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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.
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.
"Bob believes America is the greatest country in the world and is the single key to preventing the global triumph of communism. He probably believes democrats have stolen elections before; depending on social class this can variously include 1960, 2020, and various congressional by-elections. He thinks further expansions of welfare for specifically the low income are subsidizing underemployment. He follows football; if wealthy, this is college football, not NFL, usually the team of the school he went to(but not always), and also follows another sport- often baseball, but sometimes whatever his nearest city happens to be best at, or hockey if he's into contact sports, etc. He spends more energy on this than he does on politics. He believes that black culture is mostly a negative and that things like hip hop are very bad, but supports freedom of speech rather than measures to discourage them- he can't understand why his black neighbors insist on doing things wrong, when their culture is so obviously bad. But they're good people. He also believes that Islam is a bad culture, and may well believe that measures need to be taken to discourage it or keep it out of the country. He will probably clarify that more people should go to church, he's not racist but Islam has bad teachings that need to be discouraged- have you seen how they treat women? He believes that if the US doesn't stand with Israel God will punish the country, but does not think that it is possible to bring about the events of the book of revelation through human action.
He is very upset about rising prices, and depending on social class may blame taxes, government regulations, China, immigrants, or environmentalists. One thing he probably doesn't blame is boomers. He has some sympathies for young people struggling to get established, but also thinks they should get good- maybe those dastardly environmentalists/bureaucrats should get out of the way, but there's no excuse not to try. He 100% believes there is no replacement for fossil fuels, and thinks climate change is example #9000 of unhinged democrat hysteria. It's got to be a mental illness at this point, why else would they arrive at the conclusions they've come to about gender? Come on. He is very confused as to why his black neighbors continue to vote democrat when they have common sense."
This Bob is not equivalent of Lauren, this Bob is far more politically advanced person with ideas and opinions formed beyond mere icks, yucks and yikes.
Maybe it's a class distinction, but republicans mostly have some opinions, even if poorly formed or informed ones. Of course, Bob is implied to be older than Lauren. Possibly by a lot, possibly by a little.
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