D*m*nic. A British living here for the last 5 years but entered the bakery for the first time today.

L*vi like the jeans, who is a vegan from Texas, with Mexican heritage, who was well-versed in recent viral news of a Singaporean woman who talked about her boyfriend not being her physical type but was also mindful about not adding to the existing misogynistic hate directed at Erica Kirk.

V*n**ss*, who works in tech and M*rk, a dog trainer and forest tour guide.

I like remembering people and their names.

تاريخ النشر: 11:28 فجر الخميس 30 صفر 1448 [بحسب التقويم وننتظر إعلان التاريخ الشرعي من المحكمة]

خلاصة:

تولد الخبرة من أعمالٍ نزاولها ونحسنها بعد حين، لا من نطاقٍ ضيق، أو وصف وظيفي قاصر، أو اسمٍ كبير أو لقب صغير. خلاصة تجربة مهنية بلغت سبعة أعوام ونصف أو تزيد في سوق العمل. ليست دقيقة تنقضي قبل أن ينفتح باب المصعد، لكنها دقائق تساعدك أيضًا على تأمل مسارك المهني مستقيمًا كان أم متعرجًا.

مقدمة:

اشتد تعرج مساري المهني في العام الماضي 1447، واقترن السؤال عنه في المقابلات بصمتٍ يعاقبني بالرفض. ولم تزل إجاباتي -وإن صدقت- شبهة قوية للسائلين على مرافعة دفاعية أنتهض بها للاعتذار عن شيءٍ لا يعتذر منه وليس لي يدٌ فيه أو في أكثره. وما أضيق وقت المقابلات الوظيفية عن الشرح والتعليل والبيان الصادق لما جرى في الماضي.

أحدثكم اليوم عن جمالٍ يتوارى في المسار المتعرج، وعن خبرة تراكمت في مهماتٍ ووظائف لم تكن في الوصف الوظيفي، ومسؤوليات تجاوزت مسؤوليتي المحدودة، ومشروعات ليست في نطاق العمل.

وألحق بالمقال نموذجًا من سيرتي المهنية لمن أراد العلم والعمل بمقتضى العلم.

1- لا تعليق بعد اليوم: استخراج الذهب في قطاع تقنية المعلومات (14-3-1446)

لم يكن من شأني وقد انضممت حديثًا إلى تلك الشركة أن أشتغل بتصنيفها الفني عند هيئة الحكومة الرقمية. لكن رئيس الشركة عهد إلي بمتابعة ذلك الملف العالق لما نالت الشركة أقل مما تستحقه، وكان ينبغي أن تنال التصنيف الذهبي. فشمرت عن ساعدي واشتغلت بتحديث ملفات الشركة، وحسن عرضها، وتتبع ما نقص من شهاداتها ووثائقها، وإعادة رفعه في المنصة، ومواصلة الهيئة بين الحين والآخر.

اشتغلت بالمشروع شهرين ونصف الشهر حتى تحقق الهدف بحمد الله في عصرٍ من الثلاثاء في ثالث شهور السنة [ربيع الأول 1446]. وكان مشروع رفع التصنيف الفني خدمة تضطلع بها مكاتب وشركات وتتقاضى عليها الأموال الطائلة. فحمدت الله عز وجل على عملٍ ناجحٍ تنوء به المكاتب.

لم ألتفت إلى ما أنجزته حتى حدثت به أحد الأصدقاء ذات صباح، فأخبر زملائه عني، وسألوني أن أقدم إليهم عرضًا فنيًا وماليًا. وكاد أن يتم الأمر لولا مشيئة الله.

2- اربط لتضبط: قائمة متجددة لشراكات محلية ودولية (1445/1 – 1445/6)

دخلت إلى دنيا المناقصات وعالم العروض الفنية في منتصف عام 1444. وكان مما أدركته أن منظمة واحدة -وإن كانت كبيرة هائلة- لا تستطيع أن تعمل وحدها على أكثر الفرص التي تناسبها. وعرفت أن نجاح الشراكة شراكة في النجاح.

لم يكن من وصفي الوظيفي متابعة الشراكات القائمة وإدارة علاقات الموردين. إذ كان عندنا قسم المشتريات، والمطلوب مني -ومن سائر الفريق- تقويم المنافسات المختارة من منصة اعتماد، وإعداد ما يناسبها من العروض الفنية والمالية.

لم نتخصص في المجالات التي نخوضها، وكنا نعوِّل كثيرًا على شركاء متشاكسين محليين ودوليين.

ولم يلبث مدير القسم حتى انتخبني لإعداد قائمة الشركاء في الحال والمآل مقترنين بالحلول والخدمات التي يقدمونها.

اشتغلت بمشروع إقامة الشراكات وتقويمها شهرًا أو شهرين، وكان علي أن أتصل بالشركات وأن أبحث عمن يمثلهم في المملكة العربية السعودية أو منطقة الخليج.

وأعجب من ذلك أنني أنفقت بعض أيامي في اجتياز شهادة لإحدى الشركات العالمية، ونجحت في اختبارها بعد شق الأنفس وأعنت زميلًا لي على ذلك.

أفادتني هذه الخبرة كثيرًا بحمد الله، فكانت سببًا ساقه الله إلي لأترشح إلى وظائف المبيعات وبناء الشركات.

الربط سبب وثيق إلى الضبط [1].

3- تقدم إذا تأخر غيرك: المشاركة في إدارة مشروع تقني كبير (1443/6 – 1444/6)

عامٌ مضى في وظيفة أتقنتها، واجتهدت في أداء مهماتها، فلم تزدني الشركة هللة واحدة رغم إلحاحي ومطالبي. كنا نشتغل ببناء ذكاء الذكاء قبل أن يعرف الناس عنه شيئًا. وكنا نعلمه الكلام ونختبر قدرته على الاستجابة، وندربه على عبارات مختلفة عربية وإنجليزية فصحى وعامية.

تخصصت في بناء المحتوى النصي لبرمجيات المحادثة الآلية [شات بوتس Chatbots]، واستطعت أن أزودها بنماذج متعددة من المدخلات والاستفسارات على هيئة (intents, utterances, and queries) ولا داعي لكتابة الكلمات بحروف كبيرة. خطوة مهدت لي التعرف إلى التعلم العميق (deep learning) والذكاء التوليدي (generative AI).

والمقصود أنني اضطلعت بقدرٍ لا بأس به من مهمات إدارة مشروع تقني كبير (وتفاصيله في سيرتي الذاتية الكاملة التي تحصل عليها إذا راسلتني في البريد hijriman47@keemail.me).

استنابني مدير المشروع وكذلك مدير الفريق فصرت أشهد الصراع على المشروع في ساحات الحرب كما يسمونها بالإنجليزية (war rooms) وأفاوض العميل والشركة التي تولت المشروع وكذا فريق الجودة والاختبار.

كنت أتلقى التذكرة في جيرا (Jira) بالواسطة أول الأمر ثم آلت إلي الإجابة عنها، وإغلاقها في وقت محدد يسير، وصرت أباشرها بنفسي في كثيرٍ من الأحيان.

أدركت بنفسي كما لم أدرك من قبل في دورات إدارة المشروعات PMP كيف يتجاذب العميل ومدير المشروع المتطلبات، وكيف تصير الأهداف المتفق عليها سببًا في نزاع مستمر.

أردنا أن نقدم للعميل برنامجًا للمحادثة الآلية يغني عملاءه عن إشغال الموظفين بالطلبات اليسيرة المتكررة، والعجيب أننا لم نملك وسيلة لأتمتة إجراءات البناء والاختيار. اللهم إلا نظامًا يسيرًا بنيته في إكسل Excel من مايكروسوفت لتسريع الإدخال والاختبار.

خبرة تمنيت أن أستثمرها لما أردت الانتقال من الشركة سوى أنني انحصرت في اسم الوظيفة الضيق، وأحبطني قلة التقدير الذي لقيته في نهاية المطاف!

4- شذرات من التجارب (1444/6 – 1448/1)

أ- تكيفٌ بلا حدود: تعرفت إلى مبادئ أتمتة الإجراءات (RPA)، فاستعملت باستعمال باور أوتوميت (Power Automate) لتسريع العمل في السير الذاتية. إذ كانت تعبئتها وإلحاقها بالعروض الفنية استنزافًا للوقت وإرهاقًا للأصابع وإجهادًا في غير فائدة.

طريقة بذلتها إلى زميلٍ ما لما غادرت الشركة، ولم تصلح في شركة أخرى لأنها تستعمل باوربوينت (PowerPoint). لم أجد حلًا قليل التكلفة، فاستبدلت الأتمتة بنصفها وحسنت القوالب لتتسع لعروض أخرى، وأضفت إليها مواضع (placeholders) يسهل تعبئتها بالكلمات الدالة على الجهة والمشروع ومدته واسمه وغير ذلك.

