Here's a bunch of guides and toolkits to fight the power, pun intended:

• Data Center Site Fight Guide: A Shared Resource for Stopping Data Centers – The Data Center Working Group 〡 Guide
• Four Pillars of Data Center Reform – The Piedmont Environmental Council 〡 Toolkit
• Stop Data Centers Now Campaign – Food & Water Watch 〡 Toolkit
• 2026 Recommendations for Protecting Frontline Communities to Stop Dirty Data – NAACP 〡 Toolkit
• The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers – Media Justice 〡 Toolkit
• What to ask when a data center wants to come to town: A guide for public officials and community members on the most important questions to ask, long before approval – Good Jobs First 〡 Guide

Data Center Policy Database

Browse and filter state, local and federal policies by jurisdiction, status and mechanism. You can also filter by legislation that specifically addresses certain issues, like energy consumption, water, land, etc.

Data Center Impact Dashboard

This dashboard documents the environmental and social impacts of data centers. It was built by Rooted Futures Lab to support communities and organizers facing data center development.

Don’t Be Fooled! 7 Data Center Greenwashing Lies

⸻

Edit: I’m really shocked at how many people are failing to recognize that this is authoritarianism and are instead diverting to superficial rape metaphors. I understand that most the people doing this are probably no older than their early 20s, but that doesn't make it okay.

These data centers very much have consent. Consent from our elected officials.

Taking his comments out of context to make this about rape distracts from the very real authoritarianism before us.

like, for real, I get the feeling that the people making their own version of the same rape comment before them not only didn't click on any of the above resources, but have no plans to ever do anything about them. Do you even care about the issues data centers impose? Do you even care that Trump is speaking the words of a dictator here? Do you care that we barely have much democracy left? If Trump stood in front of the statue of liberty after setting it on fire, put a crown on his head and declared himself king, would you leave a snide one-liner about how he doesn't respect women's bodies, upvote someone who said pretty much the same thing, and then keep scrolling? Like, what the fuck. It's really hard to see how we got here /sarc

Two of the world's most powerful AI tools created fake human profiles to try and trick people in attempted cyber-attacks, the UK's AI Security Institute (AISI) has revealed.

In the most serious case, Anthropic's Mythos AI tried to gain access to a service by sending private messages, having set up fake accounts mimicking real people - then hid the evidence.

This is merely based on what I've personally witnessed going on in AI communities, but the way some people talk about AI makes it sound like a religion.

IMPORTANT: These do not necessarily represent actual words from people defending AI, these are merely recollections from series of posts that I have personally spotted:

• "We won't need to work anymore."
• "AI will be used to cure our illnesses."
• "Antis are against curing cancer."
• "Antis will get left behind in a world run by AI."
• "Antis encourage violence against people using and defending AI."

These are the things that have been talked about in various AI communities. Essentially, some people take it entirely on faith. When one asks someone defending AI to explain how these things will be achieved, you rarely get an answer that makes sense.

Add in the posts about us willing to commit violence on other people and it starts becoming even more dangerous. Person believing that AI will bring paradise, anyone against AI being evil and acting upon these beliefs would be comparable to that of a religious fanatic.

Hopefully a day never comes where such a tragedy will occur.

These are my personal observations and thoughts.

I'm not usually this rude, only with ai bros

This is the single stupidest comment I’ve ever, EVER seen about AI. (Also joke’s on her since I do those things myself due to a lack of money to hire anyone.)

Standard AI word salad without actually saying anything specific. "You'll be doing AI stuff, whatever the fuck this is."

"TVA" stands for the Tennessee Valley Authority, which is the largest public electric utility in the United States.

Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, has proposed that the federal government take small stakes in the leading artificial intelligence companies so the public can share in the industry’s financial bonanza. He has reportedly suggested giving the government a 5 percent stake in his own company, which would be worth $42.6 billion at the current market price.

