Fully on your side of pluralist, high-trust liberalism and good to hear it stated so explicitly. I'm pretty tech-positive, and probably more optimistic about AI than you are, but find e.g. crypto, with its anonymous, low-trust (and even zero-trust) foundations to be incredibly depressing and uninspiring.
I do think your list here is actually two separate dimensions, even if they do cluster around datacenters and AI:
1. The tribalist / populist / localist dimension, suspicious of people with different values. Along this line, pluralism and cultural exchange are at best a scam, at worst a pollution of what is natively good. It feels like right from the start of the "ChatGPT moment", a deep and knee-jerk objection on both sides of the aisle was basically that it was coming "from the wrong people".
This is now a deeply-rooted ideology or identity, unfortunately, some kind of reaction against globalization and social media showing people that the world is much bigger than they thought, and mostly different from themselves. On the bright side, its factual claims are easy to disprove.
2. The labor theory of value / ineffable human magic dimension, which says that all value is ultimately derived from some human's - preferably physical - effort or sacrifice. No human? No value. No sacrifice? No value. No tangible result? No value. See e.g. traditional artists implying that that some kind of soul-substance being almost physically transferred into a drawing ("every individual stroke carries meaning, which the viewer decodes as a human mind") that sets it apart from works made with AI.
This is more of an argument of convenience. As you say, it's unlikely that people were always secretly Marxists, or had a clearly developed theory of consciousness or art. It's just stating a definition that is the furthest removed from the promise of AI to reduce human effort.
The two dimensions conspire to create a narrative of "the bad alien building is intruding on our good and honest lives, and its purpose is to make the worthless thing", but they probably need to be debated separately to shift the needle.
“In every exchange, someone is winning and the other person is losing. Profit is usually a sign that someone’s been harmed.”
This idea is almost a human universal, we have to be taught not to think that way. This perspective is why merchants were considered the lowest social class in ancient Rome, China, Japan, and many other societies. They must be cheats: either they didn’t pay the supplier what the goods were worth, or they overcharged the buyer. It wasn’t really until Adam Smith that the idea of supply and demand changing the value of a good, and that being morally fine, became widespread.
Christianity/Islam prohibited charging interest on loaning money (usury) because it was so obviously devious and dishonest. Just no concept that a loan could make the lender and loanee both better off.
“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.”
This is factually inaccurate. Data centers have caused enough issues that they have become a major factor in Virginia state and local politics, with rises in energy prices and noise being key issues. Unconstrained data center proliferation is projected to double Virginia’s energy consumption and significantly increase energy costs.
I guess this depends on the definition of "many issues." Like after years of being the global central hub of data centers with 5 GW of power going to them (enough to power millions of homes) and being insanely lucrative for the county, voters are now saying "Oh this raised our energy bills a bit" (even though Loudoun doesn't have higher-than-average energy bills for the state, and VA energy prices rose less than the national average over the last 5 years). I guess my claim is relative to their size, activity, and revenue, this still seems pretty minor to me. I'lll need to read more about it.
Data centers raise Virginia electric bills AT THE STATE LEVEL, not just the local one.
Data centers, if not regulated, are expected to double Virginia’s total energy consumption. HUGE potential costs in transmission and infrastructure, not just generation.
We also have clean energy laws that effectively require us to buy clean energy out of state if we can’t ramp up fast enough, which is expensive as hell.
Rate increases have been in double digits. That is not just “a bit.” The increases are also on counties that don’t have data centers.
Noise is a major issue with data centers as well and reduces value of nearby housing.
Read the JLARC report, which is bipartisan and fair. You are not accurately describing the situation. It’s not all bad, but there are real and expensive tradeoffs.
I mean yeah I'm sure DCs are having a nonzero effect on VA electricity bills, but VA electricity costs have risen significantly less than the national average (+28.1% vs +35% between 2020 and 2025 https://www.construction-physics.com/p/whats-happening-to-wholesale-electricity). The double digit rate increases are a sign to me that Virginia's actually had cheaper electricity than most of America. This suggests to me that DC effects on prices have been pretty modest.
Like even in the article you linked, it seems like Dominion is planning to significantly hike the rates DCs themselves pay to cover the cost. Maybe this won't be enough? But I'm not seeing much evidence that DCs are having some huge outsized effects on rates, bc the double digit rises are happening in every state, VA's is way lower than average, and in a lot of states with no DCs the costs grew way more
“New modeling from the Open Energy Outlook Initiative shows that data center and cryptocurrency mining growth through 2030 could increase average U.S. electricity generation costs by 8% and greenhouse gas emissions from power generation by 30%.”
