https://www.newsweek.com/cost-me-the-election-data-centers-trigger-voter-backlash-12118327
A wave of voter anger over massive data center projects is beginning to reshape U.S. politics, with local officials and senior lawmakers losing elections after backing controversial developments tied to the artificial intelligence boom.
In Utah on Wednesday, State Senate President J. Stuart Adams—one of the most powerful Republicans in the state—lost his primary election after supporting a major data center development near the Great Salt Lake, in one of the clearest signs yet of the growing political risks tied to the industry.
At the local level, the fallout was just as direct. "Do I think that the data center vote cost me the election? Yes I do," former Box Elder County Commissioner Lee Perry said after conceding his primary race, after voting to advance the same project.
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The Global Government Affairs team over at X dropped a bombshell Thursday night, revealing that the X Safety team had uncovered proof positive of a foreign influence campaign targeting the build out of AI and data centers in the United States:
It turns out that, after launching an investigation, the team uncovered a massive bot farm consisting of roughly 200,000 "suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts," including hundreds that appear to have been trying to manipulate debate in the U.S. over artificial intelligence, data centers, and the associated energy costs.
This development comes after President Trump warned last month that "other nations are trying to get us to slow down" and are spending money on "propaganda" to convince Americans that data centers aren't a positive thing.
According to X, about 200 accounts within the bot farm network were posting claims that data centers drive up household electricity prices and put excessive strain on the power grid. Some of the accounts, ironically, posted AI-generated cartoons depicting data center operators getting rich while ordinary American citizens were stuck paying the bill.
[...] The insidious thing about this kind of foreign influence operation is that it preys on the concerns that many Americans already have about the data centers popping up in their communities – debates about things like electric bills and the robustness of the power grid are already happening here. All a foreign adversary like China has to do is amplify those fears and sow distrust to make it harder for the U.S. to keep building out its AI infrastructure.
Related:
- Protesters Haul A Guillotine To City Council Meeting About A Potential AI Data Center
- Texas Halts Data Center Connections to Power Grid Amid Overwhelming Demand
- The Fight Against AI Data Centers is Important – but It's Just a Starting Point
- 'Cost Me the Election': Data Centers Trigger Voter Backlash
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Snotnose on Sunday June 28, @01:05PM (13 children)
You pissed off your constituency, figured your backers would give you enough money to overcome that but all it did was fuel the flames.
About time.
Being the dumbest idiot in the land and president of the US should be 2 different people.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 28, @01:37PM (8 children)
Most of the arguments against data center is pure propaganda backed by the very powerful Chinese propaganda engine in order to favorize China's dominance in the data center space. Out in China, nobody is allowed to bitch against what the government decides so China takes advantage of free speech to destabilize America.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 28, @01:54PM (5 children)
(Score: 5, Touché) by epitaxial on Sunday June 28, @04:12PM (4 children)
Fox News.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 28, @04:30PM (3 children)
And that's why the President must be allowed to hold designated antifa terrorists indefinitely.
(Score: 4, Informative) by epitaxial on Sunday June 28, @04:51PM (2 children)
Trump appointed head of the FBI says antifa is an ideology and not an organization. https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-ap-top-news-elections-james-comey-politics-bdd3b6078e9efadcfcd0be4b65f2362e [apnews.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday June 29, @02:26AM
Article dated September 17, 2020, and has not aged well.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 29, @04:13AM
Antifa is not even that, except in the loosest sense. Antifa is simply a label used to denote those who are against fascism. So that could mean anyone from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Joseph Stalin, from hard greens to Catholic Liberation Theologians to unreformed Tankies to hedonistic leftists to democratic socialists, all of whom consider the others buzzkills. They might march together in a common protest action but there will be hardly anything they agree upon other than the rise of fascism must be stopped.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 28, @02:11PM
Russian psyops is also very active in Europe.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday June 29, @02:31AM
I have heard the same, and it's probably true, BUT ... just because the Chinese would love to make us put the brakes to any tech they can't catch up with doesn't necessarily mean that datacenters in our front yards is a great idea, or that there aren't piles of drawbacks in the way it's being implemented.