ب- القلم يرفعنا: لم يفارقني القلم يومًا في أعمالي ووظائفي، فكم حررت وراجعت صفحات المواقع (Webpages)، ومذكرات التفاهم (MoUs)، واتفاقيات عدم الإفصاح (NDAs)، والترجمات من العربية إلى الإنجليزية وبعكس ذلك. ولذلك كتبت ستة (6) تقارير في مشروعٍ تريد الشركة أن تحرك مدفوعاته الراكدة، ودفعت إليهم ثلاثة (3) مستندات عربية وإنجليزية مطلوبة للطرح المالي.

لست أنكر أنني أفدت من أدوات الذكاء التوليدي حينها، لا سيما أن بعض أهل الإدارة كانوا يظنونها مفتاحًا لكل المغاليق، وحلًا للمشكلات، وابتكارًا للمخارج السريعة.

والله يعلم أنني لا أحب أن أسيئ في كتابتي، وأحملها على عاتقي، وأنظر بنفسي في المعلومات الواردة، وأتثبت من صحتها (fact-checking) لئلا يسأل عن كاتبها على سبيل الذم والحط.

لست أنسى تلك المقالات المترجمة التي دفعت إلي لأحررها متطوعًا فلم أقنع بعيوبها السطحية، بل نفذت إلى أصولها، وقارنتها، وقدمت لطالب التحرير تقريرًا بشيءٍ من التفصيل في عيوب الترجمة وأخطائها الشنيعة.

ج- البيانات كاشفة: مكنتني إدارة المناقصات من المشاركة مع الأقسام الأخرى من مبيعات ومشتريات وفرقٍ فنية، والمساهمة في تحسين أعمالهم. ومن ذلك أنني أخرجت لمديرين أحدهما في المشتريات ذات مرة تقريرًا عن أداء الموردين وشركائهم مستفادًا من نظامه التقني.

د- العبرة بالنظام لا بالوسيلة: تعلمت إمكان التحول الرقمي وسهولة الانتقال إلى عالم الديجيتال في الشركات الصغيرة حيث تقل الموارد وتضيق الميزانية عن أكفأ الحلول وأفضل الوسائل.

تعرفت إلى إدارة المناقصات في نظام Dynamics 365 من مايكروسوفت لتنظيم موارد المؤسسات (ERP)، وأتقنتها في الشركات الصغيرة التي لا تكاد تستعمل الشير بوينت (SharePoint).

أدركت حينها أن العبرة بحسن بناء النظام وإن كان صغيرًا، وضبط موارده وإن كانت قليلة. وقد أبصرت بنفسي تكاسل طائفة من الموظفين عن استعمال النظام التقني المتقدم، ونشاط بعضهم في مجموعة واتساب أو نظام محدود الإمكانيات.

لم أعد أصحاب تلك الشركة ببناء نظامٍ آلي لرصد المنافسات وتصنيفها. لكنني وعدتهم بنظامٍ يسير لضبط المنافسات الحالية، ومعرفة الناجح منها، ورصد ما يأتي في قادم الأيام. وقد وفيت بهذا الوعد.

خاتمة:

كنت أحب أن أرى ثمارًا للبذور التي وضعتها وسقيتها ورعيتها، وكنت أتمنى أن تكفيني الأرقام الناجحة مؤونة تعليل المسار المتعرج الذي سلكته في مسيرتي المهنية. لكنني أحمد الله عز وجل على خبراتٍ تنوعت وتراكمت، وأفادتني كثيرًا في العمل والإدارة. وأحسب أن ما كتبته من مقال يخفف عني -إن شاء الله- وطأة الأسئلة المزعجة التي تنتهي إلى الرفض أو العرض المجحف وكلاهما مرٌ لا حلاوة فيه. وإن شئت أن تقف على مزيدٍ منها، فدونك السيرة الذاتية التجريبية في الحاشية، فتأملها كما تحب!

وكتب البراء بن محمد.

في مشرق الشمس من يوم الخميس سلخ صفر عام 1448.

30-2-1448

هامش

[1]

كان أحد أصدقائي في الشبكة الرقمية مولعًا باقتباسٍ عجيبٍ عن ابن رشد، تذكرته الآن وقد عرفت فضيلة الربط والضبط. والحق أن كلمته في سياقٍ آخر لا يتصل بما نحن فيه، لكنها لطيفة يحسن ذكرها.

(من لم يعرف الربط لم يقدر على الحل)

[ابن رشد – فصل المقال ص 127 طبعة مركز دراسات الوحدة العربية]

ملحق [السيرة الذاتية التجريبية بحسب آخر تحديث 20 صفر 1448]

صورة من الصفحة الأولى

صورة من الصفحة الثانية

صورة من الصفحة الثالثة

صورة من الصفحة الرابعة

صورة من الصفحة الخامسة

“What goes around comes around.” Now, the question. does that quote mean anything? No, i just thought it would be funny to throw something unnecessarily profound at the beginning and then admit i have no idea what im talking about. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about my mother lately, i havent visited her grave in some time. long enough that admitting it feels worse than actually counting the days. i tell myself ill go soon, then days become weeks. weeks become another month, another excuse. its weird how easy it is to avoid a place when you know exactly what you’ll feel once you get there. And then there are the dreams. for gods sake, leave me alone. i already sleep like ive been left halfway through something interesting with these wrist restrainers and a broken door. which doesnt sound pleasant to begin with. my dreams, naturally, have decided to make it worse. sometimes they feel so real that i wake up and have to sit there for a while, trying to figure out which part actually happened and which parts my brain decided would be a fun little extension, because it had nothing better to do. there are times where i have to make a guess. No, not remember. Guess. was that a dream? did i actually say that? did i actually see her? was that a memory? or was my mind just bored enough to manufacture an entire little world and then leave me to deal with it when i woke up? they are convincing. my dreams dont always feel like dreams. they feel like memories that haven’t happened yet or memories that never happened at all. sometimes i wake up carrying the emotion of something that doesnt exist, and somehow the emotion still feels completely real. whatever, thats funny to talk about. i guess ill always fall for my own “tricks”.

Thats enough for today, enough thoughts, enough complaints, i need a cigarette.

Sincerely, Barely trusting my own memory.

Chapter 1: The Prayer You Almost Do Not Want to Say Out Loud

It is late enough that the house has finally gone quiet. The lights are low, the dishes are still in the sink, and your phone is charging across the room. You know this would normally be the kind of moment when you pray, but tonight you sit there with nothing coming. Not anger. Not tears. Not peace. Just a strange blankness that makes you wonder whether you should even try. If you have been living in that silence, this message for when you feel spiritually numb and cannot feel God is not asking you to become more emotional. It is asking you to stop hiding from what is already true.

There is a sentence many believers are uncomfortable saying: “God, I do not feel close to You.” It sounds dangerous because we have learned to associate strong faith with confidence, gratitude, certainty, and visible devotion. So when the heart becomes quiet, we often cover it with religious language. We tell God what we think a faithful person should say instead of what the person sitting in the room actually feels. That is why this encouragement for Christians struggling with spiritual dryness and a tired faith begins in a place that can feel almost too simple: you are allowed to tell God the truth.

Maybe the truth is that you are tired of praying about the same thing. Maybe you have asked Him to change a situation for so long that you no longer know what another prayer would add. Maybe there was a time when you felt His presence easily, and now you cannot remember the last time something inside you truly responded. You still believe. You have not rejected Jesus. You just do not know how to make yourself feel what you think you should feel.

I think many people make spiritual numbness heavier by keeping it secret.

You can sit beside someone in church, sing the same song, hear the same message, and carry an entirely different experience inside. They may lift their hands while you are wondering why the words are not reaching you. You may feel guilty because you remember loving that song once. You may look around and think everyone else has something you have lost.

Then you go home and say nothing about it.

There is a man somewhere tonight who has spent the last year solving problems for everybody else. His family calls when something breaks. People at work depend on him. Someone close to him is going through a hard season. He keeps handling the next thing because that is what he does. When he finally gets ten minutes alone, he realizes he does not feel much of anything. He assumes the emptiness means his spiritual life is failing.

But maybe his heart has simply been living without enough room to breathe.

God knows the difference.

That matters because you may be accusing yourself of something Jesus is not accusing you of.

There are times when numbness can point toward something that needs attention. We can drift. We can become distracted. We can avoid God. But not every quiet season is rebellion, and treating every quiet season like rebellion can make you afraid of your own humanity.

Sometimes you have been disappointed for too long.

Sometimes grief has worn you down.

Sometimes life has required so much emotional energy that when you finally come to prayer, there is simply not much left.

You do not have to solve which one it is tonight.

You can begin with honesty.

“Jesus, I do not know what is happening inside me.”

That is enough to start.

Do not rush to add a better sentence. Do not explain yourself. Do not promise that you will do better tomorrow. Let yourself sit there for a minute without turning the prayer into another responsibility.

