Speaker 1: Zone media, welcome to it could happen here.
Speaker 2: I'm Robert Evans. Now.
Speaker 1: A few days ago I had the experience of listening
Speaker 1: to somebody that I've known for a while and known
Speaker 1: as a fairly mainstream liberal, someone who does not, in
Speaker 1: general support the personal ownership of firearms, certainly not weapons
Speaker 1: like ar fifteens, react to the recent race riots, bagrams,
Speaker 1: you know, whatever term I guess is most appropriate in Belfast,
Speaker 1: where racist mobs ran through the streets attacking people in
Speaker 1: their homes, pulling them out of their homes, lagging their
Speaker 1: homes on fire, targeting these people because they were not white.
Speaker 1: And this person, who I've known for a while, reacted
Speaker 1: to watching footage of this and reading headlines in their
Speaker 1: general shock and horror by saying something along the lines of,
Speaker 1: I guess, if this kind of stuff is on the table,
Speaker 1: I understand why people need ar fifteens. Now, nothing had
Speaker 1: actually changed about the way the world works to all
Speaker 1: this person's opinion of guns or of reality. They were
Speaker 1: simply forced to confront an aspect of reality that had
Speaker 1: previously been obscured to them, because in earlier days they
Speaker 1: had assumed that in any civilized nation and they considered
Speaker 1: Northern Ireland to be part of a civilized nation. Police
Speaker 1: would stop this kind of behavior. And if you feel
Speaker 1: like the rule of law is something you can trust
Speaker 1: on pretty immutably, then someone else saying no, I would
Speaker 1: rather have a gun of my own than trust a
Speaker 1: cop might sound like a mania. Today's episode is not
Speaker 1: about guns or gun rights. It is, in the most
Speaker 1: direct sense, about data centers and the current people's war
Speaker 1: on building more of them. I see the current vast
Speaker 1: groundswell of support for this kind of activism and this
Speaker 1: fight in general, as the most hopeful change in domestic
Speaker 1: politics in quite some time. And I think this movement
Speaker 1: could become a weapon that drives a stake into the
Speaker 1: hearts of the silicon oligarchy that currently rule quite a
Speaker 1: lot of our world. The problem is any mass movement
Speaker 1: like this, especially one built on what is essentially also
Speaker 1: like the biggest name in the news right now, AI,
Speaker 1: is going to involve a lot of misinformation and even disinformation.
Speaker 1: People don't just hate data centers for good reasons, They
Speaker 1: hate them for bad ones too, Or at least it
Speaker 1: would probably be more accurate for me to say a
Speaker 1: lot of people hate them for reasons that don't reflect
Speaker 1: something data centers actually do or make worse. The broader
Speaker 1: reason that I've seen some people have issues with this fight,
Speaker 1: with this mass movement against the construction of new data
Speaker 1: centers is that data centers are utterly necessary modern infrastructure
Speaker 1: and incredibly crucial to the maintenance of what we would
Speaker 1: consider basic daily life. This is something that's true even
Speaker 1: without AI, and this is something that was true prior
Speaker 1: to the introduction of what Silicon Valley likes to call
Speaker 1: AI into all of our lives. Data centers are what
Speaker 1: make the age of cloud computing possible, and starting in
Speaker 1: the twenty tens, we decided that the cloud was where
Speaker 1: everything compute wise was increasingly going to happen in the future.
Speaker 1: There were pragmatic reasons for this. Having words save your
Speaker 1: document to a cloud file that makes it instantly accessible
Speaker 1: from any machine with Internet access should you desire. That's
Speaker 1: a big leap forward in capability, at least in one direction. Likewise,
Speaker 1: having like a watch on your body that cannot just
Speaker 1: take down your biometric data during a workout, but can
Speaker 1: store it and analyze it over long periods of time.
Speaker 1: That offers people real utility there's a reason products like
Speaker 1: this are very popular. You can't, however, have the entire
Speaker 1: world mapped out and accessible for turn by turn navigation
Speaker 1: without needing a shitload of data centers somewhere and in fact,
Speaker 1: in quite a few somewheres to make that possible. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, there are also privacy trade offs for all
Speaker 1: of these kinds of products. That's been the entire logic
Speaker 1: of the Internet of Things era. You hand over your
Speaker 1: data and we deliver utility. Privacy advocates have had issues
Speaker 1: with this from the jump, but most people didn't because
Speaker 1: the benefits were obvious and most people don't like to
Speaker 1: read or think very hard if we can avoid it.
