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Everywhere you look, it’s not hard to find suffering intentionally inflicted by people who are in charge. As the public looks for protection from persecution by officials, from outbreaks of contagious diseases or illness spawned by uninspected contaminated food, little seems to be on offer from the powerful in the way of relief.
We might have hoped that Congress would look out for its constituents—or that even if Republicans refused to do so, Democrats might. We might have hoped that businesses relying on human consumers would have their best interests at heart. Or that universities would stand against government censorship—or at least, as the institutions most dedicated to and financially reliant on the principle of the unique value of human knowledge, that they might defend that idea.
And certainly, there have been individual politicians, companies, and universities that have stood against the administration and the current crop of oligarchs. But for the most part, the people who had the most power and leverage haven’t been standing up for these ideals or the public interest.
Instead, members of Congress and senators alike allocated hundreds of billions of dollars to easing the tax burden of billionaires and multimillionaires who already control so much in our daily lives, while funding a massive concentration camp complex intended to harm millions of our neighbors. They passed legislation to cut healthcare spending in ways deliberately scheduled to cripple the Medicaid system after the November elections this year.
In 2025, many who hadn’t been paying attention during his first term were startled by the harm that Trump was willing and able to inflict on everyday people in the interest of his pet projects—his ballroom, tariffs, being friends with dictators, a willingness to unleash the U.S. military for personal grudges or crusades, and above all, his mission to use the federal government for any purpose he chooses.
Today, I’ll write about the public reaction to data centers and the construction of concentration camps around the country. An initial pushback on converting warehouses to detention camps has been followed by a popular revolt against data centers. So let’s look at what it means when those in power see regular people pushing back, and what these movements might signal about the future.
One of the many data centers under construction in Gainesville, VA, during 2025.
All about control
With his dizzying, malicious antics, the president is trying to exercise complete control over federal power. What does that look like in terms of governance? It means Trump declares whatever he wants to be true as truth—and countless other people in charge of agencies or organizations go along with it.
If he declares the Strait of Hormuz—the symbol of his embarrassing and illegal war against Iran—to be American territory, his allies in government go along with it, so as not to face punishment. When the president renamed Lake Ontario as Lake America amid a pathetic trade war he created with Canada for no reason, Google Maps caved to his will on this pointless, false, and inflammatory action against a key democracy now under threat from the president of the United States.
The federal government has also been pulling grants for what it refers to “DEI bike lanes,” as well as calling for their removal. It’s as if Trump is a three-year-old terminal cancer patient whose every whim the entire government is indulging out of a wish to coddle him, while pretending whatever he says is real. It would be merely pathetic, if it didn’t have real-life consequences.
For anyone who might be inclined to say, “So what if he declares Lake Ontario to be Lake America? Who cares?” I would say that this willingness to call unreal things real and treat them as if they are real is a way to let bad people assert control—and not just over naming.
Last month, Pennsylvania reported its first deaths from measles in more than three decades. The administration erasing those deaths from the official record would be no more arbitrary or real than renaming Lake Ontario. But these decisions have real effects in the world: misleading the public, harming public health, and corrupting government agencies.
The point applies in its own way to tech and finance billionaires who try to impose their own warped, self-serving beliefs as fact in other settings. This was made clear in recent days by Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase. Eight years ago, Armstrong made a public promise to eventually give away at least half of his net worth to deserving charities. But now, he’s explained why he shut down his foundation in 2023, saying that philanthropy was generally a net negative for the world. He specified that he didn’t like losing control of the money and what it was used for, suggesting that Henry Ford would turn over in his grave if he only knew what the Ford Foundation was up to since his demise.
And on that last point, he may be correct, as reasonable people can only hope that Henry Ford’s own work toward his ideal society, which consisted of spreading virulent anti-Semitism globally for decades, is no longer being supported by his eponymous foundation. But the very comparison Armstrong makes puts him in the position of agreeing with Ford’s reactionary extremism.
