself after commenting because I want to see for myself). But I do think you need to add the above to the mix. In all of this, emotions play a strong part, but not all of them are invalid.
Yes this fear makes sense, and the comment is valid - but protestors aren't really talking about this they are just repeating bad stats (watch some of the community forums or see what's being shared online). Your broader point on fear of automation is real, we should cover that in a future post because it's a great topic. Note AI fears are way down the list when you look at things most Americans worry about - although expressed higher in certain circles for sure
You are correct that protesters tend to be screaming about the environment more than anything else. I just wanted to add a bit of nuance to the conversation, I suppose. I am definitely in the circle of people more concerned about automation, as you put it. And I feel more people should be aware of the consequences of it. But you do make a good point that I am probably in the minority in my concerns since that's not the popular thing to be outraged about right now. I see it more because of my personal connections to it. I look forward to a future post discussing these things. Thanks for the response!
I think you’re totally right and shouldn’t downplay how much existential anxiety about AI is animating these data center moratoriums. Sure people might be talking about some overblown environmental concern, but the reason they’re so receptive to those concerns is because of that existential fear. The people building these data centers aren’t giving people a proper off ramp for that (and in many cases tech oligarchs worsen this with crazy statements). Then you have people like Adam who aren’t wrong to say environmental concerns are overblown but who fundamentally don’t move the needle at all (or move it in the opposite direction) because he’s saying “You guys are overreacting stop.” Instead of saying “You’re right to be anxious, and this is what we’re doing to ensure that this technology works for us.
In general, it’s frustrating (as someone who wants to see progress) that pro-building people have no care to change the CULTURAL conversation around these issues (which everything is downstream from), and instead just cry out about how stupid these people are. Like yeah, that’s totally gonna get the data center built now!
- recent college grad who covered data center shenanigans at umich
I have tried to help the AI companies here btw (https://www.hottakes.space/p/ais-narrative-problem). But regardless of what happens data centers are important infrastructure we benefit from having more of. I don't think AI is going to cause mass unemployment any more than other forms of automation. I think in time it's going to do the busywork and free humans for the human work. Either way, progress is messy but marches on and things do get better. Ultimately I think the luddites lose, humans are a technology-powered race. And I say this even with thinking a lot of what AI makes is spam/junk (that stuff will go away eventually).
The AI companies manufactured this outrage themselves by talking about taking everyone's jobs, massive unemployment, etc. They wanted to be see as changing the world and they are, but a lot of folks like the world the way it is right now.
We'll see if it's too late to turn around the marketing of AI and make it more acceptable. If not, it's the fault of OpenAI, Anthropic, et al for creating this mess.
I appreciate you calling out the hysteria. It is true that data centers are using more and more grid power, and in some places that's definitely having an effect on rates. How the data center gets its power, how much water it uses, how much heat or noise it actually generates - these are all relevant facts and they can vary a lot.
The useful distinction here is between legitimate scrutiny and panic as a business model. Data centers absolutely deserve real questions about water, power, grid planning, and local incentives — but fake temperature claims and reflexive anti-building sentiment make the public less informed, not more protected. We keep saying we want abundance and then treating the physical infrastructure of abundance like a moral contamination event.
There are a lot, more than you think, of people with cush upper middle class jobs that don't do much that would not be replaced by AI. 90% of HR could be replaced. I don't need a poet laureate to write my reorg email, or click buttons in Workday.
There are a lot of people like that - see Bullshit Jobs. And people know they work in Bullshit Jobs. So yes, when AI comes along that is very good at doing *average work*, you are going to really give anxiety to people who do *below average work*.
These are the people making these arguments. They know its distasteful to make the argument of "you are stealing my nice cush email job", so they make the proxy argument that doesnt sound as self serving.
AI, good or ill, makes it terrible to be an average painter, coder, or accountant. Because AI is literally trained on the average of all things humans have ever done. It is wonderful for the above average, as it raises the floor of what they are below average at - they can use AI to be good enough at those things, while you use your human skill that you are above average at to actually compete. Maybe we need a message like that, because a.) its fucking true and b.) it is less scary than "this AI is going to take your job, now approve my data center".
