The outpouring of public resistance to the planned data center in Box Elder County mirrors similar opposition across the nation. No one anywhere seems to want the heat and noise produced by such freshwater-guzzling monstrosities — including, in Box Elder’s case, migratory birds at the nearby refuge.
But do the billionaires like “Mr. Wonderful” who are building these data centers care? It seems not.
What explains this? Well, financial profiteering comes immediately to mind. After all, they’re billionaires!
But a new book by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, “End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World,” offers another factor. The authors claim that these tech oligarchs (Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, et al.) are actively — and successfully, so far — hastening the destruction of this beautiful world. These men believe that Earth is in a death spiral, and that only by escaping to some extraterrestrial home can they survive and live happily ever after.
Klein and Taylor conclude: “It is … an existential crisis for us, that the people who are closest to the levers of power on this planet are not enraptured by the beauty that is already here and all around us.”
Tom Huckin, Salt Lake City