We take a lot of things for granted in West Virginia. The rolling hills that surround us, the grass beneath our feet, wildflowers that add color to endless seas of green, the rivers we swim in, the first dandelion we make a wish on in spring, birdsongs that wake us up on Sunday mornings, the rushing of a creek filled with rainwater from the night before, spring peepers that lull us to sleep at night, the smell of honeysuckle, the amber hues of sugar maple trees in the fall, cow pastures that used to excite us as kids, the fact that everything around you is alive. You can look around Appalachia, and for acres upon acres, you see life in harmony.
Imagine all of that, leveled.
Now it’s a Data Center. You’re paying out the ass for healthcare because the “fine particulate matter” it releases is causing you asthma and heart problems. At least you can grab a glass of tap water to soothe your throat. Oh, you can’t? Right, I forgot, the data center is using so much water from your small municipal water supply that your house barely gets any these days. You walk outside for some fresh air. Mmm… Don’t you just love the smell of soot and sulfur dioxide? Now, when you look around for acres and acres, all you see is concrete and sheet metal.
This is the future Patrick Morrissey is creating for us.
With a bill passed by the West Virginia state legislature last March, Morrissey stated that he wanted West Virginia to become the “state that is the easiest to operate a data center in.”
It’s no secret that data centers have a negative impact on the environment.
When we think about the fact that data centers waste an insane amount of natural resources, warm the land around them, increase pollution of surrounding areas and use more water than some small towns, the question becomes: Do the benefits of data centers outweigh the environmental costs on our home?
My answer: absolutely not. When you really look into what data centers do, it’s a bunch of smoke and mirrors. Nobody seems to have a straightforward, tangible answer. That’s because a lot of the data stored in these centers contains information about us that we probably don’t want stored in a random building somewhere. That includes our internet searches, our passwords, our location patterns, our ChatGPT generations, our Facebook messages, and so on and so forth.
This new wave of hyperscale data centers is even more intrusive because it is being used to train Artificial Intelligence models. Every search, every generation, every proofread, every ‘brain’-storm session you use AI for is teaching it how to recreate your likeness.
I find it particularly interesting that, in a world where you have to pay a subscription for everything, AI has remained free. As the saying goes, “If you are not paying for a product, you probably are the product.” Because the company isn’t making a profit directly from you, they sell your data, your likeness, in order to turn a profit.
I can’t tell you how many people from my hometown shared the same “I hereby declare that I do not give Facebook Meta my permission to use any of my personal data.” posts on Facebook. Little do they know that most of the time, that’s exactly what these diesel-guzzling, water-wasting, concrete warehouses of data are for, and they’re in our own backyards.
It makes sense that Patrick Morrisey may be aroused by the idea of data centers bleeding our state of its natural resources so he can line his pockets even deeper. I guess I might not care about West Virginia either if I was from New Jersey. Appalachians used to be absolutely hellbent on keeping major corporations off of our land, yet we are allowing Google, QTS, Penzance and an unnamed tech company to exploit and rape our home state.
West Virginians are consistently being left behind in the digital age, yet we’re the ones who are expected to produce it.
I’ll be honest, I have had to really reevaluate my use of AI. What used to be ‘creating a fun little image’ or ‘asking a silly little question’ has shown itself to be so much more than that. We now know the extent of the perils of AI and its data centers, but unfortunately, it’s too late. They’re here, in our beautiful state, in our hometowns, in our own backyards.
Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.
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