So the conflict of interest will just escalate more and more.

AI is attractive to governments similar to any tech capable of war, so the race for offer capacity would give tech giants massive capital from lucrative government contracts that then gets into the flywheel of model training and selling to the masses.

The problem was they built data centers in a sloppy, dirty, loud way. Imagine if the first cars were like that? Or the first electric distribution methods? Do it right if you want to grow it.

Electricity is destiny, if you can't produce it you will be a puppet of those who can. See Germany.

Voter: So, tell me about this AI stuff. You wanna build one in my backyard right?

AI CEO: That's right! It'll increase the cost of your water, electricity, and likely lower your property values due to people leaving because of the 24/7 daytime lighting and noise pollution!

Voter: Well I kinda don't like that at all!

AI CEO: Great! Because that's not all! Once we really improve on our AI, it will eat your job for now and forever! And, wait till we embody them in robots. Whoo-boy! You won't even be able to drive a truck or plumb pipes for a living! Ain't that great?

Voter: What? No! That sounds terrible!

AI CEO (thinking): Why can't I get to these schmucks?

It's the economy stupid. If you don't offer material improvement with UBI instead of selfishly flexing your utopian visions of Star Trek robes and replicators and you and only you living for a thousand years, don't be surprised if voters don't give you what you want politically.

Electricity is the ultimate fungible resource. You can convert electricity into food, housing, medicine, video games, football games (either sort), transportation, etc.

The more electricity we produce, the more broadly prosperous we will be.

It's not a question of needing more electricity - we don't need any electricity at all. We got by without it for 100k years until just the last few. But still, the more we have, the better all our lives will be.

Grid upgrades take years at the best. Utilities are already doing what they can, with re-conductoring existing power lines, adding more substations, etc.

But if a new thing is coming in and demonstrably making your life worse in return for an abstract benefit, I understand deciding that it has no place near you.

Hates as in they would rather shoot themselves in the head than read AI slop, or listen to AI music or appreciate AI art etc.

Did they not know how to argue for their case convincingly? Were they unwilling to do what was needed to get people on their side? Were their ideas against the interests of most people? Or was the issue mostly about the people in charge?

Republics have historically fared well against more authoritarian societies. In no small part because they are not stuck with the leaders they happen to have. If a leader becomes a liability, a republic can easily replace them. Companies can also do that, except when the leader also happens to be a major shareholder.

If we build datacenters in a way that benefits everyone, i.e. not solely as the corrupt, private enterprises they’ve been so far, one that leans into our political economy’s strengths, I suspect we could do it more sustainably.

One side started ramrodding construction through secret council meetings that arrested folks who spoke out against them. That’s the side to blame for escalation. And it’s the side that makes a moratorium rational while we figure out a process that works—assuming good faith doesn’t work when the guys building these things are being such clusterfucks locally and nationally.

This is an incredibly immature response to a real problem. Perhaps we need a changing of guard.

The whole datacenter debacle highlighted that the whole tech industry is completely clueless and disconnected from regular people's lives. For example, look at this: https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/inside-lowell-markley-da...

Who the hell thought that this was a good idea? They could have built this DC just a few miles away in the middle of an empty field a few miles away and avoided all the problems.

For example, Facebook was a site you trusted for enjoyable socializing and it morphed into a horrifically evil platform.

Amazon.com is a massive rug pull where it used to be an amazing place to buy good products at good prices, now it’s a hellhole of dark patterns, sponsored listings, and upsells.

Try to find one popular Internet company from ~2010 that hasn’t been massively enshittified or turned into dystopian surveillance/algorithm/addiction capitalism.

The tech industry trained its own customers to believe that any product they launch will eventually get way worse than it is now.

Amazon may be better than getting in your car and driving downtown to visit several stores to see if they have what I want. It can still be worse than it was five years ago, though, and that difference can still grate on users, even while the users continue to use it.

