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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   9416 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.

I haven't read the Substack article yet, but I did read the Klein interview, and what stood out to me was this:

And I went in and asked these organizers: Do you guys use A.I.? Do you find it useful? This was one of the top questions that my friends in San Francisco wanted me to ask: Are these people using ChatGPT, and they don’t even realize that the data centers are how they can use it?

And what I found was that a lot of these folks did say: Yeah, I’ve used it to draft an email or make a meme. They’re not denying that A.I. might have any possible utility at all, but they clearly didn’t see it as essential in the way that cars, energy and housing are essential.

They clearly saw it as like a widget — a toy — and maybe there are these risks, maybe there’s the job stuff, but fundamentally they were like: This thing is not that useful. I don’t really see in my personal life how this could justify these gigantic valuations.

And so I was talking to, for example, Charles Franklin, who runs the Marquette Law School Polls in Wisconsin, and he was explaining that usually you see 50-50 polling on issues where you have a strong anti case and a strong pro case. And the only reason you’re seeing this 70-30 bipartisan opposition to data centers, no matter whether you live near a data center or you don’t — which means it’s not just NIMBYism, it’s you don’t want a data center in anyone’s backyard — is because there is no strong pro argument for it. There is not even a fight that’s really going on.

“Nobody wants it” was a phrase I heard over and over.

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.

They clearly saw it as like a widget — a toy — and maybe there are these risks, maybe there’s the job stuff, but fundamentally they were like: This thing is not that useful. I don’t really see in my personal life how this could justify these gigantic valuations.

Yeah, that's the thing. All the proselytising for AI that I see - and that includes people discussing it on here and giving examples of what they use it for - is nearly all "it's great for coding". Yes, and I'm not a software engineer, have never coded in my life, and used Copilot once where, admittedly, it was useful. But in my day-to-day job, I don't use any AI and don't really as of yet see any need for it.

And most people are like that. "I work as a school caretaker. I'm a childcare practitioner. I work in a supermarket. I'm a nurse's aide. I'm a panel beater. What is this amazing difference AI is going to make to my life, make me 100x more productive, and give me $$$$$$ in stock options as my employer's valuation goes to the moon?"

Now, if we get proper business-oriented AI, not the "just use it, everyone says it'll make us a zillion times more profitable, no I don't know what you can use it for" versions being pushed now, then that will change. But right now it's "don't need to hire junior coders, our senior guys can do five times the work now" and "maybe office work? maybe?" for work, and mostly "ChatGPT for your online buddy/therapist/girl or boyfriend". That is the major use for ordinary people, I think: AI as 'my online best friend and lover'. And if you're average enough that you have a real world girlfriend or spouse, you don't see AI as being any good to you.

I'm not a programmer either, and I do get annoyed at the way 90% of AI discussion is centered around coding, but come on. Software is eating the world. Anything we do, we do with software. Cars have software, TVs have software, phones have software, books are increasingly read in e-ink readers, etc. Software is as fundamental to our life as oil, or electricity. Imagine a technology that made oil workers 5x more productive, and thereby made oil cost 1/5th as much. It would not just be about how much you save at the pump; it would mean cheaper groceries and plastics and plane tickets and probably entire new applications that nobody has ever implemented because they did not make sense at the previous price level. That's what AI is.

My vintage Land Cruiser doesn't have software, nor does my record player, my guitar, my film camera, or my porch swing.

And you know what? I'm a helluva lot happier when I'm using any of those things that I am using just about anything with software.

Given the way cars are going, I'm inclined to say that having software is a downgrade for my car.

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