{"id":739,"date":"2026-08-31T09:37:14","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T09:37:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/frontierhousingreport.com\/?p=739"},"modified":"2026-08-31T09:37:14","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T09:37:14","slug":"big-tech-crashes-headlong-into-american-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/frontierhousingreport.com\/?p=739","title":{"rendered":"Big Tech Crashes Headlong Into American Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The data, as it were, are in: The American people really, really, really<\/em> hate data centers. A poll conducted by Heatmap News finds that over the course of a year, opinion has gone from 43 percent net support and 42 percent net opposition to 75 percent<\/em> net opposition and 15 percent net support\u2014a swing of 61 points. Fully 61 percent of Americans now say they strongly<\/em> oppose the facilities. Dozens of them have been canceled.<\/p>\n

Read more Vets for AI<\/a><\/p>\n

In every demographic you can think of\u2014urban or rural, young or old, even Democrat or Republican\u2014huge majorities of respondents register disapproval. Brothers, sisters, come together!<\/p>\n

More from Ryan Cooper<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

This has Republican politicians scrambling to memory-hole their very recent history of being fanatically pro-AI and pro\u2013data center. And one piece of legislation in particular is going to haunt nearly all of them in Congress.<\/p>\n

Just last year, almost every House Republican voted for an initial version of President Trump\u2019s Big Beautiful Bill that would have banned any state or local regulation of AI models, or the physical infrastructure on which they run\u2014that is, data centers\u2014for a full decade. (Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Warren Davidson of Ohio, Andy Harris of Maryland, Andrew Garbarino of New York, and David Schweikert of Arizona were the only Republicans not to vote for it; Massie has since been defeated by a Trumper primary challenger, and Schweikert got drilled in the Arizona gubernatorial primary by MAGA stalwart Andy Biggs.<\/p>\n

The provision eventually got killed in the Senate 99-1, but the near-unanimous GOP vote in the House is a symbol for how fast the politics of data centers has shifted. And Democrats are unlikely to let voters forget where House Republicans once stood.<\/p>\n

As my colleague David Dayen recently covered, in Michigan\u2019s Seventh District GOP Rep. Tom Barrett is desperately trying to pose as a data center critic. The same is true in Pennsylvania\u2019s Eighth District, where Scranton\u2019s Democratic mayor Paige Cognetti is challenging Republican Rob Bresnahan, and has made data centers the, well, center of her campaign.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration has apparently still not gotten the memo; the EPA recently proposed making it easier for data centers to emit air pollution.<\/p>\n

IN SOME WAYS, THE ANTI\u2013DATA CENTER FRENZY<\/strong> is a bit confusing. The truth is data centers\u2014or server farms, as we used to call them\u2014typically have fairly minor local impacts by industrial standards. Compared to, say, a copper mine, a steel foundry, a coal-fired power plant, or an industrial hog farm, they produce little pollution, and don\u2019t use up much water or other natural resources. (Elon Musk, with his slapdash Grok facility powered until recently by thunderous filth-spewing portable gas turbines, is a notable exception, as usual.)<\/p>\n

Data centers don\u2019t provide many permanent jobs, and they use a lot<\/em> of electricity, but one can compensate for these problems. Simply use their tax payments to fund a job training program (or some other side benefit) and require the data center, rather than ratepayers, to front the cost of generation and grid upgrades. Indeed, done right, a major continuous load on the grid can make retail electricity prices go down<\/em>, by spreading the cost of distribution over more kilowatt-hours of consumption.<\/p>\n

In short, this is the kind of project that ordinarily would go through without too much fuss. In other contexts, businesses like Walmart have a worked-out formula to quiet community resistance. You hire a PR firm to polish the company\u2019s image; promise outlandish economic benefits; write some checks to the local library, concert series, or cheerleading squad; hire the children of the local gentry as managers; and you\u2019re probably all set. With a little practice, you can even get communities to compete with each other to offer the largest tax break.<\/p>\n

Outside of a few special cases, Big Tech has not done any of this, for data centers or anything else. Silicon Valley\u2019s motto is \u201cmove fast and break things,\u201d very much including local laws and regulations. When cities tried to stop Uber from running an illegal taxi service, for instance, the company set up a tool to detect local government accounts and serve them fake rides.<\/p>\n

Read more The Battle Over Mail-In Ballots<\/a><\/p>\n

The \u201cwishes of the community\u201d are just another thing to be trampled underfoot by the tech billionaire class in pursuit of some imagined glorious sci-fi utopia. And many data center deals have been accompanied by forced nondisclosure agreements with local officials, which immediately arouse suspicion.<\/p>\n

Still, the fact that not very long ago states like Georgia and Virginia were<\/em> giving data centers Walmart-style tax breaks tends to suggest something has changed. That something is obviously AI, plus, I suspect, the shine coming off Big Tech\u2019s reputation in general.<\/p>\n

The AI rollout has been the ne plus ultra<\/em> of Silicon Valley arrogance. A handful of billionaires\u2014whose steadily more incomprehensible podcast appearances indicate participation in some truly unhinged group chats, or consumption of heavy-duty chemicals, or membership in literal, no-joke cults, or all three\u2014declaimed that AI was going to revolutionize all human society, take everyone\u2019s job, and\/or maybe wipe out the human race. Therefore they needed to spend trillions and trillions of dollars building AI data centers everywhere, as fast as possible. When the tech barons blearily realized that this wasn\u2019t the best sales pitch, and pivoted to ads about how AI had dull business applications, the damage was already done.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, it turns out that while AI technology might not be at the HAL 9000 level yet, the various models are unsettlingly capable and potentially dangerous. Some models seem to touch off psychotic episodes in some people. A \u201cswarm\u201d of hundreds of OpenAI agents recently went rogue and hacked the Hugging Face site used by open-source AI development, causing severe damage. The potential AI use for mass surveillance is particularly troubling.<\/p>\n

In short, AI is manifestly a technology in need of democratic deliberation and regulation, and the Big Tech billionaires manifestly are not going to listen to anyone but themselves, unless we force them. Take the simmering unease about AI risk, add in irritation at 20 years of Silicon Valley megalomania, as well as the increasing popular backlash against tech companies\u2014Meta recently settled an enormous lawsuit about harming children for almost $17 billion\u2014and you get a good old-fashioned NIMBY frenzy against the one Big Tech thing Americans can obstruct: data centers. And this time, Big Tech has no one to blame but themselves.<\/p>\n

Republicans, of course, have never met a corporate handout they didn\u2019t like, except for green energy and technology. A year ago, it made sense from their perspective. Most of the Big Tech billionaires have become full-blown MAGA chuds and provided great help to Donald Trump in 2024. Mark Zuckerberg is doing MMA and talking about how wokeness is bad on Joe Rogan. Jeff Bezos personally stopped The Washington Post<\/em> from endorsing Kamala Harris and subsequently turned the paper into a crummy right-wing tabloid. And Elon Musk, the biggest political donor arguably in human history, is a Nazi salute\u2013throwing fascist.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s not to like? A lot, it seems. It turns out that selling America wholesale to the worst people in the country can be unpopular!<\/p>\n

I should stress that ideally data centers should be harnessed and regulated, not banned entirely. Half the internet runs on these structures now, and NIMBY efforts are much more effective in rich locations than poor ones. If that is the end of our demands, data centers will get built in poor, minority regions in America, or in poorer countries, where they will have little or no regulatory controls. It\u2019s already happening with Meta\u2019s huge campus in Louisiana.<\/p>\n

AI models themselves ought to have more specific regulations, not least because they were trained on the collective written output of the entire human race. But that\u2019s a subject for another article.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, let\u2019s not anyone forget what the Republican Party is about. A year ago, they were fully behind prohibiting anyone from doing anything about Big Tech putting up any data center they wanted, anywhere in the country. It took the biggest popular backlash in decades to get them to pretend to change course. If popular anger fades, it\u2019s a safe bet that the GOP will be right back to its Big Tech\u2013supplicating ways inside of seconds.<\/p>\n

Read more Gary, Indiana, Is America\u2019s Latest Climate Victim<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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The AI oligarchs thought they could stuff data centers down the throats of the American people. 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