Silicon Valley Needs Your Electricity
Sorry, Guys: Why Do You Hate Progress?
Just a small note this morning from the frontiers of human flourishing, courtesy of Fortune.
We regret to inform you that nearly 50,000 residents of the Lake Tahoe region are about to lose their power source. NV Energy, the Berkshire Hathaway-owned utility that has supplied wholesale electricity to the area for decades, has informed Liberty Utilities — the small California company that retails the power to those 50,000 households — that it will stop providing service after May 2027. The reason, helpfully provided by NV Energy itself, is that the utility needs the capacity for data centers. Google, Apple, and Microsoft are building or expanding facilities in the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center east of Reno, and the load growth from these projects is, in NV Energy‘s own filings, projected to constitute 75% of major-project demand in Northern Nevada through 2033. Data centers were 22% of Nevada’s electricity in 2024. They are projected to reach 35% by 2030.
Technological progress isn’t without pain, and we appreciate your patience, America.
The 50,000 Lake Tahoe residents are, in this arrangement, what political-economists might call an… unfortunate externality. Their continued access to electricity is the cost imposed on them so that Silicon Valley can have more compute for its AI models. They did not consent to this arrangement. They were not asked. The utility regulators with jurisdiction over their rates do not have jurisdiction over the wholesale supply that has been redirected. The utility regulators with jurisdiction over the wholesale supply do not have jurisdiction over their rates. The result, in the Fortune piece’s careful summary, is a system where California sets the rules, Nevada runs the wires, federal jurisdiction applies to the wholesale market, and no single entity is accountable for the outcome.
Convenient.
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Effective accelerationism, in the formulation Marc Andreessen has been articulating across the past several years, holds that the moral hazard worth worrying about is not what happens to the 50,000 Lake Tahoe residents. The moral hazard worth worrying about is the lost opportunity cost of progress if projects like the Google-Apple-Microsoft data-center buildout are not allowed to proceed unmolested by regulation or law. The aggregate loss to human flourishing from slower technological development, the framework argues, is greater than the local loss to the 50,000 residents. The 50,000 residents are a small price. The opportunity cost is a large price. Therefore: pay the small price and get the large benefit.
This is the e/acc argument in compressed form, and it is the load-bearing intellectual cover story the contemporary tech-right has been deploying to justify the extraction the Crisis Dispatch is documenting. It is worth engaging directly rather than dismissed, because it is the most coherent version of the framework the operators have been operating inside, and dismantling it does diagnostic work the generic libertarian critique does not.
The framework has several problems.
The first is that the opportunity cost of progress calculation requires the calculator to specify what the progress is and who benefits from it. The framework as deployed treats progress as if the term had a settled meaning that the calculator could apply across cases. It does not. The progress in this case is faster AI development for Google and Apple and Microsoft. The beneficiaries of faster AI development are the shareholders of Google and Apple and Microsoft, the AI researchers employed by those companies, and the eventual users of the products those companies produce. The 50,000 Lake Tahoe residents are not in any of those categories. The opportunity cost is being calculated against an aggregate that the 50,000 residents have been excluded from in advance. The framework is asking the 50,000 residents to accept their exclusion as the price of an aggregate benefit they will not receive.
The second is that the aggregate flourishing calculation requires the calculator to assume that the local costs can be compensated for by the aggregate benefits, which requires a theory of how the aggregate benefits get distributed back to the people paying the local costs. The framework does not provide this theory. The 50,000 residents will not receive compensation. They will not receive shares in the companies whose buildout took their power. They will not receive priority access to the AI products the buildout produces. They will simply lose their electricity. The framework’s calculation treats their loss as if it were absorbed by some abstract aggregate, when the actual operational reality is that the loss is absorbed by the 50,000 specific human beings whose specific lives are being made worse so that specific other human beings can be made better. The aggregate is a fiction. The local is the substance.
The third is that the framework requires the audience to accept that unmolested by regulation or law is a meaningful description of the political-economic situation. It is not. The data-center buildout is not being held back by regulation in any meaningful sense. The buildout is, in this specific instance, being enabled by the absence of regulation — specifically, by the jurisdictional accountability vacuum that has allowed NV Energy to redirect its wholesale capacity to data-center customers without effective oversight from any single regulatory body. The framework’s complaint about regulatory friction is operating in a context where the regulatory friction is not what is causing the harm. The absence of regulatory friction is what is causing the harm. The framework has misidentified its own enemy.
The fourth problem with the framework is the one that matters most. Marc Andreessen — the most prominent contemporary advocate of the e/acc framework — appeared on David Senra’s podcast earlier this year and declared that he possesses zero levels of introspection, as little as possible. He framed this as a positive feature for entrepreneurs. The remark prompted Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge, and several other commentators, to characterize Andreessen as a real-life instance of David Chalmers’s philosophical-zombie thought experiment — the hypothetical being that is physically and functionally identical to a conscious human but lacks any inner subjective experience. Andreessen has not, to my knowledge, disclaimed the characterization. I will take him at his self-description. The framework’s most prominent advocate has, in his own words, disclaimed the capacity for the kind of inner reflection that would let him evaluate whether his framework serves human flourishing. The 50,000 Lake Tahoe residents have conscious subjective experience. They are losing their power. The being who has been advocating for the framework under which they lose their power has announced that he has dispensed with the inner capacity that would let him recognize what it is that they are losing. This is not a serious moral philosophy. It is the self-administered absolution of someone who has decided that the question of who is harmed by his framework is not a question he is the kind of entity that needs to engage with.
