Notable Quotable: What It Means To Survive

Today’s quote is an excerpt from the article What It Means To Survive, by Sarah Jaffe, published in The Progressive on October 3, 2025. The article is not the in-your-face sort of viral news that will be amplified through major news outlets or social media. It's quiet news that's important because it provides a glimpse into an unregulated future of consequential social impact that will continue to lift just the wealthiest few without regard for the citizenry at large.

In sharing these truths, Youtropolis hopes to empower you with knowledge, and stimulate conversations, including idea-sharing, on what it might take to survive America's dystopian future and what we might do to have a softer landing.

"In rural northeastern Louisiana, Meta—the parent company of Facebook and Instagram—is building its biggest data center yet for so-called artificial intelligence (AI), which will be powered by three new gas-fueled electric power plants. The center will cost $10 billion, and will use roughly three times the amount of electricity that the city of New Orleans uses in a year, according to The Times-Picayune.

"Politicians justify the data centers, like the oil and gas infrastructure before them, as economic development. But leaving aside the long-term goal of so-called AI to replace workers, the centers offer very little to long-term residents besides more destruction. “Man camps” are already springing up in Richland Parish, housing temporary workers while locals watch. The project is slated to take up 2,250 acres, its buildings “totaling four million square feet—about the equivalent of seventy football fields—each lined with racks of powerful computers.” But all of that space will only create “up to 500” permanent jobs once the construction is done—about one job per 8,000 square feet. (The site was once slated for an auto plant that was never built.)

"Advocates, meanwhile, are worried about the water supply, and whether water from their aquifer will be used to cool computers rather than sustain humans. At the same time, the construction jobs seem to be going to out-of-towners, with the trickle-down effect so far apparently limited to increased traffic at the area’s few food shops. A local resident told The Times-Picayune, ‘The kind of jobs they’re creating won’t help the folks who live out here.”’

If you’d like to learn more, read Sarah Jaffe's full article in The Progressive.

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash