CATAWBA COUNTY — Watch the language around artificial intelligence long enough and you will hear a familiar drumbeat: the machines are coming, the planet can’t take the power draw, the only responsible move is to slow down, shut up, and let a credentialed few manage the danger for you.
That is not a technology debate. It is a control debate wearing a lab coat.
The same pattern showed up in the last generation’s end-of-the-world politics — the global-warming panic that treated every kilowatt and every factory as a moral crime, then quietly walked back the most absolute predictions when the weather refused to cooperate with the script. The point was never only temperature. The point was permission: who gets to build, who gets to grow, and who gets told to sit down.
Fear as a governing tool
AI doomsday talk works the same way. First comes the apocalypse story — extinction, runaway models, civilization on a timer. Then comes the policy ask: pause the frontier, centralize oversight, let an industry-and-government priesthood decide which companies may compete and which must die. Markets twitch. Politicians discover a midterm issue. Ordinary people are told that questioning the panic is denial.
If that sequence sounds like the climate crusade’s greatest hits, it should. Scare the public with an unfalsifiable catastrophe. Moralize the infrastructure required for modern life. Then transfer real decisions — energy, industry, land use — away from voters and toward whoever holds the credentials and the regulatory pen.
Intellectual history is not subtle about this method. Writers who dreamed of a world managed by scientific elites argued openly that the nation-state and mass democracy were obsolete, and that industrial society needed a governing class of technicians. The preferred path was not always a dramatic decree. It was absorption — function by function, agency by agency, treaty by treaty — until the government people still vote for no longer governs the things that matter.
Education, in that scheme, is not literacy for citizens. It is a credential wall. Keep the tools opaque. Restrict who may operate them. Over time only the initiated can rule, because only they know how the machinery works. Call it techno-feudalism if you want a modern word. No coup required. Just permanent transfer of control to whoever holds the keys.
Two systems, one county
There is another tradition, and it is the American one: take the most useful machines of the age and put them in ordinary hands. Railroads, cars, nuclear plants, microwaves, cell phones, the internet — progress that mattered when people could tinker, experiment, and build. You do not learn to swim by reading about water. You get wet.
Applied to AI, that means open infrastructure, abundant power, and compute that businesses and workers can actually use — not a priesthood that rations capability while preaching doom. Applied to Catawba County, it means refusing to let a national panic script decide our local fight over data centers before we have finished an honest argument about power, water, taxes, jobs, and land use.
Data centers are not abstract. They are concrete, steel, substations, and rate cases. Neighbors are right to demand answers on noise, water, and who pays for the grid upgrades. That is citizenship. What is not citizenship is importing a ready-made apocalypse — “AI will kill us / the climate can’t handle the load / only experts may proceed” — as a substitute for negotiating terms that leave this county stronger.
The doomsday religion wants scarcity and supervision. A growth county needs capacity and bargaining power. If AI is going to remake the economy, the places that win will be the ones that built the power plants, the transmission, and the industrial sites — not the ones that congratulated themselves for blocking every megawatt in the name of fear.
Choose the argument
Catawba County can debate data centers like adults: contracts, infrastructure costs, environmental limits, and local benefit. Or we can recite someone else’s end-times liturgy and call it wisdom.
The AI panic and the abandoned climate absolutism share a family resemblance — catastrophe first, obedience second, credentials forever. This county does not owe that script a single rezoning vote. Build the case on facts on the ground. Leave the doomsday church to the people who need it.
