Here’s what I’d tell the industry: too bad, so sad, you spent the last decade burning the trust of your consumers. Facts don’t matter anymore.

Your customers used to be excited for technology. Getting a Facebook account was fun and exciting. Getting a smartphone was about solving cool problems and messing around with beer drinking apps. We all know how that turned out.

Now we are being sold AI as something that’s going to steal our jobs and the companies developing AI are marketing them by saying they’re going to literally destroy humanity. This is after the leaders of these companies already decided to make our existing SaaS landscape an enshittified surveillance economy.

Fuck off. I’m not going to allow an AI data center in my back yard. What do I get out of it? It won’t even be a net positive in tax revenue for my town because barely anyone works there and no commerce takes place locally.

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verdverm 37 minutes ago | parent [-]

> Facts don’t matter anymore.

That's the world Trump and friends want. Are you signing onto that?

> It won’t even be a net positive in tax revenue

Facts still matter, Virginia (the data center capital of the country) is raising revenues specifically from data centers

https://mgrid.org/2026/06/30/virginia-enacts-first-us-data-c...

We can and should tax data centers and more. Historically states have competed for industrial projects by giving tax breaks, but that does not have to be how it is.

	▲	Grombobulous 28 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		When Sam Altman opens his mouth and lies to our face to boost his company’s status do the facts matter? When the tech industry stands up and lies to our face about our privacy do the facts matter? Heck, Trump and friends are the ones trying to build the data centers, if we are to be blamed for stooping to their level. The idea that the individual citizen has to assume blame for erosion of facts-based society is somewhat insulting. I don’t own a cable news channel. I didn’t found Cambridge Analytica. I don’t own Meta or TikTok feeds. Don’t blame me as the individual for the lack of facts. It is the tech industry’s own system that has spread the misinformation about data centers. They’re just dogfooding their own ideal society and oopsed their way into feeling a negative result for themselves. They can turn off the algorithm right now and stop pushing engagement bait and put all our feeds back into chronological mode. If they did that a long time ago, I bet the outrage over AI data centers would be insignificant. How did that outrage spread in the first place? This isn’t about facts, this is about politics. Politics are “who is on my side, who is going to help me, who has wronged me,” etc. The resident of a town gets zero benefit out of a data center moving into town. Zero. Negative, even, because of the noise from gas turbine generators and increased electricity rates. Unlike a factory there’s no employment opportunity. There’s no local circulation of goods and currency. E.g., when Chicago was the candy capital of the country, it employed thousands of local factory workers, retail employees, and the local population got to eat candy! Same deal with the local Detroit automobile industry. In contrast, data centers have no almost no interaction with the local economy. They don’t rely on local suppliers, barely employ anyone, and don’t sell or buy local products and services in the area. Virginia as you pointed out now has to make a special tax just to make the data centers worth having. The implication is that property, payroll, income, and sales tax aren’t enough to make them a net positive for the state.