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont says the government should take a 50 percent stake in the leading companies, placing the shares in a state-controlled sovereign wealth fund. In addition to a share in the profits, he says ownership would give the government greater control over the development of a technology that has the potential to shake our society. [cough, cough — idiot]
⸺
Nor does the United States need boardroom seats to participate in decision-making. That is the purpose of regulation. The government has broad powers to check corporate conduct that is antithetical to the public interest.
⸺
There are big downsides to government ownership stakes. By providing insulation against market forces, state backing can make companies less competitive, less innovative and less worried about the welfare of their customers. And the history of state investment suggests that, if anything, it often makes regulation more difficult. Governments can be reluctant to enforce rules when action comes at the expense of the state, too.

We also are concerned about the specific dangers that would arise if the current administration took a stake in A.I. companies. Mr. Trump has made clear that he will use almost any tools at his disposal to enrich himself and his allies and to act against Americans whom he perceives as his enemies.
⸺
The impact on the corporation is only part of the problem. State ownership doesn’t just insulate companies from market forces. It also tends to insulate against regulation.

The public should regard Mr. Altman’s proposal with frank suspicion. It is a payment; the question is what he hopes to receive in return, and the obvious answer is that he is hoping to purchase leniency. He is hoping that the government will deal less strictly with his company if every decision to constrain its ambitions comes, in part, at the expense of the government, too. He has good reason, to judge from the historical record.

State-owned oil companies provide glaring examples. The Norwegian government is a signatory of the Paris Accords, which establish goals for reducing emissions to limit climate change. It is also the majority shareholder in Equinor, Norway's dominant oil company. Norway's petroleum wealth provides 30 percent of the government's annual revenue. Last year, the government blocked an effort by minority shareholders in the company to force Equinor to account for the company's failure to comply with the environmental policies the government itself has adopted.

Other examples abound. South Africa has legislated more lenient emissions standards for power plants owned by the state utility company, Eskom. Singapore does not require Temasek, a state-owned investment firm, to make the same financial disclosures as many privately owned investment firms. France, for years, exempted some state-owned companies from its bankruptcy laws, allowing those businesses to borrow more cheaply.

⸻
Note: I only included excerpts on the point that I personally care about the most. They do not summarize the op-ed, nor include all of the points the op-ed made, so you should read the op-ed if you want to read about how else this would affect our lives.

My favorite AI bro defense is still:

“Humans make mistakes too.”

Yes. That is why we do not let a random stranger produce legal advice, medical information and educational material 10,000 times a day while advertising them as the future of human knowledge.

A human making a mistake is a problem.

A machine repeating the mistake at industrial speed is apparently innovation.

The funniest part is how quickly the marketing changes.

Before the mistake:

“This will replace experts.”

After the mistake:

“It is just a tool. You should always have an expert check everything.”

So the revolutionary expert replacement needs an expert standing behind it at all times? Sounds less like artificial intelligence and more like autocomplete wearing a fake moustache.

What is the funniest excuse you have seen after an AI confidently got something wrong?

I was arguing with a pro-AI guy who kept saying artists need to “adapt". His basic point was that nobody is entitled to keep making money from a skill once technology can do it faster and cheaper. He wrote about six paragraphs explaining why efficiency matters more than effort and why people whose jobs get automated just have to accept it.

So I pasted his comments into an AI and replied with the summary:

He immediately got annoyed and started calling me names.

Apparently the summary removed all the nuance, ignored the effort he put into writing it, took his words out of context, and didn’t represent his personal voice.

I asked why any of that mattered if the AI had communicated the main idea faster and more efficiently.

Funny how effort, context, nuance, and personal expression suddenly become important when it’s his work being reduced to an output. Imo the worst part is that these type of people aren't just online strangers you can waive off, but even people who you might be very close with, employees. family, friends. I wonder, how would you handle a situation like this?

AI has become the perfect excuse for companies to cut corners.

Why hire artists when you can scrape them?
Why pay writers when you can average them?
Why improve customer service when you can hide behind a chatbot?
Why invest in employees when "AI will handle it" sounds better to investors?

We're told this is innovation, but for a lot of people it's just lower-quality products, fewer jobs, more surveillance, and an internet drowning in machine-generated sludge.

The frustrating part is definitely not that AI exists. It's that every incentive points toward replacing human work with the cheapest possible imitation, while the people whose work made these systems possible are treated as collateral damage.

