🆕 Never Post! How Do You Stop A Datacenter In Your Town?

Mike chats with Maia Woluchem and Cella Sum – co-authors of The AI Factory: Data Centers, Power, and Resistance in Late Industrial Pennsylvania – about the fight against Data Centers happening across Pennsylvania–

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• ICE agents could be targeted by fake "tradwife" dating profiles
• Discord Launches Delayed Age Verification Measures
• OpenAI agent hacked Australian govt website
• Railroad work crews cut fiber optic cable, grounding flights across NYC
• Trump fires FAA air traffic control employees post-DC plane crash
• Did Trump’s FAA slash the staffing target for air traffic control?
• Bill would require blocking piracy sites
• Republican bill would order ISPs, DNS providers, and VPNs to block piracy sites
• Church groups ask Microsoft for 1% of data center costs
• Pennsylvania town pushes back on data center despite $10k payout
  
  

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  The AI Factory: Data Centers, Power, and Resistance in Late Industrial Pennsylvania
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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our contributing producer is Kurt White. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

These newfangled ghosts haunt by telephone and airwave. Acumen will finally languish in a good sense: type would bottle a new motto in live numbers and wine were they only not printers with so many thoughts to slip in media res or the thick of things at grasp root level up a slope on themselves. Our notion of productive labor becomes narrowed to the use of censure and science to ensure I am baffled as Yeats by those voices that still speak to Oddysseus but as the bats.Excerpt of Shadow Recension by Alan HalseyNever Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and distributed by Radiotopia.

Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta, and this intro was written on Tuesday, 09/29/2026 at 10:11AM eastern, and we have an industrious show for you this week. In this episode, I chat with Maya Waluchem and Sela Soom, two coauthors of the AI Factory, Datacenter's Power, and Resistance in Late Industrial Pennsylvania, a report published at the end of last month by Data and Society. We discuss Pennsylvania as a growing focus of the data center construction boom, how its environment and history make it a prime target, but also uniquely positioned to fight back against tech, against government, against prevailing narratives about the inevitability of certain flavors of tech progress. But first, we're gonna take a quick break.

You're gonna listen to some ads unless you're on the member feed. And when we return, we're gonna talk about a few of the things that have happened since the last time you heard from us. Raw. I'm a give it to you. No trivia.

Raw like that Aesop Rock iron fisted bliss militia. A bent funny bone drone community. Spit a thousand and six stories this week. ICE, The US domestic paramilitary force responsible according to its own reporting for at least forty six deaths in custody or detention since January 2025 needs to be careful. The FBI reports that groups of Internet women are scheming to lure agents with trad wife content, befriend, and then dox them.

The Guardian, broke this story, reviewed the FBI's report and they say it's light on the details. Who are these women? What are their aims? And how were they uncovered? Ladies, if you're out there, get in touch.

Discord is once again having a go at age verification. The San Francisco based company attempted earlier this year to roll out a version of this feature. Every account would be set to teen unless the holder provided age verification via, quote, facial age estimation. Users could upload a video selfie or photo of photo identification. Users, of course, balked, especially in the wake of an October 2025 data breach during which 70 some odd thousand users, quote, may have had government ID photos exposed, which our vendor used to review age related appeals, end quote.

This most recent go around, which began rollout on September 23, will accept many forms of age verification, but most notably will use cryptically named set of quote account signals to automatically determine the age group of some accounts. The rollout, many users noted, also coincides with in app ads for age restricted services such as online gambling site FanDuel. About this, Discord claims they are taking a deliberate user first approach to evolving our ads business to add genuine value that connects naturally with our users' sports, gaming, and entertainment interests. A fart noise. Oops.

An OpenAI agent did it again. At the end of September, the Australian government revealed that earlier in June, an OpenAI agent was able to gain access to a government health data portal while it was meant to be researching public medical spending. Australian PM Anthony Albanese said OpenAI was the one to notify the government and did not do so until September 10. OpenAI has claimed its review found no evidence of patient records being accessed. This is the first known case of an agent accessing private government data.

I'm sorry. Air traffic was grounded in and around New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia on Monday afternoon after New Jersey transit construction workers accidentally severed a fiber optic cable connecting air traffic control around the region. Twice last year, traffic was halted or delayed because of communications issues with old copper based wires connecting control towers. In May of this year, the Trump administration pledged billions of dollars to modernize the country's air traffic control system. In February of this year, the admin laid off several 100 air traffic controllers amidst what PBS then described as a shortfall in controllers.

