While you are absolutely correct, all those other industries are well established, ai and datacentres are relatively new to the scene. It's much easier to stop something that just started, then stop something that is already established.

Additionally, protesting one doesn't make protesting the other impossible. Education is an effective tool to reach people. "Are you upset that datacentres waste x amount of water, well then oil and gas wastes 10x amount. Let's protest those as well."

You're looking for the populace as a whole to have some kind of sit-down, coordinated evaluation of what has maximal climate impact, but that's not how protest movements work.

Small groups can be tactical like that. Large protest movements have to seize on whatever momentum happens, when it happens.

If people were out there protesting golf courses, I'd be there too, and I'd be encouraging it, but I'm not going to waste my breath as someone with zero meaningful platform trying to foment a mass protest movement out of thin air.

And there's something more important to this movement than just directly addressing the environmental impact of datacenters, which is the anti-large-corporation sentiment it's feeding (both from, and into). That is very important for climate action. And I'm not sure if you've been going to any (climate) protests, but there are definitely signs at all of them protesting oil and gas companies.

The bigger thing is just the whole virtue signaling of everything and anything. I try to do my best about all of this too, but I don’t protest, I don’t brag to my friends. I just kind of try to do good things (to the best of my abilities), and otherwise just shut the fuck up about it.

The clothing industry is also orders of magnitude worse, and insanely wasteful. But no, it's only now people are suddenly up in arms about water consumption.

I'm not with you on energy use, though. It's already over 5% in the US, and we don't even know how bad it is in data-center-dense Texas (which means it's bad), in a state with an already notoriously unreliable energy grid. Still is the case sometimes that politics is local.

It is and it doesn't. The bit is Fry telling someone to stop selling him on something and giving them money blindly, which isn't what's happening in the article at all. Flipped, it's someone paying another to shut up, which fits perfectly and is something an editor should be able to figure out.

If I had fucking 280 billion and wanted to build the world's biggest data center right fucking now, you bet your ass I'd buy out the entire production chain of renewables infrastructure and get fucking even richer for the next 50 years as I use the stuff at the start to make the data center, then the rest to charge the local population for green energy, and to spend the rest of the supply chain after to sell more green energy production stuff.

Datacenters Behaving Like Acoustic Weapons - Benn Jordan

cooling that doesn’t waste water

That would increase their already insane power consumption

I refuse to buy anything from Amazon. Means at times I have to pay more, get something slightly different or not at all. IDGAF, it's the only way to have an impact on them

Amazon offers education to their employees as well, it isn't like they aren't investing in their people - they just do it in a soul sucking manner.

toxic sludge is good for you

This is perhaps obscure, but a reference to a famous PR book from the 1970s. Datacenter harm is mostly about electricity scarcity pricing for rest of US, noise and sometimes water use, and financial loss. There can be pollution/global warming associated concerns, but its not a major health care issue.

stop treating oligarchs like they don’t have something to gain by supporting each other.

This is indeed the core issue in America. Israel first rulership is part of the support circle, and much more so, since 2024.

That $1B budget is unlikely to be TV advertisements for datacenters. It's likely to be bribes that get all of the pre-election candidate opposition to projects go quiet after election.

Shit, you're right. Not even 0.1%.

The raw disrepect is palpable.