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Polls from Fox to Gallup keep rolling in and the results are clear: more than seventy percent of Americans oppose data centers. For good reason. As Assaro notes, opposition is even greater in neighborhoods like Warwood getting AI data centers.
Nearly every Wheeling City Councilor acknowledged the immediate reasons for opposition: significant local harms, with little to no local benefit. Massive energy, water, and noise problems, with fewer lasting jobs than a Sheetz.
With scale, those local harms balloon. An entire Wheeling-sized city usually uses closer to 10 MW of power than the 50-100 MWs Warwood's data center has publicized. Data Center proponents aim to triple West Virginia's energy production by 2050; five times in Texas!
But the reasons run deeper.
Mass Data Is Not Steel or Professional Services
Our economy should be based on value: manufacturing valuable goods and providing valuable services. The mass AI Data Center buildout checks neither box, and destroys the second.
We should spend hundreds of millions and employ this generation's construction trades building our vision for our future. But a job-destroying AI data center buildout is not that vision.
Are there good uses for big data and AI? Yes. But we do not need to quadruple fossil-fuel consumption or put a data center in every neighborhood to meet those needs. Not even close.
The mass AI Data Center buildout is running on AI slop – massive, unnecessary quantities of it.
See the fake six-fingered images and videos; using ChatGPT to do every work report, presentation and speech and 100 more no one asked for; and massive amounts of government surveillance. It has boom-bust written all over it. Don't stake our future on it.
Data Centers Serve Big Tech, Big Government
Call me a West Virginian, but that's enough for me to oppose them.
When big government – from the president, to our out-of-state governor and our supermajority state legislature – teams up with Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos and says, "We don't care what people want. We want a mass AI Data Center buildout to make our next Trillion dollars and increase our world domination" I'm against that.
And so are the humans, 70% and counting, who live in the world they want to dominate.
It's not a partisan issue. Conservatives, libertarians, Democrats, progressives, and people who don't care about politics overwhelmingly oppose this data center buildout.
Government should serve the people. Period.
Corporations are not people. Period.
And the People are disrespected when team Big Tech-Big Government acts otherwise.
Because Wheeling, we are getting steamrolled.
Tech bros bragging "100MW" online and to investors but saying "10MW" to our city. Private meetings with overseas corporations, but no public meetings or hearings. Corporations invited to speak at City Council without notification on the agenda, while Wheeling citizens are restricted to three minutes at the end. Big government is clearing the way with executive orders, HB 2014, and the bully pulpit. And our local leaders (save Assaro) are falling into line. "This is happening. Nothing can stop it" is the refrain team Big Tech-Big Government wants to hear.
Our Human, Not AI, Future
Usually young people are the first adopters of breakthrough technologies. They better identify valuable adaptations, they are versatile enough to learn them, and they will be around long enough to make good tech stick.
Young Millennials led texting and the internet; young Gen Xers adopted computers and video games; young Baby Boomers championed amateur photography and transistor radios. The pattern goes back through the 1920's with radio, the 1800's with telegraph, and so on.
Tellingly however, AI and the mass Data Center buildout is not following this trend.
Today the AI buildout is being pushed by older generations while young professionals and even teens are leading the opposition. College graduates are "boo"ing offstage the AI generated speeches of their commencement speakers. Young people aren't flocking to AI "art" and flyers, and instead are having to tell their parents and grandparents: "No, that's not real. That's AI."
Meanwhile, AI and mass data are being pushed by successful business and political leaders nearing retirement. A last hurrah for team 'Big Tech-Big Government' before they go. Because a climate crisis, pharmaceutical-caused opioid epidemic, 40 trillion in national debt, surging cost of living, and declining WV population weren't enough to leave behind for their grandkids...
The mass AI Data Center buildout has a human problem, and we're being called out for it.
At the scale being pushed, mass AI doesn't just destroy our jobs and neighborhoods, it steals from the corpus of Human Intelligence and then undercuts us (humans) with inferior Artificial Intelligence.
That is the underlying flaw that young people, and a majority of humanity, are right to oppose.
As older generations look up from our lifetimes of Excel, FarmVille, and the Facebook comment section and declare, "We need the immediate buildout of a society centered around Artificial Intelligence," young people are saying: "Maybe let's try something else..."
Team Big Tech-Big Government is saying: "Mass Money, for Mass Data, Right Now!"
Team Humanity is saying: "Slow down." "Chase value, not money." "Seek information, evenwisdom, and not raw data for data's sake."
Human Intelligence, Not Artificial Intelligence; this is the lasting innovation our young people are heralding in. We will use AI, to serve us. We will not let AI use us. And that is what this mass AI Data Center buildout is doing.
There are metrics – decibels of sound, ppm air and water pollution, megawatts of energy – that we can and should regulate.
But the number one metric our leaders need to respect is the will of the people.
The mass AI Data Center buildout is not inevitable.
There are things we can do.
Come to our very public hearing Tuesday, Aug. 25. Speak or listen. Then use your human intelligence for our future