Features

Last December, in a piece called “The Data Center Backlash Is Global,” I reported that residents around the world were rising up against Big Tech just as they have risen up against Big Wind and Big Solar, rejecting applications to use land. Sure, AI may be a world-changing technology, but the rush to build massive new data centers has resulted in dozens of rejections or restrictions on projects from Indianapolis to Dublin, Ireland. People are worried about property values, water usage, electricity costs and what it means for the neighborhood: “quality-of-life impacts,” as a member of the Indianapolis council, who led the opposition to Google’s billion-dollar project, explained.

There is a wave of books asking how social media platforms shape the stories we tell about ourselves and, through that shaping, what new kind of self they are producing. Megan Garber’s Screen People argues that the language and ethos of entertainment have permeated every aspect of life, so that we now see each other as characters in an ongoing show whose continuity we are responsible for maintaining. Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s The Story of Your Life, out in August, makes the related case that algorithmic platforms have disciplined what counts as a shareable experience into what Jia Tolentino’s blurb calls a rigid, optimized, phone-shaped norm. I haven’t read either yet, but I’m willing to bet they’re basically right.

A few years back, I lost a significant amount of weight. It came off entirely by accident following a major unforeseen life crisis that resulted in a prolonged reduction of appetite. Almost overnight I went from being a healthy average-sized middle-aged woman to a thin one. Everyone was very complimentary, of course. But this was in 2022, back when shedding weight still seemed like an accomplishment and evidence of restraint rather than something to be bought and administered via needle and private prescription. I waited for my dress size to rebound to an eight from a four as it had in the past but this time round, for whatever reason, it did not.