I was watching some hot World Cup action the other day when this local ad from a lobbying group called Virginia Connects graced my television screen. I didn’t know that Virginia Connects was behind this spot until the very end of it, which is standard practice for all evilmongers these days. If I see a commercial that begins with a tasteful montage of Americans doing super-serious, deeply American things, that ad will inevitably end with a plug for AI, Meta pinky-swearing to keep your kids safe, or a promise that Jesus gets me.
This Virginia Connects ad plays out in a similar fashion. It opens with an all-American dad using his smartphone to give his all-American wife (who’s also a troop, naturally) the play-by-play of their son’s baseball game. It’s all generically wholesome enough until the final three seconds, when a warm voice-over tells the audience:
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“Virginia’s data centers. Connecting us with what matters most.”
Go ahead and let out a long, pained groan. I know I did
This ad represents a somewhat belated push by the tech industry to fight back against Americans’ growing distaste for data centers. That Virginia Connects ad I linked to? It’s no coincidence that the people behind it disabled YouTube comments under it. Even Republicans hate data centers now. Save for Donald Trump, naturally. No, the president can’t get enough of these wonderful structures. He’s actively castigating the numerous lawmakers and citizens alike who oppose data centers and are, in increasing numbers, imposing bans on their construction. Your home state of California hates data centers. Georgia hates them. Virginia hates them, despite the troop baseball mom on TV feeling otherwise. And New York state just imposed a moratorium on their construction, which really got Trump upset, as evidenced by this online rant he fired off direct from his gold-plated Mar-a-Lago toilet:
“Data Centers are tremendous WINS for the States and Communities that are lucky enough to get them. New York should change its Policy, IMMEDIATELY. The Radical Left Dumocrats must not be allowed to cause us to lose Data Centers, AI, and all of this incredible new Technology, to China, and other countries! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
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Alas, this incredibly cogent and well-reasoned plea on behalf of data centers from Trump has failed to sway public sentiment in favor of building more of them. Americans, myself included, despise these things. And so should you. Let me tell you why
Superficially speaking, a data center isn’t much to be worked up over. It’s essentially a warehouse for data storage. A server farm, same as the ones that have undergirded your internet and mine for the bulk of this century. AWS, Cloudflare, Google Cloud: These companies and others house the vast majority of online data that Americans use as part of their daily lives. Until a couple of years ago, this country’s existing server farms were sufficient enough to handle all of that data. So why, all of a sudden, are tech companies falling all over themselves to build so many more of them, and as quickly as they can? Time for another long, pained groan out of you. From the International Business Times:
“Major technology firms are increasingly leaning on complex financial engineering to fund their $3 trillion AI infrastructure build-out.” And later on in the piece: “Analysts point to similar arrangements involving not only data center construction but chip and energy purchases, where combined commitments across top tech firms now top $1.8 trillion, outstripping their $1.4 trillion in recorded balance sheet liabilities.”
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That’s right. All of these data centers aren’t being built to connect you, the normal person, to what matters most. They’re intended to connect you to big tech’s AI ecosystem, which itself was designed to cut you off from what matters most, namely other people and the collective intellectual, emotional and spiritual value that humans have provided one another throughout humankind’s existence. AI is, at its core, an evil product that’s been engineered to wean human beings off needing, not to mention loving, one another. Its implantation is the ultimate consolidation effort by a tech class that means to horde everything — every dollar you’ve saved, every minute of your time, every idea inside your head — for itself.
Therefore, data centers — bland, inert structures that add no aesthetic or intellectual value to the landscape they’re built on — stand as the physical embodiment of the AI sector’s grotesque avariciousness. They also require so much power to run that they’ve already created a supply crisis, which has resulted in higher power bills for millions of Americans, myself included (our power bill last month was $400). According to one credible report, these structures could use a fifth of the nation’s power less than a decade from now. They could quadruple their water usage within just two years. All for a bunch of faceless buildings that don’t even crank out toys, or motorcycles, or some other sort of cool product.
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And the funny part (kinda) is that data centers barely even make their owners a profit! This building frenzy is kicking into overdrive just as the AI bubble is visibly bursting at the seams. OpenAI is on pace to miss its revenue projectionsby 90% over the next five years. The indispensable tech blogger Ed Zitron reports that, in nearly the same span of time, OpenAI will burn through nearly a trillion dollars in funding, with no hope of even coming close to earning enough revenue to make up the difference. That means that OpenAI and its cohorts (Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon and more) are blighting the landscape and drinking your milkshake in service of a revolution that’s already dead on arrival. And guess who they’ll ask for a bailout when it all goes to s—t? It won’t be each other. It’ll be you and me.
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This is waste on an unimaginable scale. And if our tech overlords aren’t kept in check, they’ll waste everything we have. Don’t let them
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