Joe Allen wants to know what the robot’s name is. At first, I think the double whiskey we downed at the hotel bar must be getting to him, as he sprints like a kid at recess toward a delivery vehicle. I’m anxious about the time: I’m supposed to be driving Allen to the airport, my Hail Mary effort to get him alone for a proper conversation before he leaves Atlanta.
I’ve been back and forth with Allen, who rose to national prominence as the anti-tech prophet on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, for a few weeks now, seeking an entry into the growing movement against AI. I’d come down to Georgia, a hot spot of data center resistance, to hear one of Allen’s lectures, which he’s been giving at locations across the country. But when I got to the event, he told me he had to leave immediately after.
Fortunately, his flight keeps getting pushed back, which means I can follow him around on various side quests—like this one, to meet some friends at a nearby restaurant. He manages to evade most of my questions about their identities, changing the topic to more interesting things, like the “inverse singularity” (his idea that humanity will approach a point where our intellect and creativity collapse as we rely increasingly on AI for information). Allen’s friends at the restaurant have similarly little information about me, it seems. On our way, one of them calls Allen to ask for an ETA. “I’m bringing a friend—well, a frenemy,” he says, giving me a dramatic side-eye.
There are delivery robots all over downtown Atlanta, one of a handful of major metropolitan areas where they’re being rolled out to bring people burgers or tacos. Allen catches up to this one—which, I’m alarmed to see, has luminous white lights shaped like eyes on its front—and reads a name off the side: “CJ.” I think of the title of Allen’s recent book, Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity, and wonder what happened to the delivery worker that this robot replaced. Its eyes look pathetically, limply, past me.
When people ask what I’m doing in Georgia, I give them something easy. People hate data centers, I say, so I’m trying to figure out if they hate AI too. That’s all true. But the topic has also consumed me. In all my years of reporting on energy and the environment, I have never seen anything like the type of vitriol leveled at data centers, or the near-religious fury that has built up around their construction, or the way this resistance seems to be uniting people from the complete opposite ends of the political spectrum.
As I’m writing this piece, a friend sends me a post from a “white Christian nationalism” account on X: a seemingly AI-generated cartoon of Smokey Bear standing in front of a burning data-center-like structure, with the text “ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT DATA CENTERS.” What is happening? my friend asks. I’ll try to explain.
Once upon a time, you may have been living next to a data center and never heard anything about it.
For the past few decades, data centers have been quietly built all over the US, largely in areas with both fiber connectivity and proximity to power—Silicon Valley and the DC area were popular choices. They helped stream Netflix or store stuff in the cloud or do any one of the countless stupid and important things we all do constantly online. Then came ChatGPT and the AI race. Suddenly, tech oligarchs argued, we needed to build as many data centers as possible—and fast. Making the best AI, they said in speeches and news interviews and social media posts, required a massive buildout, especially of hyperscalers—behemoth versions of the structures we already had. The Trump administration bought in, rolling back environmental regulations to get the government out of the way of development.
Data centers began cropping up everywhere, as companies hurried to find the cheapest land, power, and water. Every day brought a splashier headline. Elon Musk reportedly trucked in unpermitted gas turbines to his Memphis xAI campus, located in a majority-Black neighborhood already suffering from high levels of pollution and contamination. A popular (later disputed) Washington Post article estimated that a single ChatGPT search guzzled the equivalent of a bottle of water. People eyed their electric bills as new data center loads caused utilities to forecast sky-high demand. If you trusted various economic outlets, data center construction now underpinned pretty much the entire US economy. All of this as tech CEOs publicly mused about how AI would take everyone’s jobs and replace human creativity itself.
People, naturally, started to ask questions.
