David Wallace-Wells:  The Politics of AI Are Shifting in Real Time

The Bulwark Daily - The Bulwark

In this episode of The Bulwark Daily, David Wallace-Wells discusses the rapidly shifting political landscape surrounding AI and data centers in

Key takeaways

• A majority of Americans (75%) oppose the construction of data centers in their communities, despite economic incentives like tax cuts and high-paying jobs.

Main topics

• Public opposition to data center construction
• Political realignment around tech infrastructure

Notable quotes

"75% of Americans oppose the construction of data centers in their communities. That is more than would oppose the construction of a nuclear power plant."

Conclusion

The episode concludes with a warning: while data centers symbolize technological progress, they've become

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:12) Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show. It's been a minute. Opinion writer for the New York Times and columnist for New York Times Magazine. He writes about science, climate change, technology, and the future of the planet. His book, The Uninhabitable Earth, is a real pick-me-up. It's David Wallace-Wells. What's up, man? Speaker 2 (0:28) I'm just great to be here. Speaker 1 (0:29) I'm grateful for you stepping away from Romeo and Juliet to hang out with me for a little bit. As my gift to you, you have such a broad remit. over there, as mentioned. I've read interesting newsletters about AI, ICE, climate, Fauci redux. I'm just going to let you pick what you want to talk about first. What are you the most animated about right now? I Speaker 2 (0:53) mean, at the moment, I think the politics of AI is the most exciting and dramatic political story of the summer. I mean, I would say there was polling that just came out today, I think, or yesterday from HeatMap showing that Now, 75 % of Americans oppose the construction of data centers in their communities. Something like 60 plus percent oppose them strongly. That is more than would oppose the construction of a nuclear power plant. And if you think back to what the opposition to nuclear power did to the build out of nuclear power decades ago, it looks like we're heading for an incredible collision course here because we're... building out data centers, trying to construct a massive compute empire at breakneck speed. And this opposition is rising, growing really, really quickly. And that's been happening for, you know, nine months, 12 months, depending on how you want to clock it. But the really significant thing that's happened over the last couple of weeks is that a lot of political leaders are aligning themselves with the opposition here. And Kathy Hochul in New York was the first one. But, you know, Greg Abbott in Texas, of all places, is now, you know, signed a kind of data center moratorium. We're seeing, you know, Josh Shapiro, who is basically campaigning for president as a like, I'm going to build stuff guy, get shit done is his motto. He's imposing a data center moratorium. And so you see across the political spectrum. politicians like, you know, getting a read of which way the wind is blowing and putting themselves in the camp of data center opposition. And this is, you know, completely, you know, novel as far as I'm concerned, you know, signing up with the populists against the sort of economic interests of states and communities. And I think the The sort of decision there, the sort of contrast there, the showcase there is really, really powerful when you dig into it. Just a few brief little case studies. In Loudoun County, Virginia, they're now making half of their tax revenue from data centers. They've cut property taxes by 30 % because of the revenue coming in from data centers. In Louisiana, where you are, Richland Parish, I think it's called, they've given elementary school teachers $50,000. bonuses. These are women and men who make less than $50,000 a year. All of them, they got bonuses because of the construction of a new meta data center there. And you see similar stories all around the country where you have this incredible flow of money coming into local communities when data centers are built there. And yet the local populations are unwilling to accept those projects. even with that money promised to them. And increasingly, you now see state and national leaders signing up not with the corporations who want to do that work, but with the people who are opposed to them. And this is, I think, just a really big deal, a really new pattern in American politics, and a sign of... where populism is in the summer of 2026 that we're now seeing people like Greg Abbott or Josh Shapiro on the protest side of the equation. Speaker 1 (4:10) Yeah, the Shapiro thing caught my eye too. He sent an executive order this week that he described as implementing the strictest standards in the nation on AI data centers, which is a little bit counter to his brand, right? And he's more of a technocrat. It's not as if, you know, you wouldn't want to have... reasonable restrictions on data centers if you're a Josh Shapiro, but to kind of try to position himself on the cutting edge of this, I think is noteworthy. I'm