Data centers are not yet a partisan issue. There is plenty here for conservative and liberal alike to hate. The writers of our reality have a way of, with time, turning agreement into acrimony, but for the moment, I think we have an opportunity. 

The planned Botetourt data center will be a Google installation. This company has also recently made news for its plan to release 64 million mosquitoes, lab-infected with a fertility-killing bacteria, to manage the mosquito populations of California and Florida. The ecological impact? Unknown, but we can expect it to be above zero: many creatures eat these insects. The native population would, however, eventually rebound, but Google plans this to be a repeated intervention—a mosquito subscription service. 

You can understand why Google would want a data center, but are almost certainly wondering what mosquitoes have to do with its business. The explanation lies in an open, and nasty, little secret—the “bio-digital convergence” and the “internet of nano-things”—but let’s leave this aside for now. We have here one model of corporate practice. It goes like this: find a thing that is plentiful, inexpensive or free, take it, poison it, and sell it back to its original possessors, the public. It works for mosquitoes, and it works for our water. We gave our water to the Water Authority. It filters it, and treats  it (such that I will not consume it without further filtration) and sells it to us for a profit. Oh, and it can commodify it, issue bonds on it, escape all taxation, and, if it prefers, sell it all to Google. 

It’s a racket, and we don’t notice, in part because we’re preoccupied with ideological narratives. Our preoccupation, funnily enough, is engineered using the same trick: take our noblest instincts and values, repackage (poison) them, and sell them back to us as grist for the partisan mill.  

Conservatives are providers and protectors. Because of the former, they can be duped into using Austrian economics as a perverse apology for (decidedly not laissez faire)  monopoly capitalism. Because of the latter, they can be made to support the PATRIOT Act, or endless wars in support of corporate expansion.

Liberals are nurturers and conservators. Because of the former, they might support, simultaneously, endless immigration and the welfare state. Because of the latter, they can be duped into advocating for Rockefeller-funded “green” energy technology, such as wind farms, disastrous for the environment. 

Ingeniously, these priority sets map beautifully onto the  different dispositions of the sexes. This has become something of a commonplace in U.S. political discourse, and you can find maps of what the electoral college would look like if only men, or only women voted, such as this one. 

And here we see the trick repeated a third time. Intact families need less from the government, and less from corporations. If men and women can be made to incessantly harangue each other about their preferences (imagining them to be sanctioned by a holy political code), then the family is weakened. If what was meant to be a division of labor is mistaken for ideological incompatibility, the family can be destroyed. And again, what the family can provide for itself, protection, provision, nurturance, and conservation, is sold back to us as the police, wage-slavery, social services, daycare centers, public schooling, “green” tech, and so on. 

Also in this series:

The Botetourt Data Center: a Bad Deal with a Scammy Cherry on Top

The Botetourt Data Center, The Water Authority, and an Invitation to Corruption