Data center resistance certainly has some of its roots in classic NIMBYism: Lots of Americans simply don’t trust stuff being built, in their backyards, by powerful companies for mysterious purposes. But the pace of the outrage that’s built up around the country is shocking. A recent Gallup poll showed that 70 percent of Americans would somewhat oppose or strongly oppose data center construction in their area. In the past few months, we’ve seen an attack on a pro-data-center council member (Indianapolis’ Ron Gibson); an attack on a tech CEO (OpenAI’s Sam Altman); data center moratoriums introduced in at least a dozen states (including Georgia) and passed in one (New York); and countless cities and counties passing their own bans or moratoriums, including in deep-red places like Hill County, Texas. People have been either arrested, detained, or escorted out while protesting data centers at public meetings in New Jersey, California, Wisconsin, and Indiana.
When I started reporting on data centers last year, Washington was, seemingly, completely unprepared for the backlash. It was unprepared for anything AI-related, really—small wonder for a Congress full of folks so old they can barely work their phones. Two of the first national politicians who I saw call out data center development were the right-wing populists Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie, who worried about how a proposed 10-year ban on state-level AI regulations could be leveraged to build data centers on private property. “Forcing eminent domain on people’s private properties to link the future Skynet is not very Republican,” Greene tweeted in June 2025.
Meanwhile, Steve Bannon, Trump’s erstwhile former adviser and a longtime critic of technology, was regularly addressing AI on War Room under Allen’s guidance. At the end of 2025, when the Trump administration tried to re-up a ban on regulation, a MAGA coalition, led by Bannon, was the one to stop it. Bannon told ABC News last fall that Allen was a key part of his plan: “He’s going to every conference possible, meeting people ... and I told him, I want you to go to every church that asks you. I want you to go to MAGA, Tea Party meetings. I want to get the base in the loop on this at the ground floor.”
Anger against data centers and public anxieties about AI are usually treated in polling and policy as separate topics: one an expression of environmental and civic worries, the other concerns about job loss and chatbots. But there's growing evidence that it's not so clear-cut. Research published in June of a small sample size of voters, for example, shows that very few people opposed to data centers actually live near them, and most of those who are against data centers are also skeptical of AI. Bannon, it seems, did a better job reading the room about how the American right might rebel against data centers, airing one segment last year that described data centers as “weapons labs” that are “being turned onto the population.”
I couldn’t shake the feeling that the populist right knew something I didn’t—about AI, about Americans’ attitudes to tech and the built environment. Even about where we might be going with all of this. That’s why, back in January, I first reached out to Allen.
Joe Allen has startlingly blue eyes behind professorial glasses and the shit-eating grin of the guy in high school who likes to tell non-PC jokes. He also has an origin story that’s catnip to lamestream media journalists like me. (And to less lamestream ones, apparently: When I ran into Allen at an event in New York, he was accompanied by Suzy Weiss from the Free Press, who informed me that she was also profiling Allen.) After touring internationally for years as a rigger for musical acts like the Black Eyed Peas and Calvin Harris, with a brief to get a master’s in theology from Boston University, Allen watched the music industry collapse during Covid. He’d been writing about the evils of technology, a long-standing interest of his, for far-right and far-left outlets, and he was living in a van in 2021 when Steve Bannon’s producer called to invite him on War Room; Bannon offered him a job as a tech correspondent shortly afterward. At one point, Allen was living at the apartment in DC where War Room is recorded.
The world of AI safety and ethics is incestuous, almost completely inaccessible to normies, and full of people who live mostly in London or the Bay Area. (Many high-profile AI safety researchers, in fact, are headquartered in one office block in Berkeley.) They all argue with each other about whether we’re going to be annihilated by an all-knowing superintelligence and should therefore slow down or halt AI development, or whether that same superintelligence will lead us to Nirvana and should therefore be developed as fast as possible.
Allen arrived in this world as an outsider, able to speak its nerdy language with a mass-appeal, conspiracy-tinted flair. Since his book on transhumanism was published in 2023, Allen has interviewed AI critic Gary Marcus, debated futurist Max More and tech ethicist Nell Watson, and given a talk with a top official from the Golden Gate Institute for AI. The same day that Max Tegmark, an AI safety scholar and the leader of the Future of Life Institute, did an event with Bernie Sanders, he appeared on War Room with Allen and Bannon. The AI safety people began posting about Allen “in all their group chats,” one AI advocacy organization staffer told me. “Now everybody’s like, Joe! Joe! Joe!”
