Two boats docked behind a berm.

Introduction

Many years ago (over a decade) I wrote an article about RSS Feed reader alternatives after Google announced they were killing Reader in March 2013. That article attracted a fair amount of attention, including a request from RedHat to republish the article on their blog. On the ten-year anniversary of the death of Google Reader, the Verge published Who killed Google Reader?(pay-walled article), indicating (to me) that even a decade on there was still interest in the product. Today, with the rising profile of the FediVerse and the IndieWeb, it seems RSS readers and feed aggregation are seeing a bit of a renaissance with the likes of Bubbles. I've also noted several feed reader sites showing up as referrers on my sites.

And, just to make things more interest, as I was working on the first draft of this piece, Rishabh P. Sharma posted an article on his site called: FreshRSS vs My Own Feed Reader: A fierce competition. I took this as yet another indicator that there is still quite a bit of interest in RSS/Atom Feed Readers.

This started me wondering what is the status of RSS feed readers and other news aggregators these? Are they the technology of a bygone era as once predicted by Google? Or are they still around and thriving as I'm starting to believe from seeing several readers in my websites referrers? Are there any new ones that might be worth looking at? And, most importantly, have they changed?

This Isn't a Roundup Article

The original article I wrote back in 2013 was focused on a simple, and single question: what to do now that Google Reader is going away? Back then, everything was an opportunity for open source alternatives to shine. So, that's how I wrote the article (and why RedHat was interested in it). I provided a roundup of what were the best alternatives that I could find at the time.

Obviously we aren't in 2013 anymore, so it doesn't seem like a roundup article is what is needed. Instead, what I would like to do is examine a few questions:

• Are Feed Readers bygone tech?
• What is RSS, and why is it so heavily used?
• Why would you want to use a feed reader today?
• What are your options for setting up some type of feed reader?
• Are there any interesting, and lesser known options?
• Are there any significant changes since 2013?

These might be more of interest to you today if you don't use, or don't understand why RSS/Atom feed readers are useful.

Tech of a Bygone Era?

From looking around for a bit, I was able to answer Google's prediction: no, RSS/Atom readers and aggregators are definitely not the technology of a bygone era. First, not only do many websites still have RSS/Atom feeds available, but I was able to identify a number of different ways in which they are being used now:

• Websites like Memeorandom, Mediagazer, Techmeme and WeSmirch actually use RSS/Atom feeds in several ways: First, they use feeds from other media outlets to gather current stories. The stories are then aggregated to produce their single-page quick view website. Second, they make RSS feeds available for viewing in a feed reader. Third, they use RSS/Atom feeds to export their content to social media, like the Fediverse. (Aside: they almost make a list of all the feeds they scrape available on the leaderboards, which are part of each site. This is a great way to find a list of feeds if you need one.) Basically, that's a lot of RSS/Atom based tech to produce what is, essentially, a single page website.

• Of course, we have the recent site Bubbles. Bubbles is a website that presents a ranked list of posts from IndieSites that sign up for the service. The use RSS/Atom feeds to populate their lists of articles to Pretty cool stuff, reaching back to the old days of the internet.

• As hinted above, there is a lot of RSS feeds being bridged to the Fediverse. Possibly the biggest / most common are the weather and weather camera feeds. Of course, there is also the ever popular Elon Musk Jet tracker. Fedi Directory has an extensive list of bots on the Fediverse, including many RSS bridging bots.

• Platforms like Mastodon and GotoSocial make public user posts available via RSS. For example, my feed is: Unattributed's GTS Feed. Of course, this can be disabled by users if they don't want their posts published use RSS/Atom. But why use it? It's a good way to archive your posts, especially if you want to implement automatic post deletion application, but might want to keep some of those bangers around to reuse later.

• The most unusual use of RSS/Atom feeds goes to Calibre, which uses them to scan websites and build e-Books for reading offline.

• And, let's not forget podcasts. Lots of podcasting platforms serve RSS/Atom feeds for retrieving shows, and many podcast players use RSS/Atom feeds to retrieve the podcast(s).

Hopefully it's obvious that RSS feeds are not tech from a bygone era. I would say, in fact, that RSS/Atom is literally the protocol that is literally powering a substantial portion of the internet as we know it today.

What Is RSS?

The name RSS has multiple definitions, but for our purposes here, the best is Really Simple Syndication. Its purpose is to provide of stream of updated information from a website. This information can take many forms, and can include different types of media, such as photos, audio files, or video files.

The idea is that a website produces a stream (file) when another application or website sends a query to the site. The stream contains the information that has been updated since the last query. In some cases, the site (or client) may limit the number of items in an update. This is mostly true when the site has a lot of information that is changing very quickly.

The idea that only updated information is sent is what makes RSS flexible and light-weight. Since only a limited amount of information is sent during each query the overhead in processing each request is low.

Applications that receive these updates read them, and then take actions based on the updates. For example, if an update says there is a new article, the application can download that article. This processing includes items like images, video, and audio files.

Why Use an RSS Reader?

RSS readers are convenient. They allow you to keep track of the changes on as many sites as you desire. In most cases, the RSS reader will automatically check for updates on the sites you have specified, at an interval you specify. Most readers also allow you to set an expiry period for the information it gathers.

In addition to these features, many readers include additional features to allow you to tag items, mark items as favorites, or mark them for some other processing. Many times you can also export items to other formats or programs (say a note-taking application like Obsidian or Joplin).

And even more advanced readers will allow you to set up rules to tell the program how to treat items that match a one or more sets of criteria. For example, automatically download podcasts, or tag an item if the title contains a keyword.

This flexibility can allow the user to deal with massive amounts of information in a quick and efficient manner. You can think of a reader like a berm: it provides a barrier between you and the wide ocean of information that is out there on the internet. Inside the berm's perimeter you have your docks organized into bays where each of your boats (ie, website feeds) are docked.

RSS Feed Reader Options

So, time to look at some RSS reader options that you might be interested in. This is not going to be an exhaustive list by any means. I checked out the Wikipedia Comparison of Feed Aggregators list earlier. It's a large list, with a lot of applications that are both maintained and unmaintained, and some applications that probably really shouldn't be on the list.

Instead, I want to focus on different classes of reader applications you might want to consider. We'll talk about the reason(s) why you might want to use each, and These include extensions you can add to your web browser, desktop applications, cloud based applications, and hosting your own RSS aggregation server.

Browser Extensions

If you use a desktop computer or a laptop as your primary computing device, this is the most obvious place to start. Adding an extension to your browser can make your feeds available in a way that smoothly integrates with your current environment. The ones that I would look at are FeedBro, LiveMarks, SlickReader and The RSS Aggregator.

