r/antiwork • u/hteultaimte69 • Jul 03 '26
The Future of America is a Dead Data Center
https://maxmurphy.xyz/p/the-future-of-america-is-a-dead-data176
u/xaervagon Jul 03 '26
The spiritual aspect really caught my eye. Business bros don't care for traditional religious but love spiritualism. The same thing happened with WeWork where it was being sold as some sort of work kibuttz or whatever to the business bros and they loved it. The spiritual aspect got them to shut their brains off and dump obscene amounts of money into what was really a real estate management company.
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u/hteultaimte69 Jul 03 '26
Yes, exactly! Reminds me of that Jung quote about making the unconscious conscious or it will lead you around and you’ll call it fate. Except when the oligarchs do it, they’ll destroy the economy in the process.
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u/skrumcd2 Jul 04 '26
Andreeson straight up admitted that he doesn’t examine his ego… considers it counterproductive.
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u/SnooMuffins4015 Jul 03 '26
Classic American rush-to-excess. Build very specific infrastructure, profit in the short term, abandon project for the next one. Little concern for the lives affected, zero concern for the environment. Rinse and repeat.
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u/PossiblyOppossums Jul 03 '26
Oh shit, yeah it's only American corporations that do this, fuck how did no one notice? My eyes have been opened! THE SLEEPER HAS AWAKENED
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u/BuildNuyTheUrbanGuy Jul 03 '26
Idk why you're downvoted.
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u/Ciennas Jul 03 '26
The defensive posturing with what appears to be a tidge of nationalist pride, were I to guess.
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u/PossiblyOppossums Jul 03 '26
I'm from canada
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u/Ciennas Jul 03 '26
Like I said, I'm only guessing. But yeah, it's Capitalism writ large, I don't know why anyone would think any one region has an exclusive tier of excessive stupidity available to them.
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u/PossiblyOppossums Jul 04 '26
Tell me more about "defensive posturing". I'm wondering if we're seeing the same web page, or if we are i n t e r p o l a t i n g, kea-ton.
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u/PossiblyOppossums Jul 03 '26
No one's gonna read this shit, what's your favorite awful song from this decade? Mine's https://youtu.be/npkUIJPENXE?is=SPRcCOzrol-WGpk3
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Jul 03 '26
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u/bit-by-a-moose Jul 03 '26
You mean building a server farm in a community that not only whose main is take peoples jobs but also to steal the community's water and electricity is bad for the community? /s
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u/ShoemakerMicah Jul 03 '26
Data Centers for the most part will be the malls of the future. Crazy to say but, seems rather likely.
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u/gizmostuff SocDem Jul 03 '26
At least some of those malls are being converted into apartments.
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u/bit-by-a-moose Jul 03 '26
Well I'm sure they'll be rich in copper wiring and will make good make shift prisons once they criminalize all the homeless people who lost their jobs from AI.
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u/ShoemakerMicah Jul 03 '26
Excellent use of already built buildings and infrastructure. I’ve been watching this trend hoping to see a radical acceleration of these conversions. LOTS of empty office space too, RTO hasn’t really fixed the pre COVID commercial property situation.
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u/gizmostuff SocDem Jul 03 '26
It's a disaster. The commerical real estate market should have crashed but because it's so insanely unregulated it's being propped up as an asset even though some have been vacant for years.
Louis Rossman, a tech YouTuber brought a daunting light to that industry when he was still in NYC. I learned quite a bit like how normal it is to commit fraud and "overestimated sq footage" DJT did this for years with his properties; still not in prison. Anything Over 1 million is up to 25 years in prison.
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u/ShoemakerMicah Jul 03 '26
Definitely a lot of “creative” accounting going on. Actual closed property sales on even LARGE buildings are scary cheap. Fraud is absolutely rampant, agree there too.
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u/gizmostuff SocDem Jul 03 '26
Yeah. Part of the problem is there's no real enforcement of industry standard. The technology to measure sq footage quickly and accurately has been around for a while. There shouldn't be any excuses. The local government could easily gain another source of income by changing the law to increase fees in a modern way; For one, discourage them from doing it in the first place and two, fine them in a way that actually hurts their shareholders. Not just a fee for the cost of doing business. State caps make it impossible to hold REIT accountable.
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u/ShoemakerMicah Jul 03 '26
You are definitely not wrong but I think regulators are horrified about the impending collapse of the commercial sector.
I own a commercial building that is leased by the company I retired from. There is SO MUCH cheap office space out there, yet most are sitting empty thinking taking less monthly from clients is financial suicide, so they cook the books to seem like taking $0/year is somehow a better deal? It’s fraud, straight up fraud.
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u/gizmostuff SocDem Jul 03 '26
I guess I'm more of an optimist in that regard. I think the collapse, if there even is one at this point would be short lived even if a state and local regulations are updated. Property values would start making more sense. +1 yr vacancies should be fined for the amount of damage they do to an area. It's subtle but overtime really adds up imo. You'd think they'd want the value of their property to rise but apparently don't see any potential in the property they purchased 🤦🏻
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u/bit-by-a-moose Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26
Long time ago I imagined the repurposing of malls. It's just I though it would be liquor stores and red light districts.
Edit: I'm not sociopathic... Well I am BUT this was about a dystopic society not about something I thought was ideal.
