What I dislike is the lumping of all datacenters into one hated bucket. I suspect people don’t realize that, for example, the fediverse… exists in datacenters. Take away datacenters and the entire internet goes away.
I think what people don’t want is a bunch of shitty datacenters (meaning using shitty power sources, for example) that are being built for AI or massive government/private data over-reach.
You WANT some datacenters…
This is like being against… prepared food. Sure, cooking from scratch is better, but outlaw all prepared foods and now you will be exhausted cooking every single day. We depend on some prepared foods. What we want is less added sugar, more healthy prepared foods, safer food, at a lower cost. We want improvements, not a complete ban.
With how fast big tech moves to break things there‘s no time for nuance. I‘m not being sarcastic or anything. I‘m serious. We genuinely don‘t need all that computing power. It makes live only harder instead of improving it at this point because it‘s mostly used to replace us in the job market and spy on us in our free time. So yeah, fight every single data center. Fuck nuance.
I think the main reason is that people didn’t notice the old data centers. There is a data centre in my town about a two minute walk from where I live, I lived here for 3 years before noticing it. It’s just a non-descript massive gray building and somehow it’s kind of invisible. I could probably ask people who’ve lived here their entire lives if they knew about the data centre, and I suspect that most of them would swear up and down that there isn’t one. It doesn’t make noise, it doesn’t generate huge amounts of traffic, it doesn’t use that much water up if any, and it has its own electrical supply. I essentially live right on top of it, yet it has basically no effect on my life. According to Google Street view it was built some time between 2015 and 2017, so it’s not an AI data centre.
These new AI ones require orders of magnitude more power, and cooling. They have a much larger impact on the local environment.
This is like saying anyone against Big Oil doesn’t understand that cars need gasoline.
Data centers are unregulated, inefficient, ecologically destructive resource pits parasitical on local townships. They’re a blight that needs to be regulated or curtailed. Anyone who is not against them is simply insulated from the externalities of their cancerous existence.
Now Imagine a world where data centers had to use (and purify) wastewater and generate their own clean energy. Why, then I’d be all for them!
There is unfortunately a lot of propaganda on this subject, and it’s quite aggravating how much of the public has just bought into these ideas. A data center is no less “ecologically destructive” than any other large building project, like a meat processing plant or chemical plant, except they don’t even have to worry about food safety or chemical pollution. The only novel things about a data center are:
Servers need a lot of electricity
Servers need cooling
Data centers can generate noise pollution
Does that need some level of mitigation? Of course. But, the current attitude makes people believe that they are on the level of some nuclear waste processing facility.
purify wastewater and generate their own clean energy
These are jobs for other facilities. A data center, just like 99.999% of the other buildings, are just going to buy whatever electricity is already on the grid.
If you want clean energy, promote more alternatives on the grid. Electricity is only as clean as whatever your local power plant provides.
What I dislike is the lumping of all datacenters into one hated bucket. I suspect people don’t realize that, for example, the fediverse… exists in datacenters. Take away datacenters and the entire internet goes away.
I think what people don’t want is a bunch of shitty datacenters (meaning using shitty power sources, for example) that are being built for AI or massive government/private data over-reach.
You WANT some datacenters…
This is like being against… prepared food. Sure, cooking from scratch is better, but outlaw all prepared foods and now you will be exhausted cooking every single day. We depend on some prepared foods. What we want is less added sugar, more healthy prepared foods, safer food, at a lower cost. We want improvements, not a complete ban.
Same with datacenters.
There is also the difference that the fediverse runs on a few potato servers. You could barely fill a few racks with the servers that do the fediverse
This in contrast with AI that requires tonnes of datacenters all over the world
With how fast big tech moves to break things there‘s no time for nuance. I‘m not being sarcastic or anything. I‘m serious. We genuinely don‘t need all that computing power. It makes live only harder instead of improving it at this point because it‘s mostly used to replace us in the job market and spy on us in our free time. So yeah, fight every single data center. Fuck nuance.
I think the main reason is that people didn’t notice the old data centers. There is a data centre in my town about a two minute walk from where I live, I lived here for 3 years before noticing it. It’s just a non-descript massive gray building and somehow it’s kind of invisible. I could probably ask people who’ve lived here their entire lives if they knew about the data centre, and I suspect that most of them would swear up and down that there isn’t one. It doesn’t make noise, it doesn’t generate huge amounts of traffic, it doesn’t use that much water up if any, and it has its own electrical supply. I essentially live right on top of it, yet it has basically no effect on my life. According to Google Street view it was built some time between 2015 and 2017, so it’s not an AI data centre.
These new AI ones require orders of magnitude more power, and cooling. They have a much larger impact on the local environment.
The U.S. has over 3000 datacenters, which is 10x 2nd place (Germany). Most are very small nondescript buildings near the airport.
This is like saying anyone against Big Oil doesn’t understand that cars need gasoline.
Data centers are unregulated, inefficient, ecologically destructive resource pits parasitical on local townships. They’re a blight that needs to be regulated or curtailed. Anyone who is not against them is simply insulated from the externalities of their cancerous existence.
Now Imagine a world where data centers had to use (and purify) wastewater and generate their own clean energy. Why, then I’d be all for them!
There is unfortunately a lot of propaganda on this subject, and it’s quite aggravating how much of the public has just bought into these ideas. A data center is no less “ecologically destructive” than any other large building project, like a meat processing plant or chemical plant, except they don’t even have to worry about food safety or chemical pollution. The only novel things about a data center are:
Does that need some level of mitigation? Of course. But, the current attitude makes people believe that they are on the level of some nuclear waste processing facility.
These are jobs for other facilities. A data center, just like 99.999% of the other buildings, are just going to buy whatever electricity is already on the grid.
If you want clean energy, promote more alternatives on the grid. Electricity is only as clean as whatever your local power plant provides.