The strange thing about honesty is that it can feel less spiritual than performance, even though it may bring you closer to the truth. We often think prayer needs to sound hopeful before it can be faithful. But there are moments when the most faithful prayer is simply refusing to pretend.

Jesus already knows what you feel before you name it.

He knows you are disappointed.

He knows you are tired.

He knows you miss the version of yourself who prayed more easily.

He knows you are frightened by the silence.

You are not giving Him bad news.

You are finally letting yourself stop carrying it alone.

And perhaps that is where you begin again—not by trying to feel God, but by allowing yourself to speak honestly to the God who has never needed you to pretend.

Chapter 2: Staying With God When Nothing Inside You Moves

The next afternoon, you may find yourself standing in a grocery store aisle with a basket in your hand, trying to remember what you came to buy. Your mind has been full all day. You answered people, handled responsibilities, drove where you needed to go, and kept moving. Then, for one strange second beneath the bright store lights, you realize how tired you are. Not just physically tired. Tired in that deeper place where even prayer has started to feel like another thing you should be doing better.

You do not have to turn that moment into a spiritual test.

You can simply recognize it.

There are seasons when returning to God does not feel like returning home. It feels more like sitting beside someone you trust when you do not have anything to say. The relationship is still there. The love is still there. The silence does not cancel either one.

This is where I would encourage you to stop asking yourself whether you feel enough and start noticing whether you are still willing to remain.

You opened this article.

You are still thinking about God.

Some part of you still wants closeness, even if you cannot produce the feeling.

That matters.

You may have spent so much time trying to get your old spiritual life back that you have missed the possibility that God can meet you differently now. Maybe you used to pray for thirty minutes and now you can barely manage three. Maybe you once filled pages in a journal, and now the notebook sits untouched beside the bed. Maybe worship once brought tears, and now you listen quietly while folding laundry.

None of that automatically means you are moving backward.

Faith can become quieter without becoming weaker.

There is a woman sitting in a hospital waiting room tonight with a paper cup of coffee she no longer wants. Someone she loves is behind a closed door. She has already prayed every prayer she knows how to pray. Eventually she stops asking for new words and simply whispers, “Jesus.”

That may be all she has.

It is still prayer.

Sometimes we complicate our relationship with God because we believe every spiritual moment must contain insight, emotion, clarity, or relief. But there are days when faith is simply staying turned toward Him.

If you are spiritually numb, try letting your prayers become smaller for a while. When you wake up, say, “Thank You for another day.” Before a hard conversation, say, “Help me.” When fear rises, say, “Stay close.” Before sleep, say, “I am still here.”

Those prayers are not inferior because they are short.

You can also stop judging every Bible reading by how strongly it affects you. Read a few verses and let them exist without demanding an emotional response. Truth does not stop being truth because your heart is tired.

And give yourself permission to notice your actual life. Maybe you need rest. Maybe you need to talk to somebody. Maybe you need to admit that the last year hurt more than you have allowed yourself to say. Spiritual honesty sometimes begins with ordinary honesty.

There may come a morning when you notice something small. You look through the window and feel grateful for the sunlight. A verse stays with you after you close the Bible. You pray without deciding to pray. You realize the silence does not scare you quite as much.

Do not rush that moment either.

Let faith return at its own pace.

And if you are not there yet, you do not have to be.

Jesus is not standing at some distant finish line waiting for the emotionally restored version of you to arrive. He is with the tired person you are right now.

You can stay there with Him.

You can tell the truth.

You can remain.

Sometimes that is what faith looks like before it feels like anything again.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

Explore the complete Douglas Vandergraph Master Index: https://douglasvandergraph.com/douglas-vandergraph-master-index/

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s faith-based videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

The decisive document in the fight over western Coweta County, Georgia, was not a protest sign or a petition. It was a line on a zoning map. For years, 829 acres of pine and hardwood about thirty-five miles south-west of Atlanta had carried the designation Rural Conservation, a category the county's own comprehensive plan reserved for what it called rural places and complete communities. In April 2026, on a three-to-two vote of the county board of commissioners, that land became Industrial. The change took seconds to enact and will take a decade to build out: nine data centre buildings, two substations, a campus valued at seventeen billion dollars and rated at nine hundred megawatts, roughly the output of a nuclear reactor, dropped into a landscape whose defining feature until that afternoon had been that almost nothing was there.

The residents who had spent fifteen months trying to stop it were, by then, extremely well organised. Laura Beth, the chairwoman of a group called Citizens for Rural Coweta, had learned in early 2025 that a hyperscale campus of more than 4.9 million square feet was proposed to run past her back garden, and had started a Facebook group, Stop Project Sail, which TIME reported in July had grown beyond eight thousand members. They read the ordinances. They turned up to every hearing. They had no financial interest in the outcome beyond the water in their wells and the value of their houses. And they lost, by one vote, on a body of five people.

I keep returning to that margin, because it exposes what the national argument about artificial intelligence tends to skip. We debate whether the machines are worth their cost. The question Coweta County actually had to answer was procedural: who possesses the authority to trade a place's groundwater, its grid capacity and its rural character for a facility it did not ask for and will not use? That has an obvious legal answer in most American jurisdictions, and a deeply unsatisfying one. The bodies with formal power to decide are frequently not the bodies containing the people who bear the consequences. The harm has one footprint and the franchise has another, and the AI build-out has made the gap between them impossible to ignore.

A Country Learning to Say No

The gap is being noticed at scale. On 18 July 2026, according to Reuters reporting carried in newspapers across the country, opponents staged 142 protests across 42 states, coordinated by a group calling itself HumansFirst and described as the first nationally organised day of action against the AI build-out. Texas hosted eighteen events, more than any other state; Georgia eleven; California eight. HumansFirst was co-founded by Amy Kremer, a veteran of the Tea Party and of Women for Trump, who has compared the mood to 2009 while insisting the campaign is nonpartisan, and who blames both parties for letting the companies build at this scale without troubling to consult the people who will live beside it.

The protests are the visible edge of something larger. The Information reported in June 2026 that more than three hundred American cities, towns and counties had adopted bans or moratoriums on data centre development. Data Center Watch, the tracker maintained by the AI research firm 10a Labs, counted 833 active opposition groups across forty-nine states by March 2026, up from 396 at the end of 2025, and calculated that in the first quarter of 2026 alone at least seventy-five projects worth a combined 130 billion dollars were blocked or delayed. Taken cumulatively since the start of 2025, the tracker puts the value of projects blocked or delayed at roughly 286 billion dollars.

Public opinion has moved with it. A Reuters/Ipsos poll of 4,531 Americans, published on 11 June 2026, found that just fourteen per cent were comfortable with a data centre being built near them, and that fifty-seven per cent would oppose one in their community, including two-thirds of Democrats and half of Republicans. Only a third agreed that building data centres at the current pace was mainly a good thing. Seventy-seven per cent were worried that AI would make electricity more expensive, and Republicans, Democrats and independents worried about it in close to equal proportion. This is not a partisan split so much as a broad, cross-cutting discomfort, and it has begun to register at the level of state executives. On 14 July 2026, Governor Kathy Hochul signed Executive Order No. 62, imposing what her office described as the first statewide moratorium in the United States on new hyperscale data centres, pausing discretionary state environmental permits for facilities drawing fifty megawatts or more for up to a year while regulators build a framework. New York's average residential electricity price has climbed by close to sixty-eight per cent since 2019. “They drive up costs for local ratepayers,” Hochul said of the facilities, “and I refuse to let those costs get passed down to New Yorkers.”

What happened in New York before that order is the more revealing half of the story, and it is this essay's question in miniature. On 4 June 2026 the state legislature passed the Responsible Data Center Development Act, a one-year moratorium on state permits for data centres drawing twenty megawatts or more, with dedicated rate classes, transparency standards and impact studies attached. The Senate carried it forty-four to sixteen, the Assembly one hundred and two to thirty-nine. Hochul did not sign it. Six weeks later she issued an executive order of her own, and commentators now expect the Act to be vetoed. The thresholds are the tell: the chamber closest to the affected districts drew its line at twenty megawatts, the single executive at fifty, more than twice as permissive. Both instruments are lawful, both get reported as a moratorium, and they are not the same policy. The choice between them was settled by which office holds the pen.

One widely repeated figure deserves care. Reporting on the backlash, including TIME's, has cited electricity price rises of up to 267 per cent in states with dense data centre activity. That number originates in a Bloomberg analysis of wholesale prices at tens of thousands of individual grid nodes, which found that in some locations near major clusters the monthly wholesale cost of power was as much as 267 per cent higher than five years earlier. It is a wholesale, node-level finding rather than a residential bill, and when Senator Elizabeth Warren used it as a household figure in June 2026 PolitiFact rated the claim mostly false. The distinction matters, because the ease with which the number has migrated into the shorthand of the debate is itself a symptom of how little reliable, locally specific information reaches the people asked to accept these facilities.

