My friend went home to America and came back almost cheerful. 
The good news he told me: The BLM fists and pride flags, he said, were largely gone. 
The bad news: They’ve been replaced by “No Data Center” signs. 

Suddenly I knew where to stand on data centers. 
When the same chorus of NPC’s that spent a decade insisting a child is stunning and brave to have their genitals chopped off and you’re bigot if you want to protect them from the butchers, that Elon trying to cut government waste is a bridge too far, and Tesla owners and the company must pay by being torched, the same NPC’s claiming a city on fire is “mostly peaceful,” suddenly agrees that a windowless building full of servers is the new original sin, you can usually assume the warehouse is doing something useful.

The messaging is sloppy in a familiar way. 
Yesterday my wife scrolled into an Instagram post announcing that Gary, Indiana had been dark for fourteen days — and blaming data centers. Gary did lose power for about two weeks. 
A derecho storm on August 11 hit with gusts around 99 mph, Cat-2 hurricane strength, plus flooding and tornadoes. Poles snapped, trees took the lines, NIPSCO spent a fortnight rebuilding. 
That is a storm and a brittle overhead grid, not a rack of GPUs in a field. But in creating an association, repetition and emotion matter most. Tie it into a tragedy and point to the wrong culprit. It was a devastating storm, but when you’re getting psyoped, that makes no difference.


Find a bad night. Name the unpopular thing. Repeat until the unpopular thing is the bad night. You do not need a smoke-filled room in Moscow for that. 

Copy-paste activism, local grievances, and a few people who benefit from delay will do most of the work. 
Foreign services are happy to amplify whatever already travels. 

The older version of this play is energy. Nuclear is dense, low-carbon, and ugly in the imagination, so it was easy to scare. American scarcity of plants is a pile-up: Three Mile Island, cost overruns, cheap gas, waste politics, and yes, incumbents who liked the status quo. And taking advantage of this, who do you think helped fan the flames of anti-nuclear activism. The oil companies. And why wouldn’t they? They have a pipeline of profits to protect.

 Germany is the expensive exhibit. The Greens did not need a Kremlin stipend to hate reactors; that feud is older than Putin. Merkel’s government sealed the accelerated exit from nuclear after Fukushima. But believe it when Russia paid to spread the green message, to psy-op the public. Moscow did not invent the feud. It rented the gap and expanded it it: kill the atom, sell the gas


And lo and behold, Russia had the substitute to sell. Nord Stream money soothed some NGO fights over the pipes — a €10 million Baltic “nature” foundation with WWF, BUND, and NABU, later a much larger “climate” vehicle in Mecklenburg that helped finish Nord Stream 2. And billions in revenue cheaply derived from handing out some money to the opponents of fossil fuels. 
Pay the people who hate oil to hate uranium. Then sell them oil’s cousin by pipe.




German Results post 2022: mothballed nuclear plants, re-opening much less environmentally, carbon-emitting coal plants, electric bills up, factories and jobs- gone, and a gas habit that made staring down Putin harder. 

Same genre, smaller stage: online poker. Churches supplied the sermon. Las Vegas and some tribal casinos supplied the lawyers. UIGEA went onto a 2006 port-security bill. The easiest way to beat a competitor is still to make him illegal with the long arm of government. Nothing says family values like a casino PAC.


Today the prize is compute. Putin told Russian students in 2017 that whoever leads in AI “will become the ruler of the world.” 
The live race is mainly Washington and Beijing. Russia is loud and a distant third. Slowing American data centers is still a gift to whoever is building faster. Water usage is one of the ways they incite opposition, but reclaimed and closed-loop cooling is spreading. 
But the electric bills go up! Well, most of the data centers are bringing their own electricity with behind-the-meter gas, solar, or dedicated plants. True, some still lean on the grid and fight interconnection queues, but many high-growth states have not seen the worst residential spikes. Jobs and tax base are not a myth. There is major benefit and growth in localities and high paying blue collar work, Someone still has to pour the slab and pull the feeder.


What is coming as a result, robotic surgeons, cancer cures, and the ability to fight off the destructive forces that would like to takeover the planet. 

Keep the signs. They are the joke and the tell.

Same trick as ever: pin every blackout, every bill, every dry river on the thing you already wanted to stop.

The storm in Gary was a storm. The race for AI is a race.

Confuse the two and you lose the second one on purpose — paid in false virtue and cheap dopamine for sandbagging the on horse in the race who doesn’t want to enslave the world when it wins, and your “latest thing” signs are the wind at the backs for the Chinese.