Amazon wants communities to stop »defying« its AI data centers, which is a fascinating way to describe democracy when democracy becomes inconvenient. Apparently locals should provide the land, water, power and infrastructure, then politely shut up while one of the world’s richest corporations decides what »progress« looks like.

It’s the american dream, stop resisting!

The clear sense of entitlement coming from these companies is appalling. And the history of American politics shows us that when the whims of the wealthy entitled are denied the go fucking nuts. These people are going to want revenge, it’s going to be brutal, and we need to be ready for it.

history of American politics

Myths based on nothing

Not sure what you’re getting at, friend. Wealthy/conservative backlash is not a myth. One example is the rise of the Tea Party movement in terrified reaction to the election of Obama, largely funded by the conservative billionaire Koch brothers; and that led directly to the rise of Trump. Another is the backlash to Clinton’s election, which drove billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife so profoundly, droolingly mad as to fund “The Arkansas Project”, spending millions to find something, anything, that would destroy his presidency, thus feeding the rise of conservative media–which, god help us, remains a huge influence on national politics to this day.

There’s also the conservative movement’s collective pants-pissing at the rise of women’s liberation, legalized abortion, and the potential passing of the Equal Rights Amendment, which led to an enormous backlash against women from all corners of the political right that we are still dealing with today.

Backlash is real and it’s dangerous, especially on account of the innate, furious psychopathy of the rich, and the fear-addled, weak-willed minds of their conservative rank and file; there’s no telling what these nuts will do when they feel backed into a corner, but it’s always harmful to everyone else in the long run.

If your argument proves anything, it’s that backlash is dangerous when it’s funded.

If the ruling class is coherent, or is made to comply (see Putin), then the rich can squeeze everything from us

that backlash is dangerous when it’s funded

That is largely my point, yes. The people trying to put datacenters in our neighborhoods are very, very rich. We ordinary people can stop this, but we need to be ready to continue the fight when they hit us back.

All of those bastards.

Yes, unironically they should. Otherwise, a scary basilisk will eat them

Its oligarch logic. Democracy is foul and needs to die because democracy means Bezos has one vote, the same as any barista or construction worker, which is utterly ridiculous. He should be in charge, of course. So stop defying him.

It’s why they buy legislators and city council members. And presidents.

In our county Amazon is being allowed to build a massive data center right next to our reservoir, take over maintaining a dam on the creek that comes out of the reservoir, and discharge 98 degree water into the creek.

Time for tropical fish.

Sounds sustainable.

„We‘re stealing your intellectual property, your infrastructure that you paid for and your land to rent it back to you later. Please do not resist.“ -AI industry

What else needs to be said other than, yeah, these criminals have lost the plot.

“Resistance is futile…”

Locutus?

That’s a lie.

They aren’t saying “please.”

“Just like the national highway system, our country’s economy, national security, and everyday lives stand to benefit immensely,” he wrote.

Right out of the gate, the national highway system is owned by the public, not fucking corporations you knob.

The truth is slipping out of the lie. It’s a tacit admission that the real customer for all this compute is the Orwellian surveillance system ICE/Flock/Palantir/the Trump regime in general is building.

The executive accused the media of spreading “misinformation and outright lies,” arguing that “in the age of social media and 24/7 news, myths take hold faster than ever before.”

Misinformation and outright lies? Isn’t that “executives” playbook?

I don’t believe anything what “corps” are trying to tell.

Remember the tale of the kid crying wolf? That’s on them.

Especially the companies who literally made social media a thing

Can we stop talking about water usage and start talking about how this is a military operation

Nah, people latched onto the water use for some reason. We’re rolling with it

Our enemies have long had no understanding of why they opposed making things better for everyone, when they come ranting about Amazon stealing our water we need to welcome them to the cause and tell them the bad guys are developing mad Max militarized AI tanker trucks to steal it harder

Uh, fair enough. Yeah I guess that’s a good hook. But still, I can only see the correlation between the exponential increase in Flock cameras and datacenters. Clearly it’s all for surveillance, precrime and the like. If we center discussion around water we move it away from the actual harm being done. Policies become about “ensuring water isn’t wasted” instead of “ensuring datacenters don’t get built”. It’s a distraction, no? Or rather, it’s co-optation.

I mean…I don’t disagree with you

But there’s a hard truth I know I’m still grappling with

None of it matters. Most of our allies are not at a level they will engage with the truth of the matter. If their faucet is blocked by a tree root, they’ll be further convinced, and if they always have water they won’t be unconvinced

So if they care about water, good messaging means that water becomes the stand in for the right to privacy. Nothing you say (or at least nothing I have tried to say) will make them understand the privacy implications. I haven’t convinced a single person that privacy is actually critical to democracy. And trust me, I’ve tried a lot of angles with many different people

We just have to accept they’re pointed in the right direction, and that trying to educate them can only hurt the cause. They won’t be ideologically won over, but on the flip side, it’s not really about water for them either

Even if we did reach them on the issue, that wouldn’t wake them up. They won’t care about the next issue, like the cameras, until they’re worried that agents are laughing over their genital pics or something, whatever they latch onto next

So just let water be the metaphor. They’ll cheer with us, they’ll march with us, and they won’t blink when you tell them AI water usage is eroding their rights

So this guy is claiming we’re listening to misinformation while simultaneously hiding behind NDAs regarding data centers.

