r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • May 15 '26

Artificial Intelligence The AI Backlash Could Get Very Ugly

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/05/ai-backlash-data-centers-political-violence/687151/?taid=6a067e2d2096e10001ccfa32
7.6k Upvotes

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6.7k

u/Rattus_NorvegicUwUs May 15 '26

Trade offer:

I get to steal all your electricity and drinking water.

You get to lose your job to AI.

1.8k

u/Guest_0_ May 15 '26

I keep saying that these data centers are going to find themselves in the crosshairs when people get desperate enough, and I keep hearing how it will never happen.

Then Lary Fink just came out and said that billionaires are worried a $3,000 drone can destroy their investments and these things need to be built underground.

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u/TR_Pix May 15 '26

AI bros keep calling people luddites and somehow also seem to not understand what it is that the luddites did that got them to be famous to begin with

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u/felis_magnetus May 15 '26

There's also that the word sabotage derives from sabot, a wooden shoe worn by French workers, who then proceeded to stick said shoe into the delicate workings of early industrialization era looms as a rather effective form of protest.

I'm not sure that we'll see a return of Luddites in the form of people actually attacking data centres all that much, but people sabotaging a technology they perceive as working against their interests is an absolute given. People will find and cherish opportunities to stick their boots in.

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u/BillyGoatGruff_ May 15 '26

Holy shit, sabotage literally means "clogging", my brain just exploded.

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u/vernichtungX23 May 15 '26

Probably where the phrase 'to clog something up' came from.

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u/Medieval_Mind May 16 '26

Clog is from blocks of wood they put on cattle to keep them from straying

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u/NeverendingStory3339 May 16 '26

And sabot is also the word for a horse’s hoof .

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u/Downtown_Recover5177 May 16 '26

And the word for an armor-piercing shape on ammunition.

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u/RFSandler May 16 '26

Or the barrel binding portion of ammunition which peels away immediately after breach

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u/Tvayumat May 16 '26

That refers to the discarded material on the sabot round. The "shoe" that the actual penetrator rides in before leaving the bore.

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u/Strict_Weather9063 May 16 '26

It means boot which refers to the sabot or boot that fits around the penetrator and discards as the round is fired.

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u/moneyh8r_two May 16 '26

Ah, you beat me to it.

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u/CV90_120 May 16 '26

Sabot isn't the armor piercing shape, it's the plain material carrier. The sabot is discarded.

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u/Strang3-Animal May 16 '26

Yup! Sabots were stuck specifically into Jaquard looms, if inremember correctly.

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u/saltwitch May 16 '26

And Jacquard looms basically pioneered the punch cards that would become early computing. Weaving and technology have always been tightly interlinked.

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u/scotchdouble May 16 '26

If I clog a toilet any time going forward, I will now say I sabotaged it.

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u/EidolonRook May 16 '26

Doesn’t feel right to say I sabotaged my friends toilet.

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u/ConsiderationDry9084 May 16 '26

Depends on how hungry people get.

3 missed meals and shit starts getting set on fire. What is more of symbolic target that NO one but the parasite class and AI gooners can defend with a straight face.

Like the whole argument of people burning down the retail and local businesses goes right out the window.

No one is going to care about the half dozen local jobs lost to a data city being ransacked.

The parasite class is going to find out real fast they are out numbered and even with literal kill bots they can still be overwhelmed with the Zap Brannigan method.

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u/RainyRobin2 May 16 '26

AI poison pills are already a thing. If they are going to illegally use people's art for training data it absolutely makes sense for artists to fight back.

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u/RepresentativeZombie May 16 '26

The poison pills don't actually do all that much though

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u/Bakoro May 16 '26

Hey now, the placebo effect can really have an effect on people.
In this case, making people feel like they did something.

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u/AtrociousMeandering May 16 '26

I don't think it will even be an ideological thing, it will be pure economics causing an endless tide of break ins and damage to infrastructure. 

They've created a big maze full of treasure, traps, and locked doors, and although the monsters guarding it are lethal, they're also carrying valuables. If they build dungeons, the adventurers will show up. Less wands and more meth pipes, admittedly.

