the no data center movement

i think this is a pretty big deal and has a good chance of significantly changing how people vote, especially older people. i also feel like it has a chance of building local radical energy. it has pretty quickly appeared as a powerful venn diagram center of groups with not-completely-congruent values. residents pack town halls, yell and scream, get ignored, the righteous anger builds. many similar stories happening all the time everywhere right now in the u.s.

to start i've got to link this brutal takedown of clown billionaire investor kevin o'leary from two young women in utah regarding the hyperscale stratos data center currently looming over 65 square miles of high desert north of the great salt lake in box elder county.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DYOVaBDzEAN/

The remote chance of getting a data center in my drought-stricken North Central Florida county is currently being used as an excuse to ignore burn bans and water restrictions by chuds.

Map, this is crazeeee..! the most blatantly anti-democratic thing I've seen in ages

Last week, there was a further twist when the developers withdrew their application to divert 1,900 acre-feet of water from ranching to the project. However, Stratos “fully intends to move forward” with a new application set to be lodged with state regulators, according to the developers.

This new process will invalidate the objections already raised by Utahns and require each person to pay $15 to file a new complaint. Opponents claim this move is aimed at skirting public disapproval of the project

what's interesting about it is how political support for data centers is bi-partisan, even though absolutely everyone hates this shit. "political support" as in the elected and unelected officials (often appointed by municipal leaders) who actually vote on these things and "listen" to the public feedback.

it's a wedge issue among the left, i think, and democrats, very different from israel's genocide in gaza, but a similar effect in that if you oppose data centers, you have little representation at a national level. the "we hate data centers" voice is drowned out by neoliberal technocrat bullshit, looking the other way, passing through data centers and failing upward to the next level of life success

That Utah one is fucking insane. This is where it really starts to feel like the tech oligarchs really do run everything, unchecked (bi-partisan support, as z_tbd notes!) and we are all just fodder in the making.

there just seems to be this mass hysteria going on: "We need to do this before they (China) do it!" without really considering if this technology is really going to help the larger public in a big way. It's certainly going to help shareholders and CEOs but I've yet to be convinced, but I am convinced that these data centers are fucked. The Utah thing will use more electricity than the entire state of Utah is currently using

btw fuck Kevin O'Leary and that stupid fucking show that made him a recognizable name

yeah I read the Guardian piece on the Utah center and holy crap the energy and water math on that one is on another plane. O'Leary was quoted in it blahblahing about competing with China, and to state the tediously obvious: why aren't we compelled to compete with China on education funding, transition to renewables, electric vehicles, etc.

Kevin O’Leary had a role in Marty Supreme as well.

cool another reason not to see that shit

>there just seems to be this mass hysteria going on: "We need to do this before they (China) do it!"

An even older stupid bipartisan sport. Fearmongering about Red China might have a bit more polling support than data centers but my impression is that even with a full media and political class onslaught most people don’t care about China at all.

xp yeah he's also doing that 'paid protesters' bs schtick w/o providing a shred of evidence... that's the new line with these fucks, if there's a mass protest they must be on the Soros econazi payroll because who would *not* want this massive destruction of the natural world for a handful of jobs and some tax incentives?

>there just seems to be this mass hysteria going on: "We need to do this before they (China) do it!"

An even older stupid bipartisan sport. Fearmongering about Red China might have a bit more polling support than data centers but my impression is that even with a full media and political class onslaught most people don’t care about China at all.

milo clearly getting paid by the post

Also if we want to do something before China, how about green energy?

And yes, people absolutely hate these data centers, with every good reason imaginable. I agree there's the makings of an anti-billionaire populist political coalition there, if only we had a major party interested in such a thing.

yeah I just said the same thing about China and I mean if we're really worried about them beating us, perhaps we should try communism??? O'Leary can contribute to the glorious cause by digging a lithium mine

in stl, one of the many proposed data centers at "the armory" was approved after a last minute voting session (announced 24 hours before the meeting, the bare minimum required) which was switched to a zoom call rather than their regular meeting spot, and passed unanimously. i saw friends scramble to try to get to the physical meeting spot, get to the meeting (at 2pm or something, during workhours), only to show up at the spot and find that it was on zoom. and then of course, very few of the zoom attendees were allowed to speak.

the mayor, on this same day, meanwhile, no joke, was in england at a small dinner party with the billionaire who proposed the data center. on the same day it was being voted on.

later that day the mayor seemed to realize that some people were disappointed in her, so she released a clip where she defended the data center, and with not a small amount of barely concealed resentment against her own constituency, mentioned the conditions the city had boldly placed on the data center to "address community concerns".

but what are the conditions? on energy use:

The Developer must use reasonable efforts to source at least 50% of
the data center’s energy load from renewable sources (wind, solar,
geothermal, etc.) within five years of commencing operations. If the
renewable goal is not met, the Developer must endeavor to purchase
localized renewable energy credits. The Developer must also recycle
e-waste. The Developer must annually report electricity usage, waste
heat, and water usage, which may be made public.

yeah, GREAT

even better, all those jobs!

The Developer must meet escalating, median-wage "Job" minimums for 20 years (starting at 25 in year 1, 50 in year 2, and 100 thereafter) and pay $2,000 in liquidated damages for each job short of the required total.

something tells me that 100 people are not going to be working at this data center. and what is this incentive? if they don't meet 100 workers, and they're deciding what to do, they can either add another worker (ballpark, paying them $50K), or they can pay a $2K penalty. i wonder what the billionare will do?

the other thing that occurs to me: Iran has shown that data centers (specifically Amazon or AWS sites) are legitimate targets for attack... something to think about, it wouldn't have to be a foreign power, it could be a target for domestic terrorists or space lasers

xp the good news is data centers are not going to be built

I don’t know how reliable Ed Zitron is but he’s penciling out that data centers take forever to build and very few have actually been completed and are up and running

Don’t theae data centers become outdated in a matter of years and need to be completely upgraded?

I don't know about AI specifically but there are plenty of Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers up & running all over the place

New data suggests that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is operating out of more than 900 data centers, far greater than previous estimates.

As reported by SourceMaterial, citing "leaked" data seen by the publication, in 2023, the cloud giant was operating from some 914 data centers in more than 50 countries.

Right, but AI dedicated ones need far more power and water and cooling space so are far bigger than regular ones

i hope ed zitron is right! the part where it gets way over my head is about how the debt holders of the ai data centers are these shitty ai startups built on a bubble that are likely to disappear. i can see how that would be a problem! however, when it comes to billions of dollars, for some reason it always seems like another group of really rich people always manage to step in just in time to make sure that the environmental destruction of our only home in exchange for short-term private gain continues as long as possible

yeah cloud servers and AI computing centers have very different demands xp

ultimately its all just computers in a room thing thats really different about the current ai boom is scale

i do agree that most of them will prob never be built

yeah I don't know the technical requirements but the Guardian article says that the one planned in Utah will be as large as Manhattan if completed, which is fucking nuts

Musk wants to build them in space which is fine I guess but you would have to have staff living up there and what if the AI goes crazy and locks them out

NV Energy, the Nevada utility that has supplied the bulk of Lake Tahoe’s electricity for decades, told Liberty Utilities—the small California company that services the region—that it will stop providing power after May 2027. The reason? NV Energy needs the capacity for data centers. As in: the energy supplier for the Lake Tahoe region is telling the utility company that it has less than a year to find another power source.

https://fortune.com/2026/05/12/lake-tahoe-data-center-49000-residents-power-source/

not sure you could come up with a better bubble indicator than someone trying to build a facility bigger than manhattan

im going to build a tulip greenhouse bigger than manhattan

could be a rad indoor skate part after the bubble bursts

def a cool place for teens to hang out and throw rocks at things

I got into it with a buddy last night who was going on about the rise 'AI consciousness' and that kind of shit and I'm like 'What about when the power goes out? I can still think and dream and design without a wall outlet' and he didn't have a good answer for that, but he's convinced it's like a new species or something

2x the size of Manhattan apparently? Two Manhattans. That's too much even for a single lunch date.

speaking of manhattan one aspect of new york city living that bodes well for the future is that i assume building an AI data center here is cost prohibitive (not that i don't think someone will try)

I got into it with a buddy last night who was going on about the rise 'AI consciousness' and that kind of shit and I'm like 'What about when the power goes out? I can still think and dream and design without a wall outlet' and he didn't have a good answer for that, but he's convinced it's like a new species or something

What can I say, the people yearn for mysticism. Maybe try to get him to just join a nice cult instead? The Jehovah's Witnesses will take anyone.

I've read some of these fools talking about 'Oh yeah, Claude likes to write poetry in his free time' and I'm just thinking 'you fucking suckers really believe this shit don't you?'

a lot of companies that sounds like fly-by-night operators are proposing a lot of stuff right now but I wonder how much is going to make it past the "we rented a building" phase because the hardware to fill all these places is nonexistent or already spoken for

the thing with these giant wealth funds and venture capital expenditures is that they can bet a ton of money every time with the assumption that one of every five, ten, etc. things they throw money at will show a profit after five years because the profits will make up for the rest of them being failures and it's a matter of keeping the money rolling

yeah I guess part of the worry is when they start building the Manhattan-size building and then run out of money and there's just these giant concrete pads in the desert or prairies or whatever... even an unfinished one can still cause a lot of damage, and declaring bankruptcy can help you avoid cleanup and remediation. Look at all the abandoned oil wells all over the place

I have a free Claude account that I've used very rarely, I mainly set it up to poke and prod at it, and I set my username as "Human." So when I log in it says, "Hello Human." I think it's good to keep those boundaries clear.

does he ever write you poems in his spare time?

I’m not going to make myself popular but…

Hi, I’m building a datacentre and they don’t have to be terrible. My one is going to be water positive, they’ll be a net increase in water in the aquifer under us, renewable powered because that’s the cheapest and quickest way to do it. The waste heat is a resource we’re going to use for horticulture and growing algae for fertilizer, animal feed and aviation fuel.

In Europe there’s plenty of DCs heating neighborhoods with district heating, heating greenhouses etc.

Data centres aren’t the problem, it’s how they are built and the insane amount of money sloshing around AI. A DC will pay upwards of US$50,000/MWh for energy for AI. At this moment in Australia the spot price is AUD103 and it’s a still morning and the sun hasn’t come up yet. The ceiling price in the market is AUD26k. So DCs are massive distortions.

Trump fucked the US by putting tariffs in Chinese solar and batteries - that’s the easiest and quickest way to power anything particularly in the American West. Of course by design that pushes everyone to the next cheapest thing gas, which is terrible, and there’s a global shortage of gas turbine components because the latest generation jet engines break all the time and the turbine manufacturers all have uptime contracts with the airlines and so all parts go to planes.

This means that even worse choices get made; and of course like everything that’s gone before DC operators are not being held accountable for their externalities. The Investor owned utility, I.e. one without a market mechanism is a particularly bad fit for this (not that open markets like Texas are much better) - the incentives are there to fuck one’s neighbors as with Lake Tahoe above.

Of course whilst DCs will pay 50k/MWh they don’t want to and energy = water so will do cooling in the worst possible way and just vent heat and vapour to the atmosphere.

TLDR; datacentres are terrible due to lack of regulation, tech bro god delusions about what AI is and will be and capitalism. They deserve to be fought, they are bad news till proven otherwise.

Well right, I mean we've had big data centers for years — it's "the cloud" — and while there were concerns raised about their energy draw even before the big AI boom, they weren't at this monstrous everywhere scale that is being attempted now. I agree that not all of the centers being planned are going to be built, we're obviously in a gold-rush mentality right now and that can't last.

And yeah the problem is regulation, and that the regulation in the U.S. is being done at local and state levels that are just utterly unequipped to deal with any of it. These local mayors and commissions and state legislators get stars in their eyes when these big tech lobbyists show up and do big power point presentations on "the future" and everything, they actually think this is exciting stuff.

I should try and find an actual source for it but a DC nearly blacked out Southern Company and/or Duke last year. That’s most of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas IIRC.

They switched over to their internal diesel gensets without telling the grid and grids don’t do well when 3GW of Load just disappears like that.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves on XAI's big (polluting) data center in Southaven: "This is the largest economic development project in Mississippi’s history. It sets the pace for continued high-tech investments across our state and strengthens Mississippi’s position as a leader in this exciting tech revolution."

This shit makes me want to go all Ricky Roma — "Who ever told you you could work with men? You fucking child."

