今天,我与 The Verge 的政策记者 Gaby Del Valle 对话,聊聊针对 AI 数据中心日益高涨的反对声浪。
Gaby 最近 报道了一篇精彩的报道,讲的是佛罗里达州 Hernando 县,上个月该县委员会一致通过了一项为期一年的数据中心建设禁令。她参加了当地由名为 Humans First 的组织发起的一场抗议活动,这是一个保守派草根运动,专注于抵制 AI 数据中心的建设。
你会听到 Gaby 解释说,这是一场规模更大、范围更广、且跨党派反对数据中心的行动的一部分。反对的不仅是作为实体建筑的数据中心,更是作为支撑 AI 热潮的基础设施——这场热潮夺走了当地的就业机会,并用垃圾内容填满了信息流。
数据中心建设已成为公众对 AI 情绪的一个投射对象:某种他们可以将恐惧与不满指向的实体存在——甚至能通过社区组织和抗议制造足够的压力将其叫停。
所以我想让 Gaby 带我了解这些抗议在实地是什么样子,尤其是那些党派归属通常将他们与大企业站在一起的选民。你会听到 Gaby 说,数据中心正在打乱党派界线,把铁杆特朗普选民变成抗议者,而他们关心的却是像地下水污染和永久性化学物质这类通常被贴上左翼标签的议题。
这是一个令人困惑的时期,数据中心将在未来的选举政治中扮演重要角色。所以我猜这不会是 Gaby 最后一次就 Humans First 这类运动发声。
好:Verge政策记者 Gaby Del Valle 谈两党对数据中心的反弹。我们开始吧。
Gaby Del Valle,你是 The Verge 的政策记者。欢迎回到 Decoder。[
谢谢。很高兴来到这里。
我很期待和你聊聊。你之前和我们的朋友 Alex Heath 一起上过节目,但这是我第一次在 Decoder 上和你对话。我觉得你刚写的那篇关于 佛罗里达州数据中心与保守派反弹 的报道,真实地预示了进入中期选举之际科技政策将会是什么样子。[
你刚去过那里。你和一群抗议数据中心的人聊过。就我们的政治而言,这确实是一场阵营重组。告诉我们你发现了什么。[
我发现的是,人们真的、真的、真的、真的非常愤怒。而他们愤怒的原因因社区而异,但说到底又都是一样的,如果这么说能讲得通的话。他们有着本地化的担忧。他们告诉我佛罗里达非常潮湿。在如此潮湿的地方建一个需要保持非常凉爽干燥的数据中心,根本说不通。他们中很多人担心地下水。他们担心 PFAS 被排入水中。
但我也和亚利桑那州的人聊过,他们有着相反的担忧。亚利桑那州不太潮湿。亚利桑那州非常干燥。而他们也在说:“在沙漠里建数据中心根本说不通。”所以无论你所在的社区是什么样,你都会说:“因为 X 原因,在这里建数据中心根本说不通”,基本上就是这样。
在阅读你的文章、并听你讲述你正在为后续文章所做的其他报道时,真正让我印象深刻的是,数据中心的建设和数据中心的抗议活动,并不能整齐地对应上我们长期以来所看到的那种惯常的左右派文化战争阵营划分。我很好奇你对此的看法。为什么埃隆·马斯克不能直接命令他那支追随者大军去支持数据中心呢?
这对我来说太有意思了。这里有一点背景故事,可以回答你的问题。组织“人类优先”(Humans First)的那位女性——这个组织原本是两党性的,现在则只专注于组织保守派——当年很早就是茶党运动的创始人或组织者之一。而在我看来,这有着相似的气质。这不是左右派的问题。这是民粹主义者与技术官僚之间的分歧。
你在左右两边都能看到这种现象。比如说,在去年的 Abundance Conference 上,立场从中右到中左都有。而且每个人都是支持核能、支持 AI 的。我们当时听到的是,“这些东西已经是大势所趋。我们必须想办法聪明地去做。”与此同时,轻描淡写地说,民粹左翼和民粹右翼都对技术发展持怀疑态度。
这种怀疑在多个维度上都有所体现。读你的报道时,我不禁被一件事触动:关于数据中心,竟然存在如此多不同版本的阴谋论思维。
我很好奇,是不是因为它们太显眼了。它们如此庞大,需要如此多的开发和如此大规模的建设,以至于你可以把任何担忧都附会到它们身上。“这件大事正在发生,而我感觉自己毫无掌控力。我还担心 5G、中国政府干预,以及 X、Y、Z。而我可以把这一切都指向这个非常庞大的东西,而且针对它还有一套说‘不’的程序。我可以去参加我所在镇的镇委会会议,然后直接说‘不’。”
我是说,我觉得这是其中一部分原因。有意思的是,我认为在用水问题上,存在一个从阴谋论思维到——我猜可以说是——被误导的思维的谱系。我们现在知道,它们的用水量并不像我们之前以为的那么多,等等等等。但在光谱的最极端,我交谈过的人中有一个人告诉我,数据中心附近出生的牛全都是死胎。我试图追查这件事。我当时想,“这是从哪儿来的?”结果是得克萨斯州的一个农场主声称他的养牛场里有一头死胎小牛。
于是这件事就通过互联网谣言和社交媒体的传播机器被放大出来了。我觉得这是其中一部分原因。还有一个社会崩塌的问题,只要你稍微和人们聊一聊就会浮现出来。我聊过的一位女性说:“我有这么一个朋友。ChatGPT 告诉她,她不能再和我做朋友了。”你还能听到各种各样这样的故事:人们伤害自己、擅自停药,或者诸如此类,因为他们一直在和聊天机器人对话,而事情出了岔子。
我觉得这给了人们一种掌控感。我可以去参加我的社区委员会会议或议员会议,然后说:“我不想要这栋安置那个正在撕裂我所在社区的可怕东西的大楼。”所以这不仅仅是那栋实际的建筑。我认为这是对生成式 AI、尤其是对 LLM 的更广泛反弹。
我最近一直在推的一个观点是,AI 产品并没有赢得市场的心。所以如果那些数据中心上面就写着 Netflix,也许人们会更喜欢它们。
但相反,那里正是那些垃圾内容的来源,也正是工作岗位将要消失的原因。那里也是 Mark Zuckerberg 只会变得更加富有的地方。是否存在这样一种动态——人们就是不喜欢数据中心所制造出来的那个东西?