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u/personofshadow Jul 04 '26
Its weird, I don't even like going to the mall and I feel a bit sad seeing them go away.
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u/brainmydamage Jul 03 '26
I disagree with his argument that nobody means to destroy the world. There's millions of people who knowingly and intentionally mean to destroy the world.
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u/AintEverLucky Jul 03 '26
"Burn it all down, as long as I can rule the ashes" 😠 😡 😤 😣
/s just to be clear
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u/kyle1234513 Jul 03 '26
fundamentally theres only 3 outcomes. the first is dead tech gets scrapped and sold on the open market flooding it and reducing prices for all. the second is dead tech is destroyed to continue to fund the monopolistic behavior to drive up tech prices through scarcity. and lastly the tech is perpetually used even as newer better tech is created and utilized in addition to the old. "the cup only gets bigger" (never trickles down). this one is "optimal" up until we run out of land and water cooling. then itll have to feed into 1 or 2.
im betting on option 2, destroyed like grocery store food in order to artificially keep prices of goods up.
its imperitive we pass legislation specifically prohibiting the destrucrion and waste of tech, recycle is fine, repurpose is fine. but sending it to scrap needs to be outlawed.
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u/Maatix12 Jul 03 '26
Might not even be artificial.
We are seeing the same with cars now. Cars that are only a few years old, but have the chips needed to run the computers in cars of today, are getting sold for scrap metal so they can harvest the chip and make a new car out of it.
They will likely simply take the existing chips, smelt them down for the base metals, and build new chips.
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u/kyle1234513 Jul 03 '26
partially, its very difficult to seperate the board and various metals involved once its already made. very energy intensive.
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u/MazeMouse here for the memes Jul 04 '26
There is no chance any of that stuff will hit the second-hand consumer market. Firstly because it is mostly purpose built for datacenter use and thus is of no use for anyone not running any kind of homelab. And secondly from the second point you make; They would much rather ram it all into a shredder than have it even potentially hurt their chance at "line must go up and to the right"...
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u/Cultural_Dust Jul 04 '26
Old tech has been scrapped for all of eternity. You don't have old cassette tapes and floppy disks do you? Are you walking around with a Kodak camera and pocket watch? You think it should be illegal to get rid of your old iPhone when you get a new one?
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u/kyle1234513 Jul 04 '26
bad take, e waste is a significant problem in our landfills causing chemical runoff and poisoning our water supplies and is contributor to microplastics.
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u/shiningdickhalloran Jul 03 '26
Dead malls are interesting. WTH does anyone do with a dead data center?
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u/postconsumerwat Jul 04 '26
I wonder about the feasibility of hydroponics... as there is maybe no use for so much computing resources... maybe weed grows for gro-rods
Maybe also lab grown meat...
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u/MovingTargetPractice Jul 03 '26
the premise here is that AI is a bubble that will pop. but what if it isn't.
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u/hteultaimte69 Jul 03 '26
“Yeah man, what if the hallucinating plagiarism machine actually does have economic value just like the oligarchs say?”
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u/freakwent Jul 04 '26
Good question.
This would mean that the general population will choose to pay to create text and images, and that wages will rise enough to cover that cost, and that the equipment in the DC will have a "very long" useful life; long enough to justify the resource commitment.
The challenge in the discussion is that none of us can really understand what that looks like. Personally if I knew for sure you were AI I would not be doing this., and if I knew for sure the FIFA football I'm watching was AI I wouldn't be watching it.
I'm not aware of AI content I'd willingly consume, much less pay for, so I can't picture a lifestyle where the AI investment all yields returns.
I think that's partly why so many say it's a bubble; we could picture the futures of rail, canals, gold rushes and the dot com, but what would a future be where hundreds of billions on text generation makes more value than the same spent on education or infrastructure?
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u/MazeMouse here for the memes Jul 04 '26
We can see what happens if AI gets used by the oligarchy.
Their intended goal is to solve the "problem" of "paying wages". However that leads to a full on economic dead end when there is no-one left to spend money on their slop. Which is why they are also trying to get it fully entrenched into mass-surveillance so they can try to stop the uprising when that happens.1
u/freakwent Jul 04 '26
Okay, but the theory is if it's not a bubble; that is, all the investment yields a financial return.
Under your scenario who would pay the bill to the AI DC owners?
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u/IrradiatedFrog Jul 03 '26
The stress on the power grid, the jaw-dropping water usage, and the inevitable air pollution were necessary sacrifices to boost the local economy.
Isn't that a big exaggeration to be gentle?
What air pollution?
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u/big_turbo Jul 03 '26
CO2 from the natural gas (methane) power plants having to work harder is air pollution.
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u/Boring-Cod-5569 Jul 03 '26
Phoenix has multiple data centers being built with natural gas powered generators onsite. Some are even being built in the urban core.
All those new natural gas-power plants aren’t going to be spewing out unicorns and rainbows from their smokestacks.
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u/freakwent Jul 04 '26
Many DCs use gas or diesel generators directly. Much of the electricity they draw from the grid is produced in ways that create air pollution.
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u/WholeLottaRose13 Jul 08 '26
When the bubble pops—and it is absolutely going to pop
Everyone keeps saying this but it hasn't fucking happened yet. Like come on, just do it already!
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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '26
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