On a chilly Thursday evening last December, citizens in Dorr, Michigan, a small community about a half-hour south of Grand Rapids, attended a town hall meeting to discuss the possible construction of a data center on the north end of town. Some of the attendees came from families who had lived in Dorr for generations and, worried about the disruptions posed by a new data center, came ready to defend their town. Instead, to their dismay, they discovered the township supervisor had, without a public hearing, already signed an agreement. Microsoft, never bothering to send a representative to meet the public, now held the deed to more than 250 acres of prime farmland, an arrangement citizens knew nothing about until everything was signed and sealed. With the land already sold and the ink dry, the citizens’ impotence turned to repressed rage.

　　I say “repressed” because the citizens have not, as yet, taken matters into their own hands. To my knowledge, no lawsuits have been filed, pitchforks wielded, or Sabo-tabbies unleashed. No doubt the nameless and faceless drones at Microsoft had bemused looks on their faces as the citizens of Dorr organized their seemingly pointless protests. After all, what mattered Dorr’s 7,900 souls when progress was at stake? So what if that little town was sacrificed on the altar of Big Tech? One imagines a Microsoft exec in his Seattle high-rise pulling on a cigar, a martini in his other hand, smiling smugly at the thought of a small group of Michiganders thinking they could stop the course of history itself.

　　It doesn’t bother me that Dorr, Michigan, doesn’t matter to the executives at Microsoft; what bothers me is that it bothers those executives that Dorr matters to the people who live there. Dorr is just one of those “middle-of-nowhere” places to which people stubbornly cling, places where, for generations, people have lived and loved and raised families and built communities and buried their dead. Who would deign to defend such places when the future is at stake?

　　G. K. Chesterton wrote about such a conflict in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, a satire of a time in England when “democracy was dead; for no one minded the governing class governing.” The leaders of all the different neighborhoods in London agreed on building a new roadway through the city, but one of the leaders, Adam Wayne, decided to defend Notting Hill and fight, à la Jane Jacobs, the developers and their bulldozers. Wayne’s affection for Notting Hill was a “speck of grit in a great machine.” The other leaders expressed dismay at Wayne’s willingness to stymie progress over a meager tract of land. Wayne remained undaunted: “That which is large enough for the rich to covet … is large enough for the poor to defend.

　　Which brings me to Michael Munger’s essay. He rejects the notion of citizens exercising both their constitutional rights and general good sense, as implied in his title’s acknowledgement that public review of development poses, at best, a dilemma for those who favor progress. Munger’s main focus is on the building of data centers, which he regards as vital infrastructure. The ensuing conflict involves those who want to build the centers, and of course those who use AI, and the people who live in places where the centers are to be built. Munger characterizes this as a “prisoner’s dilemma,” although I don’t think the metaphor quite fits, because he seems to believe that one of the parties should be able to get off scot-free. I’d think the “tragedy of the commons” more nearly fits the situation he describes, especially given the resulting allocation of resources.

　　Perhaps people are realizing that their lives are better when they’re simpler, and part of that simplicity is sticking to a place and getting to know your neighbors and working and worshipping with them.

　　The parties in a prisoner’s dilemma (having already committed a crime) are not bound together in any sensible way, and so it better fits adversarial negotiations, such as those between large corporations, notably absent in Munger’s essay, and denizens of a place. Munger’s sympathy is clearly with the big guy, without whom all the blessings of modern development would never see the light of day. Citizens trying to protect their places against the mass machinery of modern industrial and technological economics create “collectively ruinous” policies.

