Podcast: Powering Politics: A Conversation with Astra Taylor, Robinson Meyer, and Nicholas Rabb Publisher: Boston Review Date: August 17, 2026
Speakers: Robinson Meyer — founding executive editor, Heatmap News, and contributing opinion writer, The New York Times; Nicholas Rabb — organizer, No Data Center Monterey Park, and postdoctoral researcher, Eco-STEM Project, California State University, Los Angeles; Astra Taylor — writer, activist, and documentarian
Moderator: Lily Hu — Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Yale University, and contributing editor, Boston Review
This Boston Review panel examined the rapidly growing movement against hyperscale AI data centers, its unusual ideological breadth, and its political implications ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. The discussion connected local concerns about electricity, water, pollution, noise, secrecy, and land use with broader opposition to AI, corporate power, surveillance, and the loss of democratic control. The panelists agreed that the backlash creates a significant organizing opportunity, but cautioned that it will not automatically produce a coherent progressive movement.
A rapidly expanding backlash
Lily Hu opened by emphasizing that artificial intelligence depends on a vast physical infrastructure of energy, land, water, and global supply chains. Hyperscale data centers can cover millions of square feet and consume as much electricity as entire cities.
Hu cited a recent Gallup poll finding that 70 percent of Americans would somewhat or strongly oppose a data center being built in their area. More than three hundred cities, towns, and counties have already placed bans or moratoria on hyperscale construction. New York became the first state to enact a statewide moratorium on new data centers, and roughly a dozen other states — red, blue, and purple — are considering similar measures.
The issue has also moved into electoral politics. Hu pointed to Benjamin Wallace-Wells’s argument in The New Yorker, written with reference to Abdul El-Sayed’s win in Michigan, that AI is now a major election issue, and to a Wired article contending that data centers are breaking American politics. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, community campaigns disrupted at least seventy-five proposed projects worth approximately $130 billion.
The striking feature of the backlash is its political diversity. Self-identified MAGA Republicans and Democratic progressives may offer very different explanations for their opposition, but they frequently arrive at the same town halls and ballot boxes.
Public opinion turns sharply
Robinson Meyer said data centers have become the biggest story in American energy and the biggest story in American infrastructure — the largest physical infrastructure buildout, by many accounts, within living memory. Heatmap, founded in 2023 as a climate, decarbonization, and energy news site, began tracking data centers because so much of what it had learned covering the renewable buildout carried over.
Heatmap’s polling showed an exceptionally rapid change in public opinion. In August and September 2025, respondents were almost evenly divided: approximately 43 percent said they would support a data center in their area, 42 percent said they would oppose one, and 15 percent were unsure. Seven months later, in May 2026, opposition had risen to 71 percent and support had fallen to 21 percent — a shift Meyer characterized as nearly 50 percent.
Resistance crosses almost every demographic group, although it hews toward more liberal constituencies; college-educated women are among the most opposed. Meyer added that men aged sixty-five and older were the only surveyed demographic that clearly believed AI would improve both their own lives and society, a cohort he noted owns more stock than any other and whose income depends on the future of the market. The same polling found that most Americans want AI regulated at the national level, and that most would support a data center moratorium at any scale of government.
Astra Taylor described the opposition as a “Bannon to Bernie” coalition. Other populist positions draw comparable support in polls, she noted; what is rare is an active movement on the ground, and its emergence as an electoral force seemingly overnight.
Monterey Park organizes locally
Nicholas Rabb described the campaign against a proposed 50-megawatt data center — large enough to be classified as hyperscale — in Monterey Park, a majority Asian American city outside Los Angeles. A developer had approached the city council a couple of years earlier, proposing to build in the heart of the community beside residential homes. Residents discovered the project in November 2025, coincidentally, when someone at a local council meeting noticed it on the agenda. No one had been informed.
Organizers reached out to local community groups and mobilized hundreds of residents to town halls. They banned the facility through three municipal ordinances declaring the data center a public nuisance and barring any from being built in the city, and swayed a council that had started out pro–data center. A special-election ballot measure held in June passed with more than 80 percent of residents voting against the project. Rabb said Monterey Park is the first city in the United States to ban data centers citywide through both ordinance and ballot measure, and that the campaign beat back a multibillion-dollar Australian investment firm.
Monterey Park may not map onto other cities. It is not especially high-income, but it has many homeowners, and Rabb said residents were accustomed to mobilizing and to rejecting the assumption that a minoritized community is easy to overrule.
The campaign succeeded because organizers could point to immediate material consequences: higher bills, air pollution, water consumption and contamination, noise, and the heat island effect, which extends a couple of miles as servers run. Rabb contrasted this with his years organizing with the Sunrise Movement for the Green New Deal, which started at the top and tried to trickle down. National movements, he suggested, could learn from a sequence that begins with what materially affects people’s lives in a specific place and builds outward.
