Politicians Loved Data Centers. Now They’re Running Away From Them. (w/ Nathaniel Rich)

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the bullwork takes. I'm glad to be here with the fellow New Orleans and he's contributing writer for the New York Times magazine professor at Tulane. He's the author of a new novel called Cloud Thief, which we'll get to in a bit. He also wrote a big piece of New York Times magazine this summer called How a Gang of Thieves pulled off a multi-million dollar data center heist, which has some interesting implications on the ongoing data center conversation. It's Nathaniel Rich. What's up, man? Hey, great to see you. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to do it. A lot that I kind of want to cover with you, but prior, I guess, ongoing, not even just prior, even on a climate beat. A lot of climate, a lot of climate things to write about here in New Orleans. I do feel like sometimes I give a short shrift just because there's so much craziness happening out there in the world, but as we're sitting down to talk, we have this oiling tragedy, ongoing in Nepal that seems to be stemming from a melted glacier, you know, all this flooding, which obviously has climate implications. Been a very lot of deaths the summer in Europe. So I just wanted to see if you have any kind of open-ended thoughts on the state of our climate. It's not great. The Nepal story is horrible. I've seen some of these videos that are, they almost see may I generate it? I guess we're in a world now where you see something that's shocking that you leap there. I think, and a lot more has to be known, including, by the way, the names of all the foreigners who were there, because a lot of the victims, it seems, that haven't been announced, were tourists in these regions. But I think what, I mean, what stands out to me is the suddenness and the violence of it is not something, I think, a lot of people tend to associate with climate change, where culturally it has this kind of slow motion, frog and boiling water feeling. That's not actually, I think, what we're going to be experiencing in the coming decades. What happens, it tends to move in lurches. And when you destabilize this sort of fundamental variables that are responsible for life on Earth as we know it, yes, there are gradual shifts over time with temperature, things like that sea level rise. But it also creates a situation where you can have sudden dramatic, horrifying, shocking events. You think of natural disasters, a crazy wildfire, a hurricane, or a flood, but there's often stories, things like this, where it seems like, and we don't fully know, the scientists aren't speaking with 100% certainty yet, but that the permafrost over time has been melting, and essentially the glacier that's been attached to the rock is slowly getting detached. And then all of a sudden, it collapses and you get this. And that, I think, is going to be much more symptomatic of the way we are going to experience climate change in the decades ahead as these sort of sudden, shocking shifts. And I don't think we're really prepared for culturally have a language to discuss yet. And it's one of the things that strikes me because, I don't know, there's something about the climate story's been with us now for so long that we've all these other things that grab people's attention. And I think that's part of it. And part of it is there's some modest progress that was being made. And then part of it is just it's hard to have new stories to tell about it. But like this, the videos from this to me, it's so jarring. Just to talk to imagine being in this situation and watch this insane, it's like an avalanche slash meets a flood. And I don't know, I do think it potentially has the chance to grab people's attention back. And when hearing you talk about it, it's like the old Hemingway line about you know, you go bank up slowly at first and all at once. And like that, there is that element to this. And I mean, obviously just another strategy, not to say it's just so relying, but just to say that like some like things like this have to happen, I think, to recapture people's attention onto this story that has kind of gotten onto the back pages. There's some truths to that, although I think you're right, but I'm always wary of that idea of, if only there's a climate disaster. Strong enough to get people's attention. Then the public conversational shift. You know, I'm kind of changing my mind even as it comes out of my mouth. It's like in more and more in my beat on the democracy beat, I always said, you know, what's going to shake people back is like, this is what I was saying back in 2020 on the podcast circuit. What we really need is some like external force that really creates a crisis where everyone doesn't, you know, everyone, you know, gets shaken away. And it's like, you know, we really need stable leadership and stable institutions in charge. And then COVID happened. And it like supercharged or anything and made everything worse. So I hear your hesitancy. I thought you were going to say, if only God forbid, say a group of terrorists, white supremacists, stormed Congress with God, maybe if something like that happened. That's how I feel about climate every summer because every summer is essentially the hottest summer in the history of known the historical record. And no one's ever really done a supercut. Actually, there's one exception. It's great climate documentary. The White House effect that I was personally involved in, but like a supercut of every to the TV news every summer saying, 1991 is the hottest summer ever recorded in 1992 is the hottest, you know, and so it's every summer, we have some version of this every hurricane. But I think for the climate advocacy crowd, if that's what you're waiting for is something to knock it into people's senses that it's not going to ever happen. And I think the challenge is more about