　　Munger cites studies indicating that citizens who attend town-hall meetings—what Alexis Tocqueville referred to as “the nursery of democracy”—are not representative of the citizens-at-large. Maybe. But perhaps they are the people with the most skin in the game, or perhaps they are the people who have the most to lose, or perhaps they are the people most rooted in that place and thus have the most solicitous care for it. I can’t say for sure, but I’m sure not going to dismiss the concerns of people whose only fault was that they showed up. While Munger concedes “there’s no reason to believe that people who show up to these hearings are bad actors,” he then insists that “the country cannot afford to keep letting a hyper-local, unrepresentative hearing decide questions whose costs of delay are now measured in the trillions and whose clock, on data centers and housing alike, is not particularly patient.” The benighted citizens want to control the pace of progress so as to manage it, “but the data-center buildout now underway is happening on a timeline set by a global technology race.” True, perhaps, but a truth that makes us less free.

　　As a hyper-localist, I take exception to this. My first objection involves Munger’s conflating of housing and data centers as if they have an equal claim as public goods. Shelter is a basic human need, and the housing shortage has complex causes. Munger largely attributes the shortage to NIMBYism. I don’t doubt that this is a factor, but it’s a factor in part because people reasonably don’t trust outsiders with their “develop-and-depart” plans who have no intention of sharing in the fates of the people whose places they alter. Think, for example, of how the interstate highway system destroyed neighborhoods and towns and people’s lives and livelihoods.

　　People also look at housing as more than just shelter; they also see it as an investment. This becomes especially a problem, as we should have learned back in 2007, when outside financial interests disrupt local markets by both predatory lending and by purchasing housing to make a quick buck. We also learned back then that local banks are far more sustainable and resilient than the “too-big-to-fail” banks, and also better at providing for local investment when playing by the same rules.

　　The “quick and easy” approach has negatively affected all development in this country. Munger largely regards developers and capital investors as benign entities determined to pursue public goods. I disagree. When local developers use local businesses to grow incrementally and in sustainable patterns according to sensible and locally-controlled zoning practices, the housing crisis becomes less severe because the principal agents all have pride of place as part of their motivation. Instead, large-scale developers, operating speculatively, tend to produce overly elaborate designs that require large investments in infrastructure and unfair tax abatements, operate with great complexity, and generate enormous amounts of debt. Americans who built the old-fashioned way did not face the same housing problems we face today.

　　Daniel Herriges, in his Unleash the Swarm: Reviving Small-Scale Development in America’s Cities, has demonstrated the ways in which international building codes, obsession with parking and complex infrastructure, and centralized regulatory and financial systems are “optimized for development monocultures,” which cultures are always more fragile and less flexible, and also more boring and uglier.

　　In residential development, monoculture means single-family homes, built to a production builder’s cookie-cutter template. In commercial real estate, it means the auto-oriented strip mall, the power center, the chain restaurant or pharmacy: cheap one-story buildings with surface parking. We built a system that was really good at delivering those things at scale, but by extension we’ve created huge scale diseconomies for anyone who wants to deliver something else.

　　The “something else” of which he speaks includes highly successful programs like the one in South Bend, where local developers or co-ops pick a block or two, commit for the long haul, and get to know the area and its people well, thus building up their trust. “Live there, if you can. Frequent its businesses. Get to know every neighbor, every property.” This is necessary to get traction on the housing crisis and will produce far better results than those of large-scale outside developers and capital.

　　Munger also conflates the housing problem with the building of data centers. Shelter, as I said, is a basic human need; data centers are luxury goods, if goods they be. Munger acknowledges the public skepticism concerning the underlying technology, but drops the argument rather than engaging it. Whether data centers and AI are genuine public, much less private, goods is a question of the first magnitude. I understand the need for good housing policies, but I reject the equivalent claim concerning “the advantages of fast AI and streaming services, cloud storage, and other benefits.” We’re spending an awful lot of money on a luxury good that makes us all stupider, less competent, more miserable, and diminishes our capacities. I’m asking Munger to give an honest accounting of costs and benefits, especially the human costs, but also costs in terms of energy and tax rates. Nor does he consider the long-term environmental costs that will also be paid for by generations hence.

