AI’s reputational crisis is triggering a massive backlash against data centers including two attacks on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and another against an Indiana city council member.
I’ll get to the attacks on Altman but other than reminding readers that he is fondly referred to as “Scam” Altman by former colleague and current litigation opponent Elon Musk, I have other sub-topics to cover first.
Readers are encouraged to see this morning’s post about Maine’s potential data center moratorium.
Let’s start with the political context.
AI’s Reputational Crisis
Alex Heath’s piece for The Source, “The AI industry’s reputational crisis,” inspired my headline and also contains these two paragraphs:
The 2026 Stanford AI Index, published today, found that only 38% of Americans view AI positively, the lowest the report has ever recorded. (In China, that number is 84%.) Trust in the U.S. government to regulate AI sits at just 31%, dead last among all countries surveyed. I also noticed a recent Gallup poll showing that almost half of Gen Zers believe the risks of AI in the workforce outweigh its benefits.”
Today I spoke with Russell Wald, the Stanford HAI executive director who helps oversee the AI Index. “It’s really fascinating when you hear so many companies say this technology is so powerful and dangerous, but yet they’re building it at such breakneck speed,” he told me. “It’s these walking contradictions that they make themselves.”
Here’s a telling graph from the above-mentioned Stanford AI Index:
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) April 14, 2026
Things are so bad that even notorious centrist “popularist” David Shor’s Blue Rose Research is warning that AI’s reputational crisis isn’t happening in a vaccum.
It’s A Rigged, Unaffordable System, Stupid
From Shor’s “AI Is Colliding With America’s Affordability Crisis (PDF)”:
AI is arriving into an economy Americans already think is rigged Voters aren’t experiencing the cost-of-living crisis and the rise of AI as separate issues; they see one unified threat where a system already rigged for the elite is using new technology to further stack the deck against them.
The capabilities of AI are advancing faster than our institutions can absorb, creating a massive vacuum of trust.
57% of Americans say that the world is moving too fast for them to keep up. Anxiety about AI has shifted from a personal concern to a societal crisis, with 79% of the public worried that the government lacks a plan to manage the displacement of entire industries in a tinderbox economy.
Voters see this as a massive disruption requiring solutions that match its scale – moving beyond temporary f ixes toward a permanent architecture for economic stability.
The public mandate is not for the government to run the industry or hand out checks, but for government to protect Americans and level the playing field – ensuring fairness in an economy that feels increasingly unaccountable.
The mandate from voters is clear: if someone is going to benefit from AI, it cannot be at the expense of the American people. Voters expect our policies to protect them from being taken advantage of in a world that already feels rigged and out of control.
Comes with charts!
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) April 15, 2026
Now let’s look at how dire AI’s reputational crisis was even before the threats to Sam Altman’s life.
And the Data Center You Rode In On
Tech Policy Press warned in March that “The Public is Getting Fed Up With Data Centers. Politicians Need to Take Notice“:
The country is in the midst of a massive data center boom, with data centers being built and announced at a record-breaking pace. In response, communities are fighting back, organizing coalitions and showing up en masse to public meetings where data centers are being discussed. The crowds at these events worry about the data center’s impacts on their community, and they resent how massive companies use their power and wealth to ride roughshod over the community’s wishes.
Public resistance to data centers isn’t a simple case of reactionary NIMBYism or anti-tech pearl-clutching. Instead, these are stories of communities resisting corporate impositions that will bring material harms, with few benefits in return.
Last year, I co-authored a report studying the impacts of data centers on their local communities. This research found three key issues with data centers.
First, as last week’s White House meeting acknowledged, data centers lead to higher electricity prices for nearby consumers.
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Second, data centers impose significant costs on the local environment.
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Perhaps these costs would be worth bearing if data centers brought jobs and benefitted local economies. But, my report’s third finding is that data centers don’t bring stable, high-paying jobs.
The public affairs firm Capstone (run by David Barrosse, a former advisor to Gen. Wesley Clark’s 2004 presidential campaign and to the megadonor- funded Democracy Alliance) did some handicapping in January about which projects were likely to run into the most effective public/local government opposition as AI’s reputational crisis builds:
Pushback proliferates faster in localities operating under Home Rule, in which local governments can legislate independently of the state. Data center moratoriums in Indiana and Georgia reflect a growing disconnect between Republican-majority local and state governments. On the other hand, counties operating under Dillon’s Rule (e.g., Virginia, Texas), which requires local governments to adhere to state law, are likely to follow the state government’s approach to data center development, providing regulatory clarity for investors.
