Data Centers Without Consent Are Just Another Form of Arbitrary Power

I find it striking that your largest infrastructure project since the highway system should be proposed, not for the passage of bodies and goods, but for the passage and storage of what you call data. We are told that these data centers may cost some $700 billion, that some praise them as “big, strong, bold … Money Machines,” and yet that skepticism grows, even among those who once followed such praise with little question. I take no side in your factions; I attend rather to the form of power here attempted. For such an undertaking touches lives, liberties, and estates on a scale that demands we ask, in sober earnest, by what right it is done.

When I first defined political power in the Second Treatise of Government, I described it as the right of making laws with penalties, only for the public good, and by consent. Power so limited is government; the same power stretched beyond that trust is usurpation. Here, the question is not whether men may build great works; they may, by their labour, improve the earth and make it more useful to human life. The question is whether the authority to re-shape whole regions with data centers, energy grids, and the like, is exercised under rules known and assented to, or by a few who, dazzled by promised riches, would make themselves judges in their own case, and expect the rest to call it progress.

Consent is not a charm-word that can be muttered once and forgotten. It is the continual measure by which we judge whether those who wield the legislative and executive power still hold it on trust. In this matter, the people whose lands, air, and daily lives will bear the weight of these structures must meaningfully consent, whether directly or through representatives truly answerable to them. You tell me that public qualms are rising and that opinion, even among prior supporters, is now split. That division is not a defect to be managed by better slogans; it is a signal that the understanding of the people has not yet been satisfied with evidence that these vast “Money Machines” secure their common good, and not merely private gain.

Property, in the larger sense, includes not only acres and buildings, but the very lives, liberties, and estates of men. When I wrote that each man has a property in his own person, and in the labour he mixes with what God has given in common, I added a proviso: there must remain “enough, and as good” for others. Applied here, it is not enough to say that a company has bought land and so may do with it as it pleases. One must ask whether the use to which that land, and the surrounding commons of air, water, and energy, are put leaves others with enough and as good for the preservation of their own lives and industry. A project may be immensely profitable and yet, if it consumes shared resources without such regard, fail the very test by which property becomes rightful.

Nor can we forget the law of nature, which is but reason, teaching all who will consult it that no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. Positive laws that clear the way for data centers must be examined by this higher rule. Do they provide standing, public, and equal laws by which all know their rights and remedies? Are there impartial judges to whom an injured neighbour may appeal if noise, heat, strain on the grid, or other burdens fall disproportionately upon him? Or are special indulgences granted, exemptions contrived, and contracts struck in secret, such that when the harm appears there is no accessible tribunal, and men are told they must endure it for the sake of national greatness? Where the latter is found, one may be sure that arbitrary power is already at work.

Some will say that in a world of swift changes, rulers must act by what I once called prerogative: a power to do good, even without a specific law, where the public safety is concerned. I do not deny this, within bounds. But prerogative is not a blank cheque; it is a temporary trust, revocable the moment it plainly serves particular interest rather than the common good. To invoke urgency, or competition with other nations, as a standing excuse for haste, opacity, and the brushing aside of local concerns, is to turn prerogative into a cloak for domination. If “emergency” becomes a permanent condition, you have not vigorous government but a subtle kind of tyranny, all the more dangerous because it travels under the name of innovation.

Because the work proposed is so large, prudence demands patience. A people may endure some first misjudgments; they know that rulers, being men, are fallible. But if, instead of the “deliberate, community-building approach” some now commend, they meet only a frenzied digital goldrush, in which their doubts are mocked and their burdens ignored, they will one day begin to see a long train of abuses, all tending the same way. Then the dissolution of trust in their governors will follow, and with it a right, and perhaps a duty, to alter the legislative they can no longer regard as their own. To avoid that calamity, those who now press for data centers must proceed by open evidence, fair bargaining, and real consent—or reconcile themselves to ruling, not by right, but by force.

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