是的,绝对如此。他们不喜欢数据中心带来的很多东西。这不仅仅是 AI。我认为 AI 是其中很大一部分,但这是我正在做的另一篇报道的一点预览……在图森,有一个数据中心项目正在建设中。我在那里交谈过的人说:“是的,这可能是 Amazon Web Services 的设施,而 Amazon 与 ICE 有合作。”所以这项技术正在助推大规模驱逐,不是直接的,而是通过构建监控所依赖的那些不起眼的基础设施。
这里面有两层。一部分是邻避心态,“字面意义上,我不想这东西出现在我家后院。我不想我的城镇被污染。我不想要这个。我不想要那个。我不想看到它。我不想要噪音污染。”然后另一部分是,“我不喜欢这座巨大建筑所代表的东西,以及它给社会带来的后果。”
这会跨越两党界限吗?还是说这更多是文化战争色彩的?
两者兼有。它跨越文化战争的界限,因为人们对大语言模型的作用有着不同的担忧。我交谈过的一位女性谈到了社会纽带的断裂。在建设方面,她说:“我们是一个偏乡村的社区。我们不想要这个庞然大物破坏我们美丽的起伏山丘。”所以那是右翼色彩的东西。还有很多反开发的情绪,既不属于右翼也不属于左翼。
在左翼这边,我会说也存在类似的文化战争担忧,但这是……我不知道这算不算必然是文化战争担忧,但就是助推驱逐出境。我认为双方都担心 AI 导致的失业。而且双方都已经意识到,这些设施其实并没有多少长期的就业前景。有大型建设热潮。有暖通空调方面的工作。但要真正维护这些设施,并不需要那么多人。
我认为人们已经意识到了这一点。关于 AI 数据岗位的承诺,或者说 AI 热潮会带来与数据中心相关的工作岗位,其实并不属实。
是的。最多也就是每个这类设施几百个岗位,至少就我们现在拥有的数据中心而言是这样。你觉得为什么有些抗议能上全国新闻?犹他州那个 Kevin O'Leary 的数据中心成了全国性新闻。也许只是因为他是个卡通式人物。
然后还有佐治亚州的一个新项目,那里可能会有一个大型 OpenAI 设施,似乎没有引起太多关注。还有你在报道的那些佛罗里达州的项目,但似乎不像其他一些项目那样具有爆炸性。
是的,我觉得这是个好问题。佛罗里达州有一处引发了爆炸性反响,那只是因为它在海湖庄园附近。我觉得那一处很明显能上全国新闻,因为它和总统有关。说实话,我认为很多时候决定一件事能否成为全国性新闻的关键因素,是事件中心是否有一个卡通角色。然后还有数字。犹他州那个,我一时想不起来它预计有多大,但据说规模极其庞大。于是它就成所有数据中心开发的代表。
它们正在各地被规划建设。而我觉得特别有意思的是,反对声浪也到处都是。比如我很大程度上依赖《坦帕湾时报》来梳理这篇报道的背景。他们对此跟进得很紧。他们会去参加这些会议,看着人们被质问、被追问,“你签了保密协议吗?签了还是没签?”
你觉得地方政府在积极回应吗?你现在已经去过其中一些抗议活动;你也和全国各县当地的人聊过。民主的基本单位本应是你的地方政府,因为你认识那些人,你可以在杂货店和镇委员会会议上冲他们喊话。
我们看到,在其中一些情况下,正在竖起一堵墙:地方政府说,“不行,我们必须推进这个开发项目。这是唯一可用的经济发展机会。”而民众则说,“不行,我们要把你们赶下台。”你认为地方政府总体上是在积极回应,还是完全没有回应?
我觉得这真的要看情况。在 Hernando 县,他们确实通过了暂停令。佛罗里达州有很多县都通过了暂停令。但在 Tucson,情况又不一样,市政府会回应民众的诉求,县政府却不会,两者彼此对立。网上有各种视频,人们再次冲着他们的代表大喊大叫,质问 NDA 的事。然后那些人就说:“我们不能透露自己是否签了 NDA。”这算是个回答吧,但也就那样。
我觉得这真的取决于很多因素。其中之一是社区有多小。另一个重要因素,我认为是当官的人有多担心自己会被选下去。在佛罗里达州,州长选举的共和党初选,我觉得可能会受到这个问题的影响。初选就在几周后,而目前的领跑者 Byron Donalds 从 AI 行业和数据中心开发团体那里拿了大量资金。人们很愤怒。人们真的非常愤怒。
他得到了 Trump 的背书,而我交谈过的每一个人,作为自豪的 Trump 选民,都说了类似这样的话:“我不明白 Trump 为什么要背书他。我不会投给他。”我聊过的一位女士告诉我,她反对 Democrat 说的一切,但她说如果 Donalds 赢得初选,她会投给 Democrat 或独立候选人。而且 Donalds 也变了……不是他在数据中心开发上的立场变了,而是面对这么多反弹,他谈论这件事的方式变了。
他是怎么改变立场的?他现在是怎么谈这件事的?
他说,他的愿景是让佛罗里达成为世界金融之都。对很多人来说,这听起来很棒,但这些人对此非常不满,既因为他们……我的意思是,这里面还有很多其他因素在起作用。佛罗里达的住房成本呈指数级上涨。不仅在迈阿密这样的大城市,比如在坦帕的郊区也是如此。房价已经飙升到——作为一个在那里长大的人——我根本无法理解的水平。我真的想不通。
所以我认为,对开发和数据中心的很多反对声音,也与人们生活成本的上涨有关,以及——用他们的话说——外来开发商涌入并改变一个本就在变化的社区。他后来表示,我们需要数据中心开发,但需要以负责任的方式进行。
佛罗里达州州长 Ron DeSantis 是另一个很好的例子。他支持了一项法案,要求数据中心自行承担水电费用,并允许各县要求它们使用再生水,这将解决水资源问题。但《坦帕湾时报》报道称,他还支持了给予数据中心大规模税收减免的立法。而且他推动修订了那项法律——我认为是 2017 年签署的——使其仅适用于超大规模数据中心,而恰恰是这类数据中心让人们有意见。
我交谈过的人都知道,佛罗里达州目前有一些数据中心,规模较小。那里没有超大规模数据中心,但大约有一百个为 Netflix 之类服务的小型数据中心。他们对此还能接受。我聊过的一位女士在 IT 行业工作。她说:“我明白数据中心是个吓人的东西,我们需要它们来做很多事情。但我不想要这个庞大的设施用掉我们所有的电力、发出这些频率,等等等等。”另一件我觉得非常有意思的事——
等等,你能解释一下“发出这些频率”是什么意思吗?