Hyperscalers, including Amazon.com Inc.’s Amazon Web Services (AMZN), Alphabet Inc.’s Google (GOOG), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), and Meta Platforms Inc. (META), are more likely to encounter local-level pushback due to the size of their projects. However, these Big Tech companies have significant financial and political resources to circumvent project delays. Smaller companies specializing in co-location data centers, such as Equinix Inc. (EQIX) and Iron Mountain Inc. (IRM), are generally less vulnerable to local pushback.
When evaluating whether to invest in a given project, developers should consider the key potential drivers of local pushback: (1) economic development (e.g., job creation, property tax revenue, community benefit plans, land value); (2) noise and air pollution from electricity infrastructure; (3) water usage; and (4) preservation of rural or suburban character.
For obsessive nerds this Brookings research summary of America’s Rural Future virtual symposium held in January may be of interest to see what corporate America is being told about the ups and downs of data centers in rural America.
What we do know is the polling for data centers is collapsing, at least in Virginia, per The Washington Post:
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) April 15, 2026
That shift suggests Virginians now consider data centers almost as undesirable as nuclear power plants, which a 2023 Post-University of Maryland poll found just 33 percent of voters nationwide would be very or somewhat comfortable seeing built in their community.
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Similar disillusionment has taken hold across the country. Nationwide, 62 percent of Americans say the cost of data centers outweighs the benefits, according to a Marquette Law School poll conducted in January.Virginia voters have also soured on tax breaks for data centers that create at least 1,000 jobs. In the 2023 Post-Schar School poll, they were favored by 61 percent of voters, but the new poll found that 37 percent now support them.
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The new poll results underscore the intensity of public frustration with Silicon Valley’s plan for a boom in construction in Virginia and nationwide. The tech industry’s insistence that it must rapidly construct power-hungry data centers to compete in artificial intelligence innovation has created a major political hazard for elected officials, especially at the local level where the projects receive approval.
There’s also a particular demographic that really hates this stuff, per HeatMap:
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) April 15, 2026
And the resistance triggered by AI’s reputational crisis has notched some scalps, again per The WaPo:
“Opposition has been expanding along with the intensity,” said Miquel Vila of Data Center Watch, an AI security firm’s research project that tracks resistance to the facilities. During a three-month period in 2025, communities around the country blocked or delayed 20 projects, a number greater than the total opposition over the previous two years, according to the group.
And I have to give a big shout out to citizens of the charmingly named Festus, Missouri who threw out half of their city council after said council approved a $6 billion data center.
That’s an encouraging counter to the depressing reports of citizens arrested for speaking out against data center buildouts at local meetings from California to Oklahoma.
Nothing like a populist backlash to encourage CEOs to reach for the checkbook.
Leading the Future Comes at a Resistance Leader
Faced with a reputational crisis, the AI overlords naturally moneyed up and formed a super PAC, per Politico:
Pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future and its affiliated groups raised more than $140 million in contributions and commitments since launching in August of last year, Playbook’s Ali Bianco reports. The haul, shared first with Playbook, underscores the growing financial muscle of one of the most prominent super PAC networks aligned with the AI industry. It’s already begun to pour money into key races and currently has a whopping $100 million in cash on hand.
Voice of the Valley: The group boasts support from Silicon Valley heavyweights including OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, venture capitalist Ron Conway, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and AI company Perplexity. It’s already spent $1 million on an ad campaign blasting New York state Rep. Alex Bores in the Democratic primary for New York’s 12th Congressional District, and plans to expand its investments in the coming months.
Clanker wars: The huge cash sums confirm the nascent AI lobby as one of the biggest political influencers this cycle. But AI-skeptic groups insist politicians pushing for regulation shouldn’t be deterred. They note Bores — who spearheaded new state rules for the industry — received sizable counter-donations from AI safety advocates; and that AI skepticism remains a popular position with the wider public. It’s a struggle we’ll see play out on a larger scale in the months ahead.
I previously covered Leading the Future and their attacks on NY State Rep. Alex Bores in March.
Wired has a new interview with Bores, the politician targeted by Leading the Future’s whose primary will be held in June.
