Just reading this was a real threat to my dental health. Early on, I thought, "I'll bet she has at least a bachelor's, probably an advanced degree, likely doesn't know any working class people, she's just doing some reflexive virtue signalling," and sure enough she's a professor. It's particularly infuriating because I live in West Virginia where we don't even get to have hearings to voice our opposition, nor is there an initiative process here. There is opposition to all three of the data centers proposed a year or two ago--now there are two more and I haven't heard about opposition but likely that's because they're new. West Virginia has the lowest average income in the country, and the lowest educational attainment. Hardly a hotbed of liberal elite affluence. Fact is, we're used to be treated as a garbage dump by the rest of the country--stripped for logs, then coal, now natural gas and riding on that, data centers.
I also intensely resent the implication that I should apologize for the fact that my opposition is based on concern for the environment (among other things). Don't you people understand that we all depend on Mother Earth like a newborn depends on its mother, and we're killing her? Climate change, biodiversity loss, PFAS and plastic contamination, sperm counts and insect populations dropping by one to two percent a year--do you not understand that this leads to human extinction in a few decades?
As for NIMBYs, in my experience most become NIABYs--in which case it's perfectly excusable if their opposition began when an atrocity in their own backyard made them begin paying attention.
Also, somebody please tell me WHAT is the great wonder that we should be willing to make all these sacrifices for? AI can help us avoid learning anything in school and still get a degree. It can pretend to be a friend and worsen a mental health condition. It can make spiffy cat videos, and deep fakes to harass enemies and exes. It can justify layoffs. It can collate all the data the various government agencies, social media and cellphone companies have on us so when the uprising finally comes, they'll already know who the potential leaders are. It can locate and target "enemies" for extrajudicial killing. It's already helping make America whiter.
They're desperate to shove these things in wherever they can as fast as they can, because people are waking up fast to the harms not only of the data centers, but of the AI dystopia they will enable. Many of the CEOs have been pretty explicit about the neofascist dreams they hope to achieve. Buck is on their side. She is not a leftist.
And I know how thermoses work, so this isn't an argument for space data centers lol but if they want to shoot data centers into space, they can have at if they aim them at the sun. lol
I'm in northeastern Pennsylvania and our county commissioner gave a good speech at a county meeting about how we're always taking everybody's garbage, in fact, that's literal in fact, and that this data center stuff is more of the old thing. We're in the anthracite coal region. I included this on my audio podcast the title of the post is Don't feed data center trolls or accept their frame up... and the video of his speech is in the references if you scroll down, there's a video of just his remarks if you just want to hear that. I think you might relate to it. And I would like to say that this is the first county commissioner we've had that is like this. We've been stuck for so long with problematic people in these positions. So I think there's a bit of hope actually.
i think at a very fundamental level these techno-utopians/optimists are anti-humanists. they do not care (nor seem to understand) how fragile life is, how fragile the biosphere is, and they view humans as a commodity just like any other. i try to approach issues like this with a level head but deep down it just straight up disgusts me whenever i see someone arguing in favor of generative AI. it's a fundamentally harmful technology and i don't see how its existence can be maintained without systemic exploitation of a permanent underclass (to be particular, i'm thinking of the horrors that the data labelers often in the global south have to go through - which is a prerequisite function for how these models are trained).
Something that neither she nor you mentioned is the public concern over direct effects of resource extraction entailed by the current generation of data centers. In Arizona we are 25 years into a drought, at levels not seen since the 1500s. The seven states that depend on Colorado River water are in crisis mode, fighting over who gets how much. And then we have a series of proposed data centers, each of which would use as much water as a new city.
The drought also means far less electrical generation from dams on the Colorado, with likely higher energy costs and less grid stability. Yet each new data center would also require vast amounts of energy, which also entails consuming large volumes of water if the generators use steam (as in all the fossil fuel plants and nuclear).
So local opposition has really been across the socioeconomic spectrum, as people worry where their water will come from, and how much they will be charged for water and power. It’s existential, not elitist.
Yes this is something that we... actual public health activists and environmental groups and community advocates talk about all the time, and the environmental journalists do write about it.
Thank you for another fine, thoughtful piece. To stay within the bounds of respectful discourse I will only characterize the author of the pro-AI piece as an elitist and leave it at that. You showed her premise to be nonsense. I must in my mind anyone who claims AI is a better tutor/teacher than a human would likely be a very uninspiring and unimaginative instructor.
