Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘What does the data center backlash tell us about the country’s attitude toward growth and progress and change in other domains? The answer isn’t exactly clear, since so much of our economy and future has been wagered on this one bet that it has begun to look less like a novel technology than a new social and economic model, imposed from above.

It’s been almost two decades since the financial crisis, but before A.I., no obvious paradigm had really emerged to succeed the one that gets loosely called neoliberalism. There have been a few bursts of new industrial policy, including successive rounds of trade and tariff wars and some small-scale reshoring, of which the data center build-out is a symbolically significant part. There were promises of a Green New Deal and a care economy — and perhaps more than promises, given that nine-tenths of new energy infrastructure in the United States is clean and that health care and social assistance accounted for so much American employment growth in recent years.

We’ve flirted with a crypto future, the metaverse, legalized sports gambling and futures markets and wallpapered the rest of our lives with advertisements for them and their kind. We’ve heard sermons about abundance, deliverism and popularism and come to understand that there may not be an end to this age of broad discontent without meaningful progress on the affordability crisis so many Americans feel — even the pretty well-to-do among us. We’ve been told, “It’s time to build,” then watched as the most avid advocates of a new American dynamism have refused to acknowledge any check on their imperious projects as legitimate.

In all this time, full of so much political turmoil and economic frustration, nothing else has loomed as large as A.I., which now seems to many Americans to occupy almost the whole horizon of possibility. This is the biggest reason that data centers have attained such totemic significance for so many Americans and why technologists have tended to see the backlash as an uncompromising war against progress. But 75 percent of Americans aren’t against progress. That’s absurd. They just resent it being imposed on them, unilaterally and unconditionally.’ (from the New York Times)