Without Our Consent: AI, Data Centers,Trump and His Billionaires:

"It’s A.I. as sort of an avatar for a small group of Silicon Valley billionaires’ ability to impose their vision of the world onto everybody else without their consent...… that will then transform the image of your community, your lived reality, into the world that these tech companies have decided for you."

Jasmine Sun on Ezra Klein’s August 4 podcast episode, “The AI Revolt Is Here”

 Jasmine Sun is a journalist and blogger who grew restless at Stanford some five years ago and began a career marked by energetic and nuanced reportage, as well as a knack for particularly cogent and fluid takes on the Silicon where once worked.

I was already well behind my own blog-posting schedule when I came across her visit with with the ever-perspicacious Ezra Klein –“The AI Giants Weren’t Prepared For This” ,  stuffed with the kind of perceptions you see above.

I’ll cite it sparingly, but it merits it’s own discovering  (albeit paywalled):

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-jasmine-sun.html

They discussed her recent article on her website (she also contributes to The Atlantic), chronicling a swing through the Midwest—plus New York governor Kathy Hochul talking  about implementing pushback against data centers and the AI roll-out they enable. It’s titled, in lower case as is her wont on her Substack, “no data centers in my backyard”: https://jasmi.news/p/no-data-centers-in-my-backyard

The piece includes a chat with progressive newcomer (and data center opponent) Abdul El Sayed, who just this morning was declared the narrow winner of the Democratic Senate nomination over a four-term politico Haley Stevens.

 This has been the week when the popular sentiment against the tech oligarchs reached a new high. Sentiments she describes formed part of a tangled bank of issues that includes the postponed Paramount/Discovery merger, the influence-peddling of the Trump White House, and the ongoing elbowing among  the tech mandarins  in their conspicuously greedy AI build-out race.

(The Hollywood merger has its own contentious history, with Trump again being a factor. Watch this space for more on all that soon.)

Originally cited above as an invocation to the topic were a pair of quotes derived from coverage of an event in February of this year when some 200 activists gathered at the Virginia capital of Richmond to protest the latest crop of planned AI buildouts that state, already more pockmarked with suck facilities than any other. (How that came to be so mysterious; in some ways the land rush—or is it the land defacement? —dates back to the AOL installations that began what now sems to be a quaintly gradual process. Accompanying the private sector innings was a hastily-launched agglomeration of  increasingly large facilities in the state’s northern regions fueled by their proximity to D.C.’s government—and especially defense department—infrastructure.

Recall the “Department of Defense” ?  That august and highly professionalized DoD? You didn’t have to be a war hawk to consider that those three words brought a reassuring sanity in a parlous world, right? 

But then. As the clown cars pulled up to the White House and government agencies, Trump 2.0 happened. Soon an inked-up, aggressively “kinetic”-minded popinjay, his hair slicked back with gun oil, sent the dive bombers forth in our name, and using our tax dollars, to massacre non-combatants and leave young girls’ schoolbooks flapping in the rubble and blood-soaked dust.

Whatever the November mid-terms bring, however much some sort of blue wave may do to stop the ill-planned violence and cruelty-is-the-point global agenda, there’s actually a phenomenon afoot that’s causing more uproar, more pushback, than all the rest of Trump’s malfeasance. 

It’s as plain as the moment in Easy Rider when Jack Nicholson’s character George Hanson opens a campfire chat with, “You know, this used to be a pretty good country…”

It’s the anxious moment when we realize the economy (and the related war of choice, and, oh yeah,  the executive branch dismemberment of the Constitution) is happening without our consent.

As Jasmine Sun’s reporting makes particularly lucid even as hundreds of journalists at all elevls are point out, there’s a more resolute kind of anger that’s neither red nor blue and gains much of its power from that very bipartisanship.

The target of the national ire is clear. It is indeed the conspicuous scurrying to deploy Artificial Intelligence--and its most visible component, the build-out of  date centers, stringing their transmission cable across landscapes that once stood unspoiled. The pushback came organically, even as the tech oligarchs pounded their peptide-swollen chests over the billions of “spend” to gin up the necessary “compute”. A varying but substantial percentage of regular Americans tell the pollsters they truly fear the foreseeable damage to  the jobs that sustain so many middle-class households. 

