David Wallace-Wells

speaker

678 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 6d ago

David Wallace-Wells’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

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The Opinions · Is This the Fastest Opinion Shift in American Politics? · 15 Jul 2026 podcast

Yeah, exactly.

Although, you know, one of the most astonishing facts that I read about this recent pattern is that Loudoun County, Virginia, which is the epicenter, expects to get half of its local tax revenue from AI data centers by 2030 or so.

So you're talking about a significant expansion of local tax revenue.

But I think one part of the AI story that feels so distressing to people is that, you know, a lot of people will say at these town halls, nobody asked for this.

I wasn't screaming about how I needed a chat bot to run my travel itinerary or do my taxes.

Maybe I'll find a reason to do that.

Maybe it will even be a little bit better.

But we're living through this revolution.

I'm speaking in the voice of someone, an activist.

We're living through this revolution that none of us were agitating for because a select group of very rich and powerful people decided that it was absolutely necessary, persuaded

the powers that be to take their hands off of the system and let the money do its work.

And I think one of the personally, one of the things that I think is animating the local backlash is something that's not all that local, which is just the sense of my future is now being written by people who don't have my interest at heart, who are completely insulated from the kinds of effects that they may be unleashing and who have bought off the at least tacit support of the federal government.

And that powerlessness is quite enraging.

And it does make you think, where can I grab a hold of this story?

Where can I take control?

And I think that's one reason why it's showing up so much more at the local level than the federal level is because you can just storm into a town hall and you can just rally your neighbors against something in a way that you can't necessarily make sure your senator is going to vote for a

AI data center moratorium or whatever.

There is some access point that is still visible to people in local communities that even if it isn't going to change the whole shape of the AI future, it allows them to feel empowered in a way that almost any other political activism towards AI is going to feel effectively like they're engaging in some kind of fatalistic performance.

And it is interesting that at the international level, the U.S.

is actually considerably more skeptical of AI and worried about AI than almost any other country for reasons maybe having to do with the way that Silicon Valley has re-scripted our lives over the last couple of decades, and maybe also to some extent because we've seen the fecklessness of our politics in trying to take control of that system.

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