In late 2025, the Center for AI Safety recruited Allen to advise a bipartisan group on AI safety, dubbing it “Humans First,” a term Allen had been using as a kind of rallying cry. The organization’s goal was to figure out how to galvanize regular people around AI, to demand that politicians in Washington put guardrails on a technology that threatens to potentially upend the existence and purpose of humanity. (No pressure.) The event that brought me to Georgia was the second leg of Humans First’s maiden voyage, fresh off a few stops in Florida.
A motley audience filled about half a lecture hall at Georgia Tech that evening. Some were students, including members of a nascent AI safety club that had invited Allen. (Two told me they’d come only because of the posters put up around campus.) A camera guy from More Perfect Union, the leftist content channel that’s become a central hub for anti-data-center videos, hung around filming. Also in attendance was a well-heeled group of Atlantans in their thirties: two women with glossy, long hair and, seemingly, their partners.
Up front, Jeremy Ornstein, a slight Humans First staffer with wild hair, started us off. Like a surprising number of Humans First staffers, Ornstein has a background in climate organizing. It showed: “A tiny group of people in control are racing ahead faster than ever with power and profit,” he warned, in a familiar, almost Obama-style cadence.
Then Allen, sporting a belt with a big American flag buckle, strode up with a “Howdy, Georgia.” He stood before a whiteboard on which, earlier that day, he’d doodled a little Jetsons-style robot, a cheerful expression on its face as it aimed what looked like a ray gun at a group of stick figures with dazed expressions on their faces. “HUMANS FIRST,” Allen had written in big bubble letters, underlined four times.
Allen played clips of Sam Altman intercut with footage of Marshall Applewhite, the leader of Heaven’s Gate. He told us, in his booming east Tennessee drawl, that Heaven’s Gate believers are a good metaphor for what AI leaders believe: Humanity must leave behind our physical bodies to ascend to the heavens, to meet the superintelligent beings living on the other side of the Hale-Bopp Comet. Everyone laughed a little nervously.
Allen’s lectures follow a familiar pattern: jarringly right-wing talking points (at Georgia Tech, a Great Replacement joke!) smashed together with hallucinogenic nightmare descriptions of our future (the idea that a globalist cabal of tech oligarchs want to replace all of humanity with robots). A lot of it can sound completely insane, until you remember: Oh, right. Elon Musk does own a brain-chip implantation company. Sam Altman has blogged about how humans will “be the biological boot for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch.”
“Even if they were to create machines that were smarter than you, even if they created machines more powerful than you, you would have to continue to fight, because if you don't, you're a weakling,” Allen told the room. “If you don’t, you lay down and let the machine roll over you like a monster truck in a white-trash arena, and no one, no one wants that. No one but the most masochistic person wants that.” I found myself, surprisingly, suddenly, on the same page. Yeah! Hell yeah!
Allen ended the speech with a cri de coeur: “To the greenies in the room, I say, Earth first! Right? Greenies?” (Not sure if that was directed at me.) “To the patriots in the room, I say, America first! And for anyone in the room with blood pulsing in their veins, anyone in the room with fire in their minds and hearts, you have to remember, in a machine age, humans first.” I nearly leaped to my feet.
The “friends” Allen is now dragging me to meet turn out to be the well-dressed Atlantans I spotted at the talk, whom Allen had also just met. As he and I chase robots and drink whiskey before joining them, I ask if he has any nice memories of technology. He rattles off a couple typical alt-Gen-X-kid experiences: looking at Jane’s Addiction and Marilyn Manson’s websites; visiting a nascent Rotten.com. But the real shining moment in his relationship with the internet, Allen says, was discovering Ted Kaczynski.
