Data Center Dysphoria
Fear and Loathing in the Pennsylvania Data Center Resistance Facebook Group
Question: What is the most pressing issue/challenge in the municipality today, and how do you plan to address it?
Answer: Protecting the health of our citizens, the character of our community, and the strength of our tax base from mass housing developments, fracking, and AI Data Centers. The notion that the financial health of the township requires us to accept these projects against the wishes of the residents is a lie. We are only in a position of vulnerability because of the cowardice and collusion of both Republicans and Democrats at the state level, who care more about their political careers than about protecting the interests of the citizens. To address these threats, I will continue to do what I’ve been doing for the past four years: fight to the greatest extent the law allows to put our citizens’ needs first and negotiate aggressively against any corporate interest that threatens to ruin the Indiana Township we know and love.
As I read the answer to the question posed above, it feels like it was written by another person, in a different time. Something uneasy, unsettling creeps in when I think that I was the one who provided that answer to Pittsburgh Tribune Review writer Mike DiVitorrio last October, in an interview just a few weeks before the 2025 election. It’s not that I no longer hold these values or work toward these commitments. In fact, for much of the past two months, I have been swept up in the very kind of local political power struggles described in my answer, a steady stream of municipal conflicts leaving me derelict in my duties as a Substack writer and reader.
What feels so uncanny about that interview is recalling the thought process behind this particular answer, in light of what has come to pass in the months since the article was published. I remember consciously hoping to tie the struggle against AI Data Centers (what at the time felt like a left-wing concern) to the more non-partisan, normie “NIMBY” interests of my constituents, like challenging mass planned residential developments. I wanted to spark interest in an AI issue that still felt fringe, inspiring public pressure to push a Model Data Center Ordinance I had sent to our Township Manager and Solicitor a few months earlier. I wanted action. I wanted the residents of my politically purple community to see that the fight against Data Centers, fracking, and mass housing (that is not sustainable, affordable, or durable) is all part of a broader struggle of the people against a parasitic, “Collusionist” corporate-political order, a ruling elite willing to destroy our sense of home, our public health, and our connection to the natural world, all in the rapacious pursuit of profit thinly veiled behind flimsy justifications based on economic growth, job creation, and alleviation of the housing crisis. Now, seven months later, the AI debate no longer feels so fringe, and the Data Center resistance has exploded into a full-fledged, non-partisan political movement. What makes my well-meaning words from that pre-election interview feel so surreal in June 2026 is that I had no idea seven months ago that the movement I so desperately wanted to emerge would spread at such a dizzying, disorienting, and dangerous rate.
My window into the staggering weirdness of this movement opened in April, when I joined the Facebook group Pennsylvania Data Center Resistance. My own Township had still not passed a Data Center Ordinance to protect our citizens, despite my prodding. I had attended community workshops and mobilization campaigns devoted to building institutional capacity to slow AI encroachment. Many of these community organizing events were led by citizens of the nearby Borough of Springdale, which had been sold out by Governor Josh Shapiro, whose administration had pushed on the town a faceless, hulking Data Center instead of an education center to honor the town’s most famous resident, environmentalist Rachel Carson. It felt like time was running out, and soon my community, Indiana Township, would be the next domino to fall in Big Tech’s accelerationist blitzkrieg toward Artificial General Intelligence.
I joined Pennsylvania Data Center Resistance to find solidarity, inspiration, and insight into how to protect my citizens before it was too late. I found what I was looking for, but so, so much more. Most notably, I found the by far the most thoroughly mutated, schizophrenic, and raucous political formation that I have ever encountered. At first glance, the Pennsylvania Data Center Resistance seems like nothing new, just another bizarre political subculture, an online wormhole spawning the kind of extremism that has steadily destabilized American politics throughout the course of the 21st century. One effect of the Internet Age no one can deny is the growth of echo-chamber communities built around niche political psychosis. But spend an hour or two in the Data Center Resistance group, and you will find a political community unlike any you have encountered before, something fragmenting and scrambling rather than cementing and reinforcing the usual political divisions that have channeled the flow of political extremism in our lifetimes.