Thanks for this piece. It’s sadly not too surprising to see Jacobin on the wrong side of this issue. They’ve become more and more comfortable with condescending to the working class rather than understanding and advocating for them.
Great article. I would go a little further with your final sentence and say that "Fighting data centers is where community begins". For many, there are precious few opportunities to come together to do something about *waves hands* all this stuff that's going on. We little folk often feel like there are several speeds of government, and we get little if anything to do with any of them other than vote occasionally for parties that all look the same. Taking a fight to "the man" has always been a galvanising experience, especially for those with nuanced things to say about the processes they see going on around them. Keep up the good work and I'm enjoying reading "Blood in the Machine".
I am glad you have had a mild push-back at Holly Buck for the exaltation of Generative AI tutors: "It’s clear that, for many subjects, the personalized tutoring offered by AI is far better than the outdated lecture-based model still employed by universities."
This is completely false for two reasons:
1. Many universities do not simply use the "outdated lecture-based model". I work at one that has not used this as the main form of instruction for the last 50 years
2. It is NOT clear that for many subjects personalized, GenAI tutoring is "better". In fact, in all the decently designed studies that I have seen that measure the real impact i.e. acquired learning, a personalized AI tutor improves performance while the tutor is available but when the tutor is taken away acquired learning is less than for children who learned without the false aid of the AI tutor. The acquired learning gap was between 17% and 25% based on the study.
We have to push back against the lies and false promises of the GenAI and AI boosters: they sell us hypothetical (and often disproven) benefits while the immediate harms are real.
The "personalized tutoring offered by AI is far better than [insert any desired non AI supported learning methodology]" is one of the most pernicious false benefits being flogged by AI boosters and many non-boosters who simply swallow the "common-sense logic" that personal tutoring must be good. Not in the case of GenAI and how they have been used so far. It is pernicious because it is one of the main arguments that Google, OpenAI. etc. and the sociopathic VCs behind them are using to get GenAI tools into the classroom with our children where it will harm their learning and harm their development as autonomous and independently-minded human beings.
Thank you! As a learning designer, that comment irked me. Are lectures the least helpful form of instruction? Yes. Is a "hallucinating" chatbot better? No!
You might be interested in 404 Media's story on Arizona State University and how they built a chatbot to make personalized modules by chopping up lectures into 1 to 2 minute clips accompanied by AI-generated explanations. This was all done without notifying professors:
IMHO, a key problem with Holly Buck's argument -- and the data center build out in general -- is the assumption that generative AI has a future worth making these massive investments of social capital in. While none of the gen AI firms have yet turned a profit, and indeed, there may not be a path to profitability for this technology, why invest in computing infrastructure that may be abandoned and obsolete in 5 years? And why should we leave it to the Tech Broligarchy to make such decisions about our communities, landscapes, and natural resources?
I'm surprised that Jacobin would publish this piece, it's so tone-deaf. These data centers are very much NOT in affluent communities. I didn't see it in your piece but pretty sure there's a lawsuit in Tennessee (Knoxville?) about residents of a very much NOT affluent area, all the harm the data center has done to their lived environment, etc. and how they are trying to fight back!
The other big issue to me, which readers of Ed Zitron (spelling?) will recognize, is that most of these data centers will NEVER BE BUILT. The two main companies everyone is tripping over themselves to build these for (OpenAI and Anthropic) have zero path to profitability, and it's probably not hyperbolic to say that at least one of them will be out of business within a few years. So we should sell out communities lands and resources for what very well might be an eye sore and a hole in the ground when these projects are abandoned in a few years?
The Jacobin piece is incredibly ahistorical. Buck seems to know nothing about the environmental movement, or about organizing, or about what AI is up to. Have wealthy elites used zoning to keep their neighborhoods pristine? Of course they have. But that’s not a reason to approve building power plants, Superfund sites, and data centers everywhere—it’s a reason to democratize the movement and build them nowhere, which is how the environmental movement developed.
Data centers have devastating impacts. In the US, they’re ignoring or being exempted from every existing ordinance on the books to protect people, water quality, resource allocation, access, and the financial stability of communities.
If the environmental movement has stood for anything, it’s that the argument that exchanging degraded environments in exchange for the latest fabulous thing has never been true. Clean water, air, land; safe, livable communities; and our health and well being are never worth trading for some potential future benefit.