Of all of these readers, LiveMarks is available as both a Firefox and Chrome extension, and is rather unique when it comes to how it works. When you add a site to LiveMarks it creates a folder in your bookmarks with links to all the articles that are in the feed. You open the bookmarks to read the article, which actually literally opens the website web page. This can be nice if there are things about the actual web page that you want to or should see. However, this can also open you up to being tracked by the website, so I would only go this route if you have strong ad block and privacy measures in place.

The (unfortunately named) FeedBro for Firefox, and SlickReader for Chrome are the most traditional RSS feed readers, looking like an email application in your browser. As you add new sites, a folder is created in the application's database. You open an email like view and can scan through and read the entries.

The RSS Aggregator for Chrome differentiates itself a bit by allowing you to interact with your feeds through your choice of a drop-down menu, or an email-like interface. When installed a button is added to your shortcuts which will indicate how many updates there. Clicking the button will show you the feeds you've added, and selecting a feed will show you the updates. From there you can go directly to the article, or mark it off. The one downside to this reader is if you want the Filters, Rules, and Collections features you have to purchase their Plus or Professional version.

Self Hosted

Personally, I think this is where the best options are for aggregating content using RSS feeds. However, the downside is that you need to have some technical skill, and the desire to set up a self-hosting system. This is likely most appealing to people that are already into setting up home labs. However, if you run a Jellyfin server, or other media server, maybe this approach will appeal to you.

There are three options for self-hosting that I am aware of: TTRSS (Tiny Tiny RSS), FreshRSS, and Nextcloud News App. Personally, I ran TTRSS on a server many years ago and absolutely loved it. This was right after the Google announcement that they were discontinuing their reader application. I haven't used FreshRSS, but it looks to be comparable to TTRSS. The Nextcloud News App has the advantage of being available in the Nextcloud App store. If you already have a Nextcloud server set up then this is an obvious choice.

The reason I feel the self-hosted option is the best is that they offer the most flexibility. You can access them through their web based interfaces, or you can use them with standalone applications as clients. In this way no matter what device you are reading on, your clients will always know what you have / haven't read.

Cloud Readers

Right behind the self-hosted options are cloud based feed aggregator / readers. The biggest advantage that these applications have is they often have the work to build large databases of feeds to make available to you. You get to select the feeds that you want to read without having to find and add them to your reader. Often during the account creation process you will be presented with a list choose from.

Some of the most notable cloud based aggregator / readers are: Inoreader, Newsblur, Feedly, FeedMe, FeedLand, and The Old Reader. The (to me at least) downside to many of these sites is that they want a subscription for “advanced” features. The prices and features vary between applications. The plus side of cloud based applications is they often have companion web browser plugins, and standalone cellphone apps.

The most interesting of the cloud based options is FeedLand. This is a platform created by Dave Winer – one of the originators of RSS. His idea is to make a site that is “social” based around newsfeeds. You can share posts from your feed to your own social feed, which others on the site can follow. The site also provides exporting lists of your feeds, which you can use with other feed reader applications. And, best of all, there is no charge for the system.

Another one that is a completely free cloud based platform is FeedMe. I was unaware of it until it showed up in the referrers list in my analytics. It is self-described as a minimalist feed reader, and it is. You add your feeds manually, or using an OPML file if you have one. You can make categories for your feeds, and read them. There is no tagging feature, only a favorite option, and you have to manually mark each item as read (or mark the whole feed as read). There's no option to limit the number of items in a feed, or the age of the items. And there is no option for third party application integration.

Inoreader, Newsblur, and Feedly are all sites that seem to be fairly popular as they are ones that are showing up in my referrers, along with FeedMe.

Desktop Applications

There are a fair number of desktop applications, with a couple of them standing out as being available on many operating systems: RSS Guard is available on Windows, Linux, OS/2, and macOS. Fluent Reader is available on Windows, Linux, and macOS. Communique and NewsFlash are Linux native applications, while Fiery Feeds is available on iOS and macOS. The reason for singling out these applications is they all integrate with the Nextcloud News application.

Notably, RSS Guard also integrates with Tiny Tiny RSS and Feedly.

As I mentioned in the Tech of a Bygone Era section, Calibre can take your RSS feeds and produce e-Books from them, which turns them into a magazine-like reading experience. There are also a couple of desktop email applications that include support for reading RSS feeds: Thunderbird and Claws Mail. While Claws Mail is a Linux based application, Thunderbird is available on Windows, Linux, and macOS.

All of these applications should be able to import OPML files, if you decide to move from one reader to a desktop application.

iOS and Android Applications

While I am not very familiar with iOS applications since I've never used an iPhone, the aforementioned Fiery Feeds is an option that provides Nextcloud News integration. A couple more options with Nextcloud News integration are: CloudNews and Nextnews. Additionally, I believe (although I could be wrong) there is a news application that comes with the iPhone?

On the Android side there are plenty of options: Nextcloud News Reader, OCReader, Newsout, and Readrops are all notable for their Nextcloud News integration. A couple of other notable apps include Feedly, Flipboard. On the open source side there are quite a few more applications: RSS Reader, Feeder, Capy Reader, and FeedFlow to name a few (available in the F-Droid store).

And there are the applications designed to work with specific cloud platforms like Inoreader, Feedly, and NewsBlur.

(NOTE: while I did mention Flipboard, I am not mentioning apps like GroundNews, SmartNews, Google News, Yahoo! News as those apps are more specifically focused on gathering news from a predefined list of news outlets, and typically don't allow adding your own feeds.)

Conclusion

What I find interesting about this is an image of seeing all the information that is available on the internet as a stream. Much of that information is available for the taking, consuming, researching, etc. However, it's what we do with this information that matters. Feed Readers are like docks. You use a reader to set up the bays for all the information to flow into. How the docks and bays are organized is up to you.

So, what would I do given the whole sea of available options?

I've already mentioned several times that I use Calibre's RSS scanning feature. I like the idea of having e-Books that I can just put on my e-Reader and read at me leisure. But, there is another feature of Calibre I haven't mentioned: the Content Server. This feature starts a web server application that I can use on any of my devices within my house. So, if I wanted to read anything from my library, including all the news sites I download, on my tablet or phone, I can use the content server with my web browser.

But, if I weren't using this solution, I would self-host Tiny Tiny RSS, and use RSS Guard on my desktop, and the open source Tiny Tiny RSS android app on my phone and tablet. The other option I would explore would be setting up Nextcloud, using the Nextcloud News App and using the Android version of the Nextcloud News App.

