Data center hysteria is our latest group chat gone wild

Remember 2018, when every city council, major airline, and coffee giant suddenly decided that plastic sip-lids were the frontline of planetary salvation?

It was the great Plastic Straw Panic. Celebrities made somber videos, corporate PR teams scrambled, and public policy shifted on a dime. The entire crusade was built on an eye-popping stat repeated with absolute, religious fervor: Americans use 500 million plastic straws every single day. With 330 million Americans, that is roughly 1.5 straws per person per day.

It sounded scientific and was repeated by reporters and even the National Park Service. With institutions and people we trust every day without verifying, you might be shocked to learn that this estimate wasn’t the outcome of a peer-reviewed publication. It wasn’t even something derived from a trade association representing the largess of American straw manufacturing. Instead, the statistic was actually an environmental science project of a well-meaning nine-year-old kid in Vermont named Milo Cress.

Milo’s project was totally defensible for a fourth-grader. But major media outlets, international corporations and politicians took that number, ran it through the viral echo chamber, and regurgitated it without a single second of basic scrutiny. Overnight, a kid’s napkin-math guess became unquestioned gospel. In this form, it spurred legislation that put the weight of jail time and $1,000 fines behind it — as with a California bill.

We didn’t need bot farms in China or foreign influence operations to fall for it. We did it all by ourselves, the way humans always do — in the glorious, chaotic excess of the crowd.

Which brings us to today’s........

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