Often, it seems like conversations about societal ambitions and expenses slip and slide between various levels of organization. Sentence fragment personalizes a victim into a single person, the next snippet villainizes a whole profession, and then the next dooms a bureaucracy to nothing but drag on the whole project. Wouldn’t it be useful to stick to a certain level and develop a feel for the actors and outcomes within this space?
For instance, all this abrupt distancing from data centers doesn’t feel like action from the bottom up. It feels like action from the top down. And not from actors in and around the industry but a professional class of people interested in pushing power to show they can. A group of people that need to perpetuate their employment and have picked this to be their topic du jour.
A bottom-up activity might start with individual actors, such as coal miner families objecting to dangerous working conditions. After unsuccessfully petitioning employers, they enlist politicians to engage at the top. Meryl Streep played this role in the 1983 movie silkwood. But I haven’t heard of residents filling all the seats in a city council meeting to talk about data centers. Individual actors are not showing their hand. The action decision is not at the individual level.
Being at the right organizational level of analysis is helpful, not because societies reach solutions in only one way, but because the conversation can remain consistent. Residents are not saying no to data centers. There is no evidence they have picked through the pros and cons and come to a decision. What is transpiring in the public sphere is at a different level.
Perhaps the objections will emerge to no more fruition than gas stoves. Remember when they were to be banned? And then cooks said, absolutely not! I like my gas stove. It’s just that if we keep the analysis at the right O-level, then the actual action-takers can be encouraged or squashed.
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