When American manufacturing was truly coming into its own in the early 20th century, workers sometimes labored 12-hour days for seven days a week and risked life and limb working near dangerous machinery.
Factories blackened the skies of American cities and poisoned waterways.
Yet some of the same people who insist that the American economy needs to re-industrialize to return to a version of those halcyon days can’t bear the thought of the construction of industrial-scale computing facilities.
They complain that data centers are unsightly and use lots of energy and water.
But what do they think major factories are like?
If today’s standards applied, we almost certainly never would have built manufacturing facilities at scale.
Industrial buildings may look pretty in Edward Hopper cityscapes, and facilities like the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge complex had a certain majesty as captured by photographers and painters.
Otherwise, factories — especially when clustered together — generally looked more like William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” than anything the average local zoning commission would want in the neighborhood.
No one ever said, “God, that smokestack looks gorgeous — I wish I lived closer to it!”
Data centers have caused outrage because they look like big warehouses — but imagine the vapors everyone would have if they spewed soot over streets and houses, created slag heaps, divided neighborhoods with rail lines and other supporting infrastructure, and packed workers into subpar housing nearby.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thought she had a trump card in the anti-data center case when she brandished two jars of dirty water from a house near a data center (the house’s well was perhaps disturbed during construction).
But that’s nothing compared to the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, which repeatedly caught fire from 1868 to 1969 as a by-product of the sort of industry that populists on the left and right look back to fondly.
The early 20th century gave us the worst of these sort of phenomena; they were finally alleviated in the postwar years.
Still, even then, factories inevitably were ugly, used a lot of water and energy, and depended on workers willing to take jobs much more hazardous than service or office work.
If we couldn’t have tolerated operations using prodigious amounts of water and energy — key inputs of the Industrial Revolution — we never could have had, for instance, integrated steel mills, which suck up an unbelievable amount of water to circulate through their furnaces and account for something like 5% of the entire country’s energy usage.
Paper mills would have been a complete non-starter.
Aluminum smelters, the largest of which used as much electricity as a city? Forget about it.
Chemical plants? Oil refineries? No and no.
We hear much about Big Tech titans’ arrogance, and of how anger toward them explains opposition to data centers.
How does their high-handedness compare to the industrial titans of yore?
Well, we haven’t heard of any tech companies locking out the workers building their data centers, then sending in Pinkerton guards for a gun battle with the resisting electricians and plumbers.
That would be what Carnegie Steel did during the 1892 Homestead Strike near Pittsburgh.
Now, data centers don’t provide the regular employment of old-school factories.
The blue-collar work force needed to build them and to maintain and update them is substantial, though, and that’s driving up wages in exactly the fashion everyone has long said they wanted.
It is a symptom of the perversity of the current moment that we’ve imposed huge tariffs on the rest of the world in order to — at the margins and perhaps only in theory — create more blue-collar jobs, while at the same time are preparing to turn our backs on private-industry-driven investments that will make such jobs more lucrative and plentiful.
If the tariffs are tinged by nostalgia, the data centers are meant to power the next wave of innovation.
It doesn’t speak well of us if the backward-looking vision is more appealing than the future-oriented one.
One of the advantages of the mass manufacturing revolution at the time is that it was at the technological and economic frontier, where large-scale productivity gains and national power are forged.
The AI revolution is at the frontier now, and it should be considered a minor miracle that an economic phenomenon all about computing power is driving a blue-collar construction boom.
What’s not to like?
We never would have become the country we are today if the response to the physical assets necessary for economic growth and good blue-collar work had been: “Not in my backyard.”
X: @RichLowry
This story originally appeared on NYPost