Quelle surprise! Trad Lefties being all gooey at the prospect of culture altering technology, controlled from centralised organisations... so aligned with the TechBros, except that the Lefties' blind faith is in the uncorruptible nature of democratic institutions, rather than in the deliberately corrupted ones of capitalism.
F that bullshit argument in Jacobin shitting on data center resistance. So this is 2 writers for that outlet that I wouldn't trust now and I've barely paid attention to that outlet.
Who do they think are homeowners who can just eat a 100% reduction in home value and just live with an underwater mortgage and be able to move when the house is unlivable? I'm a disabled public health activist, and a lot of the people fighting data centers in my county are senior citizens. What are people supposed to do when their home is unlivable and they can't afford to buy a new house or even pay rent because the only reason they were getting by is that their mortgage had been low or they'd paid off or inherited a house where they took care of their parents? This is why people bought houses to hedge on future rents. A LOT of people in my area who own homes would have to pay 3x or more per month to rent someplace now. Do you think that's doable on a fixed income?
This is just another situation where these people always want to talk to people in Pennsylvania, but as soon as I open my mouth, they may as well just say "no no Chloe shut up we want to talk to affluent small business owner maga trump voters and find out what they think so we can say everyone there is like them". Or maybe they'll talk to wannabe anthropologist like journalists or fancy scholars who helicopter in here and then decide what we're like! Us Appalachian bumpkins.
Well guess what, I can tell you about the maga because I know everyone wants to hear about them more than they want to hear about me. Yes there's maga in the local data center organizing. And it's being led by just ordinary residents, and helped by environmental and social justice groups. (And undermined by solar industry groups pretending to be environmental groups.) And the lead maga trump trucker convoy guy who last made headlines because he took his trump truck down to counter protest at a No Kings demonstration and then got charged with hit and run with it. And he's been making the rounds at public meetings speaking out against data centers. Bonus, he berates the local Democratic county commissioner regularly for things like proposing a very mild anti-ICE ordinance, but this trump trucker was speaking out about how instead of the bankrupt hospital being sold to a for-profit healthcare company, he said it should've been seized by county government to be made into an employee owned worker co-op hospital.
Meanwhile I've just spent the past 12 hours sorting through Right To Know emails from the state government showing how they've secretly been in cahoots with AWS to push data centers here, and putting them in chronological order so they make sense to people. Meanwhile our governor, our Democratic governor, is on both sides of a public private partnership with AI. And people are still floating this Trumpian figure as a possible 2028 presidential hopeful. Some of the maga assume that democrats are the problem. Seriously. And it's hard to disabuse them of that when the democrats who control the state house just passed a data centers bill that hands a lawfare gun to the industry actors, and all the democrats in the PA state house voted for it, while most of the Republicans voted against it.
They have so much available space that instead of seeing AI data centers as a threat to grid stability, China treats them as a convenient way to “soak up oversupply,” he added.
I'm also wondering at what point the switch to a Star Trek style "utopia" will happen
Through readings of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) and Dave Eggers’s The Circle (2013), the article shows how these originally critical dystopias have been appropriated by tech leaders to legitimize privatized sovereignty, algorithmic control, and oligarchic dominance, while concealing concentrated power beneath narratives of innovation and inevitability.
I didn’t read the Jacobin article, but the tech angle is worth raising as well. It’s far from certain that the current approach to AI (brute force scaling) is the best one. It’s unclear even if the current approach will *meaningfully* improve with scale. Forced constraints might be a good thing for the tech itself in a “necessity is the mother of invention” kind of way.
Just reading this was a real threat to my dental health. Early on, I thought, "I'll bet she has at least a bachelor's, probably an advanced degree, likely doesn't know any working class people, she's just doing some reflexive virtue signalling," and sure enough she's a professor. It's particularly infuriating because I live in West Virginia where we don't even get to have hearings to voice our opposition, nor is there an initiative process here. There is opposition to all three of the data centers proposed a year or two ago--now there are two more and I haven't heard about opposition but likely that's because they're new. West Virginia has the lowest average income in the country, and the lowest educational attainment. Hardly a hotbed of liberal elite affluence. Fact is, we're used to be treated as a garbage dump by the rest of the country--stripped for logs, then coal, now natural gas and riding on that, data centers.