His argument also highlights something apparent about both Trump and the billionaire class of tech, finance, and media moguls. For them, it’s not enough to influence global systems, affect the lives of millions, or make riches far beyond what they could spend on any luxuries they might want. These people want to control humanity itself.
Billionaires tend to portray themselves as humanity’s saviors. But if their expanding power requires blighting communities—as Elon Musk has done in Memphis with noise and emissions pollution—they are more than willing to inflict suffering on others without taking any responsibility for the harm.
Blaming woke
The roots of concentration camp societies rise from the circumstances by which already powerful people try to convince the public to give them even more power to harm vulnerable people. Which is why it’s so strange to look at what’s happening now, in relation to the modest accommodations that advocates of social justice pressed for in recent decades. Is sending small children unaccompanied to unstable countries, or arresting adults to be tortured in detention in the U.S. or abroad, or shooting citizens and non-citizens alike in the street really comparable to being forced to attend an occasional human resources training or being made aware of the effects of what you say in daily life?
One of the most common things is to hear that “woke went too far.” The CEOs and tech giants seem to think that the powerful should not be impacted at all by even minor inconveniences—as if diversity and immigrants didn’t build their industries and a better country.
And that message found resonance with those who already felt a lack of control in their own lives. The CEOs and the public weren’t actually mad about the same things. But the wealthy funded a political reactionary movement that has managed to conflate the two, all to their advantage.
And if the general public didn’t start out mad about the same thing as the CEOs, they wound up swallowing the lies that were fed to them. They bought everything from the myth that brown and black people in the U.S. and immigrants across the board were somehow harming vulnerable white communities to the delusion that the smallest accommodations for trans people would lead to civilizational collapse.
But the promise of social improvement through persecuting one’s neighbors turns out to be an empty one. Punishing trans people and abusing immigrants hasn’t helped the economy at all. Many voters and nonvoters alike are still angry about their own lack of control over their own lives, and Trump and his fellow billionaires have made the situation worse. So the rage is now coming out in other ways.
The upside of public revolt
David Wallace-Wells noted in an opinion piece yesterday that data center opposition spans the political spectrum, with three in four Americans opposing the idea of one being built in their community. A majority of Republicans agreed.
Part of what this data center opinion shift shows is that you can only keep things aloft in an abstract, unreal way or so long. Bad actors can throw your neighbors into demonized categories and generate fear that some people will tack their anxieties onto. And those who have been deluded will make wild projections—as if the persecuted are somehow the attackers. (Witness the guy in Roanoke who told the Washington Post last week that he thinks the Democratic candidate in his district is correct about diagnosing the problems facing his community, he will not vote for her, because he is too worried about the danger that trans people represent. “I got granddaughters,” he told the reporter.)
But when the abstract and imaginary bits fall away, it’s harder to fool people. Data Centers are often loud. They are power hogs, raising costs for surrounding communities. Many data centers and detention camps alike have been authorized by local authorities without ever seeking public input, let along telling anyone the deal is underway—until it’s too late. Some backroom deals have been sneakier, excluding even local officials.
The modern political sphere is made up of so much talking about an idea and being for or against it in ways that are detached entirely from the real world. But detention facilities and data centers involve actual construction and physical spaces, tangible things that can be comprehended and refused. We’re now seeing a potentially more productive rejection of the larger, abstract false bill of goods: a massive public reaction against data centers.
In politics, you have to seize opportunities and make your own, too. Each time people push back, it reminds them that politics isn’t just something that gets done to them. It’s something they can do, too.
The downside
Yet there are risks to the revolt against data centers. Massive public resistance to something rarely leaves room for subtlety. In my opinion, resistance needs to be fused with education efforts and a positive path toward changing the situation and addressing the underlying needs of the community. Without a coherent path forward, any anti-data center movement may well fall victim to opportunistic rage-baiting that directs harm at scapegoated communities in the long run. Any large social reaction can itself become reactionary in dangerous ways.
