this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2026
593 points (99.3% liked)
Technology
88390 readers
3293 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Nah, people latched onto the water use for some reason. We're rolling with it
Our enemies have long had no understanding of why they opposed making things better for everyone, when they come ranting about Amazon stealing our water we need to welcome them to the cause and tell them the bad guys are developing mad Max militarized AI tanker trucks to steal it harder
Uh, fair enough. Yeah I guess that's a good hook. But still, I can only see the correlation between the exponential increase in Flock cameras and datacenters. Clearly it's all for surveillance, precrime and the like. If we center discussion around water we move it away from the actual harm being done. Policies become about "ensuring water isn't wasted" instead of "ensuring datacenters don't get built". It's a distraction, no? Or rather, it's co-optation.
I mean...I don't disagree with you
But there's a hard truth I know I'm still grappling with
None of it matters. Most of our allies are not at a level they will engage with the truth of the matter. If their faucet is blocked by a tree root, they'll be further convinced, and if they always have water they won't be unconvinced
So if they care about water, good messaging means that water becomes the stand in for the right to privacy. Nothing you say (or at least nothing I have tried to say) will make them understand the privacy implications. I haven't convinced a single person that privacy is actually critical to democracy. And trust me, I've tried a lot of angles with many different people
We just have to accept they're pointed in the right direction, and that trying to educate them can only hurt the cause. They won't be ideologically won over, but on the flip side, it's not really about water for them either
Even if we did reach them on the issue, that wouldn't wake them up. They won't care about the next issue, like the cameras, until they're worried that agents are laughing over their genital pics or something, whatever they latch onto next
So just let water be the metaphor. They'll cheer with us, they'll march with us, and they won't blink when you tell them AI water usage is eroding their rights