More than NIMBYism
Meyer said Americans distinguish between classic cloud facilities — which support banking, email, Netflix, and YouTube — and much larger AI-oriented hyperscale centers, and do not have the same objections to the former. Distrust of AI intensifies opposition without being its only cause. Data centers can be quasi-industrial facilities to live near regardless of what their computers process.
Heatmap’s tracking of contested projects found that the leading reason a project gets contested is concern about air or water pollution and environmental impact, while the leading reason a project gets canceled is noise — a failure to meet decibel requirements, which Meyer reads as a proxy for siting too close to homes. The sector’s profitability has also drawn speculative developers with no hyperscale experience. In Florida, a residential developer with a tract it could not convert to housing tried to put a data center there; the county passed a moratorium to stop it.
Rabb said Monterey Park residents delivering public comment consistently raised AI backlash: being forced to use AI, technology-driven job losses, surveillance, ICE, and the power of billionaires and trillion-dollar companies to impose their will. Many, he said, are acutely sensitive to living under an increasing degree of undemocratic control. Organizers were accused of NIMBYism and rejected the charge, and opponents attempted to turn the trade unions against them. The community wanted things built — housing, public and community infrastructure — just not AI infrastructure.
Taylor argued that NIMBY functions as a slur that can obscure legitimate claims to clean air, quiet, and health. She visited Memphis, Tennessee, site of multiple xAI supercomputers, roughly a year ago, shortly after the MechaHitler episode had soured local opinion on the technology. South Memphis is mostly Black, has a long history of civil rights organizing, and has been treated as an industrial sacrifice zone. The community’s most urgent concern was the unpermitted, arguably illegal gas turbines being run there, which have since grown in number. Reporting on the third supercomputer Musk built describes residents tormented by noise, with property values falling and sleep, physical health, and mental health degraded. Starting with something concrete makes organizing real, Taylor observed, but exposes organizers to accusations of selfish localism — a tension she urged the panel to stay alert to.
Data centers and renewable energy
Hu raised the parallel between anti–data center organizing and campaigns against solar farms, noting anti-solar influencers who blend implicit NIMBYism with the pro-environment, anti-corporate language usually associated with progressives — concern for animal habitats, or for closed-door meetings between local officials and large renewable developers. Bill McKibben has criticized environmentalists who oppose necessary green energy infrastructure.
Taylor said she takes her cues from McKibben on this and pointed to a recent case he cited, a large solar battery farm near Santa Fe, New Mexico, where community responses expressed concern about fire risk. That dynamic — the climate crisis being weaponized to block the solutions to the climate crisis — is dangerous. She argued the larger problem lies with a right that can no longer be straightforwardly denialist and instead reframes the enemy: rather than disputing extreme heat or wildfires, it blames “climate fanaticism,” a phrase she attributed to the leader of Spain’s far-right Vox party. Taylor connected this to a pattern she had just written about, in which the MAGA right fills a vacuum on animal welfare because liberals and Democrats are not speaking to the issue directly. If the liberal camp retreats from forcefully making the case for transitioning off fossil fuels, it leaves that messaging space open.
Meyer acknowledged similarities between rural reactions to solar farms and to data centers. A solar farm has no gas, creates no local air pollution hazard, and helps fix climate change rather than worsen it — but it can convert a pastoral landscape into an industrial one, employ few people, and send its electricity and economic output to an urban core. Anti-renewable organizing in Indiana, Wisconsin, and Ohio has often taken the shape of farmland protection and has shifted toward opposing data centers without abandoning its hostility to renewables. The resulting policies may not prevent data centers from being built; they could instead push developers toward gas.
He illustrated the electoral stakes with Wisconsin, where Francesca Hong lost the Democratic primary to David Crowley, who named data centers as his sharpest disagreement with her — prompting Republican Tom Tiffany to ask why that, of all issues. Because the Wisconsin Public Service Commission has primacy over energy production and can override local attempts to block solar, Meyer said, the risk is that this authority is extended to data centers or rescinded for solar.
Meyer also noted that opposition is not inherently wrong simply because it is local. NIMBYism as a movement emerged in response to the interstate highway system, and the cities where highway opponents fought off interurban freeways — Washington, D.C., and the Village in Manhattan among them — had booming downtowns thirty years later. The question is not whether residents resist development, but what they resist and why.
From local concerns to wider coalitions
Rabb argued that the right succeeds by listening to legitimate concerns about health, food, land, jobs, and the economy, then attaching authoritarian solutions to them. Liberals and some progressives, by contrast, can become so confident in top-down solutions that they ignore material realities — a failure made obvious over the past decade in climate politics, where national programs met local contexts and were rejected.
