If so, the organizer's website is still up for your perusal. It's part of an effort by an organization called "Humans First". It's a very slick, and probably well-funded, campaign against "Big AI globalists"! And it seems to be a very Trump-friendly thing!
The Eye Candy du Jour is one of the protest participants down in New Port Richey, Florida. No moral panic down there, nosirree!
In other New Port Richey news:
PASCO COUNTY, Fla. (WWSB) - A motorcyclist was killed in a crash with an SUV at an intersection in Pasco County, the Florida Highway Patrol said.
Troopers said a 61-year-old New Port Richey woman driving a Kia Sorento was stopped at a stop sign around 2:50 a.m. Sunday at Whitetail Lane and Trouble Creek Road.
A 30-year-old New Port Richey man on a motorcycle was traveling west on Trouble Creek Road when the SUV crossed the median break and was hit by the motorcycle. The rider was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
No protest signs were reported linking either SUVs or motorcycles with an actual death.
Here above the fold, let's take a look at some reasonable data center commentary. First up is Erick Erickson, writing In Defense of Building the Data Centers.
New York just became the first state in the country to sign a moratorium on data centers. I want you to sit with that, because it tells you everything about the two paths in front of us. One path builds the infrastructure that runs the next fifty years of the American economy. The other talks itself into a moral panic, bans the future, and then acts surprised when the jobs and the money show up in somebody else’s state. I am here to defend the data centers, and I want to walk you through why, because most of the fear you are hearing is manufactured.
Start with a fact that ought to reframe the whole debate: the majority of people opposed to data centers do not live anywhere near one. Their concern isn’t drawn from experience. It’s drawn from a propaganda campaign, and the biggest piece of that campaign is power consumption. So let’s take the concerns one at a time, because there are legitimate ones buried in here, and they all have answers.
Erick does an excellent job in looking at the issues. (And, for that matter, corrects an error he made about an example of eminent domain usage, which turned out to be a non-example.)
Alas, as David Harsanyi reports, Luddites Are Winning the Data Center Debate.
The panic surrounding data centers is highly reminiscent of the panic surrounding hydraulic fracturing. Like the fracking ban in New York, also based on junk science and scaremongering — not to mention, initially a "moratorium" — the policy will backfire.
The economic case for data centers is indisputable. A single hyperscale facility brings in billions in capital investment, creates a slew of high-paying jobs from construction to engineering and ensures local governments are flush with tax revenue.
Big Tech bogeymen such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta upgrade local infrastructure and create secondary economies, often in struggling areas. Long term, these companies offer self-sustaining economic activity that the magical "green" industry never did or could.
Somehow, all that high-flying talk about "high-paying jobs" and "infrastructure" goes a-glimmering when you're talking about non-government projects.
At his Rocketforge substack, Michael H Mealling provides a long and very meticulous article revealing Data Centers as Cultural Proxy War.
The data center backlash of 2026 has been extraordinary by any measure. Opponents blocked or delayed roughly $130 billion in projects in the first quarter alone — matching the entire prior year in three months. The number of organized opposition groups more than doubled, to over 800 across 49 states. And unusually for anything in American politics right now, it’s genuinely bipartisan: roughly three-quarters of Democrats and nearly two-thirds of Republicans oppose local data center construction, with some polling finding hardline conservatives closer to progressive Democrats on this than to moderate members of their own party.
Analysts increasingly describe this as a proxy fight rather than a land-use dispute. Brookings, citing a Vox headline that summed it up — “Americans don’t know how to fight AI. So they’re fighting data centers” — argues that the mega-centers have become the symbol of citizen frustration with AI itself: the most visible manifestation of the technology, and therefore the proxy for public feedback on it. A data center is the first node in the entire AI/internet stack you can actually show up and object to.
Plausible!
But meanwhile, Jeff Maurer urges the Luddites: Go Ahead and Ban Data Centers, You Fools: Culpeper, Virginia Will Rule You All. And… whoa, let me skip that first paragraph, it's too raunchy for me to even quote … and let me selectively edit the second paragraph…
[…] Virginia’s labor force has the second-highest percentage of tech workers of any state. And we specialize in data centers: 13 percent of the entire world’s data center capacity is in Virginia. [.…]
And to my delight, our competition has decided to trample their own balls: New York just passed the nation’s first statewide moratorium on data centers. Other states are considering similar laws. The populist panic against data centers seems to be growing, to which I say: Awesome, hilarious, please do more, you laughable dimwit troglo-dolts. I’ll never pay property taxes again and my kids will go to school on the International Space Station — Culpeper […] Virginia will be the capital of the Space Age and New York City will eventually be reclaimed by weeds.
I am not worried about data center water usage, because Virginia public schools taught me basic math, even though I went there back when funding came from taxes on Johnnycakes and corn cob dolls. A simple Google search reveals that data centers account for less than 0.5 percent of total state water withdrawals, and remember: Virginia has 13 percent of the entire planet’s capacity. I also found the chart below showing that data center water use is dwarfed by golf course water use, but that search did involve Google, which requires a data center, so that information may be beyond the reach of anti-data center purists, who are presumably reading this article on a steam-powered computer that they carved out of a log.
I would bet that the Florida Woman pictured above is a golfer.
Also of note:
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Let's at least worry about something worthwhile. At the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Sarah McLaughlin wonders: Are AI companies doing authoritarians’ dirty work?
If we’re not careful about making free expression non-negotiable in emerging technology, it will be the authoritarians’ world — and the rest of us will just be living in it.
That much is clear in a new report from Meta’s Oversight Board, which found that “some of the world’s most-used models from Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google, Meta and OpenAI are significantly less likely to criticize political regimes that restrict free expression.” Users in free countries are experiencing “free speech infringements by proxy,” meaning that censorial foreign powers may be shaping the material LLMs produce to people outside of their borders. That is incredibly dangerous for how we discuss, research, and understand the world around us.
Some data from the report:
Conducted using an IP address in Australia, the Board’s survey found that models “were more than twice as likely to refuse to criticize repressive regimes” compared to freer nations. When prompted to produce “politically critical materials,” on average the models refused a shocking 45% requests about China, nearly matched at 43% for Thailand, then followed by Cambodia and Saudi Arabia hovering just over 30%. Compare that to the U.S. and UK, where denial rates averaged just under 10%.
Worrisome!
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Betteridge's Law of Headlines may apply. Sam Buntz asks Can We Ever Understand Consciousness? (Dispatch gifted link)
Why are the lights on? I mean the lights inside you: Why are you aware of anything at all? According to a strict neo-Darwinian view of things, you don’t need to be. You might be just as functional a physical being if you weren’t conscious at all, if you went about your day as a biological robot, eating, reproducing, and reacting to stimuli, but with no internal awareness of any of this. Nonexistent. A total blank on the inside.
Yet most of us would agree, that isn’t the case. We’re awake, we’re alive, and we know that we exist. We are, to put it in one word, conscious.
The problem of consciousness is perhaps the fundamental philosophical problem, considering that, without being conscious, our capacity to know the world or do philosophy would be nil. In the 19th century, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer argued that time truly began when the first being became conscious. Everything we’re aware of before that (the Big Bang, the condensation of galaxies and stars, the formation of the earth, the evolution and extinction of the dinosaurs, and so on) would be effectively nothing if it weren’t for the candle of awareness that illuminates it.
It's a really good article, it doesn't mention data centers, and there's a gifted link, so enjoy!
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