Greetings, Dear Reader,
You know, I used to have this thing I’d say in the newsroom …
UNITED STATES OF MANIA
“He should have nuked the internet.”
When Trump was suspended from “Twitter” in 2021, I used to fantasize to my staff: “Imagine Trump said to himself, ‘I can’t be on Twitter? Then no one can,’ and on his way out, he cracked off some nukes over key server farms and fried the internet.”
Obviously it’s not that easy, if you consider launching nukes easy (at least a significant portion of the brain worms electorate did think Trump would eventually start launching nukes). Frying the internet is basically impossible. It’s way too globally distributed.
(Now hitting a handful of high voltage transformer sites could in fact lead to a regional loss of electricity that spans months, even years, but I digress. The Pentagon already knows this … )
The story continues: People eventually emerge from their internetless homes bleary-eyed, disheveled. UberEatless, Amazonless, forced out into the real world. Neuroticism craters. So does mental illness, especially among women. No more social media. No more iPads. No more scrolling, looping, or swiping. Church services explode. Little League teams each have three dad coaches. Sidewalk chalk can’t be produced fast enough to meet the demand of little girls. Little boys start retardmaxxing again, building traps in the woods, climbing trees, scrambling to move homemade bike jumps from the center of the street as cars approach. Shouts of “game on!” heard deep into the evening, right before cell phoneless moms open doors yet again to call out, “DINNERRR!”
I know what you’re thinking: Geoff, what the hell does this have to do with data centers.
I’m getting to it. Patience, young padawan.
At that time, early 2021, the country was in between old manias and new ones. If you recall, following Trump’s 2016 election, we were hit with several. First, the great Nazi Scare. Basically everyone who wasn’t Nancy Pelosi was a Nazi. Everyday working class shmoes were losing their jobs because people in traffic thought they chucked secret Nazi hand signals. Sarah Silverman mistook construction markers on the ground for a swastika.
We also had Russiagate. Michael Cohen’s phone pinging in Prague (he was never in Prague). Trump’s bank secretly pinging Russian servers. It got even more insane than that. People on the left legitimately believed Putin changed vote tallies. The media thought poorly worded Russian memes changed the outcome of the election. “Millions of likes” on Instagram and Facebook, which Mark Zuckerberg at first attempted to say is basically nothing compared to the daily volume, were suddenly taken to be a sign of the end of Democracy. An entire, multi-trillion dollar industry sprung up to censor online communications. Dozens of NGOs working with government agencies, spies and officials sought to scrub wrong think from public discourse.
Then just as the hysteria was starting to subside, a new one: Covid. This is not to say that Covid was illegitimate. It was legit. Two years later though there were still people wearing masks outside by themselves on bright summer days. At its height, you could be physically assaulted by completely random, once normal people inside a grocery store for not wearing a mask. People were lining up to give their children experimental “medicine” despite overwhelming evidence saying children were not at risk.
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The concurrent Black Lives Matter hysteria has still not fully subsided. Their riots were exempt from Covid restrictions because “racism is a more urgent disease.” They said that with all seriousness. NFL teams still have BLM messaging in every endzone. Violent criminal and all around shitty person Jacob Blake was invited on liberal networks like CNN as if he cured cancer when we already knew he had assaulted his girlfriend and attempted to kidnap his kids by knifepoint. If you ask a liberal to this day, they still think somewhere between 100-1000 unarmed black men a year are killed by police. The number never hit as high as 15 in recent years, and most of them were justified. Harvard researcher Roland Fryer definitively proved there was no bias in police shootings, not once, but twice, and then Claudine Gay attempted to get him fired.
Black Lives Matter was such a powerful manic episode in the public sphere that it went completely global. As a result, usually cloistered European and Nordic countries opened their doors to waves of Muslim and African migration. In many places, questioning this hysterical policy decision was verboten. You could go to jail!
We had the transgender mania. We actually castrated children! The plastic straw mania. Disinformation manias. The MeToo mania.
And the hysterical manias have shown no signs of stopping. In fact, their frequency has only increased. Remember all the pregnant women gobbling Tylenol to own RFK Jr online? Today it’s Lindsay Clancy and women the world over filming themselves doing insane shit around their kids.
It’s also, sad to say, hit data centers.
I’m rather ambivalent about data centers and the whole debate. I don’t feel educated enough. I only just found out recently that it actually matters where they’re built. I thought you might be able to just build them out in the desert, but no, their location matters a great deal.
I also only found out recently that the widely reported water usage is probably wildly wrong by orders of magnitude. They don’t actually consume all that much. If the electorate knew this information widely, their opinions would change to the tune of 30 percentage points.
Generally speaking, I’ve approached the story like most infrastructure stories: There are some populations for whom a new data center is definitely, 100 percent an exploitative wash. They take your land, they disturb the peace and quiet, and in some cases, they flat out boot you from your own property.
Other populations seem to prosper as a direct result. In fact, the richest county in Virginia also happens to be the one with the most data centers.
Various theories abound for why this mania occurred. Was it top down? Is it a psyop? Are online actors dispersing propaganda that goes to benefit American rivals like China?
Perhaps. I might even call that probable.
Is it possible that it’s mostly organic though? A good friend of mine who is paid to publicly support data centers seems to think it is. He doesn’t buy the top down explanation. He thinks the skepticism, resistance and downright hatred bubbled up out of the collective online consciousness.
That actually makes the most sense to me.
I’m 45 years old. I remember a time before Steve Jobs walked on stage and introduced the iPhone. I remember life before Tom was everyone’s MySpace friend, before Mark Zuckerberg ate Tom by making relationship status a big deal.
The most ironic thing about this theory is that it means the companies who most want data centers are literally hosting the platforms that gave rise to this newest mania. If Instagram reels, Facebook, X, and Amazon’s internet servers don’t exist, does this new mania have anywhere to organize?
Above all, there’s a deep sense among regular people that something has been taken from us. We’ve also been lied to incessantly by the exact people who are now telling us there’s nothing to fear. As recently as a few months ago, those same people told us we’d all be out of work pretty soon.
Something, many somethings, countless undefined and yet tangible things have evaporated in the digital age. People are crueler and crazier. Just look at the women outside the Lindsay Clancy trial. Renée Good and Alex Pretti definitely had some kind of internet psychosis.
I think that people reflexively believe this is the last stand. If we allow “data centers” to take over and to propel AI into every facet of our lives, we’ll be fully gone. This is the rubicon.
People used to ask me, if Trump nuked the internet, what would you do? You work on the internet. Your job would cease to exist. And I’d generally say someone’s “gotta take one for the team.”
I suppose the real answer is that I’d find something productive to do that would improve my community.
WHAT I’M READING
Nancy Pelosi Makes Massive Bet On AI’s Energy Boom
It’s always good to pay attention to the Pelosi family’s investments.
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ROOKE: Trump Administration Takes Big Bite Of Immigration Apple With $103,265 Fee
This might change things up.
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Trump Administration Announces Uncovering More Than $13 Billion In Suspected Fraud
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