“Other key findings from the modeling include:
Regional cost surge: Central and Northern Virginia face projected 2030 electricity cost increases exceeding 25%, the highest regional increase in the model.”
Why it matters: Absent policy action, this increase in demand for electricity generation could lead to dramatically higher electricity bills for consumers and undermine the nation’s clean energy goals.
For example, capacity market prices in the nation's largest grid operator (PJM) exploded in December 2024, from $30 to $270 per megawatt-day (MW-day), a ninefold rise that will increase bills for 67 million customers across 13 states.
Catch up quick: Traditional utility planning assumes predictable 1%-2% annual demand growth over decades, but data centers are driving regional growth rates of 20%-30% annually. This mismatch between conventional planning timelines and demand growth has exposed limitations in capacity planning practices and increased short-run electricity generation costs, with some markets heavily utilizing older and more costly fossil-fuel generators in the short run.”
Per the NYT, “A June analysis, from Carnegie Mellon University and North Carolina State University, found that electricity bills are on track to rise an average of 8 percent nationwide by 2030 and as much as 25 percent in places like Virginia because of data centers.”
Right, in the future they could cause significant issues, but my point in my post that I'm responding to is that so far they haven't caused many issues at all, which I think the numbers reflect. This could all change in the future and maybe the CMU study is correct, but I also think it's correct to say that so far they haven't had an outsized effect on VA electricity prices, especially when you compare it to the tax revenue they've brought it.
From the BBC article on data centers in Loudoun County
“The reason she, and so many others, are opposed to these large facilities is not just because of their overpowering appearance - a typical data centre can be 100,000 square feet, turning whole streets into large industrial blocks - but some of their side effects, too.
A massive bright blue concrete and glass data centre sits just steps from Greg Pirio's front door in Loudoun County. Thirteen years ago when he purchased his home that patch of land was filled with green trees and chirping birds.
Today, he deals with the centre’s impacts in real time - the one that bothers him the most is the noise pollution.
"There are no birds around here anymore," he said, noting the humming or buzzing noise the centre emits scares away a lot of wildlife from his area.
Data centres can raise the electricity rates of everyone around them
In addition to the noise concerns, people who live in the area expressed frustration with rising electricity bills.
In the past five years, wholesale electricity costs have gone up by as much as 267% in areas near data centres, an investigation by Bloomberg News found.”
My takes on how each populist belief you mentioned would fare post-AGI, and whether or not they'd become true:
> 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.
This will still be false post-AGI, but a weaker version of this could very well be true, where profit/trade becomes much more negative post-AGI, and zero/negative-sum interactions become more common than today as a percentage of trades.
The biggest reason for this is that human labor will become essentially worthless post-AGI for everything that isn't legally/culturally required to have a human, but their capital and land is still valuable, and empirically when this sort of situation happens, selfish motivations tend to generate disaster for less powerful groups, and trade usually exacerbates rather than reduces this (Examples here include human invasion of non-human territories to deforest areas so we can have more food, the 400 year history of colonialism starting with the Native Americans being colonized, as well as wars like the Banana Wars where the US invaded countries on the behest of company interest).
Another reason is identity issues becoming more important relative to economic issues once humans are very, very wealthy post-AGI, and in general identity conflicts are far more zero-sum/negative sum than economic conflicts today.
> 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.
This will remain false post-AGI, if only due to differing values, though if we focus on a single value system, it's not impossible that AGI tech does let us route around tradeoffs in the long run, though I assign it low probability.
> 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.
This will also remain false, and the best thing you can say about it is that big, global institutions might become just as bad as small, local institutions, though this depends on their values again.
> 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.
I don't think there will be no positive-sum trades post-AGI, but I think this will turn out to be a lot more true than people will give it credit for. I won't repeat myself on why our current institutions could become a lot more predatory after AGI, and then ASI, but one particular issue here is that the cost of conflict will at least for a while go way down due to AGI and nanotech, and rationalist theories of war require the cost of conflict to be sufficiently high to prevent war, and our current era of wars being very, very costly even for the winners really only held up from the 18th-21st century.
(Indeed, a lot of the reason why humans go to war with animals, besides their land being very valuable but they are not valuable in economic terms is because the conflict is essentially cost-free for humans to engage in).
> 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.
Depends on values, but I'd guess this remains false for the majority of humans.
> The world is getting irrevocably worse. Technological progress is always just a march toward something worse.
Depends on values, again.
> Individual humans are magic. Any implication that things humans do can be truly replicated by machines is an attack on human dignity.
Yep, this one will be totally falsified by AGI, and I'm very sure of this.
> 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.
Yeah, the labor theory of value will remain false post-AGI, and this is the central mistake lots of people make in economics by far.
So my main difference is that I'm a lot more pessimistic about pluralism post-AGI not breeding total wars, and I'm less optimistic than you on people having an incentive to keep most humans alive once most people aren't needed anymore for the economy to grow.
I agree that AI and data center critics in particular go in for a very subtle kind of Cartesian, human dignity thing, but I don't think that a common enough low-trust populist belief to make a general list like this. Most people aren't thinking about AI at that level!
I feel I have a foot deeply in both camps. I work as a software engineer on agentic systems and am from Oklahoma, a place that deeply holds many of the beliefs you list here. I think there is nuance to these positions that you miss with how you frame them.
1. Positive sum trades certainly exist. Few would deny that, even among the demographic you are talking about. Skepticism arises when decisions are made on behalf of large numbers of people. It is extremely rare to find a trade between large groups where no individuals within either group ends up worse off, even if both groups are made better off overall. Examples of this would be immigration and free trade. Both generally benefit society as a whole, but badly hurt specific individuals and communities. Data centers seem similar in that the benefits will be massive for some and the harms life altering for others.
2. Generally, people who are skeptical of positive sum thinking do not simultaneously believe that trade-offs do not sometimes have to be made. I would argue that they are, at least in general, more aware of both the necessity and the cost of trade-offs than the average person. They may passionately oppose a particular trade-off if they believe their position is worsened by the decision, but they will do so under no illusion that some rosy future exists if only we would let it happen.
3. The mistrust of large institutions comes from first hand experience with them. Many of the people who hold these beliefs run farms, served in the military, or were otherwise exposed to systems enormously more powerful than themselves. The experience is harrowing and quickly disabuses one of the notion that large institutions can be trusted to care for either their members or the people they are supposed to serve. The instinct to trust small institutions is a reaction to this experience. Small, local government might screw you over, but when it does, you can change the direction quickly. If some far away governing body screws you over, you will be powerless to stop it. The feeling of being powerless over your own life is central to the opposition to large institutions, be they companies or governments. Your experience with technology is not representative of the experience of most Americans. For the average American, their experience with the internet has been endless ads, scams, and deliberately addictive platforms. For me, it has mostly been fairly utopian as well, but almost all data shows us that is not true for the vast majority of our neighbors and fellow countrymen.
4. Pluralism, at least in my view, is compatible with two statements about the world. 1. There is no right way to live life. 2. There are some wrong ways to live life. My sense is that objections to AI and to the data centers it requires arise from a sense that AI is often used in many ways that fall into the second category. Young people falling in love with chat bots, creating nonconsensual pornography of peers, and cheating on assignments. Companies and governments spying on employees and citizens. It is totally within the bounds of pluralism to say "I want people to pursue lives that they find meaningful" while also drawing boundaries around behavior that is either criminal, obviously unhealthy, or both. We all know that allowing people to kill themselves with fentanyl in the streets is not a positive outcome. The same could be said of allowing companies to build addictive platforms that compel their users to act against their own interests.
5. We agree on information generally. I think the regulatory state in the US has caused an overallocation of resources to the information and service sectors but this is a separate discussion.
6. This is a total straw-man. Few people would argue that technology always leads to something worse. If there are a statistically significant number of people who think lightbulbs or airplanes or calculators were bad, I've never met a single one and I've spent a great deal of time in the parts of America where people allegedly hold this list of views. That said, it is indisputably true that many of the advancements of the last 2-3 decades made many Americans far worse off. Opioids, billed as a non-addictive treatment for chronic pain, became the scourge of a generation of working class Americans. Social media led to the mass abandonment of third spaces and a loneliness epidemic. Cryptocurrency and online gambling led to scams, addiction, and poverty. It is hard to blame people who have been on the receiving end of some of the worst blunders billed as technological advancements in human history for being skeptical of the next round of supposed advancement, especially when those building the technology promise that it will soon make humans irrelevant.
7. This is another straw man. Humans are not magic. Individual human agency is sacred and must be protected, even at the cost of a poorer future. Physical labor is fundamentally different from decision making. When we outsource decisions about what should and should not be done to machines, we abdicate the essential human experience. We should all reject this, no matter what supposed good it will bring.
8. The labor theory of value is wrong and many do make this mistake. That said, policymakers spent the last fifty years deliberately trying to limit the value of labor through international trade and immigration in the pursuit of lower prices.