The admin has also lowered its FAA hiring target for the year by 2,000 people. Your ISP may be required to block, quote, piracy sites if a bill proposed by US rep Daryl Isa becomes law. The bill targets US based ISPs, DNS providers, and VPN services with a 100,000 or more monthly users in The US. Copyright holders could ask courts to issue blocking orders against quote, foreign piracy sites after which ISPs at all would have to remove access. The text of the bill describes such sites as primarily designed or provided for the purpose of providing access to material that violates an exclusive right or protection afforded under this title, having only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than providing access to material that violates an exclusive right or protection afforded under this title, or marketed by or at the direction of the operator of the accused online service to promote the use of the foreign online service in committing violation of an exclusive right or protection afforded under this title.

Opponents say the proposed law, the text of which has only recently become available, is overbroad and as with much recent proposed Internet regulation is ripe for abuse and would serve to harm really only the already vulnerable. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, Public Knowledge, and others signed a letter to ISA which reads in part, small businesses and nonprofits face the greatest risks and have the fewest protections. In Italy, overblocking has brought down digital infrastructure for hotels, car mechanics, retail shops, telehealth programs, and even a nunnery. The ones bearing the cost of overblocking are the ones least poised to bear it and the ones who have no remedy for the days or weeks or more of lost business that results from an overzealous blocking order. America's small businesses cannot afford to be treated as acceptable collateral damage for multibillion dollar entertainment and sports industries.

Ars Technica reports that the Motion Picture Association has been pushing the US government to implement such a blocking regime. ISA retires from congress this year. Moron. Microsoft has ghosted a church group in Indiana after they asked the tech giant what percent of a new data center's yearly operating costs would be fair as a donation back to the community where it would be built. Ars Technica reports we make Indiana was originally planning to ask Microsoft for one to 2% of the yearly operating budget of a new $1,000,000,000 data center to be built in South Bend, Indiana, But they decided instead to ask the company for its proposal.

How much money does Microsoft think should go back to the town? Despite Microsoft's promises to support the community, they have provided no guarantees and representatives have been unable to answer even basic questions about the environmental impact of the construction or ongoing operation of the data center. Meanwhile, in Hazel Township, Pennsylvania, North Point development sent letters to 10,460 households promising a $10,000 check if a new data center development project is approved. Regardless, most residents remain against, citing according to the New York Post concerns over pollution and job loss due to AI generally. Town officials described the check scheme as a, quote, cutting edge strategy in the process of getting resident buy in.

But locals are unswayed, one telling the Post, quote, we don't need that around here. One gets the sense in both scenarios like countless others that tech giants are frustrated by the demands or perhaps even the mere existence of people. People who live and go to work and school and have families nearby the proposed sites of gargantuan facilities wherein they'll facilitate health care coverage denials, ICE immigration enforcement, and that new meta agent that apparently tells strangers your home address. How dare the folks in the shadows amongst the din of breathing in the particulate filled air spewed by these facilities wonder what's in this for me? The negotiation is of course always unbalanced.

Tech companies, their construction partners, hyperscalers, they have all the money and the ear of local government as well as media and even some unions. Fighting back or fighting for something, some return is no easy task. After the break, I'm gonna talk with Maya Waluchem and Selah m Soom, authors of the recent data and society report, The AI Factory, Data Centers, Power, and Resistance in Late Industrial Pennsylvania about the ongoing data center construction boom in Pennsylvania and how Pennsylvania's history as a home to industry makes it a uniquely suited site for both data center development and data center resistance. Joining me are Maya Waluchem, the director of the Trustworthy Infrastructures Program at Data and Society, and adjunct faculty at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering. Her work as a researcher and technologist focuses on how communities reassert power over the technology foisted upon them.

Maia, thanks for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

And Cella M Sum, who is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Virginia's Digital Technology for Democracy Lab. Sela is a member of Collective Action in Tech, a research and organizing project aimed at tech workers and a former tech worker organizer herself with Big Cartel Workers Union. Sela's research focuses on technology, power, and resistance in labor and community contexts. Sella, thanks for being here.

Thank you. Happy to be here.

So both of you are coauthors of the recently published report from Data and Society, The AI Factory, Data Centers, Power and Resistance in Late Industrial Pennsylvania. The report looks closely at a number of communities in Pennsylvania where people are figuring out how to build, support, and sustain local resistance to, data center construction projects, mostly through grassroots means. And before we get into all of, the conclusions that you come to in the report, which are just just great, and I cannot recommend highly enough that anybody listening to this go and read it. To start us off, was just wondering if you could just, like, take us through the numbers as far as the research that went into this report. Like, How long did you spend on it?