Electeds Don’t Get Tech
New York State Assemblyman Bores told Wired about his journey from happy Palantir employee during the Obama administration to quitting when they began working with Trump’s ICE. He also talked about the dire paucity of elected officials who understand tech and his 2022 campaign slogan that “one person in Albany should know how tech works”:
Wired: But why don’t more lawmakers understand technology? Why don’t they understand the companies who are creating and commercializing these tools, these platforms?
Alex Bores: …we have a Congress that is dominated by lawyers, and I love my friends who are lawyers, but you want to have a diversity of backgrounds in office, and maybe the skill set of software engineers and the skill set of Congress has less overlap than the skill set of lawyers and Congress. You need people that play in a few different arenas, but it’s also something that’s new and moving fast.
While I was working, I got a master’s in computer science with a specialization in machine learning. So when I was elected in 2022, I became the first Democrat elected in New York at any level with a degree in computer science.
I will be only the second Democrat in Congress with a degree in computer science. There are two Republicans who are there, but out of 435 members
The profound ignorance of tech on the part of most American lawmakers is no joke. In a prior life, I was once responsible for updating a future Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee on tech issues and it was like showing an alarm clock to a chicken.
That same senator went on to be a huge RussiaGater and played a central role in Twitter and other social media titans upping their censorship game at the behest of US politicians.
Talk about AI’s reputational crisis!
Alright, let’s get to the Kino.
Shots Fired, Molotov Cocktails Served
The trouble started, as it so often does, in Indiana, per Fortune:
Ron Gibson, a city-county councilmember, woke up just before 1AM on Monday to find 13 bullet holes in his home, along with a note on his doorstep that read “No Data Centers.” He and his 8-year-old son were home at the time, according to a statement released by the councilmember on Monday, though neither reported injuries.
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The shooting appears to have been politically motivated, tied to a proposed data center in Indianapolis’s Martindale-Brightwood neighborhood. Less than a week prior to the incident, Gibson had voiced his support for the construction of a data center in his district. The Indianapolis Metropolitan Development Commission approved a rezoning petition on April 1 in a 6-2 vote for a 14-acre $500 million data center project for Metrobloks, an LA-based data center developer, as reported by Mirror Indy. Gibson isn’t on the commission that voted to approve the rezoning measure, but he supported the commission’s decision in a statement last week as the data center construction site falls in his district.
And then they came for Sam Altman.
Incendiary Press Coverage, Incendiary Attacks?
Sources, cited above, has a good summary of WTF happened:
On Friday, a 20-year-old man named Daniel Moreno-Gama threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman‘s San Francisco home, setting fire to an exterior gate. Less than two hours later, according to the federal criminal complaint filed today, he showed up at OpenAI’s headquarters on Third Street, smashed the glass doors with a chair, and told security he came to “burn it down and kill anyone inside.”
Officers recovered incendiary devices, kerosene, and a lighter from his backpack, along with a three-part document. The first section, titled “Your Last Warning,” listed the names and home addresses of AI executives and investors. The second discussed what Moreno-Gama called “our impending extinction” at the hands of AI. The third was a letter addressed directly to Altman: “If by some miracle you live, then I would take this as a sign from the divine to redeem yourself.”
Then, early Sunday morning, two people in a Honda sedan allegedly fired a round at Altman’s property. Amanda Tom, 25, and Muhamad Tarik Hussein, 23, were arrested and charged with negligent discharge of a firearm. Police haven’t said whether the shooting was connected to the earlier attack.
And the public response?
Holy Luigi, Scam Man!
As chronicled by Brian Merchant, the public response on social media certainly reflected AI’s reputational crisis:
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) April 15, 2026
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) April 15, 2026
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) April 15, 2026
i didn’t realize how bad it was until i saw this comment section on instagram https://t.co/xxlHiM7r4P pic.twitter.com/j1qMwqWVrl
— “paula” (@paularambles) April 12, 2026
One Sam Stands Against Vox Populi and in the Darkness Bind Them
Presumably ignoring the online response to the attack, Altman took to his blog to respond, where he posted a pic of his husband and child “in the hopes that it might dissuade the next person from throwing a Molotov cocktail at our house, no matter what they think about me.”