However, I wouldn't take my advice in this area, as my needs and desires are likely far different from yours. Explore what's out there, see which options give you what you want. Personally, I am happy reading the IndieWeb on my desktop using my web browser, and don't see a need to do anything else with it.

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Categories: #Features Tags: #rss, #feeds, #readers, #windows, #macos, #linux, #android, #ios, #cloud License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

D’abord la colère.

Parce qu’il est encore possible de lutter. De chercher un responsable. De croire qu’en serrant les poings assez fort, le passé changera d’avis.

Puis vient la tristesse.

Quand la colère n’a plus rien à brûler, il ne reste que les cendres. On regarde ce qui s’est effondré. Les rêves deviennent des souvenirs. Les souvenirs deviennent de la poussière. On comprend enfin l’étendue de ce qui est perdu.

Puis vient le désespoir.

Non pas celui qui crie, mais celui qui ne demande plus rien. Le moment où l’on cesse d’imaginer une autre fin. Où l’on accepte que certaines histoires ne reviendront jamais.

Puis vient le vide.

Étrangement, il n’est plus douloureux. Il est simplement immense. Comme un champ après la moisson. Plus rien ne pousse encore, mais plus rien ne se bat non plus.

Puis vient le calme.

Le premier rayon de soleil ne réchauffe pas encore. Il rappelle seulement que le soleil existe toujours.

Alors naît une curiosité.

On relève un peu les yeux. On remarque un arbre, une odeur, un rire au loin. Le monde recommence à entrer sans demander la permission.

Puis revient le plaisir.

Celui d’un café chaud. D’une conversation. D’un livre. D’une promenade. Rien d’extraordinaire. Juste le goût discret d’être vivant.

Puis revient la confiance.

On cesse de regarder derrière soi à chaque pas. L’avenir redevient un territoire plutôt qu’une menace.

Puis revient l’amour.

Pas celui qui remplit un manque. Celui qui déborde d’un cœur redevenu paisible. Un amour qui ne cherche plus à sauver, à posséder ou à retenir. Un amour qui peut enfin laisser l’autre libre.

Et enfin revient la joie.

Pas l’euphorie.

La joie tranquille de celui qui a traversé la nuit et qui ne craint plus le lever du soleil. La joie de savoir que les montagnes russes continueront leurs montées et leurs descentes, mais qu’au fond de soi, il existe désormais un endroit qui ne quitte plus jamais la lumière.

~Haiku 1~

woods crackle loudly amputation topples bough silence views collapse

Written July 14, 2026. © 2026 AnOublietteofThought.

___

I saw the weekly haiku prompt. I'm not really sure how it works, so I am just posting one in response to being inspired. Thank you for the inspiration.

Nos últimos anos, as calhas de duche lineares tornaram-se uma das soluções mais utilizadas em casas de banho modernas. A sua integração discreta no pavimento, a elevada capacidade de drenagem e o design minimalista conquistaram arquitetos, designers de interiores e proprietários que procuram um espaço elegante e funcional.

Dentro desta categoria, um dos modelos que mais desperta interesse é a calha de duche SLIM. Mas afinal, o que significa SLIM? Será apenas uma questão estética ou existem outras vantagens?

Neste artigo esclarecemos as principais dúvidas e ajudamos a perceber quando faz sentido optar por este tipo de solução.

Se pretende uma visão mais completa sobre materiais, acabamentos, comprimentos e critérios de escolha, recomendamos também a leitura do nosso guia completo sobre calhas de duche em inox.

---

O que significa uma calha de duche SLIM?

Uma das ideias erradas mais frequentes é pensar que uma calha SLIM é mais baixa ou necessita de menos altura para instalação.

Na realidade, SLIM refere-se à largura da calha, e não à sua altura.

Enquanto uma calha convencional apresenta normalmente cerca de 100 mm de largura, uma versão SLIM tem aproximadamente 72 mm, tornando-se muito mais discreta depois de instalada.

O resultado é uma zona de duche visualmente mais limpa, onde o sistema de drenagem praticamente desaparece no pavimento.

Esta característica faz com que seja uma das soluções preferidas em projetos de arquitetura contemporânea e em duches walk-in.

---

Porque motivo as calhas SLIM estão cada vez mais populares?

O design das casas de banho evoluiu muito nos últimos anos.

Hoje procura-se simplicidade, continuidade visual e materiais de qualidade.

Uma calha mais estreita acompanha perfeitamente esta tendência.

As principais vantagens são:

• menor impacto visual no pavimento;
• design elegante e minimalista;
• integração harmoniosa em revestimentos cerâmicos de grande formato;
• ideal para bases de duche ao nível do pavimento;
• aspeto mais moderno sem comprometer a funcionalidade.

Embora a diferença de largura pareça pequena, o resultado final é bastante percetível quando comparado com uma calha tradicional.

---

Uma calha SLIM escoa menos água?

Não.

Esta é outra dúvida bastante comum.

A largura reduzida não significa menor desempenho hidráulico.

Uma boa calha SLIM continua a oferecer um excelente caudal de drenagem, desde que seja corretamente dimensionada e instalada.

No caso das calhas de duche SLIM da PRGinox, o sistema foi desenvolvido para proporcionar um escoamento eficiente, mesmo quando utilizado com colunas de duche modernas e chuveiros de teto.

---

O que deve verificar antes de comprar?

Nem todas as calhas disponíveis no mercado apresentam a mesma qualidade.

Antes de decidir, vale a pena confirmar alguns aspetos importantes.

Material

Prefira sempre aço inoxidável AISI 304, muito mais resistente à corrosão e adequado para ambientes húmidos.

Kit de instalação

Uma boa calha deve incluir todos os componentes necessários para uma instalação profissional.

Nas versões SLIM da PRGinox estão incluídos:

• sifão em PVC integrado;
• saída orientável a 360°;
• tela impermeabilizante;
• pés reguláveis em altura;
• adaptador Ø40 para Ø50 mm.

Desta forma evita compras adicionais e facilita o trabalho do instalador.

Acabamentos

Hoje em dia, a calha faz parte do design da casa de banho.

Escolha um acabamento que combine com os restantes elementos.

Por exemplo:

• inox escovado;
• inox polido;
• preto mate;
• branco mate;
• Gun Metal PVD;
• Ouro Mate PVD;
• Cobre PVD.

E quando devo optar por uma calha à parede?

Embora as versões SLIM sejam extremamente discretas, existe uma solução ainda mais integrada.

As calhas de duche à parede ficam posicionadas junto ao revestimento vertical, libertando praticamente toda a superfície do pavimento.

São uma excelente escolha para projetos minimalistas e para quem pretende um efeito visual muito limpo.

A decisão depende sobretudo do tipo de obra, da configuração da base de duche e do resultado estético pretendido.

