Weekly Grounding #142
Data centers; Thomas Massie; military biotech; scientism; environmentalism
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
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“The Small Midwest Community Leading America’s Crusade Against Data Centers”
The Wall Street Journal reports that “More than 90 local governments across the country have enacted or are considering measures to limit construction of data centers out of concern that these properties will sap their communities’ electrical power and boost utility bills…Probably nowhere in the U.S. has the backlash reached a more fevered pitch than in Festus, a city of 14,000 near the Mississippi River and about 30 miles from St. Louis.”
“When the City Council last month approved a proposal by a St. Louis developer to build a data center to accommodate AI, residents erupted in protest,” the report continues. “They hit the streets to rally more residents to their cause…After people in this St. Louis suburb voted out four local council members who supported plans for a new data center, dozens of residents packed City Hall to make clear they weren’t done. New council members who opposed the project were sworn in to cheers, and some in the crowd then taunted and booed the mayor who supported the data center.”
The Journal notes that, “With the midterm elections about half a year away, opposition to artificial intelligence as well as the construction of data centers to support it is evolving into a campaign issue for politicians of all stripes. A Quinnipiac poll last month found that most Republicans and Democrats would oppose the construction of an AI data center in their communities, with electricity costs and water usage cited as top reasons…Opponents in Festus express many of the concerns voiced in other parts of the country. They worry about the proximity to homes; pollution from generators and wastewater; an overburdened electrical grid and higher utility bills; and disruptions to daily life from years of construction. Some residents cite environmental horrors from the region’s industrial past. A few miles from Festus is Herculaneum, site of the former Doe Run lead smelter, which closed in 2013. More than 100 families were relocated because of dangerous levels of lead contamination.”
“Massie is a Real-Food Hero”
At Harnessing the Power of Nutrients, Chris Masterjohn, PhD chronicles some important aspects of Thomas Massie’s record in Congress. On the topic of data centers, Masterjohn notes that “Massie led major efforts to protect the rights of local governments to regulate AI data centers. Without Massie, you probably would have lost your ability to fight any AI data centers being put in your backyard.”
He explains that “Massie used his seat on the Judiciary Committee to directly kill the Protect American AI Act, which would have granted privileges to AI datacenter permits. He opposed it on the basis that no industry should get special treatment. The original ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ had a provision that would prevent state and local regulation of data centers. Massie exposed this on X, and that played a major role in the popular opposition that got it stripped in the Senate.”
Masterjohn reports that Massie also “originated and championed the Processing Revival and Intrastate Meat Exemption ‘PRIME’ Act. Crafted by the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, in turn founded by Sally Fallon Morell of the Weston A. Price Foundation and others, this act is meant to remove the USDA as an impediment to small farmers…After ten years of championing this bill, Massie finally got a major part of it passed by the House as part of the Farm Bill on April 30 of this year. The bill itself passed 224-220.”
Thanks to AIPAC lobbying, the pro-real food and anti-data center movements have lost one of their only sincere allies in Congress.
“The Future of America’s Military Industrial Complex”
At The Financial Times, Rana Foroohar writes that “Global conflict is on the rise, and technology—from AI and cheap drones to sensors, robotics and unmanned systems—is fundamentally changing the nature of war. And that’s leading to an investment boom…Investment in US defence and aerospace ETFs hit a monthly record in March (they were up 573 per cent year on year as of the third quarter of 2025).”
She note that this investment boom “is predicated on the idea that warfare is, like the world itself, becoming more digital and decentralised. Conflict is asymmetric—smaller nations like Ukraine or Iran can now hold their own against incumbent powers by leveraging cheap technology. Meanwhile, the need for greater speed, resilience and redundancy in supply chains is moving the production of everything from drones to the placement of AI data centres closer to home. The decoupling of the American and Chinese tech stacks has created opportunities for start-ups in both countries, as the old, highly globalised and concentrated model of defence shifts.”
Interestingly, the financialization and biotechnologization of war relates back to food in some disturbing ways: Foroohar writes: “I was interested to read about a $9mn US Army contract given to Biosphere, a company developing a ‘portable biomanufacturing system’ capable of producing protein-based food rations for troops using just air, water and electrical energy. The idea is to create a highly distributed model of food production in which rations could be made anywhere at the drop of a hat. In 2021, I wrote about University of Wisconsin biologist Molly Jahn, who has worked on similar ‘making food out of thin air’ technology at Darpa, the innovation arm of the Pentagon. At the time, it was fiction; today, the technology is commercially viable.”
“The Ideology of Science”
In a brilliant piece at Social Studies, Leighton Woodhouse writes that “Sometimes it takes the distance of time to see through the mystique of authority. And there is no authority more mystical than Science.”