I’m not sold on these so-called data centers, but I do agree there is constant aversion to technology.
When the railroads were being built, speakers would come to towns on the proposed routes and claim the high speed of the trains, which was 60 mph, would suck the oxygen from the lungs of your cattle suffocating them.
Wracking my brain trying to imagine where one would go near most neighborhoods, it just isn't zoned for commercial real estate in most places. America is huge there's plenty of space. The Utah project won't bother anyone it's in the middle of the desert!
Except they aren't just putting them in the desert. I live in rural Texas, there's a local town that has 5 data centers already with plans to build more. The people who have lived there for generations, don't want them. One or two was ok but now it's out of hand. If you choose to live where it is green and open for miles around you, you don't want some big ugly building to come in, especially when they get tax abatements, and give nothing much back to the community. Of course you wrack your brain imagining it, they won't be near you. I like going out, seeing farm animals, hearing birds, seeing deer, coyotes and other wildlife, that is my choice and it is scary to me to know that a data center may or may not be built near me and I get very little say in that. I use technology daily, I have AI affecting my job, not in a way that will lose it but in theory should enhance it. So far it's been extremely underwhelming and causing me more problems than it solves, they say it will learn....we shall see.
There are a few reasons this issue cuts across party lines and elicits outrage from working people on the left and the right.
1) AI is becoming deeply unpopular with working people as it threatens everyone's ability to make a living
2) Data centers add salt in the wound with plenty of documented examples of inflating local residents' utility bills $10-$15 per month (Virginia/Dominion Energy)
3) Data centers aren't bringing sufficient numbers of jobs for workers to offset their cost on residents
Big Tech needs to focus on diffusing resentment by putting money back into the pockets of working people. One way they could do this is by offering a $20 monthly credit to every local resident's utility bill.
I think it's a perfectly reasonable ask that data centers are forced to contribute to improve the electrical grid and are taxed at a higher rate than residents to bring in money for the city. This would bring even more benefits locally
But they don't. They get years of tax abatement and zero benefit to the communities they are affecting. They claim they will bring in jobs but most of the people in the communities surrounding them do not have the skills for those jobs, even the temporary construction jobs usually bring in outside contractors and labor, read cheap labor and any other implication that might come with that.
But in this analogy, who's actually building the guillotines? The people blocking power infrastructure in their counties while the rest of the country needs electricity, or the people trying to build it? NIOBY or NIMBY, the outcome is the same: nothing gets built.
The first time around it was a guy named Antoine Louis, and then a surgeon named Joseph Ignace Guillotin advocated for a more humane means of public execution.
This time around, it’s probably three parties all operating independently:
1) the 2026 San Francisco equivalent of the type of clique of highly successful and highly discreet professionals and investors you’d see either late at the Docks in NY (in the 1970s) or in certain liquor licensed establishments between the hours of 10pm and 4am in London (in the 1990s), or the friends of the men who tried to kidnap Tanya at the end of Season two of white lotus funding these things through backroom deals;
2) desperate debtors, with an inflated sense of their education and cultural ideals, mindlessly taking paychecks to tweak the design (and who are quitting droves by the way), ((^[]the new thing is they’re getting surveyed by their bosses and having their own cognition’s harvested to fuel the AI algorithms, so that one’s great and interesting.))
3) and then normal people struggling to get by often by taking construction work who are actually building it.
–––
The NIOBY, for all its faults, is an attempt to stymie the effects of the social cannibalism, through an aporetic stance on visible issues which affect them.
Adam MacKay made this point in the opening and closing of Vice.
Adam Curtis gestured at this point implicitly by identifying the failures the Occupy movement.
I love logical fallacies, so…
Your name is Adam why don’t you get it too?
Kidding.
I think your argument might be valid on a higher level of thinking.
But as the subject matter of sociocultural pamphleteering it falls a little flat because the broader degree of trust in government, media, medicine, you name it is like totally debased.