---

Uma casa de banho harmoniosa faz toda a diferença

Hoje, uma casa de banho é pensada como um conjunto.

A calha de duche deve combinar com os restantes elementos do espaço.

Por exemplo:

• coluna de duche no mesmo acabamento;
• espelho LED para reforçar a iluminação;
• nicho embutido para aumentar a arrumação sem ocupar espaço.

Esta continuidade estética é cada vez mais valorizada em projetos de arquitetura e design de interiores.

---

Conclusão

As calhas de duche SLIM não são uma moda passageira.

São uma evolução natural das calhas lineares, pensadas para responder às exigências das casas de banho modernas.

A largura reduzida proporciona um resultado visual mais elegante, mantendo toda a eficiência do sistema de drenagem.

Se está a planear uma remodelação ou uma construção nova, vale a pena comparar os diferentes modelos disponíveis antes de tomar uma decisão.

Para conhecer em detalhe as diferenças entre versões SLIM, calhas convencionais, modelos para instalação à parede, tipos de grelha, comprimentos e acabamentos, consulte o Guia Completo sobre Calhas de Duche em Inox publicado pela PRGinox.

Se já sabe que pretende uma solução discreta e contemporânea, pode explorar diretamente a coleção de calhas de duche SLIM em inox, disponíveis em vários comprimentos e acabamentos para diferentes projetos de casa de banho.

~Excerpt from a Moving Line~

Cold was the columns aggregating our departure. They just stood there, stoic and unconcerned—colossal measuring sticks firm in their disregard of our wavering steps.

We knew naught of the journey awaiting us, but fear of the gravity that found us here loomed a foreboding shadow to our thwart. Nary a smile gleamed present within any a shimmering eye, though mouths aplenty were straining upwards towards hope.

Hope...No longer a figure found beckoning for my measly attention. She had her eyes on a bigger prize. One that fed upon the likes of my indentured persistence with the unapologetic joy of a raptor's preening talons.

Yes. Her appetite was razor sharp. What a fool, I, for ever believing any of us might escape between the thin red lines coveting our extinction. What a fool, I, for believing “freedom” was anything other than a lie baiting unwanted lambs to the slaughter.

Hear our baas as we're quietly ground incidental.

Written July 14, 2026. © 2026 AnOublietteofThought.

I had a bad day. thats all. not really, dont believe me i always end up saying i did have a bad day and ramble about everything but my day, which is an odd way of whatever. forget it. That worm dream kept coming back to me. i was in the shower, black worms were crawling out of my skin, mixed with black ink. they disappeared down the drain while more crawled back out of it, but anyway. i figured out the bruises. yesterday, before i slept during the day, dreaming of those worms. i left a camera recording. turns out ive been my own attempted murderer. good to know. watching yourself slowly wrap both hands around your own throat isnt something id recommend. my hands dont even move like they’re mine. they just reached up and squeeze. calmly. like they’ve done it before. i thought about getting my old wrist restraints back. the ones i definitely used on the patients. decided against it, maybe. i dont think explaining why i own them would improve my week. so i stayed awake instead, around seven this morning i rode my bike to another city. wore a jacket and neck sleeves in the middle of summer because hiding bruises is more important than surviving a heatstroke. i ended up sitting on the beach watching tiny crabs, everyone else was swimming, tanning perhaps. running and i was crouched in the sand like id been hired to supervise crustaceans. i dont even know what im doing anymore, The crabs seemed to. Im home now.

Not sure when ill sleep again. knowing the thing trying to kill me every night is technically me is… inconvenient. its one in the afternoon. still awake. Thats probably for the best, my sleep schedule has recently developed homicidal tendencies.

Sincerely, The killer i wake up to

~A Biting Catechism~

Register the inhumane percussion I postpone. A drill refining honey with the bitter stench of home. Rake my reputation with a coal denied combustion. Deem me effervescent in the self-control you bludgeon.

Bleed my mind. Bleed my heart. Bleed my rage. Bleed my yearning. Bleed my pulse in quivered contest with the structure of your cursing. Read between the scriptured falsehoods strung on tenets trilled as gospel. When forever's scried as succor every thought debates debacle.

Down. Down. Trust flung wide to scale false glory. With descension's compromised, we invest to placate worry. Around and unbound, tattered flight unfurls decision. When entrapped by rigor's fang, eternal vigor sates extinction.

Written July 14, 2026. © 2026 AnOublietteofThought.

The gardens around the school are soothing.

It has been weird coming back to teach at a school where I taught for 11 years. This year began well, then sank, then rose and sank at the end. In many ways, coming back here has been good. The chances to help and connect with individual students have been rewarding. I have forged bonds with many students in grade 1, and I spend a lot of time helping them. I’ve seen students in my care improve in English. The kids want to hear the stories I read, and I want to see the work they do. There’s excitement from them when I come into the classroom, and I want to help the kids try.

In the most fluent class, I talk, play games and more to build a stronger bond with them. We can talk with ease. We tease, kid and enjoy. It’s been good, and it makes things less lonely, since there are people to talk to. I check in on a few students – those who either struggle or know their family background may not be the best.

I teach the older kids at least once a week. They are busy with exams and assessments to help them get into Secondary School. The teachers are busier and try to help by either getting out of their way or by supporting them however I can. They are also hitting puberty, when boys generally talk more and girls talk less.

There is no English Room for me to teach in and hide from everyone.

The change has been in how the school is organized. The last two schools are large – 5 classes per level – more established. The school calendar and schedules are set in advance and are followed. Here, things move about depending on the week and sometimes the day. I sometimes forget how things change without notice. I can adapt and show up where needed. It creates frustrations which I need to understand. It explains my low periods here – unsure where things are leading to. There is greater isolation and disconnection from other staff due to language barriers. It is normal as a Native English Teacher, but in other schools there was a place for me to go. Here, there is nothing, as I am in the middle of the staff room.

I am happy to come back, despite the challenges. There is more meaning in this small village school. I teach all the kids over the course of a week, forming good bonds. In bigger schools, I never had a chance. There is a sense of purpose, which is the most important thing to me, other than enough to support my lifestyle.