I also intensely resent the implication that I should apologize for the fact that my opposition is based on concern for the environment (among other things). Don't you people understand that we all depend on Mother Earth like a newborn depends on its mother, and we're killing her? Climate change, biodiversity loss, PFAS and plastic contamination, sperm counts and insect populations dropping by one to two percent a year--do you not understand that this leads to human extinction in a few decades?
As for NIMBYs, in my experience most become NIABYs--in which case it's perfectly excusable if their opposition began when an atrocity in their own backyard made them begin paying attention.
Also, somebody please tell me WHAT is the great wonder that we should be willing to make all these sacrifices for? AI can help us avoid learning anything in school and still get a degree. It can pretend to be a friend and worsen a mental health condition. It can make spiffy cat videos, and deep fakes to harass enemies and exes. It can justify layoffs. It can collate all the data the various government agencies, social media and cellphone companies have on us so when the uprising finally comes, they'll already know who the potential leaders are. It can locate and target "enemies" for extrajudicial killing. It's already helping make America whiter.
They're desperate to shove these things in wherever they can as fast as they can, because people are waking up fast to the harms not only of the data centers, but of the AI dystopia they will enable. Many of the CEOs have been pretty explicit about the neofascist dreams they hope to achieve. Buck is on their side. She is not a leftist.
When it comes to generative AI hyperscale data centers and cryptocurrency printing data centers... I'm not NIMBY. I'm NOPE. (Not On Planet Earth)
By NIABY I meant Not in Anybody's Backyard, but I think I like your NOPE better.
And I know how thermoses work, so this isn't an argument for space data centers lol but if they want to shoot data centers into space, they can have at if they aim them at the sun. lol
I'm in northeastern Pennsylvania and our county commissioner gave a good speech at a county meeting about how we're always taking everybody's garbage, in fact, that's literal in fact, and that this data center stuff is more of the old thing. We're in the anthracite coal region. I included this on my audio podcast the title of the post is Don't feed data center trolls or accept their frame up... and the video of his speech is in the references if you scroll down, there's a video of just his remarks if you just want to hear that. I think you might relate to it. And I would like to say that this is the first county commissioner we've had that is like this. We've been stuck for so long with problematic people in these positions. So I think there's a bit of hope actually.
i think at a very fundamental level these techno-utopians/optimists are anti-humanists. they do not care (nor seem to understand) how fragile life is, how fragile the biosphere is, and they view humans as a commodity just like any other. i try to approach issues like this with a level head but deep down it just straight up disgusts me whenever i see someone arguing in favor of generative AI. it's a fundamentally harmful technology and i don't see how its existence can be maintained without systemic exploitation of a permanent underclass (to be particular, i'm thinking of the horrors that the data labelers often in the global south have to go through - which is a prerequisite function for how these models are trained).
Something that neither she nor you mentioned is the public concern over direct effects of resource extraction entailed by the current generation of data centers. In Arizona we are 25 years into a drought, at levels not seen since the 1500s. The seven states that depend on Colorado River water are in crisis mode, fighting over who gets how much. And then we have a series of proposed data centers, each of which would use as much water as a new city.
The drought also means far less electrical generation from dams on the Colorado, with likely higher energy costs and less grid stability. Yet each new data center would also require vast amounts of energy, which also entails consuming large volumes of water if the generators use steam (as in all the fossil fuel plants and nuclear).
So local opposition has really been across the socioeconomic spectrum, as people worry where their water will come from, and how much they will be charged for water and power. It’s existential, not elitist.
Yes this is something that we... actual public health activists and environmental groups and community advocates talk about all the time, and the environmental journalists do write about it.
Thank you for another fine, thoughtful piece. To stay within the bounds of respectful discourse I will only characterize the author of the pro-AI piece as an elitist and leave it at that. You showed her premise to be nonsense. I must in my mind anyone who claims AI is a better tutor/teacher than a human would likely be a very uninspiring and unimaginative instructor.
Thanks for this piece. It’s sadly not too surprising to see Jacobin on the wrong side of this issue. They’ve become more and more comfortable with condescending to the working class rather than understanding and advocating for them.