How many train rides? How many interviews? How many diners? What was the process like?

Oh, that's such a great question. I I will say it was a real labor of love. A laborious one, but a real labor of love the entire way through. So we started our first... We took our first trip in November 2024.

So this is the first week right after the presidential election. We, as a team, took four trips together across a full week across the state between November 2024 and I think it was April 2026. But in that time, we had many many many intermediary moments in between. We have a few folks who are residential to Pennsylvania, so we're going out on their own time. We stood we sat in many many coalition meetings.

We went to a bunch of industry conferences. We, were in many municipal meetings as well. I think over the course of our two years, we, talked to almost 50 people on record and many many more sort of ambiently through the course of our our time, which included folks that we talked to while door knocking, folks that we talked to while organizing, folks that we talked to while trying to engage with sort of industry folks and many people in between. But

I love the story of... There's like... Was it a former mayor that you met just like sort of circumstantially while eating lunch?

Yeah. We went to Cuffy's Diner in... Right outside of 3 Mile Island, which actually was recommended to us by an uncle of one of our teammates on the team, who is a long long long time resident of Central Pennsylvania. But, yes, Kuppie's Diner was a really instrumental sort of site wherein journalists... Where journalists went to right after the Three Mile Island disaster and it's still a real sort of home for the community today.

The mayor who was mayor at the time of that disaster was sitting at the bar the first time that we went to go get pancakes and eggs. And, yeah, we got to talk to so many people that day about sort of what 3 Mile Island meant to them, what they think about sort of Microsoft's plan to open it back up again, and many other things about being a central Pennsylvanian.

And if I understand, you... So there were a number of reasons that you all took Pennsylvania as your focus for this report. One of them being that each of you has a connection to the state in one way or another. Is that right?

Yeah. I grew up in Central Pennsylvania, where a large data center development is starting, PACS 1, which is about five miles away from my mom's house. And so when I first heard about it, I knew that I wanted to get involved. But I also am a recent PhD graduate from Carnegie Mellon University. The whole development around data centers came on my radar when there was the AI and energy summit, last year in July where president Trump and senator, McCormick basically announced $90,000,000,000 of investment to data center and AI infrastructure.

This was a closed door event where many students and faculty were barred from campus that day. At the same day, there were protests around, president Trump. There was a stop to summit rally. And so I think this was the moment where a lot of people in Pennsylvania started to recognize what was happening. And that's when I started to get involved.

And, thankfully, Maya was looking for a research assistant around that same time. I jumped at the moment of getting on this project because not only, do I have personal ties to it, but based off of my own research around community risklessness to AI, data centers have been one of the central points that have gathered so many different people on the ground. And so that moment was really exciting. And I I I think Maya had the foresight even a year before that to see what was going on.

Yeah. Thank you, Sela. I I really... It's... What Sela mentioned is so true that I think for so many of us on the team, there were a team of five of us plus, know, a few babies who were part of this research team.

And, you know, it was a real joy to get to really experience this place that we have all experienced in many ways either in the public discourse, either, you know, every four years on Pennsylvania suddenly, you know, the state that we're all paying attention to because of election season or because our, you know, of our deep connections. I'm a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, undergrad at least, and I I really, you know, have been such a beneficiary over time of the public investment that has happened across the history of Pennsylvania, the Commonwealth Of Pennsylvania. And so really, you know, we had a a question and really trying to interrogate what it meant for this state that has given us, you know, home, education, this real sense of history in our own personal lives. What it meant for that state to be sort of used as an exemplary vision of what AI was supposed to mean to this country in general. So for our other teammates who aren't also here, you know, we have a teammate who lives in Philadelphia.

We have another who is a fourth generation, Pittsburgher. We have, another who spent, her entire academic career really studying the relationship of AI to industrial history, and it really felt like, you know, we got the opportunity to come home to think about, you know, the places that we knew in this particular way and really try to examine them with as many skills as we've acquired since the time that we first arrived in Pennsylvania.

I mean, yeah, kinda like you're describing like a dream team for doing this kind of work, it sounds like.

Yeah. It was very... We got a lot of time in the car together. I feel like it really made us stronger.

One thing that you mentioned in the report too is that Pennsylvania has 71 active and 66 proposed data center sites throughout the state. So this is very much a kind of, like, in progress development boom, you know, I guess, as everybody has been calling it. I was just wondering if you could situate that. Like, is that a lot?

Yeah. There are a few other states that, you know, I think are often pointed to as sort of the leaders of this, you know, big AI boom. Virginia is one. Virginia has the highest concentration in the country. Texas is another.