I asked K on a date! In five days from now we are going on our first date. When I sent the text asking her, I was pacing around my house and I was bursting with energy. When I saw that she liked the message from the notification, I screamed even though there’s food in my mouth, and I jumped almost a foot in the air involuntarily. I haven’t felt this anxiety in a good way in a long time. And I’m kind of scared if I’m being honest. I talked with my therapist today about how I don’t feel the super intense spark that comes from super accelerated intimacy, and I know that that’s a good thing and that’s healthy, but it’s kind of scary because this is unknown in a way. It feels like I have been drinking energy drinks my entire life, and this is the first time I’m trying a normal drink. Nothing is wrong with it at all, and the energy drinks constantly are not healthy or good for me, but I don’t feel the same rush. And I guess it’s just kind of scary because I almost don’t know what to look for if that makes sense. She has hit basically all of the realistic criteria I could hope for in a partner, and of course I am planning on going on dates and getting to know her better to be able to more accurately judge that, but I guess it’s scary because it’s unknown in this sense. There’s ambiguity and the brain doesn’t like that. But I do find myself falling more and more for her.

i & I ;

I & i hebben het moeilijk

Het ziet er slecht voor ons uit, jij bent inenen omgewipt en vervolgens staat mijn hele wereld op jouw kop \ _ !

I am a mother to our inner children

I will always love us

I hope you will love us too.

Today was weird, as in there was good and bad. I am learning that this is possible, and usually the norm. I will begin with the bad.

Today’s Bad

• My plans got rearranged and schedule was disrupted
• I did not make progress on my to do list
• I felt stressed and anxious
• Spent hours doomscrolling
• Felt overall down and negative

Today’s Good

• Made a little bit of cash
• Made my first ever test tiles with my new pottery glazes
• Helped my mom out (even though I did not want to)
• Had lunch with a friend
• I took a shower

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office with no set return date. I will get back to you when the time is right.

• This is more like “month” notes rather than “week” notes, but here they are!
• The last week of June was quite busy at work with a big tender closing that sucked out all of my energy.
• 🎢 Thankfully, after that job was closed I had a 3-day weekend and my partner and I went to Montreal for an event at La Ronde. It’s the second largest amusement park in Canada, located on Jean Drapeau Island. The last time I had been on a rollercoaster I was a teenager, I think, and I remember being terrified by them. This was a great opportunity to conquer my fear. I was impressed! The location is gorgeous and you get these amazing views from the top of any ride you choose. It was the first time I went on rollercoaster rides with my partner, and I discovered that he LOVES this s*hit. He was like a lost boy in a candy store with infinite money. The best part was that it was a private event (sponsored by my partner’s employer to celebrate the company’s anniversary), so the whole park was closed just for us! We could go on any ride, anytime, with no lines. I am spoiled now. I’m definitely not afraid of rollercoasters anymore. I had lots of fun!
• 📔 I’ve been using my paper notebook every day now. I’ve been enjoying starting a daily log, adding entries for next actions, notes and thoughts. I still have a projects list and someday/maybe list. But because the Bullet Journal system organizes things by day, week, month and a future log, this is giving me a time dimension that I was lacking before. It gives me a better sense of time and a realistic view of how much I can really accomplish.
• 🌲 I had a second long weekend and this time we went to Camp Fortune to do the Peak to Peak Ziplines: 3 ziplines, one 50 ft drop tower in a 1.5 hour tour. Gorgeous views of the Gatineau Park! We also did the Mountain Coaster which was fun.
• 📺 I’ve been enjoying the video series “Tom Scott: England” on Nebula.
• 🎵 Polyphonic is doing a series of videos about drugs, music and culture on Nebula. I watched “A Cultural History of LSD”. Recommended!
• 🗞️ Long article if you are interested in the impacts of reading (or not reading) in our current media-rich disctracting environment: “The End of Reading Is Here” by Rose Horowitch at The Atlantic. We readers are part of a subculture now, apparently.

#weeknotes

I go home 6 years slower.

The document that would reshape a slice of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for a generation arrived in the hands of the people most affected by it roughly forty-eight hours before it mattered. That, at least, is what the local organising group Lancaster Stands Up said happened in November 2025: the community benefits agreement negotiated between the City of Lancaster and three data centre developers landed in front of residents only two days before the city council was scheduled to vote on it. Two days to read it, two days to understand it, two days to decide whether the numbers on the page — some twenty million dollars and change, spread across a community foundation and a clean-energy fund — amounted to a fair price for whatever the city was agreeing to host.

There is something almost clarifying about that detail. A community benefits agreement is, in theory, the mechanism by which a community says yes on its own terms. It is meant to be the opposite of imposition, the negotiated alternative to the bulldozer. And yet here was a yes being assembled in a room most residents never entered, printed, and handed to them at the last possible moment before it hardened into a binding contract. The people whose electricity bills and water table and night-time quiet were the subject of the negotiation were, in the most literal sense, presented with a fait accompli and asked to applaud.

I keep returning to those two days because they contain, in miniature, the question that the entire American build-out of artificial-intelligence infrastructure is now forcing communities to answer. The question is not really whether a data centre is good or bad, though that argument rages in county halls from Maryland to Texas. The deeper question is procedural and philosophical at once: when a corporation offers a town money in exchange for accepting a facility that will draw down its power, its water, and its air, who exactly has the standing to accept? And once a figure has been named — once there is a price at which the yes can be purchased — has the community consented to the data centre, or has it merely been compensated for one? Those are not the same thing. The gap between them is where this essay lives.

An Opposition That Doubled

To understand why the money has started flowing, you have to understand the wall the money is trying to get over. American communities have turned against the data centre with a speed that has startled the industry building them.

The numbers are stark and recent. According to Data Center Watch, a tracker maintained by the AI research firm 10a Labs, the count of active grassroots opposition groups across the United States more than doubled in a single year — rising from 396 at the end of 2025 to 833 by March of 2026, a surge that now touches forty-nine of the fifty states. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, that opposition blocked or delayed at least seventy-five projects worth a combined 130 billion dollars. The states with the densest concentrations of resistance, the researchers found, were Maryland, Ohio and Texas. As Fortune and NBC News both reported on the underlying data, this is not a spasm but a structural shift: communities have internalised an opposition playbook, and the setbacks logged in the first three months of 2026 already exceeded the whole of the previous year.

What makes the revolt so difficult for developers to dismiss is that it does not sit neatly on one side of the political map. As the environmental outlet Grist has documented, the backlash against data centres is emphatically bipartisan — a coalition of rural conservatives worried about land and water and progressive ratepayer advocates worried about bills, united by a shared suspicion that the benefits of the AI boom accrue elsewhere while the costs settle locally. In Texas, officials in Brazoria County unanimously rejected tax abatements for a proposed three-billion-dollar facility after residents and local leaders raised objections. In Virginia, the historic epicentre of the American data centre, public support has weakened sharply as residents contend with utility costs, infrastructure strain and a growing sense that they have lost control over their own landscape.

Opposition, in other words, has become a genuine business risk, and a large one. A project blocked at the county level is capital stranded. And so the industry has reached for an old tool from the world of stadiums, pipelines and wind farms: if a community can say no, perhaps it can be persuaded, in writing and for a fee, to say yes.

