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I remain deeply fascinated by this, because I guarantee that other issues have come up that have impacted him, personally, as much (if not more) than a data center. It's like someone turned on the subtitles for policy implications--but only for data centers. Just data centers. Nothing else.

As someone whose parents have fracking happening on 3 sides of their house that’s so remote it’s almost 40 minutes to the next gas station, I can say that having that kind of noise & light & air pollution 24/7 is viscerally upsetting in a way few other things I’ve experienced are.

yeah but like... people down here are mad BEFORE they have shown up. folks are losing their shit about the rumor of a potential data center down the road, and it's just... "this is happening to other people" is not usually a motivating realization for a lot of these people?

Yeah I figured people had driven past one and heard a fair share of horror stories, but that is maybe giving them too much credit. Could be the threat of the power bill going way up is enough, but maybe it’s more likely there’s some primal hatred this is triggering

Data centers have the sweet spot of issues for everyone in my mind. General ignorance of what they do so no real priors for most. Tech being coded liberal for many conservatives (especially with insanely off putting know it all doing a massive media push), local government input for types that 1/

love to yell at every meeting while also skipping that section whenever possible (so those state/federal types are forcing something on us!), and then steal my jobs as an advertising method to finish it off. Without the cultural backing to ignore outcomes like so many other issues and here we are.

People keep telling me "oh but they can see how this impacts them in their own backyard" and like I'm sorry but I live in rural Alabama, I can see how 8,000 GOP policy decisions impact all of us every day. But usually the white conservatives are selectively oblivious because (usually) racism.

I mean the answer really could be "the tech CEOs are just that off-putting" because they are even if you didn't spend the last week trying to dodge harry potter cult discourse like an Neo in the Matrix

I think the problem making white guys upset is that rich white men can't buy their way out of data centers moving in. The proposed centers are not being kept "over there" enough, partially because of the water consumption issue, but its not aesthetic or property-value-increasing like a golf course.

This is the part that really has me baffled. Just this specific part right here. lol bsky.app/profile/most...

Could it be that it is a big, physical, noisy thing? Like, you don't have to make any intellectual leap (low regs->polluted river). There is just a big hulking thing there. Like how they hate windmills

If I had to guess, and this is a guess, most other policies they put under general government stuff which they relate more to Dems, the whole playbook of Government doing things bad and all of that Data centre's bypass that I suspect because of how new they are and being connected to tech