There are many... I believe Pennsylvania might be somewhere in the top.

I was gonna guess. I don't know the actual numbers, but I feel like it's one of the fastest emerging ones, but not... Certainly not the one state that has the most data centers.

Where I think Pennsylvania really, you know, is important to the broader US picture is that it has some, unique qualities that give it a real narrative meaning. So Pennsylvania sits on the Marcellus Shale. That is a huge energy source for a lot of the, data center boom that is projected across the state. I think also because it lands every two to four years as a sort of beacon of American industrialism when it comes to, the election season. You know, federal leaders are in Pennsylvania often trying many of these, narrative pieces that build up the parts of the AI race that is, you know, taking place nationally.

So I think Pennsylvania, even if it's not necessarily, you know, the highest concentration or, you know, the biggest, you know, rising force. I think it is a bellwether for where many of the arguments that are landing across the country are going to go. And part of the reason that, you know, we really felt it was important to be there now before it rises in public, the public imagination.

I would also say that, the Pennsylvania administration is trying to position Pennsylvania as an AI ready ready state. I think it was ranked top three states for AI readiness, as far as incorporating government services, using AI. And so there was a big push from the public administration at the very top to welcome AI, and that includes data centers and AI infrastructure.

Got it. Can you take me through in a little bit more detail what AI readiness is?

Yeah. I mean, it's it's a it is a real question. You know? I think that vision of what AI means increasingly, you know, has just become muddy over the course of the two years that we've been out in the road. You know, when it comes to data centers, I think it can be just as much about infrastructure as it is about energy, as it is about labor.

You know, so much of what we imagine, the wins from AI to be sort of in the realm of infrastructure work often comes down to, you know, supposed jobs or, revenue that can come from this investment by big tech companies in these small towns. So perhaps, you know, positioning oneself as as really ready to accept that infrastructure might be one element of what it means to be AI ready. You know? Yeah. Another version might be, we're able to use these tools, you know, in public service, within government offices, you know, within our educational institutions.

What we saw in that, announcement that Sela referenced earlier that $90,000,000,000 that, was announced in July 2025. There are, sort of signals all over the map about what presumably AI means to the state. There are... There's funding that's going towards Carnegie Mellon and other, you know, institutions to start training programs. There's money going towards, you know, developing the energy grid to be...

To allow, you know, more energy to be flowing for these data centers when they finally do come online. So it is money, perhaps maybe intentionally so. If it's, you know Right. Allows us to sort of project whatever you might want onto what AI readiness looks like.

AI readiness means per... A potential readiness to cash some checks.

Sure. Okay.

Got it. You do talk in the report. It's sort of like... It is both its own section and something that comes up again and again throughout the reporting that, like, Pennsylvania does provide a really particular arrangement of both natural and labor resources that is sort of unique in a way. And I was wondering if you could just, like, take us through what exactly that means.

Like, what are the natural resources that are available that, you know, you don't find in other places where there's an AI boom happening? And then what is the sort of labor aspect of that?

I think we can start by thinking of sort of, you know, what Pennsylvania means to this American story. And hear it every four years that, you know, Pennsylvania is the home of American industrialism, that it was so important to, you know, steel, coal, etcetera. But what we often leave out in that sort of storytelling is that after those companies went under and the industrialization happened in the, you know, mid twentieth century, so many of those assets are left on the land. You know, we talked to an interviewee who said, you know, Pennsylvania is home to America's trash. It just has, you know, tons of fracking wells that are sitting in people's backyards.

It has tons of empty coal mines that have been collecting water across time. All sorts of, you know, infrastructure that's now being retooled for this data center boom. And so, you know, in some ways, some might say that actually that that layering of these old infrastructural sort of ghosts is one of the things that makes Pennsylvania really unique and really targeted for data center development. And we see that in a lot of ways in some of the projects that have been... Have gotten the most attention.

You know, through Mile Island is the site of the largest US nuclear disaster in history. And in 2024, it was, you know, big in the headlines because Microsoft bought the reactors at 3 Mile Island to use to support their data center boom. And so I would argue that's one of the... And it's what we argue in the in the piece that, you know, this lasting legacy of industrialism not only leaves these physical manifestations, but also this kind of nostalgic piece that makes the labor components of this AI boom really salient. Salla mentioned that conference in 2020 or 2025 that was behind closed doors where Trump, governor Shapiro, many senator McCormick, and many industry leaders met to talk about this big AI boom and what this could mean for Pennsylvania communities.

