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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   12611 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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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.

“Small communities don’t have the legal budget to negotiate well. You’ll never hold a company to a contract,” said Cathy, who feared Janesville once again tying itself to a single big employer—especially one in a “high-risk industry” like AI. City officials were promising to lower wheel and property taxes on residents, but that assumes everything goes right. What if the project gets abandoned? How does Janesville avoid “another GM plant scenario”?

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.

"I ask the three what they envision being built here instead, but don’t get much of an answer. I suspect that Adam is partly right—maybe this is a choice between a hyperscale data center and a concrete slab. And Alyssa, Cathy, and Kaycee would rather pick the slab."

Some of the objections Sun hears in other towns fare a bit better.

In 2017, the Village of Mount Pleasant, Racine County, and State of Wisconsin offered over $4 billion in tax incentives and infrastructure investments to win a bidding war for a Foxconn plant. In return, Foxconn promised Mount Pleasant—population 26,000—a $10 billion investment that would create 13,000 jobs making flat-screen TVs. The village eminent domained the land and prepared infrastructure. But Foxconn kept downsizing their plans, citing high labor costs. By the end of 2024, just over a thousand jobs had been created. Mount Pleasant was saddled with over $183 million in debt that Foxconn and Microsoft are still servicing.

The memory of the Foxconn fiasco is still raw. We heard it referenced in conversation after conversation as a flaming symbol of corporate failure.

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.

My conversations make me wonder if the technical content of data center deals is mostly beside the point. Closed-loop cooling systems? “I don’t believe them.” Paying millions in taxes? “I don’t believe them.” Creating a thousand jobs? “I don’t believe them.” I hear a reflexive skepticism of every claim.

Rather, the way that AI companies engage with communities—forcing NDAs, dangling billion-dollar promises, pushing environmental externalities far away from AI’s wealthy user base—resembles a classic story about dark money in politics. Your politicians are being bought by billionaires and gigantic corporations to screw you over. It’s not Skynet: it’s the oligarchy.

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.

In the end datacenters don't make long term jobs: to the town they're in, they're essentially inert boxes that pay taxes, similar to solar farms and many other low labor projects.

The thing is that the citizens instinctively know that if the government gets a huge windfall, $0 of that will go to helping the citizens, and it will all get wasted. I know a certain town baleeted its public transit to save 1c of sales tax, and absolutely none of the savings went to the people. The mayor spends it all on a bunch of vanity projects.

that pay taxes

Even that's not a given.

The Shapiro administration’s latest budget estimates show Pennsylvania could lose out on about $2 billion in revenue by mid-2031 due to a tax break that some lawmakers want to repeal.

Sometimes I wonder if all of the problems with modern politics are tied to cheap transportation and communications technologies. People care about status. They want people to like them. Noblesse Oblige is founded on making the people like you. If public officials lived in their communities and interacted with people in their communities, then doing good deeds for the people and saving them a bunch of money would be a vanity project! The status and validation and pride that the mayor seeks for themself ought to be from the people. But if they just fly around on jets talking to rich people and politicians from other cities then the status turns into big ostentatious displays that rich people care about.

Somehow we need to ground politicians, their status, and their emotional state to be related to the people. If the majority of the time they spent socializing was with random people from their districts then they would automatically seek to make the people happy because that would be what flatters their egos.

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