American communities have reason to be up in arms over the observable threats posed by data-center construction and operation, just as 400-plus data-center developers have, correspondingly, reason to be secretive and duplicitous. The speculative rush to construct thousands of massive new computing hubs is not, after all, another "not in my back yard" vexation like prisons, comm towers, power plants, and industrial facilities, but an entirely new species of encroachment. Extortionate power and water-supply requirements, absurdly short-term component service life, and demonstrably harmful long-term operational byproducts should guarantee an end value verging on miraculous, if not at least economically proportionate – which is what sales reps, myopic opportunists, and inducement-corrupted public officials deceptively claim. In reality the opposite is true, and to the extent that communities succeed in nixing these projects they are preventing or forestalling big-picture disasters equal to or greater than coast-to-coast resource-gulping behemoths belching hundreds of thousands of pounds of carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, ammonia, VOCs, and particulates not per month, week, or day, but per hour.
Economically, the data-center-development craze is an irrational-exuberance-driven economic bubble that will make the dot-com crash look like a dress rehearsal and that will, almost certainly, "necessitate" government-decreed bailouts shouldered by victims, aka taxpayers. In concert with the arguably deliberate timing of unsupportable U.S. debt and an unwinnable unconstitutional "small potatoes" war responsible for a now-unavoidable global-energy catastrophe and depression-defining inflation, the coming data-center implosion is poised to handily and finally euthanize private-life-respecting value-backed currency in favor of a surveillable, life-controlling digital replacement. In short, of officially economically establishing a ruling class over a subject class.
Ethically, in concert with the inarguably deliberate availability of global-digital-prison components, data centers selected to "survive" the implosion will gratefully furnish data-dependent population-behavior-control services to their government benefactors. In short, of enabling the official political establishment of a ruling class over a subject class.
Regarding the proposed Grant County, New Mexico, center, a stark symbolism exists in the fact that the developer's claimed address is empty space in Manhattan's Tower 56. As if to further flaunt their contempt for truth and accountability, Site Layer 1's chart figures are a bit . . . off. The first three emissions categories of 74 pounds (each) per hour total 324 tons per year, not 225. The fourth totals 162, not nine. Five and six should be 666 and 959 respectively, not 184 and 241. Likewise for seven with eight being close enough to accommodate rounding. Category nine, ammonia, is curiously correct at 140. And 32 Wartsila 9.4 MW internal-combustion engines emit 295,004 pounds of greenhouse gasses per hour, not "n/a."
Which begs the question: Did Site Layer 1 arrive at these numbers using a Treasury Department calculator, or AI? Thankfully, this homeless LLC avows to operate not more than 24 hours per day, seven days per week, for a maximum of 52 weeks per year.
It is helpful to listen carefully to the pronouncements of politicians regarding their support or opposition of any life-changing "public" development, particularly when what they say resembles past behavior. In 1994, Vera Coking refused to yield to Donald Trump's collaboration with the state of New Jersey to forcibly take her home of 36 years to construct a casino-limousine parking lot. Trump hired crews to demolish the unfinished Penthouse Boardwalk Hotel and Casino surrounding Mrs. Coking's historic residence, removing her fire escape, breaking her windows, starting a fire on her roof, and nearly destroying the top floor of her residence by dropping concrete blocks into it. In 2004, after Mrs. Coking retired to San Francisco and the failed Trump Plaza was scheduled for demolition by new-owner Carl Icahn, Trump denigrated the resolute woman with words familiar to anyone not of use to him: "She's lost all value because she didn't play the game. She could have been living happily ever after in Palm Beach, Florida. It's very sad, and frankly very foolish."
This month, Trump issued an admonitory denigration to data-center-wary Americans:
"The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor. If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign. The good news is that there are plenty of other places that want them. If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame. China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement. Actually, they can't believe it's happening. President DJT."
For anyone who has come to realize that the time-proven actual meaning of TDS is not Trump Derangement Syndrome but Trump Delusion Syndrome, a verbal spanking from the Artist of the Con provides abundant incentive to unconditionally reject the data-center invasion.
Objective information on data-center development can be found at AIDataCenterMap.org.
Michael Russell
TheSecondDeclaration.com
