Tech people are amazingly bad at marketing to The Community. And by “the community,” I mean normal people, not the “open source community.” Take the datacenter problem. Tech companies need more compute, so they need datacenters. They plop them down in some small town, avoid paying taxes, and consume huge amounts of electricity and water.
To the locals, these city slickers just take. They don’t give anything back.
It’s like whoever is making these decisions didn’t live through the Walmart-ization of Main Street. Or, on the left side of politics, 20 years of fighting over salamanders versus parking lots.
You have to give something back - something visible, tangible, and directly useful. Walmart drove down prices and massively increased availability. They sell groceries now, which is its own kind of social infrastructure.
My memories are foggy on this, but I don’t think we had that kind of availability in the 80s. You certainly couldn’t buy cold medicine for your kid at 3am on a Sunday night. And while walking to the register, you couldn’t contemplate whether your midnight snack should be shawarma frozen pizza or a mortadella sandwich. Those benefits became legible, and they still are.
Sure, people on the left still think Walmart is aesthetically bad. It never escaped the stigma of gutting mom-and-pop stores. But, conceptually no one cares: you can just launder those preferences through brands like Target and Costco, and then it’s as if the big box store panic never happened:
No matter who we are or where we’re from, at Costco, we’re more alike than we are different. There’s no such thing as the real America, but if there were, you’d find it here. And you’ll find me here, too, for I have become the Costco person I was always destined to be, preordained by geography and epigenetics, nature and nurture. // From “I Want to Live Like Costco People," by Jordan Michelman
The point is: those city slickers eventually became part of the community that once reviled them. The tradeoff became understandable.
With datacenters, there is no such legibility. When people hear that these companies are escaping taxes, it gets even worse. It looks like mom and pop are getting ripped off yet again. Same old city slickers.
Meanwhile, AI companies can’t help themselves when it comes to talking about ending civilization, replacing jobs, or building godlike systems. Then every week brings another story about how strange, contemptuous, or detached the executives are. These folks make Uber look like the Easter Bunny.
Why not do things like:
- Take some of that SoftBank and sovereign wealth fund money and just pay the full taxes. I mean, how much are we talking, $10 million, $5 million? Even at a $100m…is that going to shut down the AI industry?
- Build hospitals with names like “Regional Data Center Hospital.” In Austin, the name “Dell” is prefixed on all sorts of things that aren’t computers. I’m sure that helps. And, like, is real. (That said, Dell is located right over the border between Austin and Round Rock for, you know, lower taxes.)
- Provide cheap or free fiber internet to the surrounding communities. Everyone needs Internet.
- Give every resident ChatGPT for free.
You could call that bribery. Or you could call it becoming part of the community.
When I pick up litter from my neighbor’s yard, I’m not bribing them. I’m participating in shared life with them. And then the next time I need to borrow their pressure washer, it’ll be easier to get it from them.
Eventually, most people accepted Walmart because the benefits became obvious in everyday life. The benefits of AI infrastructure and datacenters remain entirely invisible. All people see are giant windowless buildings, noisy backup generators, and companies trying not to pay taxes.
What exactly did these city slickers think was going to happen?