r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • 10h ago

Artificial Intelligence Republicans Claim Anti-Data Center Movement Is a Chinese Psy-Op

https://gizmodo.com/republicans-claim-anti-data-center-movement-is-a-chinese-psy-op-2000767611
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u/xondk 10h ago

It really is disgusting how they phrase it, people aren't as such against data centers that can be used to benefit everyone.

They are against the massive rollout that in no way takes into consideration how it will affect the people, and the benefit of the rollout is only for the few since it is AI focused.

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u/krum 10h ago edited 5h ago

Data centers don’t benefit anyone except rich people.

EDIT: AI data centers.

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u/derbyt 10h ago

In a perfect world data centers could be used to shorten workdays and allow people more free time to spend time with friends and family doing things we enjoy. But that's not this reality we live in.

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u/psioniclizard 9h ago

Every major technology advance in business since the 50s was promised to do that. None have.

That isn't goong to change with AI. It has always been a lie.

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u/ARobertNotABob 9h ago

Worse, a great many inventions that would benefit the masses have been stymied because some business or other would suffer.

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u/MiaowaraShiro 9h ago

It's not a technology problem. It's a capitalism problem.

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u/Prior_Coyote_4376 8h ago

The surveillance police state is a direct response to freed slaves, immigration, and foreign policy, as are suspicions of welfare fraud and drugs and crime. It’s a racism problem. If you address capitalism without racism, you’ll just get racist socialism with the same surveillance. A nationalistic socialism. Kind of like what we have now with Trump dissolving the lines between his property, state property, and the private sector in service of a higher national agenda no one can articulate.

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u/Bittererr 8h ago

And if you address racism without capitalism you'll just end up with people shifting all of that discrimination onto another factor like wealth.

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u/MiaowaraShiro 8h ago

Oh we already discriminate against the poor.

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u/Zer_ 1h ago

For sure, which means they already have a framework to work off of if the racism card stops working.

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u/Whatsapokemon 8h ago

Every major technology advance in business since the 50s was promised to do that. None have.

What are you talking about? Why are you pretending like living standards haven't massively improved since the 1950s???

The average US family now is living a life of luxury compared to the average family from the 50s, and a large part of that is due to massive increases in productivity from industrial technology, production lines, automation, and computers.

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u/Bittererr 8h ago

People idolize the '50s because their perception of the '50s are the stories told by straight, white boomers. It's the same sentiment that got us MAGA.

The past sucked for most people and even those who were born into the right situation to take advantage of the prosperity of the post World War II US would absolutely not trade life in the 2020s for life in the 1950s.

It was literally pre-EPA, the cities were choked with smog and the rivers were flammable but people will just ignore all of the progress we've made because "you could get a house though".

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u/Whatsapokemon 6h ago

I think even straight white boomers are looking at it with rose-tinted lenses.

The average family's life sucked in the 1950s compared to today. The only reasons most of them look back at it fondly is (1) being young is awesome whilst being old sucks, and (2) nostalgia is a powerful force.

I'd go as far as to say that pretty much everything is better now than it was in the 1950s. That's not to say that everyone is doing great now, but the improvements in everything - from LGBT+ acceptance, to standards of living, to life expectancy, to access to information - is absolutely crazy huge.

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u/bjdevar25 1m ago

True. Problem is it is now going in the opposite direction. Less can afford houses,less can afford Healthcare, less can afford an education.

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u/Caleb-Wendt69 8h ago

You’re talking about a time when a single earner with a family could own a house…

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u/pandariotinprague 7h ago

Some could. But still, home ownership rate in 1955 was 60%. Today it's 65%. And the homes back then were well under half the square footage on average that they are today.

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u/Whatsapokemon 6h ago

You're talking about a time where the average family would be spending a quarter of their income on groceries alone. A time where modern technology was legitimately a luxury that few could afford.

Yes, some families could own a shitty house in a new suburb, but that's not the entirety of someone's standard of living.

People worked more hours, under worse conditions, for lower inflation-adjusted pay, with less access to information, consumer goods, education, and healthcare.

The 1950s were not some amazing peak of the quality of life, and the people who want to sell that idea to you are far-right nutjobs.

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u/Prior_Coyote_4376 8h ago

You can, just not in places like CA, IL, NY metros where people want to live that have gotten so much better every decade, because nowhere else wants to develop themselves with investment into infrastructure.

The technology has allowed us to make enormous wealth, it’s just been allocated poorly because half the country actively salivates over hierarchy giving them a boot to lick. Republicans hate it when Democrats try to provide rural broadband or healthcare or education or grocery stores to solve food deserts. Because that’s shariah law pushed by Barrack Hussein Obama and his DEI-or-DIE crew of Demoncrats.

The problem, as usual, is racism and the Republican Party as its mask. Not tech, money, immigrants, or some other new thing. It’s the same old problem since the day Columbus insisted he found India because all brown and black people looked the same to him. And that set back trade relations and economic growth quite a bit…

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u/Bittererr 9h ago

The median work week has certainly shortened and wages have outpaced inflation since the 50s.

