Nick Trimmer

The most powerful piece of technology ever created is not a machine or a software. It's a story. Story has been wielded by the greatest leaders and innovators throughout history to shape belief, move capital, and inspire action. That's why we're launching Project Genesis: brand new offering from Delta Studio that turns your founder story into an instrument to bend the arc of history. Over the course of just three weeks, you’ll receive: 1.) Story coaching with our Head of Narrative Design. 2.) A cinematic storyboard visualizing your company’s founding narrative using professional filmmaking techniques. 3.) A Modular Story Guide with three written versions of your story crafted for fundraising, hiring, and media engagement. Your Story Bible can be used immediately — Walk into your next investor pitch, recruiting call, or media appearance with the confidence of a cinematic protagonist. Ready to take control of your narrative? Shoot me a DM and I'll show you what we've been working on...

I’m no Girard scholar, but this seems like a pretty clear example of the scapegoating mechanism emerging in response to the political, economic, and social instability of this era. Since we cannot "sacrifice" AI, we will simply find its closest incarnation - the data centers.

He's right about this. TikTok gets a lot of the blame for propagating some of the most egregious disinfo campaigns, but many of the most damaging narratives are spread on Facebook. If you explore some of the anti-data center community groups, you'll find a robust mix of platitudes, outrage videos, false information, and endless AI slop. Each comments section is dominated by hysteria and outrage. Within the community groups, most people find a way to attribute their own political grievances and existential anxiety (political, economic, social instability) to data centers. Most importantly, these arguments cannot be met with evidence and factual corrections. Until you understand why people are reacting this way, you'll never know what to do about it.

A reminder to some of you that you’re losing a PR battle to this

A fascinating example of anti-mimetic behavior in the wild

This is actually an important first step when conducting any counter-narrative operation: one of the most effective means of changing the perception of a thing is to give it a new name. At any given point, several narratives are circulating around a person, place, or idea. The most successful narratives are coherent (clear message), resonant (emotional connection), and repetitive (shared widely, repeated often). The more a single narrative is reinforced, the more entrenched it becomes in the minds of the public. With time and repetition, that narrative acts as a sort of parasite that embodies its host. The two become synonymous. The most effective way to break this entrenchment is to change the name. A new name helps sever the association between the destructive narrative and its object. However, this new name must immediately be followed by a new narrative to define it. In the past, terms like "Nuclear" became synonymous with "disaster" or "Chernobyl". In response, some have attempted to describe nuclear power in a way that subverts the political baggage of terms like "renewable energy" and "nuclear energy". After all, both are victims of their own entrenched political narratives. @wolfejosh, for example, often advocates for the term "Elemental Energy" to describe renewable forms of power generation like solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, nuclear, etc. This approach accomplishes two things: 1. It strips the political ideology from existing forms of"renewable energy" and reframes it as a non-partisan technology. 2. It launders nuclear power production via the halo effect associated with more popular forms of "renewable energy". This same form of conflict is occurring today. Ideas like "stolen water" or "environmental destruction" have become entrenched and deeply associated with the topic of "data centers". OpenAI's attempt to change both the name and implied purpose of its data centers is an important first step to break destructive narratives.

When we finally capture the Chinese fishing fleets pillaging the South American coast, we're going to feed them to the Shinkei Discombobulator

A reminder that one of the most destructive mistakes made by this administration was its refusal to ban TikTok

This is a critical fact of life that I have to remind myself of from time to time. Humans, by default, are openly hostile to change. Yes, narrative is a useful tool that can help frame the change in a more familiar context for the recipient. But it's not *any* narrative that will change people's opinions. It has to be the right one. Humans have an attention hierarchy that you must abide by if you wish to influence perception. At the top of this hierarchy are more "lizard brain" priorities related to food, shelter, and sex. At the bottom are more abstract concepts like common good and long-term planning. If you're attempting to counteract a fear-based emotion, you cannot respond with abstract notions of "reduced electrical bills", "reduced property tax", and "more jobs". These heightened states of emotion must either be assuaged or overridden if you wish to appeal to the conceptual. This is the reason why most narrative operations are built to invoke powerful emotions quickly. You cannot make appeals to logic or rationality when someone feels like they're under threat. In response, most counter-narrative operations attempt to redirect the emotion, rather than to overcome it: "You shouldn't be afraid of THAT -- in reality THIS is much scarier." There's no perfect, consistent way to overcome this. Narratives that appeal to our rational thinking take longer to penetrate the emotional armor of fear and greed. Admittedly, one of the most consistent ways to pull someone out of an emotional spiral is via some sort of reward mechanism. Do you want to help someone overcome the fear of getting into a car with a complete stranger? Make it half the price of a taxi. Want to get someone to try a consumable product for the first time? Give it away for free. Want to overcome the existential dread about the threat of data centers and AI? Pay off the taxpayer. Politicians know this better than anyone: Narrative is great, but sometimes a good old-fashioned bribe will do the trick.

The most expedient way to retake the data center narrative would be to do two things: 1. Appeal to a common enemy by associating data center opposition with boomer-style NIMBYism 2. Push heavy into the narrative that they're giant cash machines for stagnant local economies

We're past the point where bad narratives surrounding data centers can be explained away with a few rational arguments. The tech sector has repeatedly made the mistake of assuming that technological progress is an inherent good in itself, and that this goodness will always win out in the end. This is demonstrably false. For the past several years, various coalitions and interest groups have hijacked "data centers" as a cause du jour. These structures have become a vessel into which anyone can thrust their generalized anxieties and sacrifice in the name of some platitude like "collective prosperity" or "human dignity". If you want to take control of the narrative, you need to create a new one. It's not useful to prepare a list of statements detailing why data centers are important. Nor is it impactful to point out the fact that our digital infrastructure has relied on data centers for decades. None of this information changes how a person feels about the topic. This feeling, of course, is not about what the data center is; it's about what it represents: it's an abstract threat to a person's identity and their ability to exert control over their life and their circumstances. In order to counteract these narratives, you can do one of two things: you contextualize the threat in terms that assuage the underlying feelings associated with the thing. Or, you build an entirely new association.

I've always wondered if there's a consistent liquidity threshold within any given market that would make the prediction reliably accurate. i.e. a prediction market with $1M in liquidity can be meaningfully influenced with a $100K bet in either direction.