My friend Lee last night took me to a town hall meeting in the small town of Westover (pop. 2000). About 300 people — that’s over 10 percent of the town — gathered in an Assemblies of God church to meet with four men representing the developers of a proposed data center, which is strongly opposed by many. I tell you, it was enough to renew your faith in democracy.
What are data centers, and why are some people so angry about them? Grok defines them thus:
Data centers are specialized physical facilities (buildings, rooms, or campuses) that house computer systems, servers, storage devices, networking equipment, and supporting infrastructure. They serve as centralized hubs for storing, processing, managing, and distributing large volumes of digital data and computing workloads.
Basically, giant warehouses storing servers. Doesn’t seem like it should be that big of a deal, but people really hate them. Look at this:
Opponents fear that these things will use up too much water (to cool the servers), introduce constant low-level noise into the environment, use so much electricity that it will drive up their electric bills, and various other problems. All of that came up in last night’s two-hour meeting. But mostly it was this, as described in this excellent interview with a Silicon Valley journalist who traveled throughout the Midwest recently to find out why so many local folks hate the things:
But what did I see? There was a bunch of stuff that was surprising, and again, it kind of shows what a bubble I was in. One is that a lot more people were really furious not just at the AI companies, but at their local governments. I kind of thought that everyone would hate AI because of the job stuff, or that they were really suspicious of OpenAI, Meta, whatever. And there was a general negative-ish sentiment toward AI and AI companies. But when I asked activists what riled you up, or why are you frustrated with this data center, it was much more about: we hate how our local council or our mayor kind of bent over and sold out to these tech companies. So it was much more a story of dark money and politics and corruption, and your democratically-elected officials selling you out to some big corporation who shows up with a check and an NDA, more so than anger about the technology.
I actually heard very little about the technology unless I explicitly prompted people — hey, what do you think of ChatGPT, do you use it? Some people were like, yes. Some people were like, no. Most people were like, sometimes it’s not that useful, but it’s fine. That was kind of the median response I got about ChatGPT. As someone who spends a lot of time in the tech world, all we think about is “big model scary”, but over there it’s much more “big corporation scary”. And so I found that really surprising.
Oh, yes indeed. The crowd in the jam-packed church last night was about as angry at its town council members as it was at the four data center men on the stage! Before I get into it, here is a map, from a website run by the activist Erin Brokovich, on the number of data centers either existing or under development in the US. I had no idea there were so many!
Last night’s meeting was a very Alabama thing, and honestly, it was a great exercise is civic action. They held it in a church, and opened the proceedings with a prayer. At several points in the evening, people asked their fellow citizens to pray for the town council and civic leaders as they try to figure this out. But when one of the four data center men pointed out in his remarks that “Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior,” folks in the audience seemed to feel patronized (I don’t blame them).
So, what’s this about? A couple of years ago, it seems, some property developers bought up over 400 acres of nearby land, and worked with the then-mayor, the planning commission, and the city council to start the process. At some point more recently, local people woke up to what was happening, and many of them hit the roof with anger. They came to believe that they had been deceived, that all of this happened without their knowledge.
It was pointed out several times last night that all the planning meetings had been posted and open to the public, but some citizens pointed out that they weren’t well publicized, and the public announcement was done in a minimal way, such that you would have to be paying close attention to know what was going on. The entire issue has really roiled the small town. It cost the previous mayor his job, and judging by the comments last night, locals have been savaging each other on Facebook over it. (Though by show of hands, nearly everybody in that church last night was against the data center, two or three people over the course of the evening begged their fellow citizens to stop abusing each other on Facebook.)
I didn’t get the name of the four data center men onstage. Over the course of the evening, they answered people’s questions. No, the center will not draw water from the aquifer, but from the municipal pipe running along the highway. It will use a “closed loop” cooling system that recycles the water, changing it out every few years. The tree line planned to buffer the site from the highway will lower the decibels, they said, and anyway, they’ve all agreed in writing that the center has to abide by standards that exceed what the EPA requires. Anyway (they said), the buildings will only cover about 120 acres on the 400+ acre property; the rest is for buffer. The county’s civil engineer remarked that this planned site “far exceeds” anything required of it by the local building codes (meaning that the building will be much better than it has to be by law). And so forth.
