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When's the last time you checked on your local, elder millenial foids?
They have thoughts on Data Centers and Democratic Socialism, don't you know?
One of the thing that keeps me coming back to the Motte is the lack of any algorithm-ing. Posts get upvotes in the original reddit style and that's all you need. Still, one notices patterns. One style of persistently highly upvoted post is that of the personal story or extended anecdote. It's no mystery. People relate to people and the writing quality here on the Motte is generally high enough that a "human interest" story generally weaves together that emotional resonance with content rich analysis of the pressing issues of our time.
I include this preamble as a means of introducing what will be an attempt to combine some thoughts on recent data center posts, DSA (that is, Democratic Socialists of America) wins, and the current state of local foid vibes.
Why the focus on foid vibes? Mostly because I noticed this post got a lot of good comments. It seems like my "Lauren" archetype struck something of a nerve, but a generative nerve.
So, let's talk about "Lauren" (Again, not her real name and, this time, also kind of a mashing together of a few different folks I have semi-regular contact with in my little town).
Lauren Doesn't Like Elon Musk's Rich Guy Data Centers.
Lauren, like most normies, doesn't know what Anthropic is. She knows that Claude is an AI chatbot and knows that "GPT" (meaning ChatGPT) is like, a different AI chatbot, right? OpenAI is some sort of an AI company, but the connection between OAI and ChatGPT may not be solidly in place in Lauren's mind.
But Lauren knows who Elon Musk, the person, is. And, obviously, he's a Nazi because he "literally did the Nazi salute!" His desire to go to Mars is just a rich man's self indulgence and there's no real need to go to space when we have so many problems on earth. People are literally starving!
Unsaid by Lauren is that Elon is just plain weird in a weird guy kind of way. She hints at it with little jokes, but she's pretty sure he's into weird sex (probably anime stuff), and smells bad. His autistic ouevre during interviews doesn't come across as "quirky sensitive boy" who will write her poetry but as "potentially dangerous engineer dude who might show up unannounced at her home."
She (Lauren) also knows that Elon is "doing lots of AI" and, therefore, has to build a bunch of data centers - including one in our area!
Data Centers are not good. They use a ton of water and also pollute the water. They're loud. Or they make a sound or something. Lauren isn't sure where she read it, but she knows she read that being around Data Centers can cause all sorts of cognitive issues. Plus (like Elon) they're so ugly!
I'll inject my a TollBooth editorial background comment here. Lauren has recently started seeing a new therapist. Lauren tells me this therapist (female, black) is literally so much better than her last therapist - whom Lauren stopped seeing in about 2021. She's very happy that the Therapist is helping her stand up for herself and focus less on people pleasing. Lauren looks forward to reporting to the therapist how much non-people pleasing she's been doing recently (primal scream from TollBooth: MY GOD, THE IRONY).
But back to Elon's Load Bearing AI Data Centers. So much yuck! I gently tell Lauren that the water usage issue is quite fake. There's enough trust between us that after I pull up a few stories on my phone - from sources she trusts (like Vox!) - that she shrugs and agrees. Water issue aside, however, the real issue is that the local government isn't being transparent enough with how they're dealing with the Data Center developers. That's the problem; transparency!
I ask her what that means. Lauren tells me that out of the three different public town halls that the local government has hosted, two of them were delayed by 30 minutes, but then finished at the scheduled time instead of extending! They couldn't even get through all of the public comments verbally and people had to submit their concerns to the specially created data center public commentary website. Zero transparency! Zero accountability!
I emote with Lauren. I agree that when things happen people feel things about those things that have happened. She loves that I "get" her - she tells me so.
Again, gently, I point out that having all of these town halls and creating a special website for public comment seems above and beyond, no? Aren't most issues around here handled through the normal city/county calendar of public hearings etc.
Lauren cedes the point before doubling down on it (a very underrated tactic). Yes, they're doing "more than usual" - but the data center issue is so big they need to be doing even more! And that lack of doing more means, of course, that the fix is in and a deal's already been made and so that's why there's no transparency! These greedy capitalists!
Which brings me (Lauren?) to the DSA. Have I, TollBooth, seen the fun wins all of the DSA members are racking up! Isn't it AWESOME! Lauren says this, funnily enough, tongue-in-cheek. Lauren knows I am a real life conservative. She knows I am not jazzed about the DSA wins. But Lauren also thinks that I am literally Ron Swanson from Parks and Recreation. She thinks my conservatism is funny ha-ha "I like guns" conservatism. Lauren sees me as actually a totally good guy who is pretty much a White Dude for Kamala but also likes Jesus a lot. So Lauren isn't worried about me flipping out over the DSA stuff. And I don't flip out, because I am not a fucking psycho.