And, you know, often when they do that, they talk about the labor that they expect to come from this. You know, they'll say, well, it's huge in construction jobs because we need people to build these data centers. Or, well, you know, it's really, you know, it's our patriotic duty to be part of this new industrial revolution, which is pulling on this long history of these incredible unions that formed when these industries were, you know, particularly strong. But that is not necessarily the picture that we have today. You know, Pennsylvania's strongest unions are in care work.

They're not necessarily in, you know, steel workers and iron workers, which, you know, in many ways is a loss for so many of these communities that, you know, built an identity and an economy around these things. But it also is a little bit thin. You know, we talked to a few of those folks who are part of those unions and, you know, they have said, even if this is a bubble, you know, and we presume it might be because, you know, we don't know what's gonna happen, you know, in the future. But it's a very thin window for us to expand our ranks and maybe this time won't come again. So it is a bit confusing that I think, you know, so much of this expansion is based on things that have happened in the past.

It's based on the industries that we need to come back. It's based on these unions that we need to, you know, sort of rise again, but it's not a very complete answer to any of that loss and any of that, sort of trauma that many of these communities have been experiencing over the past, you know, many many decades.

Yeah. I I do think that there is excitement at the very least. The data centers do not house, very many workers within it, and, obviously, there's construction jobs. But, in talking with some of the union union folks, from the building trades, they're really excited about the huge energy projects, like 3 Mile Island, like the gas plant and coal plants that will be driving a lot of, the electricity that will be used to power data center. So it may not be data centers themselves that, may create those long term jobs, but, they did reason, you know, one of the things with the 3 Mile Island opening is that these are, like, twenty, fifty year projects that can be sustained.

And so I think that's why a lot of the building trades and construction, and energy folks are really excited, because they do see that as, leading to sustainable jobs.

I think that's right. And I I would also say, you know, I I I feel it's speaking in some way to the kind of precarity of a lot of these sort of local economies that we have, you know, so many towns across the Commonwealth who's... Who are sort of over indexed in a in a way on a particular type of industry. We stopped in many towns where, you know, we would speak to folks who would say, you know, that coal plant went under or that nuclear plant went under and that really tremendously changed the sort of foundations of this town. So many people left.

So many people haven't found jobs since then. And so there there is, you know, real material, to that nostalgia that even if, you know, that promise on a space is very thin, that, you know, the data center will come, it's gonna have 10 jobs fine, you know, but as sellers mentioned going again. Yeah. Exactly. The power plant will get going again and that might, you know, give us another opportunity forward.

So it it does create, I think then, this really muddying effect for municipalities, for residents, for folks who, you know, over the course of that two years, we're really trying to figure out what actually is the meaning of this big data center boom. I'm hearing that there are jobs available. I'm also hearing that maybe, you know, I might not have water or may or Right. You know, these are, you know, hugely polluting fossil fuel. Like, it's it's just...

It's very hard then for municipal leaders who in some ways are really caught unawares at this to to... At least in the early days to turn down the amount of money that was coming, you know, coming at them because at the time, right, this is $90,000,000,000. The, you know, Amazon investments in Eastern Pennsylvania are $20,000,000,000. It's like the the largest investment that's come to the state of Pennsylvania in a long time. It's one of the reasons why I I feel the pushback that sort of broken open some new political imagination has been really important because it is a pretty tremendous thing to have broken up enough space to be able to really question what it means to take or even just bite this hand that's feeding you as much money as is feeding.

To eve... To even have any square footage to stand in a space where you're saying, maybe we say no to the billions and billions of dollars. Yeah. That actually gets a little bit to the next question I wanted to ask, which was... So in the report, describe one...

It's the AI Horizon Summit. This is a conference in Pittsburgh on AI's expanding role across robotics, health care, energy infrastructure, and more, during which you describe a narration that plays out over a loudspeaker. And the narration is, we carry a legacy where grit meets energy, from the first sparks of steel to the steady pulse of nuclear to the all time high demand of natural gas. Why here? Because Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania offer what others can't, direct access to the toughest real world problems in energy, healthcare, manufacturing, and defense.

Problems worth solving. Problems that forge billion dollar companies and the next generation of industry titans just as Andrew Carnegie once did. Putting aside for a second being like, maybe we do industry titans again. How fun would that be? Which is just a wild connection to make on purpose.

You then link this sentiment, and those delivered throughout the summit, and from other sort of stakeholders in these projects, to that of inevitability. And I think the huge sums of money also speak to this sense of inevitability, like large scale development of AI as software is inevitable. The construction of data centers that then supports it is inevitable. And maybe so too then is the construction that this has to happen in Pennsylvania, because this is the place that can do it. But you write that this inevitability depends on a single vision of the future, one with profound flaws and weaknesses.

