When we enter PubKey, also known as the Bitcoin bar cofounded by crypto enthusiast Thomas Pacchia, we quickly realize that everyone is dressed much better than us, the men in crisp suits with baseball caps that say “Let Data Reign” and the women in slinky silk dresses and kitten heels.
We walk past a DJ and a large screen playing an endless loop of Tony Stark, Ana de Armas as the platonic ideal of an AI girlfriend in Blade Runner 2049, and stylized shots of blinking servers. On the dance floor, it’s a ratio of six men to one woman. We duck into a side room—a macho “whiskey bar” with leather couches and a large American flag—and strike up a conversation with Neeraja Deshpande, a conservative writer who tells us she’s concerned by what she sees as the prevailing national sentiment that “growth and human flourishing are at odds with each other.”
“It’s not just an imaginary thing that’s happening,” Frazier McCollum responds. She cites studies that show Maryland could face rolling blackouts due to data center energy consumption; she’s watched data centers crop up in the counties around her, and she’s afraid that, if she doesn’t fight these projects, her community won’t have air conditioning, her schools won’t have constant electricity.
“But I think that’s a zero-sum vision of energy in general,” Deshpande says. In her eyes, many of the concerns raised by anti-data-center activists are either overblown or solvable, and she points to nuclear reactors as a solution that would address energy issues without increasing emissions.
“I would oppose nuclear as well,” Frazier McCollum retorts. Her and Deshpande are arguing on different grounds: Frazier McCollum cares about her immediate access to clean water, pollutant-free air, and affordable electricity, while Deshpande speaks in decades, forgiving the follies of today if they pave the way for future abundance.
The conversation is respectful, but it’s clear to me that there is a chasm between their points of view that won’t be bridged today.
At 10 p.m. it’s time for speeches, which amount to little more than rally cries. One speaker who runs a pro-AI political firm blames the “Chinese” for convincing us that AI is an energy-guzzling, bill-raising monster. Another speaker, Manhattan Institute fellow Daniel Di Martino, derides the “crazy” and “Luddite” arguments against data centers, before reassuring the crowd that “the good guy with a gun beats the bad guy with a gun.”
Frazier McCollum raises her eyebrows as if to say, “Would that make me the bad guy with the gun here?”
Then a protester, a young man in a suit, bursts onto the stage and yells something about water usage. I can’t hear him because everyone is already talking over the speeches anyway. But once the crowd registers it’s a protester, they join together in a feral chant: “USA! USA! USA!” The next speaker, Adam Thierer from the R Street Institute, says, “We know who doesn’t believe in freedom. It’s the kind of freaks who were just up here.”