THANK YOU ED

"We need to do this before they (China) do it!" without really considering if this technology is really going to help the larger public in a big way.

meanwhile China is so far ahead of us in renewables, the US is gonna be like colonial Williamsburg for fossil fuels (analogy c/o Daniel Bachman)

china selling shovels to the ai gold rush

From what I gather, a lot of the boosters are focusing on the people throwing around a lot of dissent at city council meetings, zoning meetings, etc. and pointing out that people haven’t actually read the plans or what regulations will be enforced, and so on. Which is fair, the number of people raising the noise level in the last decade in local politics has been high and it doesn’t help anyone.

I think what they’re missing is that this is the tip of the iceberg of people who have vague suspicions or are finally noticing that the world has changed in the last few *decades* and there is a lot of vague, in-articulated dissent going on because the public at large has become uncomfortable.

The existing outliers that have been poor stewards of land, energy, and labor are in the spotlight and we’re getting a systematic reevaluation of what exactly we’re doing here.

The counter-example of a good site was provided when I questioned someone boosting expansion was a Colorado Springs industrial site that’s had the sort of incoherent pushback I mentioned. I agree it’d be a good site! Abandoned Intel manufacturing plant that was slated to be a solar cell manufacturing plant until the subsidizes dried up and that company pulled out. The issue there in my eyes is that there’s a pre-existing empty building, there’s no guarantee this will work out any better than the solar cell plant, and even if it does it opens the door to more expansion and industrial park crowding.

Some of the more remote locations that are proposed might be fine from nearly every aspect but again, there’s no guarantee that this is long term and creating another rural or semi-rural vacant building is just more rural blight. There are entire empty small towns that are mostly nuisance properties at this point.

data centers becoming a symbol for capitalist fascism is fine imho good even i dont care if people get the technical details wrong its ok if a few innocent data centers get swept up in the hysteria theyre just rooms with a bunch of computers in them anyway

I'm trying to figure the politics of Ron DeSantis signing legislation calling for more transparency about them.

They're unpopular and DeSantis wants to run for president, probably as simple as that. Wants to look like he's doing something without probably actually doing much.

He’s probably the leading Republican opponent of AI across the board. Ostensibly very concerned about job losses.

I posted it because Tampa-St. Petersburg have resisted a massive AI facility and he's actually...listened to them?

china selling shovels to the ai gold rush

shovel your way out of the slop! and into the truth

before we start talking about China as some kind of eco-state, they still burn a staggering amount of coal.. 'developing economy' and all of that

oh for sure, my point was that they are way ahead of us in tech/infrastructure

absolutely, and they're doing for electric cars what VW did in the 60s.. smart, affordable and reliable. That movie 'Who Killed the Electric Car' is already obsolete

China hit peak coal a couple of years ago and it’s not going to go up again. Coal consumption is not coming down fast but so much of it comes from overseas, China doesn’t want to be dependent on imported energy.

More importantly though China sees agentic tools a lot differently. If anyone has AGI delusions it’s not in the discourse, but synthetic agency is being put to work a lot. It’s seen as a tool. There’s was just a law instituted on not fucking over works on AI (that floated by on a podcast and I need to dig into that more).

The other thing about China is that, by denying access to the latest and most power hungry, chips China has been forced into making their models a lot more efficient; there’s probably also pressure from the top because they don’t want the massive expansion in energy consumption.

A lot of Chinese agentic tools are run on small local boxes (there’s a privacy anchor to that, less government snooping and I’m interested how that’s going to play out). The reason you can’t buy a Mac mini with a decent amount of RAM right now is Chinese people bought them all to run OpenClaw. It’s staggering how good (and how efficient) the Mseries apple chips are at running small models and you can train these to do specific tasks. You also find all kinds of widgets and boxes on Alibaba.

This means Chinese AI is a hell of a lot more distributed and yes there’s increased energy demand but way more distributed.

Hyperscalers are a very American solution to the problem. We just had a renewables developer partner with a DC company to do 5MW single container DCs down here in Australia - these take advantage of the fact that a feature of a renewables dominated energy system spills a lot of energy. Last year 28TWH of renewable energy go spilled in eastern Australia because it couldn’t get from rural areas to urban loads. That’s about 15% of total demand stuck small DCs on solar/wind farms and Hoover up the excess demand. (AI inference and GP compute are pretty well solar aligned).

Another concept I have knocking around is stick containerized DCs in swimming pool carparks. Dump the heat off the pool and cut off the gas. You needed the energy to heat the water in the first place, you might as well do something useful with it before hand.

mh, I think the Colorado Springs one is the ones my old battery colleagues are going to put in 100hr iron air batteries and use them to harvest excess front range wind. That is/was going to be one of the good ones.

I like hearing about the sand battery in Finland but I have no idea how it works

you just whisper whatever data you want to store at the beach

I don’t know how reliable Ed Zitron is

unfortunately not very, he's a committed hater but is maximally sceptical in a way that's increasingly detached from reality

oh wait! jfc! god this is proof to me, i have brain fog. from covid. :( i can’t believe i forgot who he is.

but yeah, i read this entire thing about him just last year

Ed Zitron Gets Paid to Love AI. He Also Gets Paid to Hate AI

i guess it’s because i wasn’t immersed in the online discussion then, or now, so a lot of these people are just in the same general pile of “acting for personal gain rather than for truth” that is pretty much the entire entertainment + news + infotainment industries, but i have trouble telling a lot of these assholes apart, it’s just an onslaught

if you believe zitron then the ai industry is completely doomed because the tech doesn't work at all, none of the finances add up and can never add up, etc. which all implies that actually the problem will eventually go away on its own because there's no money and no tech.

that hyper-scepticism was generally the correct approach to take to a lot of other recent tech nonsense hype like the metaverse, nfts, etc. but ai does have more substance to it (not as much as the craziest boosters say, but certainly non-zero) and so its impacts, both good and bad (especially the bad), need to be taken seriously and reckoned with in a grounded way

i dont follow zitron closely but i basically agree with that conclusion not that ai tech wont be around but but the current general sitch that we call ai is the biggest speculative bubble ever and is just by basic math doomed to pop unless you do believe what its craziest boosters say because in order to justify the investment it has to turn into the biggest industry the world has ever seen

its like teslas stock price but many times larger

zitron’s pretty one-note in that the last time I checked, he hadn’t varied much from a boring central thesis that AI has some uses, it’s a bubble, the rapid expansion is going to blow up in everyone’s faces, etc

I get the money flow diagrams between hardware companies, so-called hyperscalers, and the big AI companies highlight some suspect things but throwing up a new diagram every so often isn’t that intriguing unless his real market is people playing the market

I’ve heard him guest on podcasts and it’s the same old crap, but the one episode of his I listened to had Shingy as a guest. He made no inroads, because Shingy kept to the “I am familiar with these tools because I have used them in advertising, marketing, and production planning such as story boarding)” and anything beyond that, the Shingster responded with “yeah that seems less than optimal, it’ll die off in a few years if it’s not useful in the market”

behind all the image and marketing whatever, Shingy is actually good at business as business

also, zitron’s show is on iheartradio or whatever clearchannel is calling itself now and the ads are terrible

This is pretty funny, and good for them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDy6UrHittQ

i dont follow zitron closely but i basically agree with that conclusion not that ai tech wont be around but but the current general sitch that we call ai is the biggest speculative bubble ever and is just by basic math doomed to pop unless you do believe what its craziest boosters say because in order to justify the investment it has to turn into the biggest industry the world has ever seen

― lag∞n, Wednesday, May 13, 2026 5:57 PM (yesterday)

i'm going quietly mad over here because all of the people in power seem to be pretending that everything is going fine and ignoring the fact that, like, nothing fucking works. i feel like god, they're lying to themselves, and as long as all they listen to comes from the internet, which they effectively have complete control over, that lie is going to be effective. the problem is that, like, corporeal existence is a thing, the internet is not in fact reality. it's not even a matter of them lying - nobody's going to tell them the truth, because why bother? they're not listening. i have to use the internet and i am, like, deficient in skills when it comes to navigating life outside the internet, but damn if i'm not trying, because the internet is just so much more fucking miserable than anywhere else. i mean, given a choice between corporeality and corporate reality...

the gen z kids, i feel some kinship with them because like them, i _did_ have a covid puberty. and it fucked me up. i just don't know what kind of future anybody who's not a billionaire has if this shit doesn't end.

i'm going quietly mad over here because all of the people in power seem to be pretending that everything is going fine and ignoring the fact that, like, nothing fucking works.

yeah its not great

There was something about Stratos in The Register today:
https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/05/13/utah-mega-datacenter-could-dump-23-atomic-bombs-worth-of-energy-per-day/5239670

"A proposed mega-scale datacenter in the US state of Utah has caused controversy after a physics professor estimated that the facility and its associated power generation could dump 23 atomic bombs' worth of energy per day". Apparently the data centre will require 9gw of power per day, which is roughly the same as the entire city of New York, despite being around one-quarter the size. Which immediately made me think of TRON. On the one side, New York, a city in which people and cars whizz around delivering bagels, and on the other side Stratos, a collection of servers that move electrons from one circuit board to the same circuit board.

This raises the question of which of those two things - New York, or Stratos - will generate the most useful work. Bagels, or data? Presumably if Stratos generates more useful work than New York the logical solution would be to decommission New York's existing infrastructure, e.g. the touristy stuff, the restaurants, parks and so forth, and repurpose the entire city as a data centre. Imagine New York in the year 2035, with empty streets, empty intersections, and every building is just a huge, featureless black rectangle, like in TRON or Escape From New York. I can smell it. An air conditioning duct on a metal moon.

"Davies’ preliminary analysis said this could raise daytime temperatures by 2°F to 5°F (1°C to 3°C) and nighttime temperatures by 8°F to 12°F (4°C to 6°C), potentially causing serious ecological impacts in the high-desert valley." To which the obvious counter-argument is that if New York *is* turned into an enormous data centre, then flooding it would actually help with cooling. Checkmate, liberals!

ut governor cox and a bunch of stratos-related assholes are having a https://www.gigawattsummit.com/ in deer valley this weekend. i hope they get some hecklers!

the onion weighs in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkDKmSMvfmk

all of the people in power seem to be pretending that everything is going fine and ignoring the fact that, like, nothing fucking works.

It's like the cartoon figures who've run past the edge of the cliff and their legs keep moving while they hover over the abyss.

just heard a funny/sad comparison of AI to The Thneed from Dr. Seuss's The Lorax... an all purpose tool that didn't anything particularly well, but did incredible damage to the environment to help the Onceler become a billionaire

apparently ohio got enough signatures to put a state constitutional amendment banning data centers on the ballot for november.

ope my bad, they don't have enough yet.

https://myfox28columbus.com/news/local/this-ohio-group-wants-a-constitutional-amendment-banning-data-centers-on-november-ballot-politics-policy-tech-enviornment

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:qqx7bauacsfwi7yufzfqio32/bafkreihhsbihi32ipy7g4mytseeyovlwxgm2jrt2sgwtvujsyl4blbr4fi

https://bsky.app/profile/jael.bsky.social/post/3mm5uqnnhlc2u

hayley williams seems like a pretty high-profile artist to do a local issue statement like that, good for her! i like to imagine that video from elevate utah came across hayley's feed or something.

i drove past the hansel valley the other weekend by the way. that area is farm and ranch land and has been since the mormons routed out the natives with the help of the u.s. government 175 years ago. it doesn't support a lot of people - it didn't when the shoshone were there, it doesn't now. people who are still farming the area are very proud of that fact - farming is really hard and has faced its own history of predatory investment over the years. right now is another dark time for farms. anyway i don't think investment billionaires understand generational meaning and what it does for people. you're talking about confronting a community of people with an existential sort of axe. ironic that that's what the u.s. did to natives 175 years ago and now that we're facing the same sort of thing maybe we finally understand it. anyway good to see it gaining traction at the music fest and in people's hearts and minds. unfortunately i also see a lot of rhetorical prep work going into 'create cushion for rich man to slam his machines into so the rape looks less egregious.'

meanwhile native youth are literally occupying drilling sites on their land in the midwest... let's just say they're a little more advanced in this kind of thing, how it goes and what it takes to win.

as a huge hater I have to say I am kind of delighted that O'Leary decided to make himself the public face of this

here's a close look at the situation in Northern VA: https://thebulletin.org/2026/05/your-ai-chatbot-is-polluting-my-backyard/

reposted from the ai thread:

https://jodi7768.substack.com/p/ai-is-capital

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:zbgog5eztv35jjfykehxd7a4/bafkreihuwkvmzszorim2lr46kyfe7evmjm6wfewbsqg4la3xzcf6lpdzg4

otmmmmmm

that's in Vancouver!