The Difference Between By-Right and By-Permission

To understand where authority actually sits, you have to understand a distinction almost nobody outside land-use law thinks about until it lands on them. In American zoning, a use is either permitted by right in a given district, meaning a developer who meets the technical standards is approved administratively through site-plan review, or it requires a discretionary act, a rezoning or special exception, which triggers public hearings and a legislative vote.

For most of the industry's history, in most of the places it grew, it was by right. Loudoun County, Virginia, the densest concentration of data centres on earth, permitted them by right across much of its industrially zoned land, which is precisely how the corridor filled so fast and so quietly. That changed on 18 March 2025, when the board of supervisors voted seven to two to make data centres a special exception use in districts where they had been by right, converting an administrative rubber stamp into a legislative process with staff review and public hearings. Even then, the board grandfathered applications submitted before 12 February 2025 for projects more than five hundred feet from homes. The reform arrived after the pipeline had already formed.

The by-right question determines whether there is a public decision at all. Where a data centre is by right, there is no hearing to attend, no vote to lobby, no record to appeal. The community's only formal opportunity to shape the outcome came years earlier, when the zoning map was drawn, in a proceeding almost nobody attended because nobody imagined what would eventually be built there. The decision had, in effect, already been taken by the county's past self on behalf of its future one.

Where discretion does exist, the procedural rules become the whole battlefield. The most consequential legal defeat the industry has suffered in Virginia turned on a technicality of notice. On 7 August 2025, Prince William County Circuit Court Judge Kimberly Irving voided the rezoning for the Prince William Digital Gateway, a project of more than two thousand acres beside the Manassas battlefield, holding the ordinances void ab initio because the county had failed to comply with the state code's public-notice requirements: the advertisement for the December 2023 hearing was published three days before it. The Court of Appeals of Virginia affirmed unanimously on 31 March 2026. The county and the developer Compass Datacenters withdrew from the litigation in April. QTS, the Blackstone-owned operator, petitioned the Supreme Court of Virginia in May through an affiliate, then withdrew the petition on 2 July 2026, leaving the lower rulings standing, and after a Court of Appeals order on 29 July the rezonings are void and the land reverts to the district it held before. The largest data centre campus ever proposed in the United States, some 2,100 acres of it, is dead. Years of civic argument about water, viewsheds and historic land hinged on the calendar arithmetic of a legal notice, because that was the only lever the law actually handed the objectors. The lever worked. The project was not defeated on water, or on viewshed, or on any ground the community had spent years assembling. It was defeated on the date a newspaper advertisement ran.

Ken Confidential

The second structural feature that determines who decides is information, and here the asymmetry has been engineered deliberately. In July 2026, Public Citizen published a report by Deanna Noël titled The Secret Data Center Buildout, documenting the routine use of non-disclosure agreements between developers and the public officials who will vote on their projects. It found that eighty per cent of Virginia localities with proposed or existing data centres have NDAs in place, and that at least ten states have introduced bills restricting the practice. Some agreements forbid officials from revealing that discussions are occurring, that confidential information has been received, or even that an NDA exists.

The Minnesota Star Tribune documented the same machinery in its own state, reporting that eight cities, two counties, at least one state agency and a school district had signed such agreements; of twelve cities the paper approached with known data centre proposals, only four had never signed one. Leslie Krueger, the University of Minnesota's assistant vice president for planning, space and real estate, spent August 2023 corresponding about Meta's Rosemount campus, code-named Project Bigfoot, with a company representative who identified himself to her only as “Ken Confidential”. Further north, in Hermantown near Duluth, city officials knew from September 2024 that a large project was proposed and declined to confirm publicly what it actually was until the Star Tribune obtained the city's emails roughly a year later, at which point the scheme filed as Project Loon turned out to be Google's. A community can be kept from knowing not merely who is building but what is being built, for a year, by the officials it elected. In Tucson, negotiations over a 290-acre campus proceeded for roughly two years behind NDAs that concealed the end user's identity from the public and from most of the city council. “Giant corporations prefer to operate in the shadows,” the council member Lane Santa Cruz said, “but Tucson is not for sale. We deserve transparency and accountability.”

Coweta County shows how the two asymmetries compound. Investigative reporting by DeSmog, based on public records requests, established that Project Sail's public face, an entity called Atlas Development, LLC, was fronting for Prologis, the San Francisco-based logistics real estate giant, whose involvement was concealed until May 2025 even as its logos appeared on project illustrations. The records showed a steady programme of private access: a meeting between a Prologis vice-president and one commissioner at a Newnan law office in July 2025, another with a second commissioner in August, personalised email updates to all five the day before a public hearing, further emails in October. The lobbyist Arthur “Skin” Edge IV submitted recommendations for the county's data centre ordinance on 7 July, writing that he did so on behalf of the Project Sail team and stating that Atlas Development had retained him as an attorney for the project; both Atlas Development and Prologis subsequently told DeSmog that they were not represented by Edge. Somebody's account of who was speaking for whom is wrong, and the instructive part is that the public record does not allow anyone outside those rooms to establish whose. After a CBRE vice-president testified at the November 2025 hearing, commissioners amended their draft to allow data centres on collector roads, raise the height limit from sixty to seventy feet, and replace a requirement that utilities demonstrate adequate capacity with a letter of intent showing preliminary coordination.

Set against that, Laura Beth's account of her group's access is stark. “Coweta County has not met with us specifically about the ordinance,” she told DeSmog, describing commissioners who would accept only group emails and declined the telephone conversations residents requested. The rules governing the facility were being drafted in one conversation and defended in another, and only one of those conversations had a transcript.

The Lawsuit That Followed the Vote

Suppose a community clears every hurdle: it learns about the project in time, secures a discretionary hearing, persuades its elected board, and votes no. What happens then is the sharpest test of where authority really lies, and the answer arrived in a farming township of about 2,200 people in Washtenaw County, Michigan.

In September 2025, after months of contentious meetings, the Saline Township board voted four to one to deny the rezoning sought for a Stargate data centre campus backed by Related Digital, Oracle, OpenAI and Blackstone, with DTE Energy contracted to supply roughly 1.4 gigawatts. Two days later the developers and landowners sued, alleging exclusionary zoning: the claim, under Michigan law, that the township had unreasonably barred a legitimate use, strengthened by the fact that Saline Township had no industrially zoned land at all. Facing litigation costs against an annual municipal budget of roughly a million dollars, the township settled by consent judgment, accepting community benefits worth about fourteen million dollars, including four million for farmland preservation, along with water and noise restrictions. The attorney who advised the settlement observed that zoning power is not absolute.

The sequel is more revealing than the settlement. Residents organised to force a referendum on the rezoning, a right Michigan law affords them. On 14 January 2026 the board formally rezoned the land to industrial to comply with the consent judgment; on 28 January it reversed that action and restored the agricultural designation, reasoning that the judgment itself authorised the project, so no map change was required. Because there had been no formal rezoning, there was nothing to petition against. Tammie Bruneau of the Rural Michigan Defense Fund put the consequence plainly: if the map need not be updated and no notice published, there could be no referendum. The resident Kathryn Haushalter, whose motion to intervene in the settlement had been rejected by a Washtenaw County judge as untimely, asked the question the episode poses: “What does it look like when residents are not able to determine what happens in their communities? What are we expected to do?” On 1 June 2026, Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Sam Altman appeared at the ceremony marking construction of the campus.

Tucson demonstrates the same lesson through geography rather than litigation. On 6 August 2025 the city council voted seven to nil to reject the annexation that Project Blue required, after residents objected to roughly two thousand acre-feet of city water a year. But the land was unincorporated county territory, and the Pima County board of supervisors had already voted three to two in June to sell it and had approved the zoning. The developer, having earlier signalled that the project could not proceed without the city, redesigned the facility for air cooling, which uses far less water and considerably more electricity, and pressed ahead through the county alone. On 3 December 2025 the Arizona Corporation Commission approved the power purchase agreement four to one, Commissioner Rachel Walden the sole vote against; Tucson Electric Power expects to be supplying the campus with two hundred and eighty-six megawatts by 2028. Amazon Web Services withdrew as operating partner. The project continued, and then acquired one more venue. Arizona's attorney general, Kris Mayes, has appealed the commission's approval, contesting the speed of it and arguing that the agreement lets the utility and the developers set electricity rates between themselves, a power the state constitution reserves to the commission alone. For once the proliferation of forums runs in the objectors' favour, though nobody in Tucson could reach that one either. The state's chief legal officer took an interest, which is a different thing from a community having a say.

The pattern in both cases is not that local government was overruled. It is that “local government” was never a single thing. It is a set of overlapping venues — township, county, court, utility commission — in which a developer need prevail only once, while residents must prevail everywhere.