[笑]就是噪音。我在边境安全博览会上和这些人聊过,他们为一家数据中心公司工作,全都住在弗吉尼亚州。连他们都说:“是啊,这很糟糕。”他们说:“我讨厌在自家社区里走动,因为我一直听到那个声音。”而他们就是在数据中心工作的。我不认为她指的是 5G。
这是其中真实存在的一个因素,紧挨着“中国是反派”——无论你需要中国扮演哪种反派。再说一次,这整件事里有一部分就是:这是一件你可以阻止的大事。邻避主义的力量可以阻止它。也许我们阻止不了其他所有事情。我们阻止不了 Facebook 做那种感觉像在偷听你说话的定向广告。没人知道怎么阻止这件事。这很糟糕。我们不喜欢它,但没人知道怎么阻止它。
“我可以阻止这栋建筑被建起来”,这似乎不仅打乱了我们的文化战争阵线,也把政治搅得一团乱。Byron Donalds 说他希望佛罗里达成为世界金融之都。第一,这非常搞笑,因为他不得不面对纽约、伦敦、北京和阿姆斯特丹的存在。一个一个数下去吧。
有很多地方可以争夺这个头衔,而迈阿密可能根本不在竞争之列。但通过建数据中心来实现这一目标,并不是通往那个结果的道路。那只是一堆经济发展项目,可能带来一些短期收益。
感觉人们已经意识到了这一点,而且他们已经意识到这是你可以阻止的事情。我很好奇还有没有别的什么。你花了大量时间报道右翼,我想知道还有没有别的什么也能像这样打乱阵线。因为几乎在其他所有情况下,“咱们来盖东西吧,咱们把白宫拆了盖个宴会厅吧”都没问题。盖东西更好,而这在文化战争中被归到其中一方。
是的。我的意思是,这同样是非常佛罗里达特有的情况,但围绕这件事的政治竟然被打乱到这种程度,着实让我吃惊。其中一位女性谈到了这项即将通过的投票提案。它将为房主提供更多税收豁免,我觉得这是标准的共和党做法——为房主减税。人们会喜欢这个。
她说:“这太糟糕了。这会剥夺县政府原本可以从房主那里获得的资金,进而会进一步诱使各县把数据中心引入我们的社区。”所以她在考虑这件事的二阶和三阶效应,尽管那是一项相当民粹主义的倡议。但没错,这一切都太混乱了。
你如何看待右翼内部的这种混乱,以及它随后蔓延到民粹主义左翼?那种一群亿万富翁在2024年全力支持Donald Trump的想法,进而导致了,我也不知道,一群播客哥们儿在2024年全力支持Donald Trump。曾经有一股由Peter Thiel、Marc Andreessen、Elon Musk以及All-In播客所引领的关于建设、科技与未来的文化浪潮。感觉那股浪潮已经以某种方式走到了尽头。
我不认为那股浪潮如今还在驱动文化了,因为出现了对AI的反弹。我们都能看到大学生在毕业典礼上发出嘘声。如果这种反弹是针对数据中心、针对AI抢走工作、针对亿万富翁整体的,那它在右翼那边会演变成什么?因为那曾经长久以来是右翼的驱动力。
我认为这仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。我认为问题在于,这种反弹是否强大到足以动摇人们在其他党派议题上的关切。
如果你有一个民主党候选人,既反对数据中心开发,又不太热衷于授权所有佛罗里达州警察去执行 ICE 逮捕,那么一个支持特朗普移民政策、但不想让数据中心建在自己社区的人该何去何从?我不知道。我觉得这正是该党目前苦苦挣扎的问题。
我的意思是,我觉得特朗普对人们来说就是这样一个完美的化身,因为他不知怎么地既代表了反精英情绪,又代表了勤奋工作和资本主义。他就是这两者的完美融合,我甚至不知道该怎么形容。我想,他包罗万象。没有其他人能像他那样包罗万象。他们没有那种劲头。他们就是没有。
我能提出这个论点吗?
可以。
我想我可以提出这个论点。我在威斯康星州长大,那里可能和佛罗里达州有许多相似的动态,因为威斯康星州的人记得曾经有大工厂的时代。在我长大的城市拉辛,曾经有一家 Case 工厂生产拖拉机。基诺沙有一家克莱斯勒工厂生产 Jeep Wranglers。这些都是真实发生过的事情,而所有这些都已经消失了。
所以特朗普会承诺所有这些基本上看起来像制造业的巨大经济发展。我觉得他的版本,即便有关税,也是:“我们会把制造业带回所有这些地方。而那些制造业需要大量辛勤工作,但那份辛勤工作中会有尊严。”
到最后,你可以指着一台 Modine 空调说:“那东西是我造的。是我们社区造的。”我觉得这非常有诱惑力。我是说,特朗普多年来一直承诺我们要在美国造 iPhone,就是威斯康星州和富士康那一堆事。
也许这些东西从来都不可能成真,因为现在已经不是这样制造任何东西的了。而且这甚至也不再是美国人真正想做的那种工作了。但你把这些干劲全都拿来,然后说:“其实,我们要造的是数据中心。”而在这条路的尽头,没有人能看到“我造了一辆 Jeep Wrangler”。他们能看到的是 Elon Musk 变得更富了;而他们自己刚刚失去了工作,他们的孩子觉得自己没有未来,他们的信息流里满是垃圾内容。
而我觉得,在芸芸众生之中,有些东西被割裂了——你可以对所有人说:“是啊,我能为你做的最好的事,就是让你成为世界上最富有的工厂工头。”于是人们会说:“这听起来太棒了。这比我网上做的那些乱七八糟的事强多了。”但你不能说:“我要让 Sam Altman 变得更富有”,因为这对任何人来说都毫无意义。所有这些建设对任何人都没有任何好处。
我看看这些反弹的声音,我看到的只是,各个政治光谱上有很多人都已经意识到了这一点。你可以拆掉我们的社区去建桥梁和工厂,你可以让烟囱污染天空,只要大家都能有工作。但如果你做了这一切,而我得到的只是 Amazon Prime 上越来越多 AI 生成的电影海报,而且价格每个月都在涨,那就去你的吧。我在想这种联系是不是……这只是我的猜测。我在想,你在采访这些人的过程中,有没有在你的报道里看到这种联系的任何迹象。
我觉得是这样。我觉得佛罗里达版的造 Jeep Wrangler 就像是,以前有橙园和养牛场,现在都没有了。我小时候开车经过一片橙园。那片橙园已经没了。现在那里是一家 Publix。以前有一片老奶牛场。现在那里是一个商场。
一方面,那正是人们想要的。人们想要消费,但他们至少在佛罗里达,也喜欢觉得自己住在一片橙园附近。就像,“哦,也许那家伙用了成吨的农药。也许那片橙园对你的健康比数据中心还糟。”我不知道。我没有这方面的统计数据。但你能看到你的经济所生产的东西带来的实实在在的影响。
现在就像是,“有一栋我们谁都进不去的建筑。它发出可怕的噪音。而且我觉得它正在喝掉我所有的水?”然后它还在让你的孩子变笨、变得疏离,让所有人都丢掉工作。人们不喜欢这样。
再次强调,这些人不是卢德分子。我交谈过的那位女士说:“我是通过 Facebook 得知‘人类优先’的组织[行动]的。我知道这其中有讽刺意味。我知道我在 IT 行业工作却反对这个数据中心,这其中有讽刺意味。”他们不蠢。他们明白,我们赖以构建生活的所有这些东西都需要某种东西来为它们供电。他们只是不希望那个“某种东西”就在离家开车可达的范围内。他们希望它建在别的地方。
而除了太空之外,那个“别的地方”应该在哪里,目前尚不清楚。
除了太空。
那会是完全不同的一期Decoder。但这是业界给出的一个答案:“这些人,他们那些愚蠢的担忧太烦人了。我们干脆把数据中心放到太空去,”也许他们就能解决那个问题。谁知道呢?