Altman also said some other stuff in response to the attacks and AI’s reputational crisis, including passive-aggressively blaming Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker profile for the attack:
Words have power too. There was an incendiary article about me a few days ago. Someone said to me yesterday they thought it was coming at a time of great anxiety about AI and that it made things more dangerous for me. I brushed it aside.
Now I am awake in the middle of the night and pissed, and thinking that I have underestimated the power of words and narratives.
He lathered on more family blog blather in a section called “what I believe”, try not to gag:
Working towards prosperity for everyone, empowering all people, and advancing science and technology are moral obligations for me.
AI will be the most powerful tool for expanding human capability and potential that anyone has ever seen. Demand for this tool will be essentially uncapped, and people will do incredible things with it. The world deserves huge amounts of AI and we must figure out how to make it happen.
It will not all go well. The fear and anxiety about AI is justified; we are in the process of witnessing the largest change to society in a long time, and perhaps ever. We have to get safety right, which is not just about aligning a model—we urgently need a society-wide response to be resilient to new threats. This includes things like new policy to help navigate through a difficult economic transition in order to get to a much better future.
AI has to be democratized; power cannot be too concentrated. Control of the future belongs to all people and their institutions. AI needs to empower people individually, and we need to make decisions about our future and the new rules collectively. I do not think it is right that a few AI labs would make the most consequential decisions about the shape of our future.
Adaptability is critical. We are all learning about something new very quickly; some of our beliefs will be right and some will be wrong, and sometimes we will need to change our mind quickly as the technology develops and society evolves. No one understands the impacts of superintelligence yet, but they will be immense.
He typed a bunch more stupid crap (all of which contributes to AI’s reputational crisis IMO), but I’ll let this one howler suffice for our purposes:
My personal takeaway from the last several years, and take on why there has been so much Shakespearean drama between the companies in our field, comes down to this: “Once you see AGI you can’t unsee it.” It has a real “ring of power” dynamic to it, and makes people do crazy things. I don’t mean that AGI is the ring itself, but instead the totalizing philosophy of “being the one to control AGI”.
The only solution I can come up with is to orient towards sharing the technology with people broadly, and for no one to have the ring. The two obvious ways to do this are individual empowerment and making sure democratic system stays in control.
Anyone who’s been following Altman’s family blog antics for the last decade will be pulling their hair out right about now and screaming about AI’s reputational crisis.
“Once you’ve seen AGI” — give me a family blogging break! Sam Altman has no more seen AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) than you or I have, dear reader.
And as Gary Marcus and many others have pointed out, the brute force approach to scaling Large Language Models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT will never ever ever lead to AGI. Not possible. Not happening.
But Altman wasn’t the only commenter to react to the violent turn caused by AI’s reputational crisis.
Democracy Works for You, Oligarch
Dave Karpf has a warning for Sam and his ilk:
Altman responded to the molotov cocktail incident with a heartfelt plea to turn the temperature down. He blamed last week’s Ronan Farrow/Andrew Marantz article, “Sam Altman May Control Our Future — Can He Be Trusted.” This is a textbook strategic communication play: the molotov cocktail-thrower discredits the entire movement he is associated with, so Altman is associating him with absolutely everyone who voices concerns.
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The options for the AI industry are (a) legitimate backlash or (b) illegitimate backlash. The mass public turns to violence when the avenues for legitimate, orderly contention are unavailable or non-functional. The Luddites smashed machines because it was illegal to forming unions.I suspect the next few years will see an awful lot of anti-data center activism. People are going to raise their voices and say “we don’t want these data centers raising energy prices here. No more giveaways to Musk/Altman/Zuckerberg.” OpenAI’s lobbyists and comms consultants will surely brand it the “new NIMBYism,” and “AI populism.” They’ll treat participatory democracy as a form of damage and try to rout around it. I expect they’ll be quite cutthroat in their maneuvers.
That’s a mistake though. The friction of participatory democracy creates a pathway for legitimate resistance. If you do away with that friction, the illegitimate alternative you’re left with is firebombs. As I’ve written elsewhere, Democracy is an incredibly good deal for elites, one that they ought to stop taking for granted.
There is a broad sense right now that tech billionaires run the world, entirely unconstrained by the public. This, to a great degree, is because they do. They bought the government, shredded the regulatory constraints, and treated neo-feudalist edgelords as political sages. It was a short-sighted maneuver, destined to fail. Silicon Valley ought to be more appreciative of the social stability provided by democracy. The alternatives are so much worse.