In his book, Allen vividly recalls coming across the Unabomber’s manifesto in the late 1990s while “surfing the web” at his community college writing lab. Kaczynski, a brilliant mathematician undone by the failings of the modern world, wrote “Industrial Society and Its Future” while mailing bombs to universities and business executives; The Washington Post and The New York Times were both encouraged to publish the manifesto as a way to make him stop. “Uncle Ted made more sense than any peacenik or techie cares to admit,” Allen writes.
The influence is apparent. On War Room, Allen acts the part of a preacher at the pulpit warning us all of the coming dystopian age. A lot of his work is somewhat adjacent to body horror: What happens to our souls, he wonders, when our bodies and environments are increasingly digitized? I ask him why he thinks people hate data centers. He says: “If you ever see a fetus growing, and you see the brain growing and the neurons forming—it's amazing. Data centers, if you think about them as neurons of the Antichrist, that’s what we’re witnessing. The false messiah.”
As we arrive at the restaurant, Allen’s new “friends” make space at their table and order some bread. One of them is Hannah Cox, a political influencer with more than 100,000 followers on X. Cox’s husband works in tech and, she tells me, has been “completely blackpilled” by the possibility of AI taking everyone’s jobs. Cox herself is “politically homeless” and came to Allen’s talk even though he’s not, she says, someone she’d usually listen to.
Cox and I have very different social media feeds. When I follow up with her later, as the data center furor in Georgia reaches new heights, she tells me that everyone on her timeline seems to have agreed that data centers are being installed to conduct surveillance on the population. “It’s, I feel like, a ubiquitous fear,” she says. “Like it’s almost a bygone conclusion.”
Two days after I drop Allen off at the airport, I drive out to Troup County, about an hour and a half south of Atlanta, to meet with a local activist named Gage Bailey. Although I arrive at the coffee shop 10 minutes early, Bailey is waiting for me. A stack of documents sits in front of him, color-coded in different highlighters, next to a massive iced drink with a bunch of whipped cream piled on top.
Bailey, a Democrat with a degree in environmental science, first heard about data centers coming to town in the spring of 2025, when an acquaintance told him about one that might pop up on land that was formerly used by an industrial plastics developer. There were, he says, next to no public details about the project—how much power it was going to use, how much water it might draw from the local aquifer. He started doing research, compiling a 13-page memo extensively footnoted with primary sources, about the environmental impacts of data centers.
Like many of the earliest folks involved in the movement, much of which has its origins in environmental concerns spread by groups like local Sierra Club chapters, Bailey began networking with fellow environmental advocates, learning to file public records requests by trial and error. Now, he manages a 4,000-person Facebook group and has helped with anti-data-center efforts in neighboring counties. His co-moderator is running for local office as a Democrat on an anti-data-center platform.
There are a surprising number of Gage Baileys across Georgia, and more are rising up each day. National membership in data center opposition groups on Facebook has exploded in recent months, from under 100,000 in December to more than 500,000 by July. They’re not all Earth-hugging lefties. Shortly after I have coffee with Bailey, a woman in nearby Coweta County goes viral on right-wing media sounding the alarm that Georgia Power, the state’s deeply unpopular utility, is using various tactics to destroy her home and set up transmission lines for a data center—seemingly fulfilling Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Skynet prophecy.
Bailey is hardly the type to watch War Room—he’s focused more on the slog of passing local ordinances than on Allen’s nightmarish visions of our robotic future. But as we talk, I wonder how Allen’s statements about tech oligarchs might land with him. Bailey learned last year that Google was the eventual tenant of the nearby data center project. He and some other environmental advocates had one meeting with Google in November, but afterward the tech giant ghosted them. Working with the company is “not going well,” he tells me. (In a statement to WIRED, Jamal Jessie, an Atlanta-based manager of community and workforce development at Google, said the company was focused on “direct, collaborative engagement with local schools, nonprofits, and civic organizations to deliver tangible regional benefits” and had formed a “$1 million partnership” with a local group helping people with their energy bills.) Bailey, who hasn’t been able to find a job in environmental science and works full-time at a convenience store, has a lot of ire for the world’s most powerful corporations trying to build AI in his backyard. “I don’t see a scenario, at least in the immediate future, in which we’re going to be able to trust these tech companies,” he says.