Overall, I think it is totally unfair to dismiss concerns about data centers on the grounds that they arise from a low-trust view of the world. Many peoples' life experiences led them to mistrust large institutions and their mistrust is understandable if not wholly justified. We need to address these concerns and clearly demonstrate to people that we can build a better future with technology as a means to an ends, not as an end in and of itself. I fully agree that AI can help us solve big problems, but we owe it to society to ensure that the problems AI solves are more beneficial than the problems we create are harmful.
I’m watching this happen right now in my town. As soon as the public got a whiff of a proposed data center, there has been an outpouring of resistance, much of it based on these errors. https://nottingham.substack.com/p/a-data-center-for-nottingham
Spot on Masley. Like the far left many on the right are seeing the world as victim or victimizer, exploiters v. exploited. There's another problem with the DC discourse -- the shoddy framing of the discussion of costs and benefits or 'impact analysis' which emphasizes the benefits as jobs and taxes revenues. And neglects the vital importance of DCs as the heart and brain of our new online world. Like it or not the viability of the internet has become an existential issue.
I've never met or heard tell of one of you glassy-eyed AI proponents being even mediocre at any art or craft.
"Ummmm humans aren't magic, silly! AI can direct movies too!"
No it can't, and if you don't understand why you are too far gone and the only conclusion I can muster is that you must be one of those weak pitiful people who has decided to embrace the rot. I feel as though you would have been one who would've voted to demolish Pennsylvania Station. I feel as though you'd have been proud to.
I never said AI can currently direct good movies. This goofy overreaction is exactly what I’m talking about. Low trust people always talk like supervillains
Good post, though I think 1 becomes more understandable when data centers get tax breaks. Your energy bills rise in the here and now when everything is already expensive, in exchange for tax contribution to the community further down the line. The math may pencil out, but I get anger in that case.
I've re-posted Andy's essay on "X" and LinkedIn as there is much to commend it. My group, globalleadersassembly.org is approaching the low-trust, local level by fostering dialogues on global policy at the local level. While pernicious demagoguery and malicious algorithms are feeding low-trust populism, elites ( I include myself) usually don't hear the voices of local concern when macro economic decisions are laid at their doorstep. I believe in Ricardian comparative advantage so that there is more than zero sum advantages to trade, i.e., the economic pie should grow for all parties.
However, local and regional economies can be crippled for the "greater good" of importing lower steel, aluminum, car, and manufacturing costs, etc from elsewhere. Low-trust communities have lived this nightmare. Similarly, data center developers are not "listening " to local communities who are concerned with higher retail electricity prices and ignore or dismiss health concerns from the use of reciprocation engines to "temporarily" fuel the energy demand of data centers (See Gemini: Gas turbines generally produce significantly lower emissions of most major pollutants than reciprocating engines, particularly regarding nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, particulate matter (PM), and un-burned hydrocarbons (UHC), including methane slip.
Perhaps through constructive dialogue amongst policymakers, developers, health experts, labor, etc., we might find mutually agreed solutions to sound economic development in a timely manner.
> 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.
I recently got into a debate with a Persuasion contributor for their framing of this very subject.
Interesting blog. Can I ask where you got the "cluster of beliefs common in very low-trust, populist voters and thinkers" from? I am interested in it from the persective of other public policy challenges. Thanks
Fully on your side of pluralist, high-trust liberalism and good to hear it stated so explicitly. I'm pretty tech-positive, and probably more optimistic about AI than you are, but find e.g. crypto, with its anonymous, low-trust (and even zero-trust) foundations to be incredibly depressing and uninspiring.
I do think your list here is actually two separate dimensions, even if they do cluster around datacenters and AI:
1. The tribalist / populist / localist dimension, suspicious of people with different values. Along this line, pluralism and cultural exchange are at best a scam, at worst a pollution of what is natively good. It feels like right from the start of the "ChatGPT moment", a deep and knee-jerk objection on both sides of the aisle was basically that it was coming "from the wrong people".
This is now a deeply-rooted ideology or identity, unfortunately, some kind of reaction against globalization and social media showing people that the world is much bigger than they thought, and mostly different from themselves. On the bright side, its factual claims are easy to disprove.
2. The labor theory of value / ineffable human magic dimension, which says that all value is ultimately derived from some human's - preferably physical - effort or sacrifice. No human? No value. No sacrifice? No value. No tangible result? No value. See e.g. traditional artists implying that that some kind of soul-substance being almost physically transferred into a drawing ("every individual stroke carries meaning, which the viewer decodes as a human mind") that sets it apart from works made with AI.
