Comment by Planktonne

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lH7ZVcDlnk

This former Google employee, not operating under an anonymous username, says to a live audience at 19:00 that "Don't be evil", as suggested at a company meeting by a fellow employee in June 2000, was in fact meant to be a joke

He says that he thinks Google has "strayed a bit"

> >"A lot of opposition to data centers isn't about specific claimed benefits/drawbacks, but the fact that the people behind them are known to be bad actors."

>HN commenters favouring data centers never seem to address this either. It

>appears they just don't get it.

Can you point me to some comments favouring data centers? I know people get the opinion that I favour things that I do not because I challenge unsupported claims against them. I have a tendency to defend against any criticism that I feel to be unfair. This seems to conflict with a point of view that any argument that moves people to your cause is a good argument, whether it is valid or not. The sense that perception is truth is ingrained into a lot of people subconsciously, and there are a cynical few who believe it explicitly.

The problem with the "known to be bad actors" argument is that an action is assumed to be done with bad intentions because they are bad actors, which is then used as evidence that they are bad actors.

There are definitely bad actions, and each should be addressed. There are few organisations that perform bad actions as a goal. Religion and other ideologies followed to a similar extent can provide that. Self interest rarely does. This is where Larry the Lawnmower becomes a useful demonstration, A lawnmower is not your enemy, even if it does chop your hand off.

>If someone does not like "AI" software nor the people behind it, then it makes little sense to argue about electricity, water, eminent domain, etc.

People know this. But they also know that not liking something (and I think hate is not too strong a word for the depth of feeling here) just because of what it is, is prejudice. People do not want to be bigots so they argue the issues. Electricity, Water, intellectual property, competition for work, intellectual property, privacy, etc. Those are all individual issues each with their own properties. If a person has a wide variety of individual issues like that and they decide against a single thing like AI, then there are only a few options. It is either a massive coincidence, a sign of prejudice, or the coordinated work of someone who is explicitly aligned against you.

The same would, of course, would have to be true for those people aligned against you. If all of their thoughts supported one result they would be similarly be prejudiced. So if you take the path of assuming they are against you, you cannot accept that they would do anything to address your concerns.

This leads to what was stated above

>Closed-loop cooling systems? “I don’t believe them.” Paying millions in taxes? “I don’t believe them.” Creating a thousand jobs? “I don’t believe them.” I hear a reflexive skepticism of every claim.

I'm not even sure that what the article says is true when they say

"Back in San Francisco, it is striking how little the AI industry understands its own unpopularity"

I think there is an awareness, but also a sense that there is nothing that can be done except ignore it. If they do the bad thing, they will be vilified. If they do the good thing, no-one will believe it and they will be vilified. Once trust has been lost, there is no point in engaging. Any attempt to regain trust would be seen as an attempt at further manipulation.

We live in a world where people will look you in the eye and say with absolute certainty that the fact that "Don't be evil" was taken out of the Google code supports the idea they are bad actors.

Yet to this day, the last line of their code of conduct says...

"And remember... don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!

Last updated July 16, 2026"

People will say that with such confidence that, If I say it is not true, they enthusiastically search it up, express surprise that the "don't be evil" is still there, and then say that it means nothing, because it's their actions that matter.

...and that is the truth. It _is_ their actions that matter. That's precisely what I push back on things that claim to know what their actions will be based upon some hidden state that they believe can be divined. The sense of certainty that they are malevolent, because they did a thing that was interpreted as a bad thing because they were assumed to be malevolent.

People, organisations, corporations, and governments can all do bad things. They can all do good things. We can judge their deeds better than we can judge their intentions.

Perhaps instead of "We don't believe you" people could just start with "I would like to believe you, show me how"

Corporate America is trapped in a race to the bottom - if you do the 'right' thing and say, don't negotiate hard for tax breaks from the host city or get some sort of predatory preferred pricing from the utilities providers to the detriment of local residents, 1) your shareholders might go after you for not maximising profit and 2) your competitors will do these things anyway and undercut you.

mostly unrelated but amusing: I keep getting fliers from Google fiber trying to get me to switch. Every one has this one bizarre line in it: "our customers have never had their rates go up!"---as if I am too stupid to realize that is not a promise. Now, I have no idea if that works on other people. Maybe enough other people are stupid and don't notice that that's not a promise that turns out to be good ad copy. But I am personally so put off by the disrespectful attempt at manipulation that I consider switching less, even though it might well save me money. It is significantly worse for them, as a sales tactic, than if they had written nothing there at all.

You raise an interesting point. If we look at Mag7: Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta/Facebook, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Tesla: All of they are probably building data centers at a furious pace. (Honestly, I'm not sure if NVIDIA needs as many as the other six.) However, we do not see great opposition to their own data centers. Why? My guess: They are incredibly careful about how they plan data center expansion to reduce brand impact. Most of the opposition seems to be directed towards (1) pure play data center builders/operators who are mostly B2B and don't care as much about their brand retail reputation (2) pure AI/LLM companies, like OpenAI and Anthropic. About (2): I wonder is the pushback deeper than the data center environmental impact and more about pushback against the unknown: "The Singularity with take all of our jobs.", etc.

The difference being that AI companies are destroying all sorts of stuff, and cellphone companies didn't - they just provided cellphones.

Society did decay because of cellphones but it wasn't anything to do with the cellphone companies. The towers always were exactly what the cellphone companies said they were.

The difference in attitude between cell phone conspiracy theories and data center conspiracy theories is almost entirely driven by the media reporting on them. The media (correctly) identifies people worried about cell phone radiation affecting their health as crackpots. But because the Anglosphere media establishment itself is threatened by the tech industry at large, it not only fails to report on anti-datacenter sentiment among uninformed people as similar crackpottery, it amplifies basically-inaccurate negative memes about data centers such as their water use.

You raise a good point. I was raised in the 1980s and 1990s. Every few months there were interviews and investigations on a local news programme about how using a mobile phone might cause brain cancer. Or living near above ground power lines caused all kinds of imaginary illnesses. From what I can see, most of those crazy people moved on to a new conspiracy theory. I cannot remember the last time that I saw any serious media coverage of either issue from my childhood.

This is an example of the same problem as the article; you're treating trust as entirely unrelated to reality. It can get out-of-step, but that's not the only possibility, and it's not the one we're facing here.

The problem with conspiracy theories is not that they're based on a lack of trust, but that they're not rational. Sometimes a lack of trust is perfectly rational.

Cell towers don't actually fry your brains. Steam powered trains don't move so fast you suffocate. However, the big tech CEOs are absolutely going to take your data and use it against you. They are going to build data centers that harm your community. The fear here is reasonable and evidenced.

This isn't unique to AI, but AI is the current iteration of the same problem. Sometimes people distrust outsiders because they're star-bellied sneetches, but sometimes they distrust them because they're the British empire. You can't treat all distrust as unreasoning.

An early form of anti-clipchimping. He would not say the words "shame on me".