Two stories this week look unrelated until you stand back. LG responding to allegations that its TVs log viewing behavior, audio signals, and device activity, and the Trump administration weakening EPA rules to accelerate AI data center construction. The connection is not a conspiracy. It is an architecture. The TV in your living room generates data. That data goes somewhere. Somewhere is a data center. The data center costs something: electricity, water, land, clean air for the people who live near it. In both cases, the cost is externalized to people who did not sign up to pay it.
The Surveillance Economy and Its Infrastructure Costs
LG's response to the allegations, as reported by Gamers Nexus, Level1Techs, and independent researchers, follows the familiar pattern: minimize, contextualize, gesture at consent frameworks buried in setup menus. The data being collected is not incidental. Smart TVs are surveillance devices that also show content. The business model depends on behavioral data being more valuable than hardware margins, which it increasingly is. Meanwhile, the data centers processing that behavioral data are, under the new EPA carve-outs, permitted to operate with lower environmental standards in the name of national AI competitiveness. The communities absorbing the pollution are not the ones capturing the value.
Manischewitz, Dating Shows, and the Consent Problem
The pattern extends into marketing. Manischewitz building a dating show to reach Gen Z is a softer version of the same logic: capture attention, generate behavioral data, convert it into brand equity. The dating show format at least makes the exchange visible. You watch, you feel something, the brand benefits. LG's data collection and the data center's pollution are the same exchange made invisible. Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick's argument about enshittification as a condition rather than a moment applies here: the surveillance infrastructure does not degrade through malice but through accumulated small decisions to externalize cost until the people bearing it notice. They are noticing.