David Wallace-Wells writes:

Like any mass populist movement, this one features echoes — and veterans — of others. But with data centers, something different, bigger and perhaps irreducible appears to be happening. Perhaps the better analogy is not with any movement of the social media era but with the long crusade against nuclear power, which managed to pull many threads of opposition together because nuclear plants’ iconic towers triggered, beyond political objections, apocalyptic ones, as well.

On the ground, the fight over data centers looks like a conflict over the nature of progress, the shape of the future, and who gets to determine the terms by which citizens submit to the visions of technologists and their financiers. To many who believe in the promise of A.I., it looks like a degrowth cul-de-sac — and a test case for whether dreams of frictionless technological progress can survive democratic blowback.

But one of these groups is simply much larger than the other. Only nine percent of Americans surveyed by Pew Research in June said they were more excited than concerned about A.I., perhaps because opponents had heard more about the risks it poses than the concrete gains it might deliver. You can’t reduce data center resistance to just fear any more than you can call it simply the influence of short-form video. Yet one way of reading the backlash is as a many-headed protest against inevitability — about not just the technology itself but also the whole package of breakneck build-out, social disruption and insane wealth creation it has come wrapped in. Is this really the only future on offer? [Continue reading…]