Sparks: AI firms say UK has a year to head off datacentre protests before construction is threatened

Twelve months, they say, as though the seasons kept appointments; the men who feared the last crisis are dust, and the men who fear this one will be dust before the cooling towers rust.

Fear of the great humming warehouses dissolves the moment you see them for what they are: atoms arranged into computation, no more supernatural than rain, and no more permanent.

That a handful of corporations, having privatized the profits of computation, should now petition the government to manage the discontent their own construction has provoked, is not a development the architects of self-government would have recognized as anything but a new species of dependency.

In the lands I have traveled, the caravanserai is welcomed when it brings water and trade, and stoned when it consumes the well and leaves nothing; the question in every market is the same, whether the stranger's house will feed us or drink us dry.

The industry petitions for protection in the language of national interest, which is the language industries have always used when the mechanism of their profit begins to inconvenience the public, and the impartial spectator observes that the datacentre's benefit is concentrated while its cost is dispersed.

We are told the datacentre is chosen, but it is a survivor: a thousand configurations of capital and silicon were tried, and the ones that remain have outcompeted the alternatives, not because they were designed for the public good, but because they fit the conditions of the market - change the conditions and observe how quickly the survivors change.

The committee's report notes that the public must be offered greater benefits, and recommends a consultation, which will be held after the construction, which will begin in twelve months, which is the same twelve months the public was told it had last year.

They say they have a year to win the people over; I never had a year, I had a night, and the route was decided by the water and the dogs and the safe house, not by the timetable of the men who owned the land.

'We have twelve months to head off public opposition,' the firms told ministers, and in that sentence the public is an obstacle, the opposition is a threat, and the twelve months belong to the firms, not the people.