You’re referring to case of an entire town council that got caught being binded by NDAs, right?

How cam those superseed the duties abd obligations elected officials have towards their constituents?

It’s not just one. It’s standard for data centers. NDAs regarding water, electricity, and general operations.

Some, the city council calls it a warehouse and then the residents find out later it’s a data center.

That should be a crime. An electes official bound by a privately signed document? That’s rich.

or else they will send all the amazon empty boxes to local communities.

The executive accused the media of spreading “misinformation and outright lies,” arguing that “in the age of social media and 24/7 news, myths take hold faster than ever before.”

Yeah? Well whose fault is that?

We’re all looking for the guys that did this.

Yea, stop defying and start actively opposing

The tech industry has fully lost its plot.

It never had one, those companies are complicit in genocide, war crimes, news manipulation and part of imperialism since two decades, so destroying the earth is like a side hustle.

I mean wikileaks documents in 2012 showed that google were intentionally involved in the proxy war of Syria, this was lead by western governments co operated with islamist terrorist to start a civil war.

Julian assange wrote an article in 2014 warning everyone about google.

UN report about Amazon role in the genocide of gaza.

Honestly, 2 decades is charitable, more like since computing was first invented, in the 1940s

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman pleaded in a 3,000 word blog today with communities to embrace data centers

Who the fuck is reading the blog of some Amazon executive who isn’t already on the kool-aid?

(also, lol at job title inflation finally reaching the “CEO” level. I see Amazon now has 3 CEOs and an “Executive Chairman”.)

Who the fuck is reading the blog of some Amazon executive who isn’t already on the kool-aid?

Apparently someone who is too stupid to understand the difference between “a blog” and “a blog post”.

That’s at least 3 different salaries that can be replaced by AI, and distributed among the workers, possibly 4.

“Guys, shut up and just do what I’m saying!”

Incels that were just in the right place at the right time to get rich.

This gentleman can eat a dick.

He can eat a dildo cause he ain’t worth a dick

No you wouldn’t

Please, I BEG of You, LET us REPLACE your Jobs!

-Matt Garman!

Have any of these AI CEOs, politicians or tech bros that try to rally behind a nationalistic “gotta win the AI race against China” ever explained what is actually consequential about this race in their view for anyone but themselves? Like other than your personal company’s outlook, your stock portfolio or your political influence/military usage over what is, best case scenario (being generous), a valuable and useful advanced tool for some types of work… what difference does it make to the average internet user if their AI chat bots or agents are developed in or run on data centers in the US or China?

Or more realistically, if they have the largest market share in the world, because there’s no lose state that means that the US AI companies can’t still exist… unless the AI companies keep pissing people off enough for the public to actually just shut down every data center.

It seems pretty clear that the only real motivation is an unimpeded return on their massive investments. China having market share in AI applications does not, inherently, threaten anyone’s safety any more than if they have a minority share in the market.

Using rational reasoning like you are doing here exposes the deeper meaning of this

I advise to take a look at this book

Link

“I won’t listen to words anymore” - Bezos

The executive accused the media of spreading “misinformation and outright lies,” arguing that “in the age of social media and 24/7 news, myths take hold faster than ever before.”

Dude, you are literally trying to build the lying pipe, that makes the lying more conversational, and this is your argument. You are holding 40 bloody knives and yelling that THEY are sending a dude with a knife if we don’t act right now… You are in the hot dog suit.

These people should be elected to the “Sun council for exceptional beings”. Very prestigious… Very wow… It’s where we shoot you into the sun.

This is still pretty much bleeding edge technology, who’s to say that the way we are currently doing thing is the most optional one? I’d rather they stop building these massive data centers and instead have their researchers focus on making these models run on consumer level hardware since throwing more and more compute power at the problem is not sustainable in the long run.

They don’t want the risk of actually having to design, build and market products to consumers. They want to sell a fungible commodity that someone else makes a product with, they get to make money regardless of the success or failure of any given product.

Ultimately, they’re not really interested in any of this because they think that it’s a useful technology. They’re only interested because the business model of building a bunch of data centers and selling the computer is simple and low risk. They wouldn’t be putting any money in to it if not for that business model.

Most of the leadership at these companies made their names in the cloud services and web hosting boom. They’re sticking to what they know and what has been the only really big success for the industry in the past decade.

AI is, sure. But data centers have been around for literally decades. There’s nothing bleeding edge about it.

We know how to run data centers efficiently and less wastefully. It’s just more expensive so these fucks don’t want to do it.

They could power themselves entirely from solar and wind. They won’t. They could use closed loop cooling. They won’t. Because those options are more expensive and AI isn’t profitable yet (if ever).

They could do like what you’re saying and turn their models into locally run things on the end user device. They won’t because the only way they’re making money right now at all is on the mass data they collect from it.

Or what? They’ll drive local energy prices even higher?

Nope.

It’s not just that we don’t care about any AI race, it’s that we’re also over American exceptionalism too.

We don’t want to be ahead of Chinese AI, we want to stop Chinese AI from ruining the environment.

or what, motherfuckers?

ALTstaaare

Sounds a lot like we need another “All you had to do was pay us enough to live” moment