The war on data centres is a bit fake

If you think outrage at data centers is merely a CCP plot, then you're going to be in for a bad time. Is China doing something similar to what Russia did during Black Lives Matter, promoting real and fake US accounts to stoke domestic discord? I'm sure. But did that mean there weren't real issues around policing and race in America? Of course not.

Same here. Techies like to say that data centers have always existed, so people must not be objecting to data centers, it must be something else, something nefarious. People don't object to the floors AWS has in some random office building that looks like every other building. Because those were built with planning by corporations usually seeking their own long-term sustainable self interest. If there were tax breaks given, it was usually during periods of economic growth.

Those aren't the kind of datacenters being pumped out and dropped onto communities today in this mad rush to win the new missile race with the new USSR. People are broke, we're in stagflation, none of these datacenters are bringing much of anything of value uniquely to the people who have to deal with their externalities. Even when they bring their own energy to not overload the grid and raise prices, it's usually an onsite literal jet engine powered by natural gas that screams as loud as, well, ever lived by an airport? Now imagine a low-flying plane exactly over your house, 24/7, forever.

I've had a "datacenter" in my apartment or house for decades. Usually it has been a minitower that runs pretty silently in a closet. I got my hands on a used rackserver with 128GB of DDR4 RAM, you know the kind that have fans as loud as a jet engine. Guess who didn't realize exactly how loud those are, even if they're in a closed closet? Or how much heat they generate, especially in the summer? Or exactly how much a sustained 500 watt load costs in California and how that will bump us over our baseline and into extra charges territory?

Yeah, I did to my family exactly what the data centers people are protesting did to those communities. Had I bought a Mac Studio (with even more compute) that sits in a cabinet, my wife would not have vetoed my data center. But I wanted to cut costs and didn't even think about the externalities, just about what I could do what that sweet sweet 128GB of DDR4.

Clearly not biased when you say the opposition is the CCP. Good lord.

I think ordinary US citizens have reasons to be wary of data centers in general. Because of the prevailing backlash on tech today, and concerns about fascism and surveillance, and harmful social media. There are many reasons for everyday Americans to hate on DCs without foreign influence telling them that they should.

As I've pointed out, time and time again, DCs are nothing new. DCs were, in previous eras, disguised and hidden in machine rooms and wiring closets in every single corporate HQ in every office park in all parts of our nation. There were lots of machine rooms when most services were on-prem and company-hosted.

The DC phenomenon is a consolidation and expansion of a prior phenomenon that was not so visible and rather difficult to fight, if you wanted to. Because every corporation could keep those machine rooms confidential, and they had a lot of leeway in what could be done with their owned or leased properties.

But now, as DCs pop up and externalize these machine rooms, they expose them directly to the public. Sometimes literally in their backyard. So they make noise, they don't create jobs, they suck resources, they don't pay a lot of taxes or even benefit from tax exemptions! There is very little to like, from an ordinary citizen's perspective. The tech sector can argue all they want. They're cooked, for now. Everything will be an uphill battle.