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I was asking a question rather than making a pitch.

I just play dumb and keep hitting 0.

The Press: "Hideously corrupt and nazi morons have been granted total impunity to ruin your life. They want to do it a lot, but need more [thing]. If you press this button they will have less [thing], and it will make them sad." [several months later] "Wow, the public really loves this button!"

It’s one thing it seems you can actually do something about and change in <<waves hands around>> all this.

Data centers destroy people. Data centers destroy communities. Data centers obliterate the environment that sustains life.

My anti-AI propagandizing is working 😁

People don't like it when electricity and computer parts cost more.

The water out of the faucet started turning brown.

Look at the replies to this thread. A bunch of half-remembered amalgams of stories that didn’t hold up under the lightest scrutiny. Water turning brown? Ended up being someone’s private well failing. Water usage? The usage is almost negligible.

👆👆👆

Nature is healing

And energy bills. And all those viral sm posts from people who live near data centers. There is no pr thst could make them popular.

Yep. Same. I saw folks fighting the anderson county water drilling and they were opposing it on a water usage basis. To me, AI water usage spread to those groups and then spread like wildfire.

9 months ago people werent really aware how loud and obnoxious they are and that their city councils were gleefully willing to put them anywhere

Well they’re not just in Virginia anymore so yeah!

workplace mandates made them actually have to use the products, combined with the general time it takes a narrative to build imo

Sure, but we can't escape fault here either. This is on us as a people for being lazy and refusing to understand new concepts and ideas. We could have done something about it. Still can. But we don't. That's on us, not the greedy guys who acted greedy. We knew that would happen (or should have)

the sheer scale of money being dumped into this amorphous promise of future success (for a select few!) while public infrastructure crumbles

That's my take too, people are finally thoroughly fed up with how they imposed their worse vision of the internet on us but we were powerless to stop it, and i think that same hubris carried over to "we will triple your homes power bill and destroy you with ambient noise" but we can stop that

"We updated your phone overnight. No, we didn't ask. No, you can't go back to the old version. Documentation is boring so there's no guidance on how to do any of the stuff you used to do. Have fun explaining to your mom why her phone is different now!"

Can't forget a thing you never bothered to learn

We really don’t understand your opposition to our new LLM, which we call ‘The Suicide Whisperer’

"sorry we just sell endless products that unconsensually nudify people and melt people's brains with unhinged racism, nope, can't do anything about that. And our leaders openly call for resegregation and abolishing the 19th amendment, yeah. Definitely no connection there." I hope they all die poor.

It's not just the tech industry, it really feels like rich people think they won and it's masks off. They stopped pretending they need to put real effort into the lies they tell normal people. See also: everything from Samsung discontinuing their SMS app to FIFA changing their water bottle policy.

The capitalists forgot one whole point of a smoothly-running regulatory state is to get consumers to trust you, spent so much on destroying it, and are now shocked, shocked people don't trust them and are trying any means still available to stop them themselves.

It coupled with a time of rising energy costs, and your usual Zoning stuff and a whole lot of people wanting someone to yell at pulls it all together.

ai facebook slop against ai datacenters p effective. better invest in it

> they forgot how to sell light industry I think part of the appeal for them is forcing AI data centers on unwilling communities. It inflates their genius self image to think the foolish commoners don't understand what's good for them

It's Glonzoism to a degree, but it's the ones trying to sell it who invented this Glonzo. "This thing is going to take your job! It's the only thing that matters anymore!"

One factor I wonder about is how much "there's an AI bubble" has permeated society. If someone thinks there's a bubble, I can easily see how 'should we build an AI data center' sounds kind of like 'should we build a new mall in 2026'

I think it's largely plain old NIMBYism. Most people wouldn't care because it's not their problem. But since May 2025 data centres have been announced for literally everyone's backyard. Hence, massive public backlash.

I think that people experiencing winter heating bills made a huge difference. Maryland is an outlier, but our electricity costs increased *89%* (www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-where...). With how cold it was, my bill was double what it was last year. Data centers are an easy scapegoat

That video of the couple who now live with nonstop loud droning noises really showed how obtrusive they are.

Lotta vibe based theories but from a material perspective I would pair this with Ed Zitron’s reporting and propose a significant lag time between the data center announcement boom and mass experience of living near data centers

Probably all those reports about the groundwater being poisoned at locations that already had them.