　　It’s part and parcel of a modern industrial and technological society to treat “change” and “growth” and “progress” as if they are the same. When a quarterback throws an interception, that’s change, but it’s not progress. A lineman may grow by putting on 30 pounds but become slower and less agile as a result. “Progress” requires a discernible goal: matriculate down the field to the other team’s goal line with the intention of crossing it. Modern technological and industrial developments, to the degree they have any clarity about goals, are fundamentally about replacing human capacities with automated ones, wrapped up in claims they are making life “easier.” That’s not a goal related to human flourishing.

　　When people are silenced concerning things that matter to them, they have a way of finding other means of expression.

　　Munger’s essay evinces no tragic dimension. He doesn’t acknowledge that the expansion of AI and the resource-sucking data centers that it requires have any trade-offs, never mind posing a unique danger to human well-being. Even the people working on AI, as Jacob Coxon acknowledged in his recent resignation from Anthropic, worry about the apocalyptic implications, some thinking there is a >10 percent chance that the technology could kill all humans within the next decade.

　　Assuming our dependency on AI and Big Data, Munger concludes that this dependency is what should preclude citizen involvement in the decision-making process. He thus argues that developers—who, by the way, will never be building these data centers in their backyards (just as these tech innovators didn’t let their own children use the destructive “smart” phones they placed in the hands of other people’s children)—ought to have free rein to bypass concerned citizens by giving developers a “reject” option. Rather than resorting to the time-honored democratic principle of persuading citizens, legislatures ought to enact “‘anti-snob zoning’” laws that let “developers override local zoning boards in towns that have not met an affordability threshold, functionally forcing an ‘Accept’ move that no individual town would choose on its own” (emphasis added). America may be the home of the free, but it has no hometown of the free.

　　I take offense at people who care about their town, the ones who pay the price for someone else’s “progress” and pocketbook, being disparaged as “snobs.” Nor will I countenance the idea that distant and often anonymous powers or “invisible hands” should override the will of the people who occupy those places. Legislatures so empowering developers are abandoning rather than exercising representative government.

　　I’m encouraged by the fact that all over this nation the little guy is having his say. People are justly skeptical of two things. First, sitting at the beginning of the AI revolution, they worry about the claims made on its behalf. They worry about losing jobs the way they already lost their children to the promises of Big Tech. They know they’ve been lied to repeatedly about the glories and blessings of the information age. They’ve witnessed the toxic influence of social media on our politics. They’re still waiting for the Internet to democratize the world. They’ve spent workdays made less engaging and satisfying by the endless stream of emails. They have seen their habits become algorithms. They worry about the capacity of the government to spy on them and use the information for oppressive purposes, just as corporations are clearly mining and collecting data. They express concern about the United States implementing something like China’s social credit system. They’ve seen their neighbor’s lives destroyed by online doxxing and canceling.

　　Americans are also getting religion when it comes to the claims of “progress.” They know the promises of progressives are as much a bane as a blessing. They see how progress has been purchased with massive debt, cheap goods, depleted resources, widespread mental health alterations, and weakened institutions, and how the benefits have been unequally distributed. Perhaps they realize that their lives are better when they’re simpler, and part of that simplicity is sticking to a place and getting to know your neighbors and working and worshipping with them. What good will a data center do them? How many times have they had the rug pulled out from underneath?

　　I have hope for Dorr, a town named after Thomas Wilson Dorr, a democratic reformer who, frustrated by a lack of representation and Rhode Island’s antiquated constitution, organized his followers to create a new one in what is now called the “Dorr Rebellion.” Rhode Island, then having two Constitutions and two governments, faced a crisis that eventually led the Dorrites to try to seize the State Arsenal in Providence. The failed effort did lead to some constitutional reform, but also to Dorr’s arrest and imprisonment. I’m not advocating for violence, but when people are silenced concerning things that matter to them, they have a way of finding other means of expression. Dorr’s contemporary namesakes might meet a similar fate, but they need not fully accept the fate our technological epoch imposes on us. We’re already in an iron cage, so why gild the bars of those in distant places?