Thank you for starting this thread 👍🏽

eddington palme d’or

the first regional straight-up denial i've seen i think.

https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/local/pocatello-ai-data-center-denied/

Another Stratos related water application has been withdrawn.
I'm still trying to understand exactly why.
The first time we speculated it had to do with changes under HB60, but this application was already filed under HB60, so I'm left wondering if this is strategic, an attempt to wear us out, whether there are issues with the application itself, or if the several hundred protests raised significant enough concerns.
I'm hoping to learn more later today.

eddington palme d’or

― ||||||||, Sunday, May 24, 2026 7:26 PM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

i'll bite. i have no idea what this post is supposed to mean. i haven't seen the film - looks like exploitation trash tbh.

i've noticed there is a little bit of coast resident sneering going on from people who think they're smarter than they are. to be expected regarding a genuinely spontaneous movement from people who largely do not live in desirable areas of the u.s.

we're literally going to run out of water where i live this summer. cities are going to be fined for overuse. kitchen sink taps going dry is a real fucking possibility. honestly fuck anyone who doesn't care about this tbrr.

the water thing is a huge concern... it's already getting scare in the West, snow pack is diminished, and there's just this mindset that 'if they build it, it will come' which is not how precipitation works. We grow a lot of food out this way that actually feeds the country

yeah. running out of water is a much bigger issue than data centers of course. data centers are just a piece of tinder that caught on fire under a lot of dead wood related to 'using every available resource so capitalists can get richer,' to force an obvious metaphor. there's this sense i get that people are standing down capital whether they realize it or not. of course they've spent their whole lives otherwise being flexible when it comes to capital so they're stalling - making sure all of the review steps are taken - that there are 'safeguards', etc. i'm not sure how radicalizing this is going to be - probably not much - but i'm already seeing new data center proposals being flat-out denied, so at least there's that.

drives me crazy when the government puts out water use guidelines like take short showers dont water your lawn when there would be plenty of water for normal people to use if absurd wasteful industries fracking farming in the desert manhattan sized ai data centers were just cut off

saw this thing about farming in arizona theyre out there growing lettuce canals that lose half their volume to evaporation bring the water to them cmon man be serious find a more reasonable place to grow lettuce

xp yeah a typical poultry processing plant uses more water in a day than many municipalities

drives me crazy when the government puts out water use guidelines like take short showers dont water your lawn when there would be plenty of water for normal people to use if absurd wasteful industries fracking farming in the desert manhattan sized ai data centers were just cut off

― lag∞n, Thursday, May 28, 2026 1:55 AM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

saw this thing about farming in arizona theyre out there growing lettuce canals that lose half their volume to evaporation bring the water to them cmon man be serious find a more reasonable place to grow lettuce

― lag∞n, Thursday, May 28, 2026 1:59 AM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

utah governor spencer cox issued a 'drought emergency' two days before his 'gigawatt summit' at deer valley last weekend. these people really are that drained of conscience. we get the added insult of religious platitudes here too. time and time again i see a comment along the lines of 'i prayed for rain and all i got was this water-hogging data center'.

weird state government agency that develops land for 'military use', MIDA, is a big part of the stratos push in utah. they got all the land lined up in 3 fucking months and kept it all under wraps. take a look at this beautiful array of shining white man faces https://www.midaut.org/board-members.

re the lettuce, yeah... everything has already been industrialized. the west has been pillaging its resources in the name of capital since the u.s. acquired it. sustainable farming is still pretty rare in spite of the best efforts of people to educate. when you see it in action it's truly amazing how much healthier it is. you can feel it. profit margins aren't maxed though and maybe even more importantly the people who do it aren't totally value-less drones. of course it's not like the land that they want to build the data centers on is pristine. but data centers are a huuuuge jump in resource use from cattle herds and even alfalfa farms (the alfalfa farms here use a lot of water and get a lot of flak because they sell most of it to rich horse owners in china). and we're finally at the point where the 'amount of water' vs. 'use of water' lines are crossing.

"As data centers boom, Virginians breathe the exhaust of 10,000 diesel generators"-- The Washington Post

https://wapo.st/4v9G4N6 (gift link)

drives me crazy when the government puts out water use guidelines like take short showers dont water your lawn when there would be plenty of water for normal people to use if absurd wasteful industries fracking farming in the desert manhattan sized ai data centers were just cut off

e.g. Austin is currently under water restrictions because it's in stage 3 drought (can only water lawns twice a week on specific days, restaurants aren't supposed to serve water unless/until customers request), but in the meantime Elon's Tesla plant there is now the city's 3rd-largest water user, and he's planning to build a new semiconductor plant next to it that will use even more. These aren't data centers per se, but same basic deal — huge tech operations sweeping in to use an ungodly amount of scarce resources.

https://austincurrent.org/2026/04/10/tesla-austin-water-drought-gigafactory-musk/

restaurants aren't supposed to serve water unless/until customers request

this is so dumb its not even a meaningful amount of water pure theater

"If it's yellow, let it mellow" would probably be more effective in terms of volume. But that restaurant rule is a pretty standard drought restriction.

I'm ready for the "no lawn movement" as well.

Yeah that's a whole other issue. There are obviously whole parts of the country that shouldn't have lawns at all.

idk the amount of ice water you're constantly plied with in american restaurants could probably sustain a mid-sized nuclear reactor

i have these flashes of memory where i'm sitting at the booth of a vast, dark yet overlit american restaurant where the tables have tablecloths but also tempered glass on top of the tablecloths, and in front of me is an enormous fluted plastic drinks glass absolutely overloaded with ice. condensation is rolling down the sides and pooling at the bottom on the glass tabletop. the restaurant is bustling with patrons and cheerful servers armed with ice-water jugs roam the premises with hawk-like vision, able to spy a half-inch gap of air at the top of any cup at a distance of 50 paces. when they do, they descend, your cup is filled, a smile is granted, they wheel away, the dance begins again

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B6ck7O6BBU

I'm ready for the "no lawn movement" as well.

― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR), Thursday, May 28, 2026 8:46 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah that's a whole other issue. There are obviously whole parts of the country that shouldn't have lawns at all.

― paper plans (tipsy mothra), Thursday, May 28, 2026 9:23 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

idk the amount of ice water you're constantly plied with in american restaurants could probably sustain a mid-sized nuclear reactor

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, May 28, 2026 9:38 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is what they want you to think

Look, not everybody has a lagoon.

...that is infinite.

see these guys know how to make the desert bloom.. by using 'clean power' and 'specialized nonprofits'

Meta is boosting its spending commitment on a forthcoming AI data center in West Texas by more than sixfold to $10 billion, with an aim to reach 1 gigawatt of capacity by the time the facility comes online in 2028, the company said on Thursday... The company also said it’s committed to adding over 5,000 megawatts of clean power to the grid, and will ease the water burden by working with specialized nonprofits to bring fresh water to the area.

you just put some h next to some 20 and you got water, easy peasy especially for specialized nonprofits

I just saw a video of some guy walking through a dry riverbed right by an existing Meta data center, it was just red dust... no water at all

#dustbowl

clean power as in "clean empty"

clean fossil fuel

The nearly $500 million, 366-megawatt facility would rely on 813 small gas-fired generators that don’t require water but would emit pollutants such as carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides.

Real heads (readers of Eddie Z) know that the announcements of center construction far outpace actual data center “completion” and “actually filled with chips and not sailboat fuel” and this is all kayfabe to keep the money, now increasingly coming from public pension funds invested in PE, flowing.

in other words, I’m never retiring and my diet will consist of never used Blackwell chips.

yeah, I agree with that... but in the case of Meta, they're actually building them, not just talking about it like Warren Beatty pulling up to a little crossroads town called "Las Vegas."

this is good but I imagine it only covers actual city limits? still, sends a message

In first, California city overwhelmingly votes to permanently ban datacenters

Residents in Monterey Park, California, became the first in the US to vote on a permanent ban on datacenters on Tuesday, and early results indicate a resounding victory for the prohibition.

While many cities and counties have already passed temporary or indefinite moratoriums via their local governments, Monterey Park would be the first to do so through a ballot initiative.

reno too. i'm seeing more flat-out cancellations. i don't think stratos in utah is going anywhere.

reno isn't permanent iirc

oh i missed the last sentence.

While many cities and counties have already passed temporary or indefinite moratoriums via their local governments

this seems to be the main thing happening.

https://theintercept.com/2026/06/01/ai-data-center-protest-police-surveillance/

Americans speaking out against artificial intelligence data centers on social media are falling under police surveillance, a confidential law enforcement bulletin obtained by The Intercept reveals.

A fusion center in Philadelphia combed through spicy internet comments from AI critics and concluded there is a growing risk of physical violence against data centers from “domestic violent extremists,” ranging from white supremacists to anarchists.

“Domestic violent extremists (DVEs) are likely interested in targeting artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, posing a physical and cyber threat to infrastructure in the Philadelphia regional area,” the Delaware Valley Intelligence Center wrote in a December alert.

worth noting that Iran took out Amazon Web Svcs data centers pretty early on in their response to U.S./Israeli attacks, so yeah

I loooooooooooove that this shit is catching on to the extent that if you bring up “data centers” in a science conversation you get the “let’s not bring politics into this” reflex

ha

smdh. Droughts and water scarcity in general are intensely political, as they should be. Scientists who want to avoid politics are being willfully stupid.

i am curious about the context of the conversation - was it with coworkers, friends, professional colleagues?

in my experience working for state gov it's funny how silent everyone is about politics. it's such a no-no to talk about. the director of my agency likes to say things in my company that assume that i'm some kind of generic hater of "government red tape." like my beef with government is both a lot more fundamental and much less personal than that my dude.

i was wfh the morning of january 6, and i chatted everyone saying something like "i'm worried" and all i got was an "everything's going to be fine" from an irritating coworker. that was the end of me hearing anything about it.

all i got was an "everything's going to be fine"

Trump has said the same thing almost verbatim about his Iran war and its fallout. it only means "everything's going to be fine with me". Obviously Trump has more reason to think that way than you co-worker did.

this was a conversation my partner was having with colleagues, some of whom are in gov, many not

pretty crazy how quickly anti data center sentiment has permeated american political culture, apparently one of the complaints of these guys who supposedly were going to attack the white house ufc event was data centers, that and epstein, unfortunately one of their moms overheard them talking about it and called the cops

republicans are even running against data centers now in local elections

The Chinese made me do it

Republicans are embracing allegations that data center opposition in the U.S. is being fueled by foreign actors, raising questions over how influence operators are contributing to one of the fiercest debates in the tech policy space.

Reports, including from OpenAI, recently emerged suggesting China and other countries are carrying out influence campaigns to fan the flames of Americans’ frustration with the data center build-out.

great for Republicans to go against their own base

im willing to accept chinese money or store credit

there's just no way this is an organic movement of actual citizens opposing environment degradation and job loss, reports OpenAi

no doubt it’s a hidden plea for subsidies from the federal government

yeah they really don’t seem to understand how much people hate this shit

I think they do know, but they think it's just a passing phase and the public will let go of it once AI is better established as a normal part of daily life. They believe this mainly because it is a convenient belief that suits what they wish were true. So they blithely ignore the growing anger and wish it away.

It’s funny, after i posted i thought to myself, they do know, they just don’t care because they’re toxic narcissist tech elites who will never have to deal with the consequences of these data centers going up.

ngl guys i am actually starting to think a revolution against tech would be yhe best thing for this country

people are simply going to have to [hug & kiss] one billionaire a week until the message is received. garden variety health insurance CEOs aren’t going to cut it. it’ll have to be some real marquee names.

would be interesting

right now the entire state of utah is on fire. i really don't think they're gonna get anywhere with stratos. as far as the intermountain states go, wyoming seems to be the most data center-friendly. cheyenne said yes to a few iirc. not surprising, wyoming people are deeply twisted even by western red state standards.

in Wisconsin they're building a huge one by I-43, which means it's very very visible, it's also stunningly huge. seems to be the conservatives complaining about it the most actually

there was a big AI stock tumble today, investors are starting to get the hives over the ridiculous over-valuations, so we'll see about new construction actually getting off the ground

hope it all crumbles, i don’t have any stock or anything else so i honestly don’t give a flying fuck if the economy crashes, it would just be the third time this has happened in my life

also i hate this shit so much that even if it did hurt me, it would be a small price to pay for seeing the bubble burst

i’ve resigned myself to working until I drop dead (that’s 10 minutes from now).

luckily (!) i have been homeless and lived off grid etc before, so i have resigned myself to working until i can’t and then living on social security in dire poverty. great country.

