The One Big Issue That Connects the Data Center and Flock Backlash

At some point this week, a group text seemed to go out across Silicon Valley suggesting that the industry has a major messaging problem. Across the country, city council meetings that otherwise go unattended are suddenly full of rowdy, engaged citizens ready to voice their concerns and frustrations over the encroaching creep of Big Tech in the form of data centers and surveillance systems like Flock Safety’s license plate readers.

The backlash to data centers seems to have reached its fever pitch this week when Liquid Death ran an advertisement with former NFL player and current podcaster Jason Kelce encouraging people to send their piss to data centers. You know you’ve lost the messaging war when a national brand and their celebrity endorser view pissing on you as a safe marketing bet.

Behind the scenes, the panic is setting in. On Wednesday, Axios reported the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent an urgent memo to AI companies warning that they’re getting killed in Ohio on data centers, basically urging the firms to come up with a way to sell these things. Donald Trump, who has refused to back away from data centers, said this week that data centers “could use a little public relations help.”

To address the issue, OpenAI has put up job listings for community engagement leads in Ohio and Georgia tasked with trying to “reduce risk of opposition” to data centers. Meta similarly has put up a job listing for a community engagement manager to build relationships with “key stakeholders in the data center community,” per Bloomberg . But doing that suggests that these companies simply do not understand what they’re up against.

Earlier this month, the same cycle hit Flock and its automated license plate readers that litter communities across the country. After a slew of instances of community members destroying the company’s all-seeing eyes, Flock finally set out to address the issue by sending its CEO out on a press tour. It culminated in the company announcing several policy changes , like reducing its default data retention period and changing the way information is shared across police departments following countless reports of cops abusing the surveillance system to track exes and loved ones.

What’s instructive in these approaches is that the answer offered by Big Tech and its backers is not to back off but rather to find a better sales pitch. The idea is that these poor, uninformed citizens have had their heads clouded with misinformation (maybe from China), and if we just set the record straight, public opinion will turn around.

President Trump, in trying to help right the ship, told media members this week, “If I were a governor or a mayor, I would want that [data center] in my community,” because “the jobs are enormous, and the money paid, the taxes paid, are just enormous.”

But that classic pitch hasn’t resonated with voters—perhaps because they’ve heard it before. Wisconsin, which has become a central hub of the anti-data center sentiment, already got burned by a Big Tech overture back when Foxconn promised its planned LCD screen plant would employ 13,000 workers.