Speaker 1: For almost twenty years, consumers largely ignored the rollout of
Speaker 1: data centers around the world, even sometimes into our backyards,
Speaker 1: because big tech had reasonably good pr and most people
Speaker 1: were pretty happy with their gizmos. All in all, you
Speaker 1: get a hint of how uncontroversial this used to be.
Speaker 1: In a twenty twenty two article I found published on
Speaker 1: Microsoft's source EMEA website, written by Bill Briggs. The title
Speaker 1: was critical to our modern society, how data centers power
Speaker 1: everyday necessities. Now, there was a little bit about AI
Speaker 1: in there, but this is twenty twenty two and the
Speaker 1: hype cycle hadn't nearly hit its peak at that point.
Speaker 1: The article spent much more time emphasizing how integral data
Speaker 1: centers are in things that people like quote. Simply put,
Speaker 1: they are the physical infrastructure behind cloud computing, and across Europe,
Speaker 1: Microsoft data centers are operating around the clock to support
Speaker 1: a wide spectrum of critical services, from the life saving
Speaker 1: work of doctors and first responders to essential services like
Speaker 1: groceries and online banking. At the same time, data centers
Speaker 1: also empowered everyday necessities like food deliveries, remote work, and
Speaker 1: video calls to family. The article goes on to include
Speaker 1: a quote from Rahil Nasir, an associate research director at
Speaker 1: a market research firm, who called data centers the invisible infrastructure,
Speaker 1: which I find interesting because absolutely no one would call
Speaker 1: it back today.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: People only saw them as invisible back then because there
Speaker 1: hadn't been much public discussion about these things, and there
Speaker 1: weren't nearly as many of them, to be fair. In
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two, the del Oro Group estimated global data
Speaker 1: center capex to have been about two hundred and forty
Speaker 1: one billion dollars. McKenzie is currently predicting global spending on
Speaker 1: data centers will reach seven trillion dollars by twenty thirty.
Speaker 1: The number of data center projects in development or under
Speaker 1: contract exploded pretty much right after Microsoft put out the
Speaker 1: article I quoted from earlier, and this put millions of
Speaker 1: people face to face with the reality of data center
Speaker 1: construction projects, many of them revolted. Q one of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty six saw a record seventy five data center projects
Speaker 1: blocked or delayed nationwide, which made it, in NBC's words,
Speaker 1: the most blocked and delayed quarter for data center projects
Speaker 1: on record. Researchers at Data world watchtold journalists they did
Speaker 1: not consider this a cyclical spike polygon, instead a structural
Speaker 1: shift caused as quote communities internalized an opposition playbook, legislative
Speaker 1: sessions introduced formal regulatory uncertainty, and the number of active
Speaker 1: opposition groups more than doubled to eight hundred and thirty
Speaker 1: three across forty nine states.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: The rapid and obviously organic nature of this growth has
Speaker 1: alarmed certain democratic and Republican politicians, largely the ones who
Speaker 1: have taken money from the tech industry. Some of these
Speaker 1: folks have panicked and insisted that Chinese government propaganda is
Speaker 1: behind the growth and opposition to data centers. The New
Speaker 1: York Times published a piece by sociologist Tressy McMillan Cottam,
Speaker 1: who argue that Democrats need to make the issue of
Speaker 1: data centers their issue because she believes that these protests
Speaker 1: could have a significant impact on the midterms, and in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty eight, in her column, she states that she
Speaker 1: wasn't initially sold on the value of data center protests,
Speaker 1: but time around activists convinced her that she'd been wrong,
Speaker 1: in part because this was not an issue that inherently
Speaker 1: drew urban or suburban or rural voters together, but all
Speaker 1: of them like it didn't inherently pull out Republican or
Speaker 1: Democratic voters, and thus it was a way to bring
Speaker 1: people together and get them working together uncommon cause, which
Speaker 1: is a really beneficial thing to do if you're trying
Speaker 1: to pull people closer into like a broader political alignment
Speaker 1: with you. And I would add to that point, just
Speaker 1: based on my own research and what I've seen, I
Speaker 1: feel like the fight against data centers is something that
Speaker 1: has what I like to call a high likelihood of
Speaker 1: fundamentalism in it or HLF, and an HLF issue is
Speaker 1: a kind of political fight that if you get drawn
Speaker 1: into it, you're really likely to become some to fundamentalist
Speaker 1: on the matter. And abortion would be a good example
Speaker 1: of this sort of issue, right. That's why back in
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies the Republican Party adopted abortion as a
Speaker 1: central concern, because if you get someone to become an
Speaker 1: anti abortion activist, they'll vote just based on that right.