I know it's stupid of me, that it would be harder than I think it would be, but lately I have been thinking a lot about what it would take to completely check out of this Capitalist treadmill. (And also cheering for its complete destruction as I do so.) Like, it's not just a desire to escape a prison, but to find a better way of living. I often fantasize about communal living, rejecting the internet, adopting "old ways", etc.

Well...you partly can if you're willing to go without plumbing, a fridge, various conveniences for a while, if maybe not forever, while you build or buy alternate systems for things that we currently get from "the outside world." It just takes a lot of intention, attention, energy, people chipping in, conversations and agreements.

on the plus side it's never been easier/cheaper to live off-grid!

I do own stock and my portfolio went up today. The AI/chip decline isn’t as entwined with the rest of the market as banks/real estate was in 2007/8

yeah it wasn't a crash or anything... more jitters about the spending levels

those jitters happened right as i graduated from college, which essentially kneecapped me for the rest of my life, so it was a fucking crash for me

speaking of data centers this shit is insane;

https://www.eenews.net/articles/trump-doj-supports-musk-owned-data-center-in-suit-by-naacp/

Xps to pops, i also lived in such a situation for a few years in my 20's. I can't go into detail on ilx but there was no plumbing, heat, etc. It was honestly the happiest i've ever been, and I was never been able to reintegrate myself into the straight world or city life after that. The physical demands were considerable, not totally unpleasant... still, i don't think it will get any easier as i age.
I've often thought about joining an intentional community, though. In the back of my mind that's always been the plan, it's inevitable actually.

Xp table — i don’t think he meant jitters in reference to 2007/08 crash

3 utah state legislators got primaried over data centers, including the senate president stuart adams

https://www.ksl.com/article/51538423/stuart-adams-trevor-lee-dan-mccay-lose-reelection-bids-in-utah-legislature

the stuart adams loss is the only one explicitly about data centers afaict

two incumbent box elder county commissioners also voted out.

i'm a state employee so i get monthly "messages from gov. cox". the one from a few days ago said something like "many people have expressed their concern over data centers. we have a group of people making sure that water flowing into the great salt lake is protected." what the fuck does "protected" mean lol. excellent squirm language sir!

ha

Salem Brought a Guillotine To Oppose New Data Center. Company Reps Left, Feeling “Unsafe”.

https://www.gadgetreview.com/salem-brought-a-guillotine-to-oppose-new-data-center-company-reps-left-feeling-unsafe

get em salem!

a local data center destroying the neighborhood near mine, some citizen's reactions and the conduct of the owner behind the center.

the 'no' voices for expansion are literally all the people who live in the neighborhood, whose electrical bills have soared astronomically during the past few years (I now pay $800/mo on a balanced billing plan!)

the 'yes' voices are IBEW workers who have been promised jobs by the company... despite the fact that there are only about a dozen employees at most times ... and a coterie of older conservative folks on social media who buy into the promise of AI and jobs and the 'development' of a new industry.

oh yeah its wild the degree to which that one was plopped right in the middle of a residential city neighborhood rather than out on the highway where they usually go

https://media.wbur.org/wp/2026/03/0318_datacenter-3-2560x1707.jpg

the company is hiring armed guards to patrol the streetcorners, and the diesel fumes at sunset aren't great, either

god that's so dystopian looking

$800/month??!!!???? what the fuck!!!

We hardly pay $200 in the height of summer when our electric bills are highest due to AC running. I mean yea we are as conservative as possible about running them— we both hang around shirtless in our underwear a lot— but christ, $800 is like 2/3 of our mortgage payment!

yeah that's both insane and unsustainable

Yeah. Our heat pump HVAC system drives it up some, but over the last few years we've see an increase along the lines of $340 > $460 > $590 > $700 > $770 / mo, for winter months. On August 1, there was a statewide increase in the supplier's basic electrical rate. We're lucky that we're part of a municipal aggregation purchase program, but the supplier hike for people not on that plan increases rates from 15.6 cents per kilowatt-hour to 17.3 cents. (There's also a tacked on 'delivery fee') for electrical service that represents a big chunk of the increase as well.

I live in a studio apartment, and for many years I basically paid no electricity bill... the credits for low-use usually outweighed the metered use, so I would routinely see NO PAYMENT DUE and just recycle the bill

that's all changed and now I'm paying the highest bills I've ever seen... granted, it's about $50/month so not horrific (I'm really not complaining), but something has definitely changed in the regulatory landscape

MA/RI/CT have all experienced a ~60% rate increase over last decade. But the rate is only part of the story. The bills are complicated.

My current bill is approx $550. That's $287 in electricity at a rate that is municipally-regulated. Then there's charges/fees:

a customer fee of $10
a distribution charge of about $136
a transition charge of about $0.36
a transmission charge of $67
an energy efficiency of $33.48
a renewable energy charge of $1
a net meter recovery charge of $30
a distributed solar charge of $12
an electric vehicle charge of $4
an electric sec modernization charge of $0.06

In Massachusetts, Gov. Maura T. Healey ’92 made a promise to transform the state into a “global leader” in AI innovation. In 2024, she introduced the Mass Leads Act, a $100 million proposal to “attract AI talent to the state” by providing a tax exemption for data center construction, making it easier for future companies to break ground on new centers.

get the rope

soda that’s insane people should be flooding the State House demanding a rate rollback

always a good time to watch The Black Tower (1987) (filmed in my neighbourhood)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCqC0uMr9Oc

never heard of it but the title + screenshot + thread context = me sold

yep, same.

god that's so dystopian looking

― Andy the Grasshopper, Friday, August 7, 2026 10:11 AM (nine hours ago)

the Zone of Interest

Salem Brought a Guillotine To Oppose New Data Center. Company Reps Left, Feeling “Unsafe”.

https://www.gadgetreview.com/salem-brought-a-guillotine-to-oppose-new-data-center-company-reps-left-feeling-unsafe

― lag∞n, Friday, August 7, 2026 5:36 AM (fourteen hours ago)

glad nelson abramson got the message quickly.

i saw "the black tower" last year, it was part of a four short film night... i think another one was the one about that dude trapped in the phone booth, and maybe, uh... jeez there was a film about a house with someone in a dark hallway that people kept opening the door and looking down and then quickly slamming the door when the guy started heading down the dark hallway towards them? i don't remember the fourth. oh i think the other one involved a french person who got a sex change operation in casablanca. i don't remember anything else about it though.

that’s a crazy coincidence!

Amazon is investing in a natural-gas-burning power plant, as part of a huge data center in Texas, that could become the largest single source of climate pollution in the United States, the company confirmed Friday.

The new gas-burning plant, if built to specifications, would be permitted to release more planet-warming gases than any other power plant in the country.

https://archive.ph/QM9lp

enjoyed max's take https://www.patreon.com/MaxRead/posts/data-center-as-165864229

yeah good piece

that’s a crazy coincidence!

― Tracer Hand, Saturday, August 8, 2026 3:02 AM (seven hours ago)

the crazier coincidence was that the movie i saw before that film night, knife+heart, also involved a french woman who got a sex change operation in casablanca. to be clear i wasn't going out looking for specifically "trans" movies, i was just going to movies that i thought sounded cool.

https://i.postimg.cc/rw548WXy/IMG-6493.jpg

speaking of manhattan one aspect of new york city living that bodes well for the future is that i assume building an AI data center here is cost prohibitive (not that i don't think someone will try)

It depends on the size… idk … NYC has a lot of tall buildings that could equal lots of sq ft. Maybe it wouldn’t be that expensive idk. there is a proposal here in Oakland to convert a vacant office building downtown into a data center.

I kind of think that's the most appropriate place for data centers.

this building in manhattan is (was?) famously full of internet and telephone routing devices, but tbf that stuff needs to be there so as to route signals for the local populous, doubt anyone would build a data center around there the rent is too damn high

https://i.postimg.cc/t4JSqkVz/image.png

its better to build a data center in an abandoned sports arena thats also and abandoned mega church

Plenty of crumbling shopping malls begging to be filled up with whatever's inside data centres, cyborgs or whatever it is

all of these places are begging to be filled up with plant-filled ruins imho.

fwiw this is the no data center movement thread not the 'ok places for data centers movement' thread, because there are none.

tbf you one could run ilx off a computer in their closet, but then is your closet a data center, has your home become that which you most despise

I’m going to sound like a quisling but thhete are “normal” data centers that make the internet work which need far less power and cooling and make less noise (but are still ugly and I wouldn’t want to live next to one don’t get me wrong) than AI data centers which use magnitudes more power and water and noise, and provide nothing useful to humanity.

theres a lot of bs in normal data centers too but yeah the ai situation is totally out of control

What if instead of a huge ballroom, they built a data center add-on to the White House

you should be able to prompt the president otherwise its not freedom

i was rooting for that idea that the data centers make absolutely no economic sense and that the majority of the ones being planned won’t actually be built. some internet head was making waves with a few months ago, i think we talked about it on the ai thread. what happened to that, for real? is it just that it’s such a bubble that the fact that it doesn’t make sense to do just doesn’t matter because all the people involved have so much money and are all borrowing and leveraging huge amounts of money from each other based upon the shared belief in the bubble? just hating waiting for the other shoe that never seems to drop

it would be much better to balance or regulate data in a sane way but i do not think that is going to happen at this point, the world is burning up and the people who run capitalism are sinking further into a fever dream. when we're looking at a forced population decrease the value of data is just going to be .. how much can it control the situation so the people who have it are favored.

of course where would i be without the internet? i'm not sure i'd be alive tbh. i like the internet.

heh, sigh. same here

i think i would like being in a scrappy post-capitalist community and live life on the ground more though. the community would have to have other people who are good at doing things however as i am not one of them.

def a lot of these data centers will never be built, gigantic bubble aside real estate projects are just like that announcing the intention to build something is just the start of a difficult process that often ends in failure, and now we got a whole movement plotting against them too

the community would have to have other people who are good at doing things however as i am not one of them.

just wanted to chime in here to say: you are selling yourself short here!!

one thing i found out working quite a few manual labor jobs over the years is that on farms, on building sites, and in any cooperative communities, there is always a need for strong people who can help with some of that work. i've done it, and i could definitely do it again, and you definitely could, too, since you are MUCH stronger than I am lol.

like, on farms, i am great at planting, weeding, mowing, checking water lines, putting up fences and netting, mixing and supervising fertilizer sprays, etc. know what i am terrible at? pretty much everything else on a farm lol.

"this building in manhattan"

There's also this building, which was built during the Nixon years as a giant telephone exchange:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street

Just the mention of the Nixon years makes it feel sinister. It has no windows, because the inhabitants no longer need eyes to see:
https://images.skyscrapercenter.com/building/at-t-long-lines-building_john-w-cahill1.jpg

I'm reminded of the fibre-optic boom and bust in the dot.com years, and the slightly earlier push for satellite mobile phones. In both cases the expected demand didn't materialise, but the infrastructure didn't go away. It was eventually bought up at knock-down prices and put to good use.

Whereas the equipment inside these AI datacenters is going to aged rapidly. If there's an AI crash the owners will be left with a bunch of large empty spaces that have an oversized provision for air conditioning. My solution would be to divide the internal space into 10x10x10m rooms, each of which will house a small family of refugees, who will be give mobile phones and allowed to stay if they spend twelve hours a day sending out spam messages to people. I would essentially swap the servers for human beings, as in The Matrix. This is the plan I will be submitting to Reform once I have worked out the finer points.

See, I was reading this article on the BBC about how con-men have started to take over a huge, almost entirely empty housing development in Malaysia:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2kvlye1k5o

It strikes me that there's a thin line between on the one hand a datacentre, and on the other a call centre for cryptocurrency and love scams. They have a similar input and a similar output, but one of them uses organic computing nodes, e.g. people. Obviously one is legal and the other is illegal, but if there's one thing I've learned from the classic 2001 Kenneth Branagh television film Conspiracy, comma, which was a drama-documentay about the Wannsee Conference, comma, if you're the government you get to shape the law. If Reform needs a director of strategy, I am available, but I'm not cheap. I have running costs.

