If you have spent some time on the everything app recently—or, god forbid, gone outside and spoken to normal people—you will have noticed that nobody likes data centers. There are a lot of people claiming very loudly that this is obvious, and that if you weren’t such a sweaty little tech weenie you would know this already. They use water and stuff. They are a physical manifestation of Sam Altman taking your job. What are you? A loser?
At the risk of appearing out-of-touch and sweaty, I will admit that the intensity of these feelings has caught me off guard. Data centers are less popular than coal power plants. People are crying and shaking in local planning hearings like they’re going to flood the local underprivileged school with volatile hydrocarbons. It’s a giant box that hums and makes one hundred billion dollars—who could object to that?
Oh well. Anyway. It’s all in service of one of the largest infrastructure build-outs in history, which will be used as the substrate for a major technological revolution. So they’ll probably just buy every teacher in Ohio an emotional support pony and it’ll all work out, right? Right?
Just Act Normal
I’ve been running a bit of a fever for a few days now. No, don’t feel bad for me. Febrile is actually the best way to watch this interview with Mark Zuckerberg from 2010. We were sweating together.
I had remembered the early 2010s as being a time during which the public and the media were unusually generous towards technology companies. We were years away from the New York Times editorial directive that technology was to be covered as a source of power to be held to account. Theranos and Juicero (not the same scale, if you were wondering) didn’t appear until the middle of the decade.
But nonetheless, Mark gets an absolute grilling up there. He sweats through his hoodie, folks. The nice lady journalist needs to help him disentangle himself. The thrust of the critique is that Facebook “sells people’s data”, or, if it doesn’t sell the data directly, it somehow profits off it being sold or connected or otherwise used in a nefarious kind of way. Doesn’t that seem quaint.
After this, I listened to a few interviews from 2018—one with Ezra Klein, then still at Vox, and one with Kara Swisher again, this time for Recode Decode. Mark is more confident in these interviews, and had clearly come prepared to have his feet held to the fire. How did he feel, emotionally, when he found out that Facebook was being used by Buddhist nationalists to stir hatred against the Rohingya minority in Myanmar? Russia used Facebook to steal the 2016 election for Donald Trump—what are you doing to make sure that doesn’t happen again? Why should anyone trust Facebook again, with anything, given its track record? Is Facebook just going to move fast and break things again, like it did in Myanmar?
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s kind of incredible to hear the seriousness with which journalists like Ezra and Kara treat, for example, the Cambridge Analytica scandal. There is basically no interest in understanding, factually, what has happened and why. Facebook '“sells data,” influences the course of elections, shares “misinformation” and facilitates ethnic cleansing in Southeast Asia because of course it does. What else would you expect from a bunch of tech bros? These charges stuck in the minds of elite human capital from the first NPR piece and have stayed there ever since.
Why did this happen? Why was “selling ads”—the economic basis of the entire media sector at the time—rebranded by that same media as “selling your data”? Why was a Facebook app installed by 250,000 people tortured to explain the first Trump Presidency? Why, in the USA, did it seem like such a gotcha question to ask Mark “should someone really be able to post something wrong on the internet?”
I think the only answer that makes any sense is: the vibes were fucked.
Maybe this was because of something about Mark Zuckerberg. Maybe it was an inevitable consequence of social media—Martin Gurri writes about this—and Facebook was just the best to do it. Maybe it was completely unrelated to Facebook or social media, and everyone just goes reliably insane every 20 years for reasons that are basically unknowable and mystic. But something was going on.
(Just as an aside: I’m not sure Facebook’s mission holds up any better than the statements of its critics. Facebook doesn’t even pretend to “connect people” anymore—it has reached its final form as Craigslist with Tiktok built in. And short-form video might actually be as bad as people thought 2010-era Facebook was.)
Freshman Five
I know I said this earlier, but it’s worth repeating—people don’t like data centers.
There is a conversation happening online right now about whether people don’t like data centers for reasons that are fundamentally material—a data center will make power costs rise, and traffic will be bad while they build it, and now my electrician is going to demand that I start paying him money instead of throwing him a six-pack when my sockets start electrocuting me—or whether there is also an ideological or even ethical element.
You might expect, for example, that when AI CEOs explain that they are building AI that will replace all white-collar labor, people might listen. And when they see that there’s a planning proposal to build a Jobs Destroyer 3000 right next to their house, they might campaign against it for reasons that are fundamentally downstream from what it symbolizes.
This is very attractive to many people for many different reasons, but it doesn’t yet appear to be true. For most of the people who are opposed to data centers, the reasons appear to be rather prosaic (although not necessarily factual).
Ron DeSantis says that people’s dislike of data centers is driven by their “distrust of Big Tech titans and their designs of expanding tech power over the citizenry”. Which is frankly exactly the way I’d expect Ron DeSantis to try and jump on this particular issue. But the post he’s quote-tweeting makes a more useful and fundamental observation—maybe the AI guys are weird little freaks with bad vibes?
Taylor Lorenz, as always, has been the voice of reason on this issue. Everyone has lost the plot. They have no idea what’s going on. They have no idea how much water a data center uses but they’re super mad about it. They think the data center gave their nine-year-old chihuahua cancer. What we need is some grounded conversation about the costs and benefits. Thank you Taylor.
Vote for Pedro
Facebook the company, and Mark Zuckerberg the founder, have been deeply unpopular for more than a decade now. Just this morning, news has broken suggesting that it settled a $16 billion child safety case. But Facebook the product has never faltered. People love to use the product. These two states can coexist in part because Evil Facebook exists over there. Facebook causing a civil war in Myanmar is evil, but I like to talk to my friends. Mark Zuckerberg feeding his fat little cows macadamia nuts while Syria starves is evil, but this little app on my phone is fun :). I like pictures :).
Mark Zuckerberg built Meta into a $1.4 trillion company, and even though social media in the abstract was unpopular and technology was unpopular and he was personally unpopular for most of that time, there was never an opportunity for that popular opposition to crystallize into something that could slow or stop the growth of the business. (People could have deleted the apps. But they like the pictures :))
This is not, however, true for machine intelligence.
Artificial intelligence has all the makings of a truly transformative technology. But realizing that potential will require a physical infrastructure build-out of a truly staggering scale. The data centers are, of course, part of this. But the wider promise of AI is not just cheap tokens—it’s also real progress in the worlds of cells and atoms. Feats of engineering and manufacturing that are possible only with the help of data centers full of geniuses. And those feats will need to be performed in factories, built—if their benefits are to flow to the US—in the US.
And every construction site is an opportunity to say no. You can say no because of the water stuff. You can say no because you want to preserve the character of your neighborhood. You can say no because you think Sam Altman and Dario Amodei and Mark Zuckerberg have really fucked up vibes. And actually you don’t even have to give a coherent reason—you can just say the first five or six things that come to your head. You might not be able to create something by voting for it, but you can definitely veto.
This, it seems to me, is a real problem. In the last 50 years, people have largely come to oppose new infrastructure, and they have been assisted in that by the creation of many tools and processes for the vetocracy. Over the last decade and a half, many people have come to regard the technology sector with dislike and distrust. Now, the vanguard of the technology sector is asking politely if they can build a giant box in your backyard. Yes, it does hum a little, but it also produces one hundred billion dollars.
I have a feeling that we’ll be talking about this for a long time.
