I spent Sunday afternoon on MS NOW with Jacob Soboroff and Deja Foxx for a segment called Prediction Markets, where Jacob goes out into the world, asks regular people what they think is going to happen, and then brings the tape back for the rest of us to react to.
We covered the Trump’s curse on the LA Dodgers, the White House ballroom, and some Abdul El-Sayed. I always have fun with Jacob. Our relationship began on TV when we both co-hosted TakePart Live alongside Megan McCain over a decade ago.
We all had fun but the core of the segment was Jacob in the field.
He was at Eastern Market in Detroit, which he called one of the great American places, and where you can get cauliflower for a dollar! Things got real when he asked people about data centers.
A woman in her 70s said the thing she was most afraid of was the water and the utility bills. She said she is about to stop working and she would like to have money left to do nothing with, and she doesn’t want a $200 dollar water bill.
Another woman from Saline, near Ann Arbor, described a data center that arrived in what she called the most beautiful rural part of their farmland. Now she says the water is bad and the company wants to flush effluents into the Saline River.
Money quote:
“We had umpteen, I can’t tell you how many meetings we had. They ignored us, ignored us, ignored us.”
This is the most precise description of the American condition I have heard all year.
The most bipartisan issue in the country
The heart of what I said on air is this: data centers have become the most bipartisan point of agreement in America that almost nobody is talking. Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon overlap on it. Democratic Socialists and Tea Party organizers are showing up at the same community meetings and finding that they agree.
This is not a story about people being anti-technology. I have never met a person at one of these meetings who is against computers. It is a story about people being anti-imposition. Anti-oligarch. Anti-trillionaire-wannabe. The rage is not primarily aimed at the servers. It is aimed at the power structure that decided something enormous would happen next to their homes, using their water and their grid, without their consent.
Most of us walk around with a diffuse, hard-to-name feeling that we are not being heard. That the decisions shaping our lives are made in rooms we will never enter by people we will never meet. That feeling is real and it is corrosive and it usually has nowhere to go. Look at our voting system, stupid wars, economic concentration, cowardly Congress, climate catastrophe, and overpriced World Cup tickets! For most of these systems, the people nominally “in charge” are not responding to the people. Congress should be held in contempt of The People. Essentially, the people’s rage has nowhere to go.
A data center gives it somewhere to go.
It shows up physically, in a zoning hearing, utility commission proceeding, a city council meeting. Suddenly the abstract feeling of powerlessness has a literal address and a public comment period. In the fascist-embracing USA, this is rare. This is why the energy is so intense. It is not really about the building. It is about whether this democracy can still deliver a yes or a no that means anything.
Deja made the point that in Tucson, Arizona, the city council passed regulations on data centers and the crowd showed up wanting more. They wanted a ban. She started as a grassroots organizer and she said watching a whole new generation discover the city council meeting is the exciting part. She’s right.
Twenty minutes from my house
I live in the Coachella Valley. About 20 minutes from me, residents spent months in triple-digit heat packing a city council chamber until the council reversed itself and terminated a development agreement for what would have been an enormous data center.
Their rallying cry was date farms, not data centers, and we wrote about it at length at Life With Machines.
They did it in 116 degree heat, showing up over and over, asking one question: who decides?
That’s the whole thing. It is the question underneath the data centers, the ballroom ruling, and every headline that tells you a technology did something to you. Technology does not decide. People decide. Executives, councils, commissions, eye-shadowy vice presidents, apartheid-loving executives, and most of the time they decide while we are not in the room.
The good news is that many rooms are actually open. Public utility commissions are among the most powerful and least watched bodies in American life. Most people do not know these bodies exist. The people who show up to them get to help decide what gets built, where the water goes, and who pays for it.
One more thing about the ballroom
Deja made the sharp point that the appeals court ruling was not about whether the ballroom is tacky. It was about whether the president has to work with Congress.
But what I latched onto was one small phrase in the ruling. The court said the president is a tenant, not the owner.
That cuts to something deep about a man whose fortune is substantially built on putting his name on buildings other people own. But it also cuts to something true about the rest of us, and about the country. None of us own this place. We are all holding it for a minute and handing it on. It’s our job to be good stewards while we’re here.
What to do
If you have been carrying that not-being-heard feeling around, here is somewhere to put it:
Find out whether a data center is proposed anywhere near you. The answer is yes more often than you would guess.
Find your public utility commission. Learn whether its members are elected or appointed, and by whom.
Show up to one meeting. Just one. Bring a friend and make it weird and social.
Here’s a video guide we put together:
And check out Data Center Watch
Thanks to Jacob and Deja for a good conversation, and to all the folks at Eastern Market for keeping it real.
