I stood at the thrift store looking at the electronic gadget. Decades earlier I’d purchased a used IBM 8088 desktop computer from the print shop that once occupied the same downtown space.
I brought that IBM home, plugged in an expansion card, and connected a 2400 baud modem to dial in to some of the first internet accessible bulletin boards in the valley.
By the mid-1990s, Whitefish internet pioneer Skip Schloss convinced me to sign up for one of the first email address offered in Montana. I learned some programming skills in my youth and was anxious to do something productive with the desktop computer.
Years before I got that IBM, with its 64 kilobytes of memory, mom bought me a brand-new Commodore VIC-20. I quickly hooked it up to the television and plugged in the auxiliary tape deck to store my Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. I felt powerful.
Years later several of us put up $100 each and bought a used Kaypro compact computer with its suitcase screen and metal lunchbox case. We hooked up a dot matrix printer and no longer had to go to computer building to use a terminal. The school was transitioning from punch cards to computer terminals and a massive main frame.
The old laptop on which I’m typing today’s words is a half million times faster than the central brain of the campus mainframe back in the 1980s. It’s wild. We suddenly have thousands of times more memory at my fingertips. And one laptop can hold a thousand times more data than the entire school.
Here we are, all modern, with everybody having a computer in their pocket, on their table, refrigerator, or in their car. The amount of power suddenly needed to run the next generation of technology is staggering.
Montana is a hot spot for data centers. We got cold streams and cheaper power than most places across the nation. Our power used to be significantly cheaper before a past state Legislature raked rate payers over the coals with a corporate scheme they dubbed electrical deregulation. Locals have been paying extra for that Legislature and governor for years now.
Montanans are understandably skeptical about the massive data centers corporations want to expedite. A colleague reminded me of past Montana schemes like VentureStar and Rotary Rocket, Harding Jail, Micron Campus, and the Mitsubishi Hitachi fuel cells using Berkeley Pit water to power Los Angeles. Or the Zortman-Landusky Mine or costly electrical deregulation.
The corporate data center proposed in Broadview, a small town with 140 people in eastern Montana, is thousands of acres in size. It would reportedly consume as much power as all the existing homes in the state of Montana combined. Sounds rather expensive for the rest of us and sure smells like an electrical-deregulation level promise.
Last Legislature’s all-knowing attitude expanded the massive property tax cuts for these behemoth computerized buildings for 10 more years while showering dedicated networks and power plants with massive cuts. Lawmakers fortified these corporate complexes with an eyepopping 85% property tax break that even subsidizes some crypto currency mining.
That same Legislature severely restricted local government’s ability to ban data centers. By adding onsite power facilities into state critical infrastructure laws, lawmakers protect Big Data with felony fines and prison time for disruptive citizen protests. Rep. Debo Powers stood with the people of Montana on both counts. The rest of Flathead lawmakers sided with Big Tech.
No homeowner got that kind of screaming tax deal. Despite years of promises, homeowners can’t even get all their property reappraisal tax dollars back from the state. The math is simple, homeowners pay more when corporations pay less.
Montana Democrats spent the last weekend on the east side of the state. From everything I hear it sounds like good people were rebuilding, reorganizing, and reinvigorating the party. People want a fighter who stands up for working ideals. And rank and file Democrats delivered.
Working Democrats handily wrote a two-year data center moratorium into their platform over muted objections of the corporate and establishment wing of the party. Democrats said that Big Data should pay their property taxes, fund our schools, police and firefighters, just like any other large and centrally assessed corporations doing business in the state of Montana.
Many elected politicians won’t listen to locals about these massive data centers. That’s no surprise. Big money talks. Consultants run the game. And recent lawmakers simply ignore the platforms once elected to power. This time feels different. People had enough. Time will tell.
Back at the thrift store, I put the device down. I thought about the computers I’ve enjoyed on the farm over the decades. Found them productive, useful. But these data centers make me nervous as hell that homeowners will again pay lots extra for an elusive corporate insider deal.
There’s opportunity for a candidate with conviction to stand up to Big-Tech and say no versus that all too familiar mumbo jumbo, word salad we hear yet no one trusts. I know, trust is asking a lot from politics. A simple yes or no on data centers would help.
Montanans are fed up with the constant political double talk and sickened by Big Tech’s dark money which flooded primary elections. People started gathering signatures in Butte-Silver Bow and Yellowstone counties to allow a citizen vote on data centers, something even the Legislature couldn’t ban thanks to our great state Constitution.