I’ll let Brian Merchant from Blood In The Machine have the last word:
Altman was no doubt shaken up by the attack, but the blog post is nonetheless remarkably free of serious self-reflection. If anything, it evinces a lack of understanding of the causes of the violence aimed at him was part of, and ultimately, even bolsters Farrow’s thesis: that Altman will say and do anything to advance his interests, including in times of crisis. It also reflects much of the AI industry leadership’s glaring disconnect over the anti-AI rage, its causes, and how it might meaningfully be abated.
After all, many AI executives have publicly declared for years that the technology they’re building and selling is so powerful that it might literally end humanity
In this way, for the last three years, the AI industry has asked the public to treat it as if it were Trump—seriously, but not literally. This is impossible. Startups like OpenAI and Anthropic are among the largest in history precisely because investors, and markets, took them both seriously and literally. Those investors expect to see the superintelligence and especially the mass automation they were promised.
If you take at face value what the AI executives themselves have been saying for the last decade, that an AI powerful enough to make humans go extinct is nascent, then acting with force to stop it would be a rational action. The AI industry and its executives—including Sam Altman—need to own this outcome, not blame it on Yudkowsky, safety researchers, or worried activists who take what they say literally.
I know I promised to let Merchant have the last word, but I can’t resist the temptation to point readers at this post by former professional Magic: The Gathering player turned “rationalist” AI-fear monger Zvi Mowshowitz called “Political Violence Is Never Acceptable” and which is just as naive as the title sounds, but might be worth a look for readers who are curious about the “rationalist” perspective on AI. TL;DR, Zvi is a doomer who buys all of Altman’s AGI and ASI hype.
As for his argument regarding political violence, I’d point him toward John Locke, Nelson Mandela, Franz Fanon, or Walter Benjamin, but what’s the point, none of them printed their arguments on Magic: The Gathering cards.
Hang tough, it’s only going to get more cray cray from here.
Related Posts on OpenAI:
- OpenAI as The Money Pit
- Silicon Valley Ideologies as a Lens for Viewing Current Events
- Flailing OpenAI Follows Meta’s Malignant Model
- Artificial Super Intelligence: The Faith of the Tech Elite
- The Tangled OpenAI and Microsoft Alliance Frayed Under Pressure
- Elon Musk Headed for Supernova with OpenAI Suit, SpaceX-xAI Merger?
- Weak Links Oracle, OpenAI, UAE Are Hammered by Iran War
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Nat, your posts are brilliant. I hope you don’t overwork yourself during Yves’ absence.
Thanks much! I’m going to attempt to be very disciplined and do what’s necessary and no more.
I’ve been screaming about the AGI fraud for years and have had years of being brushed aside, especially from the “robot cars are cool” crowd.
I think The Onion expressed the value of AGI the best.
https://theonion.com/man-who-threw-molotov-cocktail-at-sam-altmans-home-claims-he-was-following-chatgpt-recipe-for-risotto/
LOL
Altman must be a bigger pussy than an israeli.
Looks like his gate got a tad charred. I’ve seen more damage and danger from a tiki torch on a porch.
The bit about democratic norms and institutions acting as a release valve to prevent revolution is salient. The wealthy are notoriously ungrateful as a class. They worked themselves into hysterics that FDR, one of their own, would be the American Stalin because he was trying to save them from themselves. And not even within a decade of his death, they worked to undermine New Deal policies that kept Americans able to believe that capitalism could work for them.
The Stanford guy says, “So many companies say this technology is so powerful and dangerous, but yet they’re building it at such breakneck speed.” But are they? Or are they just talking it up and exaggerating the build-out that is going on? Ed Zitron seems to think many of the data centers that are supposed to be getting built at breakneck speed are still at the hole in the ground stage and stumbling over permitting, materials and labor issues. He also thinks there is not enough money in the global economy to pay for these suckers on the scale that is being talked about. Especially with major investments being backed by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who have been getting heavily bombed since Trump went on his rampage over there. And the sooner you build a data center and fill it up with GPUs, the sooner the installed tech turns obsolescent.
They’d rather have people engaged in their hype about how allegedly powerful they are rather than pay attention to all the grift and IP theft (with regards to LLMs).