And I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about like, how is it that... Right. We've talked about the government and private industry in the report you mentioned also media. Like, how do those groups, other than showing up with, here's your $90,000,000,000 or whatever, you know, other than showing up with impossible to imagine amounts of money, how are they all working together to try to force this sense of inevitability? How do they how do they make that?

Where does it come from?

I would say, the... Even the AI Horizon Summit, it was, hosted on a strip strip of lands, called the AI Avenue in Pittsburgh, which was nicknamed that by the AI strike team. So in itself, it's treated as a marketing term. That it's a narrative by design by a few powerful people that have the ability to run the discourse and that goes to the public administration. There's another one, with team Pennsylvania who created this fifty year roadmap trying to position AI and infrastructure developments.

And so they they've been doing this for many many years now.

Yeah. You know, when I, think about some bit of that narrative construction, In some ways, it really is necessary if what you want is for this boom to happen because you need the permission of places like Cumberland County and Archbald and Bethlehem and, you know, the towns right around through Mile Island in order to execute that. If you if, you you know, it doesn't come without convincing argument. And the argument on its face, you know, because, you know, over the course of that two years, we were starting to understand, okay, the jobs from the data centers themselves are not, you know, very strong. Oh, perhaps there are environmental risks that we need to worry about.

Oh, perhaps there's, you know, concerns about tax revenue or waste or, you know, racial and economic justice. There's a there's a very risky investment. And you need to kind of sell some... Something Mhmm. To be able to sort of, you know, kind of enable people to believe in that vision.

And increasingly, they were relying on, you know, inevitability. We talk about a few in the report, the sort of use of imagery around nationalism and war. This kind of like vision of the AI race that, you know, we just must do it because it's the direction that we're going in. Even if that is a little bit faulty and we started to understand a bit sort of the components of what they meant when they would talk about this inevitability. You know, in the report we had followed some of the efforts of the Datacenter Coalition that is a, you know, a trade group that represents the...

Those in the data center industry. And they have a few websites that they use in Pennsylvania and in many other states where they're, you know, investing in data centers. And in there, they raise a few examples for why data centers are necessary. They say, well, you enjoy your video games and you need them for video game storage and it's good for electronic health records and it's great for, you know, grading software and all sorts of sort of tools that we need as part of the economy. So if you are perhaps a resident in that place, maybe in some way, there was a world in which you could be sold on those arguments.

But where I feel this kind of inevitability framework really missed the mark is that it's not really attuned to the conditions that we are all living in today. In the time that we were out in Pennsylvania, seven Penn State University campuses closed down. Septa, the the public transit in Philadelphia had a funding crisis. People did not have transportation on the first day of school. We have had cuts to health care.

We have had cuts to, you know, many different parts of, you know, our social safety net that might otherwise allow someone a life of dignity. So this kind of, you know, this answer that like AI is inevitable and it's gonna change health care. Like, what does that mean if you don't have access to health care in the first place? Like, I I think it's a bit, you know, it started out quite brawny, you know, as that AI Horizon Summit is saying, you know, that vision of titans, it's a big one that I think if you if you are holding on to that nostalgia we just talked about that maybe that would, you know, resonate in some way. But when it meets the reality of the worlds that we are living in in 2026, it is not a sufficient answer.

And I think that is where, you know, a lot of that, you know, really profound pushback is is stepping into. This data center is not gonna give me health care. It's not gonna answer my questions. It's not gonna, you know, give me the life of dignity that I hope that I can get in this place that has been my home for many generations.

Yeah. And I think over the course of this research, we have seen sort of a shift even within the discourse of the proponents that were initially supportive of this development. Governor Shapiro is one example of that. But when Maya and I went to a a Datacenter Summit, back in April March. March, it was a very different tenor than what the initial summits that we attended even a year before that.

And lot of these, folks are on the defensive and trying to say, oh, communities have these concerns but a lot of it is around misinformation of what the potential benefits are. And so it's very clear that community pushback has been effective enough to have, you know, the shift in discourse. Right? Where now, you know, they have to actually prove, that a lot of these benefits are coming to being, which they haven't yet. Right?

But it's it's been really exciting to see this momentum growing.

Yeah. What does that pushback look like? What does the kind of resistance that gets the people who are holding the levers of power to, like, take their hands off of the lever for a second?

I... I'm seeing a bunch of different tactics on the ground. So it can happen at your local municipal meeting. Right? Just showing up in these council meetings, being able to make public comments, and just showing up.