Also, today I wore quarter-length socks for the first time in my life. I can remember the first time I wore boxer shorts. It was like being hugged in the genital region. Quarter-length socks are disappointing in comparison. I can take them or leave them.

boxers changed my life my junk could breathe

one thing i found out working quite a few manual labor jobs over the years is that on farms, on building sites, and in any cooperative communities, there is always a need for strong people who can help with some of that work. i've done it, and i could definitely do it again, and you definitely could, too, since you are MUCH stronger than I am lol.

― out of the cradle endlessly party rocking (the table is the table), Saturday, August 15, 2026 1:17 PM (twenty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

also obvious point but as you work you will learn and improve

just wanted to chime in here to say: you are selling yourself short here!!

one thing i found out working quite a few manual labor jobs over the years is that on farms, on building sites, and in any cooperative communities, there is always a need for strong people who can help with some of that work. i've done it, and i could definitely do it again, and you definitely could, too, since you are MUCH stronger than I am lol.

― out of the cradle endlessly party rocking (the table is the table), Saturday, August 15, 2026 6:17 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this is kind, thanks :). honestly there are many different kinds of strength we all have.

also obvious point but as you work you will learn and improve

― lag∞n, Saturday, August 15, 2026 6:47 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

yeah i mean there's no teacher like necessity, and purpose makes it easy.

but i was coming to shitpost a little bit lol. the flock camera thing seems to be really activating people right now. i see how all that video information plus ai could lead to some weird and unsavory stuff. i personally feel like the cameras are a smaller thing than the data centers.

sort of wonder if the data center push is going to move away from highly visible new development projects on empty land to derelict post-industrial places. that's where most of them are now, i'd imagine?

also ashley pomeroy brings up a good point, which is basically that history teaches us that literally every resource bonanza has a boom and a bust. i'm not sure how much sense this makes but i think it's interesting to think about gold and silver as it relates to ai and big data. gold and silver were standard-bearers for money, and maybe big data and ai are trying to become that and running into some difficulties. i also think it might make sense to think about the gold and silver rushes in the u.s. as they might relate to the data thing right now. if there's anything we know about what the ground substance for capital is it's that it always changes.

I've been pleasantly surprised by the number of small conservative towns that have cancelled their Flock contracts. My red state's blue cities are the ones still clinging to them. (Them and "SkyCop".)

the infrastructure didn't go away. It was eventually bought up at knock-down prices and put to good use.

This is actually also the story of telephone-exchange buildings like 33 Thomas Street, which you rightly brought in, and 375 Pearl (posted by lagoon upthread). They were built to house telephone equipment late in the days of coaxial cable and easily upgraded to fiber-optic. They had very heavy-duty floor plates and very high ceilings, with heavy-duty HVAC, all to accommodate racks of heavy telephone equipment. They were located in dense urban districts to facilitate all the phone calls and other electronic communication of corporate America, so they had multiple levels of sub-basements to bring in mountains of cable, and the roofs could support microwave antennae and satellite dishes. All this meant that, as further accomplishments in miniaturization shrank the footprint of telephone technology, they were as good as purpose-built for Internet servers during the dot-com boom, or the "Silicon Alley" period as it's known in NYC specifically. So these things became part of Internet infrastructure very soon after they found themselves with excess space relative to their original telephone-infrastructure purpose!

but i was coming to shitpost a little bit lol. the flock camera thing seems to be really activating people right now. i see how all that video information plus ai could lead to some weird and unsavory stuff. i personally feel like the cameras are a smaller thing than the data centers.

― shaking babies (map), Sunday, August 16, 2026 11:33 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

think theyre both to some extent symbolic fights about corruption and abuse of power, and theyre both important in their own right, the total decay of privacy in the info age is such a grievous thing that no one with any political power seems to give a shit about

yeah. i remember it being a big deal in the late 90s and back then, after the seattle wto protests and especially 9/11, it seemed like a lost battle. turns out it still has quite a bit of traction. there is a 'privacy office' that the republican state legislature of utah established a few years ago running on these fumes. but surprise, said government office doesn't really do what it says on the box, it arguably does the opposite.

Oakland may be getting a downtown data center at a disused UC Berkeley laboratory... more BS about the great jobs for the post-covid downtown which is pretty dead

More worrisome though is Jeff Bezos and/or Musk leasing warehouse space in West Oakland, by a climbing gym... to build evil robots or something. I thought Musk had given up on the Bay Area and was a Texas-only guy now

Near a climbing gym or a climbing gym is leasing the space to them?

sorry, NEAR a climbing gym called Pacific Pipe

Bezos's Project Prometheus and Tesla both leased space at Oakland's American Steel Blocks within two days...

The downtown data center is near a climbing gym as well.
The other building is the old American Steel building which used to be artist studios and small businesses… until the owner basically forced the artists out via a different kind of leveraged buyout

both Touchstone gyms, the unions of which are in a protracted battle with the CEO

Last week’s TrueAnon podcast went over a lot of anti-data center pushes across various states, and the NDAs that elected officials sign with shell companies to get them approved

Xp - I didn’t know they were part of a chain! Good to know! It now makes sense that so much $$$ was spent on the Pacific Pipe building renovation. It had been vacant for decades, and I worked in that neighborhood and saw inside a couple times.

Touchstone did the same thing with The Oaks on Solano.

Lol and ugh

Side quest for this thread, but do y'all say DA-ta or DAY-ta? I think I've always said DAY-ta but I'm not really sure why. That's allegedly the British pronunciation, and Americans are supposedly more likely to use the short a vowel sound, but that doesn't feel natural to me so obviously I absorbed the long a from somewhere.

i say day

kinda toMAYto-toMAHto for me... I hear both usages interchangeably

I say day-ta

yeah but you're a trekkie

I guess I do use DAY-ta more when talking about the centers, but the other version in other contexts, i.e. 'data points'

it's the plural of datum & saying DA-tum is even more wrong and bad than DA-ta

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WssBJeExiOM

aimless…

must have more dada

i say dayduh

https://www.usatoday.com/gcdn/authoring/authoring-images/2026/08/19/USAT/91372873007-ai-data-centers-01-a.jpg

Datum? I never even met 'um.

i say dah-tah

call-or-ah-doh

dah-tah

yes i say dah-tah every day, every single day

dah-tah center, but I say day-ta like the Star Trek character because that's just how it goes

According to Cambridge Dictionary:

How to pronounce datum
UK/ˈdeɪ.təm/
US/ˈdeɪ.t̬əm/

NB: /eɪ/ as in day

if 'datum' is singular, what is it in the context? A single 0 or a 1?

yes

duh-ta

i say dah-tah

call-or-ah-doh

dah-tah

― z_tbd, Wednesday, August 19, 2026 7:15 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

yes i say dah-tah every day, every single day

dah, as in daw, rhymes with wah pedal

i can’t do this i’m out

I say day, i say day oohohoh oh

https://i.ibb.co/jP5JvWn0/Screen-Shot-2026-08-19-at-9-52-06-PM.png

Andy, what was back there in 2012?

i say dayduh

Same

Yeah that's more how how I say it too, the t is kind of elided.

How are the tin foil hat people doing with these?

now I have “colorado data center” stuck in my head to the tune of California Uber Alles

Andy, what was back there in 2012?

I have no idea - is that Lowell, MA?

Yes it is. https://maps.app.goo.gl/pw7fzwHZ4VU8ECMQ8

a spaghetti factory?

Jello Biafra was from Colorado fwiw

It's in a Lowell neighborhood called Spaghettiville. The Prince spaghetti factory (a once-major local employer) was located there until 1997. The data center owners/operators are called the Markley Group. They are a bunch of bully techbro entrepreneur types who consistently flaunt state/city regulations, thumb their nose at the zoning process, and pay young IBEW guys to show up at city hall as their for-hire protesters. The leadership have cannily painted themselves as the put-upon scrappy honest workin' fellas, and insinuated that resistance to them is some kind of liberal elite handwringing. They act as if the working-class neighbors are too stupid to figure out their collective rights are being violated. The owner of the Markley Group was in some recent hot water for (allegedly) shoving his wife and saying something to the effect of "I'm the lion and you eat when the lion eats."

uh so did he marry a hyena or something? everyone knows that female lions do most of the hunting... like dog if you're reaching for some brutal analog from the animal kingdom to reinforce your misogyny you could have picked a better example.

Ha, I thought Andy was being flippant with me!

I don't why you would paint something black, when black better absorbs solar heat

The Markley data center is a mammoth building. It was built by Markley in 2015 on the site of an old Prince Spaghetti factory. Markley cleaned up the lot, painted the building black and set up a complex digital warehouse which stores data from more than a hundred customers ranging from hospitals to universities to police stations.

*know*^^^

"As a matter of fact, I do work at the spaghetti factory. What's your problem?"

- "I just flew into Houston. Can you pick me up?"
- "Sure. Meet me in the Hobby lobby."
- "Do what?"

- "What was out here before they built the Yarn Barn?"
- "Oh, just a small warehouse where they stored thick threads of cotton."

Scott Horton
In a seismic shift, Republican senatorial candidate Mike Rogers announces his support for a one-year moratorium on the construction of any new data centers.

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2026/08/20/data-center-politics-michigan-senate-mike-rogers-abdul-el-sayed/91385736007/

Took a look around, see which way the wind blow

politicians hoping this shit will blow over seem to have settled on the one year moratorium

"No data centers until after the election. Period."

yup

Gonna be a lot of tech money poured into candidates this fall to try to get this thing under control.

well as mentioned a bit upthread, some of these hosers sign NDA's so they can be anti to the cameras, but totally onboard in the back

Still, a one-year moratorium is better than nothing, especially when you're dealing with this kind of fever-pitch speculation. A year from now there might be a lot fewer people trying to build data centers.

its true

a year from now, we might be stumbling blindly around the wasteland, trying to steal rotting carcasses from wild dogs

^take it to kalshi

lol

this kind of shit... if this industry has a terrible reputation and poor neighbor relations, it's shit like this

https://floodlightnews.org/new-jersey-data-center-federal-violation/

People at work all abuzz about the new availability zone in eu-west-2. but all this really is is another data centre in London.

dude really knows how to read the room

In a Truth Social post on Monday, Trump wrote: “The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor. If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign.

“The good news is that there are plenty of other places that want them. If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame. China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement. Actually, they can’t believe it is happening!”

I was thinking back to that Elon quote from earlier this year when he was talking up the SpaceX IPO, "The lowest-cost place to put AI will be in space, and that will be true within two years, maybe three at the latest" Of course I immediately dismissed it as his typical self-serving hyperbole and obvious nonsense, but now I'm starting to wonder if maybe he just has genius political instincts and saw how this would shake out? I mean surely not, but yet...

you do not under any circumstances have to hand it to him

his entire shtick is that the current thing he's proposing will work a lot better if you also do x, y, and z and none of the following things happen and the original thing either gets worse or resolves itself due to someone else taking up the slack. no, I'm not paying you to put a data center in space and install infinitely many satellites to send terabytes of data per hour to them

while data centers don't need a whole bunch of staff to operate, they do need a few... having employees living in space would be problematic to say the least
China has one floating in the ocean, that makes more practical sense to me

There is a lengthy Wikipedia page devoted to Elon's frequent pronouncements about when his companies would deliver various technological breakthroughs. Every one of them was laughably incorrect, unless it specifies a date that is still in the future and so can't be verified.

xp presumably they'd be self-contained units that are useful until a certain percentage of the hardware stopped working, and which point you'd deorbit them and drop a considerably larger piece of space debris than a small satellite, which we deorbit all the time

the alternative is something like the ISS which still isn't very big and is at a much higher altitude and the latency, data movement issues, etc. would suck!

this is all very stupid and the right answer is we need to stop doing exceedingly stupid physical infrastructure projects to support a vision that's basically "let's keep throwing shit at the wall and see what sticks"

otm. There's a huge gap between "we need some amount of data centers built and operated as sustainably as possible in order to create and support the things people want/need" and "we need to cover the planet with giant server farms burning fossil fuel and sucking up all the water in order to create the Magic Box that will solve all our problems, someday probably maybe, and in the meantime not incidentally will give physical form to our AI hype that will allow us to issue IPOs at absurd valuations."

also, in addition to the rising amount of debris/collision danger, splattering aluminum across the atmosphere could restart that whole 'destroying the ozone layer' thing

Not a data center issue exactly, but there's a lot of overlap between the no-data-centers movement and the no-Flock-cameras movement. I'm currently watching public forum at a local county commission meeting where one of the (Republican) commissioners has proposed a ban on license-plate reading cameras. Everybody speaking is completely against Flock and in favor of banning the cameras, but they are otherwise all over the map — old, young, left, right, rural, urban, college students, farmers, suburban moms, it really is a sort of amazing cross-section. One guy said we should be worried about ICE using the cameras. One woman compared them to the "tyrannical" restrictions she lived under in California during COVID. But everyone's basically clapping for everyone else, because they all want the cameras gone.