另一个答案是:“我们就用蛮力碾压他们的担忧。这件事太重要了。我们无论如何都要做。也许我们就在某个社区资助一堆教育项目。也许我们就多付一笔钱。也许我们替所有人付电费。”
我不知道这些做法有没有获得任何支持。科技公司或新型云厂商能在这些社区做些什么来克服反对意见吗?他们能直接买单医疗保健吗?还是说这根本行不通?
我不太清楚为医疗保健付费的情况,但有一点我没有写进那篇文章,因为它极其枯燥、非常技术性,那就是那场小型抗议活动最后以一位土地使用专家大约一个半小时的演示收尾,讲的是如何撰写地方分区法规来阻止超大规模数据中心被建造。内容非常具体,比如“你可以要求它们分散在多个小块土地上。”真的很枯燥。“你可以要求它们使用这个量的再生水,等等等等。”
我认为,比起数据中心不存在,人们更想要的是对它们如何建造——如果它们注定要建的话——有一定程度的社区参与。我觉得如果他们得到了这个,他们也许不会被安抚,但至少不会觉得有一股巨大的外部力量闯进来、碾压他们的社区,尤其是在他们生活的其他方方面面已经都有这种感觉的时候。
这正是我最感兴趣的地方。我们的政治和文化中有太多东西已经被全国化了。一切都发生在国家层面。纽约市长是一个全国性政治人物这件事,既非常荒唐,同时也是很长一段时间以来发生的最好笑的事情。
数据中心是非常本地化的。它们就发生在人们的后院,而在佛罗里达、佐治亚或图森建造的数据中心,跟我这个在纽约的人毫无关系。距离足够远。
也许你从每个人那里听到的只是:“去别的地方吧,等我们到了别的地方,我就不在乎了。”但这件事其实非常本地化。而且非常需要面对面。人们去参加这些会议;他们彼此碰面。已经有故事说,原本永远不会喜欢彼此的人,因为都讨厌数据中心而跨越了党派界限。
对数据中心的反对,是否可能催化某种回归真正的地方政治和真正的社区建设?
我确实这么认为。再说一次,我正在与多个州的组织者交谈,他们去参加这些社区会议、镇议会或县议会会议,并对他们的代表大声抗议。有时是数百人。我觉得这可能是个奇怪的类比,但它让我想起对右翼组织和地方教育政策的本地反弹,很多反跨性别反弹就是从那里开始的。你会走进学校董事会,然后说:“我不想让我的孩子被教这些性别的东西。我不想让我的孩子知道奴隶制是坏的。”
我不是在价值判断上把他们相提并论。我只是觉得,这处于一种地方参与的程度,同时又是一个全国性问题。正是这些非常、非常、非常地方化的政策,最终可能推动——即使不是国家政策变革和国家政策讨论,至少也是国家政治氛围。无论谁赢得民主党和共和党初选并在2028年竞选总统,他们会怎么说数据中心?我不知道,但我知道这将会受到今年和明年所发生之事的影响。
我其实非常好奇特朗普会怎么处理这件事。正如你所说,他本身就是一个矛盾的综合体。他非常擅长读懂自己的基本盘。感觉特朗普的基本盘在数据中心问题上非常两极分化。有很多人热爱唐纳德·特朗普,但憎恨数据中心。然后还有他的金主,他们热爱 AI 建设,热爱数据中心。这是一道深得不能再深的裂痕。
这些人中的很多人会说:“AI 只是有营销问题。如果我们能让人们相信这轮建设以及即将到来的超级智能的好处,他们就会支持了。”
他们能拥有的最好的营销者就是唐纳德·特朗普。但他似乎不愿意在他们可能需要的层面上做出那些表态。而且他显然非常清楚自己的基本盘憎恨 AI。你觉得他会怎么打这张牌?你觉得 MAGA 联盟会如何回应?
好,那你记得特朗普谈论 H-1B 签证的时候吗?甚至不是他谈论它的时候,而是围绕我们打算怎么处理这些签证的整个风波?
记得。
特朗普说:“我认为我们应该给每一个外国学生的大学毕业文凭上都盖上一张 H-1B 签证。”我当时想:“你在说什么?你的政府对这些签证收 10 万美元。”他一直在说这样的话:“这些孩子非常聪明。我们需要他们留在美国造芯片。”
我觉得他就会那么干。特朗普的特点就是,他可以想说什么就说什么,想做什么就做什么,而喜欢他的人会继续喜欢他。有时候他们会说,“哦,好吧,我不喜欢他这个具体的政策。我不知道他为什么背书这个候选人,”但他们仍然会支持这家伙。
但足以在这个问题上弥合分歧吗?在其他每一个问题上,他都能让选民两极分化,而且他都能做到,但是,“我要在自家后院建一个数据中心,它会发出那种噪音。”也许还不够。
但问题是,他们并不认为这是来自特朗普的。他们想的是,“这些公司正在进入我们的社区。”如果你把这些点连起来,就会想,“谁支持这些公司?总统。谁给了总统大量资金?所有这些不同的公司。”
人们不是这么看的。他们把这些科技寡头看作是与政治脱节、与一切脱节的人,就因为他们有那么多钱。他们不认为这与总统有关联。相反,他们认为这与州长、与县委员会之类的有关联。但特朗普却超然于这一切之上。我不知道为什么。
好吧,我很好奇,也许我们应该在这里结束。佛罗里达州州长初选即将到来。如果 Donalds 输了,即使有特朗普在数据中心问题上的背书,你认为这会是一个信号,或者是对中期选举将会发生什么的预示吗?