Within the Pennsylvania Data Center Resistance community, I saw a few familiar faces, local environmental nonprofit leaders who had provided the Model Ordinance that I submitted to our Township Manager. But I soon encountered characters cast from another side of Facebook, distant reaches of the social media universe I had never seen before. There were former MAGA believers turned heretics, acolytes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie, channeling their repressed desires for Epstein Files vengeance into a new battle against the Billionaire Class, the globalist elites whose presence had emerged out of shadowy human trafficking networks and made itself manifest in hulking hundred-acre development projects overrunning rural America. There were jaded Bernie Bros, posting clips of AOC presenting tap water to the EPA that had been tainted by Meta’s Stanton Springs Data Center in Georgia, and memes of Lenin telling methheads about the precious metals found in GPUs powering local server farms. And then there were MAHA-tinged paranoiacs, still demonizing Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates like it was 2021, warning of chemtrails and geo-engineering, decrying Data Centers as surveillance operations ready to impose the UN 2030 Agenda on the unsuspecting denizens of the heartland. This was a rowdy gathering of ideological misfits and loners, rife with internal tensions but united in a common cause to thwart the individuals and institutions forcing AI Data Centers on their communities. This leaderless movement was neither left-wing nor right-wing, and it sure as hell wasn’t centrist. This was a wingless, acephalous alien creature whose hollowed-out core throbbed with an insatiable hunger for revenge. Joining the Pennsylvania Data Center Resistance felt less like arriving at a political rally or campaign fundraiser, and more like wandering into the rough-and-tumble Mos Eisley Cantina of Star Wars fame.
Immersed in an alien world, I was struck by the notion that the struggle against Data Centers had birthed a political coalition unreal enough to have been birthed by the hallucinations of AI itself. Even while building coalitions and helping distribute Model Ordinances to residents across the Commonwealth, there was an uneasy, disorienting feeling that I couldn’t shake during my time within the Pennsylvania Data Center Resistance, a feeling I could only describe as dysphoria. In recent years, the term dysphoria has most often been applied to the struggle of those who identify as transgender, a sense of unbearable unease caused when one’s sex assigned at birth (according to the heteronormative binary) doesn’t seem to fit with one’s inner sense of gender. Yet dysphoria is a broader psychological condition that can be applied in myriad scenarios. The ICD-11 defines dysphoria as an “unpleasant mood state, which can include feelings of depression, anxiety, discontent, irritability, and unhappiness.” Something like a general mood of political dysphoria hung over the Data Center Resistance community, as individual members struggled with the uneasy anxiety of mobilizing collective action across party lines while questioning their own identities outside the comforts of our typical American binary of Democrat and Republican. As a local politician, I have always built community coalitions across party lines, practically applying the Horseshoe Theory, which suggests greater proximity between the far right and far left than with those in the center. I’ve openly recognized the potential of the Middle American Radical to break free from right-wing prejudices and join in the fight against corporate power. Yet even for a political pragmatist like me, time spent in the Data Center Resistance triggered the dysphoric sense that even the Horseshoe Theory no longer applied, and that the political spectrum was no longer just bent at the ends but had become twisted into a puzzling, non-orientable Möbius Strip.
While interactions within the Data Center Resistance were often tense and disorienting, what brought all of us to this community was a far more sinister, pressing, and general dysphoric condition: conscious awareness of what it means to exist as a human in this Age of AI. The dysphoria of working across familiar political lines is minor compared to the dread of realizing that our political and corporate elites are wagering most of our nation’s wealth on a technology that they themselves do not understand and that they themselves admit could wipe all sentient life off the face of the Earth. The Data Center Resistors have opened their eyes to the truth that their leaders have fallen into cult-like AI Alignment with the forces of Big Tech and Big Oil, those who would threaten human existence itself for no greater assurance than the possibility of sustained quarterly earnings growth. Whether it is Governor Josh Shapiro’s phony GRID standards or his challenger Stacy Garrity’s shamelessly opportunistic flip-flop toward a “pause” on Data Centers, politicians’ performative gestures toward “responsible AI development” are met with jeers by the Resistors. They see the vulgar absurdity of Republicans and Democrats invoking job creation and economic growth justifications for subsidizing a technology that threatens to eliminate millions of jobs and potentially vaporize the growth of not just the economy but of all living things. Data Center Dysphoria is just a natural, rational response to the recognition that we are already living in an unnatural, irrational dystopia.