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Shut up and take our money: Amazon plows $1B+ into quashing datacenter dissent
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2026
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Technology
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While you are absolutely correct, all those other industries are well established, ai and datacentres are relatively new to the scene. It's much easier to stop something that just started, then stop something that is already established.
Additionally, protesting one doesn't make protesting the other impossible. Education is an effective tool to reach people. "Are you upset that datacentres waste x amount of water, well then oil and gas wastes 10x amount. Let's protest those as well."
That is the most defeatist argument I think I've heard. You're essentially suggesting that it's too late to fix the biggest issues, so you're going to protest things that won't actually have an impact just because it's easier.
You're right that people could be doing multiple, I'm just pointing out they aren't doing that.
At this point it's clearly either just performative activism, or people are using the environment as an excuse to hide their worries about the economic impacts that may affect them (completely valid)
The third option is that people are so poorly educated that they actually can't think rationally about this issue. I'm not ruling that out at this point.