GoKawiilJoe Allen wants to know what the robot’s name is. At first, I think the double whiskey we downed at the hotel bar must be getting to him, as he sprints like a kid at recess toward a delivery vehicle. I’m anxious about the time: I’m supposed to be driving Allen to the airport, my Hail Mary effort to get him alone for a proper conversation before he leaves Atlanta.
I’ve been back and forth with Allen, who rose to national prominence as the anti-tech prophet on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, for a few weeks now, seeking an entry into the growing movement against AI. I’d come down to Georgia, a hot spot of data center resistance, to hear one of Allen’s lectures, which he’s been giving at locations across the country. But when I got to the event, he told me he had to leave immediately after.
Fortunately, his flight keeps getting pushed back, which means I can follow him around on various side quests—like this one, to meet some friends at a nearby restaurant. He manages to evade most of my questions about their identities, changing the topic to more interesting things, like the “inverse singularity” (his idea that humanity will approach a point where our intellect and creativity collapse as we rely increasingly on AI for information). Allen’s friends at the restaurant have similarly little information about me, it seems. On our way, one of them calls Allen to ask for an ETA. “I’m bringing a friend—well, a frenemy,” he says, giving me a dramatic side-eye.
There are delivery robots all over downtown Atlanta, one of a handful of major metropolitan areas where they’re being rolled out to bring people burgers or tacos. Allen catches up to this one—which, I’m alarmed to see, has luminous white lights shaped like eyes on its front—and reads a name off the side: “CJ.” I think of the title of Allen’s recent book, Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity, and wonder what happened to the delivery worker that this robot replaced. Its eyes look pathetically, limply, past me.
When people ask what I’m doing in Georgia, I give them something easy. People hate data centers, I say, so I’m trying to figure out if they hate AI too. That’s all true. But the topic has also consumed me. In all my years of reporting on energy and the environment, I have never seen anything like the type of vitriol leveled at data centers, or the near-religious fury that has built up around their construction, or the way this resistance seems to be uniting people from the complete opposite ends of the political spectrum.
As I’m writing this piece, a friend sends me a post from a “white Christian nationalism” account on X: a seemingly AI-generated cartoon of Smokey Bear standing in front of a burning data-center-like structure, with the text “ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT DATA CENTERS.” What is happening? my friend asks. I’ll try to explain.
Once upon a time, you may have been living next to a data center and never heard anything about it.
For the past few decades, data centers have been quietly built all over the US, largely in areas with both fiber connectivity and proximity to power—Silicon Valley and the DC area were popular choices. They helped stream Netflix or store stuff in the cloud or do any one of the countless stupid and important things we all do constantly online.