The US discussion over datacenters is depressing. Datacenters do not use a lot of water, they produce very useful outputs, they are not a blight on the landscape. All of this is obvious. But I don’t want to restate the obvious. What bothers me most about the discussion is that people seem to think this is or should be a collective decision. No.

We have a simple set of rules that everyone must follow. You buy land from someone willing to sell it. You contract for electricity. You hire workers who want the job. Your obligations to your local neighbors come from the same laws that govern everyone else. We do not ask what the land, electricity and labor is for. If you follow the rules, that is nobody’s business.

This is the distinction North, Wallis and Weingast make in Violence and Social Orders (paper here) between limited access orders or the natural state and open-access orders. For most of recorded history large-scale economic activity depended on access to political power. In the natural state, “people outside the coalition have only limited access to organizations, privileges, and valuable resources and activities.”  The dominant coalition controlled entry into valuable activities and created rents by granting privileges.

An open access order works through general criteria. Organizational formation is “open to everyone who meets a set of minimal and impersonal criteria.” In economic life, the transition entails “the ability to create economic organizations at will, open entry and competition in many markets.”

The key word is impersonal. The same conditions apply regardless of who wants to build or whether public officials admire the proposed use. The state is not necessarily laissez-faire but it’s role ends once you have complied with the impersonal rules.

Now look at how a data center actually gets built. Rezoning, special use permits, comprehensive plan amendments, a negotiated “community benefits agreement” of school donations, fiber, soccer fields, and payments in lieu of taxes, public comment and then more public comment. These are not general rules. They are terms of admission negotiated with whoever holds the veto. Calling them community benefits doesn’t change the structure. Access to economic activity has become something that must be bargained for, argued for in the collective sphere, and paid for and how much depends on political access. The natural state returns.

(The subsidies, by the way. are the same error wearing the other hat. A sales tax exemption written for datacenters and a county moratorium aimed at datacenters both replace a general rule with a judgment about whether this industry deserves to exist. An open access order offers neither special favors nor special burdens. It offers a rule.)

Opponents often complain that communities deserve more of a say. No, they do not. You did not vote on the bakery and the baker did not vote on you. That is the deal.

Datacenters happen to be where this is most visible today. Their size and novelty make them easy targets for vilification and rent extraction. But the big issue is not datacenters. It is whether building depends on following impersonal rules or on securing permission case by case from those who control access. The natural state was the human default for ten thousand years. The open access order that displaced it is the foundation of our prosperity and our political strength, and it is younger and more fragile than we like to think.