The haves in this society are still living on the Ketamine trip of 2000s era Hockey Stick growth promises, and committing grift, fraud, and theft to avoid confronting the reality that it’s not sustainable.
All the while another form of environmental concern loom large in the background: overpopulation and the ecological reality of not having enough perks for being alive. Especially for the sober minded, undistracted defenders of capital who enjoy the ability to delegate and relax.
And don’t get me wrong. AI is wonderful. I just don’t think that AI should be hooked up to data centers. Both in principle, and because there are too many pre-existing clauses in the social contract at this point.
When a society cannot express its needs to itself through honest dialogue and conflict mediation, solutions feel attainable only at the level of chess-playing over vast time horizons.
The requisite insanity for which requires either a machiavellianism to win in advance or a radicalism to reject the former through desperate acts in accordance with the Sun Tzu’s dictum about what to do on desperate ground. My better angels argue the rejection of both.
But the delusional prophet in me agrees with Sean Penn’s rendition of Harvey Milk, “You fight the hell back.”
We can always talk. But, in the interest of realness,
- go make tirzepatide cost $10 so I can give you my full and undivided attention,
- go create 10 million jobs with like 40 years of job stability, so 10 million other people can give you theirs,
- go solve the problems which actually underlie the political animus of the people shouting NIOBY,
- at a minimum assent to the distinction,
And then, maybe at that point the conversation can be had in good faith.
For the moment all I can tell you is you really look like you’re just arguing in favor of data centers for one reason or another. And in the current climate given the actual existence of tangible frustration about the sense of powerlessness to stop the construction of these things, that might be a damning position to take as far as 999,000 out of 1 million people you’d meet on the street would be concerned.
I feel like another part of the panic though, is people's fears about A.I. It has been stealing jobs and causing problems for artists. Maybe not on the scale that most people think, but it is happening. And its also causing problems with learning in schools (I am married to a teacher and good friends with another so I see this through their struggles with it). So part of the equation here is that real people ARE being affected in a negative way, and lots of people see data centers as expanding a thing that has taken something meaningful away from them or a loved one.
I think that your other points on the matter are most likely true (I intend to research this myself after commenting because I want to see for myself). But I do think you need to add the above to the mix. In all of this, emotions play a strong part, but not all of them are invalid.
Yes this fear makes sense, and the comment is valid - but protestors aren't really talking about this they are just repeating bad stats (watch some of the community forums or see what's being shared online). Your broader point on fear of automation is real, we should cover that in a future post because it's a great topic. Note AI fears are way down the list when you look at things most Americans worry about - although expressed higher in certain circles for sure
You are correct that protesters tend to be screaming about the environment more than anything else. I just wanted to add a bit of nuance to the conversation, I suppose. I am definitely in the circle of people more concerned about automation, as you put it. And I feel more people should be aware of the consequences of it. But you do make a good point that I am probably in the minority in my concerns since that's not the popular thing to be outraged about right now. I see it more because of my personal connections to it. I look forward to a future post discussing these things. Thanks for the response!
I think you’re totally right and shouldn’t downplay how much existential anxiety about AI is animating these data center moratoriums. Sure people might be talking about some overblown environmental concern, but the reason they’re so receptive to those concerns is because of that existential fear. The people building these data centers aren’t giving people a proper off ramp for that (and in many cases tech oligarchs worsen this with crazy statements). Then you have people like Adam who aren’t wrong to say environmental concerns are overblown but who fundamentally don’t move the needle at all (or move it in the opposite direction) because he’s saying “You guys are overreacting stop.” Instead of saying “You’re right to be anxious, and this is what we’re doing to ensure that this technology works for us.
In general, it’s frustrating (as someone who wants to see progress) that pro-building people have no care to change the CULTURAL conversation around these issues (which everything is downstream from), and instead just cry out about how stupid these people are. Like yeah, that’s totally gonna get the data center built now!