This is more of an argument of convenience. As you say, it's unlikely that people were always secretly Marxists, or had a clearly developed theory of consciousness or art. It's just stating a definition that is the furthest removed from the promise of AI to reduce human effort.
The two dimensions conspire to create a narrative of "the bad alien building is intruding on our good and honest lives, and its purpose is to make the worthless thing", but they probably need to be debated separately to shift the needle.
“In every exchange, someone is winning and the other person is losing. Profit is usually a sign that someone’s been harmed.”
This idea is almost a human universal, we have to be taught not to think that way. This perspective is why merchants were considered the lowest social class in ancient Rome, China, Japan, and many other societies. They must be cheats: either they didn’t pay the supplier what the goods were worth, or they overcharged the buyer. It wasn’t really until Adam Smith that the idea of supply and demand changing the value of a good, and that being morally fine, became widespread.
Christianity/Islam prohibited charging interest on loaning money (usury) because it was so obviously devious and dishonest. Just no concept that a loan could make the lender and loanee both better off.
“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.”
This is factually inaccurate. Data centers have caused enough issues that they have become a major factor in Virginia state and local politics, with rises in energy prices and noise being key issues. Unconstrained data center proliferation is projected to double Virginia’s energy consumption and significantly increase energy costs.
The backlash was strong enough that the Virginia legislature did a study on the topics from the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee. https://jlarc.virginia.gov/pdfs/reports/Rpt598.pdf
It also has a lot of fiscal benefits - it’s not all bad! - but claiming very few issues misreads the situation. A lot.
See articles about its impact on Virginia politics
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/11/08/prince-william-county-gainseville-election/
https://www.bisnow.com/national/news/data-center-community-relations/data-centers-were-on-the-virginia-ballot-that-might-be-new-normal-fastest-growing-asset-class-131742
https://www.vpm.org/elections/2025-10-28/election-2025-data-centers-earle-sears-spanberger-dominion-clean-virginia
https://www.eenews.net/articles/with-data-center-fights-tearing-apart-towns-virginians-cast-ballots/
I guess this depends on the definition of "many issues." Like after years of being the global central hub of data centers with 5 GW of power going to them (enough to power millions of homes) and being insanely lucrative for the county, voters are now saying "Oh this raised our energy bills a bit" (even though Loudoun doesn't have higher-than-average energy bills for the state, and VA energy prices rose less than the national average over the last 5 years). I guess my claim is relative to their size, activity, and revenue, this still seems pretty minor to me. I'lll need to read more about it.
Like Loudoun's household electricity rate is 14.25 cents (https://findenergy.com/va/loudoun-county-electricity/) whereas VA average is 14.72 (https://findenergy.com/va/) and the national average is 17 (https://www.thisoldhouse.com/electricity/electricity-rates-by-state). I'm somewhat skeptical that data centers actually caused a really significant jump here.
Data centers raise Virginia electric bills AT THE STATE LEVEL, not just the local one.
Data centers, if not regulated, are expected to double Virginia’s total energy consumption. HUGE potential costs in transmission and infrastructure, not just generation.
We also have clean energy laws that effectively require us to buy clean energy out of state if we can’t ramp up fast enough, which is expensive as hell.
Rate increases have been in double digits. That is not just “a bit.” The increases are also on counties that don’t have data centers.
See for example https://www.whro.org/environment/2025-08-20/heres-how-and-why-dominion-energy-plans-to-raise-your-electric-bill
Noise is a major issue with data centers as well and reduces value of nearby housing.
Read the JLARC report, which is bipartisan and fair. You are not accurately describing the situation. It’s not all bad, but there are real and expensive tradeoffs.
I mean yeah I'm sure DCs are having a nonzero effect on VA electricity bills, but VA electricity costs have risen significantly less than the national average (+28.1% vs +35% between 2020 and 2025 https://www.construction-physics.com/p/whats-happening-to-wholesale-electricity). The double digit rate increases are a sign to me that Virginia's actually had cheaper electricity than most of America. This suggests to me that DC effects on prices have been pretty modest.
Like even in the article you linked, it seems like Dominion is planning to significantly hike the rates DCs themselves pay to cover the cost. Maybe this won't be enough? But I'm not seeing much evidence that DCs are having some huge outsized effects on rates, bc the double digit rises are happening in every state, VA's is way lower than average, and in a lot of states with no DCs the costs grew way more
Link to the Carnegie Mellon study. https://www.cmu.edu/work-that-matters/energy-innovation/data-center-growth-could-increase-electricity-bills
“New modeling from the Open Energy Outlook Initiative shows that data center and cryptocurrency mining growth through 2030 could increase average U.S. electricity generation costs by 8% and greenhouse gas emissions from power generation by 30%.”
