What would pro data center propaganda look like?1
A few things seem to be true at once:
People really hate data centers, and their opposition appears to be driven by sincere concerns about water, electricity, and local environmental damage
Some of the most alarming claims appear to be exaggerated, decontextualized, or straight up wrong
The factual pushback hasn’t stopped the opposition from growing
In an attempt to reconcile these three points, many on Tech Twitter are claiming that the data center hatred is actually because of Chinese propaganda (it probably isn’t) or because of an abstract hatred of Big Tech (seems very real on the ground, less clear in polling data).
But there’s a difference between the content of people’s beliefs versus the conditions under which those beliefs might be reconsidered. Look, for example, at this absolute moggery on an anti-data center Reel:
I strongly suggest you watch even 10 seconds of this: https://www.instagram.com/citiesbydiana/reel/DbUQamaz24-/ 2M views and 117,000 likes!
Then, this poor guy drops the worst WELL AKSHUALLY of all time
The original poster replies
And then she stomps on him
No disrespect to my boy Ben Sanders, but presumably this is what the average data center supporter looks like in the minds of young people on Instagram.
The simplest explanation here is that poor Ben just didn’t read the room. Everyone was trying to have a good laugh, and he scared the metaphorical hoes by pulling up to the comment section ready to argue.
This isn’t new, and we’ve all been talking past each other on hot button culture topics for at least the last ~decade. On our shortform video feeds in particular, anti-data center sentiments have already become culturally encoded. If you try to debate earnestly, you’re always showing up as the weirdo ruining the party. You are absolutely going to get dunked on. So why are so many in the tech industry still treating the data center debate as a contest of facts?
The adults in the room are trying to flip the data center narrative with op-eds and case studies.2 But before any of this resonates with people, it has to be culturally imaginable to root for data centers. Public opinion is formed partly through aesthetics and identity, and there has to be some social permission to entertain the otherside. Otherwise you’ll be bullied out of the comments section every time.
I. QUIET THE WATCHDOG OF THE MIND
II. MEET BRAINROT WITH BRAINROT
III. PEOPLE FOLLOW PEOPLE
I. QUIET THE WATCHDOG OF THE MIND
I’m just about finished with Lewis Hyde’s banger, “Trickster Makes This World.” Hyde describes the trickster as the character who changes culture from its edges. When a society is so caught up in its entrenched narratives that it is frozen from any progress, the trickster sits at its boundaries, ready to do something amoral (not immoral) for the sake of moving the plot forward. Rather than confronting an existing social order head-on, he uses jokes, misdirection, and play to make its rules feel less settled.
Brainrot — or shitposting or whatever other shorthand you might reach for to describe internet-native humour — strikes me as the contemporary toolkit of the trickster. It reminds me of T.S. Eliot’s idea that a poem’s explicit meaning is a “bit of nice meat for the house-dog”: something that occupies the rational mind while the poem’s rhythm, imagery, and emotional structure shape our subconscious less directly.
In theory the tech industry could put out shortform videos that engage point-by-point on common data center misconceptions, but I suspect they’d get annihilated like our friend Ben Sanders. The first step in a pro-data center campaign wouldn’t begin as another rational rebuttal — the anti data center story is too settled. Its job would be to use humour, play, and misdirection to destabilize the entrenched narrative until a new one even has an opening to emerge.
II. MEET BRAINROT WITH BRAINROT
Admittedly this leg of work is probably the job of someone ten years my junior who is actually living in the dirt of shortform video. But just to illustrate the point, let’s riff on a few ideas:
Charlie Kirkify Data Centers
RIP Charlie Kirk, who has met a fate worse than death, and has joined the ranks of absolutely absurdist internet characters.
Generative AI has helped a ton of new internet-native news formats spawn over the last few years: Bikini Bottom News (the talking fish from Spongebob cover real news headlines in a totally absurd way), Clayspiracy (Claymation animation of conspiracy theories), or Cardboard Case Files (stop motion explainers, though funnily enough it seems the original account has been banned). These formats are clearing tens of millions of views weekly.
I suspect there’s some absurdist angle with which you can tell positive data center stories. Charlie Kirk, who in his life was a firmly right wing character, might be the perfect representative of pure absurdity to build a data center news page around. You can imagine some format similar to “Bikini Bottom News” or “Clayspiracy”, where an animated version of Kirk is covering daily positive stories about data centers.