To be fair, they did promptly publish a rebuttal https://jacobin.com/2026/04/data-center-ai-moratorium-bernie
and they had a pretty great discussion of how tech like AI erodes working conditions running at the same time, just fwiw
Great article. I would go a little further with your final sentence and say that "Fighting data centers is where community begins". For many, there are precious few opportunities to come together to do something about *waves hands* all this stuff that's going on. We little folk often feel like there are several speeds of government, and we get little if anything to do with any of them other than vote occasionally for parties that all look the same. Taking a fight to "the man" has always been a galvanising experience, especially for those with nuanced things to say about the processes they see going on around them. Keep up the good work and I'm enjoying reading "Blood in the Machine".
I am glad you have had a mild push-back at Holly Buck for the exaltation of Generative AI tutors: "It’s clear that, for many subjects, the personalized tutoring offered by AI is far better than the outdated lecture-based model still employed by universities."
This is completely false for two reasons:
1. Many universities do not simply use the "outdated lecture-based model". I work at one that has not used this as the main form of instruction for the last 50 years
2. It is NOT clear that for many subjects personalized, GenAI tutoring is "better". In fact, in all the decently designed studies that I have seen that measure the real impact i.e. acquired learning, a personalized AI tutor improves performance while the tutor is available but when the tutor is taken away acquired learning is less than for children who learned without the false aid of the AI tutor. The acquired learning gap was between 17% and 25% based on the study.
We have to push back against the lies and false promises of the GenAI and AI boosters: they sell us hypothetical (and often disproven) benefits while the immediate harms are real.
The "personalized tutoring offered by AI is far better than [insert any desired non AI supported learning methodology]" is one of the most pernicious false benefits being flogged by AI boosters and many non-boosters who simply swallow the "common-sense logic" that personal tutoring must be good. Not in the case of GenAI and how they have been used so far. It is pernicious because it is one of the main arguments that Google, OpenAI. etc. and the sociopathic VCs behind them are using to get GenAI tools into the classroom with our children where it will harm their learning and harm their development as autonomous and independently-minded human beings.
Thank you! As a learning designer, that comment irked me. Are lectures the least helpful form of instruction? Yes. Is a "hallucinating" chatbot better? No!
You might be interested in 404 Media's story on Arizona State University and how they built a chatbot to make personalized modules by chopping up lectures into 1 to 2 minute clips accompanied by AI-generated explanations. This was all done without notifying professors:
https://www.404media.co/email/f20bb25f-7b9c-48a6-b8bf-7bc22f18a25f/
Thank you Jasmine. I'll look into it.
IMHO, a key problem with Holly Buck's argument -- and the data center build out in general -- is the assumption that generative AI has a future worth making these massive investments of social capital in. While none of the gen AI firms have yet turned a profit, and indeed, there may not be a path to profitability for this technology, why invest in computing infrastructure that may be abandoned and obsolete in 5 years? And why should we leave it to the Tech Broligarchy to make such decisions about our communities, landscapes, and natural resources?
I read the Jacobin piece. Having done so I’d have to say I found your article polite in the extreme.
There is and will be no "good, truly democratically guided AI development and use". Otherwise, excellent essay, as usual!
I'm surprised that Jacobin would publish this piece, it's so tone-deaf. These data centers are very much NOT in affluent communities. I didn't see it in your piece but pretty sure there's a lawsuit in Tennessee (Knoxville?) about residents of a very much NOT affluent area, all the harm the data center has done to their lived environment, etc. and how they are trying to fight back!
The other big issue to me, which readers of Ed Zitron (spelling?) will recognize, is that most of these data centers will NEVER BE BUILT. The two main companies everyone is tripping over themselves to build these for (OpenAI and Anthropic) have zero path to profitability, and it's probably not hyperbolic to say that at least one of them will be out of business within a few years. So we should sell out communities lands and resources for what very well might be an eye sore and a hole in the ground when these projects are abandoned in a few years?
The Jacobin piece is incredibly ahistorical. Buck seems to know nothing about the environmental movement, or about organizing, or about what AI is up to. Have wealthy elites used zoning to keep their neighborhoods pristine? Of course they have. But that’s not a reason to approve building power plants, Superfund sites, and data centers everywhere—it’s a reason to democratize the movement and build them nowhere, which is how the environmental movement developed.
Data centers have devastating impacts. In the US, they’re ignoring or being exempted from every existing ordinance on the books to protect people, water quality, resource allocation, access, and the financial stability of communities.
