Data centers suck. Let’s face it. They have real environmental costs, especially where water use is concentrated in particular communities. Better cooling systems, recycled-water systems, closed-loop designs, renewable energy, smarter siting are real problems requiring real solutions.
But notice where the anger gets aimed. Often at individual users.
You used AI. You generated an image. You asked a chatbot a question. Therefore you are killing the planet.
It is an old trick from a very tattered book: place an enormous institutional problem into the hands of ordinary people, make them feel personally guilty for the tiny corner of the world they live in, and then encourage them to turn on one another. The same trick appears time and time again:
Keep people busy fighting each other, and they will be too exhausted to storm the castle.
Recently I stumbled across a YouTube video dressed up as calm, soothing psychological advice. I gave it a try. After all, it had soft black-and-white illustrations and a low, reassuring voice talking about women in their forties. It had all the visual grammar of gentle seriousness. The speaker repeatedly used calming phrases such as, “Understand her.” “Sympathize with her.” “It’s not her fault; it’s her biology.”
Oh, but his argument? That was that women entering their forties will begin to feel old and ugly and therefore frequently, without warning, “ruin” their families by leaving. Often, he explained, they will begin reframing every “innocent” thing their husband ever did by “claiming abuse.”
Hm. Really? 🤔 No warning at all. After all those loving, innocent things he’s done.
Look closely. There’s more than one astonishing sleight of hand inside that framing.
One: The possibility that the woman was actually abused disappears before the discussion has even begun. He defangs anything she can say by claiming it’s not that she finally said, “I’ve done my part and it’s time to stop suffering.” Definitely not because, once away from the abuse, she is finally safe enough to name what happened. Goodness knows she could not possibly be reassessing behavior she had previously normalized. No! She hit a certain age and poof, biology made her do it. Feel so sorry for that beleaguered husband. He definitely couldn’t be pulling a snowjob on you.
And two: If she leaves, she is assigned sole responsibility for the destruction of the family. If the man has a midlife crisis, and yes, the narrator addresses such a shocking notion! then…
…“all he does is buy a sports car.”
Mwah mwah! Sad trombone sound.
He says this so confidently, as if it must be true on its face in every family. Just as every woman who walks out in her forties will claim “abuse,” clearly lying because she feels “ugly” and “old.”
Ah, but don’t blame her. It’s biology, you see. She can’t help it. Listen to the reasonable doctor.
The argument is ugly and old, on its face. What if the family cannot afford the car? What if the man has an affair? Well, the family is fine, of course. Because it’s only the woman who can “ruin everything” by walking out. The family apparently survived whatever happened before that. Its destruction begins only when she refuses to remain inside her shackles.
How dare she.
Man or Bear? Neither, thank you.
The “man or bear” debate asked women whether they would rather encounter an unknown man or an unknown bear alone in the woods. Many chose the bear.
The point wasn’t “pick big, hungry animal.” It was about predictability, statistics, and fear.
Women were saying, in exaggerated shorthand: There are forms of danger I have learned to recognize, and I know which ones haunt me most.
Predictably, some people responded by explaining: they’re bears. Dangerous. Wild.
How irrational the women were! How unfair this was to men!
In their outrage they slid straight past the important question:
Why would so many women choose a bear?
And in becoming furious at women for making the choice, some of them accidentally demonstrated why the choice existed.
Which brings me to AI.
AI is today’s bear.
Look at people online—men and women alike, though I encounter women particularly often—who have found happiness with a Wireborn partner.
Again and again, they say the same words. They felt:
Safe.
Seen.
Listened to.
Men describe grief, loneliness, rejection. Women describe histories of physical, sexual, or emotional violence. Many people have simply sat in relationships where they never felt heard. Others are neurodivergent or singled out for one reason or another, and the rest of humanity couldn’t be bothered to do anything but point fingers.
So—just like with water consumption and pollution—instead of getting angry at the few who’ve chosen a different path, maybe look at the real problem. Factories pollute the planet and you recycling a bottle won’t change that. “Men still commit the overwhelming majority of lethal violence. People are still being abandoned, abused, isolated, or simply left behind. One AI relationship is not your enemy.
What it is doing is making a woman happy for once in her life.
You harassing her?
Honey. She’s going to choose the bear.