Where the Decision Actually Lives

Step back far enough and the venue keeps moving upward. Justin Kollar, writing in the Journal of the American Planning Association in 2026, describes this as planning under pre-emption: states removing land use, zoning and environmental review authority from cities and counties through statutory overrides, utility governance, fiscal incentives and procedural constraints, so that decisions migrate to state agencies, utilities and corporate actors, and planning becomes administrative coordination rather than deliberation.

West Virginia has gone furthest. Its House Bill 2014 bars counties and municipalities from adopting or enforcing any ordinance limiting a certified microgrid district or a certified high-impact data centre, and exempts those projects from county and municipal zoning and land use ordinances, from building permitting, inspection and code enforcement, and from licence requirements. What is left to the locality is the power to charge fees and to send fire engines and police cars. Nor does the statute restrict what may be generated inside a microgrid district, so a gas, coal or nuclear plant may be sited in a county that has been relieved of any authority to review it. And the property tax revenue such a facility produces does not stay where the facility stands: the statute routes the greater part of it to the state, partly to fund reductions in income tax. That last provision repays attention, because the standard defence of accepting a data centre is that the host is compensated for what it absorbs. West Virginia has legislated away the deliberation and the compensation together, and left the county with the facility. In Pennsylvania, a proposed Data Center Siting and Permitting Act would have the state environmental department designate at least fifteen pre-approved sites. More than three hundred data-centre-related bills were introduced by state legislators in the first six weeks of 2026.

Much of the most consequential decision-making never touches land use at all. It happens at public utility commissions, bodies whose members most residents cannot name. On 15 April 2026 the Louisiana Public Service Commission voted four to one on Entergy Louisiana's application to build the generation for Meta's Richland Parish campus: seven new gas-fired power stations, some two hundred and forty miles of transmission and a set of nuclear uprates, a programme of 21.37 billion dollars, the largest investment in the utility's history, binding ratepayers across the state for the term of a twenty-year agreement. What the commissioners approved that day was not the plan. It was a request to fast-track it, skipping key steps of the standard regulatory review; the vote on the application itself is set for November 2026. The distinction is this essay's subject reduced to a single procedural motion. Before anybody decides the question, somebody decides how much deliberation the question is going to get, and that second decision is taken first, in a proceeding almost nobody is watching. Entergy maintains that Meta will cover construction costs and that customers will save money. The Alliance for Affordable Energy has warned that if Meta departs before the contract ends, the cost of the gas plants could fall on ordinary ratepayers; the Union of Concerned Scientists noted that the commission declined to investigate a financing arrangement under which Meta established an additional parent entity, retaining a twenty per cent stake, and borrowed twenty-seven billion dollars against the project. Whatever one concludes about the risk, a decision of that magnitude about who bears what is being taken by five elected commissioners in a venue with no relationship whatsoever to the parish hosting the buildings.

The tariff question is following the same path. According to Utility Dive, state regulators approved twenty-nine large-load tariffs in 2025, against fourteen in the whole period from 2018 to 2024, and by June 2026 twenty-four states had approved at least one. Minnesota's HF 16, enacted in June 2025, requires the state utility commission to create a very large customer rate class and allocate attributable costs to it. Oregon's POWER Act directs its commission to establish a separate class for facilities of twenty megawatts or more. Texas Senate Bill 6, signed on 20 June 2025, established a regime for loads of seventy-five megawatts and above, requiring new transmission-level connections to install equipment permitting remote curtailment during firm load shed events. These reforms matter enormously for whether the build-out raises household bills. They are also decisions taken hundreds of miles from any affected backyard.

Then there is the fiscal layer, which quietly converts a public choice into an accounting one. Good Jobs First has documented that most states subsidise data centres through sales and use tax exemptions on hardware and software, some lasting as long as forty years, alongside property tax abatements, and calculates that public subsidy runs to roughly two million dollars for every permanent job created. Abatements and payment-in-lieu-of-taxes arrangements are typically negotiated by development authorities rather than legislatures. At the top of the stack sits Executive Order 14318, signed on 23 July 2025, directing federal agencies to streamline permitting, identify federal land for siting and expedite environmental reviews for qualifying projects. Every one of these levers is legitimate in itself. Stacked together, they mean that by the time a proposal reaches a county board, most of the consequential variables have already been fixed elsewhere.

The Boundary Problem in a Rural County

This is where the argument stops being about zoning and becomes something older. Democratic theory has a name for the difficulty at the centre of the data centre fight: the boundary problem. In 1983 the political theorist Frederick Whelan set it out with uncomfortable clarity. Democracy is a method by which a group makes decisions, but it offers no democratic method for deciding who belongs to the group; any vote on the boundaries of the demos must be taken by a demos already constituted, which places the foundational question outside democratic determination. Robert Dahl, who framed the same difficulty a decade earlier, could find no satisfying escape from it.

One candidate answer is the all-affected-interests principle: those affected by a collective decision should have a say in making it. Robert Goodin, examining it in Philosophy and Public Affairs, treated the principle as the most promising basis for constituting a demos while showing how radically expansive it becomes once taken seriously, since almost any decision affects almost everyone at some remove. Sarah Song, writing in International Theory, argued the other way, that the demos should be bounded by the state, precisely because affectedness is too elastic to draw workable lines. The debate is unresolved for good reasons. But the data centre is an unusually clean instance of the mismatch it describes.

Consider the footprints. A hyperscale campus draws on an aquifer that obeys hydrology rather than municipal boundaries; its cooling demand, at the upper end of industry estimates, can reach five million gallons a day, comparable to a city of fifty thousand. Its electrical load falls on a regional transmission system, and PJM's footprint alone spans thirteen states and the District of Columbia. Data centres consumed about 4.4 per cent of American electricity in 2023, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's report for the Department of Energy, and are projected to reach between 6.7 and twelve per cent by 2028. Emissions travel with the wind; xAI sited turbines for its second Memphis supercomputer across the state line in Southaven, Mississippi, while the computing sat in Tennessee. Ratepayer costs fall on a customer class defined by a utility's service territory. Not one of these footprints coincides with the electorate of a county board of commissioners.

The subsidiarity principle, familiar from European constitutional law and Catholic social teaching, holds that decisions should be taken at the lowest level competent to take them. It is usually invoked for localism, and here it is often assumed to settle the matter in favour of the county. But subsidiarity contains its own limit, and the limit is competence. A township of 2,200 people cannot competently allocate a regional grid's capacity, and should not have to. Equally, a state utility commission cannot competently decide what a particular hillside means to the people who live beneath it. The failure is not that decisions are made too high or too low, but that they are distributed across levels in a way that lets each venue treat the questions it is worst placed to answer as somebody else's problem.

Elinor Ostrom, whose fieldwork on commons governance won her the Nobel prize in economics in 2009, derived design principles for institutions that manage shared resources without collapsing. Two are directly relevant: that the boundaries of the resource and of the group entitled to use it be clearly defined and congruent with local conditions, and that most individuals affected by operational rules be able to participate in modifying them. Measured against those principles, American data centre siting fails not because it is too democratic or too little, but because the people bound by the rules and the people entitled to change them are systematically different sets of people.

The Strongest Case Against the Veto

It would be easy, and dishonest, to leave the argument there. The case for local control over land use has a bleak record, and anyone who wants to strengthen community authority over data centres should sit with it.

The most rigorous account is Neighborhood Defenders, the 2019 study by Katherine Levine Einstein, David Glick and Maxwell Palmer, which examined thousands of participants in local land-use proceedings and found that the people who turn up to oppose development are not representative of their communities. They are disproportionately older, whiter, wealthier and far more likely to be homeowners; they oppose new housing considerably more strongly than their neighbours do; and the participatory institutions built to democratise planning reliably amplify their voices. The result has been a decades-long housing shortage borne overwhelmingly by people who never got to attend the meeting because they did not yet live in the town.

The same dynamic has kneecapped the energy transition. The Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia found that by the end of 2024 at least 459 counties and municipalities across forty-four states had adopted severe local restrictions on siting renewable energy, a sixteen per cent rise in a year, and identified 498 contested projects across forty-nine states. Between 2018 and 2023, at least thirty per cent of utility-scale wind and solar projects were cancelled during siting, largely because of community opposition, local ordinances and zoning. If your principle is that affected communities may refuse infrastructure they did not choose, that principle has already been road-tested, and used most effectively against solar farms and transmission lines.

The pro-build response also has a legitimate core. Matthew de Boer, writing in the Fordham Law Review in 2026, notes that states have aggressively pursued data centres with incentives while declining to regulate their siting, leaving municipalities to manage hyperscale facilities with frameworks designed for warehouses. His proposal is light pre-emption modelled on housing reform: not the elimination of local authority but its discipline through procedural mandates and objective standards. The Michigan exclusionary zoning doctrine that defeated Saline Township exists for a reason. A jurisdiction with no industrial zoning anywhere within it has, in effect, pre-committed to refusing every industrial use, and a legal system that permitted that at every boundary would make nothing buildable anywhere.

