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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.
Firstly, you're absolutely correct that the water-use and land-use arguments are bullshit and i don't think anyone local really buys any of it, the people making the decisions, that is the local government, chamber of commerce, land-owners, Et Al. are fully aware of how much land and water agriculture uses, and they are used to playing hard-ball when it comes to negotiating the terms of that use in a way the the typical Silicon Valley VC guy is not. I suspect that the water argument is aimed more at urban liberals than anyone else. That said the power grid and associated infrastructure concerns are entirely legit, local communities have either been burned or seen others get burned too-many times to trust in mere promises.
This is exacerbated by the sort of cultural differences you describe with things like NDA's, for someone who's already kind of expecting to get shafted, trying to swear them to secrecy is only going to reinforce that impression.
Finally there is a more general anxiety about AI as an industry, but rural anxiety about AI is a very different beast from urban AI anxiety, Francisco the fruit-picker and Paul the plumber aren't worried about Claude the chatbot stealing thier jobs, or imenentizing the eschaton/singularity they're worried about folks at Anthropic shredding books while trying to enact the villain's plot from Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning (or more realistically) they're worried about Flock cameras being used by thier cultural enemies to identify and hunt wrong-think.
Rural communities are worried about flock cameras, yes, but they’re also worried about the pace of technological-cultural progress. They can remember when rap music was deeply controversial and bikinis weren’t thé norm(this is, literally, something middle aged people can easily remember, it was that recent). They may not want those trends reversed but they also don’t want them accelerated and they can easily draw the connection between big tech/entertainment(and they don’t see the difference between the two- their exposure to AI is mostly on social media) and cultural change- there’s a reason thé gays in Disney movies are such a visible there, there. The fact that they correctly identify the new computer doohickeys as associated with cultural change and controlled by their enemies is a much bigger factor than specific predictions.
¿Por qué tienes ese acento gráfico?
Anyway, anyone who remembers bikinis being normalized isn't middle-aged anymore; that mostly happened in the 1960s. The famous old-fashioned-style song, about even shy girls getting used to bikinis, hit #1 on the charts! Of the subsequent wave of 60s' "beach party movies" only a large minority had bikini in the title but most of the rest at least had bikini-clad characters, usually on the movie posters too. Bikinis weren't the norm in the sense that more than 50% of women wore them, but they still aren't: most women wear one-piece swimsuits still, and most of the rest wear tankinis.
Social media and Hollywood might be accelerating cultural change today, perhaps even relative to the 60s, but nobody's making their multi-billion-dollar datacenter investments because they need extra servers for Instagram clips or renderfarms for Disney movies, they're doing it because they really think better-trained bots can take a lot of jobs and/or immanentize the eschaton. If rural people think otherwise (citation needed?), I guess that's less of a stretch than the water use panic, but it's still kind of missing the point.
In the bush era they were risqué and not the default.
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