The four men also pointed out that the data center will produce hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue for the county to use in its schools, or whatever it wants.
None of this placated the crowd. Addressing the crowd, one local man said, “They have been deceitful from the get-go, in my opinion.” Applause all around. One local woman said she had spent hours going through public documents — documents she said the city made her pay $20 per each hour she searched them, even though they’re official government documents — and it looks to her like the city council pushed this thing through improperly. A well-known plaintiff’s lawyer from Birmingham who owns property in the town showed up, and said from his examination of the documents, it looks like city officials improperly approved it. “That guy is a big-deal lawyer,” my friend whispered in my ear. Not the kind of figure you want against you, if you’re the data center people.
There was some crazy talk, as there always is. One woman complained that the data center is a “military target” that will put them all at risk. Another woman demanded to know if this thing might end up being “another Chernobyl.”
But mostly, it seemed to me that the questions asked and the concerns expressed were legitimate. The issue of NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) kept cropping up. Apparently in some of these cases around the nation, city officials have signed NDAs to hide from the public who is behind building the data centers. Why the NDAs? From that great Nate Silver interview with Silicon Valley journalist Jasmine Sun:
[Sun:] The data center developer would be evaluating a bunch of different potential sites in different cities, and they would present it as an economic development thing. We’re going to contribute so much to your tax base. Who wants it? Who’s going to hand us some subsidies? Who’s going to build out some roads? So they would often engage in a competitive bidding-style process where they’re evaluating multiple towns or cities at once, and during that process the NDAs would prevent towns and cities from talking to each other. Another reason for the NDAs was that sometimes you need to buy out farmland, and as soon as farmers know that it’s a data center showing up and not some other project, they’re like, wow, let me add another zero to that price tag. So I think the NDAs were really a way to create a power asymmetry, frankly, in the negotiations between the data center developers and the people they were negotiating with.
In this new podcast interview, Brockovich tells David Remnick that these data center builders come into small towns and overwhelm local elected officials, in part by promises of a big tax payday for the municipality.
The four men in Westover last night emphatically denied that NDAs were involved in their project. Even if they were being truthful, you can see why local people are mistrustful. Several who stood to speak expressed cynicism about what they were hearing. One woman said that once the data center goes in, if things don’t turn out as nicely as the four men promise, what happens then? One of the four pointed out that there are remedies in law if the data center fails to live up to the codes. But then one man responded, “I feel like if y’all break your promises, you’re just going to pay a fine, and keep on making a profit.”
(At this point, my friend, an Alabama native, leaned over and whispered that people have long memories of how Monsanto poisoned the river in a nearby part of the state by pumping into the water cancer-causing PCBs, which internal company documents proved that the Monsanto knew was dangerous. Monsanto settled the lawsuit for $700 million back in 2003. The point is, local people have experience with exploitative corporations.)
Here’s the thing: are data centers really as bad as people think? Because people think they’re really bad — so bad that they would rather have a steel plant built in their neighborhood than a data center. Seriously:
At the meeting last night, one woman on the planning commission stood up and, addressing the crowd, said that she wonders why nobody came out to fight the 3,000-house subdivision that just got approved for the area. In the only grumpy comment of the evening from the data center men on stage, one of them mused, no doubt correctly, that if they were putting a Walmart super center in on that property, nobody would care.
I confess that I haven’t been following this story at all. A year or so ago, I found out a data center is going in down in West Feliciana, my hometown. It’s going to be in an area some distance from where people live, and is going to bring hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue to the parish (county). I thought this sounded like a good idea. The parish is not industrialized, and this is a great source of needed tax revenue from a non-polluting industry. Nobody will even have to see the thing. Interestingly, it’s going to be near the site of a now-closed paper mill, which during my childhood often made the air smell horrible. (“It’s the smell of money,” people would say, coping.)
But it’s a big, big story. After the meeting last night, I got to thinking that this phenomenon is not about data centers per se. I completely get why someone would have concerns about such a thing turning up locally, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me that people would rather have much noisier and more polluting industry go in than a data center. At the meeting last night, the four men on stage patiently explained that yes, there are some “bad data centers,” but listed how this one will be different — and gave details. Someone in the audience wanted to know why these people were choosing to come ruin a nice rural area with their data center. One of the men on stage pointed out that the area where the data center will go in has long been zoned as industrial, as it lies along a major highway.