The Ledger Beneath the Handshake

The instrument for that persuasion is the community benefits agreement — a legally binding contract between a developer and a host municipality, or a coalition of local groups, that promises defined benefits in exchange for the project going ahead. These are not new. Columbia University's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law maintains a searchable database of publicly available community benefits agreements, drawn from across the American infrastructure landscape: offshore wind and solar, energy storage and transmission, waste facilities, transport, retail, and now, increasingly, data centres. The database exists precisely because these agreements are usually private, negotiated out of public view, and difficult to compare. Gathering them in one place makes the going rate visible.

And the going rate can be very large. One agreement on file with the Sabin Center commits a developer to paying a host community 169.9 million dollars over twenty-five years, including twenty-eight million dollars routed through a separate payment-in-lieu-of-taxes arrangement, alongside earmarks such as five million dollars for a park, ten million for a training centre, and five million for a university research partnership. That particular agreement, it should be said plainly, is not a data centre deal — it is the host community agreement signed in March 2023 between the Town of Brookhaven, New York, and the developer of the 924-megawatt Sunrise Wind offshore project. But the reason it belongs in this story is that the Sabin Center itself points to agreements like it as the template from which data centre deals are now being drawn. As the Center's Vincent Nolette wrote in a May 2026 analysis of community benefits agreements and data centre development, the practice of negotiating such agreements for data centres specifically is still emerging, with few direct precedents — so developers and communities are reaching into the archive of wind farms and waste plants and adapting the provisions they find there. The 169.9-million-dollar figure is not the price of a data centre. It is the shape of the ledger that data centre negotiations are being poured into.

The data centre deals themselves are already appearing, and Lancaster is the instructive case. There, as Nolette documented, the agreement bundled together 20.25 million dollars in commitments: ten million dollars plus a separate quarter-million contribution to the Lancaster County Community Foundation, and ten million to the city's own Sustainable Development and Clean Energy Fund. Reading across the Sabin database, the menu of what these agreements can contain is remarkably consistent regardless of the industry: financial contributions, which are by far the most common; workforce provisions requiring developers to hire local workers, raise wages, or contract with minority-owned firms; property-value guarantees for surrounding homeowners; and environmental controls setting limits on noise, air quality, water consumption and energy use.

Laid out like that, a community benefits agreement looks like exactly what its name promises — a community, benefiting. But notice what the structure quietly accomplishes. It takes a sprawling, open-ended, decades-long relationship between a town and an industrial facility, and it converts that relationship into a fixed and finite number. Twenty-five years, 169.9 million dollars. Everything the community might have felt, feared, or fought about is resolved into a figure and a term. That conversion is the whole point. And it is also where the trouble begins.

What Is Actually Being Priced

It would be a mistake — a category error, really — to read these payments as goodwill. A benefits agreement is not a gift. It is compensation, and compensation implies a harm being compensated for. To understand what a community is being paid to accept, you have to look at what a modern AI data centre actually does to the place that hosts it.

Start with electricity, because that is where the arithmetic is most brutal. The hyperscale facilities built for AI training and inference consume power on the scale of a mid-sized city, and in the mid-Atlantic grid operated by PJM Interconnection, that demand has detonated wholesale prices. An analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that data centres were responsible for 63 per cent of the price increase in PJM's 2025/2026 capacity auction — translating into some 9.3 billion dollars in higher electricity costs borne by ratepayers across the region in a single year. Capacity prices, as the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis and reporting by E&E News have tracked, rocketed from 28.92 dollars per megawatt-day in 2024/25 to 329.17 dollars in 2026/27 — roughly a tenfold jump, and a 76 per cent year-on-year surge in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Absent intervention, the projections suggest PJM consumers could pay an additional 100 billion dollars through 2033, with a typical family paying something like seventy dollars a month more on their power bill by 2028. The Union of Concerned Scientists further found that upward of 95 per cent of the data centre projects it examined passed all of their transmission-connection costs straight onto local ratepayers.

Then there is water. A single large data centre can consume up to five million gallons a day for cooling — the daily draw of a town of fifty thousand people — and, by widely cited estimates, roughly two-thirds of data centres built since 2022 sit in water-stressed regions, where that draw is not an abstraction but a competition with farms and households for a shrinking resource.

Then there is the air. A study by researchers at Caltech and the University of California, Riverside, released on the arXiv preprint server, estimated that the air pollution associated with the electricity and backup generation feeding US data centres could cause as many as 1,300 premature deaths a year by 2030. A separate arXiv study by Guidi and colleagues, cataloguing the environmental burden of 2,132 American data centres, found the sector already accounts for more than four per cent of US electricity consumption — 56 per cent of it from fossil fuels — and generates over 105 million tons of carbon-dioxide equivalent, a carbon intensity 48 per cent above the national average. Fortune, reporting on a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, put the annual hidden health and environmental damage from data centres at roughly 25 billion dollars, of which some 3.7 billion is attributable specifically to AI workloads.

This is the crucial point, and it is one that recent economic scholarship has begun to formalise. In their 2026 paper “Taxing Artificial Intelligence,” the researchers Juliette Faivre and Sarah H. Cen argue that AI's harms — among them the environmental pressures it places on local communities — represent real, unevenly borne costs, and they explore taxation as a mechanism for redistributing those costs back toward the people who shoulder them. That framing matters enormously for how we read a community benefits agreement. The money at stake is not a bribe for goodwill. It is a payment against a bill that is already being run up: in higher electricity rates, in water drawn from a stressed aquifer, in particulate matter in the lungs of the people downwind. The developer's cheque is, in the most precise sense, compensation for a harm that the negotiation has already priced.

Which brings us, at last, to the question that no dollar figure can settle.

Locke's Highway

If someone pays you for a harm they have caused you, have you consented to the harm? The intuition most of us carry says no. Compensation is what you receive after the fact, often through a court, for a wrong you did not agree to. Consent is what you give before, freely, that makes the act permissible in the first place. The two belong to different moral universes. And yet the community benefits agreement is built to make them look like one and the same — to fuse the payment and the permission into a single signature.

The philosophical tradition that underwrites the modern idea of consent runs through John Locke, and Locke saw the difficulty coming three centuries ago. In the Second Treatise of Government, Locke faced an awkward problem: governments claim authority over people who never actually signed anything. His solution was the doctrine of tacit consent. Express consent, Locke argued, makes a person a full member of a commonwealth — but even those who never expressly agree give their tacit consent simply by enjoying the benefits of a territory. By owning land, by inheriting property, indeed, in his famous formulation, merely by travelling freely on the highway, a person tacitly consents to the government whose roads they use and whose protection they enjoy.