There's other folks that are, you know, doing rallies and going to the state capital to speak to legislators. Others are actually, you know, we call them citizen scientists, being able to actually track data center developments, creating apps. And so I think what's so beautiful about this moment around community pushback is that, you know, there's so many different ways of being able to speak up and do something about this. And the everyday citizen actually has power, to make a difference. And so, yeah, I think this is one of the exciting moments where there is so much hopelessness for so long about growing authoritarianism and the growing power of tech companies where you feel like you're you're powerless.

But in this moment, you're actually seeing everyday people making a huge difference in policy and local governments.

I think that's so true. And and it's also a really interesting moment for so many different types of organizing fights, which I think is... It's true in many places, but I also think it's just really representative of the complexity and the nuance and the, you know, beauty of a place like Pennsylvania. You know, there are so many people in these data center fights who enter it because of this long history of pushback around fracking or about coal or about, you know, long lineages of industrial harm. There are, you know, groups that are also here because they care about immigration, racial justice, utility costs.

There are like NIMBYs and YMBYs. You know, there's... It's just a... It's a wild mix of... The first time

that's ever happened.

Yeah. Exactly. It's a very very very interesting mix of folks. You know, two other members of our our team, they're anthropologists and they often use this term, you know, the data center as a simulacrum for, you know, just about everything else that is at a, you know, real pressure point right now. I think you can find...

You can take just about anything that you care about and see that fight in the data center. But, you know, one interesting example, there have been some emergent fights around emergent organizing around immigration that are finding themselves also in the data center fight, you know, on the argument that these data centers are, you know, part of the infrastructure for these huge companies that are increasingly expanding surveillance and using the data that they are taking from us to, you know, further detentions or, you know, increase policing power. There are others that might say, well, you know, data centers hold information for, you know, some of our biggest Fortune 500 companies. And if I really care about corporate consolidation, I should also care about Datacenter. So it is a it's a wide mix, but I think that is just another testament to kind of this particular moment that we're in, you know.

It was it was different when we started. In 2024, people had a lot of fear for a lot of different reasons. We hadn't seen, you know, what this administration would, you know, bring us to. We hadn't seen this kind of like real economic precarity. We certainly did in 2024, but you know, we're in a different degree of it now.

We hadn't seen this kind of, you know, real cleavage of our sort of social contract. And I think once that has broken, it's really opened up a lot of other ways for organizing to really, you know, engage in the public right of way, which we've seen in so many fights across country, but especially here in Pennsylvania.

I'm wondering what your advice is for folks that wanna oppose a data center that's near them. Like, where do they look for either help or a model, something to copy or take notes from?

I would say, you know, taking from personal experience, you are not alone in your feelings. And I don't know. I have a different relationship to the place I grew up grew up, because of being involved in the data center fight. I, Central Pennsylvania was very, does not have that many people of color. I felt very isolated.

But through actually getting involved in data center organizing, I was able to meet, people across intergenerational lines, you know, which is a really beautiful thing. And I I think just showing up, at these municipal meetings and speaking your voice is so super important. Being able to actually get involved in this political moment, through elections and canvassing, get... Getting to meet your neighbors. I think that is the one important thing.

I went door knocking in different neighborhoods that I never actually been to in my own hometown and got to meet and got invited to have tea by strangers. And so I think that's one of the beautiful things in this moment is that you are actually meeting your... The people in your own community, and it's bringing people closer together. And I think, that, you know, relationships and the community bonding has been one of the beautiful things in this moment, that is strong enough to beat a lot of the, people in power.

Yeah. I think that's so real. You know, there's so many different formations that are part of these interesting data center fights, you know, can be as small and local as a community garden or as big as a, you know, major organization that, you know, their whole budget is oriented towards a data center fight. And I I... You know, it's increasingly, you know, to plus one what Sela said, I I kind of feel like, you know, it was sad at the top of 25.

Like, oh, we all need to be in community. Like, I really feel like we see it here. You know

that's true. Yeah.

Yeah. Actually, it really is true, you know, because your community can find me... You can... It it shows up in all these different sorts of places. You know, we talked to people who were here because for thirty years, they have always gone to their municipal meetings to find out what's going on with the trash and find out what's happening with their neighbor.

And suddenly now they're here in a data center fight. And so I do kind of feel like, you know, the revolutionary act of opening up your door and talking to your neighbor is I think one of the ways that, you know, folks find themselves and what ends up being an incredibly nuanced conversation about what infrastructure looks like. You know, I I pull back to what Selah mentioned earlier about, you know, some of the folks in the building trades that I I think that's a very honest and human place to be entering from. That like I also want my family to be able to have food on the table and, you know, a job that's going to allow us to buy a home and, know, live out that version of the American dream. And I'm gonna, you know, call out Stella and thank her because in those interviews, she asked this question at the end of every one of our interviews that was, you know, what would be your dream in Pennsylvania?

