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by swed420 12 days ago
I've long suspected that monied interests are seeding social media with weak arguments about water as a distraction, and people mindlessly re-share that as part of their identity. Then the other half can come along and "correct" them while the main issue of power is forgotten. Social media gets engagement, and capital gets its data centers.

It's the same tired distraction pattern we've seen for a long time now in politics, and they keep rolling it out because it works.
2 comments
happytoexplain 12 days ago
What makes their actions mindless, exactly? Is the implication that what they've read is easily falsifiable by the average person? One of the fundamentals to society-scale problem solving is not to dismiss the masses as morons, as much as we often enjoy doing that. You must accept who society is composed of, or else you, by definition, can't fix their problems.
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swed420 12 days ago
Social media fosters that kind of behavior. Plus, people usually don't look into issues before deciding which "side" to be on, and more importantly don't examine if the sides are a manufactured false dichotomy, as they often are.
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gustavus 12 days ago
I suspect rather foreign actors seed some of the anti data center narrative in order to try and reduce American capability to compete in the space, just like the Soviets did with nuclear in the 60-80s.
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swed420 12 days ago
If they wanted to do that, they'd pick stronger arguments for starters. But either way, social media updoots and shares aren't going to change anything with capital's plans, so it'd be weird for a foreign power to think that it would.
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gustavus 12 days ago
They don't need strong arguments they need emotionally resonent ones, "AI is using all your water" is a more primal, plus doesn't matter they just flood with a thousand different arguments.

And updoots might not but plenty of people now are protesting and pushing against allowing data centers to be built near them so it is working.

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swed420 12 days ago
Like everything else, it's only a matter of time before capital gets its way. Democracy is illusory in case you haven't noticed.
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robocat 11 days ago
updoots == upvotes

(slang from reddit)

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