Comment by keeda
14 days ago
> It's not reflexive; it's evidenced. Regardless of what big tech promises, or potential mitigations, everyone knows what tech companies do now. It's not a generalised small-town lack of trust in big city folks, it's a direct response to decades of extractive behaviour by the same companies and people.
I feel like this is projection. If you look at the list of top brands ranked by a variety of dimensions (trust, innovativeness, brand value, etc.) over the past multiple years, Big Tech companies regularly rank amongst the top 100.
The HN population, being mostly in the tech industry, is aware of all the shenanigans these companies pull and that has colored our views. But the rest of the general population... not so much. I mean, even Meta properties still rank highly despite all the things we know Meta has been doing pretty much since inception.
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.
Hmm, I'm not quite sure people are being discriminating about which data centers they oppose. I recall Microsoft and Amazon making a lot of concessions to get some of their sites approved.
I do agree though that despite what reasons citizens may be citing in public -- power bills, water, pollution, noise -- the real pushback is against the "AI will take our jobs" fear. To be fair, it's not just an abstract fear for a number of people already.
Yes, that is exactly what I meant when I wrote: "My guess: They are incredibly careful about how they plan data center expansion to reduce brand impact." Most large construction projects and buildings/factories require "lot of concessions". It is a fact of life in a modern democracy.