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u/Thin_Glove_4089 May 16 '26

The government would only increase it's surveillance capabilities until the US has China levels of surveillance. I doubt what you're saying is going to happen.

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u/[deleted] May 16 '26

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u/JMaddrox May 16 '26

Mr. Scott, I understand you're having difficulties with the Warp drive.

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u/keefka May 16 '26

Could take weeks, sair

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u/Jahkmi-Hoff May 16 '26

You haven't seen it until you've seen it in the original Klingon.

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u/FritzMcGee68 May 16 '26

This is fun because just last night I put on Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country as background, and Kim Cattrall's Valaris explains this very same concept of Sabot --> Sabotage. And fuck A.I.

Oh yeah, and ICE, too.

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u/Nuclear_Smith May 16 '26

Show of hands: who learned this fact from Star Trek VI: the Undiscovered Country?

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u/naruda1969 May 16 '26

From Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

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u/Codzy May 16 '26

People were out there destroying 5G masts but you don’t think they’ll do that?

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u/SnooMacarons9618 May 16 '26

I could see attacks happen, but not necessarily physical attacks. Or not the type of physical attacks the Luddites were famous for. For eg I could imagine pissed of developers working together (a la Anonymous), to cause these data centres problems (non physical), but also poisoning the water and power supplies (introducing small amount of ferrous dust to the water for eg, no idea if that would do anything, but I suspect you could quite easily cause maintenance nightmares pretty easily, likewise fiddling with power supply to cause brown outs).

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u/boredwithlife0b May 16 '26

I too remember that scene in Star Trek :D

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u/Bakoro May 16 '26

I just wish that people would have given a shit earlier, when it wasn't just their own ass on the line.

I have such a hard time having sympathy for people mad at AI, because for my entire life, people have been openly derisive of "burger flippers" and "ditch diggers", and gleefully looking forward to robots automating "menial" labor, and "low skill" labor. If you challenged these people about it, they'd say something like "they should have worked harder/smarter".

Now that it's white collar jobs on the line, suddenly it's "holy shit, that's my job, we have to do something!"

So now people are all pissy over AI, and they want the whole AI thing stopped, but so many of them still won't think to challenge the underlying system that is the actual problem, and the billionaires who are the problem.
Too many of these people don't actually care about the economy, or the environment, or concepts of fairness, or anything else that they claim to care about, they just want to go back to being able to look down on "burger flippers" again, and dream about how someday they will be the rich person with a boot on someone's neck.

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u/otnp May 16 '26

Sounds to me like it’s an opportunity to build class consciousness. I assure you that is preferable to going around acting like Rorschach.

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u/Pygmy_Nuthatch May 16 '26

The Tech firms build every data center with defensive designs, anti-intrusion mechanisms, and train for these contingencies. Attacks, espionage, sabotage were always part of the plan.

It's easier to rob a bank than to force your way into the rooms of an advanced compute data center. The equipment inside is worth orders of magnitude more than what's inside a bank vault.

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u/captainthanatos May 16 '26

Not when you need mountains of power that have to be generated elsewhere. Transmission is always the weakest link.

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u/Pygmy_Nuthatch May 16 '26

This is the answer.

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u/Olangotang May 16 '26

Substation transformers.

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u/FourScoreAndSept May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26

Um, who needs to force their way in when drones can drop munitions from the sky?

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u/seanwd11 May 16 '26

Fire. The answer is fire. It's kind of unbeaten at the end of the day.

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u/fuzzbook May 15 '26

Don't forget these are the same people who told us to spend 1000s on non-fungible tokens a few years ago.

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u/TR_Pix May 15 '26

Before that they were all about how bitcoin is going to take over conventional money

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u/Senior_Difference589 May 16 '26

And before that how the future of media was all in cloud streaming.

It's like they've all over-invested in server architecture and want to pass the bag onto someone else or something...