But I do point out that the DSA has listed, official factions and causes that are deadly serious actual Marxists and Communists. These people think Lenin had it right and we have to commie harder in America. Lauren pauses for a second - actually pauses - and states she didn't know about things like The Marxist Unity Group who advocates for:
They literally want to overthrow America, Lauren, I say.
Well, that's not Lauren's DSA. Her DSA just wants the obvious, basic things; free healthcare, free education, a living wage! Like, hello, why are we evening talking about this in 2026? Lol!
I order another beer, smiling. Lauren veers off topic again, this time about a "Mayoral Election" for pets that is a charity effort for a local non-kill shelter. She's really excited about it. More excited about that than Elon Musk, Data Centers, and the DSA. A while later, she tells me - with mischief in her eye - about her friend, Molly, who, yes, is 41 and divorced, but is actually so smart and really cute. I lament to Lauren that while I can easily envision saxophone-accompanied nights of passion with Molly (before watching Parks and Rec afterwards, of course) I've got a lot of business travel coming up (which is true) - so I can't risk falling in love all over again. Lauren, laughing, accepts my polite decline. She shows me some photos of her niece on her phone.
Commentary
I've said it before and I stand by it: Lauren is a Basically Good Person (BGP). She's divorced and clearly heartbroken but not actually bitter. She knows in her heart of hearts she's not going to be a Mom. I genuinely feel for her on that one. She doesn't hate men. She doesn't hate America. But she's so full of emotional incontinence that anything that isn't soft and cuddly (Elon, AI, data centers) becomes a target, and anything loud and passionate that resonates with her (DSA, Kamala back in '24, the World Cup (for some reason)) becomes her sacred, personal cause....
Until she gets into what really matters; things and people that make her feel at ease and comforted; Ted Lasso, animal city council elections, the potluck that Chris from the bar is having on Saturday afternoon, Words with Friends, being the "matchmaker" for her single friends (while STAUNCHLY refusing to date on her own ... unless, like, Mark at that coffee shop asked about her?)
Lauren's problems aren't whatever her therapist is telling her. Her problem (singular) is that she is utterly disconnected from the rest of society. It doesn't look like it from the outside, and doesn't feel like it to her personally; she's out and about all the time. Her social calendar is booked up! But that social calendar is just "vibing" with people. There's no deep interpersonal anchor. No commitments.
So this means Lauren doesn't experience social issues, politics, or anything else in the way that those words traditionally imply. Lauren isn't looking at issues and plausible outcomes of policy, legislation, and local development on her local or national community. This is even more true in how Lauren relates to technology. She isn't trying to think about the downstream consequences of disrupted knowledge work or the knock-on effects of physical world (data center) construction. She hasn't thought about the revolutionary potential of nuke energy because "Hiroshima was a tragedy."
For her, all of it - literally all of her waking time - is emotional pattern matching. "Does this thing go in the "make me feel good" bucket or the "make me feel bad" bucket?. That's it. That's the rubric. There isn't even the introspection done to determine how and why she has developed various emotional attachments. Not to "Freud a Foid" too hard, but does Elon remind her of the kind austic guy she dated in college who was bad at sex yet still ended up awkwardly dumping her? Is Trump "an asshole" because he is literally the same age as her estranged father?
Nope. It's finish-the-emotion all the way down.
Which brings me to the final stanza here - the LLMification of human brains. A small thread and exchange here.
AI fucking up the corporate or commercial life of people doesn't really bother me deeply. The person who, today, thinks it is acceptable to read back LLM output verbatim during a job interview is the person who, 5-10 years ago, was mainlining hustle slop from Gary Vee and Tim Ferris before launching a podcast about crypto automation. Same agent (thank you very much) different skin.
Lauren's situation is worse. She has adopted the (lack of) introspection of LLMs as well as their simple method of "complete the x with the y most probable next token." Where "x", in Lauren's case, is a emotional-judgemental-moral reaction loop to anything. Added to that pitiful epistemic model is the sheer superficiality of it. For example, Lauren was really into the World Cup. Because soccer is left coded but it's also a sport and sports mean hot guys might be around (it is astonishing how, in her 40s, divorced, Lauren's approach to dating is essentially unchanged from her mid teens).
But even though Lauren was into the World Cup, she never learned about soccer. She didn't really understand even the basics like off-sides (the concept, not how it is enforced, which truly is Kafkaesque) the extra / stoppage time situation, or corner kicks versus throw-ins etc. And that's because none of those details fit into the "emote-judge-moralize" loop that seems to govern her life.