curious your thought, this is, I think, more of a social psychological question. I kind of want to separate out the particulars because I do think that the story with the data centers in these local communities is like, it's just different, different places, right? Like in some places, the local... City councils cut horrific deals and gave away these huge tax benefits to the richest people in the world. And you can understand why people are pissed. And in some communities, the pollution and noise issues are really bad. And you can understand why people are pissed. And then in other areas like Loudoun County, it is kind of like, why are people pissed here exactly? Everybody's making more money off of this. You Speaker 2 (5:10) would think that Speaker 1 (5:11) would be an absolute Speaker 2 (5:12) golden ticket appeal in American politics. You can pay less taxes. your local government will be much better funded. They'll be able to provide more social services. You would think that would be the kind of appeal that, you know, pitch men and politicians would dream of. And yet, no. Speaker 1 (5:27) And so that's my question is, okay, if you kind of set aside like the particulars of each case, what is driving the broad-based distrust and anger and backlash? Because to me, like it seems pretty obvious that it's... Again, setting aside the particular communities, if a data center isn't in your community or isn't affecting your life day to day, why are people so upset about it? And it feels like it's like a physical stand-in for fear about AI, being pitchforks about the richest people in the world getting richer and richer. Maybe something else. I don't know. Speaker 2 (6:08) I see it in roughly those terms, too. It's a sort of a catch-all objection. to people feeling out of control and powerless, feeling that their lives, their communities, their futures, their economic prospects are all being determined by other people, not by them. And they've been feeling this way for a while. They've expressed that frustration in a variety of ways. But the AI build out is a sort of useful opportunity to express all of those frustrations. And people bring different things to it. I mean, you mentioned a lot of the particular objections. There's also old school NIMBYism. There's old school environmentalism. There's new school environmentalism focused on the climate impacts. There are people who are worried about electricity prices. There are people who are worried about the fact that these data centers might shadow their whole small town and change the physical landscape of their environment. There are people who are worried about AI being used for surveillance. There are people who are worried about... unemployment, job loss, even existential risk. It's such a big, messy bucket. It's such a big, messy coalition that I think you're right. We shouldn't think about it piecemeal. When you think about it piecemeal, you almost get to a place where you say, well, there could be some bargains struck here. We should be able to persuade people. We should be able to make sure the sound isn't as loud. We can make sure that the electricity prices are actually going down rather than going up. There are a lot of things that can be sold to local populations. But when you have 75 % of the country saying that they are opposed to this, I mean, this is just an astronomical number. It is not the kind of number that we see in American politics about anything. Three quarters of the country opposed to data center build-out. I mean, three quarters of the country. Those numbers, they're just almost too big to imagine. A lot of people... associate it, they think in their minds, oh, this is NIMBYism or it's opposition to environmental, you know, opposition to renewables. People support the construction of renewable energy by 65 to 30. Right. People oppose the construction of data centers by 75 to 20. This is a supermajority coalition larger than anything we have seen in American politics in a generation. And I think some people, their opposition is thin. Some people, it is informed by misinformation, disinformation. I'm not guaranteeing that this resistance will succeed and stall the data center buildup. There are a lot of forces moving in the other direction. But it is striking. That number is so large. that you can lose quite a lot of people from that coalition and still have an incredible command of political power. And I think that's where we're heading because every time you see a new poll, the number in opposition goes up. It's not going down. Speaker 1 (8:59) This is what I think is about trust in the tech oligarchs and people who are optimistic about social media and now hate it and not wanting to get fooled again. And I got this when I was on my vacation. You're taking a break from your vacation now, which I'm so grateful for. I did not do that for anyone. So I'm honored. But I was with one of my friends. He was ranting about the data centers. And among his rants was the water complaint. And I'd just been doing a lot of reading on that. And I was like, I actually think your water complaints are a little overstated. There are other issues. I received this text from him that I think