Put 'em on the sites of old steel mills, already well-supplied with infrastructure, and can't be uglier or noisier. Don't put 'em near residential, or in areas that are already water-starved, and make them bring their own power so they don't impact everyone else. Were all that the case, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by looorg on Sunday June 28, @02:30PM (3 children)
Indeed. This can't really be a complete surprise. If it was then you are to gullible and/or stupid to be in politics. He chose his corporate overlords filling his coffers instead of listening to the people that can actually vote and decide if should have a job or not.
(Score: 4, Touché) by OrugTor on Sunday June 28, @03:08PM (1 child)
In his defense, coffers usually win.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Unixnut on Sunday June 28, @04:11PM
For once I am happy to see it didn't, long may it not only continue, but spread far and wide.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by krishnoid on Sunday June 28, @04:37PM
"Do I think that the data center vote cost me the election? Yes I do,"
"Do I think that supporting a large, ugly, loud, permanent, exceedingly visible, residential-resource-diverting, invisible-public-utility (not like Amazon) is the kind of political position that repulses people enough to redirect their voting patterns? Well, when you put it that way, I do now"
i mean, if they instead made it at least one of:
the electorate might have swallowed it. But ... seriously?
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday June 28, @01:06PM (28 children)
Good that you learned, but did they pay you enough to back it that it was worth it? THAT should be the question.
Money should be taken out of politics... Yeah... yeah....
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 28, @02:45PM (27 children)
I think we should pour more money in. That way we know not to vote for anybody who takes it. We will have a quantifiable measure of character.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Fnord666 on Sunday June 28, @03:31PM (3 children)
That is predicated on transparency as to who is receiving what money and from whom. I can guarantee you that politicians will not want any part of that idea.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30, @03:49AM (2 children)
The US voters can already find out roughly who has been taking money.
https://www.opensecrets.org/ [opensecrets.org]
https://www.trackaipac.com/ [trackaipac.com]
Billions have been spent in US politics over the years. Seems like there's a stronger correlation between money spent and success in elections.
Based on voting track record do the MAGAtards or Democraps truly care about character or mental competence in who they vote for?
And does it effectively matter when the Two Parties keep striving hard to give the voters Shit and Shittier? Out of 300 million people are Biden and Trump the best you can do? Even some countries with 3 million people have candidates who aren't as corrupt and mentally incompetent.
The real problem with US politics is that voters are being forced to try to vote for Lesser Evil.
Don't forget that you still get Evil even if you successfully get Lesser Evil.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30, @03:45PM (1 child)
The voters aren't being forced into anything. They just use peer pressure, under a different name, as an excuse. We have primary elections where we can knock the corrupt incumbents off the ballot entirely, but we don't. That's nobody's fault but our own. It's more primal than political.
Anyway, it's nice to see an exception to the rule with these data center whores being kicked out. Let's hope it spreads to other areas.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07, @03:54AM
OK shepherded then.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 28, @04:33PM
This is how we end upp with only millionaires in congress and only billionaires in the executive branch. The poor judiciary is still making do with cast off motorcoaches lol suckers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by crb3 on Sunday June 28, @05:01PM (21 children)
> I think we should pour more money in. That way we know not to vote for anybody who takes it. We will have a quantifiable measure of character.
Nahh, all we get with that is both sides lining up at the dark-money trough come feeding time, because nobody else can afford to campaign.
What we actually need is for every state to implement what Hawaii has, a common-sense restrictive redefinition of what a corporation is allowed to be and do, specifically written to forbid corporations to spend money on politics or political candidates. Effectively, it takes back those parts of citizenship which by-definition-sociopathic corporations are incompetent to handle. It's Citizens UnTied, and it can't come too soon.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Sunday June 28, @06:27PM (19 children)
That law is bare a month [prospect.org] old. Let's see how it fares after contact with the federal courts. I see warning signs [americanprogress.org] already:
In other words, they think they have an end run around constitutional protections such as freedom of speech by redefining corporations so they don't have these rights.
In other words, this will fail on the grounds of the Citizens United case: the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The state of Hawaii does have powers not available at the federal level. But it doesn't have the power to violate the US Constitution. Here, the catch is that one can't take away rights of people just because they are acting on behalf of a corporation. If a natural person has the right to spend in politics (pretty much guaranteed by the First Amendment BTW), then so do natural people acting on behalf of corporations.