Using parenting as an example, he writes that “The doctors who championed…[a] frigid philosophy of child development, led by James B. Watson, were cut from the cloth of the Progressive Era. The crusading reformers of that time recognized no human problem that could not be solved by the tenacious application of scientific expertise. This neo-religious faith in the healing power of science fueled a surge in new technocratic social engineering philosophies, from the ‘scientific’ management of workers on assembly lines to the sanitization of populations through eugenics. It turned every economic, cultural and political problem into an object of scientific inquiry.”
Woodhouse analyzes the relationship between science and the state, arguing that, “In the era of mass industrial competition, the power of the state was a function of the mechanical efficiency and precision with which societies were organized. In the Soviet Union, Marxism provided the intellectual basis for the rationalization of this social re-ordering. In the United States, it was Taylorism at the level of the shop floor, and among the professional classes, it was the technocratic governing philosophy that emerged from the Progressive era.”
These Progressive era scientific dogmas only began to fall apart in 1960s America when the “industrial paradigm was breaking down under the strain of its internal contradictions. The most visible expression of that breakdown was the political foment and countercultural resistance of the Baby Boomer generation, whose rebellion was not so much ‘leftist’ in orientation as anti-conformist and individualist. The New Left adopted the aesthetics and rhetoric of socialism, but in its loathing of ‘The System’ and its valorization of individual freedom and expression, it was firmly in the tradition of American frontier libertarianism, a legacy of the Scots-Irish. In violently rejecting the organization of American society on industrial lines, far from being agents of outside forces, the youth of the ‘60s were acting as antibodies expelling a foreign pathogen.”
For some of my thoughts on the ideology of science, see “Sciencesplaining,” “Jeffrey Epstein and the Cult of Scientism,” “Ted Kaczynski and the Paradox of the Postwar Predicament,” and “The Left’s Problem with Technology.”
“Environmentalism Without Spirituality is Bound to Fail”
Marco Masi probes the pitfalls of modern environmentalism at Letters for a Post-Material Future: “The capitalist industrial complex is certainly the main culprit and perpetrator, but it is still only the tip of the iceberg. It is the effect, not the cause; the symptom, not the disease. For the rapacious exploitation that characterizes environmentally destructive corporations is backed by a collective materialistic culture that resides in all of us. The ecological crisis is not only triggered by the "bad guys" (the commercial interests of big corporations, the fossil fuel industry, the financial institutions, etc.) but is a system of thought and feeling, a way of life entrenched in our collective consciousness. Materialism, physicalism, and naturalism may sound like mere philosophical preferences with no influence on our practical day-to-day life. But they do, and profoundly so. At the root of the ecological disaster stands a deeply rooted materialistic way of conceiving life and society.”
He continues: “Taking action against climate change, to protect the environment and preserve the planet, is widely perceived as a burden, a sacrifice that threatens the economy and our material prosperity. This perception reflects a deeper problem: the materialistic and technocratic mindset that dominates modern society. Under this worldview, harmony with Nature is seen as a constraint on growth, a threat to wealth, and, more subtly, a regression to a primitive existence. Environmental action is reduced to a question of economics and technology, divorced from ethics, meaning, or spiritual awareness. Only a minority recognize that this framing is not only false but dangerous. Delaying action under the illusion that we must prioritize material comfort and technological solutions will only worsen the crisis, driving us toward both ecological and economic collapse. A true ecological transformation requires confronting the limitations of materialism and technocracy, and cultivating a deeper consciousness that sees human prosperity as inseparable from the flourishing of Nature.”
“But this attitude is reflected, though with different nuances, in the environmental movement itself,” Masi writes. “Modern environmentalism is largely shaped by a materialistic conception of Nature and our place within it as well. Paradoxically, for all its moral passion, it is in many ways still captive to the very worldview that gave rise to the ecological crisis in the first place…[T]he assumption that social and economic justice will naturally translate into ecological expanded consciousness is one of the most widespread and seductive ideas within environmentalists’ circles. The reasoning that once poverty is eliminated, inequality dismantled, and basic needs universally met, people will be free to concern themselves with higher causes, and the environmental movement will swell with newly liberated and enlightened citizens will turn out to be yet another delusion. There is no doubt that extreme inequalities and economic desperation can force communities into ecologically destructive practices out of sheer survival necessity. However, the historical and empirical evidence tells a more sobering story. The wealthiest societies on earth are also, by and large, the most ecologically destructive, consuming the most resources, producing the most waste, and leaving the largest carbon footprints. Material wealth does not produce ecological sensitivity; it produces more consumption. The problem, in other words, is not merely poverty but the materialistic value system that governs both rich and poor. Until that deeper cultural and philosophical collective substrate is transformed, the dream that economic equity will automatically generate ecological solidarity remains precisely that: a dream.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.