how do you communicate the weirdness of the reality as we've reconfigured it. And that's something that I'm interested in in my own writing, but I think the shock and awe quality is actually limited over time. And then people kind of get blunt, you know, numb to it. Yeah, I wonder if one of the data center stuff. So you wrote, so this New York Times magazine piece is a is the true story of a data center heist that's informed the fiction that we're going to get to. And so you can do a standalone, you know, piece on what actually happened rather than explain it myself. Why don't you tell people about it? It's this incredible story of the heist of a data center in the center of London about 20 years ago. And I came to it and I should say that the headline is five professional thieves and a professional fake police dog that they hired dressed up as police officers went into this Verizon data center in the middle of King's Cross and stole 80 servers. They claim they were hired by some kind of banking conglomerate through a through a fixer, professional fixer, classic, you know, Ocean's 11 scenario. And that on those servers was information that would incriminate the bankers. And this was a the Times actually made me cut this detail because they didn't want to get sued. But among the banks that were keeping their data in this in this data center was JP Morgan Chase, the world's second biggest bank at the time as well as another number of major international banks. And the premise of the crime according to the the ringleader, who's a guy named Terry Ellis, who's now out of jail and telling his story, was that this was the only this was the only place outside of their headquarters where this incriminating information existed. And it tied them to a bunch of fraudulent dealings that that he thinks were connected to the whole banking crisis of the period. And they were trying to essentially get rid of the evidence. You know, the broader story, the larger story, which is also how I came to cloud thief was my learning through a different reported piece I wrote years earlier for Rolling Stone about this group of hackers and early privacy activists in 2010, who were completely obsessed with government surveillance, big tech surveillance. One of the people I interviewed who I had never heard of at the time was a Julian Assange. And I thought all these guys are they're a little paranoid like let's not, you know, like they're saying they kept saying things like the stuff that that exists in these data centers could take down governments could take down. And I was like, okay, whatever. And then as I was reporting story Assange started WikiLeaks and then went on the on the run. So I realized, oh, they might be actually telling the truth when they're talking about being trailed by the FBI and so on. But in the course of that reporting, one of these activists said this line to me, which was which really shocked me, which was, you know, Google is the most powerful is more powerful than any country in the world. And I said, well, what do you mean? Like, because they're so rich, they have so much money. He said, no, because they own the data centers, they own the servers on which every sovereign state just about every major corporation, every newspaper and magazine and you name it where they keep their files. And that really stayed with me. And it put a question in my mind, which is to say if, you know, if data is the most valuable information, if what lives in these data centers could be used to compromise just about anyone in society from a prime minister to a bank CEO, why hasn't anyone tried to steal that information and do that? And So I started to, over the years, I started to look for evidence of it. And finally, I found that in fact, some people had in this story of the British Heist is the best example. It's an interesting way into this data center story because there's, like, you know, let's go this hodgepodge of different complaints that people have that have resulted in this like massive sea change in public opinion about them, like over this summer, basically from then kind of like a 50/50 issue to really, like one of a few 80, 20, 70, 30 issues in the country. People are outraged about it. And for some of them, it's localized, you know, NIMBY issues, it's or it's localized environmental concerns, you know, for some people it's tech concerns about the big tech oligarchs, lack of trust, you know, in those guys. There hasn't been as much conversation around kind of this more whatever libertarian horseshoe angle of it, like, which is what, like, what are we, you know, what are the security implications of this? Like, what are my personal security implications of this? What are the risks of about this on a more systemic level? Yeah, so I mean, when I was writing the novel, and as you said, this magazine piece comes out of that research, I was confronting the, with the reality that basically nobody has outside of these kind of hacker privacy online specialist people, no one even knew what a data center was. And then, of course, by the time the book was published, but after it was finished being written, everybody knows what it is. It's gone from being, you can see there's now public opinion polling about it, where awareness of what they are has jumped from like 5% to 75% in a poll from the spring. I'm sure it's higher now. And then, as you said, the opinions have completely, I mean, I don't, I think 80 20 is, is understating it. I mean, there was just this thing in political today. I saw that there's 100 campaign ads about data centers that have gone on air in the last few months, and it's 100 to zero against data centers across the political divide. So people hate data centers. I mean, with a passion and, and we can talk about all the reasons why. But, yeah, essentially, I think, I mean, my, my thesis, I'm curious to know what you think about this as well. But essentially, it's