What the Data Center Revolt Is Really About

T he late Shelby Foote told a story, memorialized in the 1990 Ken Burns documentary The Civil War, of a Southern soldier, captured by Union forces, who was asked why he was fighting. The rebel, a defeated partisan of a plainly doomed cause, did not respond with any sophisticated theory or political apologetics. Why was he fighting? “Because you’re here,” he said.

In a very different time, this captures the essence of the anxiety and opposition to artificial intelligence and data centers among our neighbors in America’s conservative and rural communities. Though it is unquestionably true that some of this opposition is astroturfed, generated by competing interests and/or supported by foreign actors, it is not created by them, and it would exist without them. It is also true that much of the opposition centers on questions of resources, especially water and electricity, which are empirically answerable. Yet to treat these as arguments to be proven or disproven is to miss why they are being made at all.

China’s agents could stop funding anti-AI, anti-data-center agitation altogether, AI vehicles could be proven exponentially safer than human-driven cars, and data centers could be shown to drive down electricity and water prices, and the unease and dislike of them would persist. The thing it’s about is not really what it’s about.

What it’s about is, as Foote’s soldier said, the fact that they’re here. This summer marked the eleventh anniversary of the golden-escalator ride that plunged America into the populist moment, and by now we ought to understand that Americans have long been on the precipice of dizzying change — and not for the better. The advent of the information age has yielded exactly the opposite of many optimistic predictions made a generation ago. Society is digitally interconnected, yet this has promoted vastly more friction than understanding. The sum of human knowledge is available in a pocket-sized device to nearly everyone, yet ignorance is more robust than ever. Participatory democracy is easier than it has ever been, yet governance does not work nearly as well as it did in our fathers’ time. The net effect of social media and the information age on the American way of life seems to be that it has made it much worse.

Now comes the apotheosis of the information revolution — artificial intelligence, and its physical representation in the data center — and it is likely that it will only accelerate the diminishment of our way of life. The fact that the whole apparatus dedicated to its creation and maintenance seems to import and rely on people from outside the communities at hand — from transplants hailing from elsewhere in America to outright foreigners — accentuates the sense of alienation.

Artificial intelligence, Americans are assured, will result in more connection, more information, and more power than ever before. Data centers, Americans are told, will result in more prosperity and more material wealth than ever before. All this may be true. Yet Americans regard with legitimate suspicion the cognoscenti who are now as enthusiastic about machine intelligence as they were recently about transgender surgeries and mRNA therapies and the wet-market theory. They read for themselves the stories of Americans driven to psychosis by AI, of families atomized by a false anthropology of AI, of AI agents banding together autonomously to commit crime and fraud, of AI pleasantly designing new viruses that just might wipe out a good portion of mankind, and they think that perhaps this is not an intrinsic good. They also listen attentively to the AI-industry leaders who predict, some with evident pleasure, that AI will lead to the extinction of humanity, and they also believe this is not a good to be pursued.

They know, too, that the data center in the small American town may in fact save that small town in the same manner as a village in Vietnam’s Central Highlands in 1966 might have been saved by its destruction and the visible application of American material largesse. Our rural and small-town fellow citizens are desperate for the salvation of their communities — but they are not seeking it at the cost of themselves. They know that the homogenization of their places of birth, the land of their roots, its reduction to sameness and the importation of new populations with no purchase in their history and heritage, is in some ways worse than a decline into nothingness. A disappeared community has had the dignity of remaining itself to the end; a transformed one, propped into being by a data center and its class of outsiders, becomes a mockery of the strivings of the generations past. It is one thing to slide into memory. It is something else to slip into insult.

These Americans know something else, too: that they are Americans, not an undifferentiated consumer class that is pliant so long as it is fed and comfortable. A century past, on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, President Calvin Coolidge reminded his countrymen that material welfare and prosperity are second-order effects, not first causes:

We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren scepter in our grasp.

This is what the opposition to artificial intelligence and data centers is really about. It is not some opposition to “the future,” whatever that means. Americans seek dignity. Americans seek respect. Americans seek flourishing for themselves and their children, and they sense uneasily that a pioneer family with a Bible and a rifle, or a suburban family without smartphones or social media, may have flourished better than them. Americans want their way of life defended and continued unto “ourselves and our posterity.” Americans want to have children — and to hand this all to them.

Americans have seen, across two generations now, that the relentless and consuming advance of technology in the information age has diminished every one of these things. It is eroding what Americanness means. AI feels like the final passage: community and democracy having been superseded and atomized, man himself is now due for irrelevancy. A lot of people are going to simply take it: progress, you know.

But the Americans who remember what America means — they won’t.