You’d use a familiar internet caricature to Trojan horse in the real positive stories. It’s very possible that the character of Charlie Kirk is dripping with enough irony that no one will take the stories at face value…but I think that pattern-interrupt is half the battle of destabilizing this narrative.
Data Center Fairy
I don’t see much storytelling around what data centers might enable for us.3 Sell benefits, not features, dummy. Quincy seems like the most cited example of a community that has actually benefited from data centers in their backyard, but surely there are others.
There’s probably a funnier way to frame it, but to me a “data center fairy” could be a character that shows before / after transitions on communities that have actually benefited from data centers. Carousel posts seem to be algorithmically favoured on IG/TikTok recently, and I bet you could fairly easily put together some sort of absurd format here, swiping through image transitions with neutral data about a community evolving alongside its data center buildout. We were able to pay for a new high school! We were able to build new parks! We solved racism! Everyone say thank you, data center fairy!
III. PEOPLE FOLLOW PEOPLE
Brainrot and its equivalents might be able to weaken an existing story, but it cannot give people something new to identify with.
The reality is that people follow people, and there currently aren’t any pro-data center characters to latch onto. Young people overwhelmingly distrust AI CEOs. Once the existing data center narrative has been destabilized and there exists the possibility of some new story, the next frontier would be to create new pro-data center voices to rally around.
One of my favourite ideas this year is that you can just manufacture an influencer. The “influencer” is a medium with its own widely recognized tropes and aesthetics, so there’s no reason why you can’t just … design one in a lab, almost as some sort of performance art.4 You’ve got Ramp’s fake finance influencer Kumar, or Opal’s knowledge creator “Olivia Unplugged,” or the fake elementary school teacher “Matt Taylor.” My favourite, though, was John Chungus, the sweet old man that Anthpo created to convince young people to get outside more. “Touch grass” has been somewhat of a slur over the last few years, a way to tell someone they’re too online and it’s time to unplug. John Chungus, then, is a physical manifestation of an idea already floating in our collective unconscious. People don’t have ideas, ideas have people.
Some ways to approach this idea for the data center discourse:
Cribs for Data Centers
For all of America’s desire to build things again, it’s surprising how rarely the people actually building data centers appear in the industry’s online storytelling. I imagine a Cribs-style show, where locals / blue collar workers walk us through what their lives look like near a data center. Can they tangibly point to how things have changed, for better and worse? You could shoot it Subway Takes style, where the entire interview is a 2 minute clip, and the setting itself tells half the story (warm rural homes, sitting on a pleasant stoop, etc etc.) There are probably some good stories the internet could latch onto here.
John Chungus For Data Centers
You’d destroy all trust if you actually “manufacture” an influencer here, similar to John Chungus. But I do think it would be powerful to have a single character who represents the voice of blue collar workers. You’d probably want to hire and disclose an actual blue collar worker or union leader. It would have to be a sympathetic character who not only represents America’s desire to build things again, but would also physically go out and engage with opposition in the real world. Could he be doing AMAs, addressing real concerns from data center opposition? Could he be doing campus visits, like a non-combative pre-meme Charlie Kirk? Old people really resonate on the internet, and a recognizable character would ground the data center debate in real human experiences instead of abstract ideas.
I do not think a cute campaign turns a bad data center into a good one. If a project raises electricity bills or leaves a community with little in return, no amount of internet-fluent media will change that. But tangible benefits do not communicate themselves either, and they certainly aren’t communicated in internet-native formats. There are a whole host of landmines here for an industry that is already so distrusted — I certainly don’t think that the tech industry should be manufacturing synthetic support, or that data center opposers are some irrational force to be quelled, or that this is a black-and-white debate. But I’m shocked that the tech industry has given so little thought to how all of this enters the public imagination.
I’ve been sitting on this post for a while and admittedly I’m feeling queasy about it. There’s just so much to unpack here, and I genuinely do empathize with parts of the data center opposition. It feels especially unserious to be so flippant in the face of recent AI safety concerns. But none of y’all are coming to me for tech reporting, so take this as a fun thought experiment on internet culture. To actually engage with the topic, check out: Andy Masley addressing common oppositions, or Jasmine Sun making reporting cool again, or Andrew Sharp’s optimistic take on where this is all going, or Ezra Klein interviewing Jasmine.
Or bribes.
There’s a whole separate thread to unpack here on whether the average American even finds AI that useful.
This does feel different than straight up undisclosed marketing:
