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Sadly, I've spoken to enough friends in real life to know that it isn't astroturfed. People are using all sorts of discredited arguments to argue against AI datacenters. It's all the worst parts of NIMBYism come to roost.
Are these friends the sort of people who more or less go along with the Latest Thing? For example, how did they feel about the Russian invasion of the Ukraine?
If your friends are real independent thinkers, then fine, but in my experience such persons are pretty rare. And if they aren't independent thinkers, the fact that they oppose data centers (arguably) is not evidence one way or another on the astroturf issue.
Perhaps I am misusing the word "astroturf" here. I don't dispute that there are a lot of real people out there who are opposed to data centers. I just get the feeling that there is some institution or government entity which is quietly rousing and encouraging the opposition. It reminds me of the anti-nuke campaigns in the 1980s
There isn't much of an opposite side on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Having conventional opinions on it is no more a sign of lack of independence than having conventional opinions on homeopathy.
I tend to disagree with this, but in the interest of avoiding a culture war skirmish, perhaps you can give me a few examples of popular views on the Latest Thing for which you would agree there is an opposite side?
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Surely the mark of a successful astroturf campaign is getting normies on the bandwagon.
This would be one of the most successful astroturfing campaigns of all time. If China was behind it, don’t you think they’d be putting a lot more emphasis on,”you know, all these data center chips come from Taiwan. Why are we subsidizing Taiwan’s defense only for them to suck all of our water?”
This doesn't strike me as a serious argument at all; I simply think better of China's psyop capabilities than to expect that they'd get distracted blatantly signaling that it's them by tying in their personal shoulder chips.
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Honestly, I believe every major issue is astroturfed to some extent, by opponents to get supporters to claim weakman arguments, and by “conspiracy theorist” influencers and news for attention.
This is a dynamic people don't pay nearly enough attention to, yeah. People are plenty capable of being stupid on their own, but there are also a million different actors playing the pied piper strategy in miniature, thinking of it as anything from a satirical social experiment to a well-oiled psyop.
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But who's planting those arguments in their heads?
Datacentres have existed for an awfully long time without anyone caring, now even obscure fora have posters showing up and raising the issue.
I'm not sold, but it kind of makes one think -- I'm increasingly close to being sold on covert China media ops driving the entire political conversation here in Canada, so it's not a crazy idea.
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