He saw the data center backlash as, in large part, rage at the absence of secure jobs, affordable housing, health care, food, and community infrastructure. AI epitomizes that absence: a technology that does not care about a community’s health or well-being. Winning concrete material gains, he argued, is what earns communities’ trust in anyone offering a vision of their future.
Taylor described opposition to Tucson’s “Project Blue.” Deep nondisclosure agreements forced residents to become investigators, who determined that the company likely to benefit was Amazon — which she said has since distanced itself from the project. Water consumption and drought drew people in initially, and city council meetings sometimes reached a thousand attendees across all ages. Organizers then deliberately widened the coalition by tracing what Amazon does: web hosting for Palantir, and from there connections to attacks on immigrants, ICE, Palestine, and the Department of War.
Similar bipartisan concern is emerging around Flock cameras, which Taylor said she sees registering in right-wing media as a fear about surveillance and authoritarian technology. Rabb said many of the Monterey Park organizers moved into campaigns against Flock after their victory, alongside work on ICE and overpolicing. In each case the underlying question is whether residents retain any semblance of control over their lives.
Where development may move next
Rabb expected developers to adapt. They will build in different places to avoid organized communities — possibly on Indigenous lands or on federal lands where protections are being stripped — and may accept higher latency to site facilities farther from residents. They have already tried offering to pay for all the power, which did not work, and hold conferences on how to overcome objections.
Meyer cautioned against assuming the backlash will radicalize voters. Recent elections complicate that framing: El-Sayed, who won, ran as data-center-skeptical rather than on a ban, with policies oriented toward an equitable buildout that does not make people’s lives worse, while Hong, who ran on something closer to a statewide moratorium, lost. What voters did demonstrate, he said, is that when they wanted an infrastructure slowdown they knew which side of the political spectrum to turn to. Labor politics complicates matters further, since the buildout has been good for membership in the IBEW and the other electrical trades.
Even Texas Governor Greg Abbott has felt obliged to declare a moratorium, Meyer noted, though it is not one: it requires that data centers be audited and publish certain information, and does not apply to off-grid facilities such as the large Meta data center in the state. Regulation hooked entirely to the power grid carries a similar risk. If the governing frame is preventing electricity rates from rising, developers will be pushed toward the South, closer to the oil patch, and toward off-grid gas — insulating ratepayers while raising emissions and local air pollution.
Meyer suggested using the sector’s enormous demand to finance infrastructure with broader public benefit. He cited a Groundwork Collaborative report proposing an excise tax on data center electricity use to fund a national grid authority capable of building a grid backbone, and mentioned proposals to bury transmission lines, which would reduce wildfire risk, remove an eyesore, and permit a much larger grid. The objective should be to get the companies driving the buildout to build the infrastructure the economy, the public, and the environment need.
AI, oligarchy, and public infrastructure
Taylor argued that complaints about the movement’s incoherence should be measured against the incoherence of the executives at the top, who talk of covering the Earth in data centers and sending them to space while publicly assigning substantial probability to their own technology causing catastrophe. Over the past year, she said, these figures have shown what they value — a subset of humans, and their machines — which is useful material for anyone seeking to indict oligarchy.
She recalled The People’s Platform, her book on the political economy of the internet and social media, in which she felt she pulled her punches because so many people then believed social media would democratize the world. Its argument still holds for AI: the promised benefits require remaking the underlying economy. AI will not solve cancer, she said, if universities, research funding, and scientific infrastructure have been decimated.
Polling alone does not create power. Taylor, an organizer on debt, noted that 90 percent support for canceling medical debt is not the same as 90 percent of Americans organized to do it. The questions are how to build power and how to change people’s thinking. She suggested reviving the Green New Deal, which paired green infrastructure with jobs.
Investment in human care work and public services is among the best available bulwarks. Well-funded public schools reduce susceptibility to arguments for AI tutors; a properly staffed health system makes the robot ob-gyn being pitched in Alabama for areas without rural doctors sound as bad as it is. Technology companies present themselves as solutions to a decaying society, so building what is needed first determines where AI fits afterward.
What moratoria can accomplish
Responding to an audience question about how long a moratorium would need to run, Meyer distinguished the growth of AI from the data center buildout, and said he approaches the latter as an energy and climate story. By Heatmap’s count there are more than five hundred moratoria nationwide at county or municipal level. Some are brief, covering the interval while a county drafts something larger; some are six- or twelve-month policies that get extended indefinitely, since a settled issue is unlikely to be reopened. At the national level, what he called the Bernie view holds that a moratorium is needed to work out regulation and to pace the technology. At the state level, the model is closer to Kathy Hochul’s in New York: a year, technical assistance so communities can negotiate with hyperscalers as counterparties, and state law that lets them do so.