They need to keep they BS alive until those IPO’s hit. In the case of OpenAI especially it’s the last chance to rake in the cash before the wheels come off. OpenAI is dead within the next 18 months, given the state of world affairs probably sooner, hence the powers that be letting Sam Altman get “metaphorically” knifed in the press.
He’ll be hung out to dry and the “failing” of OpenAI will be hung on him personally not on the BS that is LLM’s and the entire scam AI industry, hence everyone coming out and saying oh he’s a liar, a scammer and knows nothing about coding or AI. I mean that was just as true for the last five years when you hyped him as a visionary genius, so why are we only getting told this by the MSM and fintech media now? He’s going to be the scapegoat.
All excellent points.
Poor Scammy, his gate got a tad charred.
What a smeghead, I’ve seen more damage and danger from a tiki torch on a porch.
smeghead :)
This is “Stab ‘im”, have you met him?
Nothing wrong with kippers for breakfast
“with 79% of the public worried that the government lacks a plan to manage the displacement of entire industries in a tinderbox economy.” The government has no plan for the war Israel got us into and the government has a lot of experience with war. I have less than zero faith that this government cares to plan for the displacement of entire industries. Where is the grift in that and besides it would be hard and complicated and long. Then there is this quote from Ales Bores, “In a prior life, I was once responsible for updating a future Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee on tech issues and it was like showing an alarm clock to a chicken.” I rest my case … there is a case somewhere in there.
that quote was from me, not Bores.
I’ve mentioned that back in January I attended a NYE party where a single small group discussing AI attracted everyone else within earshot and became an AI hatefest. I was surprised at how strongly and negatively people felt about AI and before even touching on the topic of data centers.
People are being force fed the AI slop and they’re not liking it, there’s no way to disable or filter it.
It’s making social media untenable, youtube untenable, music untenable, education untenable, work untenable, jobs untenable. And now via Trump we see it’s also making government untenable. And via data centers it’s making society untenable.
First of all, if AI is as good as it says it is and it will replace 20% of jobs, then you are asking for great depression levels of unemployment. Remember how that turned out?
Second of all, no one has explained to me how AI is going to improve my life. All I see is that I will have AI chat bots as the new flappers for every corporation and I will never be able to speak to a person again.
The reason Altman’s post was “remarkably free of serious self-reflection”, as Merchant puts it, is because he wasn’t the one who wrote it. You know he had the clanker spit it out for him.
Merchant’s point about AI firms seeking the “serious-not-literal” Trump treatment is both dead on accurate and actually deeper than he interrogates. In a sense, post-Trump – and here I mean Trump 1.0, the 2015/16 phenomenological Trump – the entire American (or western, broadly?) experience of reality has been saturated in an intense sense of frivolous urgency. It’s the youtube video thumbnail with the host’s shocked face, mouth agape, an arrow pointed at some unidentifiable but surely critical element in a photograph; the title declaiming everything changed now. It’s the red exclamation point in the corner of the icon for some app you installed 3 months ago for a reason you can’t any longer remember. It is, to brutalize Carlyle, the spam email on the great scale.
It might not be quite right to attribute this surreality to Trump personally, but I do think 2016 is a fair dividing line as to the phenomenon’s ubiquity. I have a distant, fond memory of a time before Trump when the news cycle was measured in some period of time longer than it takes to compose a tweet – and this to apply to more than political news, in fact, it used to be a football team’s beat writer would get a juicy factoid over the weekend and wait to publish until Monday.
I miss a world that took days off. Maybe I should throw my phone into a ravine.
Thanks, Nate, for your brilliant reporting. I’ve been following these stories – most of all the St. Luigi effect on Altman’s Molotov cocktail thrower – in drips and drabs. Looking forward to your yeoman’s duty while Yves is away.
Happy Birthday, Preston!🐾❤️
Thanks cat lady!
I have finally gotten around to reading some John Zerzan (thanks to Lambert). Writing about the Luddites, Zerzan seems to claim that trade unions acted as a safety valve and cooperated with management to quash the Luddites, who were more concerned about shoddy workmanship that machines facilitated than the machines themselves. We should be on guard lest something similar happens with the slop generators.
Seems also, that knock-on effects of the Epstein war may slow the build out of the “data” centers.
Your work, with Conor, Nick, Haig, Curro and Yves is especially informative and welcome – thanks to all (including the moderators).