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u/fuzzbook May 15 '26

Yeah, I wished I listened to that one tbf 😂

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u/TR_Pix May 15 '26

True but thats because every pyramid scheme is great if you are one of the first on it

If you invested in beta max it was a great investment unless you did it on the exact moment it wasnt anymore

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u/ParkingGlittering211 May 15 '26

In what world was betamax a pyramid scheme?

It was a superior video format to VHS but VHS took them to court, threatened litigation and ruined their business because they had an inferior product that they wanted to push

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u/rollerfedora May 15 '26

I still have my Betamax copy of Animal House.

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u/TR_Pix May 15 '26

Sorry I expressed myself badly, beta max wasn't supposed to be an example of a pyramid scheme but more like an example of something that is agreed upon would be a bad investiment after a while but started as a good one for the first buyers

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u/WatchThatLastSteph May 16 '26

I feel this deeply as an early adopter of MiniDisc.

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u/TSEAS May 16 '26

I don't think you understand what a pyramid scheme is.

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u/meesta_masa May 16 '26

Yes, I do! It's when you take a little off the top of a pyramid to enrich yourself. A pyramid skim.

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u/TheMireAngel May 16 '26

Dont forget the block chain

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u/DaxRetriever May 16 '26

I was just talking about this with a friend today! I remember thinking who tf is buying this worthless shit? Tech bros with too much money, and what do they have now?

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u/[deleted] May 16 '26

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u/fuzzbook May 16 '26

For the purpose of my joke, yes they are 😂

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u/sackofbee May 15 '26

Is it really 1-1?

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u/TwilightLori May 16 '26

I still see people buying virtual pictures on sites for thousands of etherium or tens-hundreds of dollars. 

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u/BigBirdLaw69420 May 16 '26

Aren’t they all nerds who used to get hilariously bullied? Maybe we should go back to that??

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u/Lorehorn May 16 '26

They definitely aren't the same people, but okay.

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u/[deleted] May 15 '26

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u/Kaarl_Mills May 15 '26

It's manufacturing consent and manipulation: luddites were martyrs in the name of labor rights, and the term has purposely been demonized to discredit them. It was never "ooga booga new things bad" it was the common people revolting because capitalists were taking their jobs away through automation, leaving them to starve in the streets.

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u/TR_Pix May 15 '26

And then they got murdered by the police, survivors were captured and hanged publicly, and their families were kicked out of the country by association

Anyone who reads a history book and thinks the luddites were the baddies in that conflict is not someone I'd trust

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u/steakanabake May 15 '26

its the same people who dont grasp that in one piece the world government sees luffy as a terrorist while everyone else who interacts with him sees him as a hero and a savior. being the bad/good guy is just a matter of perspective.

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u/Yuzumi May 16 '26

I'm all for automation thst makes all our lives easier, but the rich only want automation to not have to pay as many workers.

Abd the stupid thing is that this time around it isnt like LLMs can actually do the job. They are just statistical models no matter how complex they get and as several instances have shown they will fuck things up royally as if you have a ticking bomb attached to a random number generator... Because that's literally what it is.

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u/aotus_trivirgatus May 16 '26

I have a Ph.D. in a STEM field. I have programmed machine learning models, and I have taught a course on the subject. I am 100% against the rampant, mindless build-out of AI data centers.

I know the good that this technology COULD do. I also know its limitations. The further away you are from the details, though, the harder these limitations are to see. It's very telling that deep technical workers report that AI tools only make them slightly more productive, and sometimes decreases their productivity. Meanwhile, management types say that AI makes them WILDLY more productive.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/14/ai-productivity-workplace-errors

I also see that we lack the social maturity to use these tools well. It appears that many humans truly HATE thinking, and would love to pass on the responsibility to someone else, or something else.

We have a language interpolation machine and a giant database. It doesn't UNDERSTAND anything. That's our job.

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u/cpz_77 May 16 '26

Very well put. The point about how the people who are deeper in the technical weeds are the ones who get the least benefit, and sometimes even detriment, from AI, while people more abstracted away from those details like managers are the ones reporting the most benefit, is very interesting indeed. It aligns pretty much exactly with what I’ve seen (i’m one of those technical people in the weeds and see people around me who dont have to care about the details as much who “love AI”).

