I want to preface the following by saying tech is by no means the only cause of America’s ongoing transition into a low-trust society, but it is the most legible cause. In light of recent polling on American attitudes towards both AI generally and data centers in particular, the tech industry should gird their egos and consider their role in normalizing, promoting, enabling, or profiting from the following.
1. the normalization of dishonesty
American students use ChatGPT to cheat. Scammers use the internet to fleece the elderly. Social media personalities lie about their lifestyles. Founders make grandiose, borderline ridiculous claims. Deepfakes circulate online. Bot farms skew the public’s perception of reality. Dangerous, unregulated products are sold on Amazon. Maybe all the blame should go to bad-faith actors using tech products with malintent. That’s the standard line of defense. Most tech companies have policies in place banning such behavior, but the behavior persists. Either it is tolerated because it is profitable, or the massive scale of digital platforms makes them de facto ungovernable.
2. designing for addiction
Americans are addicted to screens, to social media, to doomscrolling, to pornography. With the rise of betting apps, they’re now increasingly addicted to gambling. Silicon Valley is famously libertarian. All of the above can be used in moderation. Shouldn’t the users be responsible for their own behavior? Of course, but that doesn’t let the companies profiting from addiction off the hook for the second order effects of their products. Meta’s recent settlement in a lawsuit contending their products were intentionally designed to addict teenagers and children undermines that defense. If tech products are designed to promote addiction, the tech industry will be blamed for the social consequences of those addictions.
3. incentivizing antisocial behavior
Much of the most popular content online comes in the form of prank videos—a euphemism for harassment. It’s not clear that this harassment crosses the legal threshold (though sometimes it certainly does) but the mass monetization of being an asshole has social consequences. It incentivizes the destruction of the commons. Everyone under 40 knows there really are strangers out there, stalking the streets, waiting to humiliate another innocent victim.
4. the destruction of the dating market
Dating apps only remain profitable when their users remain single. Obviously people still date, people still get married, and people still have children, but family formation and fertility are down globally. I’m old enough to remember when it was presumed these trends were unique to the West and downstream from the triumph of secularism and the spiritual crisis that came with it. Now that these trends have gone global, other explanations are needed. Again, I don’t want to place all the blame on tech, but when the primary mechanism for finding a partner is online dating, it’s hard not to place a substantial amount of that blame on tech products.
5. the rise of fringe ideologies
This is an overdiscussed topic and I don’t have much to add to the debate. Did tech cause new political movements? No. Are tech products the primary means by which these movements gained prominence? Absolutely. Worst of all, everyone along every inch of the political spectrum is frightened of, angered by, or threatened by one or more of these ideologies. Social media is where they thrive. Social media is where the public encounters them. Social media gets the blame.
6. profiteering from anticompetitive practices
A more niche issue, but pricing products below what they cost to produce to drive competitors out of the market is never a popular practice—especially when the time comes to deliver profitability i.e. raise those prices. Laundering money for status requires people to believe your wealth was acquired fairly. The process described above taints the fortunes of Silicon Valley with an air of corruption.
7. the promotion of nihilism
What does Silicon Valley believe? “It’s time to build?” That’s not a good enough answer. Build what? For whom? And why? The libertarian-leaning tech industry doesn’t tend to think about these questions much. Engineers are concerned with if something works, not the values that thing embodies. But avoiding the question doesn’t make it go away. It only reveals libertarianism as a fig leaf for nihilism. If you are stupid enough to fall for a crypto rug pull, fuck you. If you are weak enough to become addicted to a gambling app, fuck you. It’s 2026 America. We live in low-trust times. You can absolutely get away with telling everyone to fuck off. But when it comes time to build in someone’s backyard, they might say fuck you back.
You can feel the wheels spinning as tech realizes that the deep unpopularity their behavior has earned them also has second order consequences. It’s not hard to say things you think the public wants to hear, the sort of prosocial things that might make the people protesting your new data center reconsider their position. “We’re going to cure cancer!” “We’re going to keep Americans safe from China!” “We’re going to cut your property taxes!” “We’re going to build you a shiny new school!” These are the sorts of things you want to hear from a potential new neighbor.
But tech forgot a step. They forgot to make people believe them. If the public doesn’t trust your intentions, it will be hard for them to believe your claims. Public mistrust of tech metastasized in the dark because their products have always felt like they were somewhere else. The cloud is far away.
Now that tech needs to build physical infrastructure close by, the calculus has changed. We have higher standards for neighbors because the consequences of their behavior may have immediate negative effects on our communities. Tech has spent the last two decades absolving themselves of the second order effects of their products.
If they want to build their data centers, they are going to have to convince the American public that this time is different. That will be difficult because the easiest way to make someone distrust you is to insist “trust us.”