- recent college grad who covered data center shenanigans at umich
I have tried to help the AI companies here btw (https://www.hottakes.space/p/ais-narrative-problem). But regardless of what happens data centers are important infrastructure we benefit from having more of. I don't think AI is going to cause mass unemployment any more than other forms of automation. I think in time it's going to do the busywork and free humans for the human work. Either way, progress is messy but marches on and things do get better. Ultimately I think the luddites lose, humans are a technology-powered race. And I say this even with thinking a lot of what AI makes is spam/junk (that stuff will go away eventually).
The AI companies manufactured this outrage themselves by talking about taking everyone's jobs, massive unemployment, etc. They wanted to be see as changing the world and they are, but a lot of folks like the world the way it is right now.
We'll see if it's too late to turn around the marketing of AI and make it more acceptable. If not, it's the fault of OpenAI, Anthropic, et al for creating this mess.
I appreciate you calling out the hysteria. It is true that data centers are using more and more grid power, and in some places that's definitely having an effect on rates. How the data center gets its power, how much water it uses, how much heat or noise it actually generates - these are all relevant facts and they can vary a lot.
The useful distinction here is between legitimate scrutiny and panic as a business model. Data centers absolutely deserve real questions about water, power, grid planning, and local incentives — but fake temperature claims and reflexive anti-building sentiment make the public less informed, not more protected. We keep saying we want abundance and then treating the physical infrastructure of abundance like a moral contamination event.
There are a lot, more than you think, of people with cush upper middle class jobs that don't do much that would not be replaced by AI. 90% of HR could be replaced. I don't need a poet laureate to write my reorg email, or click buttons in Workday.
There are a lot of people like that - see Bullshit Jobs. And people know they work in Bullshit Jobs. So yes, when AI comes along that is very good at doing *average work*, you are going to really give anxiety to people who do *below average work*.
These are the people making these arguments. They know its distasteful to make the argument of "you are stealing my nice cush email job", so they make the proxy argument that doesnt sound as self serving.
AI, good or ill, makes it terrible to be an average painter, coder, or accountant. Because AI is literally trained on the average of all things humans have ever done. It is wonderful for the above average, as it raises the floor of what they are below average at - they can use AI to be good enough at those things, while you use your human skill that you are above average at to actually compete. Maybe we need a message like that, because a.) its fucking true and b.) it is less scary than "this AI is going to take your job, now approve my data center".
I’m not sold on these so-called data centers, but I do agree there is constant aversion to technology.
When the railroads were being built, speakers would come to towns on the proposed routes and claim the high speed of the trains, which was 60 mph, would suck the oxygen from the lungs of your cattle suffocating them.
Same shit, different day.
I still wouldn’t want to live near one
Wracking my brain trying to imagine where one would go near most neighborhoods, it just isn't zoned for commercial real estate in most places. America is huge there's plenty of space. The Utah project won't bother anyone it's in the middle of the desert!
Except they aren't just putting them in the desert. I live in rural Texas, there's a local town that has 5 data centers already with plans to build more. The people who have lived there for generations, don't want them. One or two was ok but now it's out of hand. If you choose to live where it is green and open for miles around you, you don't want some big ugly building to come in, especially when they get tax abatements, and give nothing much back to the community. Of course you wrack your brain imagining it, they won't be near you. I like going out, seeing farm animals, hearing birds, seeing deer, coyotes and other wildlife, that is my choice and it is scary to me to know that a data center may or may not be built near me and I get very little say in that. I use technology daily, I have AI affecting my job, not in a way that will lose it but in theory should enhance it. So far it's been extremely underwhelming and causing me more problems than it solves, they say it will learn....we shall see.
There are a few reasons this issue cuts across party lines and elicits outrage from working people on the left and the right.
1) AI is becoming deeply unpopular with working people as it threatens everyone's ability to make a living
2) Data centers add salt in the wound with plenty of documented examples of inflating local residents' utility bills $10-$15 per month (Virginia/Dominion Energy)
3) Data centers aren't bringing sufficient numbers of jobs for workers to offset their cost on residents
Big Tech needs to focus on diffusing resentment by putting money back into the pockets of working people. One way they could do this is by offering a $20 monthly credit to every local resident's utility bill.