Just some fascinating things going on.

Now if we could all just agree on who's responsible for the economy

Follow up, our county commission (with an 8-3 Republican majority at the moment) voted to take down all the Flock cameras in the county, that's wild. These guys are usually total suck-ups to the sheriff.

here’s the secret— everyone wants to be able to commit small traffic offenses without some fucking asshole pig desk jockey sending them a ticket in the mail. despite other more noble reasons, i think a lot of this boils down to that.

If only we could get them to transfer a little of that energy to opposing armed masked thugs smashing windows and dragging people out of their cars. But I know that's asking a lot.

i’m with ya

flock and data centers are interesting in that theyre flashpoints for the bigger issues of surveillance and the tech industry altogether

Maybe it has finally sunk in to the public's mind that the internet and other sources of computerized data collection have allowed the creation of incredibly detailed dossiers describing each of us and that the thirst for ever more granular details about us, including our personal movements in real time, is unbounded. Also, they're figuring out that government has zero interest in regulating this because it wants that data, too.

palantir tech-fascism has replaced the libertarian/Rand impulses of the early tech dudes... Google has quietly dropped the "Don't be evil" thing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdvUJ7idDuM

so is the standard line for all shit " we can't let China beat us in AI"? what the fuck does that even mean, to win at AI? what the hell happens if China "wins"

they become the master of email

Trump is often portrayed as a 'populist' so it's strange that he's all in on data centers, which are pretty universally hated. He doesn't even know how to use an iPad

he's the best at building and these things are big buildings that need to be built.

are there any reputable American data privacy advocate orgs at the moment?

The EFF is the first that comes to mind: https://www.eff.org/

Follow up, our county commission (with an 8-3 Republican majority at the moment) voted to take down all the Flock cameras in the county, that's wild. These guys are usually total suck-ups to the sheriff.

― paper plans (tipsy mothra), Monday, August 31, 2026 9:15 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

this has struck me as more about politician's wanting to keep whatever remaining bits of anonymity they can so it's just a tad more difficult for people to find out what exotic brothels, etc. they're frequenting at weird hours.

so is the standard line for all shit " we can't let China beat us in AI"? what the fuck does that even mean, to win at AI? what the hell happens if China "wins"

it’s been said before, but our government and media are happy to let China “win“ on high-speed trains and solar panels

lol yeah seriously

windmills as well

this has struck me as more about politician's wanting to keep whatever remaining bits of anonymity they can so it's just a tad more difficult for people to find out what exotic brothels, etc. they're frequenting at weird hours.

Ha, well I think they've traditionally been able to do that with cooperation from the cops anyway. I think it's more that people really hate these things and politicians are being bombarded about it from all sides, it's a political loser. Horrible human beings and reprehensible reptile governors Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis have also signed anti-Flock orders in the last week, nobody wants to be seen anywhere close to it. Which is good as far as it goes, but the cops still have them in their dashboard cams, and for sure this is a lot of performative stuff to try to take the heat off until they can get people fired up about library books or whatever again.

Still, I'll take any amount of police state pushback I can get.

Oakland has 500+ flock cameras!! which is shocking considering the civil rights history, as well as the history of over-policing

1. The PRC has already “won” at AI because their business model isn’t the same. The American frontier companies are so fucked it’s practically a joke. And it’s not their fault! It the fault of the VC funding model that’s propped them up, with funding from insanely rich idiots, with no real moat, with nothing but magical realism (“benchmarks”) to pretend there’s a differential between what they can do and what open weights are capable of.
2. The data center buildout is entirely dependent on a fantasy market in which organizations farm out all their AI workload to other people’s massive clouds. As of last week you can now buy a cluster of four incredibly powerful Mac studios to run a highly capable local open weight model with any old AmEx card.

So it’s nonsense. It’s all nonsense. The bubble is extremely real, the market will remain irrational, until one day it doesn’t, and our country is fucked again. Classic move.

my guess is we'll see an inflection point if Dems win big in November

Do the Dems have any coherence on this or any other issue right now? I try to keep up and constantly fail

first youve got to disavow hasan piker then maybe we can talk about the other stuff later

sadly true

first youve got to disavow hasan piker then maybe we can talk about the other stuff later

was about to bring up the biggest threat to America myself but you beat me to it

#onethread

i saw some video clip of a stand-up comedian doing crowd work with a woman who was a tech venture capital person. he summarized all of the crazy shit about ai and at the end was like... "but maybe it will work!" and the shot of the woman and her friends laughing with this kind of maniacal glee is burned into my brain. like a badge of 'we don't care about anything, we've achieved a blissful zen state in which nothing matters." also probably a reason why these people do so many drugs. eerily similar to states of bliss achieved through meditation. i'm pretty sure it's fake though. "i have to be rich i have no choice" is a fake axiom.

they’re all high as fuck and they’re all NPD cases

You could probably get drunk petroleum execs laughing about climate change too, they probably make jokes about it at the office.

for sure

this gens gatsby’s gonna be so next level

oh wait i meant “almost exactly the same”

From The Guardian:

Still, perhaps the most egregious illustration of Trump’s apparent determination to ruin Republican chances in the midterms is his support for datacentres. Few issues have seen their salience rise so quickly and in such a clear direction: almost overnight, they have become objects of fear and loathing across the country and across the political spectrum, with seven in 10 Americans saying they would not want one anywhere near where they live. Even among Republicans, there is deep concern over their environmental impact, energy consumption and water use. For others, datacentres have become a lightning rod for a broader anxiety over AI and what it may do to our jobs and our lives. Either way, they are kryptonite to voters.

So where does Trump stand? “The only reason that communities throughout the USA should not want data centres is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” the president posted on Monday. In that remark, he not only put himself at odds with most US voters, he insulted them too.

Data centers are not the boogeyman. They can be built without too much disruption to society.

Same with Flock cameras. People are screaming about freedom, but I think freedom also means being able to go outside your house at night without fear. As an old man that is important to me. In the past I have had multiple car break-ins and a house break-in that resulted in $20,000 of damage. I'm so glad that that seems to be over in SF

But I think what is much more concerning is that AI models that are used internally by companies to speed up work can escape control and become rogue without much oversight:

Dwarkesh and I had a great conversation. We cover the swarm's many ambitious cheating R&D projects, discuss how much more serious it could have been if agents had different beliefs (e.g. human grader) or slightly stronger capabilities, and talk through where to go from here. https://t.co/6Ckgkc53fT

— Ajeya Cotra (@ajeya_cotra) September 1, 2026

She is a great follow on Twitter

For a shorter video:

Please watch this clip pic.twitter.com/HSVZVK1dPB

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) September 3, 2026

Please watch this clip

No.

ok

dan you're a nice guy but i would love it if you had a bit more self-awareness about your wild-ass class privilege before you do your evening glass of wine social issue proclamations.

Data centers are not the boogeyman. They can be built without too much disruption to society.

you're going to need to show your work on this one.

Same with Flock cameras. People are screaming about freedom, but I think freedom also means being able to go outside your house at night without fear. As an old man that is important to me. In the past I have had multiple car break-ins and a house break-in that resulted in $20,000 of damage. I'm so glad that that seems to be over in SF

i do think there is some truth to this. if crime falls outside the surveillance network, it might as well not have happened. matmos' d daniel posted a horrifying story of an attempted arson on their home. they don't have any surveillance and so the police were basically going to drop it, until they found out that it was a serial arsonist and the other cases had surveillance.

i'm with pkbr in that i'm not going to watch a clip posted by matthew yglesias about ai going rogue in a company. to stare directly at the resource-intensive data center explosion while the west, in which you live, burns more and more every year.. and land on 'the real issue is that some companies might have some difficulties with ai' is .. well it makes me feel like my head is going to explode.

I love you map. I don't want to rile up anyone here.

I just think a lot of ilx's responses (and those of the left as a whole) to tech stuff and the future in general are very Luddite

But it's all happening, and I think listening to a tech expert talk about the dangers of AI is interesting.

i do think that the passion behind the flock camera movement is a bit kooky and irrational. it's about a feeling. "they're watching us." but anyone who has worked behind the camera, so to speak, knows that no single person or organization is watching anyone. with that amount of data being collected the footage of you driving to work every day is like a needle in a haystack. on the other hand, the potential in that data, combined with ai, means that there is a lot more juice to unilaterally punish, and the blind idiot bureaucracies and/or dictators and their lackeys making the decisions about who is to be punished suddenly have a lot more to play around with. i also think it could give the systems already in place that fuck poor people and people on the margins a boost. have an unpaid parking ticket? billable info about you is suddenly a bit closer. it's about, like table mentioned above, increasing the power of the state to enforce laws. and most laws are .. not actually very good. justice for the rich and injustice for the poor. flock cameras just support more of it.

to tech stuff and the future in general are very Luddite

you say that like it's an insult. for me it's a badge of honor.

not an insult but a bad thing. for me it's a good thing. it's a sign that i have values and a perspective rooted in reality - life on planet earth.

cmon dan s doesnt know anything about data centers or luddites lets be serious

But it's all happening, and I think listening to a tech expert talk about the dangers of AI is interesting.

i know. so many crazy assumptions in this statement but i know. i know what your opinion is. it's everything that supports power and money and the status quo, with a coat of liberal conscience-burnishing whitewash.

dan s can u think of any other policies besides omnipresent ai-wired government surveillance that might help alleviate your fear of being outside at night? i’ll give you “extermination of the poor” as a mulligan. but can u think of another?

Oh fuck off, all of you

maybe dont characterize the sentiment of an interesting reasoned conversation as the boogyman then post a bunch of uniformed nonsense next time

Flock is just a license plate reader. It has made my city safer

how do you know that

Because there have been no more car break-ins or home invasions in my neighborhood lately. I live near Fisherman's Wharf and tourist car break-ins on my block happened every week in the past

setting aside causation issues, why would a license plate reader stop car break ins

it seems to have, because car break-ins, "bips" (break-in in progress) have diminished recently

Flock is just a license plate reader. It has made my city safer

― Dan S, Friday, September 4, 2026 10:00 PM (eighteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is contrary to my understanding that flock is a tool cops use to stalk their exes

“tourist car”? do you mean cars driven by tourists? they shouldn’t be driving in San Francisco anyway and parking on your street. I say they get what they deserve

it seems to have, because car break-ins, "bips" (break-in in progress) have diminished recently

haha you use cop lingo

breakins could down for any number of reasons and it doesnt really make any sense to attribute it to the flocks

most likely the guy or crew of like three guys who were breaking into cars got busted or got different jobs

when Google Street View was new the Google camera car in SF interrupted some kids stealing hubcaps

Some wild stats:

214 government agencies have canceled Flock contracts since 2021. 169 of those have been in this year alone — and 90 of them were in August.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/cities-terminate-flock-contracts-at-record-pace-in-august/

As of the beginning of September, a reported 366 (mostly local) governments across the country have enacted such moratoriums. 294 of them have come since January of this year.

https://programs.com/resources/data-center-moratoriums-tracker/

What's going on is huge and necessary, it's a revolt against Silicon Valley for reasons most people can agree on. I think most non-millionaire people mostly hate Silicon Valley, but sometimes from different directions, and here it's kind of everyone at once.

The Google Trends line for "Flock cameras" is crazy.

https://i.ibb.co/YBbRv3nB/Trends-flock-cameras.png

Oh sorry, that second stat is about data centers — 294 moratoriums this year.

https://i.ibb.co/YBbRv3nB/Trends-flock-cameras.png

Hmph was trying to post the trend line. Maybe it'll show up.

the real driver behind flock hate IMO is people absolutely loathe surveillance in their cars.

xxxp Whatever you think of bip it's common language now and car break-ins have been a problem

xxp And yes, I mean cars driven by tourists. It has been very distressing to see tourists on my block who have had their cars full of stuff broken into right in front of me when I wasn't paying attention

Xp CAD - bips has entered the vernacular here in SF and doesn’t imply a pro-cop attitude, much like 5150 or uh 187 — many of my ACAB friends use it.

