Unreal Bird #16: Recess
Short newsletter this issue, and I'll be skipping my September 1 issue. It's the end of August and I'm taking a much-needed recess.
But I am very excited to share with you my latest for Tech Policy Press, "Big Tech's PR Playbook for Overcoming Data Center Opponents."
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What I'm up to
I'll be blunt: The last three weeks have been a sprint. On Friday I hit "send" on a draft report about Ohio's election workforce (an update to the 2024 report I wrote for All Voting is Local); a summary of 17 reports and recommendations for policymakers considering their options during a data center moratorium; and a blog post for the Kettering Foundation looking at what granular crosstab data on social media and democratic attitudes in the United States can tell us about this political moment. (Preview: maybe we should be paying less attention to social media generally and more to where young conservative men specifically spend their time.)
I'm looking forward to hitting "log off." But before I do:
At the start of August, I published (with Sam Totoni of UPitt's CTRLab) a long piece on how the data center industry is responding to community pushback.
This piece was a long time coming. We started with some tips that people were seeing digital astroturfing on social media: fake accounts, fake pages, fake news stories. We found a little of that, but not a lot beyond what has been previously reported. Most of it was attributed to small fry local actors, like a battery storage company, and didn't seem especially high impact.
But the more people we talked to, the more we discovered a pretty ordinary PR playbook—drawn straight from some of the same consultants who worked for big tobacco and big oil. Lots of websites belonging to opaque nonprofits with undisclosed industry ties. Microtargeted social media ads. Mailers with stock models on the front. Overt references to "counterinsurgency" efforts by industry reps. Industry-led community meetings designed to suppress dissent and manufacture specific outcomes.
To the extent any of these activities have been successful, it hasn't been because they persuaded the public. It's because they persuaded local elected officials that they know better than the public.
But zoom out, and municipal desperation for commercial tax revenue isn't an unavoidable state of nature. It's a circumstance manufactured by fifty years of corporate-friendly economic development and tax-hostile publicly policy. When a data center is voted down and officials ask "do you want us to cut the fire department or the police," that's a diagnosis that American leaders have largely given up on any vision for robust public financing. And within that ideological cage, data center lobbyists have a compelling message for local governments—even if it does nothing to move public sentiment.
Field Notes
- "The AI That Hacked Its Way Out and the Hype That Followed It," Kate Klonick.
- What if we stopped covering the OpenAI-Hugging Face hack as a sign of AI's achievements and more as pure spin capable of transforming sloppy safety policies into a marketing narrative? Maybe we'd get better regulatory proposals.
- "Albania's Cheerful 'AI Minister' Is the Product of a Government Agency Under Investigation for Massive Corruption," Lindita Çela.
- Last fall, Albania introduced "Diella," an AI-powered "coruption minister," to he world. Now, OCCRP reports, the procurement process which led to Diella's development is the target of a probe which seized 40 million euros in ill-gotten assets. So I guess we can mark this one down in the "failure" column.
- "A candidate who quit the race still beat Trump's pick in a GOP primary — because of his name," Don Moynihan.
- A Republican named Tom Smith defeated a Trump-endorsed candidate, Amir Hassan, in a Michigan Congressional primary despite dropping out of the race and raising less than $2,000 in campaign contributions. Hassan is Black and a convert from Islam to Christianity. Do I need to paint you a picture? It won't be a pretty one.
Snoot watch
Humble plea
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