If a data center raises your electric bill, is opposing it 'backwards' — or just reading the invoice?
The President calls towns that block AI data centers backwards and poor, while his own Vice President says 99% of the objection is simply higher electricity prices. So is local resistance to the AI buildout a failure of vision, or a rational response to being asked to subsidize someone else’s infrastructure?
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In the September 1 episode of Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, we dug into a week where the White House argued with itself: a Truth Social post telling towns to ’let Data Reign,’ and the Vice President the same afternoon saying the backlash is about the utility bill and the companies should put power back into the grid rather than take it out. What struck us is that the national fight has quietly stopped being about whether to build — nearly everyone in the argument now accepts the buildout — and become a fight over who pays for the power. Gallup found 71% of Americans would oppose a data center nearby, more than would oppose a nuclear plant, and that gap is arithmetic, not ideology. Unscarcity argues that abundance is built on cheap energy, but the transition period is exactly where the costs and the benefits land on different people’s balance sheets. Give the episode a listen and tell us where you land — is ‘build your own power’ a reasonable price of entry, or a way to slow the thing down?
Related reading on unscarcity.ai:
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