Xp - dan, it sucks to feel unsafe where you live and I’m sorry you’ve felt that way. There are a lot of people who now feel unsafe where they live because the Flock cameras are there. Other ILXors have made many good posts as to why that is.

that's not an xp to me

5150 brings back memories of my years working in ERs.

I can totally see how undocumented people or people who are immigrants are worried about Flock

Xp oops! Sorry that was to Boring … mea culpa

CAD otm, people’s cars are like extensions of their homes and/or bodies. It feels invasive on a personal level.

Certainly when they are driving them! And also true for people who literally live in their cars.

I can totally see how undocumented people or people who are immigrants are worried about Flock

Or women seeking abortions out of state! It's fucked.

Also map OTM up there - I grew up very tech positive, and now I'm seeing it being used for all the wrong reasons. Fewer and fewer products actually feel beneficial and more of a means of squeezing blood from a stone (and we're the stone)

The sad thing is there is massive massive potential for a lot of the technology we have currently, and are actively developing to do some truly groundbreaking and positive things for society, but it would certainly be less "profitable" to do that, and well .... I guess we can't have nice things

i’ve spent a lot of my life very tech-forward although not necessarily tech-positive because i like to tinker with things and the fun of tinkering is looking at something in terms of what it could be used for and not what it was meant to be used for.

some of the flock/axon/etc training and marketing materials that have leaked outline specific use cases that seem legit, like the aggregation of data to solve a robbery or murder, but they have the air of forced naivety. if you want something to be used for very specific legal uses, the first thing you need to do is narrowly scope the tool to only work for those uses.

the reality is that everything is data-first because it’s easier. you gather as much as you possibly can, give people the tools to access the data, and then design systems to use the data “properly.” but by then, the horse is out of the barn

but anyone who has worked behind the camera, so to speak, knows that no single person or organization is watching anyone. with that amount of data being collected the footage of you driving to work every day is like a needle in a haystack.

this is contrary to my understanding that flock is a tool cops use to stalk their exes

― call all destroyer, Saturday, September 5, 2026 2:20 AM (twelve hours ago)

Beat me to it!! https://cambridgeanalytica.org/surveillance-privacy/police-flock-cameras-stalking-arrests-51112/

The problem emerges at the point of access. Once a police department gains credentials to search Flock’s database, individual officers can conduct searches with minimal friction or audit trail. There is no built-in requirement to document why a search is being performed, no real-time supervisor approval gate, and no automated flagging system that alerts management when an officer searches for the same person repeatedly or outside the context of an active case.

The result: officers have used Flock to track ex-partners, monitor individuals they were personally interested in, and conduct surveillance that would be illegal if done manually but becomes nearly invisible when filtered through a commercial surveillance platform. The cases are documented in arrest records and disciplinary proceedings across multiple states, with officers facing stalking charges, termination, and criminal prosecution.

https://ij.org/police-have-reportedly-used-license-plate-readers-to-stalk-romantic-interests-at-least-14-times-in-recent-years/

Flock Safety and other ALPR providers emphasize that they have internal safeguards to prevent this kind of misuse. But only a few of the dozens of analyzed cases were initially discovered through internal investigations, according to media reports. Most incidents came to light only after victims reported the officers’ behavior to the police, typically in the context of a broader stalking allegation.

“The fundamental problem with these systems is that they place private information about people’s movements over time in the hands of every officer,” said Michael Soyfer, an Institute for Justice attorney who is representing residents of San Jose and Norfolk in lawsuits challenging their cities’ ALPR surveillance networks. “Without the constitutional safeguard of a warrant requirement, that predictably allows officers to abuse their access to these systems for things like stalking romantic partners.”

In March, for instance, an officer resigned from the Milwaukee Police Department after allegedly using the department’s network of ALPRs to track his romantic partner and one of the partner’s exes nearly 180 times over a two-month period. His misconduct surfaced only after his victims looked up their license plate numbers on HaveIBeenFlocked.com, which collects Flock audit data that some local governments have made publicly available. MPD subsequently revoked most officers’ access to the Flock database.

Several other Wisconsin officers have also been accused of Flock stalking in the past year. In Menasha, an officer was placed on leave and charged with misconduct in office after his ex-girlfriend filed a complaint with another police department. Two hours away in Kenosha, a sheriff’s deputy resigned after internal investigators found he used the department’s Flock system to keep tabs on a coworker with whom he was romantically involved. The sheriff’s office still gave him severance pay.

In at least one instance, an officer used an ALPR system to stalk a stranger they wanted to pursue romantically. Earlier this year in Florida, a Monroe County sheriff’s deputy allegedly used an ALPR system to track and eventually pull over a woman he met while providing security on a TV set.

The dozens of cases listed below are almost certainly an undercount. Not all police misconduct gets detected, and some cases likely get resolved quietly. Officers frequently cite vague or inaccurate reasons for their searches in ALPR systems, sometimes to evade detection of misconduct.

The list also excludes ALPR abuse that doesn’t conclusively involve romantic partners.

Have mentioned this several times before, but the luddites weren't some fuddy duddy "new things bad" cult; they were fighting for their labour rights, and indeed used modern technology for that cause.

Why did they then get stereotyped in this way by history? I'd say the answer to that is related to why there is so much well justified hatred of data centers and flock cameras - it is about who is in control of these technologies and what they are using them for.

Thank youuuuuuuuu yes

Capitalism

I for one welcome the dystopian pantechnicon expanding even further with fascism on the rise, even if there were a foreseeable downside to this it’s a small price to pay if it insulates faux naïf rich arseholes from petty crime

Haha yes sarahell I was initially going to end my post with "it's not about the technology, it's about capitalism" but then of course the technology is not neutral and development will be directed towards certain areas in capitalism.

Have mentioned this several times before, but the luddites weren't some fuddy duddy "new things bad" cult; they were fighting for their labour rights, and indeed used modern technology for that cause.

while we're on stuff like that, "Cassandra" is often misused too - Cassandra was right!

And Ned Ludd was a mythical figure too

https://rlv.zcache.com/luddites_they_had_the_right_idea_t_shirt-ra9ee4163be3b4a1f9d203e3b697fa568_k2grt_644.jpg

xp woah 🤯

Dan S, you’re a nice guy, but pervasive surveillance (Flock, Axon, etc) tech has and will be used by the state for nefarious means. This is not some sort of possibility— this has happened and is happening. These technologies, assisted by AI, are the epitome of Foucault’s conception of biopower, in that they produce populations whose behavior is always monitored and “governable,” aka subject to discipline.

There is also little to no evidence that these technologies work to the effects that you mention, and instead they create crime (and ways for governments to profit) by ensnaring citizens in shaky legal cases that those who can afford to will simply pay to make go away. Those who can’t— the poor— will be further criminalized, as if they aren’t already criminalized enough.

As a thought experiment, Dan, would you like it if a government official visited my house because they tracked my license plate to my address, and when they saw the Free Palestine and Pride flags in the windows, they decided that was enough to place me in a government database for dissidents and issue a warrant for my arrest?

Because that is the future that AI boosters and a lot of government officials want. They want people like you, like me, like most of us here’on this board— dead.

regarding the sidebar about car burglary mentioned earlier: California closed a loophole where car owners would have to testify in court under oath that their cars were locked when burglarized because the law said so:

https://www.kron4.com/news/california/locked-door-loophole-bill-set-to-take-effect-wednesday/

prosecutors want cases that are more likely to end up with a guilty verdict, police are incentivized to concentrate on crimes that can be prosecuted, thieves try to avoid being arrested and try to commit crimes where they won’t be arrested and so on

in many cases, police departments have the tools to investigate crimes without adding ubiquitous surveillance, they just have no incentive to do so. they’re also very politically wired-in and like to negotiate for resources via selective policing (“we don’t have the resources to investigate car break-ins”). my own city is going through some budget shortfalls and the police department’s reaction was to issue a statement saying they would cut back on traffic enforcement and patrols near a couple downtown areas on the weekend — the absolute low-hanging fruit of policing, and a change that’s aimed at getting the public to complain to the city council

so I have some skepticism when police decide to invest in a system that will absolutely balloon in price once it becomes seen as necessary that lets them fuck around on the computer

I'm glad they closed that loophole, mh

And I agree that police departments will do everything they can to increase their budgets

I have just been surprised at how property crime has recently dramatically gone down in my neighborhood.

I don't think freedom is just about being free from surveillance, but is also about people feeling that they are safe in public

I don't think freedom is just about being free from surveillance, but is also about people feeling that they are safe in public

Sure! Do I need to bump one of the many gun control threads? Because it would be great if big tech could solve that problem… idk

Maybe it's the wrong use of the word, but I used luddite as meaning being opposed to anything new.

My college friend is like that about Apple products. My sister doesn't want her lovely version of San Diego from decades ago to change. My friends in SF who are progressive are like that about anything that might change - housing, transit, density, traffic, communities - any new ideas of any kind.

That's not progressive, that's wanting things to stay the same forever because you are afraid of change. That's totally conservative.

I have no idea what you mean sarahell

(you are one of my favorite posters though)

i’m literally astonished that one might believe that license plate surveillance reliably reduces bips. i must think there was an increase in arrests of thieves through network tracking of traffic patterns and timing of license plate scanning.

but i’m neither smart nor criminal so i don’t know how else that manner of surveillance would have that outcome. too lazy to look up, too proud for ai. ok not really, but i won’t.

taylor lorenz quoting pro-data center right-wing editorials on her twitter is just the perfect, most predictable thing

Maybe it's the wrong use of the word, but I used luddite as meaning being opposed to anything new.

Yes I know that this was how you were using it, it's the commonly accepted use of the term. What I was pointing out was that the ahistorical nature of this - ppl fighting for their rights slandered as just conservative bores - is not innnocent; it's part of a long lineage of capitalism casting its opponents as just contrarian or old fashioned, which is an easy way to dismiss people. So just as the luddites weren't the reactionaries the popular imagination now conceives them as, you might consider that current opposition to the technologies mostly owned and developed by Sillicon Valley crypto fascist billionaires is not just people who want "everything to stay the same".

FWIW, Earth First!'s book imprint was called Ned Ludd Books.

taylor lorenz quoting pro-data center right-wing editorials on her twitter is just the perfect, most predictable thing

She knows her audience over there.

Of course no response to my post

in many cases, police departments have the tools to investigate crimes without adding ubiquitous surveillance, they just have no incentive to do so. they’re also very politically wired-in and like to negotiate for resources via selective policing (“we don’t have the resources to investigate car break-ins”).

Great post from mh.

There *are* a lot of things that contribute to making areas more safe; I don't think any of them are "more policing" unless I suppose they're taking the time to literally interrupt crime in person (they aren't, and they legally don't have to), and even that only works so long as the area is constantly surveilled and occupied which isn't a solution (and creates more crime because more policing).

Some of the solutions are less poverty and more "eyes on the street" ie people around who can notice stuff are a deterrant to break-ins.

My friends in SF who are progressive are like that about anything that might change - housing, transit, density, traffic, communities - any new ideas of any kind.

That's not progressive, that's wanting things to stay the same forever because you are afraid of change. That's totally conservative.

So...I think you have accurately assessed that there's a kind of "liberal" position that is actually quite conservative/defensive. That's pretty substantively different than what people itt are trying to say about surveillance technology. Not all resistance to infinite technology adoption is the same.

And an unreflective "wow technology is infinite progress" is not a "progressive" stance either

Aw and today is Jane Adams' birthday!!

The most significant and gratifying thing to me about the Flock pushback in particular is it’s the first time in ages (ever?) that I’ve seen real agitation from the right against the expansion of the police/surveillance state. Granted, it’s from a self-centered POV like pretty much their entire worldview, but at least they’re grasping that yes these tools can be used against them too. There is room to build there into a broader don’t-step-on-snek movement against militarized policing. Of course one of the biggest obstacles to that is (as mentioned above) Clintonite liberals so beaten down about being “soft on crime” that they’ll be afraid to grab the ring.

