Data centre NIYBYism (not in YOUR back yard) is creeping into South Africa’s national conversation. If it becomes a fixture, it will make pro-Iran “human rights” lawyers and upwardly failing drag artists like GOOD’s Brett Herron feel good about themselves – and ridicule the country, not just in the eyes of foreign investors, but our continental peers.

On Monday 24 August, an activist NGO based in the United Kingdom (UK), Foxglove, trespassed once again into domestic affairs with a press release entitled: “Civil society calls on Human Rights Commission to investigate the human rights impacts of South Africa’s data centre boom”. The following day, the Mail & Guardian published an opinion that assumed data centre expansion in Cape Town will compromise the city’s water supply. This is a mischievous assertion that was not accompanied by essential, publicly available information.

Quite why the South African government doesn’t round up nuisances like Foxglove, shave their heads and make them parade around the town square wearing circus clothing is a mystery. As with these things, it helps to look at their balance sheets.

Most left-wing agitants in the UK donate to Foxglove, from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust to Open Society. But there’s another trust that warrants scrutiny.

Sigrid Rausing, married to a former University of Cape Town student activist, is so rich that she can live at the same time as her eponymous trust donates to almost every single left-wing cause in the UK. Last week we examined the law moron Jolyon Maugham, and his role in making the Jason Arday plagiarism scandal and suicide tragedy so much worse. Sigrid also gives him cash.

How is Sigrid so rich at the same time as so left wing? That’s because Grandpa was Ruben, a co-founder of Sweden’s Tetra Pak, the product that made food supply possible outside a cold chain. What came from innovating one of the most exceptional products in history was – deservedly – mountains and mountains of money.

Presentism

But here’s the thing: today our academic, media, and activist classes apply presentism to everything from arts and film to historical political statements. Ruben, brilliant man he was, unlikely had lobby groups pointing to the plastic coating of his products and scolding, or wagging their fingers at his complexions of his management. His generation enjoyed an environment unshackled by regulation, where broadcasters told you the news and politicians walked around unrecognisable in grey suits. Now brilliant Ruben’s cash finds itself, via twists, funding a group seeking to frustrate critical development in an environment beset by unemployment and despair. For what?

Soon data centres will emerge from their real estate classification into their own asset class. Such is the level of innovation that companies like StarCloud are building them for space. While much of the emphasis has been on the development in the Virginia corridor and more recently Texas and Arizona, little has been mentioned about what’s going on in Africa, one of the last wholesale greenfield sites on earth.

Foxglove’s press release came at the same time South Korea announced a $170-million loan for Tanzania to start getting its foot in the door via the construction of an artificial intelligence (AI) factory and digital technology institute. The loan will cover the cost of building labs, AI training, robots, and advanced equipment. This is a major achievement for the Economic Development Co-operation Fund, and will invariably see others joining the race soon, including Ethiopia. What do you think will happen if Foxglove approaches the African Union and demands a “human rights” inventory? I have some ideas.

Hucksters

Our problem, captured in the Mail & Guardian, is that we haven’t acknowledged that our academic, media, and activist classes can be just as hucksterish as funeral policy salespeople – when they want to be, when there’s the scent of cash in the air. That particular column uses the terror language of 2018’s Cape Town Day Zero to warn of water shortages – yet in its application, the company responsible, Equinix, has very clearly articulated that its Cape Town data centres will use “dry air-based cooling”. For its part Teraco, another developer, uses zero-water closed loop systems.

No editorial disclaimer appeared underneath the article. The activist media legacy of people like Nic Dawes, Chris Roper, Verashni Pillay, and Sipho Kings has taught this newspaper not to bother when it comes to awkward information.

Objections to data centres are not rooted in “science” (if anything actually is), but fashion. It is particularly acute in the United States, where Democratic Socialists of America members see stopping data centres as a big tech or billionaire vulnerability to exploit. They’re not wrong in as much as investment cycles reflect, but once again – just like the Green Party in the UK – that movement’s amplification of “social justice” means that the environment has been relegated as less of a protection and more of a crutch.

What that means is that Foxglove, which is based in London, has seized an idea in America, and seeks to import it into South Africa, present conditions be damned. For its efforts the elite are willing to sponsor an exercise that could – like the Constitutional Court ruling – eliminate employment prospects and worse, let the country fall behind its lesser-developed peers eventually.

This is not to diminish the clearer purposes of decent environmental groups. That Foxglove (named after a poisonous flower) would be attacking economic prospects and not eyeing legitimate environmental threats – the “green fuel” exercise Hopefield as one example – suggests that the only thing a young black person growing up in the Western Cape will one day be able to boast about is that, for all their impoverishment and deprivation, at least they lived according to net-zero standards dreamed up in far-away places.