I think it's a perfectly reasonable ask that data centers are forced to contribute to improve the electrical grid and are taxed at a higher rate than residents to bring in money for the city. This would bring even more benefits locally
But they don't. They get years of tax abatement and zero benefit to the communities they are affecting. They claim they will bring in jobs but most of the people in the communities surrounding them do not have the skills for those jobs, even the temporary construction jobs usually bring in outside contractors and labor, read cheap labor and any other implication that might come with that.
Really good quick bait, didn’t read no it’s not
Thank you for the comment this perfectly exemplifies the problem!
It’s not NIMBY it’s NIOBY.
There’s a huge difference
I fucking hate this UI. Haha
In 1789 M got their head chopped off.
O on the other hand did the chopping.
But in this analogy, who's actually building the guillotines? The people blocking power infrastructure in their counties while the rest of the country needs electricity, or the people trying to build it? NIOBY or NIMBY, the outcome is the same: nothing gets built.
The first time around it was a guy named Antoine Louis, and then a surgeon named Joseph Ignace Guillotin advocated for a more humane means of public execution.
This time around, it’s probably three parties all operating independently:
1) the 2026 San Francisco equivalent of the type of clique of highly successful and highly discreet professionals and investors you’d see either late at the Docks in NY (in the 1970s) or in certain liquor licensed establishments between the hours of 10pm and 4am in London (in the 1990s), or the friends of the men who tried to kidnap Tanya at the end of Season two of white lotus funding these things through backroom deals;
2) desperate debtors, with an inflated sense of their education and cultural ideals, mindlessly taking paychecks to tweak the design (and who are quitting droves by the way), ((^[]the new thing is they’re getting surveyed by their bosses and having their own cognition’s harvested to fuel the AI algorithms, so that one’s great and interesting.))
3) and then normal people struggling to get by often by taking construction work who are actually building it.
–––
The NIOBY, for all its faults, is an attempt to stymie the effects of the social cannibalism, through an aporetic stance on visible issues which affect them.
Adam MacKay made this point in the opening and closing of Vice.
Adam Curtis gestured at this point implicitly by identifying the failures the Occupy movement.
I love logical fallacies, so…
Your name is Adam why don’t you get it too?
Kidding.
I think your argument might be valid on a higher level of thinking.
But as the subject matter of sociocultural pamphleteering it falls a little flat because the broader degree of trust in government, media, medicine, you name it is like totally debased.
The haves in this society are still living on the Ketamine trip of 2000s era Hockey Stick growth promises, and committing grift, fraud, and theft to avoid confronting the reality that it’s not sustainable.
All the while another form of environmental concern loom large in the background: overpopulation and the ecological reality of not having enough perks for being alive. Especially for the sober minded, undistracted defenders of capital who enjoy the ability to delegate and relax.
And don’t get me wrong. AI is wonderful. I just don’t think that AI should be hooked up to data centers. Both in principle, and because there are too many pre-existing clauses in the social contract at this point.
When a society cannot express its needs to itself through honest dialogue and conflict mediation, solutions feel attainable only at the level of chess-playing over vast time horizons.
The requisite insanity for which requires either a machiavellianism to win in advance or a radicalism to reject the former through desperate acts in accordance with the Sun Tzu’s dictum about what to do on desperate ground. My better angels argue the rejection of both.
But the delusional prophet in me agrees with Sean Penn’s rendition of Harvey Milk, “You fight the hell back.”
We can always talk. But, in the interest of realness,
- go make tirzepatide cost $10 so I can give you my full and undivided attention,
- go create 10 million jobs with like 40 years of job stability, so 10 million other people can give you theirs,
- go solve the problems which actually underlie the political animus of the people shouting NIOBY,
- at a minimum assent to the distinction,
And then, maybe at that point the conversation can be had in good faith.
For the moment all I can tell you is you really look like you’re just arguing in favor of data centers for one reason or another. And in the current climate given the actual existence of tangible frustration about the sense of powerlessness to stop the construction of these things, that might be a damning position to take as far as 999,000 out of 1 million people you’d meet on the street would be concerned.
But I could be wrong 😊