The honest position, then, is that “who decides” genuinely cuts both ways, and that a general right of local veto is not a principle anyone should want applied consistently. Which is precisely why the boundary problem is the right frame. The complaint from Coweta County and Saline Township is not, at its strongest, that localities should be able to refuse anything. It is that the procedure by which these decisions are made produces answers no defensible theory of authority endorses: hearings held after entitlements are secured, ordinances drafted by the applicant's lobbyist, referendum rights extinguished by declining to amend a map, consequences distributed across airsheds, watersheds and ratepayer classes that no ballot anywhere encompasses. That is not the tyranny of the neighbourhood defender. It is the absence of any forum in which the actual question can be put.

Making the Franchise Fit the Footprint

What would it take for a decision of this kind to be legitimate rather than merely lawful? The reforms already circulating are more modest than the theory suggests, and worth taking seriously precisely because they are achievable.

The first is informational, and nearly consensual. Public Citizen's recommendations amount to a simple proposition: officials should not sign non-disclosure agreements with private developers about matters they will later vote on, developers should disclose their identity, projected water and energy use, procurement plans and financial incentives before entitlements are granted, and existing agreements should be published. Attorneys quoted in reporting on Oklahoma's secrecy deals have questioned whether such agreements are even enforceable against public bodies. Pima County changed its own policies on NDAs and environmental review in September 2025, after what its supervisors called lessons learned from Project Blue. And the standard objection, that transparency of this kind is commercially unworkable, has now been answered by the only sort of party who could answer it. On 18 March 2026 Microsoft announced that it would stop using non-disclosure agreements with local governments for data centre projects anywhere in the world and would terminate those already in force, saying that transparency with the communities where it operates was paramount. That followed a commitment in January to pay the full cost of the power its facilities draw, decline local property tax breaks, replenish more water than it consumes and invest in local training. Microsoft is so far the exception, and should be called one: Public Citizen records that every other major technology company continues the practice. A single exception is still enough to dispose of the claim that the practice is necessary. Nothing about the AI build-out requires that the people voting know less than the people lobbying them.

The second is jurisdictional, and follows from the boundary problem. If the harms of a facility cross municipal lines, notice, standing and formal comment rights should cross them too. There is no technical obstacle to requiring that a rezoning application within a defined radius of a boundary trigger notice and consultative standing for the adjacent jurisdiction, or that a groundwater withdrawal above a threshold trigger review at the level of the aquifer rather than the parcel. That would not give neighbours a veto. It would give them a seat, the minimum the all-affected-interests principle can be read to demand without becoming unbounded.

The third is fiscal, and has the most momentum. Large-load tariffs and dedicated rate classes of the kind Minnesota, Oregon and Texas have adopted move the ratepayer question into a proceeding where it can be argued explicitly. If a facility's grid costs are ring-fenced to the customer that causes them, the county board's decision becomes one about land, water and noise rather than about everyone else's electricity bill, and the venue mismatch shrinks. The same logic applies to abatements: a forty-year tax exemption negotiated by a development authority binds successor councils and their electorates, and ought to require the deliberative treatment any long-dated public borrowing would.

New York's executive order is a hybrid of all three. It pauses state permits, an exercise of upward authority, while directing Empire State Development to publish a community investment framework within sixty days to guide local negotiations, and the Department of Public Service to prepare a generic environmental impact statement so proposals are assessed against a consistent standard rather than each locality improvising. Whether that produces better decisions or merely relocates them is unclear. That it exists in place of the statute the legislature actually passed, and at more than twice the legislature's threshold, is a reminder that the reforms are governed by the same question as the projects. But it recognises that a county board asked to evaluate a nine-hundred-megawatt load with a planning staff of a dozen is not being empowered. It is being handed a decision it has no capacity to make and then blamed for the outcome.

A Judge in Newnan

On 5 May 2026, Citizens for Rural Coweta filed a petition in Coweta County Superior Court asking a judge to declare the rezoning invalid. Their argument is that the commissioners disregarded the county's own comprehensive plan, which designated the land for rural places rather than industry, and did so despite the site's groundwater recharge areas, wetlands and watershed. It is, in essence, a claim that the county broke a promise to itself.

There is a coda to the vote that is easy to miss, and it may be the sharpest thing in this account. In May 2026, weeks after rezoning the Sargent land, the Coweta commissioners adopted a moratorium on any future data centre project in the county. Residents said it was too little and far too late; one likened it to shutting the barn door once the horses were out. But consider what the sequence establishes. The county was entirely capable of pausing. It held the instrument, understood how to use it and did use it, one decision after the only decision that mattered. Coweta's future self is now protected in a way its present self declined to be, and the difference between those two counties is not one of law, or capacity, or information, or public sentiment. It is a difference of timing, which is to say a difference of nothing at all except that the applicant arrived first.

The venue is telling. Having lost in the only forum where they could vote, the residents have moved to the one forum where nobody votes at all. That is the recurring shape of these disputes. In Prince William County the decisive intervention was a judge's reading of a notice statute, and it killed the largest project in the country. In Saline Township a consent judgment did what the electorate had refused to do, and a second judge declined to reopen it. In Tucson a unanimous rejection was routed around by a county land sale and a corporation commission vote, and the next serious challenge came from a state attorney general. Litigation has become the default civic instrument of the AI build-out because it is the only instrument that reliably crosses the boundaries everything else respects.

There is a version of this story in which the residents are simply wrong: in which a county gains a tax base and a state gains capacity it badly needs, and a few hundred households absorb a view they dislike, which is roughly what infrastructure has always asked of somebody. I do not think that version is obviously false. What is false is the assumption that the current procedure is capable of telling us which version is right. A process in which the applicant's lobbyist helps draft the ordinance, the developer's identity is concealed behind a shell entity, commissioners meet privately with one side and by group email with the other, and a referendum right can be extinguished by declining to amend a map, is not a process that produces a trustworthy answer to a hard question. It produces an answer and calls it settled.

The families in Coweta County who moved out of Atlanta to be surrounded by trees are not, in the end, asking for a veto over American AI policy. They are asking something democratic theory has never fully answered and American land-use law has stopped even trying to: what makes a decision about a place belong to the people who live in it. Nine hundred megawatts is arriving either way. Whether it arrives as something a community decided or as something that happened to it is a difference no amount of tax revenue will retire, and it is being settled right now, county by county, in rooms that most of the affected will never enter.

