Data centers are now a midterm issue, even in Brooklyn

On Thursday evening, I slipped on my neon yellow heels and a floral mini dress. It’s New York, so I can wear whatever I want to a midterm election event full of media types, techies, policy advocates, and, well, does anyone else even exist at these things? I walked into the dimly blue-lit Brooklyn warehouse and was surprised to see the room already filling up. Newsreel, the media company founded by former Forbes and Newsweek reporter Jack Brewster, hosted the event, and the lineup was heavy-hitting. When CEOs talk about a technology that could deplete 10% of human civilization, he said, “they should be called to testify in front of Congress.” My panel was up next. Ungar-Sargon noted that some labor unions support data centers because of the jobs they promise. (Reports show that data centers create many jobs initially, but those jobs are not permanent once construction ends.) “There used to be a lot of pride in a community in the Rust Belt about very ugly, enormous buildings in their communities because everybody worked there,” she said, nodding to an earlier comment I’d made about data centers being ugly. “And they knew that building represented prosperity for themselves, stability for their children, and a future and a piece of the American dream.” Herndon noted that Vivek Ramaswamy was booed for making a similar point in Ohio, a Rust Belt state. “I just want to reinforce the lack of consent happening,” he said. “Because that’s true among Republicans in those places and I’ve watched it.” Katz was also skeptical. “It’s the same people who have taken so many union jobs away,” he said. “The same institutional powers that have robbed labor and working people of jobs and profit. Now coming back to essentially finish the job and take whatever scraps remain.” Along the warehouse walls, I noticed sticky notes answering posted questions, including “Will we ever be able to get Big Money out of politics?” “God, I hope so,” one note said. Two tech founders mentioned the AI assistant startup Instinct, while a non-tech person named Sam Altman Another non-tech person brought up the rise of deepfakes and AI art. She grew up in a Chinese immigrant community, where neighbors are putting signs in their yards showing dragons choking a data center. Dominic-Madori Davis is a senior venture capital and startup reporter at TechCrunch.