Sometime this summer, someone armed with a spray can of black paint managed to get onto a railroad bridge over U.S. 11 in Botetourt County long enough to write out a four-line message:
No Flock
No Google
No Flock
No Google
Whoever this graffiti artist/vandal was, he or she perfectly captured the spirit of the times. This has been an eventful year, both in Virginia and nationally, from the legalization of cannabis to a war with Iran, but the thing that is reshaping public opinion has not come from any government: It’s come from the ground up. What we’re seeing is a remarkable revolt against technology, whether it comes in the form of surveillance cameras intended to make our communities safer or data centers intended to service the digital products that we’re using, whether we like them or not.
Across Virginia, we’re seeing localities take down Flock surveillance cameras almost as quickly as they put them up. The negative reaction to these cameras has come in both Democratic-voting localities (Charlottesville, Harrisonburg, Roanoke, Staunton) and Republican-voting ones (Crewe, Elkton, Floyd County, Henry County, Lynchburg). We are more than four decades past George Orwell’s fateful “1984” but now some have belatedly concluded that we really don’t want Big Brother after all, no matter how benign or even sometimes helpful he might be.
Perhaps the only thing more unifying has been the popular uprising against data centers. Sometimes public opinion doesn’t change at all. Sometimes it changes slowly. With data centers, it’s changed faster than the weather. For the past year, Heatmap News has been asking the same poll question about whether respondents would support or oppose a data center being built in their community.
Last year this time, 43% said yes, 42% said no. Now it’s 15% yes, 75% no. That’s a pivot worthy of an NBA star.
Politicians can be forgiven for feeling whipsawed. In rural Virginia, local officials are almost always elected on some variation of this platform — keep taxes low, attract jobs. Now some who have tried to do just that are getting hammered when the jobs in question come from data centers. It would seem that in some communities, voters would rather see industrial parks sit empty rather than see a data center located there. I’m thinking here of Botetourt County, where I live and where a Google data center has sparked protests, and in Franklin County, where a data center proposal known as Project Flash appears to have now blinked out, but there are no doubt lots of other places I could cite. (Disclosure: Google is one of our donors, through its Google News Initiative to support our expansion in the New River Valley, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy. You can be a donor, too, and also have no say.)
This has been a curious thing to watch unfold close-up. In Botetourt County, the driving issue has been the data center’s water use — even though the Roanoke Valley uses less water than it did 20 years ago. Google could turn on the spigot today, drain out all the water it’s contracted for, and the Roanoke Valley would still use less water than it did 20 years ago. The secrecy surrounding data center negotiations has been an issue in Botetourt and elsewhere, but it seems little different than the secrecy surrounding other types of economic development projects. Those draw little, if any, interest. Data centers, though, have become noxious flashpoints in a way that other business sectors have not — even though they pay well above the prevailing median in most localities. Stack Infrastructure, as part of its performance agreement for a data center complex in Pittsylvania County, has contractually promised to pay at least $80,500 a year, in a county where the median household income is $54,085.
The pushback against data centers began over rising electricity rates; the role they are playing there is very much a legitimate issue. Now it’s morphed into something beyond that singular concern.
I suspect what we’re seeing here, with both data centers and surveillance cameras, is a more general revolt against all the ways technology is intruding into our lives without our permission. I recently had to call an insurance company to resolve a problem caused when the insurance company applied a check to the wrong account. Before I could speak to a live human, I had to first run an obstacle course with an “AI agent.” No, I don’t want to talk to a machine. I want to talk to a real person. Even after the AI agent agreed to transfer me to a sentient human, it forced me to answer a survey about how it did. As you might imagine, I was not in the best of humor by the time I got someone on the phone. I’m sure I’m not alone on this.
We really have no recourse to this kind of thing. It’s not as if I can switch to a different insurance company when they’re probably all using these AI agents to handle routine calls. We can, though, vent our disapproval of the data centers that are powering these AI agents. And, increasingly, people are.
