You Must Be Brainwashed — Hippie CEO Life

In early May, hundreds of people showed up at the Box Elder County fairgrounds in rural Utah to push back on a data center. Not data centers in general. One specific project: Stratos, a campus originally scoped at 40,000 acres, roughly the footprint of Washington, D.C., designed to grow to nine gigawatts of AI compute near the Great Salt Lake. The people who live there had the kinds of questions you would expect from people who live in a state with very little rainfall and receding shorelines. What happens to the water, in a basin where the lake has already dropped 22 feet since 1986? What happens to the grid, when a single campus would eventually need more electricity than the entire state combined currently consumes? What happens to the land? How safe is this for the animals and people that live around it?

Kevin O’Leary, the investor who is the public face of the project, had an answer for the opposition. It wasn’t real.

More than 90% of the protesters, he claimed, were paid and bussed in from out of state. The Salt Lake Tribune found nothing to support that. The residents at the fairgrounds also disputed it, on the reasonable grounds that they exist and live there.

So his story changed. Fine, the protesters were Utahns. But their opinions were not their own. O’Leary went on Fox Business and named two small Utah organizations, Alliance for a Better Utah and Elevate Strategies, as the delivery mechanism: “These two cells, it’s the CPP at work here. There’s no question about it.” On Tucker Carlson’s show, he described them as “taking the content from the CPP, repurposing it, and jamming it down the throats of people in Utah on my social media feed.” He kept saying CPP, not CCP. This wonderful man could not get the acronym of the foreign intelligence operation right while insisting there was no question it existed.

And then the purest expression of the whole worldview, “At the end of the day, who would want us to stop building our electrical grid? Which adversary would want that? There’s only one: it’s China.”

Notice the sequence. First the opposition did not exist. Then it existed but was counterfeit. Two completely different stories that agree on exactly one thing, that the people of Box Elder County cannot simply be right.

The move.

Once you see the structure, you can’t unsee it. If you support the project, you are the authentic voice of Utah. If you oppose it, you are either fake or a victim of manipulation. Disagreement itself becomes the evidence of brainwashing, and the brainwashing becomes the reason the disagreement can be ignored. The position is unfalsifiable, which is exactly what makes it useful. You never have to answer the water question. You never have to defend the power math. The other side of the argument has been defined out of existence before the argument starts.

We’ve seen this movie before.

In 2018, twelve boys and their soccer coach were trapped in the Tham Luang cave in Thailand. The man who kick-started the rescue was Vern Unsworth, a British caver who had spent years mapping that cave system and who urged Thai authorities to call in the world’s best cave rescue divers. Those divers got every single person out. Elon Musk, meanwhile, had his engineers build a miniature submarine. Unsworth called it what it was: a PR stunt with “absolutely no chance of working,” a rigid metal tube roughly five and a half feet long that could not have made it through the first 50 meters of the cave’s passages. The sub was never used. Musk’s response to the expert assessment was to call Unsworth a pedophile, an accusation with nothing behind it, for which he later apologized. The pattern in miniature looks like this -> the actual experts weren’t smart enough, the tech guy would save the day, and when the man who knew the cave best said otherwise, he had to be destroyed.

Two years later it was a pandemic. In March 2020, as worldwide cases crossed 100,000, Musk tweeted that “the coronavirus panic is dumb” and predicted the United States would see close to zero new cases by the end of April. By the end of April the country was adding more than 20,000 cases a day. And he wasn’t alone. A wave of tech leaders stepped forward to solve the crisis, with no training in medicine, virology, or public health, on the theory that being good at software is a universal intelligence that transfers to anything and everything. The epidemiologists, the people with the unglamorous credentials, turned out to be right about nearly everything the disruptors got wrong.

Where this comes from.

i think this worldview has a genealogy, and part of it traces to a sentence i grew up with professionally. Steve Jobs, BusinessWeek, May 1998: “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” (The Henry Ford “faster horses” quote usually gets trotted out alongside it. There is no evidence Ford ever said it, which feels about right for this story.)

The reality is that in its lane, the Jobs line is true. People genuinely cannot spec an unbuilt product. Few people in 2006 could have described the iPhone. As a product discovery principle it works, and Jobs paired it with an obsessive, almost fanatical attention to the actual experience of the actual person using the thing.

Then the idea escaped its lane. Somewhere between Cupertino and the Fox Business green room, “customers can’t articulate an unbuilt solution” mutated into “the public can’t evaluate anything at all.” Their own health. Their own town. Their own water. The savior class kept the arrogance and dropped the empathy, and the empathy was the only part doing the work.

The inversion.

What makes the posture absurd, rather than merely ugly, is that in every one of these stories, the expertise runs in exactly the opposite direction of the rhetoric. The cave divers knew the cave. The epidemiologists knew the virus. The residents of Box Elder County know what their land, their grid, and their shrinking lake can absorb, because they are the domain experts on living there.

The two women O’Leary accused on Fox Business of being “proxies for the Chinese government” are Gabi Finlayson and Jackie Morgan, co-founders of Elevate Strategies. Finlayson’s response, “The only foreign operative here is a Canadian wealthy person trying to ruin our state.” O’Leary is Canadian. In this entire story, the one verifiable foreign actor working to shape Utah politics is the man doing the accusing.

The bill.

On June 25, O’Leary posted a clarification to Instagram saying, “I have no evidence that Alliance for a Better Utah, Elevate Strategies…are funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party.” The distance between “there’s no question about it” and “I have no evidence” was about seven weeks.

Last week, the accused sued. Alliance for a Better Utah, Elevate Strategies, and their founders filed a defamation suit in Utah federal court against O’Leary and Fox News, describing a weekslong campaign across at least ten interviews and citing not just reputational damage but ongoing threats to their physical safety. O’Leary’s attorney responded by calling the lawsuit “a cash grab.” Which is the tell, one more time, even the lawsuit can’t be sincere. On this worldview, no opposition is ever legitimate, all the way down.

Unfalsifiable claims are a superpower on cable news. Federal court, i hope, is the one room in America where “there’s no question about it” is followed by “show us.”

The part i continue to think about.

The pitch underneath all of this, the data center tour, the pandemic punditry, the submarine, is always the same, you are not smart enough, and the tech guys are here to save you. The record says the opposite. On the questions that matter most, public health, public policy, the places people actually live, the public keeps being right, in public, with receipts, and the savior class keeps needing a conspiracy to explain it.