Facebook may be the best way of seeing updates on what my grandchildren are up to, and it can be much more of a dark pattern, enslaving mess compared to what it was five years ago. People can still feel the difference and resent it, even while they look at their grandkids' pictures.

Don't mistake usage numbers for public appreciation.

Q3 Amazon’s year over year net sales growth is 2%.

https://www.retaildive.com/news/amazon-ceo-retail-business-i...

For comparison, T-Mobile grew revenue by over 7% and it’s a telecom.

Idk maybe step 1 wasn't popular.

Instead it’s about cost of living, corruption and the perception of horrible people doing well. These are less easy to one off with policies. But the public has found those options nevertheless, one of which is blocking data centers (which seem to feature all three).

[1] https://x.com/paulg/status/2118041310699352558

Neither of these phenomena are primarily the fault of the Silicon Valley tech industry; and NIMBYism in particular is largely driven by people who bought bay area houses many decades ago (my family is from the bay area, and I'm absolutely including my relatives in my parents' generation in that number - none of them work in the tech industry).

There are 2 types of tasks people do throughout their life.

1. Creative tasks that provide self fulfillment

2. Uncreative monotonous menial tasks that degrade life.

AI takes 1 and ruins it to 2. The jury is out if it will fully take your job, I don’t know if that’ll happen but no one asked for automation of these creative tasks.

When you point these AI bros talk nonsense like cure cancer, Dyson sphere, China bla bla bla.

At the very least, models need to be post trained to stop outputting art, this will never happen though, meanwhile I will enjoy my half a mil a year, while all these AI bros lose their mind over graphs, loops or whatever nonsense they’re concocting up.

Nothing about this is inevitable, AI is as inevitable as nuclear, it seems to require even more capex than nuclear.

Only the techy folks building the stuff people hate have to reckon with that. There are plenty of techy folks building perfectly likeable products; I'd hazard to guess that only a minority of programmers are involved in the creation and development of LLMs and LLM accessories. I will grant that the ones that are building all the things that folks hate so much are a very very noisy minority, though, near-deafening really.

Tech companies could build data centers in ways which are more palatable to local residents, but using less water or straining local electricity grid less costs more. And they care about costs more than communities. Even though a coal plant is objectively worse than a data center, that is (understandably) what local residents' sentiment is.

Big Tech is going to face ever growing opposition until they start catering to the needs of the communities they want to operate in. They aren't entitled to operate like this in any of our communities.

It's absolutely concentrated in AI. Specifically, the wannabe AI oligarchs.

> Tech companies could build data centers in ways which are more palatable to local residents

Tech has been doing this for decades without breaking the law [1] and driving up power prices [2]. It did it without constantly screaming about how it's going to cause mass unemployment or end the world. It did it without funneling money to–and being publicly championed by–historically-hated politicians.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=JumpCrisscross

[2] https://www.factcheck.org/2026/10/data-centers-and-electrici...

1. Making sure they are the only industry that wins

2. Dark pattern subscriptions that are very difficult to cancel

3. Garbage customer support, even for paying customers

4. Rampant privacy violations

5. No loyalty to employees even in rich times (e.g. MSFT asking 25% of employees to leave when they are absolutely printing money)

6. Tax avoidance at all costs, so there is no economic benefit to a data center in your location.

7. A faux moral high ground that they'll abandon the second they need to ingratiate themselves to corrupt politicians or need to pollute more for AI.

8. Only shareholders matter. Forget customers, communities, or employees.

It is an unmistakable stench that teaches people that tech doesn't value them at all beyond a monthly subscription.

I've worked in tech my whole career, and our industry sucks ass. It is only getting worse too.

I’m thinking about this like a post mortem for the tech industry. There is a reason consumers have no love for big tech, and data centers are just the latest and biggest reason.

Never gonna happen, can't set bad precedent by breaking protocol. They'd rather bribe their way out of any problems, which is in line with protocol.