Distracted on Data Centers

Reason number 7,589 to hate Jason Kelce: Having to defend the brutalist Borg boxes swallowing up forests like Barad-dûr.

(The first five thousand or so theses justifying revulsion at the Eagles’ all-pro center involve his deadbeat parenting, his insufferable brother, his fanbase assaulting Kris Kringle, and that backbencher bum Nick Foles eeking out Super Bowl LII.)

Since Kelce retired from grappling burly men, he’s tried his calloused hand at what any American with a modicum of name recognition does: sell out, good and hard. There’s his drop-shipped t-shirt company, which sells Hanes knockoffs stitched by Cambodians. There’s the canned pisswater he flogs under the brand “Garage Beer,” which tastes like warmed-over motor oil and touts “95 calories.” Then there’s his most abject venture: a podcast with his meathead sib featuring vapid banter with even more vapid “celebrities.” (Tom Brady and Julian Edelman notwithstanding.)

Far be it from me to fault a man peddling cheap wares after a decade of treating his body like a punching bag for a spiked mace. The lifeblood of our commercial republic is by-hook-or-by-crook merchandising. But Kelce is now hip-drop tackling the business ethic established by another dominant athlete: Michael Jordan. He’s shamelessly mixing political advocacy with his juicebox brew.

In a, to use contemporary corporate parlance, “collab” with something called Liquid Death (sounds like the Axe body deodorant of energy drinks), Kelce is encouraging drinkers to quaff even more of his feather-ale. Then, when nature calls, to jar up the ochre emiction and post it off to your local…data center?

One is tempted to say jocular Jason is taking the piss. The gag-campaign is ostensibly altruistic. “AI data centers waste millions of gallons of water,” Kelce informs the viewer over—what else?—social-media video. Like many eco-politico buzzlines, negatives are exaggerated for quailing effect. Most of these server warehouses employ “closed loop” systems for water cooling. Your municipal arboretum where shaggy-haired, Birkenstock-shodded antifa layabouts congregate to chief chiba sucks up more H2O than the Bauhausian barns fueling the internet.

Every good advert lights the public imagination, even if the target demo are ill-informed TikTok zombies. Kelce’s marketing team is well tuned to the zeitgeist’s frequency. These plugged-in pitchers also see the polling: A.I. hubs are as popular as untreatable chlamydia. Tech-savvy Democrats and paid-off Republicans are emitting shrill protestations about the pace of ground-churning for server factories. Some, such as Pennsylvania’s windsock governor Josh Shapiro, smear their opponents as FAANG simps, eager to sell out swaths of unincorporated acreage for something other than a dispensary stripmall, just a year after they stood beside Jeff Bezos holding a shovel, inaugurating a looming, vacant circuited square, promising to bring jobs like manna.

Today? These hunks of concrete and concertina copper are the second coming of Blake’s Satanic Mills, a scourge on our gentle, sensitive sense of proportion and beauty. Worse, the frizz-haired champions of our gloriously automated, fully provided-for future are doing as all spectrumy nerds do, illustrating an unvarnished, cobalt-plated dystopia without jobs or a need to shift your behind out of bed in the morning.

Clearcutting centuries-old oaks, cottonwoods, lindens, maples, magnolias, catalpas, and sycamores to erect identical illumescient infocenters is going to make a public who grew up on “Terminator” and “Final Fantasy 7” uneasy. In response to mass enviro-degradation, Americans are resorting to an atavistic practice not seen since Norman Rockwell inked Saturday Evening Post covers. They’re becoming civically engaged.

Data-center trepidation is impelling normal, 9-to-5 citizens to do unheard-of things like turning off Fox News and attending selectmen meetings, probing ward reps, starting petition drives, filing FOIA requests. They’re also manically mouthing conspiracies about stacks of byte-processors causing miscarriages and radioactivating creeks. Which is predictable: no American political brouhaha would be complete without some madcappery.

So how is a dudebro like Kelce engaging with this Tocquevillian revolt? By turning a serious matter into a live-action “South Park” parody, complete with an ear-aching diddy and frolics with a cornea-pecced Murder Man. The worst part, of course, is that the wheeze relies on the very thing it mocks: the humming cube of semiconductors just off the side of your nearby highway. It’s a “safe horny” monkeyshine in service to selling Pop-Tart-flavored iced tea. One frame of the promo features a cop-out disclaimer in the lower third: “The suits want us to tell you to please don’t actually send your pee.” A linebacker hushed by a squirly attorney—real tough guy stuff!

But hey. Laugh at the football fella, crack open one of his Modello ripoffs, and keep a-scrolling while pretending to fight the system. Meanwhile, some halfwit rube with a gob of Skoal longcut behind his black lip is haranguing your councillor about a sweetheart deal cut with Microsoft to turn the field you played youth soccer in into a 5G fortress.

Who’s really fighting the power—figurative and literal—here?