Last week, in the Five Quick Things column, I referenced an X post by The Federalist’s Sean Davis noting that one significant reason for the opposition to data centers is the stunning lack of visible philanthropy among those at the top of the tech-bro hierarchy who seek to build them.
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A middling 80 IQ narcoterrorist in Mexico has a better understanding of how to get the support of small towns than does a West Coast tech bro who fancies himself one of the smartest men on earth.
If scum-of-the-earth retarded narcoterrorists can get away with literal murder by… https://t.co/N8Zpeo4OZ3
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) August 21, 2026
In case you don’t want to open up the post to get everything Davis said, it was this…
A middling 80 IQ narcoterrorist in Mexico has a better understanding of how to get the support of small towns than does a West Coast tech bro who fancies himself one of the smartest men on earth.
If scum-of-the-earth retarded narcoterrorists can get away with literal murder by building schools and hospitals and soccer fields and showering the locals with a tiny fraction of the cash they make ruining millions of lives all over the world, imagine what Big Tech bros could get away with if they had even the slightest bit of humility or understanding of basic human nature.
And yet, they’re somehow simultaneously dumber, more arrogant, and greedier than drug smugglers and human traffickers.
What I said was this…
If you had a Rockefeller or a Carnegie or a Vanderbilt or a Morgan in your town, you might be perturbed at times with rapacious labor policies, less-than-state-of-the-art safety and environmental performance, or anticompetitive trade practices, but at least you could count on getting a museum, a zoo, a theater, libraries, perhaps a college or a park out of the deal. The robber barons were, certainly by modern standards, quite civic-minded. They made the places they lived considerably better.
You get very little of that from the tech-bro aristocracy.
The data center operators moving into the rural communities in question should definitely pay mind to Davis’ critique. Some already have, I would imagine.
But over the weekend, I came across this, from a guy named Theo Jaffee who is a San Francisco tech bro, and I do have to admit that he makes an excellent point…
People often ask why today’s tech wealth doesn’t go towards more public works, like libraries, universities, and museums during the late 1800s. As far as I can tell the answer is that they would literally not be allowed to be built.
In 2014, George Lucas, a long-time Bay Area… pic.twitter.com/2agb3nPkGx
— Theo Jaffee (@theojaffee) August 29, 2026
The whole thing…
People often ask why today’s tech wealth doesn’t go towards more public works, like libraries, universities, and museums during the late 1800s. As far as I can tell the answer is that they would literally not be allowed to be built.
In 2014, George Lucas, a long-time Bay Area resident who built Lucasfilm in the Bay, wanted to build a museum in the Presidio as a gift to the people of San Francisco, to be personally funded to the tune of ~$700 million. The Presidio Trust rejected it. He then tried to build it in his wife’s hometown of Chicago, but local nonprofit Friends of the Parks sued and held the project up for two years, long enough for Lucas to give up on the city. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will finally open in Los Angeles next month after more than a decade of planning, eight years of construction, and over $1 billion personally spent by Lucas.
Meanwhile, San Francisco has built no major museum projects since the 2016 expansion of SFMOMA, and no new libraries since the North Beach Branch in 2014. Public works, like so many other things, are bottlenecked not by donor will or available funding but by vetocracy.
Jaffee’s post was in response to another point; let me reproduce that here as well…
I can’t say I agree with him 100 percent. Ken Langone, for example, had no trouble finding high-profile philanthropic projects to bankroll even in New York, which is just about the most difficult place there is to get anything done. So if you want to get creative, you can.
That said, there’s something else, particularly in the big cities in which the greatest need for philanthropy is said to lie. Which is…
Now, it ought to be understood that Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos didn’t donate the money for Seattle’s main library. That’s a full-on public-sector project. But does it matter? If you’re going to donate money for the kinds of projects robber barons used to be known for — theaters, libraries, museums, zoos, and the like, and the local governments of those cities have any authority at all to maintain them, you can be assured they will do everything possible to ensure that whatever facility you’re funding will soon be overtaken by the lowest common denominator and shortly trashed. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: Citizens Against Virtually Everything)
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And if you try to fight to keep your creation from turning into a shooting gallery for junkies and other forms of wretched humanity, you will become the bad guy.
This is, by the way, related to something else which is being bandied about with respect to the data center issue. There are people asking why data centers are being built on farmland in the country rather than sited in urban areas on blighted property.
Which is a good question, but one with a very simple answer.
The fact is that those blighted tracts of land in those cities didn’t get that way by accident. They got that way because of the policies and actions of the abject imbeciles and communist revolutionaries who run those places.