References

1. Shah, Simmone. “Community Backlash to AI Data Centers Is Growing Across the U.S.” TIME, 22 July 2026. https://time.com/article/2026/07/22/community-backlash-ai-data-centers/
2. Reuters. “Data center opponents stage 142 protests across 42 US states.” 18 July 2026. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/jul/18/data-center-opponents-stage-142-protests-across-42/
3. Reuters/Ipsos. “Americans wary of AI-driven data center boom, Reuters/Ipsos poll shows.” 11 June 2026. https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2026-06-11/americans-wary-of-ai-driven-data-center-boom-reuters-ipsos-poll-shows
4. Data Center Watch (10a Labs). Data Center Opposition Tracker. https://www.datacenterwatch.org/
5. Office of Governor Kathy Hochul. “Executive Order No. 62: Establishing a Temporary Moratorium on Data Centers in New York.” 14 July 2026. https://www.governor.ny.gov/executive-order/no-62-establishing-temporary-moratorium-data-centers-new-york-while-state-develops
6. Bloomberg. “How AI Data Centers Are Sending Your Power Bill Soaring.” 2025. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-electricity-prices/
7. PolitiFact. “How much have data centers increased electricity prices?” 12 June 2026. https://politifact.com/factchecks/2026/jun/12/elizabeth-warren/data-centers-rising-electricity-costs/
8. Shehabi, Arman, et al. 2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, December 2024. https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/lbnl-2024-united-states-data-center-energy-usage-report_1.pdf
9. DeSmog. “How Data Center Developers Staked Their Claim in Rural Georgia.” 7 April 2026. https://www.desmog.com/2026/04/07/how-data-center-developers-staked-their-claim-in-rural-georgia/
10. Noël, Deanna. The Secret Data Center Buildout: How States Can Stop Big Tech's Abuse of NDAs. Public Citizen, 8 July 2026. https://www.citizen.org/news/the-secret-data-center-buildout-how-states-can-stop-big-techs-abuse-of-ndas/
11. Minnesota Star Tribune. “NDAs, code names and shell companies: how Minnesota officials support data center secrecy.” https://www.startribune.com/ndas-code-names-and-shell-companies-how-minnesota-officials-support-data-center-secrecy/601499182
12. WTOP News. “Digital Gateway data center project dies after final developer withdraws appeal.” July 2026. https://wtop.com/prince-william-county/2026/07/digital-gateway-data-center-project-dies-after-final-developer-withdraws-appeal/
13. Fortune. “A Michigan farm town voted down plans for a giant OpenAI-Oracle data center. Weeks later, construction began.” 6 May 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/05/06/ai-data-center-michigan-saline-politics-farmland/
14. KJZZ. “Rejected by Tucson and abandoned by Amazon, Project Blue data center moves forward.” 9 December 2025. https://www.kjzz.org/the-show/2025-12-09/rejected-by-tucson-and-abandoned-by-amazon-project-blue-data-center-moves-forward
15. Kollar, Justin. “Planning Under Preemption: State Power and Local Authority in the AI Data Center Era.” Journal of the American Planning Association, 2026. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01944363.2026.2618221
16. de Boer, Matthew. “State Intervention in Local Zoning: Lessons from Housing Applied to Data Centers.” Fordham Law Review, Vol. 94, Issue 5, 2026. https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol94/iss5/12/
17. West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy. “HB 2014 Would Preempt Local Control; Divert Millions Annually in Local Property Tax Revenue for Schools and Public Safety to Fund Income Tax Cuts.” https://wvpolicy.org/hb-2014-would-preempt-local-control-divert-millions-annually-in-local-property-tax-revenue-for-schools-and-public-safety-to-fund-income-tax-cuts/
18. Utility Dive. “Large load tariffs proliferate as states take more active role in data center regulation.” https://www.utilitydive.com/news/large-load-tariffs-proliferate-as-states-take-more-active-role-in-data-cent/816184/
19. Good Jobs First. “Money Lost to the Cloud: How Data Centers Benefit from State and Local Government Subsidies.” https://goodjobsfirst.org/money-lost-cloud-how-data-centers-benefit-state-and-local-government-subsidies/
20. Whelan, Frederick G. “Democratic Theory and the Boundary Problem.” In NOMOS XXV: Liberal Democracy, ed. J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman. New York University Press, 1983.
21. Goodin, Robert E. “Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and Its Alternatives.” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 35, No. 1, 2007.
22. Song, Sarah. “The boundary problem in democratic theory: why the demos should be bounded by the state.” International Theory, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2012. https://polisci.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/people/u3868/Song%20-%20Boundary%20Problem%20in%20Democratic%20Theory.pdf
23. Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press, 1990. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/governing-the-commons/A8BB63BC4A1433A50A3FB92EDBBB97D5
24. Einstein, Katherine Levine, David M. Glick and Maxwell Palmer. Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America's Housing Crisis. Cambridge University Press, 2019. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48584947
25. Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “Opposition to Renewable Energy Facilities in the United States: June 2025 Edition.” Columbia University. https://climate.law.columbia.edu/content/opposition-renewable-energy-facilities-united-states-june-2025-edition

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

In Summary: * The week I recently spent without central air, being able to air condition only two rooms in the back of this house with window a/c units, that week is thankfully over. Six hours ago cool air began blowing from vents throughout this house and, my-oh-my, in the immortal words of Jackie Gleason, “How SWEET it is!”

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 227.63 lbs. * bp= 133/81 (70)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 05:10 – 1 banana, 2 HEB bakery cookies * 07:34 – 1 ham & cheese sdandwich * 13:50 – meat loaf, mashed potatoes, gravy

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:45 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:05 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 13:30 – following the MLB Game, Cardinals vs Phillies * 15:40 – and the Cardinals win, 7 to 1. * 15:50 – follow news reports from various sources, * 17:50 – listening to relaxing music, and reading

Chess: * 06:30 – moved in all pending CC games

Edmonton Commonwealth Stadium – August 17th, 1987

Five of us packed in to my friends cousins Fiesta (I think) and drove three hours to Edmonton to see David Bowie, Duran Duran, and Georgia Satellites.

#Edmonton #history #BlastFromThePast

Los grandes acontecimientos no dependen nunca de ti. Puede que los pequeños tampoco exactamente.

Tú solo intentas entender qué podría pasar. Buscas un lugar propicio. Buena compañía. Y esperas. Que pase lo que tenga que pasar. A veces se nubla y no se ve la corona ni nada que no sea una noche repentina. Un silencio. Un algo contenido. Gente que aplaude porque no sabe qué hacer con lo que está pasando. Gente que lloramos porque siempre lloramos cuando hay algo enorme oprimiendo el pecho. Ponerle nombre a esa enormidas es saber que somos enanos. Que el universo es infinito y sigue sus ritmos ignorándome. A mi hace mucho que entender eso de verdad me da paz.

Un niño detrás de mi con una madre incapaz de entender el sistema solar. Desinformada de miedo “pónganse las gafas”. Entender de pronto el privilegio. Siempre fuiste una niña con al menos un adulto capaz de explicarte el mundo con una precisión suficiente. Parece una tontería. Lo cambia todo. “Mamá, con las gafas no veo nada”

Me giro. Le digo: como las nubes tapan al sol sólo vamos a ver que se hace de noche muy pronto, de golpe. Y luego de día otra vez igual de rápido. Sonríe pero sigue sin entende nada.

A veces el eclipse se nubla pero da igual porque ha sido un día precioso, porque hemos subido por las escaleras que comunican las dos playas riendo con restos de salitre en la piel. Porque el aperol tiene el color del atardecer. Porque dentro de muchísimos años diremos “tú y yo vimos aquel no eclipse en Los locos” y eso significará mucho más que un fenómeno astronómico rarísimo.

Vivir es esperar al eclipse total y disfrutar de la noche repentina. Volver conduciendo de la playa, ducharte con agua caliente a presión, el mejor disco de Iván de fondo. Que eso sean las vacaciones.

Tags: #random

Today's MLB Game in the Roscoe-verse is joined in progress. The Phillies and Cardinals are playing in the 2nd inning, and the Cardinals are leading 1 to 0. I'm following the game's scores and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.

And the adventure continues.

Today for some reason, I felt terrible.

Don’t know what set me off but it was just feelings of anxiety and a sadness which I don’t know from where it came but it was like just this distraction irate behaviour I couldn’t focus just sat for five minutes, made code, then back and then out again five minutes with the dogs, try to focus 20 min then coffee.

It’s the feeling of something very unspecific being wrong

I really tried

Having spent the workday in this weird state of mind, I went to the neighbours to help their son with his computer and I might’ve fixed it or maybe I didn’t; maybe it’s broken still, but at least it booted

And my black mood lifted too, late now I’m having dinner, watching Supernatural. Without spoiling anything I’ll say that the notion of the soul being tied to the conscience I think it’s spot on.

Tomorrow I’ll go running, it’s to keep the wolves at bay

It’ll prevent me from feeling bad

I used to think that that’s all there was to it, mere chemistry of the brain

Imbalance of the humours I used to think

But now I think that there’s something unhandled psychologically with is making these terrible feelings appear in the first place

And that the training is just a way to handle operating this broken machine in this world, which I love.

Thank God! A 5-man hvac crew arrived a little after 9:00 AM, and they drove away in their pickup trucks a few minutes ago: roughly half past Noon. They were friendly, efficient, and cleaned up after themselves very well. I sit here now enjoying cool air blowing through the vents, with a brand new central air unit, a brand new furnace, and a new little wall thermostat.

And the adventure continues.

My impressions of the pre-release event for The Hobbit set.

The Hobbit is the latest Magic the Gathering set, a sequel to the Lord of the Rings (LOTR) set from a couple of years ago. As the fantasy universe is common to both Magic the Gathering (MTG) and LOTR, the set was quite successful and even left us with some very powerful cards like The One Ring and Orcish Bowmasters. Last week, Wizards of the Coast released The Hobbit. The set is on the smaller side, and it's too new to tell what cards will shine and which cards will be quickly forgotten.

One of the best ways to get your hands on the new set and have some fun at the same time is a pre-release event at a local game shop. You get a pre-release kit, which is a sealed box that includes 6 booster packs, a small promo pack, and a 20-sided die. You build a 40-card deck from the 6 packs of cards, and battle other players. Pairings are random, and since everyone starts with 6 packs, one's success comes down to skill, and a little bit of luck too. You play 3 rounds, and each round is best out of 3. I won 1 round and lost 2 rounds, because I am still new to the sealed format and still learning the tricks of assembling the best 40-card deck from a pool of cards I have not seen before. So, I'm OK losing some games for now.

While the gathering part of Magic the Gathering is fun, especially when you go with friends, another big draw for me has always been the artwork on the cards and the fantasy themes of the game. The Hobbit did not disappoint! I am a fan of elves in MTG, so I built and elf deck out of the 6 booster packs. Specifically, I built a green-blue landfall elf deck. I ignored the new mechanics in the set in favor of my preference for elves. I also did happen to have quite a few elf cards to make this work.

