“The Sky Is Falling!” Thank goodness someone said something

Published July 9, 2026

We humans have a hard time finding a healthy balance. While you and I might not always agree on the key words “healthy” and “balance,” hopefully you get and agree with the general premise. We tend to take things to extremes.

If you picked up the print edition of this paper two weeks ago – the edition with my “Gaussian Splat” article – you might have noticed a bit of accidental editorial irony. I noticed it the moment I turned to the page. But now that I think about it, maybe it wasn’t accidental. Let’s go with “providential.”

My column, a rather optimistic deep dive into the staggering potential of some of our latest technological developments, was laid out right next to the opinion page’s political cartoon. The cartoon depicted a massive data center as a giant Dune-like drooling sandworm disrupting local infrastructure while the depicted Texan was focused on a small screwworm. 

Wow. I had to laugh. Many of the technological leaps I have celebrated in my column are physically impossible without the infrastructure the cartoonist was demonizing. And then the topic for this week’s article hit me. 

Maybe you’ve noticed lately in the news a panic over new data centers, and it has reached a fever pitch. Communities are fighting zoning approvals, local politicians are facing fierce backlash, and grid operators are warning of severe power shortages. The dominant narrative casts these facilities as resource-gorging monsters that will drain municipal water supplies, collapse our aging electrical grids, and more. Genuinely, it feels like the sky is falling.

But if we step back and look at the broader arc of technological history, we see a comforting pattern. Society consistently greets massive technological shifts with apocalyptic dread. We look at the friction points of an innovation, project them linearly into the future, and often assume the world is ending.

Historically, this has led to some phenomenally stupid predictions. In the late 19th century, people believed the telephone would invite evil spirits into the home. OK. That works if you count gossip. Then, medical experts warned that the human body would physically disintegrate if subjected to the terrifying 30-mile-per-hour speeds of a passenger train. Editor’s note: I’ve provided an entertaining online list with 15 historical tech panics that live up to both definitions of hysterical. Check it out.

Similarly, in the 1980s, critics genuinely believed the Sony Walkman would create a generation of anti-social zombies, destroying civic life entirely. Well, some might say that did happen more or less. And that’s kind of my point. Clearly, the Walkman didn’t singularly have this impact. Regardless, we have a rich – almost comedic – history of underestimating our own ability to adapt even while continuing to do stupid things.

Ponder this: panic is a catalytic part of this cycle. While the most hyperbolic predictions look foolish in retrospect, alarmism itself serves a vital evolutionary purpose. The whistle-blowers and the fear-mongers appear to be a valid component of progress, because identifying the worst-case scenario is exactly what forces us to engineer better solutions.

Consider the Y2K bug. If you’re too young to remember the January 1, 2000 hysteria, ask someone older or look it up. Today, it is often dismissed as a manufactured panic including a collective delusion where people hoarded canned goods for a digital apocalypse that never arrived. But Y2K wasn’t a hoax; it was a successfully averted “disaster” that would have otherwise caused real-world disruptions.

The panic was a catalyst for needed action. It generated massive public pressure, the political will, and the billions of dollars required for programmers to tear into the digital plumbing of the modern world and fix a foundational flaw before the clock struck midnight. When people laugh that “nothing happened” on January 1, 2000, they fail to realize that nothing happened precisely because the alarmists prompted the fix.

But sometimes we don’t get the benefit of an understandable specific deadline, and that magnifies things when absurd hyperbole damages the credibility of an actual issue. We saw this with Al Gore’s 2006 film, An Inconvenient Truth, which relied on extreme, near-term predictions like an ice-free Arctic by 2014 and imminent 20-foot sea-level rises. When those catastrophic deadlines passed without a deluge, it handed critics ammunition to dismiss the actual impact of climate change as pure alarmism.

Since this is an editorial, I’ll editorialize a bit. Personally, I have consistently taken the concern of global warming seriously while refusing to drink the Kool-Aid and join the quasi-religious sect that mocks anyone who questions them, their motives, and/or methods. I just hate it when the supposed solutions to a problem and self-elected saviors are possibly worse than the problem.  

In this case, Al Gore ultimately didn’t do us a favor. The boy cried wolf on the timeline, and a significant portion of the village stopped listening. This brings us back to today’s data center crisis. The people protesting the energy and water demands of these massive computational clusters are not crazy. They are highlighting the real friction of our current transition. The grid strain is happening right now.

But what the “sky is falling” narrative misses is the innovation that this same panic triggers. The public outcry over water usage is already forcing the tech industry to abandon traditional evaporative cooling in favor of other better options. The panic over rolling blackouts is prompting tech giants to open their wallets and fund the next generation of energy infrastructure. Or not. Sure, it could be horrible. But probably not.

The loud and concerned among us can and should identify the friction points, and the resulting engineering will eliminate them. But please, please, please remember that fear-mongering is often counter-productive. Thirty years from now, we may look back at the Great Data Center Panic of the mid-2020s and chuckle. But if that happens, we will only be able to because the people complaining today forced the industry to build a better tomorrow. 

Either way, we’ll still be asking “What were we thinking?” Who else remembers corduroy 3-piece suits?

I say “Stay serious, but lighten up a bit.” We don’t want to look even more foolish to our grandchildren. Hey, and maybe we’ll have shown them what healthy balance looks like. Yeah, right. Like that’s ever going to happen.

And beyond this, let’s see what’s next!

 

J Matt Wallace