我觉得这会是一个巨大的信号,哪怕只是因为 Donalds 的民调远远领先于其他所有人。他是明显的领跑者,而民调排名第二的副州长也支持数据中心。如果有任何反数据中心的候选人赢得共和党初选,那将是惊天动地的大事,而且是全州所有人都完全预料不到的。但这有可能发生。更疯狂的事都发生过。
未来几个月我们将对此进行大量报道,尤其是在中期选举之前,因为这种党派界限的重新洗牌、这种文化战争的重新洗牌,似乎非常重要。我们长期以来所拥有的政治格局,似乎已经无法承受所有人都憎恨同一件事的局面了。
也许这就是美国所需要的一切。看起来,每个美国人都憎恨这些发出巨大噪音的庞然大物,可能正是让我们团结起来的东西,这到底是好是坏,你可以自己做判断,但我想不出还有别的什么。没有任何其他事情能像这样跨越党派界限。你能想到吗?
真的没有。完全没有。而且我认为它跨越了党派界限,不仅仅是因为人们憎恨它,还因为有一些极度保守的女性跟我谈论当地的环境和生态问题。她们在谈论农药和水中的永久性化学物质,如果你看5到10年前的共和党政治,你不会想到我们会走到今天这一步。
我们在国家层面还在搞气候变化骗局那一套,而在基层我们已经在谈论农药了。这里面有文章。
Gaby,随着事态发展,我们肯定得再请你回来,尤其是在我们深入报道所有这些选举的时候。非常感谢你来到Decoder。
好的,谢谢邀请我来。这次挺有意思的。
Today, I’m talking with Gaby Del Valle, a policy reporter here at The Verge, about the growing backlash against AI data centers.
Gaby recently reported a fantastic piece about Hernando County, Florida, where last month the county commission unanimously approved a yearlong moratorium on data center construction. She attended a protest there organized by a group called Humans First, a conservative grassroots movement focused on combating AI data center build-outs.
You’ll hear Gaby explain that it was part of a bigger, broader, and bipartisan opposition to data centers. Not only as physical buildings, but as infrastructure that powers an AI boom that takes local jobs and fills feeds with slop.
Data center construction has become a proxy for the public’s feelings about AI: something physical they can aim their fear and frustration at — and even create enough pressure to stop through community organizing and protests.
So I wanted Gaby to talk me through what these protests look like on the ground, from voters whose party affiliations have typically aligned them with big business. You’ll hear Gaby say data centers are scrambling party lines, turning diehard Trump voters into protesters who care about left-coded issues like groundwater contamination and forever chemicals.
It’s a confusing time, and data centers are going to play a major role in electoral politics going forward. So I suspect this won’t be the last we hear from Gaby on movements like Humans First.
Okay: Verge policy reporter Gaby Del Valle on the bipartisan data center backlash. Here we go.
Gaby Del Valle, you’re a policy reporter here at The Verge. Welcome back to Decoder.
Thank you. Happy to be here.
I’m excited to talk to you. You were on previously with our friend Alex Heath, but this is the first time I’ve gotten to talk to you in Decoder. I think the story you just wrote about data centers and conservative backlash in Florida is just a real preview of what tech policy going into the midterm elections is going to be like.
You were just there. You talked to a bunch of people who are protesting data centers. It is a real alignment scramble in terms of our politics. Tell us what you found.
What I found was people are really, really, really, really mad. And the reasons why they’re mad are different depending on the community, but they’re also all the same, if that makes sense. They have localized concerns. They were telling me Florida’s really humid. It doesn’t make sense to build a data center that needs to be kept very cool and dry in such a humid place. A lot of them were concerned about their groundwater. They were concerned about PFAS getting dumped into the water.
But I’ve also talked to people in Arizona who have the opposite concern. Arizona is not very humid. Arizona’s very dry. And they’re also like, “It doesn’t make sense to build a data center in the desert.” So whatever your community is, you’re like, “It doesn’t make sense to build a data center here because of X reason,” basically.
The thing that really strikes me in reading your piece and hearing about the other reporting you’re doing for pieces to come is that data center build-outs and data center protests do not neatly map to the usual right-left culture war alignment that we have seen play out for so long. And I’m curious about your view on that. Why can’t Elon Musk just command his army of followers to be pro-data centers?
This is so interesting to me. So this is a little bit of backstory that’s going to answer your question. The woman who organized Humans First, which was bipartisan and now is focusing only on organizing conservatives, was an early founder or organizer with the Tea Party way back when. And this has a similar vibe to me. It’s not a left-right thing. It’s a populous technocrat divide.
You’re seeing that on the right and the left. So for example, at the Abundance Conference last year, it was center-right to center-left-ish. And everybody was pro-nuclear, pro-AI. And we were hearing that, “These things are here to stay. We have to figure out how to do it smartly.” At the same time, the populist left and the populist right are both skeptical of tech development, to put it lightly.
That skepticism plays out across a number of dimensions. I couldn’t help but be struck as I read your story by how many strains of conspiracy thinking there are about data centers.
I’m curious if they’re just visible. They’re so big, and they require so much development and so much build-out that you can just glue any concerns you have onto them. “This big thing is happening, and I don’t feel any control. And I’m also worried about 5G, Chinese government interference, and X, Y, Z. And I can just point it all at this very big thing by which there’s a process to say no. I can go to my local town board meeting and literally say no.”
I mean, I think that’s part of it. It’s interesting because I think there’s a spectrum of conspiratorial thinking to, I guess, misinformed thinking on the water use question. We now know that they don’t use as much water as we previously thought, et cetera, et cetera. But on the far end of the spectrum, one of the people I talked to told me that cattle born near data centers are all stillborn. I tried to track that down. I was like, “Where did this come from?” And it was one farmer in Texas who claims he had one stillborn calf on his cattle farm.
So that got spun out via the internet rumor, social media mill. I think that’s part of it. There’s this issue of social collapse that comes out once you talk to people a little bit. One of the women I talked to said, “I had this friend. ChatGPT told her she couldn’t be friends with me anymore.” You have all of these stories of people harming themselves, going off their medication, or whatever because they’ve been talking to a chatbot and it goes awry.