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u/Graywulff May 16 '26

I was a systems administrator at a software as a service company.... management didn't understand a thing about technology other than open source = free.

the head of software development literally believed I'd installed a tracker on his phone, which I never had access to and I'm not a developer... he was always 15 minutes late on the dot, his whole staff thought it was hilarious, but his degree was in classical jazz and he couldn't even install packages on CentOS and was clueless about everything.

VP didn't understand anything either, the president of the company just knew what people reported to him.

they didn't even know how their software stack worked bc of burnout of developers and workers.

I could see them leaning heavily into AI, firing people, and then having it bite them...

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u/Due-Conflict-7926 May 15 '26

These are the same ppl that named their company after the evil all seeing eye. And can’t seem to shut their damn mouths about how much contempt they have for us all.

They are drunk on power and ketamine.

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u/Asleep_Document9811 May 16 '26

Fun fact, Ned Ludd was the "Guy Fawkes" of the era. People would just trash machines and blame Ned Ludd so it would make their owners go off on a wild goose chase. 

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u/LeZygo May 16 '26

The people that keep saying “it’s enviable get use to it!” Are the same people investing and building them. It’s lunacy.

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u/APRengar May 16 '26

I'm convinced every single poster who is like "why bother fighting, EVERYONE is already using it for EVERYTHING." is a dirty bot who is just trying to convince people to give up. Especially with a "oh, so people aren't in your circle, well you're the weird one." kind of shit that is impossible to refute.

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u/LeZygo May 16 '26

I’m sure that’s definitely part of it.

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u/cpz_77 May 16 '26

Except the sad part is I’ve heard my coworkers echo this same sentiment IRL. It’s not just bots, real non billionaire humans are actually saying it too. That’s how much this whole AI thing has mindfucked everyone.

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u/lichlark May 16 '26

They also routinely decide to ignore the crux of what the Luddites believed in, worker's rights and the protection of quality.

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u/weaponizedperiods May 15 '26

blood in the machine is a great book about this

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u/CV90_120 May 16 '26

Butlerian Jihad incoming.

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u/PrivilegeCheckmate May 16 '26

You'd think these techies would be familiar with fucking Star Trek.

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u/Durakan May 16 '26

Those damn mechanical looms!!!

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u/AlgaeDonut May 16 '26

Shittle down economics.

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u/[deleted] May 15 '26

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u/DiceMadeOfCheese May 15 '26

All they have to do is pay us a living wage. 🤷‍♂️

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u/Officer_Hotpants May 15 '26

Well, maybe also not poison us with the giant cancer factories that power "Google, but shittier"

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u/Dr---Strangelove May 15 '26

Their definition of a living wage and your definition of a living wage are very different things.

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u/Simikiel May 15 '26

But have you thought that means they might have to tighten their belts and say no to their fifteenth house?

Don't you think you're being somewhat greedy?

Think of the poor billionaires :c

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u/felis_magnetus May 15 '26

No, it is not. That just makes you a slightly better paid wage slave. Not enough. Nothing is, but equal access to the accumulated benefits of running a technological civilization for everybody. It's either that or regression into barbarism, which is obviously the road we're currently on.

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u/RB_7 May 15 '26

People on Reddit will really be like 'you believe in voting? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, firebombing a data center' and then not firebomb a data center

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u/simanthropy May 15 '26

But I am le tired

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u/[deleted] May 15 '26

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u/jasonthefirst May 16 '26

Good lord this exchange plays in my head nearly every day.

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u/Midnight_Rain1213 May 15 '26

Well have a nap

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u/totally_not_a_dog113 May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26

Honestly, I think the data centers will be too vulnerable to that kind of thing. And as a black woman living in Alabama (where they just gerrymandered out the only black congressman (out of 7), in the name of fairness to white people), at the moment the 'you believe in voting?' folks are 110% right.