A lot of them have come online (at least partially) since then and more people are experiencing the malign effects. Plus there's a lot more awareness of what the tech oligarchs are doing/funding/corrupting/bribing. Tying these threats together is going to be essential.

Could be opposition to AI in general, could be people get the scraps of info - power-sucking water-polluting potentially gigantic industrial zone - and don't like it, could be they don't want a possible future T-800 factory in their county. But yeah, the mood is swinging hard now.

Anti data center sentiment can also be YIMBY if the argument is "that land could be used for houses instead of lies"

and the fact that no one can explain WHY we need it... My normie wife has never asked for someone to read, summarize and reply to email or any of the other things the tech bros believe people want. She hates this shit. All of it. As does my son.

"please subsidize the turbocapitalist disenfranchisement engine"

Not on our planet is not the same as "Not in my Backyard."

I dont think you know what NIMBY means.

and they totally ignored how rural politics works in that environment. wayyy overstepped

No

Way, way more AI slop all around. Ironically, the AI slop explosion is happening at the same time that AI has begun to break mathematics research.

I think water/energy factors in. More than half of the country is in serious drought and energy costs keep climbing, so it doesn't take much coverage for people to land on: it's taking our jobs, our water, and our energy? Hell no.

I think people really underestimate the downstream effects of No Kings and Indivisible. We had over 600 people show up to the data center meeting in my smallish town. There is no way that would have happened if the local Indivisible hadn't communicated about the event

Last year I thought it might have some uses. This year I don’t think any are worth the cost.

Electric bills have been rising and data centers are blamed for it, is my guess. Also there has been a lot of social media showing how noisy they are and the damage they do to local waterways

I think it's mostly exposure to the issue. In 2025 this was a niche topic comfined to the business section. Now it's everywhere and all the "don't know/don't cares" sorted themselves into the "no" column.

my power bill doubled and I got daily asthma attacks as soon as a data center entered operation next to me 3 years ago lmao they fucking suck fam

i think people were more scared a year ago

Yeah. The tariffs were still being negotiated and hadn't hit people as hard, the US wasn't at war with Iran and there were a year's fewer AI scandals and fewer active data centers.

Good. “AI” is ruining the planet and our brains.

If you'd like to do something small, sign this petition to help the Nashville Zoo fight a data center proposal.

Let's keep NIMBY as a pejorative for people opposed to housing near their housing.

Even that doesn't always work. Theres a structural water usage problem and the biggest, most stable source of that in the US is the Great Lakes. Microsoft pushed a center through in Wisconsin before finding out that the Great Lakes Compact can outright tell a city how much water it gets.

The avg person doesn’t use AI for anything worthwhile. It clogs up FB, they’re buying up farm land. Conspiracy kooks have a field day with it. Liberals hate the tech leaders. Easily sell job loss. And the dagger “your power bill will go up”. Like where does AI even get a footing here

hating AI is inherently misogynistic, said the jester

Wait but it helps the president make videos of himself unloading plane loads of poop on the American people, just like we always asked for

Well in AI's defense(!), the only ways it can really juice the top line revenue in the near term is to do all that bad stuff you mentioned. Helping society won't add more billions to the broligarchs' net worth and they have needs.

This is what happens when people see a major disruptive change with no government oversight.

Well yeah-and when you figure out how to do that make sure you let us all know

People hate generative ai and surveillance, is the reason I'm hearing from people!

I saw Kevin O’Leary who’s clearly plowed a lot of money into a data center project that’s on the verge of being scuttled absolutely crashing out on TV earlier today. Delicious!

And sadly, even that is not enough to stop the large tech companies and their bought politicians from continuing to operate and build out more data centers with no accountability to the local residents or care for the environment.

They are 'Control Centers' collecting information to control us.

Are they against AI, or just data centers "near them"?

Monterey Park voted to ban them - it's a small city east of L.A., with a lot of businesses.

Really seems like a straightforward side effect of the "this is a world-ending technology" gambit. Like, the gambit has worked to frame the conversation, create FOMO, and create an assumption that AI is unprecedentedly powerful tech. But it has also worked to do those things (derogatory)!

Perhaps it is analogous to nuclear power plants. When no one wanted the them or the spent fuel in their state or county it became problematic to build the power plants. And they stopped being built.