I think this gives people a feeling of control. Where I can go to my community board meeting or my council members’ meeting, and I can say, “I don’t want this big building that houses the scary thing that is fracturing my community here.” So it’s not just the actual building. I think it’s a broader backlash to generative AI and to LLMs specifically.
One of my ideas that I’ve been pushing on lately is that the AI products are not winning over hearts and minds in the market. So if the data centers just said Netflix on them, maybe people would like them more.
But instead, that’s where the slop is coming from, and it’s why the jobs are going to go away. It’s also where Mark Zuckerberg is just going to get even wealthier. Is there a dynamic of that — that people just don’t like the thing that the data centers make?
Yes, absolutely. They don’t like a lot of the things that the data centers make. It’s not just AI. I think AI is a big part of it, but this is a little preview of a different story I’m working on… In Tucson, there’s a data center project that’s getting built out. The people I talked to there said, “Yeah, this might be an Amazon Web Services facility, and Amazon works with ICE.” So this technology is fueling mass deportations through, not directly, but creating the non-sexy infrastructure that surveillance is built on.
There are two things to it. Part of it is a NIMBY, “I don’t want this thing in my backyard, literally. I don’t want my town to get polluted. I don’t want this. I don’t want that. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want the noise pollution.” And then the other part is, “I do not like what this big building represents and what it has wrought on society.”
Does that cut across bipartisan lines? Or is that more culture war coded?
It’s both. It cuts across culture war lines in that people have different concerns about what LLMs do. So one woman I spoke to was talking about the fracturing of social bonds. On the construction front, she was like, “We’re a rural-ish community. We don’t want this big blight on our nice rolling hills.” So that’s a right-coded thing. And there was a lot of anti-development stuff that is neither right nor left.
On the left, I would say there’s similar culture war concerns, but it’s… I don’t know if this is necessarily a culture war concern, but fueling deportations. Both sides, I think, are concerned about the job losses because of AI. And both sides have caught on to the fact that these facilities don’t really have a lot of long-term job prospects. There’s the big construction boom. There’s an HVAC situation. But to actually maintain these facilities, it doesn’t require that many people.
I think people have caught onto that. The promises of the AI data job, or that the AI boom will lead to jobs related to data centers, are not actually true.
Yeah. At most, it’s a few hundred jobs for each of these facilities, at least in the data centers we have now. Why do you think some of the protests make national news? The Kevin O’Leary data center in Utah is a national story. Maybe it’s just because he’s a cartoon character.
And then there’s a new project in Georgia where there might be a huge OpenAI facility that seems to go under the radar. There are all of the projects in Florida that you are reporting on, but don’t seem to be explosive in the way that some of the other ones are.
Yeah, I think that’s a good question. There was one in Florida that was explosive, and it was just because it was near Mar-a-Lago. I think that one pretty obviously made the national news because it’s related to the president. I honestly think a cartoon character at the center of it is the deciding factor a lot of the time on whether it’ll become a national story or not. And then also the numbers. The Utah one, I don’t remember off the top of my head how big it’s supposed to be, but it’s supposed to be huge. So then that becomes a proxy for all data center development.
They’re being planned everywhere. And I think what’s so interesting is that the backlash exists everywhere too. I relied a lot on, for example, the Tampa Bay Times to figure out the background for this story. They’re on top of it. They’re going to these meetings and watching people get yelled at and asked, “Did you sign an NDA? Yes or no?”
Do you think the local governments are being responsive? You’ve now gone to some of these protests; you’ve talked to people on the ground in various counties across the country. The basic unit of democracy is supposed to be your local government because you know those people and you can yell at them in the grocery store and the town board meeting.
We’re seeing there’s a wall going up in some of these cases where the local governments are saying, “No, we have to do this development. This is the only economic development available.” And the people are saying, “No, we’re going to throw you out.” Do you think local governments on the whole are being responsive or not responsive at all?
I think it really depends. In Hernando County, they did pass a moratorium. There are a lot of counties in Florida where moratoriums have passed. But in Tucson, again, the city government is responsive to what the people want and the county government isn’t, and they’re at odds with each other. There are all these videos of people yelling at their representatives about NDAs again. And then them being like, “We cannot say whether we signed an NDA,” which is an answer, but whatever.
I think it really depends on a lot of things. How small the communities are, for one. How vulnerable the people in office feel to getting voted out, I think, is another big one. In Florida, the Republican primary for governor, I think, might be affected by this issue. The primary is in a few weeks and the front-runner, Byron Donalds, has taken a lot of money from the AI industry and data center development groups. And people are mad. People are really mad.
He was endorsed by Trump, and everyone I spoke to, as proud Trump voters, said things like, “I don’t understand why Trump would endorse him. I’m not going to vote for him.” One woman I talked to who told me she was opposed to everything Democrat said she would vote for a Democrat or an independent if Donalds won the primary. And Donalds has also changed… not his stance on data center development, but the way that he talks about it in response to a lot of this backlash.
How has he changed the stance? How is he talking about it now?
He says his vision is to make Florida the financial capital of the world. And to a lot of people, that would sound great, but these people are really upset by this, both because they… I mean, there are a lot of other things at play here. Housing costs in Florida have gone up exponentially. Not only in big cities like Miami, but in the suburbs of Tampa, for example. Housing prices have shot up to levels that I, as somebody who grew up there, just don’t understand. I literally can’t wrap my head around it.
So I think a lot of the backlash to development and to data centers is also related to people’s cost of living going up and to these, in their words, outside developers coming in and changing a community that’s already changing. He has since said that we need data center development, but we need to do it responsibly.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is another great example of this. He supported a bill that would require data centers to pay their own utilities and also let counties require them to use reclaimed water, which would address the water issue. But the Tampa Bay Times reported that he also supported legislation that gives massive tax breaks to data centers. And that he pushed to amend that law, which I think was signed in 2017, to only apply to hyperscale data centers, which are the ones that people have problems with.
The people I talk to, they know that there are currently data centers in Florida, and they’re smaller. There are no hyperscale data centers, but there are around one hundred smaller ones for Netflix or whatever. And they’re okay with that. One woman I talked to works in IT. She said, “I understand that data centers are a boogeyman, and we need them for stuff. But I don’t want this massive facility using all of our power, emitting these frequencies, et cetera, et cetera.” Another thing that I think is really interesting-
Wait, can you just explain what “emitting these frequencies” means?
