PLUS: Feats of 'Willpower.'
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One of the things I’ve always appreciated most about technology is that it resists attempts to politicize it. Nothing about your relationship to gadgets and gizmos has to tell us anything about your ideological commitments. In theory, technology stands for progress, change, but you can be a progress-minded liberal who hates technology, just as you can be a nostalgia-chasing conservative who loves it. These might be confused positions, philosophically speaking, but they’re perfectly ordinary in the modern world. Whatever overlap exists between tech and politics is, at the end of the day, pretty obscure, hard to delineate.
Then there’s data centers. Right now, there's no obscurity: Everyone seems to hate them—right, left, or center. But … what does that mean? And how did it happen? And does it confirm tech’s inherent apoliticism, or negate it, or something else? Beats me. For the past year-plus or so, I’ve watched in complete amazement as Americans, divided every which way to Sunday, find themselves on tectonically resurgent common ground. Or as my boss recently put it: You could power the entire country with the hatred of data centers.
Here to explain the phenomenon—finally!—is WIRED’s very own Molly Taft. Like an angel from heaven, they appeared before me just in time, with the piece I didn’t know I needed. Molly builds their argument around a person, the anti-AI commentator Joe Allen, who, though right-wing-ish, has fans of every political stripe (Molly themself, possibly, included). Joe is no average Joe. He has opinions, weird ones. They involve a sort of quasi-alien bio-paranoia, as well as repeated references to the Unabomber. But by the end of the piece, I was convinced by them—by Joe’s opinions, and by Molly’s careful, subtle explication of them. We don’t hate data centers because of what they do. We hate them because of what they represent. Think of the political possibilities in that.
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Story originally published in October 2012
There was a time when the data center wasn’t steeped in layers upon layers of ideological meaning. That was as far back as 2012, when Google’s giant server farms were simply feats of engineering, shrouded in competition-minded secrecy and powering the internet-according-to-Google. That year, Steven Levy was among the first outsiders to get a glimpse inside, and he wrote about the results of Google’s initiative to revolutionize data center construction, which it called “Willpower.” Even though the center Steven toured is now 14 years old and outmoded, his article—which highlights the innovations fueling unprecedented access to information—reminds us that before data centers became existential threats, they were democratizing forces. Read both Molly’s and Steven’s features and let me know: Is it just AI, or are we in an era of resistance to all technology? Comment below the article or send an email to samantha_spengler@wired.com.
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