Speaker 1: And if one party is against abortion and one parties
Speaker 1: for it, they'll never consider the party that is even
Speaker 1: open minded to it being legal in some limited sense, right,
Speaker 1: they become an absolutist on the matter. These are great
Speaker 1: issues to pull people into like a voting block with,
Speaker 1: because if you can get them to associate that issue
Speaker 1: with your party, you can kind of immunize that chunk
Speaker 1: of your voter base from economic concerns or other points
Speaker 1: of attack, at least in theory. Now, different issues tend
Speaker 1: to create fundamentalists for different reasons. People who are organizing
Speaker 1: against data centers aren't doing it usually because they think
Speaker 1: the idea of a data center is wrong, But many
Speaker 1: of them do believe that AI is evil and the
Speaker 1: moral and AI is the reason that so many new
Speaker 1: data centers are going up. Many more people oppose new
Speaker 1: data centers for the specific reason they see them as
Speaker 1: a threat to their own personal environment and to their
Speaker 1: own power bills, and to the cleanliness of their own
Speaker 1: water and air. It may seem as if this is
Speaker 1: the kind of support that would tend to breed shallow activists.
Speaker 1: If you just don't want a data center in your hometown,
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean you give a fuck about one going
Speaker 1: up in Mississippi or wherever you don't live.
Speaker 2: After all, none of these people presumably.
Speaker 1: Cared about the data centers that had been going up
Speaker 1: five years ago, ten years ago, before the issue became
Speaker 1: salient to them. But as treci Cottam wrote, the realities
Speaker 1: of doing this kind of organism on the ground have
Speaker 1: a tendency to transcend the reasons individuals start getting into
Speaker 1: the fight quote. I have been watching this new groundswell
Speaker 1: of descent firsthand in community meetings, organizing sessions, and civic trainings.
Speaker 1: Here in North Carolina. The resistance has lifelong joiners, alumni
Speaker 1: from environmental and housing movements, and young organizers. There are
Speaker 1: also a lot of people who have never dreamed of
Speaker 1: being disagreeable in public, much less considered joining a rock
Speaker 1: as social movement. The imminent risk of living next to
Speaker 1: a data center maybe why they show up for a meeting,
Speaker 1: but they're committing to the issue for bigger, deeper reasons.
Speaker 1: Political corruption and corporate mouthfeasance make them feel politically impotent.
Speaker 1: Voicing their objections, sharing their anxieties with others, recalling politicians
Speaker 1: who override them, and in some cases beating the opposition
Speaker 1: is giving them something. Few politicians are offering a taste
Speaker 1: of political power. And we'll continue, but first, here's some ads.
Speaker 2: And we're back.
Speaker 1: I think it's really important to emphasize something that Cottam
Speaker 1: said at the end of that last quote, which is
Speaker 1: that part of why the anti data center movement is
Speaker 1: potent and why it tends to draw people in much
Speaker 1: deeper than maybe the initial shallowness of why they got
Speaker 1: in would suggest, is that it offers them a sense
Speaker 1: of political power and of agency, and an age in
Speaker 1: which people are being trained more and more to feel
Speaker 1: as if they have no agency. You can't stop this,
Speaker 1: you can't fight this, or alternatively, this will do the
Speaker 1: fighting for you. Right, people are getting it from all
Speaker 1: sides wherever they actually land in the political aisle. And
Speaker 1: that's quite frankly, not very much fun. It's really fun
Speaker 1: to feel like you're a part of a movement like
Speaker 1: this that's kicking ass and taking names.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: I don't share the long term goals that led Cottam
Speaker 1: to write that article, at least not all of them.