For the working poor,  the battle for survival with dignity was already all but lost. When the Musks and Altmans, the  Zucks and Lutnicks and Bezoses and Bills have left us at the mercy of a downward income spiral. Where there was once Obamacare, Big Health pushes us to the chatbots, and it seems if the predictions of unemployment in waves come true, ordinary folk are left to seek care via a five-hour wait in the ER (like “The Pitt”, but  without the witty, humane banter). 

As discussed a bit in an earlier post I wrote about the AI’s inexorability:

https://www.dogtown.press/a-terrible-empowerment-the-audacity-probes-the-surging-a-i-realm/

… Anthropic ‘s Dario Amodei was cited as trying to stem the floodtide of rule by robot machine learning. Still, as Sun told Klein, “They are the ones simultaneously warning that we might see 50 percent of white-collar jobs lost by 2030.” Her corollary point as revealed by extensive interviewing   around Silicon Valley, is that the breadth of the sweep towards joblsness is even more damaging tho what bids to be a burgeoning “underclass”: “ I have not heard a single person in the tech industry tell me that they believe that A.I. is going to decrease inequality.”

The  fervor of the data center pushback stands in for so much else. Even as the roll-out metastasizes, Virginia is still ground zero. 

“Aren’t you tired of being ignored by both parties, and having your quality of life and your environment absolutely destroyed by corporate greed?”

Virginia state senator Danica Roem to a standing ovation at a gathering of anti- data center activists in the state capital, Richmond, Virgina in February 2026

“This is a shit deal for you.”

Virginia State assemblyman John MacAuliff, putting it more concisely to the same group.

Various active and articulate lawmakers in Virginia have answered their constituents’ calls to regulate the frenzy,  At least the initiatives to stop the depredation of local water resources, and to lay some of the power grid burden on the shoulder of the mega-scalers, improved when the legislature (and the governorship) flipped after Trump and MAGA foundered in their polls and power after the president’s first-term abrogation of  human rights (er-ICE?), ecological awareness (drill baby, drill), and  funneling of prosperity solely to the elites. 

Most of the Virginia bills died in committee or rounds of voting. One surviving bellwether measure, which would have mandated noise assessments for new data centers, was vetoed by Republican Governor Bob Forehead—er, Glenn Youngkin-- who declared that the legislation would have created “unnecessary red tape.”

The complexities of the build-out have introduced their own lexicons—compute density, tail latency, topology auto-discovery, etc. Forget Thoreau’s au’s dictum to beware any enterprise that requires new clothes, now we have to beware a post-industrial-revolution new revolution that requires new words. (We all know what an NDA is, as in something a Hollywood producer might press upon a pricey escort, but in data-center world it’s what local town councils sign when the mega scalers lay out a building plan. The supposed tax benefits have come to be classed under the humbler if worldly-wise term “bribe”.) 

 Even the countervailing groundswell, if that’s what is is, requires a new label—DSA, or Democratic Socialists of America. 

Doesn’t really make the trumpets blare all that grandly, does it? We all saw in the last election cycle where Identity politics will land you. Despite bright spots, such as the pace the admirable likes of Georgia Senator Jon Osoff or general election Senate candidate James Talarico of Texas for bringing the smarts to the table, we Dems don’t seem to have the starting five for the next set of running mates at the highest level. 

Which returns us to the main point.  It’s been unavoidably obvious since the flock of tech plutocrats were starkly humbled by having to attend Trump’s second inauguration for some booty-kissing that they were in a three-legged race to see who best exemplified th longtime robber baron philosophy that greed I good.

Except it’s no longer about railroads and timber and oil—well, maybe oil—not autos and banking –well, maybe banking--and fishing and agriculture and now about the tech overlords scraping my information and  yours in the name of our convenience. Does it still need to be be said at this stage, after such an overload of evidence, that if you don’t know what the product is, you’re the product.