The people not worth replacing

The nationally unified loathing of data centers in the US comes from the contempt AI emanates

Few ideas have traveled as far as the Great Replacement, which holds that national populations are being deliberately supplanted by immigrants. Coined in France by the writer Renaud Camus, it has furnished the grammar for the advance of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, Viktor Orban’s long reign in Hungary, the Alternative fur Deutschland in Germany, and Donald Trump’s mass-deportation program in the US. It has been cited by mass murderers in Christchurch, El Paso, Hanau and Buffalo.

The idea is easy to understand. It converts a diffuse unease about demographic change into a story with heroes, villains, victims and remedies. It tells believers that they are being pushed aside by identifiable strangers, and that the process can be reversed. It mobilizes voters because it gives fear a face.

That is what makes the uproar over data centers so strange. Three-quarters of Americans say they would oppose the construction of a data center in their community: 83 percent of Democrats, almost 80 percent of independents, and two-thirds of Republicans. State legislatures have introduced a growing number of bills to regulate, delay or block such projects. Governors who courted artificial intelligence (AI) investment have paused new connections to already strained electrical grids. Only Trump still tours the country urging towns to accept what their neighbors are refusing. How can this bipartisan opposition be explained?

Illustration: Mountain People

At first glance, the two fears resemble one another. Both are about the future. Both involve a sense that one’s place in the country is insecure. Both resonate most in the countryside. And both spring from the conviction that immensely consequential decisions are being made elsewhere, by people who do not have to live with the results.

Yet one fear has divided democracies, while the other has united even the most polarized of them. Why should immigration produce rival camps while large, windowless buildings generate something close to a national consensus?

One answer is that the objection to data centers is practical. They consume land, water and immense quantities of electricity. They bring construction work and tax revenue, but few permanent jobs, and their profits flow to distant investors. A deeper answer lies in what the building says. The factory chimney once told a town something reassuring, even as it poisoned the air: You are needed here. The windowless hall says that only the town’s electricity, water and land are needed. It says nothing about the people who live there.

That silence gives the practical objections their force. The data center is the visible infrastructure of an economy that seems to need a community’s resources, but few of its members. The fear it provokes is not primarily a fear of being replaced. It is the fear of not being worth replacing.

Immigration politics is a politics of competition. This is politics of redundancy.

The older fear fueled political division because a fear of replacement needs an identifiable replacer. That replacer is a person, and a person has defenders as well as opponents. When one party says that the migrant is taking your place, the other can point to the migrant’s children in the school play and say: “This, too, is the country’s future.” Defenders can add that strangers are needed to fill the jobs natives would not take, and to pay for the pensions natives expect to collect. One person’s rival is another’s neighbor, employee or child. Immigration arguments, however bitter, remain arguments about membership in a society that still imagines itself to need human beings.

The Great Replacement named an enemy, but it also named a remedy. Deportation flights and a wall are cruel instruments, but they offer reversibility. To fear that strangers would take your job is, at least, to assume that your job would continue to exist. The fear of replacement is the fear of people who still believe they are worth replacing.

Data centers threaten that conviction. They are the most visible infrastructure of an economy that promises, or threatens, to require fewer drivers, clerks, translators, warehouse workers, customer-service representatives and perhaps eventually professionals.

What sort of social order do such buildings portend? The fear they arouse is not of being outnumbered, but of being made useless and unemployable. They foretell an economy in which intelligence is centralized, electricity is consumed on an industrial scale, profits are remote and the connection between a locality’s contribution and its share of the resulting wealth is obscure.

The new threat has no ethnicity and no passport. Nobody can be rounded up for it. There is only a structure at the edge of town, drawing power for a system that does not seem to require the town at all. That is why the fear cannot be confined to right-wing populism, and why the populist who made his career on the older fear is helpless before the new one.

Trump could tell his voters they were being displaced by their inferiors. He cannot tell them that they are not worth replacing. Nor can he tell them who is doing the replacing, because the men doing it stood beside him at his inauguration. The base that believed him about the border does not believe him about the building.

Whom do you deport to bring back a world in which you were needed? A rival can be expelled. No such remedy exists for a job that has become obsolete.

For much of US history, immigration was driven not only by war, persecution and family ties, but by employers’ demands for labor. Farms, factories, railroads, hospitals and households needed more workers. If demand contracts across a widening range of occupations, Trump’s wall might come to seem unnecessary, not because Americans have settled their quarrel over belonging, but because the economy has become less dependent on newcomers and natives alike.

The backlash against data centers is unsettling the old politics without yet settling into a new one. Its unanimity reflects not a country that has overcome polarization, but a threat that resists being sorted by party. A fear with a face can engender parties, counterparties and a program of expulsion. A fear without a face produces moratoria.

Today’s cross-party protest would hold only until people are asked what future they want. Is it merely to build the data center somewhere else?

The Great Replacement was a lie that told its believers their place was worth stealing. The building at the edge of town makes no such promise. It is not coming for your place. It has no use for it.

Stephen Holmes, professor of law at New York University School of Law, is the co-author (with Ivan Krastev) of The Light that Failed: A Reckoning.