Speaker 1: I get the sense that she wants to give the
Speaker 1: Democratic Party a powerful new long term voting block.
Speaker 2: I don't care so much about that now.
Speaker 1: I do, of course, want to see the Republican Party
Speaker 1: beaten electorally, and more Democratic votes is the only current
Speaker 1: way to do that. But the Democratic Party is not
Speaker 1: morally or logistically capable of doing anything but betraying these
Speaker 1: people in the long run. I really do believe that
Speaker 1: the reason why is the reason why the party has
Speaker 1: been incredibly slow to embrace these activists in any cohesive fashion.
Speaker 1: This movement is death for Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley
Speaker 1: has a lot of fucking money. And when I say death,
Speaker 1: don't think I'm exaggerating. Data Center Watch is calculated that
Speaker 1: the total value of data centers block in early twenty
Speaker 1: twenty six. This is just the first three months of
Speaker 1: this year was around one hundred and thirty billion dollars,
Speaker 1: compared to a total of one hundred and fifty six
Speaker 1: billion dollars in projects blocked in all of twenty twenty five. Now,
Speaker 1: a huge month last year for data construction expenses in
Speaker 1: the US was last July, which was actually a historic month,
Speaker 1: and that represented about fourteen billion dollars in expenses. So
Speaker 1: the value of the projects that have been stopped are significant,
Speaker 1: even in tech industry terms. More to the point, nearly
Speaker 1: all the money that underlies and underwrites these corporations and
Speaker 1: their owners is fake. Elon Musk could not produce a
Speaker 1: trillion dollars of real liquid US dollars if he wanted to,
Speaker 1: because that simply is not how assets work. Most of
Speaker 1: his wealth is in stock valuation, and those stocks are
Speaker 1: worth what they're worth because of consumer sentiment as much
Speaker 1: as anything objectively real. The entire AI bubble is being
Speaker 1: underwritten by the belief that this will be worth it.
Speaker 1: There are trillions in value here and we just need
Speaker 1: to spend a few trillion more to unlock them. None
Speaker 1: of that value can be unlocked without data, and if
Speaker 1: you throw a wrench in their plans to build more,
Speaker 1: you can hobble the whole effort. Any delay or serious
Speaker 1: setback creates the risk of a panic, and panic is
Speaker 1: their greatest enemy. All it takes is one sufficiently disastrous
Speaker 1: crash to kill many of these big overvalued companies. SpaceX
Speaker 1: and Anthropic and OpenAI and Microsoft and Meta can't all
Speaker 1: survive a market collapse, just as they won't sadly all die,
Speaker 1: nor can their billionaire bosses all remain masters of the universe.
Speaker 1: If they fall off their perch in a ray that
Speaker 1: shatters the global economy, we won't even have to bring
Speaker 1: all of these guys to court. Some of them will
Speaker 1: get done and by their former friends overseas. There's a
Speaker 1: reason why some VC types have already started trying to
Speaker 1: describe anti data center activism as terroristic. They are in
Speaker 1: fact terrified of it. This segment from an ArsTechnica article
Speaker 1: by Ashley Bellinger should give you an idea of what.
Speaker 2: I'm discussing quote.
Speaker 1: The researchers suggested that the back half of twenty twenty
Speaker 1: five marked a turning point, as data center opposition emerged
Speaker 1: as a national level narrative that showed the AI industry
Speaker 1: can no longer see the fights as individual zoning disputes.
Speaker 1: It is now reshaping elections, regulation, and site viability nationwide.
Speaker 1: Data Center Watch reported last year, where before officials were
Speaker 1: criticized for quietly signing deals without discussing construction with nearby residents,
Speaker 1: now they're encountering backlash before any deal is in the books.
Speaker 1: Data Center Watch found in some cases, researchers reported opposition
Speaker 1: mobilized before any project was officially filed. The mere rumor
Speaker 1: of a data center was enough to trigger organize resistance. Now, folks,
Speaker 1: when you hit this level of cultural inflection with a movement,
Speaker 1: you are in an extremely powerful but also very dangerous position.
