Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Every now and then we need a new scapegoat, i.e., something that receives the blame for all the faults and mistakes of society. We have one.

Ah, the datacenter. It is big, noisy, ugly, and raises my electric and water bills. I hate it. It is the cause of all ills in my life. It is the new scapegoat.

Never mind that I use it every time I write a blog post, do a Google search, save a computer file, shop for stuff, and … wait a minute. I do these things all the time everyday. There must be something wrong as a scapegoat is supposed to be bad, not useful.

And then there are all those jobs for everyone from a cement truck driver to an AI engineer. How can a scapegoat provide jobs for all those people? And those jobs allow people to house, clothe, and feed families. Are scapegoats supposed to do those things?

Let’s ignore all the uses and benefits of the datacenter. It is the scapegoat. Let’s only discuss its faults so we can blame everything on the datacenter. It causes inflation. It causes people to buy stuff we don’t need. It causes… give me a few minutes to make a list. Scapegoats have to earn their title, and I am sure this scapegoat will earn its title.

Well, maybe or maybe not. It relieves stress to point to something that receives blame for all the ills of the world. And those tall, noisy buildings are easy to see and so much easier to be the object of my pointer finger.