I have, in these pages, taken accelerationism more seriously than its current proponents deserve. The framework has intellectual ancestors worth engaging — Nick Land’s writing on capitalism as an autonomous process, the broader cybernetic-and-thermodynamic literature on self-organizing systems, the genuine question of whether technological development has an emergent direction independent of human intention. These are real questions. The contemporary e/acc deployment has not been doing the intellectual work that would let it engage these questions seriously. It has been functioning as the cover story for the extraction operations the tech-right has been conducting, and the cover story is being deployed because the extraction operations would not survive being defended directly.
So the operators do not defend the extraction directly. They invoke the framework. They cite the opportunity cost of progress. They warn against the moral hazard of letting regulation or law slow the projects. They thank you for your patience.
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A word, then, for the tech-right directly. The species of commentator and operator who has spent the past fifteen years lecturing the rest of the country about the importance of building, about the moral seriousness of acceleration, about how the people who object to Silicon Valley’s various enthusiasms are anti-progress, anti-modernity, anti-the-future itself. You know who you are. Mr. Andreessen, Mr. Thiel, the broader Sand Hill Road cohort, the Pirate Wires commentariat, the Stratechery register, the entire infrastructure of self-important Bay Area public-intellectual production that has made e/acc and effective altruism and techno-optimism into the brand identities of an entire political-economic class.
Here is your progress.
50,000 people in a ski town are losing their power source so that your AI models can have more compute. The utility infrastructure those 50,000 people relied on has been redirected to serve the corporate buildout that you have been telling the rest of us is the moral imperative of our time. The regulatory architecture that was supposed to protect them from this outcome is structurally incapable of doing so, because the architecture was designed when the political-economic situation was different and has not been updated to accommodate the extraction your sector has been conducting. The 50,000 people have no representation. They have no leverage. Their utility company has informed them, in so many words, that the buildout takes priority over their lives. Resource extraction, in the formulation of the Lake Tahoe resident the Fortune piece quotes. She is correct.
This is what your progress looks like, gentlemen. This is what you have been asking the country to accept. This is what building turns out to mean at the operational level. The 50,000 residents are the substrate. They are what gets used up so that the buildout can proceed.
We anticipate that questions may arise. We have prepared responses. The residents will benefit eventually from the broader economic activity the data centers will produce. AI is a strategic priority and the country cannot afford to fall behind China. The regulatory architecture is what needs to change, not the corporate behavior. The displaced residents can simply, you know, get power from somewhere else. The people pointing this out are doing so in bad faith or are insufficiently sophisticated to understand the trade-offs. We thank you for your patience as we work through the transition. Your continued support is appreciated.
So please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this transition may cause. Your electricity is important to us. Your call is important to us. Your continued patience as we work through the unprecedented opportunities of the AI buildout is appreciated more than we can say. We look forward to continuing to serve you in whatever capacity remains available after the buildout has been completed. Have a nice day.
From a piece I wrote a few weeks back (https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory), which seems relevant to your effective accelerationist bit:
Albert Camus broke with Jean-Paul Sartre and the French left over the most concrete political question there is: can the people alive today be treated as acceptable casualties in the pursuit of a better future?2
Sartre and the Marxists said yes. History has a direction. The revolution requires sacrifice. Camus said no. Any system of thought that subordinates living people to a hypothetical future has already committed the foundational moral error. Once you accept that logic, there is no limiting principle. Any atrocity becomes justifiable. Any amount of present suffering can be rationalized as a necessary input to the glorious output.
This is the structure of the AI acceleration argument. The technology will eventually benefit humanity (trillions of future humans, lives of abundance and meaning we can barely imagine), so present disruption is tolerable. Displaced workers, hollowed communities, the erosion of democratic leverage, the concentration of power in a handful of private actors who have exempted themselves from the consequences of their own project: regrettable but necessary. The expected value math works out.
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Camus staked his intellectual legacy on the claim that the person standing in front of you is not an input to a utility function. Their suffering is not redeemed by a future state of affairs they may never see. Their dignity is not negotiable against projected outcomes. The person who exists now (who has a job they’re about to lose, a family they support, a community that depends on a functioning local economy) is the unit of account. Not humanity in the abstract. Not the trillions of future beings that the longtermists conjure to win their expected-value calculations.
Once that commitment is abandoned, the door opens to every form of rationalized cruelty that the twentieth century spent a hundred million lives trying to teach us to reject.
The entire AI acceleration project is premised on abandoning it. It asks present people to bear costs for future benefits they may never see, distributed to people who do not yet exist, administered by a self-appointed class that has insulated itself from the consequences entirely.
Excellent, Mike. So spot on! Thank you.