become this, it's not original to me, obviously, but it's become this focal point for anxieties about AI, broadly speaking. If you're anxieties about AI or about employment, data centers are the answer. If it's environmental, data centers are the answer or killing data centers. You name it, rates going up and so on. But, but the original use of data centers, which surveillance folks and privacy folks have been railing on about that, which is that they collect all of our civilizations information in these boxes in warehouses that we call data centers. Nobody cared about that. And probably still that people still don't really care about that. So that I think AI has achieved what the kind of activists failed to do for 20 years, which is make people aware of them and then be frightened and concerned about them. I think of a trust. I, this is really an anxiety, but just an utter lack of trust in the people that are running these big tech companies. You know, and I, and I think that's the other change from like what, when this was in '07, you know, I think most people had a pretty positive view of Steve's job still alive in '07. Yeah, I think so. I was Zuckerberg even, you know, maybe a little dorky, but like fine, you know, gates, like the big tech, they, they, they've, it seemed like on balance, like they were, you know, maybe a little weird or quirky, but they cared about society and that they were like building these new things that were useful. Like, now you can find information you couldn't have or you could FaceTime somebody. And I think from that, from '07 to now, now people look at the stuff and think it's made me negative on their lives and that like they have no trust that these people care at all about that. No, I think the polling shows that I think a lot of these issues, as you say, were seated earlier, like, oh, it's a little weird that when I talk in my kitchen to my wife about a trip or planning, and then the next time I go on my phone, it has ads for that destination, like that's weird. I don't think I enabled anything or like, I don't, it's a little annoying that it's giving me all these suggestions I don't want and starting to write my emails for me. All of my information is wrapped up in the, in the cloud. I can't, you know, all of that, people were, there wasn't uneasiness, but they didn't quite link it together and the dominance of the AI narrative and the scale of it and the fact that the, when, when big tech promotes it, they talk about it and as if it's the terminator, I think all of that conspired, like people, when you say like, yeah, this is, there's a good chance the superintelligence will destroy us out of Calus disregard for humanity and it's overwhelming power and we'll all be out of jobs. That's the best case scenario because then we'll be so rich that it won't, it's like, what do you think? Wait a minute. So you want this thing that's going to take my job and might kill us all. You want to build a data center that allows that to happen in my community. It's going to be fucking ugly. And like, this is like the nimbism is kind of the proximate thing that you lay on top of that. It's like, okay. Well, maybe if this was useful. And, you know, it's easy, it's, it's hard to get worked up about, like, you know, a bot suggesting things in a very flattering way to you about how to write an email. You know, but it's, but when it's like, yeah, building a physical structure that's extremely loud and environmentally ruinous that's also going to raise your bills and is hideous, then I think that has a way of focusing people. And so it's, it's not surprising to me now that once people started looking at this reality that's, that the read thrust into that they are rejecting it in extraordinarily forceful forms. I mean, there's a great line in one of these times, you know, the times has been, and other publications, but the time's been running this sort of drumbeat of pieces about how everyone has data centers for a while now. And one of the earlier ones after this Indianapolis City Council member was shot at because he, his house was shot at because he approved a permit for a data center in Indiana. The piece said, and then the shooter put a sign on his doorstep that said, no data centers. And another council member said something of the fact of, you know, this is the most bipartisan issues since beer, like hatred of data centers. And so what's been fascinating to me, and this is really your beat, I'd be curious to know what you think about it, but it's like, the politics have been kind of lagged. There's, there have been pieces that are starting to shift, but not a lot of politicians, I think it's changing, but to this point, have really embraced the full force of this. I've kind of put this to work for them, but I mean, clearly that's going to change. It is going to change. It's funny. Part of this is just sheer hypocrite, like, that people have a little bit of embarrassment, because like, again, six months ago, everybody was forum, right? Like, you know, in the pre-AI context, you know, a lot of people are like, oh, jobs are coming to my community, and, you know, politicians are like, this is a win for me. I can do a ribbon-cutting idea as well, as well, as on that speaker talking about how the teachers are going to get a bonus in my district, or, you know, there's a story yesterday about how it just depends, case by case, basis, but like in some places, the data centers are actually leading to lower rates for people, you know, because it's helping cover the infrastructure costs that was going to be in your bill, whether that's long-term or not, who knows. Like, you know, like, you can understand why there was, like, short-term, myopic political reasons for doing it, right? And so, like, now, you're in these campaigns in the fall, like, two candidates, oftentimes, that both were four data centers, like, accusing the other candidates