Insurgent progressive candidates have forced a reckoning over what New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dismissively referred to as Woke 1.0, the peak-cancel-culture politics that dominated the COVID-19 pandemic era.
“Woke 1.0 was crazy,” she said on ABC’s “This Week.”
With that, AOC disavowed an entire suite of once-fundamentally progressive ideas ranging from diversity, equity and inclusion to defunding the police. Conservatives are disinclined to accept the left’s unconditional surrender even as they eschew introspection over a decade of MAGA. That’s their prerogative, but I think we should applaud self-assessment, no matter how late or convenient.
My own Woke 1.0 record is mixed. I appropriately rejected police defunding as a bad idea, but I also wrote too sympathetically about rioters and property damage. COVID-19 was the pandemic that launched a thousand bad takes (sorry, I’m still in Greek mythology mode), and I submitted more than my fair share into the internet’s permanent record.
I’m willing to accept my floggings for things I get wrong. More importantly, though, I want to apply my Woke 1.0 lessons to the future and get better at discerning the strengths and weaknesses of culturally dominant ideas and become more willing to take heat for pushing against the current.
That brings me to data centers.
Data center panic is Woke 2.0
Matthew Yglesias writes that Woke 1.0 blew up as a function of people uncritically sharing content and ideas based on false information that propped up cultural vibes — and it’s still happening.
“The progressive cause of the moment is Palestine, not anti-racism, so the specific habit of giving assent to wildly overblown factual claims to show you care has migrated from policing to Israel,” he writes.
The Israel-Hamas war has infected politics at the national level. But Yglesias mentions another issue that has inflamed passions at the local level — the “hysteria about data centers,” as he puts it.
There’s probably no better example of an issue harnessing the excesses of wokeism through political mobilization. Indianapolis is joining many cities and states in flat-out refusing to permit development of data centers through 2027, illegitimizing an entire segment of real estate. That’s an extremely left-wing view of property rights.
Yet, opposition to data centers has become so close to unanimous that any level of dissent will get you yelled at. Sound familiar?
The tenets of Woke 1.0 extended far beyond a movement for leftists. Conservatives enthusiastically jumped on board. Even the Indiana Republican Party launched a DEI program.
AOC can laugh it off now, and conservatives can keep looking for scalps, but it took a lot of groupthink for us to get there. So it is with data centers, a rare issue unifying people across party lines around some bad ideas.
Some day, data center resistance will be as forgotten as rage over net neutrality and plastic straws. For now, though, membership in polite society requires everyone to oppose data centers, or at least shut up if they disagree.
We’re going to need data centers
The consensus view — no data centers anywhere, ever — is misguided and unsupported by facts.
In Irvington, where I live, the “In this house” yard signs have been replaced by anti-data center signs (for what it’s worth, Irvington’s anti-data center signs are among the best-designed you’ll ever see).
Those yard signs are directed at DC BLOX, which is planning to build two data processing facilities totaling 320,000 square feet near the Pennsy Trail in Irvington. The proposal snuck in before Indianapolis’ data center moratorium.
This data center is nearly a textbook example of appropriate land use. It would be an objective upgrade for a contaminated former Ford factory site that wouldn’t work for almost any other conceivable development. A sane approach to data centers should be finding sites just like this to put them on.
Instead, people who once lived in peace next to a manufacturing plant now say a data center is unacceptable because of noise, environmental effects and other factors.
The most common concerns about data centers are water and electricity consumption. It’s worth taking these matters seriously, but they’re not insurmountable.
For starters, Indiana’s overall water consumption declined between 2019 and 2024, according to state data. Yet, over the same period, agriculture was the fastest-growing water use category. Somehow, water-guzzling agriculture is often portrayed as a preferable land use to data centers.
When it comes to electricity, the demand-side genie is out of the bottle forever. Some people who oppose data centers say they won’t use artificial intelligence because of environmental impacts. That’s admirable. But unless everyone is also willing to stop streaming shows on Netflix and posting photos to social media, we’re going to need the data centers.
We need to have a grownup conversation about where to put them.
That conversation can include debate over community concessions, prohibitions on tax subsidies and agreements that protect utility ratepayers from subsidizing the power needs for data centers. It’s just hard to make progress on those points starting from a position that there is no such thing as an acceptable data center.
Almost no one wants to live in a world without data centers today any more than people of the 1920s would have wanted to return to a world without power plants. The consensus panic over data centers will eventually seem very silly.
The first people to get serious can be leaders in guiding acceptable terms for data centers. Then, in a few years, they can also give side-eye to everyone else who belatedly comes crawling up to admit this whole period was ridiculous.
Contact James Briggs at 317-444-4732 or james.briggs@indystar.com. Follow him on X at @JamesEBriggs.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Data center hysteria is the new woke | Opinion
Reporting by James Briggs, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
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By James Briggs, Indianapolis Star | USA TODAY Network