Speaker 1: There's a reason that Steve Bannon's also made waves recently
Speaker 1: by encouraging his side to start reaching out to the
Speaker 1: anti data center people. He knows this energy can be
Speaker 1: co opted, or at least he believes it can. For
Speaker 1: my part, I want to see this energy harnessed. I
Speaker 1: want to see it burn brightly like the working flame
Speaker 1: of an oxyocettylene torch, because I want to see it
Speaker 1: used to cut directly into the belly of the industry
Speaker 1: that I hate. The best way for us to do
Speaker 1: this right now is to create as many moments as possible.
Speaker 1: We're projects to construct new data centers clashed with protesters.
Speaker 1: Each of these conflicts has the potential to spark a
Speaker 1: panic in the market, and every piece of bad press
Speaker 1: contributes to the overall weight of public opinion and expectation
Speaker 1: against AI and against big tech. We never know which
Speaker 1: piece will be the one that breaks this current incarnation
Speaker 1: of the industry. The name of the game for us, then,
Speaker 1: is to create as many moments as we can that
Speaker 1: endanger the future of this market and the industry behind it.
Speaker 1: And we can do that entirely legally by forcing them
Speaker 1: to confront reality. None of these data center projects are
Speaker 1: sold to towns and cities based on real, accurate information
Speaker 1: about how they will impact the environment and the local community.
Speaker 1: One good example of this recently from the United States
Speaker 1: is a story earlier this year about a data center
Speaker 1: project in Box Elder County, Utah. The proposed buildings together
Speaker 1: would have been three times the size of Manhattan, stretched
Speaker 1: across multiple sites. The project was championed by celebrity billionaire
Speaker 1: Kevin O'Leary, who was also the VC behind it. For
Speaker 1: a separate article in Ours, Technica Quote. Resident's top concern
Speaker 1: was the straight out data center project draining local waters,
Speaker 1: and they were willing to pay to protect them most,
Speaker 1: especially the vulnerable Great Salt Lake. Many locals paid a
Speaker 1: fifteen dollars fee to register comments to block the transfer
Speaker 1: of nineteen hundred acre feet of water from a ranch
Speaker 1: to the hyperscale data center. Other concerns include electricity bills
Speaker 1: rising and potential risks to air quality, local wildlife and land.
Speaker 1: Venture capitalist Kevin O'Leary, chair of O'Leary Digital and Shark
Speaker 1: Tank Investor, is behind the construction of the project. He
Speaker 1: told a local ABC affiliate that he regrets not working
Speaker 1: with state officials to be more transparent about the project
Speaker 1: from the beginning. We really screwed it up, O'Leary set,
Speaker 1: while confirming he was not expecting this intense kind of
Speaker 1: blowback from the public. He claimed that he and state
Speaker 1: officials anticipated that people would be excited about the major
Speaker 1: local investment and made huge mistakes by not involving the
Speaker 1: public more in discussions. Based on that assumption. We pissed
Speaker 1: off a lot of people, and that's not the way
Speaker 1: I do business. O'Leary said, that's not Now, given that
Speaker 1: he undeniably did business this way, I disagree, but that's
Speaker 1: beside the point. The resistance was successful. Now, the project
Speaker 1: wasn't killed entirely, but it has been massively scaled back
Speaker 1: and may yet die on the vine. The fact that
Speaker 1: resistance to this huge project and many like it, has
Speaker 1: caused so much damage to the industry has prompted a
Speaker 1: scale response. In late May and early June of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty six, I noticed a drip and then a flood
Speaker 1: of new articles and viral content critical of the anti
Speaker 1: data center protests. One good example of this would be
Speaker 1: a June tenth article on the website bar Charted by
Speaker 1: Nash Riggins. It was titled data centers get a bad
Speaker 1: rap for using too much water and energy. It turns
Speaker 1: out al meends suck up even more now. In this
Speaker 1: incredibly snotty little shit of an article, Nash is reporting
Speaker 1: on the fact that a bunch of pro AI influencers
Speaker 1: had with shocking coordination, started posting online responding to complaints
Speaker 1: about data center water usage by pointing out how wasteful
Speaker 1: it really is to grow almonds. You know, the almond
Speaker 1: industry uses even more water than AI does.
Speaker 2: And you know, if you want a good response to that.
Speaker 1: Just say, sure, put them out of business.
Speaker 2: Fuck them.