Welp, it'll go through the courts and the lawmakers will have another opportunity to tilt at this windmill rather than solve (or is it create?) problems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 28, @07:47PM (17 children)
In a truly rational and lawful society, we would interpret "equal protection under law" to mean that the wealthy and large corporations don't get to buy their way to more access, and thus more protection, under law. Unfortunately, that is not the society we have now.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 28, @07:52PM (16 children)
That would be wrong. Rewrite the Constitution if you want that change. Not "interpret".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 28, @09:04PM (3 children)
Wrong, you say? The alternative is that some people are more equal than others, and that wealth buys you more equality. That appears to be your interpretation of the Constitution.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Sunday June 28, @09:40PM (2 children)
Like it did with the "voter backlash" above? Wealthy can spend more, but they don't get a bigger vote. Finally, I think it's a bit perverse to complain about "more equality" while simultaneous propose less equality for businesses. Not to mention the disinterest in following sound constitutional law.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 28, @10:01PM (1 child)
This happened because the wealthy and the corporations bought their access and used that access to get lawmakers to support the data center they wanted to build. In this case, enough people got pissed off about how the wealthy and the corporations used their ability to be more equal than others, and took action.
Too often, it doesn't work out that way. I'm sure people like Ansley Brown [x.com] would find your words comforting when Georgia Power wants to use eminent domain to take her mother's home to build infrastructure for a data center in Coweta County [11alive.com]. I suppose she should be glad that the developers of the data center in Fayette County can buy all the access they want to get their project approved and take whatever private property they want to get their data center. We sure wouldn't want to inconvenience the poor, mistreated wealthy people and large corporations to respect everyone else's rights.
You're on the wrong side of this issue. It's too bad you can't see it. The wealthy and large corporations really are more equal than everyone else.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 28, @10:48PM
Exactly.
We'll see what happens with that case.
(Score: 5, Informative) by number11 on Sunday June 28, @09:08PM (11 children)
The Constitution does not say a corporation is a person, or has a person's rights. I have nothing against giving a corporation the same rights as a natural person, so long as the same obligations also apply. Contribution limits. Jail time in the case of criminal conduct (it might have to be "house arrest", padlock their premises and freeze their bank accounts for the duration), with no more "force majeure" protection more than a natural person has. Same tax rates as individuals. And if there's a military draft, the same chance as a natural person to be forced to serve the government for a single recruit's wages.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 28, @10:54PM (10 children)
The Constitution doesn't have to. I was very careful in how I expressed the facts:
The rights of natural people are being taken away, thus the constitutional quandary. The rights of corporate personhood are a mechanism for honoring those natural person rights. It could be done in a different way, but you'd still finish at the same end point.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aafcac on Monday June 29, @04:18AM (9 children)
There's no inherent reason for spending money to be considered speech. That's just something that SCOTUS invented in order to justify allowing the wealthy to have an undue influence over elections. Speech is speech, printing things, putting things over the airwaves, on tv or on the internet. There's really no valid reason why we are tied to the idea of allowing people with great sums of money to engage in so much "free speech" that now people think that the government is the problem and not also think that corporations and the Epstein class are.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 30, @11:18AM (1 child)
And "printing things, putting things over the airwaves, on tv or on the internet" is free, right? Free speech isn't free as in beer. That's how money gets into the equation. And if you heavily regulate such speech, then the people in control of paid speech that can't be regulated (say troll farms in foreign countries), have an advantage.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Tuesday June 30, @04:42PM
Essentially yes, there was public access TV as an option for people that didn't own a media out let, I remember there were some pretty low budget people on there, and the cost to put stuff up on the internet is trivially cheap This is my second posting here this morning and I'm out like a couple cents worth of electricity. Even the poorest people these days have the ability to post things on the internet using a smartphone, so to suggest that there is any sort of significant barrier to getting messages out based on money right here is questionable at best.
Sure, there was a period where the printing press, TV, movies and radio weren't super accessible, but that's like 30 years ago at this point and all of those types of media are dying as they can't compete with the internet.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 30, @11:42AM (6 children)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30, @03:39PM (1 child)
A corporation is comprised of a group of people. But that group is not a separate person. The group may have some of the powers and responsibilities of an individual, biological person, but that does not make it a person.
Can corporations marry each other? Does a corporation have a biological sex at its birth? Does a corporation have a right to vote in elections? Can a corporation hold public office?
If you can't answer yes to all of those questions and provide cogent explanations for why you're saying yes, then it's a sign that corporations aren't people. If you're insisting that corporations are people but can't marry other corporations or hold public office, then you're denying rights to "corporate personhood people" that you provide to real people.