It was never about “the machines themselves.” It is about the effect of the dehumanization of labour. The affect that machinery that replaced human labour had on society, community, and the worth of people. The deliberate destruction of agrarian society (the need of official script to make necessary, money payments) to push labour into the factories is a causal factor of our current predictament.
More on the Festus,Mo situation from public radio KCUR.
Voters in a Missouri town ousted every incumbent council member over $6 billion data center plan
https://www.kcur.org/politics-elections-and-government/2026-04-09/festus-missouri-data-center-election-city-council
They had to hold that town council meeting in the high school gym because the city hall was too small to accommodate the crowd.
Also, about transparency….from Dec. ’25, 4 months ago.
New records reveal Festus data center plans were kept behind closed doors by officials, developer
Non-public conversations, a developer’s input into data center rules, and Gov. Mike Kehoe swaying dissenting voices. Here’s what new documents show.
https://www.ksdk.com/article/news/local/missouri-festus-data-center-officials-knew-long-before-telling-residents/63-6ee7a78a-e463-4058-8577-dee71f96753b
So much for transparency in city councils conducting public business.
A greased palm here, a fine dinner there, pretty soon you’re talking real corruption.
Kinda reminds me of the CALPERS board and their PE investments. / ;)
Altman is giving me definite Zuckerberg vibes here.
FFS. Words and narratives (artificially generated ones) are literally his product.
Oh? Who does?
Not us! We can’t help ourselves. The government must help us, by regulating, with regulation…
…which we will of course block by lobbying to the best of our ability. Concentration of power, right? What are you gonna do?
Even though my business strategy depends on it.
He is very much like one of his AIs, performing what he thinks is appropriate guilt and contrition for the situation, without meaning a single word of it.
They think creating text without meaning can replace most jobs, because it is what their own work consists of.
G’day Nat …
I hope you won’t mind me plonking this right here:
Luiza Jarovsky, PhD
@LuizaJarovsky
🚨 BREAKING: China’s new law on AI anthropomorphism has been officially enacted, and it is the world’s STRICTEST law on the topic:
As I wrote earlier this year, to my knowledge, no AI law anywhere in the world regulates anthropomorphic AI systems with this level of detail, strictness, and concern for context-specific vulnerabilities and potential risks.
Earlier in January, I wrote an article about the law’s first draft (link below). The approved version is even more comprehensive, covering liability-related risks as well.
Article 10, for example, establishes that providers of anthropomorphic AI must fulfill their security responsibilities throughout the service lifecycle and sets out detailed obligations for each phase of AI development and deployment.
Regarding children specifically, among the prohibited anthropomorphic AI practices is generating content for minors that causes them to imitate unsafe behaviors, induces extreme emotions, or leads them to develop bad habits, which may affect their physical and mental health.
Despite being a serious topic (which has led to numerous cases of suicide and mental health harm), most countries do NOT regulate AI anthropomorphism comprehensively.
An important reason for that is that peer-reviewed studies about AI-powered emotional manipulation and mental health harm only became available recently (as only in the past years have millions of people started to engage in these types of relationships).
China’s new law is worth taking a look at, and hopefully, other countries, states, and regions will soon follow suit with their own protections against AI anthropomorphism.
👉 Lastly, if you are interested in China’s AI policy and regulation, besides joining my newsletter’s 93,200+ subscribers, I invite you to join my new Masterclass on the topic (only on June 1st). Links below.
https://x.com/LuizaJarovsky/status/2043731297458327657
As is want these ***neoliberal days*** its a multivariable drama with its roots in the out of whole cloth ideological narrative that won’t die [unenlightened consumerist atomistic individualism] , its has lots of wealth behind it in creating the perfection of the Natural Order – looks up. Un/anti/social Profit/Rents post social good being a legal regard with business being all that matters to goose GDP/stonk prices before social cohesion or environmental concerns. On the latter I recently saw a Rep congress person on some business committee, in a video, flat out say she is not concerned about Climate/Environmental issues because its not written in the Bible. Its not how WE[????] end thingy, so let it rip.