Given that the revolt is bipartisan for now, the current anti-data center movement could fuse with anti-immigrant sentiment stoked by the right to become a broader populist, isolationist know-nothing movement, spreading far beyond the seed corn planted by Trumpists over the last decade. It could solidify anti-government sentiment and paranoia even after Trump is gone.
A larger social safety net and more effective governance could address so many of the ills of and needs for basic subsistence facing people right now. But not if people reject the idea and role of government entirely.
Already entrenched
Part of the broad sweep of politicians looking to enshrine an ideology of hatred and persecution of immigrants—as well as companies looking to inject AI into every aspect of existence—is to permeate communities and daily life so completely that it will be impossible to remove them. Sam Altman declared a goal of turning human intelligence into a utility that people can buy from his company on a meter. These guys are well aware how valuable it is if we become economically or otherwise dependent on them.
This is part of why it was critical to respond early to the attempt to transform existing warehouse space into concentration camps for immigrant detention. Towns becoming dependent on detention facilities already has a dangerous track record in the U.S. Stopping these big shifts before they become a done deal or can work their money and relationships into communities nationwide is critical.
Big public reactions also tend to be ephemeral. We have to act on them quickly. And even after gains are made, we have to continue to pay attention. The warehouse movement stalled the government drive to create concentration camps from existing warehouses in the first half of this year. But despite a shift to other methods in the bigger picture, Project Salt Box reported that what the government had claimed was a defunct approach to funding detention facilities just awarded $17.3 million to a private contractor to convert a facility in San Antonio to meet ICE’s needs. These efforts will not really stop until those involved are removed from power and held accountable.
Even more than massive ICE funding, the investment into AI companies and data centers is fueling the remaining stability of the U.S. economy. The AI industry has already made our national economy dependent on them in ways that appear to be unsustainable. There are good reasons to doubt both their stated good intentions and their projections about future profitability. And if even if the latter were somehow accurate, very questions remain about any company having such outsized influence.
States and merchants
Historian William Dalrymple wrote an opinion piece last week about a similar conundrum, laying out in detail what it took for the House of Lords to dismantle the British East India Company. He wrote about how the Company’s governor general of Bengal faced impeachment, with Edmund Burke in the role of prosecutor. Burke claimed that the company was a “state in the disguise of a merchant” and needed to be reined in.
I would argue that our tech giants are likewise coming in seeking and exerting the kind of power that people have historically surrendered only to governments. But these companies are uninterested in the accountability that citizens of democracies have come to expect from governments.
And just as dangerous is our current president, whose conduct in office is what we might call “a merchant in the disguise of a state.” He’s treating the federal government like his private corporation, to pillage and benefit from at will.
We need limits on corporate power and individual wealth as well as accountability from our elected officials. Is it any wonder there’s a wholesale loathing of government and data centers by so many?
If you feel powerless, experiencing the solidarity of massive data-center resistance can be a heady thing, as people come to realize that it’s possible to control some part of their lives. But in my opinion, the key response has to be to embrace the public reaction and give it a direction that leads to more political engagement and more power devolved to the people, rather than oligarchs and aspiring dictators. The road we’re currently on can lead only to greater abuses of power.
What can be done
Corruption is when someone is siphoning money or privileges out of a process unlawfully or unethically, trading their position for personal gain. With data centers, people can see they’re being cheated, and their quality of life affected. But fury doesn’t automatically lead to change or better governance. The fury is just a starting point, a first step toward a political platform.
A parallel push could reveal how the massive ICE budget is cheating the public, too—along with the slashing of the health care budgets, and the war that is eating our tax dollars while our military kills schoolchildren overseas. As I’ve mentioned before, all roads aimed at fixing our current crisis in some definitive way seem to lead to an anti-corruption campaign against the politicians and billionaires who are stealing our resources, public goods, and money.
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