Speaker 1: Another popular article in this genre was a blog post
Speaker 1: by Andy Masley. He could taque the argument that AI
Speaker 1: was particularly wasteful by making arguments like this, per an
Speaker 1: interview with him on asfamily dot Com, almost all of
Speaker 1: that one point seven trillion gallons of water per year,
Speaker 1: specifically water that is withdrawn in the return to the source,
Speaker 1: Masley told me, referring to a widely cited estimate from
Speaker 1: Karen House Empire of AI. The book claimed surging AI
Speaker 1: demand could use up to one point seven trillion gallons
Speaker 1: of fresh water globally by twenty twenty seven, or half
Speaker 1: the water annually withdrawn in the UK. Masley says the
Speaker 1: word use in that sentence is misleading. Data centers do
Speaker 1: evaporate most of the water they use on site for cooling,
Speaker 1: but on site use represents only about twenty percent of
Speaker 1: their total water footprint. The other eighty percent comes from
Speaker 1: power plants that heat water to spin turbine. That water
Speaker 1: is then returned, mostly unchanged, to its source. Masley's viral
Speaker 1: post got him interviewed by The New York Times and
Speaker 1: earned a correction from the author of the book, but
Speaker 1: his critiques about specific claims made there shouldn't be seen
Speaker 1: as having any overall legitimacy to the broader argument about
Speaker 1: data center water use. For one thing, he acts as
Speaker 1: if all data centers function the same way basically, both
Speaker 1: in terms of how they are powered and in terms
Speaker 1: of how they do cooling, and thus you can make
Speaker 1: the kind of assumptions about water use that is making
Speaker 1: and you just fucking can't now. The Environmental and Energy
Speaker 1: Study Institute has published an expanse of analysis of data
Speaker 1: centers and water consumption. They point out that this is
Speaker 1: all much more complex than Masley's quote might lead you
Speaker 1: to believe, and I'm going to read from that article quote.
Speaker 1: In the context of data centers, water consumption refers to
Speaker 1: the amount of water withdrawn from blue or gray sources
Speaker 1: minus the water discharged by the centers, primarily warm water
Speaker 1: left over from cooling the it racks. The consumed water
Speaker 1: is generally the water that evaporates or is otherwise taken
Speaker 1: out of immediate human usage. Withdrawal of fresh water from
Speaker 1: low streams or underground aquifers may lead to aquifer exhaustion.
Speaker 1: Particularly in water stressed areas. Approximately eighty percent of the water,
Speaker 1: typically fresh water with drawn by data centers, evaporates, with
Speaker 1: the remaining water discharge into municipal wastewater facilities. The large
Speaker 1: volume of wastewater from data centers may overwhelm existing local
Speaker 1: facilities which were not designed to handle such a high volume.
Speaker 1: And again, one of the things that Masley tends to
Speaker 1: ignore is that even when you're putting this water back
Speaker 1: into the system quote unquote, that doesn't mean it's going
Speaker 1: back to the aquifers that it was pulled out of.
Speaker 1: It doesn't mean that it's going back into the same way,
Speaker 1: which can still cause massive issues. Now, how water efficient
Speaker 1: a data center is is going to vary depending on
Speaker 1: the climate of its location. But because these tend to
Speaker 1: require a lot of space, many are built in places
Speaker 1: where land is cheap. Those places are often hot and dry,
Speaker 1: like Utah and Wyoming. Data centers and hotter climates use
Speaker 1: more water. Data centers specifically built for the AI industry
Speaker 1: also have higher chip density, which requires more cooling, which
Speaker 1: uses more water. As time goes on, these increased demands
Speaker 1: lead to more and more being demanded of the local
Speaker 1: areas that agree to host data centers. Since data centers
Speaker 1: don't lend themselves to any other industries or create very
Speaker 1: many jobs, this often leaves local communities dependent upon them,
Speaker 1: which means they have no choice but to say yes
Speaker 1: to ever harsher environmental demands. I'm not creating a hypothetical here.
Speaker 1: This has happened over and over again, and I'm going
Speaker 1: to read again from that article by EESI dot org.