[Laughs] Just the noise. I talked to these guys at the Border Security Expo who work for a data center company, and they all live in Virginia. Even they were like, “Yeah, it sucks.” They said, “I hate walking around my neighborhood because I just hear it all the time.” And they work in data centers. I don’t think she meant 5G.
It’s a real element of this, right next to China being a villain of whatever persuasion you need China to be a villain for. Again, there’s just a piece of all this where it’s a big thing that you can stop. The power of NIMBYism can stop this. Maybe we can’t stop everything else. We can’t stop Facebook from doing targeted advertising that feels like it’s listening to you. No one knows how to stop this. It’s bad. We don’t like it, but no one knows how to stop it.
“I can stop this building from being built” seems like it not only scrambles our culture war lines, but it’s scrambling politics, too. Byron Donalds saying he wants Florida to be the financial capital of the world. One, it’s very funny in that he has to contend with the existence of New York, London, Beijing, and Amsterdam. Go down the line.
There are a lot of places that can compete for that title where Miami might not be in the running. But doing it via building data centers is not the path to that result. It’s just a bunch of economic development that might result in some short-term gains.
It feels like people have clocked it, and they’ve clocked that it’s a thing you can stop. I’m curious if there’s anything else. You’ve spent a lot of time covering the right, and I wonder if there’s anything else that scrambles the lines like that. Because in almost every other case, “let’s build stuff, let’s tear down the White House and build a ballroom” is fine. Building things is better, and it is coded in one side of the culture war.
Yeah. I mean, this is, again, so Florida specific, but it really surprised me how much of the politics around this were scrambled. One of the women was talking about this ballot initiative that’s going to pass. It’s going to give more tax exemptions to homeowners, which I feel is a standard Republican thing — lower taxes for homeowners. People would like that.
She said, “This is terrible. It’s going to deprive county governments of funds that they would otherwise get from homeowners, which will then entice the counties even further to have data centers come into our communities.” So she was thinking of the second- and third-order effects of this, even though that’s a pretty populist initiative. But yeah, it’s all so scrambled.
How do you see the scramble inside of the right and then carrying over to the populist left? The idea that a bunch of billionaires threw all of their weight behind Donald Trump in 2024, and that led to, I don’t know, a bunch of podcast bros throwing their weight behind Donald Trump in 2024. There was a cultural wave of Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, and the All-In podcast about building and tech and the future. It feels like that has come to one kind of end.
I don’t think that that wave is driving the culture anymore because of the backlash to AI. We can all see the college students booing at graduation. If the backlash is there against the data centers, against AI taking the jobs, against billionaires in general, what does that turn into on the right? Because that was the animating force of the right for so long.
I think that is still an open question. I think the question is whether this backlash is strong enough to shake people’s other partisan concerns.
If you’ve got a Democrat candidate who is anti-data center development, but also not super gung-ho about deputizing all Florida police officers to do ICE arrests, where does that leave someone who supports Trump’s immigration policies but doesn’t want a data center in their neighborhood? I don’t know. I think that’s what the party is struggling with right now.
I mean, I think Trump is this perfect avatar for people because he somehow stands for anti-elite sentiment, but also for hard work and capitalism. He’s just this perfect blend of, I don’t even know how to describe it. He contains multitudes, I guess. And nobody else can contain multitudes like him. They don’t have the juice. They just don’t have it.
Can I make the argument?
Yeah.
I think I can make the argument. I grew up in Wisconsin, which has many similar dynamics to maybe Florida, in that people in Wisconsin remember a time when there were big factories. In the town I grew up in, Racine, there used to be a Case factory that made tractors. There was a Chrysler factory in Kenosha that made Jeep Wranglers. This is a real thing that occurred, and all those things are gone.
So Trump would promise all of this huge economic development that basically looked like manufacturing. I think what his version of this, even with tariffs, was, “We will bring manufacturing back to all of these places. And that manufacturing will require a lot of hard work, but there will be dignity in that hard work.”
At the end of it, you’re going to get to point to a Modine air conditioner and be like, “I made that thing. My community made that thing.” I think that is very seductive. I mean, Trump spent years promising that we would build iPhones in America, and that’s Wisconsin and Foxconn and all this stuff.
Maybe none of those things were ever going to come true because that’s not how anything gets made anymore. And that’s not even the kind of work people actually want to do in America anymore. But you take all of that energy, and you’re like, “Actually, what we’re going to make is data centers.” And no one can see at the end of that, “I made a Jeep Wrangler.” They get to see that Elon Musk got richer; they just lost their jobs, their children feel like they have no future, and their feeds are full of slop.
And I feel like something gets disconnected in the multitudes where you can tell everyone, “Yeah, the best I can do for you is make you the world’s richest factory foreman.” So people are like, “That sounds awesome. That’s better than whatever nonsense I’m doing online.” But you can’t be like, “I’m going to make Sam Altman richer,” because that doesn’t mean anything to anyone. All of this construction doesn’t do anything for anyone.
I look at the backlash, and all I see is that a lot of people across the political spectrum have come to that realization. You can tear down our communities to build bridges and factories, and you can pollute the skies with smokestacks as long as we all get jobs. But if you’re going to do all that and all I get is more AI-generated movie posters on Amazon Prime whose price keeps going up every month, screw you. And I’m wondering if that connection is… That’s my guess. I’m wondering if you see any hints of that connection in your reporting as you talk to all these people.
I think so. I think the Florida version of making a Jeep Wrangler is like, there were orange groves and cattle ranches, and now there are not. I used to drive past an orange grove when I was a kid. That orange grove is gone. It’s a Publix now. There was an old cow field. Now that’s a mall.
On the one hand, that’s what people want. People want consumption, but they also, at least in Florida, liked thinking that they lived near an orange grove. Like, “Oh, maybe the guy’s using tons of pesticides. Maybe the orange grove is worse for your health than the data center.” I don’t know. I don’t have the stats on this. But you could see the tangible effects of what your economy was producing.
Now it’s just like, “There’s a building that none of us can go in. It makes a horrible noise. And I think it’s drinking all my water?” And then it’s also making your kids dumb and alienated, and making everybody lose their jobs. People don’t like that.
Again, these aren’t Luddites. The woman I talked to said, “I found out about the Humans First organizing [efforts] via Facebook. I know there’s an irony in that. I know there’s an irony in me working in IT and opposing this data center.” They’re not dumb. They understand that all of these things that we’ve built our lives around require something to power them. They just don’t want that something to be within driving distance of their house. They want it somewhere else.