For some reason we refuse to recognize the level of damage that Weaponized Governmental Failure has done in our cities, in making them uninvestable and unlivable. In all of these cities there are very affordable houses — whole neighborhoods of them — that young Americans could afford as starter homes. But nobody in their right mind would buy those properties, so they’re owned by slumlords who rent them out to Section 8 tenants. Pick any city, search it on Zillow, and you’ll be amazed at how low the comps are in the worst neighborhoods in town. (RELATED: Joe Lonsdale Has a Different Answer to America’s Homelessness Crisis)
Because nobody with an actual choice wants to live in a neighborhood where your property and your life are in danger 24/7. That kind of misery is simply not good enough for most of us.
And when an entire swath of a city is unlivable for somebody who’s trying to put themselves on a productive or upwardly-mobile path, guess what the laws of supply and demand do? They push up the value of the property elsewhere in town. (RELATED: What Doctor Zhivago Teaches Us About New York City’s Housing Debate)
Seattle could clean up that library. And those awful neighborhoods could be made livable. The blighted land could be made suitable for data centers. The tech bros could be enticed to shower those communities with the kinds of goodies the Rockefellers and Fords and Carnegies once bestowed on urban America.
But the people who run urban America will not lift a finger to participate in those efforts.
Try to clean up those neighborhoods by putting down nice things? They’ll climb all over you and scream that you’re “gentrifying” the area, and call you a racist in the bargain. Try to build a data center on that abandoned urban land and even the Section 8 tenants — hell, especially the Section 8 tenants — who live nearby will throw a fit about every damned thing you do.
And God forbid you attempt to put something beautiful – a building, a monument, some sort of public art or historical landmark of some kind – anywhere in urban America. If you attempt any sort of classical beauty in its design, they’ll say it’s “white-supremacist” or “Christian Nationalist” and call you a Nazi. Instead you have to go with some sort of brutalist or otherwise butt-ugly nonsense which appeases the communist revolutionaries and demoralizes the people you’re otherwise trying to inspire.
I’m not defending the tech bros like Jaffee is, mind you. I’m making a separate point. We’ve allowed our urban areas to become hellscapes which dissuade the kind of civic engagement and philanthropic benefits which built them in the first place, and along the way the standards of behavior and quality of life those urban areas support are actually worse than they were when those cities were full of tenements and sweatshops and kids going hungry despite working 12 hours a day.
So of course they want to put the data centers out in the country where the local politicians are eager to attract economic activity and capital investment. Rather than have to deal with Karen Bass or Brandon Johnson or Zohran Mamdani? Or the entitled simpleton Katie Wilson who’s running Seattle into the ground? (RELATED: You Simply Cannot Give Power to Lunatics)
That’s a no-brainer.
Again, it’s not an excuse for the pittance of philanthropy so many of the tech bro aristocrats are offering, and I don’t disagree with Davis’ take on their lack of civic spirit and even with his suggestion that until some of these guys actually learn those rules maybe the opposition to the data centers shouldn’t be wholly dismissed as ginned up by Chinese bots and propaganda mills.
What I’m saying is Jaffee has a point, too. And it’s actually a tougher problem.
Because there is no fixing those urban hellscapes any time soon.
Some of them — blue cities in red states, most notably — are ultimately going to be saved by state governments simply coming in and taking them over. Later this year or early next year, you’re likely to read about how the state of Louisiana, for example, will be putting the city of New Orleans under fiscal administration. New Orleans was run completely into the ground by its previous mayor, LaToya Cantrell, but its current mayor, Helena Moreno, was the president of the City Council at the time, and Moreno, faced with a $110 million budget hole she’s begging the state to provide loan guarantees to patch temporarily, has stupidly and performatively put herself at odds with the governor. He’s going to have the State Bond Commission deny her those loan guarantees until she agrees to fiscal administration, and then Louisiana will have a real chance to reform a completely dysfunctional blue city in ways which make it possible to do business there.
New Orleans might actually get a data center on blighted urban land, which will make people like this lose what remains of their minds…
But those examples won’t be universal. The Seattles, Los Angeleses, Chicagos, New Yorks and Detroits are only going to get worse. And while the tech bro oligarchs and aristocrats might be the James Bond villains we seem to agree they are, and yes — for many of them, their politics match that of the communist revolutionaries destroying those cities, you really can’t blame anybody for giving up on a Karen Bass or a Katie Wilson.
Or a Zohran Mamdani.
As a parting shot, I do want to mention an X post which landed over the weekend. It’s by Daniel Penny — yes, that Daniel Penny, the ex-Marine who had to fight through an abjectly unjust prosecution for saving his fellow New Yorkers from a deranged homeless bum threatening to kill them on a subway car after said bum expired in the resulting melee — making what he calls “The Layman’s Case For Data Centers.” You’re almost certain to have your opinion on the subject altered by reading it.
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