Like, if you if you had decision making power, like, what would you do? And we saw so many of those liberatory visions that were, you know, I wanna have a train. I wanna have food. I wanna have health care. I want, you know, the joy of Pennsylvania to be found in its rivers and its trees and the beautiful sort of environmental assets that we have here.

And so I kind of, you know, I just wonder if, you know, if we started there and at sort of the goals that we all really care about, the ability to live a life of dignity, maybe we might find that there are other ways to get there that live beyond Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Google. It might just be found, in, you know, reinvesting in our public infrastructure, all those things that we all got to benefit from for many, for many generations. Or, you know, maybe sometimes it is nuclear for some for some communities. Maybe that, you know, also can be part of the mix of answers. Like, there's lots and lots of communities and municipalities.

Pennsylvania, there's lots of ways around that question. But I think increasingly, we've seen now that there's real curiosity about starting with the the goals that we want first and kind of working our way backwards.

And the community should be involved.

Yes. And community should be involved.

You know, we talked so much at the beginning of this conversation about why Pennsylvania is a particularly well suited place for the attempt to construct these data centers. But then also, it's really sort of... It's not nice, but it's like, it is... Provides a little bit of hope to then think of the residents of being like, we know how to... You know, we know what we're doing to fight this.

Like, we as a region have sort of had to go through this before. And it's it's really interesting to sort of think about and see, you know, hear about groups of people putting that putting that knowledge and that history to work, you know, again. Unfortunate that they have to do it.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's so true. You know, this sort of industrial answer to our questions. Like, you know, if we're in a bad spot that a big company is gonna come and solve that for us, has a long history here.

You know, we talked to so many families who, you know, lost a grandpa in the mine or so many doesn't have a finger because of, you know, the harm that they went through, you know, as a result of, you know, these industrial barons at the time of the golden age. We had some folks who were, you know, recalling these really evocative stories of union busting that, you know, was incredibly violent where they lost people in their lineage, you know. We spent a lot of time at some of those museums. We went to the, you know, National Anthracite Museum. We went many times to the Museum of Industrial History in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and and really tried to situate ourselves in this longer arc that was gonna hopefully provide some answers to why this moment really is meaningful for folks.

And and, you know, when we talk to folks, so many people were pulling from from that place that, you know, this is not gonna happen to me and my family for the third time in a hundred years. You know, I'm happy to be part of that lineage to to really push back and fight back. And I think that I feel sentimental in a way because we were... We started this research before America 250 and then we ended it right at this time where we're really reflecting on what, you know, what this country means, what it's meant across the globe, what it meant means to the people who find themselves in it. And I feel like, you know, this story is set so one of America America's history and Yeah.

Hopefully, future. And I think... Yeah. I I I just feel like there's real endless possibility for who who gets to decide in the end.

Maya, Sela, thank you so much for joining us. This has been great.

Thank you

so much for joining us.

This is such a treat.

We will put a link to the report in the show notes, and we will also put a link to the summit. Is that what you said, Sella? Is it a summit? Okay. We will put a link to the report in the show notes.

Is there anywhere else that anybody should look for you or your work online?

You can find us on Instagram at data and society. You can also find out more about what our team and our colleagues are working on at datasociety.net, where we are publishing all the time about data centers, AI, chatbots, you know, AI agents, all sorts of things at the intersection of, AI, automation, data, and society. I'll shout out... Actually, this might come out on Thursday, so maybe folks might be in time for this. But on on this Friday, Sella's organized one such summit.

Sella, you wanna talk about it?

Sure. So I will be cohosting the community centered AI infrastructure summit at Carnegie Mellon University on Friday. Maya will be our keynote speaker, talking more about the AI factory. And we have a whole slew of different panels around community organizing, around data centers, and environmental impacts of AI. It'll culminate in us codeveloping a community action plan around AI infrastructure development in Pennsylvania.

So super exciting.

That's incredible. Is that open for anybody to tune into remotely?

Yes. It'll be online. So check out the website, communityaisummit.org.

We will absolutely put a link to that in the show notes. That is the news we have for you this week. We are gonna be back here in the main feed on or around Thursday, October 8. This week in the member feed, me, Hans, Jason, and Georgia discuss the apparent uptick in explanatory content online. How and why has the explainer as a format moved from long form to short form video?

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