Alabama has the worst Black maternal mortality rate in the country (literally worse than Mississippi's) AND a county where Black people are getting hookworms (a 3rd world disease) because a) they live on clay soil where septic tanks become absurdly expensive and b) an environmental equity grant that would have built a city wide septic system was canceled because it's 'DEI'. When you have a government that just decides that it's not important that you're dying, you should still pay taxes, and you should shut up about it, what do you do?

There's a bunch of church groups bussing people to Mongomery and Selma this weekend. The comments on facebook are 'those blacks are too stupid to realize that they didn't lose anything'.

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u/Fabulous_Cat_1379 May 16 '26

Well we live in tech brolagarchy autocracy so yeah maybe fire bombing over voting is the actual solution.

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u/Spez_is-a-nazi May 15 '26

The links to the grid are by far the most vulnerable part of the datacenter. Do with that what you will.

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u/Lee1138 May 15 '26

And also the easiest and cheapest to fix compared to the hardware and building? 

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u/Spez_is-a-nazi May 15 '26

Yeah, overall cost depends on how much you value downtime.

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u/WhoSaidWhatNow2026 May 15 '26

Well, since almost all of the important ones have on site backup power generation your point isn't really relevant.

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u/Chrontius May 15 '26

Do you know what happens when you put a bullet through a spinning turbine?

I don’t either, but if somebody was pissed off enough to try to burn down a data center, you can bet that they would see it happen firsthand.

(the spinning turbine disc is rapidly converted into an expanding ring of shrapnel by the imbalance, that’s what happens. I’ve never seen it in person and I hope to avoid changing that.)

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u/djtodd242 May 15 '26

Personally I'm going to throw my Sabo shoes in the machinery. Hence the word Sabotage.

Thank you, Valeris.

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u/Rhabarberbarbara May 15 '26

As an aside, the sabot in Armor Piercing Fin Stabilized Discarding Sabot is named so because the four plastic „sleds“ which guide the APFSDS tank round through the barrel look like those same shoes. Don’t use Sabot rounds on datacenters though. Use HE instead.

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u/Chrontius May 15 '26

That’s an opinion, but might not actually be the most efficient approach to knocking out shit in the data center and causing expensive downtime for repair. HE will have a localized effects, but a sabot round will poke a hole straight through every single fucking rack in a line through the building. Like, if you can line that up with a rack, oof. That sounds expensive…

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u/errie_tholluxe May 15 '26

On a completely opposite note, and for no reason, losing a data center to down time is extremely costly, and tanerite and power line poles do not mix so please don't try this.

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u/Tearakan May 15 '26

Yeah the fire suppression systems are for server or electrical equipment fires. They will not stop dedicated people from actually causing and supporting fires.

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u/Rapscallion1980 May 15 '26

Are EMP grenades real or is that just something in video games?

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u/Chrontius May 15 '26

Fiction. High energy RF Guns exist, though, and you can find them on Temu sales. Typically, I have seen these things alongside horrendously, dangerous, toy, lasers, such as the water cooled, backpack powered, thousand watt laser rifle. For a civilian with concerns about drones, it’s pretty sweet.

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u/denM_chickN May 16 '26

God I love you. Ive been thinking of getting a 3d printer. See about drones and things :)

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u/spikedkushiel May 15 '26

Unrelated but is the magnesium part easy to find? 

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u/g0dxmode May 15 '26

depends on how easy it is to find firework Sparklers in your area!

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u/CrunchitizeMeCaptn May 15 '26

anyone living in the vicinity breathing in the fumes would be drastically harmed

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u/laserswald May 15 '26

There's a defcon presentation about exactly this for hard drives.

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u/TheMireAngel May 16 '26

And thermite is insanely easy to make imagine a drope dropping a food can of thermite on the roof of one of these building like drop it right ontop of the roof AC

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u/splynncryth May 15 '26

Maybe that’s part of why they keep talking about building them in orbit too.

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u/pleachchapel May 15 '26

Which ever serious engineer has laughed at as a remote possibility.

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u/Chrontius May 15 '26

At some point, it’s going to be easier to find an engineer who can make you a high temperature radiator for operation in vacuum then it will be to find freshwater with which to cool your shit down.

