iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Replies

Andy Masley @andymasley.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

So the big lesson here is that you don't like to read and it's not actually about the time at all

paul hauntsel 👻 🎃 @paulhansel.com · 23/08/2026

I enjoy reading. Your blog post starts with "Benn called me a shill" and concludes with "won't someone think of the datacenters." This isn't focused or concise. It reads like the script of a he-said-she-said YouTube-drama video turned into text, with a little bit of a literature review mixed in. 🤢

**Contra Benn Jordan,** data center (and all) sub-audible infrasound issues are fake

One of the most popular videos ever made about data centers is a complete moment-by-moment disaster
Intro§

There is a fast-spreading new idea that data centers cause a unique harm: “infrasound.” Environmentalists may remember this as a pseudoscientific idea promoted by some fossil fuel interests to scare people about wind turbines in the 2010s. Infrasound is now the topic of what looks like the single most popular piece of media made about data centers in 2026 so far: the video Datacenters Behaving Like Accoustic Weapons by the popular YouTuber Benn Jordan. Jordan’s previous video on infrasound is one of the first things Gemini recommends when you search it. These two videos are each a complete moment-to-moment disaster, and have received no meaningful pushback, so I will be the first. Even if you have no interest in either data centers or infrasound, I think this is an amazing sociological example of how highbrow misinformation is developed and rapidly spread. I found the experience of unpacking it jaw-dropping. **After writing this Jordan accused me of being a paid shill, but you don’t actually have to trust anything I’m saying.** All you have to do is trust the authors of the studies Jordan himself is citing everywhere.

As **data centers become boogeymen for more people,** who start to see them as encapsulations of everything wrong in society more broadly, there’s going to be more and **more incentive to add on more fake issues,** and I think this is mostly just going to incapacitate people from thinking more seriously about the downsides and upsides of the largest industrial buildout of my lifetime and **maybe the most consequential new technology.**

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paul hauntsel 👻 🎃 @paulhansel.com · 23/08/2026

I was expecting a very different post going in, but seeing the scroll bar didn't give me much hope. The problem is one of platform, per @sotekprime.bsky.social. You're not in the YouTube disinformation arena, but outside, wasting time lobbing bloated blogs+skeets in while making everything personal

Sotek@sotekprime.bsky.social

Okay, but the brevity or lack thereof is irrelevant to the point here, it's about medium and not everyone can make a good video. The best hope for this kind of rebuttal is that a good video essayist picks it up.

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