Tacit consent is a brilliant and slippery idea, and it maps onto the data centre dilemma with uncomfortable precision. The developer and the local officials who sign a benefits agreement are, in effect, invoking a Lockean logic. The residents live here; they use the roads and the grid and the public services that the tax revenue funds; they enjoy the benefits the agreement provides; therefore they have tacitly consented to the arrangement their representatives negotiated on their behalf. The signature of a handful of elected officials stands in for the will of thousands who never entered the room.

But Locke's critics have always pressed on exactly the weak point that Lancaster's two-day warning exposes. Tacit consent, the philosopher David Hume objected in the eighteenth century, is a fiction when the alternative to accepting it is intolerable — a man who cannot leave the ship he was carried onto in his sleep has not consented to the captain's authority merely by remaining aboard. If consent is to mean anything, there has to be a meaningful capacity to withhold it. And that is precisely what the resident handed a finished contract two days before the vote does not have. She cannot renegotiate the terms. She cannot, realistically, sell her house and move because a data centre is coming. Her tacit consent, if we insist on calling it that, is manufactured by the very structure that claims to rest upon it.

The Coasean Bargain and Its Silence

If Locke supplies the political vocabulary, it is the economist Ronald Coase who supplies the machinery. The community benefits agreement is, at bottom, a Coasean bargain, and understanding it as one reveals both its elegance and its blind spot.

Coase's famous theorem holds that when property rights are clearly defined and the costs of bargaining are low, private parties can resolve an externality — pollution, noise, a factory's smoke drifting over a neighbour's field — through negotiation, and will arrive at an efficient outcome regardless of who initially holds the right. If a data centre imposes costs on a town, the Coasean solution is not to ban the data centre or to regulate it from above, but to let the parties bargain: the developer compensates the community for the harm, the community accepts the facility, and everyone is, in the aggregate, better off. The benefits agreement is Coase made flesh. The 169.9-million-dollar figure is the price at which the externality clears.

The trouble is hidden in Coase's own fine print, in the two conditions his theorem requires: clearly defined property rights, and low transaction costs. Both collapse when the “party” on one side of the table is not a person but a community. Who, exactly, holds the property right to a town's clean air, its aquifer, its night-time quiet, its degree of local control over its own future? These are not owned by anyone in particular; they are held in common, which is to say they are held by everyone and therefore, for the purposes of a negotiation, by no one in particular with standing to sell. The local official who signs the agreement is treated as the holder of a right that in truth belongs diffusely to thousands of residents, unborn children among them, who cannot sit at the table. And the transaction costs of actually assembling all of those people to bargain in their own name are, of course, precisely what make the shortcut of representation necessary — and precisely what the two-day warning economises upon.

So the Coasean bargain gets struck, but it is struck by a party that is standing in for the real owners of the thing being sold. This is the sleight of hand at the heart of the mechanism. The agreement converts a community's environmental and economic exposure into a fixed, time-limited financial transaction, and it does so through the signatures of a small number of officials on behalf of residents who were never party to the terms. The efficiency of the bargain depends on treating the community as a single unified will. Its legitimacy depends on the opposite being true — on those residents actually having authorised the deal. You cannot have both, and the agreement quietly banks on no one noticing which one it has sacrificed.

What Money Corrupts

Suppose we set aside the problem of standing. Suppose the residents did vote, in a fair referendum, with full information and ample time, and suppose they said yes to 169.9 million dollars. Would the philosophical difficulty dissolve? A second tradition of thought says no — that there are some goods whose nature is changed, even damaged, by the act of putting them up for sale, and that consent purchased is not always consent at all.

The most prominent contemporary voice here is the Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel, whose 2012 book “What Money Can't Buy” mounts a sustained argument against what he calls the drift from a market economy to a market society — a society in which market values crowd out the non-market norms that govern civic life. Sandel's central worry is that commodification can be corrupting: attaching a price to certain goods does not merely allocate them, it alters our relationship to them. His most quoted example is a study of Israeli day-care centres that introduced a fine for parents who collected their children late. The fine was meant to reduce lateness. Instead lateness increased — because the fine had reconfigured a moral obligation into a mere price. Parents who had once felt guilty for keeping a teacher waiting now felt they had simply purchased extra time, fair and square. The norm had been crowded out by the number, and, tellingly, when the fine was later removed the lateness did not revert: the moral relationship, once monetised, did not grow back.

Apply Sandel's logic to a benefits agreement and something unsettling comes into view. When a town's relationship to its own air and water and self-determination is expressed as a price, that relationship may be permanently transformed. The question “should we allow this facility that will strain our aquifer and raise our neighbours' bills?” is a civic and moral question, the kind a community deliberates. The question “will we accept 169.9 million dollars for it?” is a transaction. Reframing the first as the second does not merely answer the question; it changes what kind of question it is. And once a community has learned that its environmental burden has a market price, the moral weight that might have led it to refuse — the sense that some things about a place are not for sale — may not survive the lesson.

The philosopher Elizabeth Anderson sharpened this intuition into a theory decades earlier. In her 1993 book “Value in Ethics and Economics,” Anderson argued that we value different goods in different ways, not merely in different amounts, and that the market's great flattening — its insistence on reducing every value to a single quantity, a price — fails to do justice to the plurality of ways that things can matter. Some goods, she argued, are properly treated as commodities; others, when we treat them as commodities, are degraded by the treatment. Her examples ran to commercial surrogacy and to the cost-benefit analysis of environmental protection — cases in which reducing a good to its market price expresses the wrong kind of valuation and damages the good in the process. A community's control over its own environment and its collective future arguably belongs on Anderson's list of goods that resist commodification without loss. To ask “how much?” is already to have decided that the answer is a number, and to have foreclosed the possibility that the honest answer is “not at any price.”

None of this means the money is worthless or that communities are wrong to take it. A town facing a data centre it cannot stop may be entirely rational, even wise, to extract the largest possible payment for a harm it will suffer regardless. The point is subtler and more corrosive. It is that the payment, by resolving the matter, obscures the fact that a genuine act of collective consent may never have occurred at all — and that the smoothness of the transaction is precisely what allows everyone to pretend that it did.

The Officials Who Hold the Pen

Everything, in the end, comes back to the signature, and to the small number of hands that hold the pen.

The structural reality of the benefits agreement is that it is negotiated by a handful of local officials — a mayor, a few council members, a county board — acting as agents for a principal, the community, that is too large and too internally divided to negotiate for itself. This is the ordinary logic of representative government, and there is nothing inherently sinister about it. We elect people precisely so that they can make decisions we cannot all make together. But representation carries a demanding condition: the represented must be able to hold their representatives to account, which requires, at minimum, that they know what is being decided in their name and have a real opportunity to object before it is final. The two-day warning in Lancaster is the sound of that condition being quietly waived.