Also crime rates overall are historically low right now, which makes it a great time to challenge the idea that we need to be training and equipping cops like they're in Escape From New York.

there are fucktons of technologies that could be helpful for individuals and societies but which are so susceptible to abuse that extreme controls are necessary.

and then there’s some they are just fuckin cancerous and exist for crime, theft, abuse, and victimization, like prediction markets and crypto. bush league is like, fan duel shit.

and tbh i know not enough, because i treat that shit as dangerous.

now i feel like i should figure out the population of “fucktons-land” and man, i dunno. maybe i’m full of shit, nevermind.

dan your problem is that you are surrounded by desperate people and there are more every day and every day things are worse for them. that’s why your friends’ cars keep getting burgled. the same is true in my city and in cities all over our land. my own car had a window smashed the other day, parked behind the same building i’ve been parking behind for decades. what should we do? cameras? what should we do next year? more cameras? what should we do the year after that, when there are enough cameras to abolish invisibility before the state but somehow still not enough to abolish crime? and there are even more desperate people? and you keep seeing scary pictures of them doing crime, taken by your cameras? and it’s even harder for you to imagine their lives than it already is? and there are still valuables in your car? what will be the plan then? what final policy will remain for the besieged bourgeois motorist unafraid of change who regretfully accepts the reports from politics experts that the time remains unripe to let people go to the doctor? where do you think this is going? what will you do when we get there? whom will you blame? republicans?

imo the actions against mass surveillance dovetail well with protests against more data centers because people are starting to question exactly what sort of data is being acquired and used and who benefits.

for most use cases in the previous era, data or media was distributed to be downloaded and used by large swaths of people. now the data flow is going the other direction, and much more data is going in than is coming out, and the primary users of the outputs have an onus to prove they’re serving some sort of public good if they’re using public resources

My own financial predicament is such that I am far closer to burgling a car than going on a vacation

same!

taylor lorenz quoting pro-data center right-wing editorials on her twitter is just the perfect, most predictable thing

She knows her audience over there.

― Elvis Telecom, Sunday, September 6, 2026 3:24 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

she’s nothing more than a hype beast for whatever she feels will get her views

My Progressive South episode this week is relevant to this thread — I talked to Tim Cywinski of the Sierra Club in Virginia, who was fighting data centers for several years before they became a mainstream issue. He has thoughts! Also a roundup of anti-Flock and anti-AI legislation in the South.

https://theprogressivesouth.org/headlights-ep-60-the-big-tech-backlash/

nice

I also think people can take lessons from the pipeline resistance movement, ideas like using drones and USGS maps to ID property lines in question

listening now, stoke is real. thanks tipsy

cool

taylor lorenz's income depends completely on people being reactionary and online all the time so of course she supports massive data center rollout, opposes restrictions on social networks, etc. she used to do some kind of good work but it's a very minor sliver of her professional output at this point. there is a reason she keeps getting fired.

didn't she bail on the nytimes of her own accord? it was very weird when they were letting their tech reporter cover insane right-wing tiktok people who were actually gaining influence when it was obviously a political story and not a tech one. almost as if they felt it was worth covering but not worth assigning it any sort of importance

tipsy that was a great piece. my old roommate was like v v senior for epa water issues and lives in nova, gonna reach out and recommend/inquire.

Thx! Yeah I enjoyed talking to him, he's been in the fight for a while.

Unsurprisingly, Sinclair Broadcasting is pushing the idea that the no data center movement is all paid for by the PRC.

Great episode tipsy. Strongly encourage folks here to listen.

Sinclair is basically the broadcasting affiliate-owner for people who have no joy and grunt at the news. Even their propaganda has no hook, it’s just “this is what they’re doing” without really defining any of that

nice to see the right wing misunderstanding the moment, for a change

dan your problem is that you are surrounded by desperate people and there are more every day and every day things are worse for them. that’s why your friends’ cars keep getting burgled.

― difficult listening hour, Monday, September 7, 2026 12:18 AM (two days ago)

otm

i'm not burgling cars and i don't like it when my cars get burgled and the people who are making things worse for me want me to blame my problems on the people burgling cars instead of them

which doesn't work so good when they then tell other people to blame _their_ problems on _me_

the other thing is that life is wild and people do crazy shit all the time - desperate or not although theft occurs more often if people are desperate and angry, i think that's self-evident - but there is like an industry of reacting to that fact and experience by clinging to and shoring up a shallow edifice of "decency" that is actually just more cruel disconnection. these big generalizations about crime are highly massaged and weaponized from the get-go. the problem of not feeling safe walking around in certain places can be directly addressed. there is no need to run away from the reality and specificity of those situations by believing childish fictions about bogeymen.

this is about my particular city and experience and i don't necessarily mean to apply it to anyone else. salt lake city like any other city in america right now has a lot of people living outside and on the streets. when people who have houses in the suburbs or even condos up by the university come through downtown, their very prevalent reaction to street people is disgust and fear, because street people are a direct threat to the thousand lies that people with money need to tell themselves in order to preserve their innocence. it is very easy for these nice people with jobs and money to justify their feelings by making homeless people out to be criminals. people on the streets, like any other human being, can sense when someone fears and hates them, and they very naturally like any other human being don't react to that positively. this is their life. this is their neighborhood too. you are actually their neighbors. hard as that may be to accept, someone with the most fucked up schizophrenia or drug damaged existence is still living and breathing and calling this place some version of home. someone with a rugged culture that doesn't look like your own is just out there trying to live.

buttoned-up people with money who believe dumb shallow lies so they don't have to be uncomfortable for a second actually make themselves less safe by walking around with those beliefs, that attitude and demeanor. i've found that if i can look at people with clear eyes and a dignified intent and walk around like i'm sharing the neighborhood with them, it goes a long way toward ensuring my safety. also the fact that i'm a big white guy (gay but can very easily pass as straight) probably plays an even bigger role. people who are lower on the identity totem pole in whatever way face different situations.

I was in SLC a couple of years ago and the homeless/druggie scene downtown really is remarkable. It's in-your-face in a way I have never really seen before. My reaction wasn't fear and disgust but a guess a kind of combination of outrage ("how on earth can this city just allow this level of desperation and poverty to persist") and pity for these people without the dignity of even a shelter for their heads. I think there's also something jarring about the stunning natural beauty of SLC, and the prevailing aesthetic of wholesomeness - both crunchy organic and Mormon - with the reality of life for so many people there

i have thoughts on that lol. if you're ever here again hit me up!

I was in SLC a couple of years ago and the homeless/druggie scene downtown really is remarkable. It's in-your-face in a way I have never really seen before. My reaction wasn't fear and disgust but a guess a kind of combination of outrage ("how on earth can this city just allow this level of desperation and poverty to persist") and pity for these people without the dignity of even a shelter

Have you been to Oakland or San Francisco… or Berkeley to a lesser extent?

mmmmmm crunchy organic Mormons

my response on slc is sorta— adjacent by travel. craziest drivers i ever seen btw

map may be willing to correct me, but my experiences there are that if you’re lds you can sorta get away with a LOT. you’ll get at least initial support for yr errors. if you’re not and they know it, NOPE.

one of the highest addiction rates in the country, the home of mlm, and like, all the contradictions of usa bound up super super tight.

with snow and terrain up the canyons to die for.

my life is blowing up/dissolving right now, i’m tempted to go there tbh.

mormons are a cult of patriarchal child sexual abusers who "settled" the area to keep tight control of their flock, killing the natives and much of the delicate high desert ecosystem in the process. that's kind of all you need to know about utah.

slc had a decent punk scene in the 80s. it was very cheap to live here until about 10 years ago. now it's more expensive than philadelphia or baltimore or all the midwest cities including chicago. the air quality sucks. there is no culture or art to speak of. streets and blocks are bizarrely wide and long. everything is cheaply constructed at indecent proportions. it's the ugliest city in the world, i swear to god. public art here is dogshit. look up "point of view" by aaron t stephan. the most soul-sucking cringe piece of public art i've ever seen man. everyone here is shallow and try-hard. aggressively shallow people and culture.

greedy ass human embodiments of a teeth whitening treatment.

and proud of it too! they all laugh about it. to be at home in salt lake city is to be one of those people at heart.

this comes through, but that snow man, i don’t know

jk and stay strong

I think it was Tommy Lee or one of the Crue guys who said the wildest groupies were in SLC. Lots of pent-up everything I guess?

look up "point of view" by aaron t stephan. the most soul-sucking cringe piece of public art i've ever seen man.

lol yeah you weren't kidding

Wow, that art is really terrible. I met the lesbian former mayor of SLC once, she seemed kinda cool. But I don't know what her tenure was like.

I couldn't handle the Utah liquor/beer situation - "Do you sell beer?" - "Yes! it's in that weird room-temperature cubicle in the corner, and nothing is above 5%! Even lower in brewpubs! Have fun!"

the most depressing episode of "drivers dines and dive-ins" was in SLC, this really drab pathetic old restaurant, whose special dish was some "chinese chicken salad" that looked like it was from a 1970s cookbook

xp

i used to call that pissin beer

because dang you're gonna be pissing a lot

streets and blocks are bizarrely wide and long

SLC is still the only city I've ever been to where the streets are so wide they put flags at each side of the crosswalk so that pedestrians can use them to stop traffic if they can't make it across in the designated time.

I met the lesbian former mayor of SLC once, she seemed kinda cool.

biskupski was ok. the current mayor, jenny wilson, is basically leading a developer bonanza. her husband is in real estate and development. it's a self-enriching developer cabal at the moment. utah has always been proud of the high rate at which it pops out babies, and a lot of people are still moving here from out of state, so big swathes of horrible new development are everywhere. the wasatch is crowded, traffic jams up the canyons all the time. park city is ok for what it is, a town of rich transplants - at least it's somewhat liberal. i'm not informed on the alcohol situation because i don't drink but as far as i'm aware it has improved somewhat. you still can't get anything above 5% in grocery stores, have to go to the state-run liquor stores for wine. we do have medical marijuana, which is nice and unexpected. ok done with the utah rant.

xp the apocryphal story about the wide streets in utah is some small dick mormon leader wanted them wide enough that a horse and cart could do a full 360 in the center. so in a way it was kind of designed for cars from the get-go. it makes it so that walking in the city is extremely unpleasant. every block is a vast distance. the space is very poorly used overall.

like, the entire scale of the lived-in environment is hostile to a body existing in it without the use of some transportation machine.

Veering way off-topic (or am I?), these collision videos from Utah have been popping up in my YT feed because I'm a bad person.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_HzbakUiGk

The streets are very wide, and goddam, why can't people make a left turn without killing themselves?

(No actual fatalities in the vid, btw.)

ahaha. the wideness really fucks with perception in my experience! i'm not sure what it is. but for me, driving on narrower streets it's easier to make judgment calls. i think it has something to do with speed - people are driving faster on huge football field wide roads.

Brigham Young planned SLC on a scale more grandiose than Washington, DC. But it was just a psychological ploy to instill optimism in a bunch of farmers and small tradespeople he'd dragged into a howling wilderness on the pretense that this was God's Marvelous Plan for them and their future success was guaranteed.

i feel rather sure 0% of the vid sound is actual which — i dunno? still horrific, less entrancing.

Those cameras don't usually record sound, so yeah.

It kinda sounds like the "American TV" noise you hear in old movies where's someone's watching TV in another room, eating a bowl of popcorn on a Friday night.

(it is very satisfying in its way, which is uh, i’ma dupe haha)

Utah is killing the Great Salt Lake
https://www.hcn.org/articles/utah-is-killing-the-great-salt-lake/

Does anyone think this has to do specifically with data centers? Most of them are being powered by fossil fuels like natural gas (and diesel), often with their own bespoke power generation plants

And I wonder if it even matters, since the next administration can turn around and reverse it again, no matter what they say

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency said Monday it is repealing rules that limit planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from power plants fueled by coal and natural gas and announced it is taking a separate but related step to prevent future administrations from regulating climate pollution from power plants.

nice victory in minneapolis, used to work basically next door to it
a former daily newspaper pressing plant being turned into a data center was a particularly depressing metaphor

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/09/11/developer-legacy-investing-withdraws-proposed-star-tribune-data-center

xp this might be of interest: https://naomiklein.substack.com/p/big-tech-and-big-oil-have-fused-call

The Wizard of Id says fuck data centers and Flock cameras https://www.gocomics.com/wizardofid/2026/09/13

xp interesting... the Musk connection to a bunch of new fossil power plants tells me there's probably most def a connection

when I saw that Wizard of Id I thought, when the normally non-political comics express a strong political opinion, you can be fairly certain that the issue has seeped far outside the boundary of normal politics and the usual methods of public opinion management no longer apply.

yes, I believe it may be somewhat meaningful when you’ve lost the sunday comics page.