There’s nothing like walking through the sylvan countryside, topping a scenic hill, and there, looming before you, is a giant AI data center. From John Peck at Common Dreams via childrenshealthdefense.org:
If taxpayers subsidize a massive data center, will the projected “market” for increasing algorithms actually come? Many within the AI industry don’t think so — and they’re suggesting we should have learned from the Enron scandal decades ago or the even worse sequel in the subprime mortgage-fueled financial meltdown.
One word — plastics. That was the golden grail that Dustin Hoffman learned about from some well-wishers in the movie “The Graduate.”
I remember watching the film as a farm kid and thinking about the updated version I was being told by my guidance counselors — one word: computers. We are now in the midst of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” and the latest mantra is: artificial intelligence (AI). Such free advice, though, could really be a costly warning in disguise.
Granted, there is a lot of poverty in the “richest” nation on Earth, and marginalized U.S. communities often have few choices for economic (mal) development. It becomes a twisted game of pick your own poison: supermax prison, toxic waste dump, ethanol facility, tar sands pipeline.
Now, AI data centers have been added to the limited menu. Someone recently shared a map of looming AI data centers across the world. It reminded me of how a tumor spreads and Edward Abbey’s quote that “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
The fact that Big Data has targeted Rural America for its latest mastitis should be no surprise. We have lots of available land to grab, thanks to the legacy of settler colonialism and family-farm foreclosure. Back in August 2025, I remember driving past Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, and watching bulldozers flattening over 800 acres along Highway 151 and my first hunch was: data center. Sure enough, the secretive $1 billion deal with Meta was finally revealed in a November 2025 press release.
Just north of Madison in the town of DeForest, Blackstone subsidiary QTS Realty Trust is aiming to build another $12 billion data center on close to 1,600 acres. And if we need to free up more land for AI, we quaint rural folks could just abandon growing real Christmas trees and force people to buy plastic ones instead, as one Fox News “expert” suggested over the holidays.
The fake fruity Thielverse won’t be cheap.
None of that out Harold the Brain’s way.
But there is a carbon capture pipeline and 15m konzentrationslager going in two counties away.
They fight that stripmall, subdivison sector, industrial park eyesore tooth and nail out there.