Americans are no longer arguing only about power bills, land use, or AI. Increasingly, tech itself is being cast as evil — and that changes the fight.
As I — and numerous others — anticipated years ago, the populist backlash against the dystopian possibilities of super-duper artificial intelligence has begun in earnest, with the rise of data centers as the inciting event.
It is easy to see why. Beyond the standard human response to unasked-for change at scale — isn’t there someone (me!) you forgot to ask? — the populist spirit in America has always run bone-deep.
Americans do not like feeling mogged by their fellow citizens, and we like even less being lectured by the moggers about how we are unentitled to feel that way.
Alexis de Tocqueville understood the democratic dynamics of envy and resentment. Under conditions of social equality, everyone feels precariously interchangeable with everyone else, so another person’s relative advantage can register not merely as inequality but as a wound to pride.
Extend that dynamic to the “global town square,” where we spend more and more of our waking hours watching other people’s breakout advances in real time, and the sensation of being left behind goes nuclear.