Taylor noted that moratorium demands echo the technology executives themselves — Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei, and Musk have all said in some form that they would pause if they could, before adding that they cannot because of China. She worried more about what the popularity of pauses reveals: a political temperament that no longer believes permanent solutions are available, visible also in calls for a ceasefire rather than an end to a war, and in her own Debt Collective’s demand for a payment pause on student loan collections while the system is fixed.
Rabb questioned whether more time is needed. He wrote his thesis on disinformation, which is commonly framed as a technology problem but was equally a product of decayed social conditions: weak democratic and social practices for disagreeing and deliberating as a community. That pattern maps onto AI. Still, he argued, moratoria and bans are valuable insofar as the campaigns behind them build social cohesion, organizing capacity, and bridges to other struggles — because a society in better condition would be harder for these technologies to damage.
What communities actually want
Hu asked whether the panelists hold a thicker vision behind the fight, or whether local control over what gets built is itself the point.
Rabb said the things communities organize against are the mirror image of what they want. Residents oppose surveillance because they want privacy and control and not to be abducted by ICE; they opposed the data center while asking repeatedly for parks and community infrastructure. The developer understood this well enough to include a “pocket park” beside the facility in its proposal.
Taylor answered that people should have a say in their communities because people matter, and that democracy and this fight are not separable. She contrasted this with the vision of the executives driving the buildout — Musk’s Mars, Bezos’s Blue Origin future of trillions of humans in space with Earth zoned residential and light industrial, and a discarnate politics that treats embodiment as an inconvenience and interacting with other people as something to delegate to agents. These companies are explicit that their competition is daily life itself. Movements are messy, she added, and that is a feature: the task is to build coalitions with unlikely partners and steer them in a progressive direction.
An international question
Meyer closed by observing how much of the present moment rests on assumptions from the early 2010s that failed — that expanding the internet would democratize global life, that consumer devices would deliver leisure — leaving people dependent on technologies they resent but still want. The shared goals, he said, are a life of dignity, freedom, and fairness, and a society that enables them.
He argued that this is no longer solely an American choice. As with climate change, where billions of people are strongly motivated to attain prosperity that until recently required fossil fuels, the relevant question is what an international regime looks like and what is achievable globally — particularly because the opposing case is a national security and arms race argument. The United States, Europe, or some set of democracies might supply a guiding sense of direction, but the conversation has to be held at the most local and the most international levels at once.
Meyer also pointed to Timothy Shenk’s Left Adrift, on the post–Cold War development of left-wing politics, which finds considerable appetite for anti-corporate and economically populist politics. That appetite requires concessions, and it addresses voters who are deeply cross-pressured — wanting dignity and public services while also wanting a job, and feeling allied with an employer in some respects and opposed in others. Organizers understand that better than most, and addressing it is essential.
NOTES
Two counts of local restrictions. Hu cited more than three hundred cities, towns, and counties with bans or moratoria in place; Meyer later cited more than five hundred moratoria nationwide at county or municipal level, according to Heatmap’s data. The figures rest on different bases — bans plus moratoria versus moratoria alone, and an unstated source versus Heatmap’s tracking — and are not necessarily in conflict. Both are reported here as given.
Taylor’s forthcoming book. The Boston Review contributor note describes End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, coauthored with Naomi Klein, as Taylor’s most recent book. Boston Review’s own event listing and the YouTube description both state that it will be published in September 2026, and Taylor refers to it during the panel as “our book.” It is treated here as forthcoming.
Transcript status. Boston Review states that the transcript has not been fully edited and may contain errors. At least one passage in Meyer’s closing remarks is garbled at the point where he characterizes the national security and arms race argument; that sentence is paraphrased above rather than quoted.
Risk estimates attributed to executives. Taylor stated during the panel that Dario Amodei and Musk have each put the likelihood of their technology destroying everything at 20 or 25 percent. The formulation is presented in the transcript as an approximate quotation covering both figures at once, and is summarized above as an acknowledgment of catastrophic risk rather than reproduced as a specific figure attributed to either individual.
RESOURCES
The AI Data Center Backlash — Boston Review’s edited transcript of the panel
Powering Politics — full video recording of the August 17 conversation
The BR Podcast — audio version, also on Spotify
No Data Center in Monterey Park! — the campaign Nicholas Rabb organizes with
Heatmap — Robinson Meyer’s climate and energy outlet, source of the polling and project tracking
Gridlocked — the Groundwork Collaborative report proposing an excise tax on large electricity loads to seed a national grid authority
A.I. Is Now a Major Election Issue — Benjamin Wallace-Wells in The New Yorker, cited by Lily Hu
How Data Centers Broke American Politics — the Wired piece referenced in the opening framing
End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World — Astra Taylor and Naomi Klein, forthcoming September 2026
Sunrise Movement — the Green New Deal campaign Rabb contrasts with bottom-up organizing