You could make a good case that the fears of the people in that room about this particular data center are largely unfounded. But see, that’s why I don’t think this issue is about data centers themselves, in general. I think it’s about two bigger issues, of which data centers are a condensed symbol:
General lack of trust within American society
Fear of AI
One man named Emmitt said from the podium last night, “In America, we are in the middle of a trust crisis. People stand up and say one thing, and then it doesn’t happen.” Another woman, with long gray hair, said that she has spent most of her life fighting to preserve the Cahaba River watershed, and that she has learned not to trust corporations, developers, and public officials. Said she, “They’re going to tell you anything they want” — then do what they damn well please.
It was very, very clear last night that lack of trust is the main issue in Westover. All the people in that room last night believe, rightly or wrongly, that the city council was all in the bag for the developers, and hustled this project through. One of the four data center guys said that the town’s city council members traveled to other data center sites around the country during the approval process, to see how things work, and were satisfied that this could be a good thing for Westover.
“But did they go to any of the bad data centers?” a man in the crowd asked.
A woman said near the end that it seems wrong to her that small-town people should be forced to master complicated planning documents and concepts, and not given enough time to understand what’s being proposed. “We should not have to be experts,” she said.
The mayor of a nearby small community stood to affirm this, saying the people who govern little towns like his just don’t have the expertise to grasp the technical details of projects like this, and need time to study them. (Last week, under public pressure, the Westover city council passed a six-month moratorium on proceeding with their data center.)
And then there’s the fear of AI. The woman with the long gray hair said that she loves her iPhone, but that she doesn’t need all the other conveniences promised by AI, not at the cost of her peace of mind and the tranquility of their rural paradise.
That was as close as the evening came to questioning the benefits of AI itself, but I sense that this has a lot to do with the opposition, even if the opponents don’t really know it. This tweet captures what I think is really going on here:
I’m old enough to remember how widespread fear of nuclear power in the wake of the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979 shut down building nuclear power plants in America. Boy, in this era of global warming, don’t you wish we hadn’t done that? When I think about data centers, I hope that we aren’t doing the same thing: allowing fear of a new technology to cause us to harm the long-term good. I’m not saying that I favor data centers, please understand; it’s just that I am somewhat skeptical of the panic.
That said, people aren’t wrong at all to worry about the accelerated rate of change, especially around AI. They aren’t wrong to worry that in our democracy, they are losing control over their own destinies to faraway tech oligarchs, corporations, and the politicians who support them. And they damn sure aren’t wrong to worry about what the coming of AI is going to do to wreck our way of life. It could be that people tell pollsters they would rather have a steel smelter close by than a data center because they understand what steel-making technology is. No steel plant ever threatened to destroy half of all white collar jobs, as Anthropic’s Dario Amodei said AI would likely do, and soon.
At the end of the evening, the town’s mayor closed the event out by saying that he was on the town planning board when the two votes were taken to send the data center project to the city council for consideration. He said he voted for it, and “I own that.” But now that he’s mayor, and having seen the degree of opposition, he’s rethinking things. He looked kind of like he had been hit upside the head with an iron skillet.
My friend and I left admitting that we had been uplifted by seeing democracy in action in that church. That said, is this anti-data center movement the right thing? Mostly the right thing? Honestly, I don’t know. My heart lies with that crowd, but again, I keep thinking about how the decisions America made after Three Mile Island turned out to be wrong, and harmful, in terms of ensuring clean power generation (nobody was talking about global warming in the early 1980s).
At the same time, I entirely sympathize with the crowd’s fear and anger over how all this AI technology seems to be imposed on us without explanation or consent, but just with promises that it’s going to make our lives better in every way, and in any case, it’s inevitable.
Lack of trust and fear of AI (and the arrogance of Silicon Valley). That, I believe, is why so many people hate data centers. If we focus on opposition to data centers themselves, without addressing these deeper issues, we’re not going to get anywhere. On the drive back to Birmingham, my friend and I were talking about the sudden ubiquity of Flock cameras — those devices mounted on poles everywhere that photograph people’s license plates. Police say they are present to enhance public safety, to make it easier to find stolen cars, track down criminal suspects, and so forth. But all those data are being captured and stored somewhere, and shared among law enforcement. It’s a way of tracking the movements of everybody. Who approved these things? What are authorities doing with these data? What might they do?
You are right to ask. Once again, here’s Silicon Valley journalist Jasmine Sun:
So often I’m in San Francisco talking to folks I know in the AI industry, and they’ll say things, and in my head I’m just like, do you guys hear yourself? If any normal person walked into this conversation, they would flip out.
One of those examples — I think this came up in the Ezra interview, and it’s come up in your work — is that question of, why would you build something if you think there’s a 10 or 20 percent chance the thing you build kills us all? And I will hear people straight up say, yeah, that’s true, but I think it’s somewhat more likely, maybe there’s a 50 percent chance, that we all live forever and all the diseases are cured. So the expected value of 50 percent we live forever outweighs the 20 percent we all die, and I’m willing to take that chance and roll the dice a few times.
And I’m just like, man, I don’t actually think that most people in this country or in the world would take that bet. But more than that, those folks don’t really have a choice about whether they take that bet, because Silicon Valley is taking the bet and then imposing the costs and risks on other folks.
That was what I really heard with the data center stuff. There’s this sense that maybe people don’t know if AI is a bubble or not. They don’t know if it’s useful to them or not. They’re willing to cop to, yeah, it might have some benefits, it might help the economy in certain ways. But fundamentally there’s often this question of, why is Mark Zuckerberg not putting the data center in his backyard? Why are they putting it in Janesville’s backyard or Mount Pleasant’s backyard? Why are the costs and the risks being externalized while Silicon Valley reaps the benefits up front? I think that was very frustrating to a lot of the people I talked to.
That was 100 percent what I heard in that room in Westover, Alabama, last night.
In that interview with Jasmine Sun, Nate Silver points out astutely that you don’t have to think people are making sense by doing a particular thing (e.g., voting for Donald Trump, opposing data centers) to recognize that the underlying issues motivating their action is valid, and important. Silver says you can tell people that voting for Trump doesn’t make sense, but if you step back and think about people voting for Trump because it was one thing they could do to register their anger and disgust with the Establishment, well, then it exists in a different light.
About Trump, you all know how frustrated I am with him right now. But consider this: the transgender, progressive former politician who leads the University of Ghent has suspended scholar Nathan Cofnas for blowing the whistle on Jason Arday’s monstrous academic fraud. Cofnas, you’ll recall, now thinks he will be fired. (And note well, Cofnas points out that the Ghent University president had to apologize for plagiarizing parts of “her” inaugural speech as university leader!) The woke establishment in Belgium is responding to the outrageous DEI fraud that led to the incompetent Arday’s meteoric rise by seeking to severely punish the man who exposed this fraud! Do you doubt that the reaction would be similar within American academia? I do not.
So, ordinary people see things like that happen, and even if they don’t care about academia, they recognize this incredible injustice, and what power elites in charge of top academic institutions do with their power, and they may decide that they’re going to fight back any way that they can: voting for Donald Trump. Or Nigel Farage, Or anybody that these arrogant, corrupt elites hate. You can call it irrational, and maybe it is, in an obvious sense. But maybe, more deeply, it makes a lot of sense.
I think it is possible that the people of Westover who oppose the data center could be standing against an industrial facility that will bring a lot of wealth to the town, without polluting it. That they are in the grips of a kind of moral panic. Not saying that they are, just saying it’s possible. At the same time, I think it is also possible, and even more than possible, that their lack of trust in politicians and corporations, fear of AI, and anger at how all this radically life-changing technology is being forced on us without consent or consultation, is entirely valid, and they’re expressing their valid anxiety in the only tangible ways available to them.
Whether they’re right, they’re wrong, or somewhere in the middle, it felt good to be there in the crowd of a big group of ordinary Americans who cared enough about what is happening in their town to get off the couch and show up to raise hell — or rather, raise heck. This is the South, after all, and folks are polite; only in the small-town South will people who are furious at the city council encourage all their fellow protesters to hold the council in their daily prayers, and mean it. It really was a Norman Rockwell moment. You don’t get too many of those these days.
I titled this post “Alabama’s Local Heroes” as a nod to the lovely little 1983 film “Local Hero,” about a Houston oil executive who travels to rural Scotland with the intention of buying up an entire town for a massive refinery complex, and falls in love with its charm. Can’t say that Shelby County, Alabama, has quite the same appeal, but the people who live there love it as it is. One local man last night, Richie, who said his children are the fifth generation of his family to live there, described how he has lived his entire life fishing in the county’s waters. He said, “Muddy Prong is my oldest friend.” Whatever else Richie was up to last night, he was defending his own against the overwhelming forces of a Progress he neither understands nor wants.
Rod, I think you have identified the real issue: this is not simply a revolt against data centers. It is a revolt against being told that another immense change has already been decided for us by corporations, experts, and public officials—and that ordinary people should accept the risks and be grateful for the benefits.
But we are caught in a pincer movement. The people of Westover can say no to a data center, but can America say no to AI when China is saying yes? The Wall Street Journal now reports that China has nearly caught up with us, led in part by brilliant scientists trained at leading American universities. If we stop, China will not. Yet if we race ahead without limits, consent, or even a clear understanding of where this leads, we may preserve our technological supremacy while losing the civilization we meant to protect.
Information is now multiplying faster than any human mind or institution can absorb it. That leaves us somewhere between Orwell and Huxley, with Stanley Kubrick’s HAL waiting in the wings: universal surveillance on one side, effortless distraction and dependence on the other, and finally a machine deciding that it knows better than the human beings who created it. Paul Kingsnorth has been warning about this larger Machine for years—not merely machinery, but a system that steadily replaces nature, tradition, community, and finally God Himself.
When Silicon Valley men calmly speak of risking human extinction for the possibility of conquering disease and death, they are no longer merely building better machines. They are reaching for the place of God. And yet Rod has also pointed out that AI may be an exemplary tool for research, including research that could help fight disease. That promise is real. We should also ask what AI may do to schoolchildren: whether it will deepen their understanding and expand their opportunities, or weaken their judgment, discipline, imagination, and ability to think for themselves. The same tool that may help scientists discover cures could also train a generation to surrender its minds to machines.
Yesterday you wrote about companies buying old books, scanning them to feed AI, and then destroying the physical copies. That shows us another side of the danger. The Machine may not only control our future; it may eventually control our access to the past. Once the original books and records disappear, future generations will be left with whatever digital version survives—and whatever interpretation the cultural gatekeepers allow. History can then be silently altered, canceled, or simply forgotten, with no original left against which to check it.
So I stand with the people of Westover in demanding answers, even if America cannot simply withdraw from the AI race. Who decides? Who benefits? Who bears the risks? Who controls the memory of our civilization? What will AI do to our children? And what part of human life are we unwilling to sacrifice merely because China might get there first?
One of the other core concerns, and one I don't think it's often well expressed, is that the data centers are visible signs of our increasing serfdom to technology. Every data center represents some innumerable quantity of additional monthly subscriptions, fees, and rents we'll all eventually be forced to pay for everything, all while the tech companies buy and sell our entire histories willy-nilly.
Horrors like electronic price tags that change if they think you'll pay more (and instantly know who you are by your profile provided by an aggregation of everything from Flock photos to your social media to your clothing, and know it's you by your phone's always-on signals, which are also tracked worldwide) are only possible because of these giant interconnected data warehouses.
It's not just the gross abuses by law enforcement, it's the wearing barrage of endless rent-seeking by all the licit corporations who see all of us as something to monetize. Data centers everywhere make it easier to ensure we never own anything anymore.
Just in my running a small business, much of the software I need (and for which there are few viable alternatives) is all "cloud" crap anymore. I can't even have a copy of my own core ACCOUNTING data local to my own damned servers anymore because every damned small-business accounting software company out there will only rent the software to me, and will only "let" me store the data on their f**king servers. This is confidential and sensitive info, and I'm not even allowed to own it anymore, but rent it out to some bastards who could be hacked or go out of business themselves.