Your instincts will betray you. Do this instead.
This Both True is written for the data center developers, hyperscalers, utilities, and energy companies trying to build amid growing backlash. This is a special “Coming in Hot” Friday edition.
A year ago, “data center” was a term most people hadn’t stopped to ponder. Now, seven in 10 Americans surveyed oppose construction in their area.
I’ve seen this pattern before, and I call it the “Arc of Outrage.” I know it well from the fracking wars. We saw it again when farmers and environmentalists combined forces to kill (climate-friendly!) CO2 pipelines. And now the Arc is here for data centers.
If you don’t know how to navigate the Arc, your projects are more likely to stall, shrink, relocate, or die. And your company’s reputation with them.
The Problem: Your instincts will betray you.
You—the industry leader tasked with building data center infrastructure—want to explain and reason. You want to gather studies and facts, get this conversation onto safer footing. I know; I felt the same way during Colorado’s fracking wars. When that fails, your next instinct will be to avoid the fight and hunker down.
But history shows your instincts are wrong on this—dead wrong.
There’s a better way. I know—because I’ve lived through it.
Both of these things are true:
- Data centers are necessary, important infrastructure.
- Necessary infrastructure has sparked the Arc of Outrage before.
Learn from their (my) mistakes.
The situation: Welcome to the Arc of Outrage
The Arc of Outrage is what happens when infrastructure that feels necessary and obvious to its proponents feels imposed and threatening to the community. (Sound familiar?) It starts small and seemingly as a one-off. Then it builds in predictable phases until the outrage appears insurmountable. (More on the phases in a future Both True.)
In the early 2000s, the fracking wars were niche local fights that grew into an international movement with lingering ghosts today. Over the past few years, we have watched CO₂ pipelines and carbon capture and sequestration projects—necessary climate (!) infrastructure—fall into the same pattern. Now it’s data centers.
The details are different: The technologies, political drivers, and geographies all vary. But the Arc of Outrage is easy to recognize once you’ve lived through it: first concern, then fear, then identity, then organizing, then political hardening. And by the time the industry realizes it is no longer in a one-off project fight. (More on relevant differences that data center proponents must consider in a future Both True.)
Your instincts are wrong: This is mostly not about the facts
You are not going to avoid the Arc of Outrage. But you can affect its intensity.
Last week my social feeds were full of data center proponents referring to (very good) reports on data center energy use (like this and this). They said things like “Let’s get back to a fact-based discussion.”
Here’s what’s happening now:
- Your first instinct is to explain why people need data centers. Hospitals, banks, schools, businesses, and households rely on the digital infrastructure they make possible.
- Your second instinct is to have a fact-based conversation. You want to bring up studies, numbers, engineering, water-use data, energy-use data, jobs, tax revenue, grid plans, and mitigation measures.
Getting this information out matters. But how, when, why and from whom matter more than you think. I’m not saying “Stop Trying to Educate Them,” exactly. I’m letting you know that, if we’ve learned one thing from earlier Arc of Outrage fights, it’s this:
The Arc of Outrage is not mostly about facts, and facts will not stop The Arc of Outrage.
You want to take the emotion and hyperbole out of it, but it is—in fact—emotion and hyperbole that fuel the Arc of Outrage today and are going to fuel it for the next two years. Today, early in the Arc, this is already a fight about
- Agency: Can my community protect our way of life?
- Fear: What I don’t understand may very well hurt my family.
- Trust: Why would I let Big [Fill-in-the-Blank] tell my community what we have to build?
This is going to be the hardest part for you, the industry leader, to absorb. Yes, facts do matter. Of course misinformation should be corrected. But facts from an untrusted messenger do not calm an outraged audience. Often, they are grease on the fire.
Imagine a large industrial facility proposed for a spot within a quarter mile of your house. A consultant sets up a website with a study demonstrating that this facility is safe and likely to benefit your community. You blanch, then balk: Who are these yahoos? Why would I believe anything they put out? Wait, what, I don’t get a say in what’s about to happen here? It’s the most human of responses.
Trusting your instincts is exactly how you make the Arc of Outrage more intense.
Seize the day: Facts are necessary but insufficient
I am not asking you to abandon facts. Rather: Understand what facts can and cannot do. Your first moves:
- Sure, get the studies done.
- Then set them to the side and listen.
- Your company needs a team of people dedicated to public and community engagement on the topic. Not only consultants. Not communications interns. Senior operations people who can answer hard questions and make commitments. They are going to spend the next year going from public meeting to hostile interview to long-form podcast.
The longer you wait, the harder it will become for you to enter and shape the conversation. The harder it will be for you to recruit employees willing to do this work. The greater the chasm of distrust. The higher the bar to bridge it.
In two years, your company and your projects can be on the other side of the Arc of Outrage, but not all of your competitors will be there.
The Arc of Outrage Series
This new Both True series is not about avoiding the Arc of Outrage. Data centers are industrial infrastructure with real local impacts, and communities are going to react. This is about how to flatten the arc, survive it and, in the process, get important projects built.
Right now is the best time to develop your Arc of Outrage strategy—reach out if you would like a briefing. Meanwhile, over the coming months I will be unpacking various aspects of the Arc and what data center leaders should learn from fracking, CO₂ pipelines, and other infrastructure fights across the country. Although your urgent action is required, the Arc of Outrage is going to be here for quite some time.
Forward this email to the people inside your company who need to get projects built.
Heart this piece so project developers can find it before their instincts get them in trouble!
To your survival and ultimate success,
Tisha
