It just seems like inorganic messaging because the anti-data center memes and hysteria is literally everywhere on the internet. People are talking about things they know nothing about. These data centers are going to poison our water supply, burn our crops, and deliver a pestilence to our houses.
The truth is that it’s just how memes spread from person to person via various social networks. If I was going to put my money on an organization engaged in a targeted anti-data meme I would pin it on one of the first movers who already own major data centers and have the means to build more easily.
Funnily enough, I was researching this for my personal understanding yesterday and came to the same conclusions. This is a far more thorough look than I took - so really helpful for the evidence base
Any claim that someone is playing a real-world game of 4D chess... or 3D chess... or even just plain chess, should be taken with an enormous grain of salt. Even the most amoral political operator knows that "too clever" moves can easily backfire in unexpected ways.
In this case, the likely boring reality is the more depressing one: "when a bad idea gains sufficient momentum, it becomes received wisdom".
But that doesn't really explain why this specific issue has so much mass hysteria... While misinformation on social media obviously isn't new, I've personally never seen it on this scale before despite plenty of other very inflammatory topics seeming like an equally fertile breeding ground. Especially given that China would genuinely have a huge amount to gain from this, I don't think it's conspiratorial to at least ask ourselves questions.
True, and it definitely was worth investigating thoroughly.
I think a lot of it is a perfect storm of various emotionally resonant concepts that just "feel" true, at a time of economic uncertainty and unexpectedly rapid technological change. Basically:
"There is a new, frightening inhuman thing, built by powerful people whose values we don't share, occupying our scarce land with ominous-looking evil fortresses, draining our precious lifeblood, planning to disempower and replace us / wasting the world's finite resources on a frivolous scam, and obviously polluting the soil and air in the process". Then multiply that by the kind of innumeracy that hears "billion" and panics, or thinks "all the electricity used by the Eiffel Tower" is objectively a lot.
It just seems like inorganic messaging because the anti-data center memes and hysteria is literally everywhere on the internet. People are talking about things they know nothing about. These data centers are going to poison our water supply, burn our crops, and deliver a pestilence to our houses.
The truth is that it’s just how memes spread from person to person via various social networks. If I was going to put my money on an organization engaged in a targeted anti-data meme I would pin it on one of the first movers who already own major data centers and have the means to build more easily.
Funnily enough, I was researching this for my personal understanding yesterday and came to the same conclusions. This is a far more thorough look than I took - so really helpful for the evidence base
Basically any time someone is connecting the dots across multiple links of influence, you can tell they’re reaching!
Any claim that someone is playing a real-world game of 4D chess... or 3D chess... or even just plain chess, should be taken with an enormous grain of salt. Even the most amoral political operator knows that "too clever" moves can easily backfire in unexpected ways.
In this case, the likely boring reality is the more depressing one: "when a bad idea gains sufficient momentum, it becomes received wisdom".
But that doesn't really explain why this specific issue has so much mass hysteria... While misinformation on social media obviously isn't new, I've personally never seen it on this scale before despite plenty of other very inflammatory topics seeming like an equally fertile breeding ground. Especially given that China would genuinely have a huge amount to gain from this, I don't think it's conspiratorial to at least ask ourselves questions.
True, and it definitely was worth investigating thoroughly.
I think a lot of it is a perfect storm of various emotionally resonant concepts that just "feel" true, at a time of economic uncertainty and unexpectedly rapid technological change. Basically:
"There is a new, frightening inhuman thing, built by powerful people whose values we don't share, occupying our scarce land with ominous-looking evil fortresses, draining our precious lifeblood, planning to disempower and replace us / wasting the world's finite resources on a frivolous scam, and obviously polluting the soil and air in the process". Then multiply that by the kind of innumeracy that hears "billion" and panics, or thinks "all the electricity used by the Eiffel Tower" is objectively a lot.