All across the country, data centers are popping up like mushrooms. Likewise, people everywhere are mobilizing against them.
People hate the data centers. Nearly three-quarters of Americans oppose them, especially when built in their backyards.
The controversy around them has caught politicians off guard. Everyone thought they would be win-win situations. Pro-data center leaders from both major parties are now scrambling to slow the rejection movement down.
In theory, data centers have everything to offer—jobs, tax revenue and business opportunities. Communities benefit from private-sector firms that inject billions of dollars into needy rural areas at no cost to taxpayers. Schools fill up and their budgets increase. Everyone would seem to come out ahead.
Trying to Explain the Hatred
Despite the benefits, a data center revolt exists. Most reasons involve very practical considerations. Residents say they fear higher water and electric bills due to the centers’ demands. Some cite environmental concerns like air quality and noise. Others don’t like the intrusion of outsiders who come in with lucrative deals and even secret negotiations that divide communities. Yet others don’t trust the big tech companies or construct conspiracy theories around AI.
Proponents of the centers, including the President, are quick to label any opposition as backward and anti-progress. They accuse data center deniers of not wanting their communities to prosper. They say the dissenters hold their communities hostage because of irrational anxieties.
The issue is polarizing communities everywhere.
One Overlooked Reason: Ugliness
In the middle of the controversy, there is one objection that people are afraid to mention. In a world ruled by money, this reason might be considered an embarrassment. However, it is hard to deny. It is better just to say it out loud.
Data centers are ugly.
Something about them causes uneasiness. The gut reaction of many is to say stop. Keep them out. They don’t belong here.
A Deeper Problem
Saying the centers are ugly does not mean they are disordered. They are generally huge, well-designed, windowless buildings surrounded by well-landscaped lawns and parking lots. Developers do everything possible to make them practical and efficient.
However, the problem of ugliness is much deeper than just design and engineering. It involves a human desire for beauty that extends beyond the material part of reality. When this desire is suppressed, things become soulless and depressing. People need beauty because it speaks to the soul about God and His Creation.
Beauty has subjective elements, but certain objective principles must be followed. Data centers are ugly because they lack these fundamental elements. They introduce an appearance of brutality that leaves people overwhelmed and crushed.
No Proportion
First, beauty depends on proportionality. Things that are too big or too small cause anxiety since this lack of proportion makes things difficult to know and understand.
The human instinct of sociability demands proportion. As social beings, people naturally form relationships and create environments that help them understand and appreciate what surrounds them. When things are unknown or unknowable because they lack proportion, people feel like strangers in their own land.
Thus, the monstrous size of the data centers dwarfs everything around them. The facilities are gigantic, unknown boxes resembling massive computer chips, grafted into the middle of a community, without architectural style or adornment. The stark structures feel heavy, weighing down the area. Many centers have a hostile, fortress-like appearance that isolates them from the community and from the things locals hold to be proportional and, therefore, beautiful.
A second reason for the ugliness is that data centers are sterile, often gloomy structures with countless rows of machines inside and few workers. The buildings are soulless and lifeless. They are not meant to foster joy or community. They aren’t tied to any place, since they can exist wherever resources are available. They survive as intruders in the neighborhood, without seeking connections or contributing to its history.
Not Part of the Culture
Finally, for centers like these to be beautiful, they must have organic links to the local population and its culture. What makes the instinct of sociability very uneasy is the lack of points of reference within the culture. The mere knowledge that something unrelated to the community exists in the area causes uneasiness, not the joy of beauty.
A place should reflect the population that for generations has molded it to its tastes and preferences. Data centers do not have, nor do they seek, this connection to local people or their culture. It is a purely functional, transactional relationship. No one would take a visitor to see the local data center.
The Permanent Things
Thus, people hate the data centers. They may not be able to say why, but it touches upon things that are difficult to explain, like ugliness. Sometimes it involves lands, homes and memories that are worth more than money and cannot be replaced once gone.
What is missing is that human element, which does not fit into the fast-paced, sterile environments of vast cyber-networks. It is what Russell Kirk referred to as the “permanent things,” those norms of beauty, truth, goodness, justice and charity that owe their existence and authority to a power higher than the information networks—indeed to a transcendent God.
Individuals are made up of body and soul. Limiting the discussion to the material needs of big tech stifles the human spirit. The spiritual needs must be addressed as they are superior to material ones. These topics cannot be left out of the debate and ignored.
Looking for Solutions
The solution to the data center crisis is very simple. Or so it might seem.
Let’s make data centers beautiful. Let their structures inspire admiration and awe. Use local styles and preferences that reflect the rich beauty and culture of the surrounding communities.
Such solutions might seem easy, but something about a data center seems to cry out that this is impossible. The data center does not lend itself to such adornment. Its functions won’t let it escape the bounds of materialistic dreariness.
Encasing its machines inside a cathedral-like structure would only make it eerie and dystopian—a scene from a science fiction drama. It is almost as if the data center must be ugly to fulfill its purpose.
However, these problems do have solutions, but the issue must be on the table. The key is to recognize it as a problem. Then human ingenuity can work to mitigate or disguise the damage this worship of ugliness causes.
Better yet, the controversy could help raise questions about the purposes of the data center. Perhaps the mad rush to AI is misdirected.
There needs to be a discussion of the causes of the frenetic intemperance of clashing desires that lie at the root of so many postmodern problems. AI models are not the solution. To resolve the problem of ugly data centers, there must be a general return to order and, above all, to beauty.
Photo Credit: © tiero – stock.adobe.com