The data center backlash is getting spiritual

As I — and numerous others — anticipated years ago, the populist backlash against the dystopian possibilities of super-duper artificial intelligence has begun in earnest, with the rise of data centers as the inciting event.

It is easy to see why. Beyond the standard human response to unasked-for change at scale — isn’t there someone (me!) you forgot to ask? — the populist spirit in America has always run bone-deep.

Americans do not like feeling mogged by their fellow citizens, and we like even less being lectured by the moggers about how we are unentitled to feel that way.

Alexis de Tocqueville understood the democratic dynamics of envy and resentment. Under conditions of social equality, everyone feels precariously interchangeable with everyone else, so another person’s relative advantage can register not merely as inequality but as a wound to pride.

Extend that dynamic to the “global town square,” where we spend more and more of our waking hours watching other people’s breakout advances in real time, and the sensation of being left behind goes nuclear.

Americans do not like feeling mogged by their fellow citizens, and we like even less being lectured by the moggers about how we are unentitled to feel that way. Worse, somewhere beneath the resentment lurks the humiliating suspicion that we have helped put ourselves in the inferior position.

Sensitive young men of ambition today — reminding me of my own “Fight Club”-era preoccupations — are once again stalking some kind of Nietzschean-Christian syncretism that promises, amulet-like, supreme confidence and supreme humility. The reason is that both Nietzsche and Christ condemned resentment.

The gulf between the Übermensch and the God-Man is obviously enormous. Yet both traditions understand that resentment degrades the person who lives by it. And that is why the backlash against data centers has moved so quickly from personal grievance and political interest onto the higher plane of spiritual war.

More Americans across the political spectrum now speak of data centers as if they are not merely ugly, expensive, noisy, or intrusive but evil — evil as “tech” itself has become in their imagination, evil as the “tech lords” who build it are presumed to be.

On the secular left, where human justice perfected becomes an almost religious ideal, tech’s push toward superhuman capability readily appears sinister. On the woo-woo left, where witches warn that they cannot hex Trump, tech’s tilt toward post-humanity manifests as something post-natural and spiritually contaminating.

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On the right, spiritual conservatives with relatively weak institutional confidence often apply a precautionary principle: If it looks menacing, assume it’s evil. Those with stronger church lives have a different reason for suspicion: an acute awareness of man’s fallenness and the old Actonian warning that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Search a man for evil — beginning with yourself! — and evil, no doubt, you shall find. But this being America, where making me feel “less than” can register as a kind of spectral crime, the emotional incentive is to cast the first stone. And in an age when throwing a stick will almost certainly hit somebody culpable and “punchable,” it is remarkable that the techies did not prepare for the boomerang now whacking them upside the head.

But that should be the beginning of our rumination, not the end. Many, many techies are doing “this” because of what they regard as good intentions. Some sincerely believe they are acting, for our own good, out of their very best intentions.

Ignoring that fact will produce a maelstrom of resentment more destructive than the nightmares already filling our wounded and prideful imaginations.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. But the proverb should not tempt us to dismiss good intentions as meaningless. It should force us to take seriously the human yearning for the good, the wonderful, and the pure — especially in people whose projects strike us as dangerous.

Christians, in particular, are meant to remember that all creation cries out for reunion with God and that even badly distorted human desires can point toward something real that has gone wrong in the seeking.

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That does not give the maddest of mad scientists a cosmic hall pass. It does mean that, if we look without fear at the grand plans of our technologists, we may see in them a powerful expression of the universal human longing for purification.

As the structure of our economic life increasingly leaves people feeling condemned by bad debts, bad surpluses, and obligations they cannot spiritually discharge, we desperately seek something powerful and authoritative enough to wipe the ledger clean and leave us new.

Hey, our best-intentioned techies keep shouting. There’s an app for that!

No purification, no salvation; this we have known for ages. But when time feels short, we become vulnerable to shortcuts — to the fantasy of a perfectly engineered “solve” for our human, all-too-human debt.

If we merely demonize one another — losing sight of the Lord’s hidden presence in us all — then the data centers may not be what finally tears us apart. We may do that job ourselves.