Data centers and low social trust

Why I was so compelled to post a lot about data centers

There’s a cluster of beliefs common in very low-trust, populist voters and thinkers:

• There are no positive-sum trades. In every exchange, someone is winning and the other person is losing. Profit is usually a sign that someone’s been harmed.

• Every trade-off is a trick. Anything harmful cannot be made up for by other unrelated positive effects. If someone tells you we need to make a trade-off, they’re hiding a much better solution where everyone’s better off and nothing bad happens.

• Big, global institutions are always way less trustworthy than small, local institutions. The real political axis is the virtuous, authentic, everyday, rooted people vs. the unrooted powerful cabals who run society.

• It’s very important that all resources be spent on your specific value system and vision of the good life. Pluralism is a trick. Other people pursuing very different values are basically always a threat, because there are no positive-sum trades.

• Information is not valuable and not worth spending resources to acquire. What matters is physical goods. Thus, digital goods cannot make life better. It is at least somewhat sinful to spend physical resources to produce digital goods.

• The world is getting irrevocably worse. Technological progress is always just a march toward something worse.

• Individual humans are magic. Any implication that things humans do can be truly replicated by machines is an attack on human dignity.

• Some form of the labor theory of value is true. The value of a good is determined by how much thoughtful human labor has gone into making it.

I think every one of these individually is a pretty bad way of thinking about the world. The data center debate has been a place where all of these show up, and where many people talk as if they’re each individually obvious, and only the bad evil people disagree. This was a big reason why I was compelled to write so much about them. It was aggravating me how much the broader conversation about data centers (and technology more broadly) is currently dominated by what seems like very low-trust intuitions that fall apart if you just examine how data centers actually work. This isn’t to say locals are always wrong to oppose data centers, just that way too often, objections seemed to be guided by these bad ways of thinking, as opposed to concrete harms. Going down the list:

• There are no positive-sum trades. Data centers often involve lots of positive-sum trades with local communities. Mainly via tax revenue, but also lots of additional funding for local utilities. Loudoun County (with the most data centers in the country) is a good example of where data centers provide huge amounts of tax revenue for the locals without causing many issues at all. It’s noticeable how often “data center profits” are brought up as if this is a sign that they’re harming people. To me, this sounds more like they’re successfully serving a lot of people who want to use them.

• Every trade-off is a trick. Any large industry like data centers is going to come with some harms, but these harms can be made up for if the benefits are large enough. I think in most cases so far they have clearly been net good for the places they’ve been built and the world more broadly. Any other industry this large and lucrative would also come with similar trade-offs. It is okay that data centers purchase some nonzero amount of water from local utilities, as an example. This isn’t an irrevocable loss that cannot be made up for with utility and tax revenue from the data center. Whenever people talk about the harms of data centers, they often talk as if there are other options just around the corner for making local communities much wealthier without any negatives at all, but they don’t actually share what those are.

• Big, global institutions are always way less trustworthy than small, local institutions. The internet more broadly has been a utopian technology for me. A lot of tech companies have provided unbelievable value to my life, and in general I trust them more than many local small businesses. I’m not entirely trusting of all tech companies (especially due to potential risks from advanced AI), and I’m aware they can do very bad things, but I’m not at all inclined to think they’re evil just because they’re big. Larger organizations in general often allow for much more complex work, and the standardization they provide often mean many different people with wildly different backgrounds can operate in them more easily. Similarly, many in debates about data centers also talk about local politicians as being complicit in the evil because they just want more tax revenue. Even a lot of left-wing people often frame this as “the people” against very local governments. This shows a shocking level of distrust in local governance that I don’t think is correct or healthy. It’s often good when local governments try to attract more tax revenue for their communities.

• It’s very important that all resources be spent on your specific value system and vision of the good life. Pluralism is a trick. One of the reasons why data centers are interesting to me is that they each serve tens of thousands of people from around the country and world at once, each pursuing wildly different things. Any one person might disagree with a lot of what happens in a data center, but I think people around the world should be able to pursue what they personally find valuable. Even if this is all concentrated in one place, if it’s not actually a significant harm to the locals, that pursuit should happen. Many commentators seem to want to litigate the specific value of AI and other tools here. My reaction is mostly “there’s clearly lots of demand for this, so our first impulse should be to let it happen as long as it’s abiding by all local regulations, even if we think it’s goofy.” There are plenty of of other ways people spend time, energy, and water that I think is at least silly and at worst bad, but I can acknowledge that they should still be able to pursue them. Pluralism is pretty foundational to how I think. The fact that the users of data centers are invisible to locals is a big reason why people distrust them. I think this is silly. We’re constantly being affected by the economic choices of tens of thousands of other, invisible people. This invisibility is a result of living in a complex pluralist society where we’re all individually pursuing different goals, and yet have still found clever ways to coordinate with each other. Making everything local and visible would make us all poorer, and even more importantly would expose too much of our decisions to the specific judgment and value systems of the community we happened to be in. We would be less free.

• Information is not valuable and not worth spending resources to acquire. Information is wildly valuable. It’s good to spend lots of physical resources to produce a book, even though almost everything valuable about the book is exclusively in the information. Most of the ways human life has been made really wildly better are exclusively due to intellectual abstractions like economics and physics and good political ideas, not the simple acquisition of physical objects by hard labor. The internet has been unbelievably useful to me because it gave me way, way, way more access to useful information than I would have otherwise had.

• The world is getting irrevocably worse. Technological progress is always just a march toward something worse. Here’s where I have the most sympathy for low-trust thinkers. I’m pretty concerned about AI specifically. But there are a lot of ways I’m wildly excited about AI too. More broadly, I think the case is strong that the vast, vast majority of new technology has on net made society much better.

• Individual humans are magic. It is not an attack on human dignity to say that we don’t have magical angels living in our brains. The industrial revolution has on net led to much greater human dignity, even though it replaced many acts of physical labor performed by humans.

• Some form of the labor theory of value is true. I don’t think most people are Marxists, but I do think a lot of people have a tendency toward believing in some form of the labor theory of value, as opposed to the obviously correct marginal theory of value. Many people often talk about how AI in data centers cannot provide anything of value by definition, because it’s not being thoughtfully created and curated by a human. This comes up a lot in conversations about AI art especially. There’s a lot of talk about how what AI is producing cannot be valuable by definition. I’ve pontificated about this before, but I think one of the causes is that people have a bias and think all value originates in human labor. I know Marx’s actual theory is much more complex (and yet still wrong), I’m talking here specifically about a folk theory instead.

There was a recent story by Heatmap on the building backlash against data centers. It was hard to read it without coming to the conclusion that a significant portion of the strongest opposition to data centers isn’t actually coming from people who have been harmed by them, it’s from people who are carrying around this cluster of low-trust beliefs, and who are now the main voices in the national conversation. I think low-trust populism is in general the main threat in America right now to the type of politics I think actually makes the world better. The data center debate has been one of many arenas where localist, low-trust populism squares off against pluralist, high-trust liberalism. The thing that made it stand out to me is seeing how few other people seemed interested in going to bat for my side. This is not a trivial topic, this is the main new industry in America! I’d like a lot more people to enter the debate, not necessarily always on the side of data centers, but on the side of pluralism, economic literacy, and without an inherent distrust of technology or big abstract systems. Maybe this could be you!