Build the digital roads, but mind who pays the tolls

You are told that the new data center build‑out is the largest infrastructure project since your interstate highways, and that its cost is reckoned at some seven hundred billion dollars. You are further assured that these complexes are “big, strong, bold…Money Machines.” Yet those most courted by such language are, you report, increasingly divided about the scheme. When the intended beneficiaries grow doubtful while the promoters grow ever more emphatic, the impartial spectator, of whom I spoke in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, would suspect that the distribution of burdens and benefits is not quite as the prospectus suggests.

In my own time I used the humble pin‑factory to illustrate how the division of labour multiplies output. These data centers appear to be pin‑factories of the mind, serving countless calculations rather than countless pins. Like your interstate roads, they promise to widen the extent of the market, and thereby to deepen specialization in every trade that depends on rapid communication. So far, this is wholly in the spirit of that natural progress of opulence I described in The Wealth of Nations, where better roads, cheaper carriage, and easier correspondence enrich not the court only, but the common workman’s table.

Yet one must always ask, when dazzled by new works, by whom they are truly paid for. The visible gains are trumpeted: jobs in construction, investment counts, the flattery of being told one’s district is chosen for the future. The less visible charges are whispered, if named at all: higher electricity bills, strains upon local grids, environmental consequences borne by those who never signed the contracts. In Wealth of Nations I urged that every regulation and project be traced to its effects upon prices. A modest rise in every household’s bill, levied for decades, is easily overlooked when compared with a ribbon‑cutting that lasts an afternoon.

It is said that some states which resist these projects may lose not only jobs and investment, but also their opportunity to bargain for modernized grids and lower bills. Here the impartial spectator would ask a simple question. If the investment were in truth an unmixed blessing, would so much cajolery be needed to persuade reluctant neighbours? When the supposed beneficiary must be threatened with loss in order to accept a gift, we are commonly dealing, not with pure beneficence, but with a bargain whose gains are very clear to one party and very doubtful to the other.

Your age is admirably frank about profit, and I do not condemn that. It is not from the benevolence of the data‑center proprietor any more than from the baker’s that citizens must expect their bread. But when great undertakings come to the legislature, accompanied by white papers, economic models, and urgent lobbying, the old rule still holds: the petitions of merchants deserve the most suspicious attention. People of the same trade, even when perspiring over “innovation,” naturally contrive to secure advantageous terms—cheap land, discounted power, favourable regulations—whose cost is diffused over consumers too numerous and too ill‑informed to defend themselves.

There is also, in this “digital goldrush,” the familiar deception of ambition. The prospect of being first in a new economic era, of outshining rival nations, of standing at the commanding heights of technology, intoxicates rulers and projectors alike. They are tempted to treat the great chess‑board of human society as if every piece could be swept into place by decree: fields and towns remade, grids rebuilt, communities re‑rated according to their usefulness to the machines. But every piece has, as I once wrote, a principle of motion of its own. A scheme that disregards the settled habits, local attachments, and plain fears of those who pay the bills may glitter bravely on the map and yet miscarry in the street.

None of this is to deny a proper role to the state. In my writings I assigned to government certain duties: defence, the administration of justice, and public works which, though profitable to society, could never return a private builder his expense. An energy grid that is cleaner and more resilient, roads and connections that enable the labouring poor to sell the full value of their work, education that fits them to take new jobs rather than lose old ones—these may rightly claim public support. But the test is ever the same: do these vast sums enlarge the real consumption and security of ordinary families, or do they chiefly protect the profits of those already powerful? To prefer the latter while preaching the former is merely to dress the vile maxim of the masters of mankind in digital finery.

If, as some observers hope, rising public qualms transform the present frenzy into a slower, more community‑building approach, I would count that no calamity. Let the data roads be built where they truly widen markets, and let their promoters bear a fair share of the costs they impose. Let local citizens see, in lower bills, better service, and tangible improvements, that they are not merely paying rent to distant “money machines.” A nation is richer, not when its balance sheets swell, but when the ordinary workman, returning home at night, finds his life a little easier, his dwelling a little warmer, and his children’s prospects a little less precarious.