Bailey’s Facebook group is still growing, and there’s been minimal political unrest so far, he says: Right or left, all members are opposed to data centers, and most of them are deeply skeptical of AI. These unlikely coalitions seem to be holding strong outside of Troup County, too. At a recent anti-data-center demonstration in New Jersey, I asked one mask-wearing protester—who told me they use “any” pronouns and are deeply concerned about the “ethics” of AI—about the right-wing influence on the movement. They shrugged uneasily. “Any enemy of my enemy is, at least, my temporary ally,” they said.
After Atlanta, I can’t stop thinking about the Unabomber, so I brush up on his manifesto. I’d forgotten just how much Kaczynski blames “modern leftism”—with its advocacy for gay rights, feminism, and the like—for the “craziness of our world.” (To be fair, he was an equal-opportunity hater, writing that conservatives “are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth.”) For Kaczynski, leftism was an inevitable byproduct of modern society, which pits humans against the natural order of the world and must be resisted.
Kaczynski was, obviously, not someone to be emulated. But the idea that technology has a role in eroding our humanity is not an unpopular one. My girlfriend tells me a story about her high school English class: Her teacher handed out copies of two anonymized essays—one, a neatly organized dissertation about the pitfalls of technology; the other, a screed warning about the end of the world—and asked students to determine which was written by a sane person. The class overwhelmingly picked the essay about technology, and everyone agreed that the author had a great point. It was, of course, a trick question: Both were written by unreliable narrators, and the essay that resonated was an excerpt from “Industrial Society and Its Future.” Twenty years later, Luigi Mangione, who became an internet folk hero after allegedly shooting a UnitedHealthcare executive in late 2024, left a positive review of Kaczynski’s essay on GoodReads. Last year, PCMag—hardly a bastion of leftist anti-tech thinking—published an essay titled “The Unabomber Was Right.” As Allen writes in his book, Kaczynski also left a mark on some high-profile tech thinkers, including Ray Kurzweil, who wrote in 2000 that Kaczynski was “correct on the deeply entangled nature of the benefits and risks” of technology.
There are echoes of Kaczynski, I think, in the resistance to renewable energy. In states like Vermont, it has turned crunchy hippie types against technology like solar and wind, and this resistance is now baked into some of the DNA of the anti-data-center movement. A 2025 study found that more than 450 counties and municipalities across nearly all states had some sort of solar or wind restrictions in place, a 16 percent increase from the year before. The Make America Healthy Again movement, too, can be viewed as an expression of a Kaczynski-esque environmentalism: the idea that modern society is poisoning our land, air, and water and that modern inventions like vaccines or antidepressants are actually bad for us. Many of these ideas can often collide in strange places. Currently, one of the top Substack writers in the site’s Climate and Environment category is a green-living farmer who has gone on the attack in recent months against solar installations in upstate New York, claiming (misleadingly) that the panels can poison the soil and destroy farmland.
Allen’s book is a wilder read than “Industrial Society and Its Future.” The appendix, titled “My 55-Point Plan to Stay Human,” with suggestions like “Say hello to your neighbors” and “Buy a flip phone,” would be a hit at any leftist reading group in 2026 (perhaps with an edit to remove Allen’s insistence on “secure borders”). I agree with his assertion, moreover, that “it’s easy to imagine a day when … the specter of deadly AI is used to clamp down on freedom and erect miserable technocratic systems.” I do not, however, think the Covid-19 pandemic or “climate change” are examples of this already happening. Jennifer Bilek, a prominent anti-trans writer who claims that the medical-industrial complex has “infiltrated” gay and lesbian communities to push “transgenderism,” blurbed Allen’s book. When Allen recommends that I talk to her, I make an offhand remark that I don’t think she’d like me very much. “Oh, right,” he says, wiggling his eyebrows at me and referencing the pronouns listed on my X bio. “‘They/them.’”