The tech news website Tech Crunch recently published an article headlined: “AI was supposed to win people over by now — it hasn’t.”
Five years ago, the Pew Research Center found more people excited about artificial intelligence than concerned about it. Now that’s reversed, with 52% expressing misgivings about AI. I recently spoke to a group in Danville about the changing nature of the media landscape. One audience member asked if we at Cardinal used AI to help us write stories. When I said “no,” the room burst into spontaneous applause. Usually it’s younger people who are the early adopters of new technology. That may still be the case here, but it’s also young adults who are moving the fastest to criticize AI. In 2021, people ages 18-29 were the least concerned about AI. Now Pew finds that age cohort is second only to those over 65 in their wariness of AI.
Some of that may be because we’re seeing AI eliminate a lot of entry-level jobs. To be sure, AI will also create a lot of jobs — but often it’s easier to see the jobs being phased out than the ones being phased in. Once an insurance company had to hire someone to answer the phone; now it can use an AI agent — and the company couldn’t care less how I feel about that.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who has called for more regulation of AI, has warned that we’re adopting AI faster than we have any other technology in human history — and without regard for the consequences. One of those consequences is more data centers.
Last week I wrote a column about how even though Gov. Abigail Spanberger has rejected a statewide moratorium on data centers, Virginia is developing a piecemeal moratorium anyway. Since I wrote that, Virginia Beach has adopted a one-year moratorium on data center developments and Chesapeake has imposed additional restrictions on data centers and sought legal guidance about whether it can impose a ban. That piecemeal moratorium is expanding. I wrote last week about some of the impacts of such a moratorium; since then Axios reported the rising opposition to data centers represents “an existential threat to AI.” If tech companies can’t build data centers, they can’t expand the use of AI. To be sure, the growth of AI isn’t entirely being driven by tech companies. Yes, the insurance company I now despise is using AI and I can’t do anything about it, but lots of ordinary consumers are using AI by choice every day — to take meeting notes, to produce graphic designs, sometimes even to create designs for posters against data centers.
Democrats are sometimes easy marks for any kind of environmental or social justice concern, so we shouldn’t be surprised to see Democrats warning about AI and surveillance cameras and data centers. What’s more striking these days is how quickly some Republicans have come to share some of these concerns. Flock cameras have raised enough libertarian ire to outweigh traditional “tough-on-crime” concerns. Last week, Rep. Ben Cline, R-Botetourt County, said Flock cameras should come down. Now, as data centers move into rural areas, many rural Republicans are starting to side with Northern Virginia liberals to oppose them. This has confounded some Republicans, who are instinctively pro-business. Among those being left on the wrong side of popular opinion is President Donald Trump.
“If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant or a data center,” Trump said recently, “I would absolutely want it because the jobs are enormous and the money paid, the taxes paid, are just enormous.”
He’s not wrong. Data centers do spin off a dragon’s horde of taxes. They don’t create a lot of jobs, but the jobs they do create pay handsomely, as we saw above. Trump, though, is channeling last year’s politics, not this year’s. The National Republican Senatorial Committee recently sent out a memo advising its candidates that data centers are the “sleeper issue for the entire election cycle.” Trump apparently hasn’t gotten that memo but now Republican Senate candidates have.
There’s a historical precedent for this sharp reaction to new technology: the reaction to the industrial revolution in the 1700s and 1800s that has come to be known as the Luddite movement. The legendary (and probably fictitious) Ned Ludd is said to have smashed machinery in an English textile mill. The Luddites were not able to slow the spread of technology, which put low-wage workers out on the streets but made it possible for the general public to wear cheaper clothes. Today we use the phrase “Luddite” in a disparaging way to refer to those who close-mindedly reject new technology. However, if we want to be originalists, then we should recognize that the Luddites also called attention to how the benefits of that new technology were not evenly distributed. Today, we want the convenience that technology allows but we don’t want the machines that make that convenience possible.
Want more political news and analysis? Sign up for West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that comes out on Friday afternoons.