“Other key findings from the modeling include:
Regional cost surge: Central and Northern Virginia face projected 2030 electricity cost increases exceeding 25%, the highest regional increase in the model.”
Why it matters: Absent policy action, this increase in demand for electricity generation could lead to dramatically higher electricity bills for consumers and undermine the nation’s clean energy goals.
For example, capacity market prices in the nation's largest grid operator (PJM) exploded in December 2024, from $30 to $270 per megawatt-day (MW-day), a ninefold rise that will increase bills for 67 million customers across 13 states.
Catch up quick: Traditional utility planning assumes predictable 1%-2% annual demand growth over decades, but data centers are driving regional growth rates of 20%-30% annually. This mismatch between conventional planning timelines and demand growth has exposed limitations in capacity planning practices and increased short-run electricity generation costs, with some markets heavily utilizing older and more costly fossil-fuel generators in the short run.”
“
Per the NYT, “A June analysis, from Carnegie Mellon University and North Carolina State University, found that electricity bills are on track to rise an average of 8 percent nationwide by 2030 and as much as 25 percent in places like Virginia because of data centers.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/business/energy-environment/ai-data-centers-electricity-costs.html#:~:text=A%20June%20analysis%2C%20from%20Carnegie%20Mellon%20University,places%20like%20Virginia%20because%20of%20data%20centers.
Virginia has historically had a good overall business climate because of relatively low rates. Raising those rates hurts the rest of the state.
A 25% increase is a big deal that is essentially taxing everyone to benefit data centers.
Again, read the JLARC study.
Right, in the future they could cause significant issues, but my point in my post that I'm responding to is that so far they haven't caused many issues at all, which I think the numbers reflect. This could all change in the future and maybe the CMU study is correct, but I also think it's correct to say that so far they haven't had an outsized effect on VA electricity prices, especially when you compare it to the tax revenue they've brought it.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-electricity-prices/
Up to 267% increase in electricity costs near data centers.
Also, realize, money coming in largely goes to the county, while infrastructure costs are spread all over the state, to people who don’t benefit.
Data centers are not paying for their impact on electricity costs.
From the BBC article on data centers in Loudoun County
“The reason she, and so many others, are opposed to these large facilities is not just because of their overpowering appearance - a typical data centre can be 100,000 square feet, turning whole streets into large industrial blocks - but some of their side effects, too.
A massive bright blue concrete and glass data centre sits just steps from Greg Pirio's front door in Loudoun County. Thirteen years ago when he purchased his home that patch of land was filled with green trees and chirping birds.
Today, he deals with the centre’s impacts in real time - the one that bothers him the most is the noise pollution.
"There are no birds around here anymore," he said, noting the humming or buzzing noise the centre emits scares away a lot of wildlife from his area.
Data centres can raise the electricity rates of everyone around them
In addition to the noise concerns, people who live in the area expressed frustration with rising electricity bills.
In the past five years, wholesale electricity costs have gone up by as much as 267% in areas near data centres, an investigation by Bloomberg News found.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93dnnxewdvo
My takes on how each populist belief you mentioned would fare post-AGI, and whether or not they'd become true:
> 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.
This will still be false post-AGI, but a weaker version of this could very well be true, where profit/trade becomes much more negative post-AGI, and zero/negative-sum interactions become more common than today as a percentage of trades.
The biggest reason for this is that human labor will become essentially worthless post-AGI for everything that isn't legally/culturally required to have a human, but their capital and land is still valuable, and empirically when this sort of situation happens, selfish motivations tend to generate disaster for less powerful groups, and trade usually exacerbates rather than reduces this (Examples here include human invasion of non-human territories to deforest areas so we can have more food, the 400 year history of colonialism starting with the Native Americans being colonized, as well as wars like the Banana Wars where the US invaded countries on the behest of company interest).
Another reason is identity issues becoming more important relative to economic issues once humans are very, very wealthy post-AGI, and in general identity conflicts are far more zero-sum/negative sum than economic conflicts today.
> 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.
This will remain false post-AGI, if only due to differing values, though if we focus on a single value system, it's not impossible that AGI tech does let us route around tradeoffs in the long run, though I assign it low probability.
> 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.
This will also remain false, and the best thing you can say about it is that big, global institutions might become just as bad as small, local institutions, though this depends on their values again.
> 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.
