A West Texas cowboy saying advises: “Never sign nothing by neon.”
But that’s exactly the key operational method of the AI data center hucksters who’re foisting their exploitative, multibillion-dollar scams on local folks all across America. Corporate slicks for outfits like Amazon, Meta, Open AI, and Google are slithering through the countryside, luring locals to surrender land, water, electric power, and democratic rights to profiteering billionaires who promise pie-in-the-sky prosperity.
The deals are typically cut in the dim light of secret meetings, where corporate lawyers whisper to bedazzled local officials: “Just sign here, cowboy.” The key to this mass deception is a legalistic corporate contrivance called an NDA (non-disclosure agreement). It allows data center owners and a small group of insiders to “negotiate” a raw deal for area residents by hiding essential details from the public. Details like: Who pays, how much, who profits, what are the side effects, who’s responsible for damages… and why the hell is this room so dark?
These NDAs even have corporate code names like “Project Lightning.” What’s the rush? As one opponent of a Louisiana rush job said, “We live here. We want to know how it impacts us.” The inside schemers pushing that deal clucked sympathetically, winked at each other, then assured bothersome locals that “an independent study” had shown the proposed data center would cause no harm. Maybe… but the profiteers then said the study itself could not be released for public review. Why? Because the developer had covered it with an NDA.
Government by corporate-imposed secrecy is totalitarianism. Didn’t “We the People” have an armed revolution against that 250 years ago?
Thanks to reader Steve for bringing this issue to our attention!
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If you’re unsure about what “AI” and “data centers” really mean, check out the plain-English explainers we published recently: part 1 on AI, and part 2 on data centers.
Here are a few hubs of data center action that will help you find your way to join the rebellion:
Data Center Opposition Report: A regularly-published comprehensive report on the numbers of fights out there, with case studies for inspiration
The Stop Data Centers Coalition has a list of member organizations who are calling for a national data center moratorium
The Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development, a Minnesota based organization, has published a map of Facebook groups all over the country fighting data centers
One of our top go-to resources are the toolkits that MediaJustice has created
Kairos Fellowship also has a slew of guides and is developing a hotline that local groups can call for advice.