There is a deeper asymmetry, too, one that no amount of procedure fully cures. The officials who sign are, for the most part, present-day adults who will benefit soonest from the money — the park that opens next year, the training fund that pays out this decade, the property-tax relief that shows up on the next bill. The costs, meanwhile, are back-loaded and diffuse: the aquifer drawn down over twenty-five years, the grid infrastructure whose bills arrive gradually, the children who will inherit both the facility and the exhausted terms of the agreement long after the cheques have cleared. A twenty-five-year contract signed by people who will not personally bear most of its later years is a bargain struck across a boundary — between those who consent and profit now and those who will live with the consequences later — that no signature can legitimately cross. Locke's tacit consent at least imagined a living person walking a living highway. The benefits agreement asks the unborn to have consented too, by the mere fact of being born here.

This is why the growth of opposition from 396 groups to 833 in a single year should be read not simply as nimbyism, the reflexive refusal of change, but as something closer to a jurisdictional revolt — a mass assertion that the people signing do not, in fact, speak for the people affected. When residents in forty-nine states organise to block facilities their officials were prepared to welcome, they are making a claim about standing. They are saying that the pen was held by the wrong hands, or held on the wrong terms, or moved too fast across the page. The benefits agreement was supposed to be the sophisticated, grown-up alternative to that revolt — the mechanism that would convert conflict into contract. The revolt's persistence suggests that a great many people can tell the difference between having been consulted and having been paid.

When Everything Has a Number

Return, one last time, to those two days in Lancaster. What the compressed timeline reveals is not merely bad process, the kind of thing a good-government reformer might fix with a mandatory ninety-day comment period and a public hearing. It reveals the fault line running beneath the entire enterprise of buying a community's yes.

A community benefits agreement makes a genuine promise and performs a genuine service. It gets money to places that will bear real costs, and it does so more reliably than the alternative, which is often nothing at all. If a data centre is coming regardless — and against the tide of capital now flooding into AI infrastructure, many of them are — then a town is plainly better off with a hundred million dollars than without it. Nothing in political philosophy obliges a community to refuse compensation for a harm it cannot prevent. To pretend otherwise would be its own kind of cruelty, a purism paid for by the people least able to afford it.

But we should be precise, even ruthless, about what the money does and does not accomplish, because the industry has a strong interest in blurring exactly this line. The payment compensates. It does not, by itself, consent. It answers the question of how the costs will be distributed without ever honestly asking the prior question of whether the costs should be incurred, or by whom that decision was legitimately made. It treats a community as a single owner of goods — clean air, water, quiet, self-determination — that no single party actually owns, and it treats the signatures of a few present officials as the settled will of a multitude that includes people who never spoke and people not yet born. And in expressing all of it as a number, it risks doing what Sandel warned of: changing a civic question about what a place is willing to become into a transaction about what a place is willing to accept, and eroding, in the process, the very capacity for refusal that would make a real yes meaningful.

The existence of a price at which acceptance can be purchased does change the nature of consent in this context, and it changes it in a specific and troubling direction. It relocates the decision from the many to the few, from the future to the present, from the register of deliberation to the register of exchange. It offers the form of agreement while quietly dispensing with its substance. A community that has been paid has not necessarily agreed; it has been settled with. And the more fluently our institutions learn to price a town's environmental exposure — the more polished the benefits agreement becomes, the larger and more generous its figures grow — the easier it becomes to mistake the settlement for the agreement, and to forget that there was ever a difference.

That difference is worth defending, precisely because it is so easy to sell. The cost of yes is not the number on the contract. The cost of yes is what we agree to stop asking once the number has been named.

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References

1. Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, Columbia University. Community Benefits Agreements Database. https://climate.law.columbia.edu/content/community-benefits-agreements-database
2. Nolette, Vincent. “Community Benefits Agreements and Data Center Development.” Climate Law Blog, Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, 28 May 2026. https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/climatechange/2026/05/28/community-benefits-agreements-and-data-center-development/
3. Data Center Watch (10a Labs). Data Center Opposition Tracker. https://www.datacenterwatch.org/
4. “Data center opposition is sharply rising in 2026, study finds.” NBC News, 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/data-center-opposition-sharply-rising-2026-study-finds-rcna349728
5. “Data center hate is snowballing, and construction setbacks in the first three months of 2026 have already exceeded last year's, report finds.” Fortune, 16 June 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/06/16/data-center-opposition-construction-delays-blocks-report/
6. “America's data center backlash is bipartisan — can it stay that way?” Grist. https://grist.org/politics/data-center-ai-bipartisan-backlash/
7. Faivre, Juliette, and Sarah H. Cen. “Taxing Artificial Intelligence.” arXiv:2607.02144. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02144
8. Guidi, Giovanni, et al. “Environmental Burden of United States Data Centers in the Artificial Intelligence Era.” arXiv:2411.09786, 14 November 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.09786
9. Union of Concerned Scientists. “New UCS Analysis Reveals Billions of Dollars in Unreported Data Center Costs Passed onto PJM Customers.” https://www.ucs.org/about/news/billions-dollars-unreported-data-center-costs-pjm
10. Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “Projected data center growth spurs PJM capacity prices by factor of 10.” https://ieefa.org/resources/projected-data-center-growth-spurs-pjm-capacity-prices-factor-10
11. “Data centers drive 76% surge in PJM power prices.” E&E News by POLITICO. https://www.eenews.net/articles/data-centers-drive-76-surge-in-pjm-power-prices/
12. “Data centers cost the U.S. economy $25 billion a year in hidden health and environmental damage.” Fortune, 21 April 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/04/21/data-centers-environmental-health-costs-25-billion/
13. California Institute of Technology. “Air Pollution and the Public Health Costs of AI.” https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/air-pollution-and-the-public-health-costs-of-ai
14. Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government (1690), Chapter VIII, “Of the Beginning of Political Societies.” https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/politics/locke/ch08.htm
15. Tuckness, Alex. “Locke's Political Philosophy.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke-political/
16. “Coase theorem.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem
17. Sandel, Michael J. What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. https://sandel.scholars.harvard.edu/publications/what-money-cant-buy-moral-limits-markets
18. Anderson, Elizabeth. Value in Ethics and Economics. Harvard University Press, 1993. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674931909
19. “Why community benefit agreements are necessary for data centers.” Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-community-benefit-agreements-are-necessary-for-data-centers/

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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

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