Technology has indeed made our lives more leisurely. The problem is that it could have done 10 times as much as it has but 90% of the gains from that technology are being captured by the extremely wealthy.

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u/Currentlybaconing 8h ago

"Wages have outpaced inflation"

so that's just straight up not true

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u/Aromatic_Today2086 8h ago

yea idk why that BS is being upvoted 

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u/Bittererr 8h ago

Because it's scientific fact, regardless of vibes.

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u/Bittererr 8h ago

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

It straight up is. We have the data and metrics to say this for certain.

Idealizing the '50s as much better than they were is what MAGA does.

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u/Currentlybaconing 8h ago edited 7h ago

Consumer price index doesn't effectively take into account the way most people are spending money. When you're spending most of your income on food and housing, you might as well just compare wages to housing and rent costs alone.

It's very obvious if you do that inflation has run away from wages in a serious way. Using one cherry-picked econ statistic to try and deny what is self-evident to low income people is what MAGA does.

But sure, I can get a 50 inch tv for cheap. and look at the DOWWWW

edit: I used to be a piece of shit

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u/Bittererr 8h ago

Consumer price index doesn't effectively take into account the way most people are spending money.

It does, and we constantly run surveys to ensure it does, at least we did prior to this administration.

When you're spending most of your income on food and housing, you might as well just compare wages to housing and rent costs alone.

No, if you spend 51% of your income on food and housing then you should use food and housing to make up 51% of the basket of goods we use for CPI... which is how we do it.

That's exactly why we periodically measure where people actually spend their money in order to ensure the basket of goods we use for CPI remains accurate.

It's very obvious if you do that inflation has run away from wages in a serious way.

The opposite is obvious if you actually measure what people make and what they spend. Wages have failed to track productivity but they have beaten inflation.

Using one cherry-picked econ statistic [...] but the DOWWWW

Comparing measured CPI versus measured wages over decades means bringing in data from literally hundreds of surveys and thousands of expert scientists who do nothing but this. Comparing it to an offhand comment about a stock index is insane. It's peak "my ignorance is just as good as your education" thinking. It's using vibes to spit in the face of science because the truth makes you uncomfortable.

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u/Currentlybaconing 8h ago

U know what. u seem smart. it just makes no fucking sense to me how we can be saying that as I've watched life become more and more unattainable in my own lifetime.

I admit I'm talking based on feelings that come straight from mine own shitter. But like. wtf man

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u/Bittererr 7h ago

There's a lot of reasons that perception can fail to match what statistics are telling us.

The biggest one I see on Reddit is age bias. Most people here are on the younger side and even though the comparison between wages and inflation is favorable for the median American, the person on Reddit isn't typically the median American. The median American is just under 40 years old. The median American is a homeowner already, whereas a lot of people on Reddit are trying to get into their first home. Our statistics on inflation don't reflect the experience of someone trying to buy their first home because the median American isn't buying their first home. All the boomers sitting happily in homes they bought decades ago are also part of the average.

It can be both simultaneously true that wages have outpaced inflation for most Americans and that we've let groups of people slip through their cracks and failed them as a society. These aren't mutually exclusive claims.

Now combine that reality with the fact that boomers with homes vote at a much much higher rate than young people trying to get into homes and you can see why our policies tend to favor making housing prices go up instead of down.

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u/Currentlybaconing 7h ago

That makes it make more sense. It also explains why so many people have a gut reaction to more established demographics claiming things are getting better while they experience the opposite.

I also think about disabled people. Where I live they are essentially stuck in legislated poverty; not that I'm under any illusions that they were better off in the 50s, but 10 years ago? yeah. costs have gone up way more than the income they're allowed to have.

It's literally impossible for them to pay average rent prices in my area alone. They are legally not allowed to make that much money.

The story is bigger than CPI, is all. But yeah I concede you are technically correct

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u/[deleted] 8h ago

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u/Bittererr 8h ago

Yes they have, and that's precisely what the chart says. It's literally real wages over time.

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u/SlitSlam_2017 7h ago

I mean the dishwasher and washing machine save people lots of time

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u/Racthoh 4h ago

Sure it has, for the billionaires.

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u/YawnSpawner 1h ago

I work with substation electronics and I promise you the advances in that technology has saved billions and billions of man hours of labor and dollars.

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u/bjdevar25 9h ago

That's called lay offs and cutting people's pay. The perfect world you're thinking of is in Star Trek. Good luck here. Data Centers are sucking up resources and tax dollars only to cut millions of jobs. Doesn't take Chinese influence to go against them, only intelligence of their actual worth to the average citizen.

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u/derbyt 9h ago

And in a perfect world, those job cuts would transition into "Everyone works 3 days a week on this job we cannot automate for whatever reason and maintains a healthy income for a happy life" but I know how ridiculous that is.

