People Have No Idea What They Are Up Against
I've been present at historic inflection points in Cairo, Turkey, Qatar. Now I'm a Maryland reporter watching communities take on some of the most powerful forces in America over AI data centers.
Maybe I’m getting old, but they looked like kids.
With their blue hair, acne-laced faces, and septum piercings. But I suppose it takes a bit of the idealism that is granted through youth to arrange protests against some of the most powerful forces in the United States.
For the last few months, I have been covering a community uprising that sprouted in a Maryland suburb that most people can’t even find on a map. In a lot of ways it is reflective of protests that are sprouting up across the country.
If there was a man versus machine story to be told in 2026, this fight against AI data centers is it. There’s complexity, nuance, and tons of layers.
The symbol of tech hate
Data centers are massive warehouses filled with computer servers that power everything from your email to ChatGPT to TikTok. For a lot of people, they have become the physical representation of everything they hate about technology.
The hyperscale ones are sprouting up around the country at a rapid pace. I can’t think of another type of development going up as quickly and with as much capital as data centers. No malls. No office buildings. No restaurants.
And funny enough, northern Virginia in the DMV region has become ground zero for this. The area makes up about 13% of all reported data center operational capacity globally. And developers started the process of building them out in Maryland.
Why am I so obsessed with data centers?
But surprisingly, different groups in Maryland have formed unusual alliances and collectively pushed back on these developments.
And in covering this topic, I have become obsessed. Mostly because I tend to want to understand complex systems around me, and this shit is an incredible web of special interests.
I wonder how to get everyone to pause and see what I see. On one side you’ve got the obvious suspects, developers, certain politicians, union reps looking for construction jobs. On the other, the strangest coalition I’ve ever seen, socialists, farmers, environmentalists, and people who just opened their electricity bill and lost their minds.
You also have a few parties that don’t fit neatly into for or against, but are complex players with a big role in this fight — like PJM Interconnection, the electric grid operator for the mid-Atlantic.
I have done on and off the record interviews with people from all sides of this and I can confidently say that most people who are protesting have no idea what they are up against. It is insane to me that I happen to be the local reporter at this moment, at ground zero, documenting all of this in real time. Being let into something most people can’t yet see, and trying to figure out how to make them see it.
Caught at an inflection point
I feel like I have a habit of being places during rare inflection points. As a college student, I left Cairo right before the revolution that overthrew Mubarak. During my time in Turkey, the Gezi Park protests broke out, one of the largest movements to restore democratic rule. While in the Gulf States, I found myself at the forefront of the end of the war in Afghanistan, as Qatar became the landing point for over 100,000 Afghans fleeing the Taliban takeover.
If you haven’t been paying attention, the United States is at an inflection point in so many ways. And a lot of the action happens to be right where I live in the DMV. What happens with the midterms, what happens with AI, what happens with data centers, and what happens with these protests will steer the country into its next era and significantly shape the reality our children experience.
Each day I have been writing a page, documenting what I am learning from interviews. I’m not sure what it will all turn into — a book? A podcast series? Neither? Both?
What I do know is that every time I untangle a piece of this web, I have a hard time sleeping.
In a 1962 New York Times essay, James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
That’s what I’m trying to do here. Help people face it. Face it myself. All of it.
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