Back to the above link. Head desk its not like here on NC and other places in long ago conversations, the amount of not just old school Bernays PR/Marketing cortex injected in to generations, its how, lest some forget the public debate about targeting kids as young as 3/5 yrs old with marketing too brand them and hook them on the mindless drug of consumption, just to fell good or alive, decades ago now. Top child psychologists were payed stoopid money and they abandoned all those kids for a pay day to live life large. Now due to the digital life, kids all have Smart Phones[tm], most spend huge hrs on digital life, yet in the US alone the power class has do issues with it. Whack on how the Trump clan is operating now, total disregard for future global generations potential all whilst wiping the nations curtains with the proverbial genitalia of him and his masochism.
Per se my broad social networks in OZ all are shocked[lmmao] since he got into office and it gets worse every bloody day. It matters not which political camp they support. Heck at this rate some might start shedding the bad China PR and understand what place on the orb we live in and does not start endless wars – phew …. amends mate
Thanks. China has a very different approach to AI and most everything else. Seems to be working for them.
Iranians have a moral obligation to kill Altman. By doing so, they would demonstrate their gratitude to the U.S. for assassinating the Ayatollah and prevent the U.S. from becoming an AI-driven dystopia.
Thanks Nat, good round-up.
I’ll just add the end of Ed Zitron’s latest, because it is good and his post’s are so long that not many people may read the end:
Good stuff, I love that Ed Zitron!
Haven’t we been here before and is this the moment when history rhymes? In the post Civil War US there was a massive investment and buildout of railroads; the new technology. It resulted in over building, bankruptcy, financial crisis, and economic depression.
The Panic of 1873 from the US Treasury, “The panic started with a problem in Europe, when the stock market crashed. Investors began to sell off the investments they had in American projects, particularly railroads. One of the biggest banks in New York City was Jay Cooke & Company. It had invested a lot of money in the railroads, and when the railroads started having problems, Jay Cooke & Company went bankrupt.” Soon followed by many more banks. https://home.treasury.gov/about/history/freedmans-bank-building/financial-panic-of-1873
I assume we will witness a similar financial crisis, like the railroads most AI companies will go bankrupt, the shake-out will cause panic in the markets, support for bailouts, and positive editorials on capitalism. Eventually, among the enormous waste, the surviving one or two AI companies will find a niche for their product and most of the original hype will be forgotten.
The railroads didn’t learn from what happened to the canal program about 40 years previous:expansion, then financial collapse, although aided by railroad expansion (history didn’t repeat then, only rhymed).
Don’t expect Wall Street to realize that now.
A difference is that railroad tracks are pretty durable. Per Ed Zitron, AI chips are used up in a matter of years. So the most valuable part of the physical investments are not really an investment.
And before the railroads, the canals.
But at least those two manias left useful material infrastructure in the wake of their financial implosions. I am less persuaded that data centres composed of chips which are obsolete within 5 years will do the same. They could end up as little more than really, really expensive Moai …
Scam Altman:
BS! A snake oil salesman will never underestimate the power of words and narratives.
Portland, NY. A tiny town on the shore of Lake Erie, just north of Chautauqua Lake, between Buffalo, NY and Erie, PA. It’s small, wooded, rural and has no tax base to speak of.
Lots of water, available land (a closed golf course) and a need for revenue. So, the town council recently issued a sort-of approval, in theory, to a data center to be built on 14 acres.
Then the residents found out and almost universally opposed it.
I talked with my neighbor yesterday and he thinks the data center is a great idea. We’re not directly affected, being on the south side of Chautauqua Lake and lord knows the county could use an economic boost. But when I asked him how many ‘good jobs’ the center would create (after construction,) he talked 100-200. Dream-world? And, our electric rates might increase. Even more. On the other hand, the county is not about to run out of water any time soon. And that is enough to give me nightmares: water wars.
Of course, a corporation just completed a solar ‘farm’ installation just down the road. What was a beautiful piece of south-facing agricultural land had been ‘leased’ to a solar company. Our area has a few more hours of sunlight per year than Seattle.
Oh man, thanks for the distressing update from one of my favorite parts of the world. Keep fighting if you can!
Both are prominent markers of a dangerous technology running amok, so the comparison is apt and popular opposition is very appropriate.
Obviously, data centers are much less dangerous to the locals in a physical sense, and will doubtless devolve into indoor shooting ranges or Amazon distribution centers in a few years once AI goes the way of blockchain or self-driving cars or web 3.0. But until then AI’s overall effect on society is much worse than nuclear power, and it needs data centers in order to exist.
I don’t know why we keep being presented with these kinds of choices.