Perhaps most chilling is the fact that Lauren is not at all a heavy user of AI. She doesn't have a secret AI boyfriend or a galaxy of prompts to write her on-demand romantasy. But, somehow, through the collective-insect-brain of popular leftist, mainstream culture, she has adopted so many LLM-like habits that it's hard not to point and scream at it.
It would be reductive to call Lauren and NPC and then dismiss her. This is a real person with a legitimate claim to human dignity and an actually strong social track record. Lauren pays her taxes, stays employed, doesn't break the law more than a speeding ticket here and there, and some technically still illegal marijuana at her apartment. This is exactly the kind of person who I want to have feel like they are engaged with society so that they are thinking about society. But that's not happening. What made Lauren feel bad today? What made her feel good?
Lauren is not x, she's y - and that's the thing no one else is talking about. We should try to surface the scaffolding of the heart of the issue. Open the door and walk through it.
If you'd like, I can continue unpacking this in the comments.
I feel like my experience having been inside of datacenters, having been in charge of datacenters and being in planning meetings for new datacenters should give me some kind of edge in discussions about datacenters but I am mostly as hapless as everyone else.
They do create jobs, actually more skilled blue collar jobs than you might appreciate, but not like thousands of them. There's a ton of work to get them built but ongoing maintenance is probably tens of people employed permanently.
The water claims are mostly fake. Towns may sign bad deals on hooking them up with power instead of making them improve infrastructure.
What else is there to say.
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I was talking about roughly this with some friends recently, and it came up that in some ways post-industrial humans seem to be suffering the same sorts of malaise that zoo animals do. Sure, we have plenty of food and are kept safe, but we've socially isolated ourselves, and many of us are, at a fundamental level, mentally and physically unhealthy. We engage in over-grooming and self-destructive activities. Can't get pandas in captivity to maintain species-wide TFR either.
But this is entirely of our own making, and we're not truly stuck here. I wish I could say exactly which factors it is here: I really don't know. The Right would tell you we're coddled and incapable of facing the real-world situations. The Left would tell you we're just not comfortable enough. I'm not really convinced by either case there, but certain elements of both ring true. If I were a sci-fi writer, I think Do Not Create the Human Zoo would be an interesting book to write.
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Nice article, illustrating in practice famous quip of Winston Churchill (or someone else): "The best argument against democracy is five minute talk with average voter."
Good complement would be writeup of Billy Bob, lifelong Republican.
"Bob loves America, guns and Jesus. Bob hates communists and terrorists. Bob believes that America must stand with Israel for all time and fight communists of Russia and China and terrorists of Iranistan to the victorious end. Bob is certain that America is the greatest power in the world, and if she took her gloves off, she could easily finish communists and terrorists in single afternoon ... etc, etc."
Obviously, neither Lauren nor Bob are qualified to make decisions about policy both domestic and foreign. And, even more obviously, neither of them is, despite their eager participation in democratic process, really making any decisions.
The experts, the best and the brightest are making the decisions, but how bright and how good they really are?
Writeup of Edward E. Expert, graduate from one of most prestigious universities of the world with long career in most prestigious govt, private and NGO organizations, description how he thinks, how he feels and what he knows about the world is needed the most.
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Damn man, if a female acquaintance thought of me as a [X] Dude for Harris and tried to matchmake me with a 41 year-old divorcee, I’d book a physician appointment for a check-up on aura deficiency.
Also because, for women, the World Cup is another opportunity to paint their faces and dress up in CUTE, colorful outfits. Yay!
Middle-aged woman can’t even make it through a week without validation and direction from an authority figure :laughing_crying_emoji:
The issue with basic leftist BGPs (indeed, basic leftist Basically Good Persons) is that their feels get implemented into policies and practices, which results in outcomes deleterious to men and law-abiding, net-tax paying Americans—even if they don’t hate men or America per se. They help, enable, or support the proliferation of stuff like racial and other identity preferences in schools and workplaces, repeat criminals getting let back into the street with a slap on the wrist, letting millions of illegal immigrants into the country to have birthright citizen’d children and making the Jameses of the country subsidize them. People like Lauren make me think relatively less of humans and more of LLMs.
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I might be out of the loop there, but does this term actually have a more specific meaning or is it just "woman" with a layer of incel sneering ("woman (gross and stupid in the way women are)")?
Paragraphs like this make me think that if you want to really understand your outgroup, talking to someone like a divorced elder millennial woman is a fundamentally misguided approach, for you in particular. Your story could be more or less glossed as "this person believes things that are diagonally opposed to what I believe. I don't see a coherent way that anyone could arrive at this, but well, she is a primitive, pathetic creature that is not at all like me. I figure she believes those things for some primitive creature reasons". You are making it entirely too easy for yourself, and wind up with a conclusion that is largely useless. What you should instead be doing is seeking out people that are the most like you, who you will not be tempted to explain away as motivated by feelings or daddy issues, and still come to the same conclusions. There is no shortage of male contrarians out there who also sympathise with the DSA, find Elon disgusting and think Trump is an asshole. Try to talk to them, and understand why they believe those things.