Speaker 1: Northern Virginia is considered the world capital for data centers,
Speaker 1: with over three hundred operational data centers spread across four counties. Collectively,
Speaker 1: all data centers in Northern Virginia consumed close to two
Speaker 1: billion gallons of water in twenty twenty three, a sixty
Speaker 1: three percent increase from twenty nineteen. Luten County, with approximately
Speaker 1: two hundred operational data centers, used about nine hundred million
Speaker 1: gallons of water in twenty twenty three. This has led
Speaker 1: Looten Water, the county's fresh water authority, to rely heavily
Speaker 1: on potable water for data centers rather than reclaimed water. Now,
Speaker 1: activists looking for cautionary tales about what data center addiction
Speaker 1: can do to an area should look no further than
Speaker 1: Northern Virginia. The region started saying yes to such development
Speaker 1: decades ago, when the industry was very much different. Back then,
Speaker 1: AOL was based there and their data center was part
Speaker 1: of an overall campus that employed more than five thousand
Speaker 1: people per an article by the Lincoln Institute. The campus
Speaker 1: has since been demolished and three large data center facilities
Speaker 1: are being built on the site. There's a big fence
Speaker 1: around it for security purposes, so it's totally isolated from
Speaker 1: the community now, and it's only going to employ about
Speaker 1: one hundred to one hundred and fifty people on the
Speaker 1: same piece of land.
Speaker 2: That's the difference.
Speaker 1: That's a quote from a local resident, and well here
Speaker 1: from some other local residents. But first, here's ads.
Speaker 2: And we're back now.
Speaker 1: I've mostly discussed the fight against data centers thus far
Speaker 1: as an American thing, and it isn't. I think it
Speaker 1: is particularly relevant to our upcoming elections in a way
Speaker 1: that deserves particular attention. This is a global fight, and
Speaker 1: it is a global fight not just because people hate AI,
Speaker 1: but because data centers in the AI they enable, have
Speaker 1: come to symbolize the tech elite who have bought our
Speaker 1: world and who are in the process of burning it
Speaker 1: to the ground. Hatred of these people should know no
Speaker 1: geographical boundary, and this presents the possibility of international outreach
Speaker 1: as well as collaboration and strategizing. As an example, I'll
Speaker 1: discuss a small community in Romania, Mishlei, which is located
Speaker 1: in one of the poorest sections of the country. In
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, they said hello to a team from Cluster
Speaker 1: Power who wanted to construct a data center in the area.
Speaker 1: The mayor gave a welcoming speech that should sound familiar
Speaker 1: to many of you. We are incredibly proud to have
Speaker 1: an investor on board and to see people talking about
Speaker 1: the data center in Mishlei. The company contributes to the
Speaker 1: local economy by paying taxes here and has chosen this
Speaker 1: area as its headquarters. So that all sounds great, But
Speaker 1: I found an article for algorithm Watch that notes quote
Speaker 1: no documentation was provided to verify the tax revenue actually
Speaker 1: generated for the commune. By June of twenty twenty four,
Speaker 1: only ten jobs had been created, compared to at least
Speaker 1: three hundred that had been promised.
Speaker 2: Now you can find.
Speaker 1: Stories that are almost identical to this all over the
Speaker 1: United States, but also elsewhere in Europe. Like the Netherlands
Speaker 1: and Germany, and in many other places besides. Everywhere these
Speaker 1: companies do business, they leave behind broken promises and lies,
Speaker 1: like a trail of gasoline reeking behind them as they go.
Speaker 1: Why shouldn't we drop a match and watch the fire
Speaker 1: catch them. There are dangers to embracing a movement based
Speaker 1: around opposing the construction of infrastructure that is necessary for
Speaker 1: a lot of modern life. But I might argue those
Speaker 1: dangers look a lot less scary if we recognize that
Speaker 1: necessary for modern current life and necessary for life itself
Speaker 1: aren't necessarily the same thing. In much the same way
Speaker 1: as I would give up my ability to buy pistachios
Speaker 1: and almonds year round to avoid California not having water,
Speaker 1: I'm willing to reconsider what miracles of daily life are
Speaker 1: really worth the cost. If it turns out the cost
Speaker 1: is that high and the scariest thing in the world
Speaker 1: to the people of currently run it, it's this, perhaps
Speaker 1: one day soon everyone will start to feel this way.
Speaker 3: It could happen. Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 3: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 3: coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio
Speaker 3: app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, you
Speaker 3: can now find sources for it could happen here, listed
Speaker 3: directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening,