At some point this week, a group text seemed to go out across Silicon Valley suggesting that the industry has a major messaging problem. Across the country, city council meetings that otherwise go unattended are suddenly full of rowdy, engaged citizens ready to voice their concerns and frustrations over the encroaching creep of Big Tech in the form of data centers and surveillance systems like Flock Safety’s license plate readers.
The backlash to data centers seems to have reached its fever pitch this week when Liquid Death ran an advertisement with former NFL player and current podcaster Jason Kelce encouraging people to send their piss to data centers. You know you’ve lost the messaging war when a national brand and their celebrity endorser view pissing on you as a safe marketing bet.
Behind the scenes, the panic is setting in. On Wednesday, Axios reported the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent an urgent memo to AI companies warning that they’re getting killed in Ohio on data centers, basically urging the firms to come up with a way to sell these things. Donald Trump, who has refused to back away from data centers, said this week that data centers “could use a little public relations help.”
To address the issue, OpenAI has put up job listings for community engagement leads in Ohio and Georgia tasked with trying to “reduce risk of opposition” to data centers. Meta similarly has put up a job listing for a community engagement manager to build relationships with “key stakeholders in the data center community,” per Bloomberg. But doing that suggests that these companies simply do not understand what they’re up against.
Earlier this month, the same cycle hit Flock and its automated license plate readers that litter communities across the country. After a slew of instances of community members destroying the company’s all-seeing eyes, Flock finally set out to address the issue by sending its CEO out on a press tour. It culminated in the company announcing several policy changes, like reducing its default data retention period and changing the way information is shared across police departments following countless reports of cops abusing the surveillance system to track exes and loved ones.
What’s instructive in these approaches is that the answer offered by Big Tech and its backers is not to back off but rather to find a better sales pitch. The idea is that these poor, uninformed citizens have had their heads clouded with misinformation (maybe from China), and if we just set the record straight, public opinion will turn around.
President Trump, in trying to help right the ship, told media members this week, “If I were a governor or a mayor, I would want that [data center] in my community,” because “the jobs are enormous, and the money paid, the taxes paid, are just enormous.”
But that classic pitch hasn’t resonated with voters—perhaps because they’ve heard it before. Wisconsin, which has become a central hub of the anti-data center sentiment, already got burned by a Big Tech overture back when Foxconn promised its planned LCD screen plant would employ 13,000 workers. To move things forward, the state initially signed off on offering up to $3 billion in tax credits to the company. But things quickly fell apart, and to date, the project has netted about 1,100 jobs—many of which aren’t the manufacturing work the company said it’d bring to the state. Other communities have had similar experiences.
Their skepticism is well-founded, not just by experience, but by reality. The construction of a data center might create a manufacturing boom, bringing in hundreds or thousands of people to stand up the facility. But once up and running, these facilities typically employ fewer than 100 people.
Of course, reality doesn’t always matter in these cases. It’s more about how people feel. The Argument staff writer Jeremiah Johnson recently bemoaned the fact that a new poll showed people are about twice as likely to approve of coal plants being built nearby as opposed to data centers. “Coal plants use more water and pollute more. They create comparable noise pollution. There’s no way this makes sense outside a media panic.”
Washington Post opinion writer Dominic Pino similarly complained, “Data centers are the cleanest, least invasive large-scale industrial buildout of physical stuff that we’ve seen, and people still oppose it. Good thing to remember when people whine about how ‘we don’t build physical stuff in America anymore.'”
The idea seems to be that the opposition to data centers is irrational. And maybe, to some degree, it is. The issue of water consumption is a prime example. By most accounts, the worst-case figures that have circulated about just how much water a data center uses are overblown—which is not to say there aren’t still real concerns. But you can correct those figures in a vacuum and still lose people when it comes time to draw water from their local lake. They don’t care that it’s less than they thought; they don’t want it taken in the first place.
A major part of the reason these efforts to correct the record don’t resonate is that there is a severe lack of trust felt by many of these communities—a trust often violated not only by the tech companies that want to move into their town, but by the elected officials who are supposed to represent the community.
As the data center buildout started in earnest a few years ago, the companies developing the projects started using a tactic of making city council members sign non-disclosure agreements, effectively preventing those representatives from sharing information with their constituents and creating a sense of secrecy around these projects.
That is a violation of the public trust, and that’s exactly how it’s being received. Local politicians tend to have a better reputation among their voters than members of Congress or the Senate because they are usually visible members of the community. So it is seen as a betrayal when those people vote behind closed doors to approve a project without a public hearing. It has led to a growing number of efforts across the country to recall officials who go along with the desires of the tech oligarchs.
When a data center gets approved, or Flock cameras go up despite public pushback, it gives people the sense that their representatives are on the take. Sometimes they are. But much like the data center water issue, the truth doesn’t matter nearly as much as what people perceive to be the truth. It’s Stephen Colbert’s old concept of “truthiness”: some things just feel true. And when people see their local politicians doing everything they can to push through plans when the democratic process dictates that they shouldn’t, the feelings become raw.
The reality is that the AI industry and pro-data center politicians are not going to turn that around with slicker talking points. Companies have tried sending representatives to communities to talk them through the “facts” and assuage any concerns. They’ve been greeted with heckles, boos, and guillotines. They have fed city councilmembers talking points only for those councilmembers to get voted out of office.
It’s not messaging that the tech industry is losing on so much as it is vibes. There’s no turning that ship around with a messaging blitz, because what people object to runs deeper. Something about the technologies they are being exposed to, that are invading their space and their privacy, feels off to them. They’ve heard the messages and seen the outcomes. You want to tell them they’re wrong?