I don't think there will be no positive-sum trades post-AGI, but I think this will turn out to be a lot more true than people will give it credit for. I won't repeat myself on why our current institutions could become a lot more predatory after AGI, and then ASI, but one particular issue here is that the cost of conflict will at least for a while go way down due to AGI and nanotech, and rationalist theories of war require the cost of conflict to be sufficiently high to prevent war, and our current era of wars being very, very costly even for the winners really only held up from the 18th-21st century.
(Indeed, a lot of the reason why humans go to war with animals, besides their land being very valuable but they are not valuable in economic terms is because the conflict is essentially cost-free for humans to engage in).
> 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.
Depends on values, but I'd guess this remains false for the majority of humans.
> The world is getting irrevocably worse. Technological progress is always just a march toward something worse.
Depends on values, again.
> Individual humans are magic. Any implication that things humans do can be truly replicated by machines is an attack on human dignity.
Yep, this one will be totally falsified by AGI, and I'm very sure of this.
> 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.
Yeah, the labor theory of value will remain false post-AGI, and this is the central mistake lots of people make in economics by far.
So my main difference is that I'm a lot more pessimistic about pluralism post-AGI not breeding total wars, and I'm less optimistic than you on people having an incentive to keep most humans alive once most people aren't needed anymore for the economy to grow.
Yup to be clear I think a lot of my worldview falls apart if we do get genuine AGI soon, unfortunately
I agree that AI and data center critics in particular go in for a very subtle kind of Cartesian, human dignity thing, but I don't think that a common enough low-trust populist belief to make a general list like this. Most people aren't thinking about AI at that level!
Most people are thinking about noise and their electricity bills going up. Not super complicated.
I feel I have a foot deeply in both camps. I work as a software engineer on agentic systems and am from Oklahoma, a place that deeply holds many of the beliefs you list here. I think there is nuance to these positions that you miss with how you frame them.
1. Positive sum trades certainly exist. Few would deny that, even among the demographic you are talking about. Skepticism arises when decisions are made on behalf of large numbers of people. It is extremely rare to find a trade between large groups where no individuals within either group ends up worse off, even if both groups are made better off overall. Examples of this would be immigration and free trade. Both generally benefit society as a whole, but badly hurt specific individuals and communities. Data centers seem similar in that the benefits will be massive for some and the harms life altering for others.
2. Generally, people who are skeptical of positive sum thinking do not simultaneously believe that trade-offs do not sometimes have to be made. I would argue that they are, at least in general, more aware of both the necessity and the cost of trade-offs than the average person. They may passionately oppose a particular trade-off if they believe their position is worsened by the decision, but they will do so under no illusion that some rosy future exists if only we would let it happen.
3. The mistrust of large institutions comes from first hand experience with them. Many of the people who hold these beliefs run farms, served in the military, or were otherwise exposed to systems enormously more powerful than themselves. The experience is harrowing and quickly disabuses one of the notion that large institutions can be trusted to care for either their members or the people they are supposed to serve. The instinct to trust small institutions is a reaction to this experience. Small, local government might screw you over, but when it does, you can change the direction quickly. If some far away governing body screws you over, you will be powerless to stop it. The feeling of being powerless over your own life is central to the opposition to large institutions, be they companies or governments. Your experience with technology is not representative of the experience of most Americans. For the average American, their experience with the internet has been endless ads, scams, and deliberately addictive platforms. For me, it has mostly been fairly utopian as well, but almost all data shows us that is not true for the vast majority of our neighbors and fellow countrymen.
4. Pluralism, at least in my view, is compatible with two statements about the world. 1. There is no right way to live life. 2. There are some wrong ways to live life. My sense is that objections to AI and to the data centers it requires arise from a sense that AI is often used in many ways that fall into the second category. Young people falling in love with chat bots, creating nonconsensual pornography of peers, and cheating on assignments. Companies and governments spying on employees and citizens. It is totally within the bounds of pluralism to say "I want people to pursue lives that they find meaningful" while also drawing boundaries around behavior that is either criminal, obviously unhealthy, or both. We all know that allowing people to kill themselves with fentanyl in the streets is not a positive outcome. The same could be said of allowing companies to build addictive platforms that compel their users to act against their own interests.
5. We agree on information generally. I think the regulatory state in the US has caused an overallocation of resources to the information and service sectors but this is a separate discussion.