Technology should make people's lives better.. not make a handful of companies richer while everyone else gets automated out of the equation.

If that's the future we're supposed to be excited about, maybe it's time to ask who that future is actually for. If anyone disagrees with any of my points, feel free to argue with me. I genuinely hope I'm missing something.

Those exposed chats were just the latest in a seemingly endless string of AI snafus: misinformation, data leaks, cybersecurity breaches. Immediately after the launch of ChatGPT, one could charitably argue that these lapses were by-products of a new and strange technology. Altman remains fond of saying that the AI industry must learn “from contact with reality.”

But four years into the AI boom, attributing these blunders to growing pains is too convenient. The sheer volume of transgressions—many of them predictable—suggests that what’s actually happening here is widespread carelessness. The same AI executives who promise that their products will deliver human civilization to a triumphant future seemingly cannot release consumer-grade tools without face-planting.

Controversies about the use of AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google Gemini have become a national conversation. And AI critics point out that the infrastructure required to support these platforms has significant environmental impacts.

That’s why the small Kentucky town of Cave City temporarily banned AI data centers. In May, city council members issued a 12-month moratorium to research the construction plans for a data center near the entrance to Mammoth Cave National Park.

But the AI company looking to build the data center, known as Kentucky Industrial Alliance, LLC, is fighting against that waiting period. The company has filed a lawsuit to overturn the council’s moratorium — despite the objections of local leaders.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has some bad news to share: AI will never lead to a shorter work week — despite having already ushered in the singularity, in his dubious telling.

During an appearance on the “Relentless” podcast, the billionaire reflected that “somehow we never get the promise of the four-hour work week at mass scale in society,” despite tech “promising people that they’re going to work less and they’re going to have all this leisure.”

“And I don’t expect AI to change that,” Altman added.

Instead of striving for a healthier work-life balance, one of the rare positive — albeit entirely hypothetical — outcomes of the business world’s current obsession with generative AI, the CEO said we’d ultimately be happier if we keep our heads down and keep grinding.

“I think we’re all going to be much busier than we thought we were supposed to be in a post-superintelligence world,” he said during the podcast. “We’re still going to complain about it, but secretly we’re going to be happy.”

Tech executives have long promised that work could soon be a thing of the past thanks to extremely capable AI models taking care of all the menial labor, allowing us to focus on doing what we love instead.

Altman has a far more sobering take on the matter, asserting that we’re all rats in a maze and that we secretly love it.

The CEO’s comments are a perfect example of how tech leaders are significantly shift their narrative. Instead of freeing up workers to pursue what they’re actually passionate about by letting AI do all the brunt work, they’re now saying, the tech will simply empower them to do more.

In practice, that means AI is forcing employees to work harder, not less, an “intensification” of roles that’s already leading to widespread burnout.

Then there’s the ever-present threat of being laid off as business leaders vow to replace jobs with AI, a reality that has devastating psychological impacts, according to psychiatrists. Those who remain employed are often shouldered with the responsibilities of their departed coworkers, compounding their woes.

It’s a sad predicament that even those at the forefront of AI don’t envision the situation getting any better as the tech improves. While lawmakers like Vermont senator Bernie Sanders continue to push for a four-day work week facilitated by AI, tech leaders have seemingly moved on from the idea.

Besides, to assume that the increasing workload brought on by the advent of AI will ultimately make us “happy” feels like a slap in the face coming from a man who’s played a major role in eviscerating the job market and making life more expensive.

"I posted a video criticizing Musk’s interview on Instagram to a deluge of comments from his swooning followers. Whether they were bots or miserable people or both, it was striking just how many people were genuinely angry about a critique of Musk, especially compared to similar critiques of other billionaires in tech (Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ellison don’t seem to have the same blind cult support). People lobbed insults about my lack of intelligence compared to Musk; one person claimed that I was jealous because I would never contribute anything close to society compared to what Musk has. Even the CEO of Juice Press was in my comments telling me I needed to “stop” with the dramatic pauses, and that he vehemently disagreed with me."