Last week, in the Five Quick Things column, I referenced an X post by The Federalist’s Sean Davis noting that one significant reason for the opposition to data centers is the stunning lack of visible philanthropy among those at the top of the tech-bro hierarchy who seek to build them.
In case you don’t want to open up the post to get everything Davis said, it was this…
A middling 80 IQ narcoterrorist in Mexico has a better understanding of how to get the support of small towns than does a West Coast tech bro who fancies himself one of the smartest men on earth.
If scum-of-the-earth retarded narcoterrorists can get away with literal murder by building schools and hospitals and soccer fields and showering the locals with a tiny fraction of the cash they make ruining millions of lives all over the world, imagine what Big Tech bros could get away with if they had even the slightest bit of humility or understanding of basic human nature.
And yet, they’re somehow simultaneously dumber, more arrogant, and greedier than drug smugglers and human traffickers.
What I said was this…
If you had a Rockefeller or a Carnegie or a Vanderbilt or a Morgan in your town, you might be perturbed at times with rapacious labor policies, less-than-state-of-the-art safety and environmental performance, or anticompetitive trade practices, but at least you could count on getting a museum, a zoo, a theater, libraries, perhaps a college or a park out of the deal. The robber barons were, certainly by modern standards, quite civic-minded. They made the places they lived considerably better.
You get very little of that from the tech-bro aristocracy.
The data center operators moving into the rural communities in question should definitely pay mind to Davis’ critique. Some already have, I would imagine.
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