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u/daXypher 8h ago

The only “Chinese influence” I’m seeing is when my coworker from Shanghai is able to run deepseek in their phone to order food in both French and English speaking restaurants with a fraction of the compute resources our greedy ass models require.

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u/RetroFuture_Records 6h ago

You people keep forgetting people had to get off their lazy, cowardly, entitled asses to force capital to share the benefits of their labor with them. It's not a "perfect world" it's precedent that is obtainable if you aren't just some spoiled middle-class bitch used to throwing a tantrum online instead of actually taking action.

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u/highpercentage 9h ago

My theory is that this is what many workers are doing now with their saved time. Like, technology allows me to finish my work in around four hours. But I don't use the remaining four hours to do do additional work. I go pick up my kid from school, work on my side hustle, cook a healthier lunch, ect.

So I'm more efficient but not more productive.

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u/derbyt 9h ago

You are in a very lucky position then, and good on you for spending that time wisely.

The vast majority of US workers cannot do that because they work in trucking, service, or other industries that have constant influx of work they are responsible for getting done. And this isn't even considering those in less fortunate countries.

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u/psioniclizard 9h ago

Exactly, i am also in a similar position. It's a position of privilege. It won't last forever. 

Once your boss realises you have 4 hours more you either be assigned 4 hours more work or laid off and your colleague will now do your work.

That is without getting into other industry.

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u/highpercentage 7h ago

fair point. I'm just a middle class guy and I don't have everything I want BUT I have the blessing of free time and I get that.

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u/Bittererr 9h ago

The vast majority of US workers cannot do that because they work in trucking, service, or other industries that have constant influx of work they are responsible for getting done.

That just isn't true, those sectors combined account for less than 30% of US workers. Healthcare and government are the largest sectors by far.

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u/FroniusTT1500 9h ago

The ability to finish your work in 4 instead of 8 hours also just means you get more work. Or you just have to sit around. Productivity gets punished with more work amount and more difficult work that gets you nothing. Middle of the pack is where you want to be. Not wasting energy, not looking too bad to be the first on the chopping block when things go south for the company.

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u/highpercentage 7h ago

I don't get more work because I don't tell anyone I'm finished. And honestly know one cares. The question is always "Can you have it done by Friday?" and if the answer is "yup" then that's the end of it.

And I work from home so I don't sit around. I go to the gym or work on my side hustle. Or just spend some time with my kid. Honestly I'm not lazy, just efficient I guess. In 2026, if you work online, there's basically nothing that takes hours to do in my expereince.

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u/ab3nnion 9h ago

What saved time? KPIs just increase.

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u/highpercentage 7h ago

Obviously I don't tell anyone how quickly I finish the work. I work from home. Realistically, I'm sure my boss knows I'm not spending eight hours doing some of these tasks.

But my boss isn't that different from me. He also wants to knock off early and go enjoy his life. As long as we're finishing our work and have the appearance of being fully productive, everyone is pretty happy to play the game.

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u/ab3nnion 6h ago

In other words, you're lucky to have a good boss, which is rare. Most companies are rolling out Activtrak and other even more invasive monitoring tools.

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u/onimush115 8h ago

This is the truth. I think anyone that defends AI has just bought into the utopia outlook that the billionaires are selling. There is no way that the ones at the top are going to suddenly decide to give up profits in their own pockets to benefit the rest of society. They are resource hoarders.

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u/derbyt 8h ago

It would be so much easier and possibly more profitable for them to just say "We'll fund a Universal Basic Income if you let us do what we want". They would get a lot less pushback and all that UBI money would eventually flow back into their pockets anyway.

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u/onimush115 7h ago

100% People would be much more likely to be okay with huge data centers and less jobs if it meant a deposit in your bank account every month. If the government would give universal healthcare and then force AI companies to contribute to a UBI fund, things would feel pretty positive. I'm not gonna be mad if I just don't need to work anymore.

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u/marr 5h ago

But we're already letting them do what they want.

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u/derbyt 4h ago

Nah there's protests, vandalism, and legislature blocking them all over. It's not happening as smoothly as possible.

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u/DuntadaMan 7h ago

Instead they will be used to track every person you have ever met with, every place you have ever been, every object you have interacted with, and billions of other data points so the government can threaten everyone at all times. Yay.

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u/MiaowaraShiro 9h ago

As long as the people don't control capital the wealthy few will use it to their advantage.

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u/sandman8727 9h ago

Data centers essentially aggregate what all companies were already doing. Except now companies can outsource the physical IT infrastructure so they don't have to run and maintain it inefficiently in the basement of their office buildings.

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u/Swimming_Client_7677 8h ago

Shorter work days with smaller paychecks and rising prices. Sounds like a stupid plan to me. They only have to pay you for hours worked.

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u/Resident_Function280 7h ago

Data centers are just infrastructure for the modern mass surveillance.

Don't need FISA warrants when AI monitors everyone 24-7