We Didn’t Start the Fire—This Week On VICE: Members Only
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This summer, I almost lost my damn mind. I was sitting in my parents’ backyard in South Wales, staring at a screen-blue sky, while bits of burnt, blackened bracken rained down all around. Acrid smell in the air. It’s a densely wooded area and most of it was on fire to varying degrees of seriousness. Some started naturally, several deliberately by kids with nothing better to do, and others by people who spend most of their time on carpet, keen to Instagram their visits to natural beauty spots without having the common sense to know that you shouldn’t put a disposable BBQ directly on the ground.
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Whatever the catalyst, the land was a tinderbox because the country was in the midst of the driest summer since Met Office records began 190 years ago. It was the same across Europe. Record high temperatures. No rain. Apocalyptic footage of wild horses fleeing down concrete roads in France and Greece with the background in flames. I watched ash drift over the roof, like snow in hell, and read several different news stories about Welsh council members walking out of or refusing to take meetings with local residents complaining about enormous data centers being built in their constituencies. While only tangentially linked (for now) these two things happening simultaneously felt like a bad omen for the future of things like “nice picnics” and “public access to clean drinking water.”
Maybe I’m right to be concerned about the hundreds of enormous data centers popping up seemingly overnight, without resident consultation, eating up natural habitats and subsurface space and emitting endless white sensory noise that drives animals away and residents mad. Maybe I’m merely a victim of AI’s “PR crisis,” which must be solved as a matter of urgency. Fortunately, many great American minds are on the case.
In September, VICE’s roving reporter slash 7ft 1 fly on the wall Nick Dove headed to Data After Dark, a pro-data center party in Washington D.C. hosted by the tech-right newsletter Pirate Wires, AI advocacy Substack The Compute Optimist, “the liberty movement’s talent agency” Young Voices, and a roster of ideologically adjacent sponsors. Describing it as “a pep rally for the increasingly beleaguered techno-optimist minority,” Dove inadvertently found himself at the center of a conflict between anti-data center protestors and celebrants of “American innovation.” Setting the scene at the beginning of the night, he writes:
“Around 10PM, after a quick smoke, I pass a poster demanding we “LET DATA REIGN,” and the speakers take the stage. The rally turns literal, and for ten minutes, the Chatham House Rule subsides. Cobalt blue light washing over him like an American Idol contestant, [Pirate Wires writer Jonas] Du thanks the crowd, saying the hosts never could’ve imagined this could’ve turned into something this huge, this big, this much of a celebration of the dominance of American AI.
“‘Yeah! American dominance!’ a woman screams.”
Twenty-two long years have passed since Trey Parker and Matt Stone penned the lyrics “America, fuck yeah / So lick my butt and suck on my balls,” famously beloved by 13-year-old boys everywhere. How fascinating, almost comforting, to know that people are still carrying the torch despite dropping the irony somewhere back in 2015.
Read the full story behind the paywall below:
I Went to a Weird Party About Data Centers, With People Who Love Them
I maintain that the opposite of AI-generated “art” is a human being recklessly abusing a load of substances and somehow managing to make music that outlives them in the process. In the latest issue of VICE magazine, THE SELF-DESTRUCTION ISSUE, best-selling author and music critic Simon Reynolds unpacks the timeless romance of self-destruction. Tracking the itch for oblivion from the 1960s avant-garde and intravenous drugs through to opioid-laced SoundCloud rappers of the 2010s, the journey begins with Lou Reed’s “Heroin”, arguably rock and roll’s most evil song. Reynolds writes:
“The Velvet Underground didn’t invent cool—that would be Brando in The Wild One, Dean in Rebel Without A Cause—but ‘Heroin’, along with the group’s unsmiling all-black image, perfected the idea of nothing-can-touch-me. The line to punk is direct. The name Richard Hell chose for his band the Voidoids echoes the ‘Heroin’ lyric ‘I’m gonna try to nullify my life’ in the way it revels in the idea of drugs as a way to delete yourself from the world. While Hell was scribbling poetry and shooting up on the Lower East Side, over in Cleveland, Rocket From The Tombs’s Pete Laughner was singing ‘Ain’t It Fun’, asking, ‘Ain’t it fun when you know you’re gonna die young?’ Lester Bangs warned Laughner that ‘You’re killing yourself just so you can be like Lou Reed,’ and in 1977 he duly died of drugs-and-drink-induced pancreatitis, aged 24.”
Touching on artistic reputation and legacy, transcendence and fatalistic marketing, Nick Cave’s transformation from pope of self-destruction to beloved agony aunt and Pete Doherty trading class As for vast English breakfasts, Reynolds carefully picks apart the mythology of one of art’s oldest tropes.
Read the full essay in the latest issue of VICE magazine, THE SELF-DESTRUCTION ISSUE, or behind the paywall below:
Simon Reynolds on ‘Heroin’, Rock’s Most Evil Song
Emma Garland
Deputy Editor, VICE Magazine
To get past the paywall, sign up for VICE membership. A Digital Only subscription is just $2 a month (or $20 a year, if you prefer), while $70 a year also gets you 4 issues of VICE magazine, delivered straight to your door. (All three kill all the ads on this site.)
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