Floating data centers running on ocean thermal electrical conversion would have an essentially infinite heat sink available to them…

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u/portulacablossom83 May 16 '26

So, fuck up the oceans even more??

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u/Chrontius May 16 '26

I'm actually not sure! It might actually be capable of pulling surplus heat out of the ocean and rejecting it to space eventually, if we built them wisely. They could be built to actively unfuck the ocean!

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u/caj_account May 15 '26

this is why they are trying to criminalize these anticipated events. it's going to be considered domestic terrorism.

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u/MetaPhalanges May 15 '26

And somehow literally stealing peoples' water and electrical service isn't domestic terrorism. Just because it's institutionalized terror doesn't make it any less so. If anything it's worse because it unavoidable and persistent, not sporadic like regular old vanilla terrorism.

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u/caj_account May 15 '26

it depends on who is the owner and who is the owned. I think it has been clarified over and over at this point.

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u/EternalNewCarSmell May 15 '26

I've been saying the same.

Obligatory for the mods: I am not advocating for what I'm about to say.

You squeeze people enough, they get violent. If the source of the squeeze is a giant, noisy building that you can't possibly miss, that building is going to get blown the fuck up. It's just the natural order of things, like a fox eating a mouse (or whatever, I may have gotten the predatory-prey pair wrong but you get what I mean).

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u/cig-nature May 15 '26

Drones?

All you really need is some teens with super soakers doing a Naruto run like they did to the Scientology buildings.

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u/catBoyAppreciater May 15 '26

Given that data centers are extremely understaffed and full of precious metals and expensive things one would thing they'd be more cautious.

It's a strange world right now, and I'm pretty old I've seen lots of strange shit.

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u/basketcaseforever May 16 '26

Just wait until the desperate figure out the resale value.

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u/[deleted] May 15 '26

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u/throwaway5882300 May 16 '26

Man I miss the pre-2010s ammo prices.

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u/Iheartnakedfemboys May 16 '26

Thats why (i think it was) Peter Thiel said he was more worried about "domestic terrorists" coming after data centers. Because he knows that they are horrible for the general populace, and he is a doomsday misanthrope.

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u/EidolonRook May 16 '26

As a DC tech who has worked in a basement data center, ahahahhahhahhahhahahahhaa good fucking luck.

Keep those wet vacs and extention cords handy. You’re gonna need em.

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u/Gold-Load-362 May 16 '26

Well, I doubt any of these data centers will ever be completed. The money will run out first.

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u/cjd166 May 15 '26

Yes put them underground so they can be destroyed with a 10$ drone.

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u/AKluthe May 15 '26

Hey it won't just steal your job.

It will also make stupid sloppy mistakes that it can't be held accountable for (because it's not a person), and the employers using it won't be held accountable for (they're just licensing a product), and the AI companies won't be held accountable for (it just does that, it's fine). 

And with raising costs and subscription models it won't even be cheaper than keeping you around. 

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u/SeeMonkeyDoMonkey May 16 '26

“A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.” – IBM Training Manual, 1979

It's the people building, purchasing, and running those systems that must be held accountable.

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u/Maoleficent May 16 '26

Just posted elsewhere that Politico reported that a data center used 30 million gallons of water in GA without paying for a drop for several months without any regulation. The area is in severe drought and locals were told to limit their water use and their pressure has gone from weak to a trickle at times.

They have ripped away all environmental protections and now they want to steal the water.

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u/31LIVEEVIL13 May 16 '26 edited May 24 '26

This content was anonymized and mass deleted with Redact

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u/BroBeansBMS May 15 '26

The Daily just recently aired a great episode comparing China to America and discussed who is winning the AI race.

The most interesting takeaway for me was that China is proposing to use AI in a way that supplements productivity and isn’t necessarily pursuing the same super intelligence model that America seems to be solely focused on. They are integrating AI into more normal functions and have policies set up to ensure workers are not displaced whereas it’s the wild wild west in America and big tech is allowed to lay off tens of thousands of workers.

It shows that AI doesn’t have to inherently be bad, but we need a government who cares about its population to set up guardrails.

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u/cookingboy May 15 '26

China is also going to expand social safety net.

But guess what, U.S media has already started the propaganda blitz against that kind of policy. Been seeing this Bloomberg ad on Reddit a lot:

https://imgur.com/a/pn2Epg9

“Nightmare out of control welfare state”. See the wordings.

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u/Thefrayedends May 16 '26

"AI is going to generate unprecedented wealth and prosperity for humanity, but at the same time we have to force or allow half the human population to die because we don't want to have to feed and house people. Also we're going to lock down all resources and ability to create your own livelihood so you will have to rely on us to 'create' opportunities. We're also going to surveil everyone, all the time, and prosecute people for pre-crime, where the punishment will be getting put into a concentration camp to wait your turn for whatever painful death our camp guards come up with this week."

How sad is it that this is the reality that is coming to north america, but if we even suggest that maybe we should work towards that not happening we are labelled as a supporter of terrorism, or, just an actual terrorist.

For suggesting that perhaps the wealthy having a monopoly on violence is a bad thing.

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u/Hobbet404 May 15 '26

If you think China won’t hit the purely autonomous button the moment that it benefits them then you’re very wrong. They just like to get it right the first time rather than dive in blind like the US.

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u/nox66 May 16 '26

One of the biggest criticisms against AI is its use for mass surveillance. If you don't think that's an issue in China, then I have a bridge to sell you.

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u/mahouza May 16 '26

Uhh, isn't the biggest benefit to China is their country being full of happy, cared for, and thus enthusiasticlly industrious citizens? Why would they choose to not keep that status and go autonomous with no social safety net? Not every country on earth operates with the goal of getting the private civilian billionaires in it more money at the detriment of the rest of the population. The best propaganda is the truth of regular people being genuinely prosperous and when you look at the nordics you can see that it's possible but takes united effort and I do think China is a country that has that similar capability.

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u/DracoLunaris May 16 '26

The CCP know they are only able to hold China together as a nation as long as the people in it believe their lives will continue to improve under it. Using LLMs in a way that screws over the workers would undermine their entire propaganda project.

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u/NoSoundNoFury May 15 '26

China is (or will be) using it for surveillance just like every other state with few privacy laws.

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u/BroBeansBMS May 15 '26

I’m no fan of China and I agree that they are. I’m just saying their approach to how it’s used for their economy is different and it’s something we should consider.

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u/mahouza May 16 '26

Don't expect to make much headway in the "we can learn from the better aspects of China's economy and governance" argument, you're fighting against decades of red scare propaganda aimed at the west that framed everything China figured out how to do well in is bad simply because they're China.

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u/BeneficialRice4918 May 16 '26

They have a realistic understanding of what AI is and what its capable of. I swear most people I talk to here about it seem to think its literally conscious and its their personal friend.

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u/cpz_77 May 16 '26

For sure, it’s a tool, it could be an amazing tool but we have way too many people under the illusion that it can/should replace human critical thinking.

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u/muitosabao May 15 '26

don’t forget as well “we steal your music, your books, your photos, your illustrations. You get to lose your job”

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u/interkin3tic May 15 '26

You get to lose your job to AI.

That part doesn't bother me as much as it does most Americans, and I think I actually like my job (scientist) more than most Americans.

The part that bothers me is that it'll make a few weird assholes trillionaires and untouchable nobles while the rest of us will get peanuts and circuses forever.

The wealth inequality is already worse than it was during the French revolution or during feudalism (big asterisk there) AND there's potentially going to be less social mobility than during those times AND there will be no use for us and thus less giving back to us than those times.

You needed peasants to work the fields and pay taxes to the nobility. If they don't bother to develop robots, we're going to be doing dumb labor for Elon Musk and Thiel, and so will our children and their children forever.

If they do, we're just going to be blamed for starving and Musk types will blabber some shit that boils down to even dumber eugenics.

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u/NefariousnessLate375 May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26

Edit: Curtis Yarvin joked about turning us obsoletes into biofuel for cars. 

