What no one is saying about data centers and AI

There is something no one seems to be saying as data centers and AI consume our real lives, our digital lives, and our collective consciousness.

Yes it’s about water; yes it’s about energy consumption; yes it’s about life becoming increasingly unaffordable; yes it’s about the cacophonic hellscape surrounding one of these city-sized monstrosities; yes it’s about the waves and waves of layoffs we’re already seeing—not just to replace people with “agentic AI,” but to cash in human capital and exchange it for artificial capital—and yes it’s about the empowering of the AI-powered billionaires who are becoming more culturally and economically dominant than eccentric billionaires should ever become.

But that’s not all of it.

At the very core of this conversation is sacrifice.

And human beings have an innate understanding of sacrifice.

We give up freedoms for security. We give up land for lumber mills because we understand homes need to be built. We give up our tax dollars to have our food inspected and our water treated. We spend ungodly amounts of money on medication—some with horrific side effects—because we believe the primary benefit will be worth it.

We understand sacrifice because our lives are built on it.

And when it comes to the data centers and the AI they power, we are being asked to sacrifice every corner of our reality: our water, land, forests, energy, data, privacy, culture, economy, national security, and careers.

In exchange for what, exactly?

What’s the payoff for giving up everything we know, need, and love?

An ad in our social feed that uses AI-generated actors to sell us shit because they can’t sell enough of that shit to pay a real artist?

Slop pumped onto our screens, plagiarized, homogenized, and regurgitated by a computer into our eyeballs, to misinform our belief system?

To make books, movies, art, and culture obsolete?

We were promised universal basic income and cures for cancer, and we got d-list deep fakes and fake Amish farmers selling snake oil on Instagram.

The fact is, I wouldn’t pay a dollar for the shit they’re producing today. And right now, we’re in the freemium era of AI.

This is when Facebook was free. When Twitter was chronological. When Instagram was only photos. The freemium land-grab era of any new software is when it’s supposed to be at its best, because consumers aren’t paying for it. Instead, the value we receive is offset by the corporations and shareholders who are mortgaging their collective futures in exchange for an enormous windfall, should the new technology take hold and take off.

But people today have grown wiser; we know if we’re not paying for it, then we’re the product.

It’s our words, our music, our movies, photos, faces, location, emotions, and behaviors that they’re harvesting, all to produce shit we don’t even want when it’s free, let alone when they start slapping subscription fees on the firehose of slop, built with our resources, and filled with an abysmal amalgamation of our artistic creations.

And now it’s gotten to where the bet these insiders have placed on the growth of AI is too big to fail. Or at least that’s what they want us to believe.

Because I believe that if we’re the product, we should have a say in what happens next.

Even if what happens next is nothing at all, because we decide we choose our reality over their artificial fantasy.