My understanding is that it was originally a disparaging term for a woman in online incel culture, a contraction of femoid. But then the very online relative normies started using it as ironically faux-self-deprecating humor – the joke being on the poster for using incel slang, not on the woman under discussion. In many online spaces today it's a playful and informal term for a woman, the way I might use dudette, with no disrespect intended.
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Yeah, it's basically the gender flipped version of chud. Which means it needs to be used almost 1000x more often to achieve parity.
What’s also funny is that terms like “foid” and “roastie” still make internet women and white knights seethe, and now even “female” too when used as a noun.
In contrast, “chud” has been reclaimed by wrongthinkers and the attempted revenge terms of “moid” and “scrote” never really struck a chord, as moids and scrotes were unbothered, laughed them off, or adopted them to use ironically. And, of course, males don’t get butthurt about “male” being used as a noun.
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I didn't realise we were running a DEI program to increase right-wing representation in tribal brainrot here.
If we do it too hard, the betrayal will be great when it inevitably comes out that our latest 3x AAQC awarded MGTOW knuckledragger faked his CV and is actually secretly a stay-at-home husband for a muscle mommy female CEO.
I didn't realize there was another kind of MGTOW internet personality.
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LLMs, as impressive as (some) of them are, have reduced my opinion of human intelligence more than increased my opinion of machine intelligence. Many (most?) people go through life pattern matching, producing actions and words that could just as easily be modeled by an LLM. My hunch is that people have always been this way. Our machines doing the same thing puts the behavior in stark relief.
“Have you met the average human?” is my internal reaction when people poo-poo LLMs as being stochastic parrots incapable of True Thought.
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https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4AHXDwcGab5PhKhHT/humans-who-are-not-concentrating-are-not-general
Some interesting commentary on this point, from the GPT-2 era.
Sometimes when you are in a conversation you are bored in and your mind is elsewhere you start responding to only the last few words in the previous sentence from the other person that represent the only part of their last three minutes of monologuing that you actually remember. You extrapolate theme, topic, tone, narrative from them and then immediately respond. At least I do this. This is pretty simply next token prediction.
And again, not to call Hanson unoriginal, but various people - albeit a minority - predicted for decades or even centuries that the brain was essentially just a complex statistical modelling tool and that intelligence, language, consciousness etc were really all pretty basic probability/statistics functions. It’s not a new thought, it’s just one that’s been proven correct.
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That shit already free, nigga.
People who cannot get a living wage in 2026 America are mostly people who are deeply unsympathetic, or have very high expectations. We have clunky expensive universal healthcare that people who can't afford it just don't pay for, and the system works fine.
Not quite. Soccer in America has a left-coded fanbase, yes, because 'soccer fan' in America is implied to be a premiere league fan, and liking English stuff as better than American is a weird blue tribe tick, MLS or Liga mx fandom isn't nearly so political. Internationally soccer is not a left coded sport, at all, and FIFA is real cuddly with Trump, Qatar, etc, and clearly making a play to get the American red tribe into soccer.
Soccer is left-coded because it's Euro, and Europhilia is a left-coded thing. There have been many attempts to make US men's soccer happen, and none of them have really gotten anywhere, so soccer remains Euro.
FIFA is cuddly with Trump and Qatar because FIFA is utterly corrupt and therefore speaks Trump and Qatar's language.
Soccer is left-coded because it's third world coded. US Europhiles are absolutely not "philic" of the sort of European who loves soccer.
Who needs sport that can be played by any ragged urchin in Latino, Arabic or African favela? Real sport for real Americans needs heaps of expensive gear to just begin.
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This was really fun to read. It reminds me of a recent evolution I've had, or devolution.
When I was young and edgy, I used to say that I couldn't stand talking to most people because they were boring and weren't passionate or nerdy enough about anything, and all they wanted to talk about was the weather and logistics and other stuff I didn't care about. Then I got older and I forced myself to grow up, which meant that I chastised myself for being elitist and edgy, and I did my best to appreciate everyone and be fully engaged with conversations with anyone and anywhere. And then I recently realized that my teenage edgy self was naive and angsty but fundamentally right that most people are just boring for nerdy semi-autists like myself, and it's really annoying to have boring conversations with them.
I think your emote-judge-moralize feedback loop really is the dominant form of cognition for the vast majority of humanity.
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