And it’s unclear where that somewhere else should be apart from space.
Apart from space.
That is a very different episode of Decoder. But that’s one answer the industry has: “These people, their stupid concerns are too annoying. We’ll just put the data centers in space,” and maybe they’ll solve that problem. Who knows?
The other answer is, “We’ll just horsepower over their concerns. This is too important. We’re going to do it anyway. And maybe we’ll just subsidize a bunch of education in some community. Maybe we’ll just pay a bunch of extra money. Maybe we’ll pay for everyone’s electricity.”
I don’t know if those have gotten any traction. Is there anything that the tech companies or the neoclouds could do in these communities to overcome the objections? Could they just pay for healthcare? Or is that just a non-starter?
I don’t know about paying for healthcare, but something that I didn’t include in the piece, because it was extremely dry and very technical, was that the small protest ended with about an hour and a half long presentation from a land use expert on how to write local zoning ordinances to prevent hyperscale data centers from being built. It was really specific stuff, like “You could have them on multiple small parcels of land.” It was really dry. “You could require them to use this amount of reclaimed water, et cetera, et cetera.”
I think what people want more than the data centers not being there is a degree of community input on how they’re built — if they’re going to be built. I think if they got that, they would maybe not be pacified, but they would at least not feel like there’s a big external force coming in and steamrolling their community, especially when they already feel like that in every other aspect of their life.
This is the thing that I’m most curious about. So much of our politics and our culture has been nationalized. Everything happens at the national level. The fact that the mayor of New York is a national political figure is at once very silly and also just the funniest thing that has happened in a long time.
Data centers are very local. They’re happening to people in their backyards, and a data center being built in Florida, Georgia, or Tucson has nothing to do with me in New York. It’s far away enough.
Maybe what you’re hearing from everybody is just, “Somewhere else, and as we get to somewhere else, I won’t care.” But it is very local. And then it is very in person. People are going to the meetings; they’re encountering one another. There have been stories of bridges across party lines from people who would never like each other normally because they both hate the data centers.
Is there an element of a return to actual local politics and actual community building here that could be catalyzed by opposition to data centers?
I really think so. Again, I’m talking to organizers in multiple states who are going to these community, town council, or county council meetings and yelling at their representatives. And sometimes it’s hundreds of people. I think this is maybe a weird analogy, but it reminds me of the local backlash to right-wing organizing and local education policy, which is where a lot of the anti-trans backlash started. You’d go into the school board, and you’d be like, “I don’t want this gender stuff being taught to my child. I don’t want my kids to know that slavery was bad.”
I’m not comparing them in terms of value judgment. I just think it’s at a level of local engagement that is at the same time a national issue. It’s these really, really, really localized policies that may end up driving, if not national policy change and national policy discussions, but at least national political vibes. Whoever wins the Democratic and Republican primaries and runs for president in 2028, what are they going to be saying about data centers? I don’t know, but I know it’s going to be informed by what happens this year and next year.
I’m actually very curious how Trump handles it. As you said, he contains multitudes. He’s very good at reading his own base. It feels like the Trump base is very much polarized around data centers. There are a lot of people who love Donald Trump but hate data centers. And then there’s his money, which loves the AI build-out and loves data centers. That is a fracture as deep as anything.
A lot of those folks will say, “AI just has a marketing problem. If only we could convince people of the benefits of this build-out and the super intelligence to come, they would be on board.”
The best marketer they could have for that would be Donald Trump. But he doesn’t seem to be willing to make those claims at the level that they might need. And certainly he is very attuned to his base hating AI. How do you think he’s going to play it? And how do you think the MAGA coalition will respond to it?
Okay, so do you remember when Trump was talking about H-1B visas? Or not even when he was talking about it, but just the whole swirl around what we’re going to do about these?
Yeah.
Trump said, “I think we should stamp an H-1B visa to every foreign student’s college graduation diploma.” And I thought, “What are you talking about? Your administration is charging $100,000 for these visas.” He kept saying things like, “These kids are really smart. We need them in America building chips.”
I think he’s just going to do it like that. The thing about Trump is that he can say literally whatever, and he can do literally whatever, and the people who like him will continue to like him. Sometimes they’ll be like, “Oh, well, I don’t like this particular policy of his. I don’t know why he endorsed this candidate,” but they’re still going to back the guy.
But enough to split the difference on this issue? In every other issue, he could polarize the electorate, and he would get there, but, “I’m going to put a data center in the backyard, and it’s going to make that noise.” Maybe not enough.
But the thing is that they don’t see it as coming from Trump. They’re thinking, “These companies are coming into our community.” And if you connect the dots, it’s like, “Who supports those companies? The president. Who is giving the president a lot of money? All these different companies.”
That’s not how people see it. They see it as these tech oligarchs who are just disconnected from politics and disconnected from anything because of all their money. They don’t see that as having a connection to the president. Instead, they see that as having a connection to the governor, to the board of commissioners, or whatever. But Trump is floating above it all. I don’t know why.
Well, I’m curious, and maybe we should end it here. The Florida gubernatorial primaries are coming up. If Donalds loses, even with that Trump endorsement over the data center issue, do you think that will be a signal or a predictor of what will happen in the midterms?
I think it would be a massive signal, if only because Donalds is polling so much further ahead than everybody else. He’s the clear frontrunner, and the lieutenant governor who’s polling second is also pro-data centers. If any of the anti-data center candidates win the Republican primary, that is going to be huge and completely unexpected by everybody in the state. But it could happen. Crazier things have happened.
We’re going to be doing a lot of coverage of this in the months to come, especially ahead of the midterms, because this scrambling of party lines, this scrambling of the culture war, seems very important. The politics we’ve had for so long, they don’t seem like they can hold up to everyone hating the same thing.
Maybe that’s all America needs. It does seem like every American hating these big buildings that make loud noises might be the thing that unifies us, which is good or bad. You can make your own decisions, but I can’t think of anything else. There’s nothing else that’s cutting across party lines this way. Can you?
Literally nothing. Nothing at all. And it’s cutting across party lines, I think, not just in that people hate it, but I had these deeply conservative women talking to me about local environmental and ecological issues. They were talking about pesticides and forever chemicals in their water, which you wouldn’t expect looking at Republican politics five to 10 years ago, that this is where we have ended up.
We’re still doing climate change hoaxes at the national level, and on the ground we’re talking about pesticides. There’s something there.
Gaby, we’re going to have to have you back as the story develops and certainly as we go into all these elections. Thank you so much for being at Decoder.
Yeah, thanks for having me. This was fun.