So are you going to continue to gaslight everyone that "corporate personhood people" are actual people?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 30, @06:14PM
My point was that rights are being taken from real people not legal constructs.
Are you going to read?
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Tuesday June 30, @04:37PM (3 children)
They already had, there were campaign donation limits that had been in place prior to those rulings. And, it's not like SCOTUS hasn't been going well out of it's way to invent reasons why you can't regulate that stuff.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 30, @06:16PM (2 children)
And those unconstitutional limits were gone afterward. Funny how that works!
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday July 01, @03:21AM (1 child)
They're not a unconstitutional, SCOTUS ruled them to be, which is kind of funny as the court gave itself the right to declare things to be unconstitutional, not the constitution itself.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 01, @05:17AM
Already explained why.
Who should be doing it instead? Trump perhaps? It's one of those implied powers you hear about.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Reziac on Monday June 29, @02:35AM
Center for American Progress is a hard-left think tank. They sure as hell didn't recommend any laws that might advantage anyone else.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 28, @07:58PM
As I said, it's up to the voters to stop electing those that take the money, knocking "both sides" right out of the race.
The far better solution is to kill the 501(c)(3) that makes all those billions in funding tax free. That's where to put our votes to good use.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Monday June 29, @07:19PM
Follow the money. The article is propaganda because it carefully censors the money. About 4/5 of the states offer tax incentives for data centers, so its essentially a transfer of money from the states taxpayers to trillion dollar AI companies. Sort of an inverse Robin Hood thing. No one can explain why the wealthiest corporations on the planet "need" taxpayer handouts. Its kind of like how Walmart doesn't have to pay it employees enough to survive because they sign up their employees for food stamps and welfare programs in general. Slaves must be made to work! Although at least planation owners paid for their properties meals, walmart doesn't even do that. So yeah, thats one reason DCs are unpopular. The utah example is some weird 100%/80% property tax abatement. The taxpayers of Utah should have to pay for trillion dollar companies to build a shack in their city because if they don't ... they'll just have lower taxes and we can't have that?
The next reason is the country is still covered with failed mcmansion subdivisions and such. This will be the next wave of failed real estate. There's a lot of semi-accounting fraud going on about 40 year depreciation cycles and similar nonsense... all those buildings are going to be empty in a decade. The locals can get stuck with the bill to police and demolish the abandoned properties. This is a pretty big issue; my SiL moved out of a semi-rural town that was getting a data center that would bankrupt the town WHEN the town has to demolish it. It would have been by far the largest building in town, huge surface area, no jobs for the locals, of course. Just a giant white elephant they'll have to pay to get rid of in 10 years when the bubble pops and the town is literally too small to afford it. She moved down the road to a town without a data center hanging around it's neck. Its too bad, it was a nice little small town and then the bankrupt AI company destroys the town, it'll be a huge, pointless loss. Someone's going to have to pay for all the power lines and fiber lines to that town and its not going to be the trillion dollar bubble company that no longer exists LOL. Even better, imminent domain the previously working businesses so they won't even have that after the bubble pops.
So you can tell its propaganda because it discusses free floating anger caused by no reason at all probably just ignorance who knows why they're angry. But talk to the people affected and its the usual "follow the $$$$$$" and angry about bribes, and that story is being intentionally censored in "journalism" discussions.
Really, it's just a corruption thing. Fill up the local council members re-election funds to F-over their constituents by approving a project that is wildly inappropriate and often fraudulent (donate to my re-election campaign and I'll set your property tax rate to 0% totally unrelated separate activities and totally not a payoff corruption situation). How much money does it take for a politician to F over their constituents? Apparently not that much. Some take the money and run, move up in politics maybe. Some get swatted down when the angry voters react. The next batch will just take bribes from the same sources so they're not winning all THAT much. Whomever replaces this Adams guy from the story after the election this fall will just take the bribes next year.
The anger is only being taken out on the politicians. At some point, prosecutors may or may not go after the companies offering the bribes. Right, now they are not. But the wheels of justice grind slowly but very finely, who knows, maybe a decade after the bubble pops and all that land is ruined, the prosecutors will get around to filling the prisons with corporate criminals. Right now, they have free reign and only the politicians are feeling the heat.