One of the things I’ve always appreciated most about technology is that it resists attempts to politicize it. Nothing about your relationship to gadgets and gizmos has to tell us anything about your ideological commitments. In theory, technology stands for progress, change, but you can be a progress-minded liberal who hates technology, just as you can be a nostalgia-chasing conservative who loves it. These might be confused positions, philosophically speaking, but they’re perfectly ordinary in the modern world. Whatever overlap exists between tech and politics is, at the end of the day, pretty obscure, hard to delineate.
Then there’s data centers. Right now, there's no obscurity: Everyone seems to hate them—right, left, or center. But … what does that mean? And how did it happen? And does it confirm tech’s inherent apoliticism, or negate it, or something else? Beats me. For the past year-plus or so, I’ve watched in complete amazement as Americans, divided every which way to Sunday, find themselves on tectonically resurgent common ground. Or as my boss recently put it: You could power the entire country with the hatred of data centers.
Here to explain the phenomenon—finally!—is WIRED’s very own Molly Taft. Like an angel from heaven, they appeared before me just in time, with the piece I didn’t know I needed. Molly builds their argument around a person, the anti-AI commentator Joe Allen, who, though right-wing-ish, has fans of every political stripe (Molly themself, possibly, included). Joe is no average Joe. He has opinions, weird ones. They involve a sort of quasi-alien bio-paranoia, as well as repeated references to the Unabomber. But by the end of the piece, I was convinced by them—by Joe’s opinions, and by Molly’s careful, subtle explication of them. We don’t hate data centers because of what they do. We hate them because of what they represent. Think of the political possibilities in that.