6. This is a total straw-man. Few people would argue that technology always leads to something worse. If there are a statistically significant number of people who think lightbulbs or airplanes or calculators were bad, I've never met a single one and I've spent a great deal of time in the parts of America where people allegedly hold this list of views. That said, it is indisputably true that many of the advancements of the last 2-3 decades made many Americans far worse off. Opioids, billed as a non-addictive treatment for chronic pain, became the scourge of a generation of working class Americans. Social media led to the mass abandonment of third spaces and a loneliness epidemic. Cryptocurrency and online gambling led to scams, addiction, and poverty. It is hard to blame people who have been on the receiving end of some of the worst blunders billed as technological advancements in human history for being skeptical of the next round of supposed advancement, especially when those building the technology promise that it will soon make humans irrelevant.
7. This is another straw man. Humans are not magic. Individual human agency is sacred and must be protected, even at the cost of a poorer future. Physical labor is fundamentally different from decision making. When we outsource decisions about what should and should not be done to machines, we abdicate the essential human experience. We should all reject this, no matter what supposed good it will bring.
8. The labor theory of value is wrong and many do make this mistake. That said, policymakers spent the last fifty years deliberately trying to limit the value of labor through international trade and immigration in the pursuit of lower prices.
Overall, I think it is totally unfair to dismiss concerns about data centers on the grounds that they arise from a low-trust view of the world. Many peoples' life experiences led them to mistrust large institutions and their mistrust is understandable if not wholly justified. We need to address these concerns and clearly demonstrate to people that we can build a better future with technology as a means to an ends, not as an end in and of itself. I fully agree that AI can help us solve big problems, but we owe it to society to ensure that the problems AI solves are more beneficial than the problems we create are harmful.
I’m watching this happen right now in my town. As soon as the public got a whiff of a proposed data center, there has been an outpouring of resistance, much of it based on these errors. https://nottingham.substack.com/p/a-data-center-for-nottingham
just a quick comment on a first read through, but this is a great and really interesting list. immediate follow, hope to add some real thoughts later
Spot on Masley. Like the far left many on the right are seeing the world as victim or victimizer, exploiters v. exploited. There's another problem with the DC discourse -- the shoddy framing of the discussion of costs and benefits or 'impact analysis' which emphasizes the benefits as jobs and taxes revenues. And neglects the vital importance of DCs as the heart and brain of our new online world. Like it or not the viability of the internet has become an existential issue.
I've never met or heard tell of one of you glassy-eyed AI proponents being even mediocre at any art or craft.
"Ummmm humans aren't magic, silly! AI can direct movies too!"
No it can't, and if you don't understand why you are too far gone and the only conclusion I can muster is that you must be one of those weak pitiful people who has decided to embrace the rot. I feel as though you would have been one who would've voted to demolish Pennsylvania Station. I feel as though you'd have been proud to.
I never said AI can currently direct good movies. This goofy overreaction is exactly what I’m talking about. Low trust people always talk like supervillains
Way to go with the ad hominem (irony).
Good post, though I think 1 becomes more understandable when data centers get tax breaks. Your energy bills rise in the here and now when everything is already expensive, in exchange for tax contribution to the community further down the line. The math may pencil out, but I get anger in that case.
I've re-posted Andy's essay on "X" and LinkedIn as there is much to commend it. My group, globalleadersassembly.org is approaching the low-trust, local level by fostering dialogues on global policy at the local level. While pernicious demagoguery and malicious algorithms are feeding low-trust populism, elites ( I include myself) usually don't hear the voices of local concern when macro economic decisions are laid at their doorstep. I believe in Ricardian comparative advantage so that there is more than zero sum advantages to trade, i.e., the economic pie should grow for all parties.
However, local and regional economies can be crippled for the "greater good" of importing lower steel, aluminum, car, and manufacturing costs, etc from elsewhere. Low-trust communities have lived this nightmare. Similarly, data center developers are not "listening " to local communities who are concerned with higher retail electricity prices and ignore or dismiss health concerns from the use of reciprocation engines to "temporarily" fuel the energy demand of data centers (See Gemini: Gas turbines generally produce significantly lower emissions of most major pollutants than reciprocating engines, particularly regarding nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, particulate matter (PM), and un-burned hydrocarbons (UHC), including methane slip.
Perhaps through constructive dialogue amongst policymakers, developers, health experts, labor, etc., we might find mutually agreed solutions to sound economic development in a timely manner.
> 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.
I recently got into a debate with a Persuasion contributor for their framing of this very subject.
Interesting blog. Can I ask where you got the "cluster of beliefs common in very low-trust, populist voters and thinkers" from? I am interested in it from the persective of other public policy challenges. Thanks
Oh I just came up with them after following politics for a while
Thanks