is very representative of the anti-data center feeling. Okay, I've done some additional reading and research, and I'm swayed by your opinion that the water issues are not the biggest problems. I'm still quite anti-data center, so I'm just much better informed in my opposition. I Speaker 2 (9:46) saw some polls that came out last week about how much people trust each of their... tech leaders and AI leaders. And it's like 70 % distrust all of these figures. Dario Amodi, who's on some level the most approachable, the least obviously sociopathic, he's still widely distrusted. You know, Elon, Sam Altman. Because Speaker 1 (10:08) he's not obviously sociopathic, that makes me distrust him. It's like all you other guys I could tell are evil. What's happening with this one? Speaker 2 (10:16) And I think it's tied up in this broader story, which is that, you know, The last 20 years of American life, people have had material gains. They've been sort of unequally distributed, but by many measures, Americans are doing better than they used to. And yet we've had this incredible growing unhappiness and distrust with our society. And that's especially true when you ask those questions about the Internet and social media, which seemed 10 or 15 years ago to be, generally speaking, forces for good, which most Americans appreciated, and now feel deeply corrosive. In fact, a lot of people suspect that they kind of ruined a generation and maybe ruining the entire human race. I'm not a doomer on those points. I think a lot of those arguments are overstated. But Americans feel in some deep way that their experience of the world is getting worse. That is in part because more and more control and power is being exhibited by a small number of people, many of them in Silicon Valley, and many of them centrally positioned now to be determining the shape of our collective future. And when people look at that possibility, they don't think, here are generals I want to follow into battle. Here are leaders who I want to emulate. They think these people's vision of the future is completely distasteful, in certain ways anti-human. It's certainly anti-worker. And we just want to reject that out of hand. And, you know, what's striking to me most about this phenomenon is that if you had spoken to me about this six or nine months ago, I would have outlined that story in almost exactly the same way. But I also would have said one of the deeply unhappy things. about this moment is that so many people feel out of control and powerless to do anything about it. And that even if there was this incredible upwelling of resistance, probably it would be accompanied by the sense of fatalism. Like, what are we going to do? People are so rich. They've already bought the land. They've already bought the politicians, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so it's really amazing to see a huge movement, something equivalent, I think, to Occupy or the Tea Party, springing up in a time of even more. fatalism and despair about our politics. It's a sign that people are maybe feeling frustrated, maybe feeling alienated, but responding to that, not by retreating into despair, but trying to fight back, perhaps in some irrational ways, perhaps in some ways that'll burn out relatively quickly. But as an expression of broad American distrust of the powers that be, I don't think that we've seen anything this strong and this wide. in many years. Speaker 1 (13:00) Yeah, Rich Lowry of the National Review, like a child, wrote about how his support for Trump 3 was because it was a big middle finger to all the liberal elites that he hates. That inner child that we all have, though, that we want to give a big middle finger to the people we hate. In that case, it was pretty silly, given that putting the stupidest, most bigoted American as the leader of the three-year-old was a result of that middle finger. But this feels like kind of that same emotion channeled towards the tech oligarchs. Like the data center thing is like... The nation's middle finger to all of you fuckers that have been totally unresponsive and uncaring. And the times that you do demonstrate that you maybe care about us, you come off as so anti-human and weird that we do not possibly trust you. Speaker 2 (13:44) I mean, I come back to the example I cited at the beginning. I mean, in Richland Parish, Louisiana, elementary school teachers who have annual salaries of like $30,000 to $40,000 got a $50,000 bonus. Speaker 2 (13:57) And still, that community is not happy. Speaker 1 (14:00) Yeah. People are like, you can't buy me off with your dirty fucking Silicon Valley evil supercomputer money. On the evil supercomputer front, another thing you wrote about this week was kind of the safety stuff that is also happening really fast, like right now, the summer, at the same time as the data center stuff. There's this hugging face situation where some of the open AI models broke out of the... prison that they were supposed to be in, kind of, and, you know, engaged in an attack on something. You can explain it. But the interesting, I think, meta, no pun intended, point that you were making talking about this was you saw this pattern in kind