If the environmental movement has stood for anything, it’s that the argument that exchanging degraded environments in exchange for the latest fabulous thing has never been true. Clean water, air, land; safe, livable communities; and our health and well being are never worth trading for some potential future benefit.
Quelle surprise! Trad Lefties being all gooey at the prospect of culture altering technology, controlled from centralised organisations... so aligned with the TechBros, except that the Lefties' blind faith is in the uncorruptible nature of democratic institutions, rather than in the deliberately corrupted ones of capitalism.
F that bullshit argument in Jacobin shitting on data center resistance. So this is 2 writers for that outlet that I wouldn't trust now and I've barely paid attention to that outlet.
Who do they think are homeowners who can just eat a 100% reduction in home value and just live with an underwater mortgage and be able to move when the house is unlivable? I'm a disabled public health activist, and a lot of the people fighting data centers in my county are senior citizens. What are people supposed to do when their home is unlivable and they can't afford to buy a new house or even pay rent because the only reason they were getting by is that their mortgage had been low or they'd paid off or inherited a house where they took care of their parents? This is why people bought houses to hedge on future rents. A LOT of people in my area who own homes would have to pay 3x or more per month to rent someplace now. Do you think that's doable on a fixed income?
This is just another situation where these people always want to talk to people in Pennsylvania, but as soon as I open my mouth, they may as well just say "no no Chloe shut up we want to talk to affluent small business owner maga trump voters and find out what they think so we can say everyone there is like them". Or maybe they'll talk to wannabe anthropologist like journalists or fancy scholars who helicopter in here and then decide what we're like! Us Appalachian bumpkins.
Well guess what, I can tell you about the maga because I know everyone wants to hear about them more than they want to hear about me. Yes there's maga in the local data center organizing. And it's being led by just ordinary residents, and helped by environmental and social justice groups. (And undermined by solar industry groups pretending to be environmental groups.) And the lead maga trump trucker convoy guy who last made headlines because he took his trump truck down to counter protest at a No Kings demonstration and then got charged with hit and run with it. And he's been making the rounds at public meetings speaking out against data centers. Bonus, he berates the local Democratic county commissioner regularly for things like proposing a very mild anti-ICE ordinance, but this trump trucker was speaking out about how instead of the bankrupt hospital being sold to a for-profit healthcare company, he said it should've been seized by county government to be made into an employee owned worker co-op hospital.
Meanwhile I've just spent the past 12 hours sorting through Right To Know emails from the state government showing how they've secretly been in cahoots with AWS to push data centers here, and putting them in chronological order so they make sense to people. Meanwhile our governor, our Democratic governor, is on both sides of a public private partnership with AI. And people are still floating this Trumpian figure as a possible 2028 presidential hopeful. Some of the maga assume that democrats are the problem. Seriously. And it's hard to disabuse them of that when the democrats who control the state house just passed a data centers bill that hands a lawfare gun to the industry actors, and all the democrats in the PA state house voted for it, while most of the Republicans voted against it.
I feel like I'm losing my mind.
Presumably most Nimbys don't own their own bunkers and private islands....
“The thing that has kept me up at night, and is starting to really worry me,” he says, “is what happens if this gets 10 times bigger?”
https://www.wired.com/story/new-gas-powered-data-centers-could-emit-more-greenhouse-gases-than-entire-nations/
They have so much available space that instead of seeing AI data centers as a threat to grid stability, China treats them as a convenient way to “soak up oversupply,” he added.
https://fortune.com/2025/08/14/data-centers-china-grid-us-infrastructure/
I'm also wondering at what point the switch to a Star Trek style "utopia" will happen
Through readings of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) and Dave Eggers’s The Circle (2013), the article shows how these originally critical dystopias have been appropriated by tech leaders to legitimize privatized sovereignty, algorithmic control, and oligarchic dominance, while concealing concentrated power beneath narratives of innovation and inevitability.
https://academic.oup.com/isagsq/article/6/1/ksag002/8508721
I didn’t read the Jacobin article, but the tech angle is worth raising as well. It’s far from certain that the current approach to AI (brute force scaling) is the best one. It’s unclear even if the current approach will *meaningfully* improve with scale. Forced constraints might be a good thing for the tech itself in a “necessity is the mother of invention” kind of way.
I also found it odd to find an argument like Buck’s in Jacobin. It read to me like class war alright — Buck and her PMC vs Joe Lunchpail.