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There is a great new Substack article about the populist backlash to AI data centers by Jasmine Sun. She also did an interview with Ezra Klein for those of you who like audio content.
I like the article because Sun speaks fluent Silicon Valleyish while also taking the time and effort to visit and talk to the people on the ground in the rural Midwest instead of condecending at them from the coasts. She asks an important question: why precisely do people hate data centers so much?
Looking only at the statistics, AI land use and water use issues are fake. Nowhere is running out of land, and nowhere (West of San Antonio at least) is running out of water. Are the people in these communities stupid? Do they not know how to shut up and multiply?
It turns out that a lot of the fear and anger stems from a combination of distrust and PTSD from deindustrialization. An interesting example is Janesville, Wisconsin, a town with a giant concrete slab in the middle of it where the GM plant used to be.
Fascinating. The collapse of the auto industry in 2008 was apparently so bad that it is better to prevent industrial development alltogether in order to avoid the risk of another collapse. It almost makes sense until you think about it for 30 seconds.
Some of the objections Sun hears in other towns fare a bit better.
This is the steelman of the anti-data center position. People are worried that the big companies proposing data centers are going to Foxconn them and not deliver the supposed benefits.
One of the things that comes across especially clear in the Ezra Klein interview is just how unprepared the AI companies were for the backlash. They didn't realize how sketchy it comes across to insist on NDAs with local officials when negotiating deals. They thought, as a straightforward application of Coase's Theorem would tell you, that any bumps in the road could be ironed out by handing over a big bag of money. It turns out that people don't work that way. It feels like a bribe, and Americans do not like being bribed.
I haven't read the Substack article yet, but I did read the Klein interview, and what stood out to me was this:
A big part of the dissonance, it seems to me, is around the perception of what 'AI' is and whether it's valuable. Clearly a lot of people in Silicon Valley believe that this is a massively transformative technology that will be vital to the future of the country if not the world. They're frequently either outright singularitans, or simply believe that it willl turbo-charge the economy, massively increase wealth, change everything about employment, and so on.
But these people, and I admit I think they sound a lot more sensible than the tech people online, actually use the technology and go, "meh". They see it as a mildly amusing toy. Maybe it has some uses, in some niche fields, but for the most part it's just not very interesting. If they didn't get access to it, they would not particularly care.
An auto factory - you at least understand why cars are useful, and why the factories need to be built. A data centre is a huge investment for a thing that... isn't useful. All of this is in aid of a technology that's just fundamentally pretty crap. No one wants to make sacrifices for the infrastructure to produce more LLMs because no one thinks that LLMs are worth sacrificing for.
There is the marketing issue as well, of course. Pro-'AI' people tend to sound very cult-y online, at least in my experience. Many of them sound like lunatics. A lot of them also, well, to be blunt, are un-charismatic nerds. Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, etc., are not convincing ambassadors for a technology. I can understand nobody believing their promises - none of them project credibility, or even really respectability. The 'tech billionaire' is a cultural archetype at this point, and it is an archetype that one associates with immaturity, frivolity, narcissism, and callous disregard for other people and for human value in general. Last week I was talking about the book destruction story and it fits with the image again, as if there's this small cult-like group of anti-human tech-heads eager to sell the whole inheritance of the human community for digital pottage. I understand, in my gut, the feeling of disgust.
In the UK we don't really have the same data centre showdowns described in this article, because the UK is already such a planning hellhole that no one would bother. Battles tend to be a lot smaller, focused on random businesses and housing developments. Nonetheless, so many of the NIMBY arguments seem to apply regardless of scale, one of the biggest of which is some kind of weird, communist, demand-management approach. "We don't need that here". "No one wants that". "Why are they building X instead of Y?"
Well, who the fuck cares about your market opinion, random local? Why are you the arbiter of supply and demand? Very obviously, somebody wants it; that's why people are putting their time and money down to build these things, whether it's a data centre or a bakery.
Now, I do accept that there is one difference when it comes to scale: data centres are so massive that a failed construction could leave you with a giant ruin somewhere, destroying local environments for nothing, whereas a small housing development or business won't have anywhere near the same impact. But even in this article, the first example is a proposal to replace the treasured, historic ... industrial wasteland. If something goes wrong there, you end up in exactly the same position!
It doesn't seem like any of the opponents in the substack even made a general "AI bubble" or similar argument (and that's putting aside the fact that data centres are the backbone of all modern infra, not just AI. There'd still be a ton of data centre construction if LLMs didn't exist). Their complaints are much more local, and concern about the companies doing the building is rooted in general distrust of corpos rather than anything AI specific.
I'm of course aware of the meme template you are invoking, but surely it applies to every instance of regulation. If there were no consenting market or investors for, say, selling cocaine, slaves, thalidomide or rat meat labelled as "beef", then banning those things would not be necessary. Conversely, the meme presumably is not funny in its original context to people who do think that Jesus/Allah/middle-aged ladies have a right to restrict the sexual dealings of consenting adults. While it may serve as a catchy package to convey the memester's value system on the topic, it rarely conveys any information or insight that would force someone else to change their judgement of a situation based on theirs.
I'm going to make the same point I've just made to Bombadil: the point of the meme reference is that the third party in this case has zero relevance to the transaction. There is party A, wanting to buy AI services, and party B, wanting to sell AI services, and then party X, saying that the demand doesn't actually exist and this transaction isn't real.
I'm not trying to make a fully general counter-argument against regulation here, and the above example would be different if party X felt that the AI services being traded carried dangers or externalities for the wider public. But for the specific quotes above, no one is making that case, they are simply claiming that because they don't see a value in a product or service, the value must not exist.
The problem is party X is impacted - by electrical infrastructure upgrades whose costs are often spread throughout the community, by construction blocking traffic and making noise, by the eyesore on the way to work. There are concerns about water usage, which might not be based on facts but the impression a lot of party X has is that their water pressure could decrease and there's nothing they can do about it.
And in return they get.... maybe five janitorial jobs while the bulk of the "new jobs" go to people on the coasts. And a construction crew who will likely be lead by people out of town and will hire less-skilled local labor for two years before trapezing away with those paychecks.
And the taxes, how do they tax the data centers? If a data center in Ohio is responsible for a billion of dollars of sales made in California, who gets that tax money? What is the tax revenue of a data center after its built?
Maybe someone would be ok with these problems if they felt like they were contributing to a better future, if they thought everyone was benefiting in some way. But if they honestly believe these things are making everything worse, they are not worth the sacrifice.
Consider the possibility that people in small towns have a pride. Being the home of a GM factory was a source of positive identity and worth some sacrifices for the greater good. Being the home of a world-destroying machine mind is not.
Typically the local tax revenue is via property tax, to which the end usage of the datacenter is irrelevant. It's assessed based on the fair-market value of the land and improvements.
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As per my earlier response, this is not a claim that externalities don't exist or that local communities have no right to regulate local construction. I am remarking on the argument that construction shouldn't proceed because there is no demand, and this lack of demand is unevidenced and based entirely on the vibes of the objector
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