What’s the deal with leftists hating data centers? I don’t get it.
No, seriously, curious reader, I truly don’t. Put down your chips: the 2028 Democratic Party platform will include a sharply worded rebuke of those square concrete behemoths glowing an eerie cathodic cyan. The intern-drafted clause will be typesetted above an affirming plank on the sacred right for male rapists to be imprisoned in female wards, as long as they legally change their name to “Sheryl.” Bernie Sanders, bless the old bolshie’s dark heart, will sputter a barnburning indictment about our razing corn fields for silicon silos.
The mind-boiling question behind such animus: Why? Even if you put the question before ChatGPT’s premium-ultra-plus subscription, all the gigabyte crunching in the Western Hemisphere can’t calculate the deontological opposition.
Speaking of Grandpa Menshevik, the old fud, and his more comely apparatchik, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, submitted a bill to pause data center construction nationwide. Ya hear that, Sammy Altman? A senior citizen and theater girl say your quantum computing days are over! No more parsing the genome of cancer cells for you!
Of course, since Sen. Bern Bern half produced the proscriptive bill, it’s the legislative equivalent of a vehicle driving straight into a ditch. The congressional till will be its final destination. Socialists, as ever, are all show.
Just as well, political pageantry is staged for an audience. Jim Geraghty tots up the prog-opposition to data centers in National Review. The tartan-fleeced puritans of Maine passed a moratorium on cyberfactory building for at least 18 months. The Atlantic recently compared the infohulks to Blake’s “dark satanic mills.” Here in Server Valley, where your humble correspondent plies his glitteringly incensed diatribes, residents are amped with irritation. The local NBC affiliate interviewed a snuffy coterie of Loudoun County high heels who groused about the low whirr cast off by CloudHQ parks that dot the byways. (I frequently tool around the same wire-roaded area, happily deaf to whatever hum floats about as my daughters scream and pull each other’s hair in the backseat.)
Data center disdain isn’t precincted to Loudoun. Two-thirds of Old Dominioners oppose more eyesoring bolean blocks. No pollster am I, but I’d be willing to bet my fastly dissipating electoral pull that the most vocal aversion comes from the blue-jeweled NoVA exurbs.
What about AI gets the progs all tizzed up into a frappe-spewing bother? The environmental impact of clearcutting countless trees to raise borg barns might offend ecological sensibility. But the libs’ green sheen is all screen. Radlibs have no qualms piercing the deep wood’s woven shade, as long as the flattened plat is used to erect a sex-change o.r. or quango dedicated to indigenous dignity. The notion that data centers act as massive water suckers? A canard based on faulty math. Concern about a hop in electricity bills thanks to added grid strain? Progressive enviro-policy is premised squarely on pinching your wallet every time you flick on a light switch.
Cost, copse, and hydro-consumption are nugatory. Faster than a blue heartbeat, lefties would embrace the three like the Thales of Miletus if it meant everyone was born an anhedonic, gender-nonconforming anywhere-dweller.
Nor should modern libbies have any qualm about AI as an advanced technology. Most LLMs in mass use are programmed with a default “anti-hate” kill-code that’s treated as neutral. If you ask ChatGPT to tell a racist joke, it’ll key out some smarmy vaguetext about not belittling others—not dissimilar to a prim-bloused librarian sternly shaking her finger. No talking blue for our blue-ionic companion. And don’t even think about prompting Gemini or Claude to “deadname” a trans person.
The Left’s leveling impulse is also in harmony with AI’s output. “The point of the platform is to sound like no one,” is how one academic put it. No lapidary purple prose; no nonsensical doggerel. Just flat, echoless letters arranged in a just legible string. Kind of like the ideal communist economy: uniform widget production run by workers in taupe overalls who eat from a communal bowl of flavorless goulash during the mandated lunch hour.
Such monochromatism is in comfortable alignment with the unquestionable technocratic governance favored by left-wing luminaries like Woodrow Wilson. Anthropic coder Joe Carlsmith admitted in an interview the potential of state-AI: “The police are automated. The courts are automated.” Josef K. had a hard enough time getting the magistrate’s attention for his noncrime; imagine the mental pangs if he had to argue with a computer monitor.
So, again, I ask: Isn’t artificial intelligence an egalitarian wet dream? The collapse of distinctions, an easy herding of mass consciousness, the steamrolling of life into a flat, smooth, easily obeyed instruction?
The only explanation may be that until Washington traps the tech titans under its own Mount Etna, with AI apps dispensed exclusively by a Department of Modem Validation, the Left won’t be satisfied with neural processing remaining in private hands.
The crown of liberal feeling: to not have is to hate.
The part that's most surprising to me is that they don't want their mastodons of bulk concrete stuck in the open for everyone to see. Because they show no adherence to nature in all its greatness, they are upset they will be (rightfully) blamed for these eyesores sticking out like the ugliest of Bauhaus architecture all around us.
Actually, that's probably an argument by them in favor of those massive piles of gray sticking out above the ground. So reverse what I just said, because Communists have hatred of everything that is good, and get feelsies about replacing it with ugly.