The competition is so intense that in order for media to survive now, it needs to relentlessly farm clicks/views. So a story about a datacenter being built near a migratory goose pond carries way more value than the story about the pond actually is a Walmart parking lot runoff pit.
There is like this business game of whoever can fear monger and misinform the most without outright lying wins, and being honest and truthful gets you punished.
Political choices have trade-offs. We have to give up some things to gain others.
But somehow politicians get away with promising to solve all problems all at once, even though that's clearly impossible.
One can very much oppose the expansion of data centers while also using Claude all day to build software, because if you don't, you will lose your livelihood to someone who will. The problem isn't the technology, it's how it insanely disempowers workers in the labor market vs capital.
Until we have a durable solution for that along with the externalities that data centers impose on their localities, there is nothing hypocritical about using LLMs while voting to bring them to heel in the interest of the many over the interests of the few.
The fact that I enjoy social use social media and AI, even though I have complicated feelings about the ethics of the companies building them, including the impact of expansion of data centers. This doesn't have to be all or nothing!
Common pattern:
"I'm campaigning against A."
"But you want B, which clearly is caused by A."
"I don't care!"
The problem is that they often will never suffer from their irrational campaigns because the campaigns are prevented by other powers, so they don't learn that they were irrational; or they do suffer from it, but only much later and in an unspecific way, so they never connect the dots and again don't learn from it.
Smart phone or other things this sentence is usually trotted out for not so much.
Or maybe, just maybe, one can acknowledge that a thing benefits them personally isn't necessarily justified for the whole country or humanity as a whole, and admitting this makes them less hypocritical?