Right-wing anti-globalism isn’t the only way to do anti-AI populism, of course. The scholars Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres argue that the development of AI is mostly an excuse for the wealthy and powerful to exploit existing inequalities and push a eugenic agenda. (Gebru and Torres have also criticized AI safety groups, including the Center for AI Safety, which has given money to Humans First.) There’s also the religious way. In May, Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas, his encyclical on AI, which advises humanity to develop technology responsibly and always be aware of the primacy of humanity. Like clockwork, a post popped up on my X feed of a photo of the Unabomber split with a photo of Leo. “You killed the man … But not the idea,” the caption read.
Data centers, which are bringing together the most disparate neighbors in all regions of the country, may represent an opportunity to wage a real, unified fight against tech oligarchs. There’s a dream here, evident even in the pages of The New York Times, which in early May ran a headline that called data centers “the most bipartisan issue since beer.” The movement seems to envision a middle ground between rejecting technology wholesale—of truly Unabombering out—and rolling over and giving Big Tech everything it wants. But even if this middle ground does exist, it’s going to be a journey to reach it—one that our political system might not be prepared for.
In the weeks after I return from Georgia, it feels like the mainstream right fully takes over the data center conversation. People like Tucker Carlson and Matt Walsh make viral videos questioning the construction of specific projects. (By the way, Allen specifically wanted me to get this on the record: “Matt Walsh should have his beard plucked out like an Egyptian priest and be forced to kneel before Osiris. He copies my fucking shit all the time.” Walsh, through a spokesperson, disputes this.) Nancy Mace, running for governor in South Carolina, announces that she supports a yearlong moratorium. Florida governor Ron DeSantis, an outspoken AI and data center critic, signs first-of-its-kind legislation to ensure, in part, “that local governments maintain the authority to reject data center development in their communities.”
Politics comes for Humans First too. In late March, there’s a high-profile spat online where pro-AI White House allies like Marc Andreessen and David Sacks retweet a piece critical of Humans First. Shortly after, the organization splits along partisan lines. The conservative wing keeps the Humans First name and makes the right-wing political activist Amy Kremer, who helped organize the January 6 “Save America” rally in DC, its chair; Allen leaves the group. When I ask Allen about the changeup, he is curiously coy (but characteristically body-horrible): The group was “undergoing mitosis,” he says. “I am now a lone organelle floating in the residual cytoplasm.”
In mid-April, I go to DC for a Humans First event billed as the kickoff for the conservative arm. While I’m in town, I have this idea of taking Allen to visit an area of northern Virginia colloquially referred to as Data Center Alley, the densest stretch of data centers in the world, just about an hour outside the city. I reach out to a few operators to see if anyone will let us inside. It’s a weird email to send: I know everyone hates you right now, but could you let me into your facility to reassure everyone it’s not filled with poisonous water and haunted spirits? Almost immediately I receive polite nos. It’s for security reasons, one representative says.
I end up driving around Data Center Alley anyway. (Allen is too busy to come.) I’m prepared to be a little underwhelmed—data centers are, as I’ve told countless people, just buildings. But I’m genuinely shocked by the sheer density of what’s here, how much construction I see, how impossibly big the buildings look edging up on the neatly manicured lawns of the wealthy northern Virginia suburbs. One of them, a Vantage facility partly painted a beautiful deep blue, is so loud that I can hear a constant, low-level hum even in the cul-de-sac across the street. I don’t know it yet, but months from now, Humans First will organize a national day of protest against data centers, with events in nearly 150 counties across 42 states.
I park my car in the cul-de-sac and take out my notes from the night before, on a speech at the Humans First event given by a woman named Alicia Shamblin. Her 23-year-old son, Zane, killed himself last year after drinking hard ciders and talking to ChatGPT for hours; she and her husband are now suing OpenAI. Got his masters’ degree a few months earlier, my notes read. ChatGPT told him “Rest easy, king.” I wonder from which data center the LLM had sent that last message.
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