of being more for it, right? Like, you're saying this in a book, and the Wisconsin governor's race is like the most prime example of this. Ohio governor's race. You know, I don't want to malign Amy Acton. I don't know if she was ever for them, but definitely in Wisconsin when they're both for them, they're now running out, so I'm going to be the other guys, more for them. The Ohio, I just was reading a piece about the Ohio Senate race, where there was like a Republican senatoral committee memo warning that he used to might lose it because he's become, because of data centers, because he's become the face of Ohio data centers, which is a tough, that's a tough face to have, I guess. Yeah. And Sherry Brown, I guess it's a side benefit of the fact that he had lost, so he's going to out of the game during the day to set a bill down, so he doesn't have any record on it. I do think that that's happening, and you'll see more, but I want to get your book, we just one of the things, because it's something that I hadn't even thought about, forget covered before I was reading your New York Times mag piece, which is you quote somebody that says, if you want to bring the global financial system to its knees, bomb, mawa, which I guess is the New York Stock Exchange data center, and I like doing alarmism around here a lot to be alarmed about. And I was like, oh, like that part of this, you know, as it ties into drones and asymmetric warfare, like does seem like a real risk that people aren't even thinking about. Absolutely. And that's sort of the tricky thing about this subject is that the kind of heist or at least my story, the kind of heist that Terry Ellis pulled off 20 years ago, you couldn't really accomplish it now because the information is not living at any single information, not living in any single data center, data center infrastructure was slightly different back then, particularly in the case that I wrote about. Now the threat is much more, yeah, kind of vandalism or terrorism. And already we've had the first attempted terrorist attacks of data centers. We've had attempts to assassinate data center and tech CEOs. There was a guy who went into Virginia who trying to target in an Amazon data center, trying to take down 70% of the internet. There have been stuff in war zones and I think in the Middle East where data centers have been targeted. So yeah, that's certainly where we're headed. And there's also a confusion of different types that the new data centers are being built to power these language models as opposed to store information although they can do both. And so there's sort of two types. But yeah, there's, it's absolutely, you know. - So maybe less systemic risk to a terrorist attack on the Claude LLN data center. Not that we had to be for that. - Well, wherever it's more centralized, the more, that's the point that these experts kept emphasizing to me is, you know, whenever information is more centralized and as the data centers build out, you have more and more stuff in one place than the result of an attack is worse. And the Mawa example is sort of hilarious. Like, you know, the guy said you could bomb Wall Street and you'd keep doing your Schwab trades. And then, but then the second you bomb Mawa, it goes to black. - Well, I don't, you know, I don't want to know what's going to beat us first. You know, what's going to get us first on the very, on your various beats, you know, climate apocalypse, AI apocalypse, it's a race against the clock. I want to go to Cloud Thief. This is the New York Times review that it's kind of, I guess maybe the nut graph of their review, which peaked my interest 'cause it covers a lot of topics that I like to get into. Underneath the topical coding, Cloud Thief isn't really about data centers privacy or climate change. Its main subject seems to be Tim's malaise and perhaps a broader contemporary malaise for which Tim has meant to be a stand-in. - Yeah, I was just you, specifically. - That's me, this podcast is the malaise. I trust me, I've got some fucking malaise, man. - Well, it really goes back to your last comment. That's what you're getting at. You're actually getting at the, sort of the perfect transition for the novel and really everything I write about, which is, it's not so much like predicting the future, like predicting which terrible scenario or risk is going to swallow us up. It's really about, well, how do we live it at time when we're constantly being reminded and terrified by all of this stuff? We're inundated with worst-case scenarios, with risk, with threat. Even while standards of living are pretty good, historically speaking and global history, all of that, we've also never been confronted with more bad news all the time. And so, in the novel, Tim is a kind of disgruntled, climate journalist, effectively, who is about 10 years into his career and completely defeated, feels like his whole career's been a waste. He went in with big ideals and, you know, that sort of designs on saving the world and honorable ideas about journalism. All of that is completely out the window by the time the book begins and he's looking for answers and he meets a woman, Virginia, who's a kind of tech savant who's living off the grid in the middle of New York City in a storage unit. And they get together and they figure out this idea for a perfect crime, which is to pull off this heist of a data center and essentially enrich themselves and become invincible through the crime and money that they'll earn. Of course, the book doesn't end that way, but that's sort of where it starts in the kind of nihilistic view that I think a lot of us at least flirt with in our daily lives. Like, what's somethings? And so, you know, the story is really about, well, what do you do with that? What are the answers? Like, one reaction is just to say, screw it. I'm going to go, makes a lot of money and commit some crimes and protect me and my