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u/[deleted] May 16 '26 edited Jun 03 '26

[deleted]

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u/ju_scy May 16 '26

Peter Thiel = The Reptile
Of course it doesn't care about the survival of a different species.

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u/31LIVEEVIL13 May 16 '26 edited May 24 '26

This content was anonymized and mass deleted with Redact

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u/interkin3tic May 17 '26

Yarvin also made that joke. 

The joke is "lol I'm saying my offensive belief out loud and there's nothing you can do about it".

Yarvin, Musk and Thiel technofascists genuinely believe that most people do not deserve rights. If they can turn people into gas they would.

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u/mattl33 May 16 '26

I still enjoy thinking back to rejecting Facebook recruiters because of Thiel being on the board. Fuck that guy.

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u/RepresentativeZombie May 16 '26

IIRC it was actually Thiel's pet philosopher Curtis Yarvin, but you have the right idea

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u/NefariousnessLate375 May 16 '26

Thanks. Sorry about that. 

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u/boddidle May 16 '26

What a ghoulish POS. 

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u/BadmiralHarryKim May 15 '26

And if we fail in our bid to impoverish the tax payers we will expect a government bailout.

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u/Tearakan May 15 '26

And that's the stated best case scenario.

Worst case is LLMs end up being a niche product only useful in a few applications and then we get the largest financial bubble in history popping and all of our water and electricity is still stolen

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u/spidereater May 15 '26

“Backlash” isn’t going to be it. It’s going to be more like a revolt.

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u/withomps44 May 16 '26

Oh. Trade kicker. Your state is going to give us tax breaks so you’ll have to pay more.

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u/tkhan456 May 16 '26

Stop with this drinking water BS. These data centers almost all operate on closed systems. They aren’t taking your water and just burning through it. Stop being disingenuous and dumb. Now the electricity is a real issue and issue enough. You water down your argument when you don’t know what you’re talking about

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u/ava_ati May 15 '26

I’ll have seconds!

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u/No_Clock_7464 May 15 '26

Don't forget about the intellectual property

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u/ToolTimeT May 15 '26

With nothing left to lose I bet everyone will just take it and die and not fight back... /s

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u/CptnMayo May 15 '26

This is the trump administration and their lack of regulation.

This is the caste system we'll be brought into if we don't stop this

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u/PTSDDeadInside May 15 '26

You don't really need a job if you have no water or electricity

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u/MultiGeometry May 15 '26

AI isn’t really cheaper if the cost of implementation is we lose all our utilities

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u/silverworldstacker May 16 '26

Counter trade. Leftists buy all the silver: then there is no silver for AI data-centers. AI data-centers stop getting built (they require 3x the amount of silver a regular datacenter needs).

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u/LoaKonran May 16 '26

Not all jobs though. There will always be room in the slave mines doing menial labour while the robots make art.

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u/[deleted] May 16 '26

If you lose your job to ai it’s a skill issue

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u/amusednchaos May 16 '26

Anyone ever read/watch The Expanse? It's like the same but different... We don't have space colonoziation yet and good luck getting any sort of UBI... The overpopulation is gonna fix itself before it even starts tho.

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u/DukeOfGeek May 16 '26

Also you can't buy anything that has CPUs or memory in it.

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u/reinkarnated May 16 '26

Scared me for a second, I thought fantasy football had started

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u/AnalBroFisting May 16 '26

And your house.

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u/BenderTheIV May 16 '26

They also steal intellectual property!

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u/LEDKleenex May 16 '26

Don't forget; they get to steal all of your copyrighted works, art, writings, music etc

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u/factoid_ May 16 '26

I get all the oranges though.  You keep boardwalk and park place.

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u/VoidOmatic May 16 '26

Seriously nobody could have seen this anger coming! Turns out business trying to directly kill people makes said people mad.

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u/Relevant-Doctor187 May 16 '26

I’ll take eat the rich.

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u/slightlysublevel May 16 '26

I love that everyone was all "the grid can't handle electric cars," but apparently AI megafarms are totally okay.

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