The highlights of my deck were Beorn, Reluctant Host, Silvan Reveler, and Thranduil's Company. Silvan Reveler alone won me the games I did win. She gets me a land card upon entering most times, and can come back from the graveyard for 3 mana, which in this deck is a pretty low cost. Beorn's adventure spell, Till and Tend, triggers landfall and helps me ramp. Thranduil let me play yet another land and pumps a creature for the turn, giving it vigilance too. This enables safe attacks without losing a blocker on my opponent's turn. Once ramping is compete, the 5 mana Beorn can come in, and he's a 5/5 with trample, a pretty serious threat even if he's not an elf.

A selection of support cards helped the strategy along. Bilbo Baggins, Burglar is not an elf, but he's a good support character. For one blue mana, Take a Glance lets me decide what my next card will be (Scry 2). Then, when cast, he lets me draw a card. Card draw is so important. Then, Down in the Valley is a saga that ramps on the first turn it enters, then gives you an elf token (or more, if I manage to play multiple lands that turn). Very useful! Wood Elves is a reprint on an older card. The fact that it lets you play an extra Forest untapped is key and significantly better than untapped.

Some utility cards helped me in a few specific scenarios. Confusticate and Bebother is a great option because I was able to use it either as a counter-spell, or as card draw. Mirkwood Nurturer was interesting. I had it return Enchanted River's Grasp to my hand, then cast it again, resulting in 2 enemy creatures being tapped before my attack phase. A great move to end the game and swing for lethal damage with a couple big creatures like Beorn.

Overall, the strategy was to ramp as much as possible, so that the landfall triggers made my board stronger, and the extra mana helped me cast the spells I needed to protect my own creatures and keep the attackers at bay. Silvan Reveler was a very cool card. Between this pre-release and the recent Stixhaven set, I find myself very happy playing blue-green. I always liked green, but I am finding blue adds some much-needed interaction (counter-spells, card draw, etc.). Happy with The Hobbit, thought I don't see myself buying many more cards from this set. The 40 card deck will be enough to provide some fun playing my friends.

Thanks for reading!

#story #mtg

#gyushuaabo22yl

Senja kian tenggelam di ufuk Barat. Dengan penerangan yang agak redup, Choi Yido menatap cermin di hadapannya dan wajah yang bak pinang dibelah dua dengan ibunya pun menatap balik. Rambut hitam tertata rapi. Mata gelap yang memukau. Pipi tinggi, rahang tirus, bibir tipis tanpa cela. Paras yang cantik dan tampan sekaligus—androgini. Tubuhnya melesat tinggi ketika pubertas menyapanya lima tahun yang lalu. Sayangnya, ia tetap tidak bisa mengalahkan tinggi badan rival abadinya, Kibum.

Mengesampingkan bayangan Kibum yang membuat lidahnya sepat, Yido mengusak rambutnya ke belakang dengan tangan, mengacaukan tatanan yang telah diusungnya sejak ia memulai hari. Tidak ada kewajiban untuk tampil formal di muka publik malam ini, jadi ia tidak memedulikan penampilannya sama sekali.

Surat telah dilayangkan ke rumah Paman Mingyu. Sang utusan telah melapor pada ayahnya bahwa tugas telah selesai dilaksanakan. Namun, hingga detik ini, tak ada balasan dari rumah keluarga Kim.

Gelisah? Tentu. Bukannya Yido tidak mengetahui bagaimana perasaan Paman Mingyu terhadap prospek dirinya melamar Gyuri. Sejak awal, Paman Mingyu jelas-jelas menentang mereka. Paman Joshua selalu bilang kalau Paman Mingyu hanya orangtua menggelikan yang kelewat sayang pada putrinya (yang mana menurut Yido sangat masuk akal; Toh ini Kim Gyuri yang mereka bicarakan). Tetapi, separuh hati sang Alpha muda gelisah kalau-kalau alasan Paman Mingyu menentang adalah karena Yido dianggap tidak pantas bersanding dengan putrinya.

Ego Alpha-nya terusik. Jika ada yang pantas mencintai Gyuri, maka seharusnya pangeran kerajaan penerus negara ini adalah kandidat nomor satu, bukan? Sedari kecil ia ditempa oleh pelajaran di bidang tata negara, sosial politik, militer dan sejarah kerajaan, selain etiket dan budaya. Dirinya lah yang paling paham apa yang dibutuhkan negara ini beserta masyarakat di dalamnya. Ayahnya tidak mengajak Yido turut serta dalam pelaporan para warga setiap paginya sejak ia remaja untuk menjadikan pengetahuannya sia-sia belaka. Ia bahkan berhasil mengimplementasikan taktiknya dalam mengenyahkan potensi pemberontakan di sisi Utara dekat perbatasan beberapa bulan yang lalu.

Semenjak Kak Seongso menunjuk Kak Nara sebagai pengantinnya, orangtuanya telah mempersiapkan Yido sebagai penerus utama tampuk kepemimpinan.

Tapi kenapa Paman Mingyu masih saja merasa itu tidak cukup?

Apa lagi yang harus Yido lakukan agar Paman Mingyu bersedia memberi tangan Gyuri kepadanya??

Pikirannya kalut oleh berbagai suara yang saling bertentangan. Sekali lagi, pemuda berusia sembilan belas itu menghela napas. Kemeja putihnya yang terbuat dari sutra kualitas terbaik itu kini nampak acak-acakan, hasil kebiasaan buruknya yang suka berjalan kian-kemari ketika tenggelam dalam pemikirannya sendiri—mengelilingi peraduan, bahkan satu istana, tanpa sadar. Ibunya bahkan pernah menyadarkan putra tertuanya itu dengan menepuk kepalanya kuat-kuat, mengejutkan ayahnya yang tak sengaja menyaksikan kejadian itu.

Setiap detik terbuang tanpa jawaban dari keluarga Kim adalah setiap detik keyakinan akan bobot dirinya tercungkil mengenaskan. Ia perlu tahu reaksi Paman Mingyu dan Paman Joshua atas surat itu dan berdiam diri di istana tidak akan membawakannya jawaban yang ia cari.

Tugasnya sebagai pangeran kerajaan untuk hari itu sudah selesai. Saatnya Choi Yido menyelinap keluar dengan memanjat tembok istana dan mengganti mahkota emasnya dengan topi pet sederhana yang senantiasa dikenakan anak penjaja koran di jalanan tengah kota.

Ah, ya, lihat kan?

Bagaimanapun, Choi Yido adalah anak ibunya.

A Brief Summary: Abbreviated book reviews for summer reading recommendations.

• “What Did Dinosaurs Think About?” by Jean Le Loeuff: this book was initially on the 14 day loan display, but I renewed it 3 times because I liked it that much that I kept re-reading portions of the book! Please note that the author of this opus is a world renowned paleontologist and museum director, which is to say that this is not written by a dimwitted Guardian columnist “science communicator” – and while this book is written at an accessible reading level, it does presuppose the reader has some basic knowledge regarding dinosaurs and their unique biology. One of the better takeaways that I got from this book was that the encephelation quotient of the triceratops was commensurate to that of a dolphin, making triceratops the smartest (best) dinosaur. Educational & Entertaining, 5/5 Stars
• “Magic in Islam” by Michael M. Knight: I have apparently been tricked into reading a book on Islam by a white American, Allahumma irhamni. Oh look a degree from Harvard, that's not suspicious at all! Now if I'm done with the ad hominem, we can go back to reviewing books. The most salient points in this book are made towards the beginning by examining the cultural frameworks going back to Alexander The Great's employ of Babylonian magos (priests) for celestial navigation, and the heuristics of applying the label of “magic” to any system not properly understood. The book goes on to explain the linear cultural history of Islam, the tautology of it's theology, and accounting for cultural exchanges. This book is okay beginners material for new converts to Islam, but contains very little information about actual sorcery; useful source material for disproving stupid Wicca & Thelema. 2/5 Stars
• “The Vanishing Church” by Ryan Burge: I often recommend the book “Bowling Alone” to people, because it was written about 20yrs prior to everything it predicted coming to fruition. Mr. Burge's book is written in a similar vein, examining the weaponization of Christendom by the political class, trends in declining membership attendance, statistical extrapolations and potential solutions to the problems. Refreshingly objective and absent of superstition. Useful for intel re: church planting . 4/5 Stars
• “Letters To The Human Race...From The Cat” by Vicky Hall: there needed to be a fun book on this list. The author, Ms. Halls, is a veterinary nurse and feline specialist belonging to the Association of Pet Behavior Counsellors, and has published a surfeit of books on caring for cats. However, this book is not a thick tome of interpreting the nuances of kittens – it's a series of missives written 'in-character' from the perspective of cats, and their waxing philosophies thereof. It's also got cute cartoons in there! I read fun stuff too. It's cheery and whimsical. 5/5 Stars