No actual human fucking wants data centers. Every day I wake up and it feels we're moving closer to torches, pitchforks and guillotines.
The level of vitriol i see in all countries over data centers is looking more and more as a proxy against ai.
You can really see how a terrawatt of ai compute in space will make alot of sense vs on earth.
Years of higher electricity price is good reason to be against. The communities gain nothing from those data centers, so it is a bad deal.
And yes, AI industry made an extraordinary achievment in making themselves hated. 10/10 success of their own marketing and PR.
Your town gets worse basically forever so the rich can get richer. Queue “hysteria”.
But even assuming the data center was only used for AI model training, more or less everyone who uses any electronics now either uses generative AI directly themselves or uses services whose employees use generative AI at work to create those services. AI is extremely popular and widespread now among many large and diverse groups of people.
A lot of ai usage is forced and unwanted. People dont perceive it as source of greatness, but as source of slop, cheap low quality and enshittification and crutially, existential threat.
Second, there is an obvious difference in scale here which you're ignoring.
Third, a website that can run on a pair of servers doesn't actually need to be, and the world would be better off if fewer were.
I'll grant the general public may not understand enough that they already rely on "datacenters", but there are reasonable arguments against gigawatt buildouts for AI, while still using technologies that run in datacenters in general.
Did you read the next sentence of my comment?
How many data centres were there 20 years ago? I can’t think of anything I do online that I didn’t do then - talking on forums, shopping, watching video, listening to music.
The billionaires who are consolidating control over the media and social media would want nothing more.
Plenty of prominent billionaires have openly aligned with authoritarian over fairly-elected government. The fact that the media and social media properties they control promote divisive, pitchfork-y content doesn’t strike me as a coincidence.
In a violent revolution, even if successful, based on historic pattern, those billionaires would concentrate economic and political power. It was the fact pattern in the French Revolution. It’s been true for every post-WWII revolution too. It will probably get more and more true and people and assets become more and more mobile. The only exceptions were the pre-WWII Communist revolutions; that pattern ended with jet travel.