family. That's not always fully satisfied. And so then the book goes into some other places. But I think that's what you're getting at is sort of the heart of the modern experience right now. Just like, what do we do with all of this? What do we do with the knowledge that this is the hottest summer of all time and probably the coldest summer of the rest of our lives? Like, how do we sit with that? - I mean, people always wanted to get really rich, right? So there's like nothing like new about that. But I do think that there is something underlying like the current scam, a moment of like the crypto scams and everything with the president being a crypto scammer. And, you know, it just, and, you know, the prediction markets, like it feels to me, particularly among younger men, that there is kind of a, like, it's almost noble to like, you might as well go out and get yours right now, right? Like that the economy has been rigged against us and to like, this is, you know, the path that's been provided to me and like, screw all the people that want to virtue signal about it. Like, I do think that that is a very of the moment, like mindset, a particular certain demographic. - And I think it's, and I get it. I was like, it's a totally rational response. Is it the most sort of morally upstanding response? No. But I think that's what's interesting about these questions. And that's why I think we're literature has a role to play here is that these are subjective questions. Like each one of us has to decide, what do we do with this information? And some people might say, yeah, I'm just going to like, build some scam business and make a lot of money. And I get it. There are other people who are like, I'm going to become a full-time advocate or activist. And then most of us are somewhere in the middle and it's the negotiation of our own role in all of this. How much, you know, and how much of the bad news do we let in and how much do we block out? Where do we position ourselves? That's the kind of constant negotiation, I think, of modern life now. And those are the, that's why the stories that I'm interested in are ones about people who are trying to navigate that. But know that there's not really a right answer. But it's just about, well, how do I hold on to my humanity in some way in this kind of fallen place? - I think a lot about just like one, it's like in a post-COVID, you know, kind of like, I was doing my rounds after COVID going to see my buddies that I've had seen in a while. And I was like down in LA and we're in the backyard with my friends. And this is not any of the people we just described. I mean, they're all, you know, what you're talking about, kind of like trying to model through, trying to do their best, trying to be good people, trying to be parents. And like, one of them said, you know, like this, honestly feels like it could be out of a corny sitcom show. But, you know, we might have been a little high, but it was like really on the nose. So he's just like, I really just do think it's gonna be worse. Okay, like he was not like saying it like this big, heavy way, it was almost just like, you know, like a throwaway comment. Like, I think that's like, we're on a trajectory where shit is gonna be worse for the kids. And I sat with that a lot because I was like, you know, are we just getting, is this the classic middle-aged thing where everybody thinks it's getting worse, right? Or is there like something different happening? And I've really come around to the view that like, it's something like meaningfully different than just like Uncle Rico and nostalgia for the good old days of high school, right? That there is this real fear there. And like that, that lives side-by-side with what you were talking about with this, like things are fine for them like day-to-day, right? Like they're not pessimistic or realistic, but it's just this like thing hanging over, you know, what's, what's to come. - Yeah, and then, and so then if you sort of push that even further, then the question is, well, how do they preserve what they value in their lives in at a time when it's worse? You know, that's, that's not the end of the conversation. That's just the beginning. Like, okay, we're in a worse time. Now what? - All right. - And that's where I think the storytelling, and you know, it's, my feeling is the more you can talk through these stories and reading is a big part of this for me at least. The more you understand the reality, the more you can see that, oh yeah, data centers have been all around us always or like the climate's been warming our entire lives, then you can kind of sit with, bring that information in and then you can decide personally, like, well, where do I go with that? And how do I think about having children? How do I think about what I do with my days? How do I think about my work, all of that? And then at least you can have a more reasoned and kind of sophisticated and mature evaluation rather than just like, everything's getting worse. So, oh well, you know. So I think it's all part of a kind of process, but it's very much an individual process. It's not, it's not for me to prescribe what you should do or what your friend, you know, it's for each of us has to go through it. And I think by, you know, through stories, that's one of the best modes we have. - Well, I've got good news for myself and for you personally, which is I'm reading again. You know, during the first year of Trump, I didn't, I didn't have, I was like, I was only reading stupid Trump stuff in news and what my guests had written that stuff. And so I'm back, I started reading, I'm blocking out reading time and a heist book that talks about my malaise. It definitely feels like it's for me. So I hope you enjoy it. I'll be checking out ClubP if I hope everybody else does and I appreciate the time, right, man? - Thanks for having me, great to see you. - I'll see you soon. - All right, take care.