Building Liberal Compute

simongrimm.substack.com

12 points·surprisetalk··3 comments

The title made me hope for an article about making software serve democracies better instead of consolidating power and wealth. It's about how datacenter build-out in the EU might be accelerated by loosening regulations. Still interesting but a bit of a bummer.

I guess, on that note, are there writeups or articles on how software/compute might be used to help, rather than hinder, liberal democracies? From someone who increasingly sees the tech industry as a tool for authoritarians.

It's always funny to see liberalism used to defend oligarchy. Arguing simultaneously that AI data centers are critical for European sovereignty and that democratic institutions should keep their hands off them and let three American plutocrats build them wherever and however they choose is genuinely insane.

I don't know for sure, but when enlightenment thinkers pioneered liberal ideology and included in it respect for private property, I don't think they had in mind that the roads and water and means of transportation, communication, the land you live on and the air you breathe being the private property of a totally-not-a-king very smart businessman.

I had to look. Private and toll roads have a long history, and enlightenment thinkers did have varying opinions about whether private roads made sense or not. Generally, if labor is required to maintain a thing (whether water, roads, etc.), running it as a business can make a lot of sense. What you don't want is someone using monopoly power and/or regulatory capture to extract excessive profits for necessities like that.

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