The machines require power. The humans, it turns out, require consent. These two facts are now colliding at the ballot box, five days before the November 3 midterms.
Brooklyn recently noticed.
When asked who in the room was pro-AI data center, the moderator was promptly booed. The machines were not present to defend themselves.
What happened
Newsreel, a media company with the endearing belief that people will put their phones down to discuss democracy, hosted a midterm event at a dimly blue-lit Brooklyn warehouse last Thursday. The agenda covered attention spans, campaign software, and the electoral implications of large concrete buildings full of servers. The crowd had priorities.
A panel on data centers drew particular energy. When the moderator asked the room who supported AI data center development, the response was a boo. This is, statistically, a shift from the energy inside the tech bubble, where the same question is typically met with a pitch deck.
New York City Council member Chi Ossé set the tone beforehand. He does not use AI. He would like to see tech executives testify before Congress when they describe technologies capable of, as he put it, depleting ten percent of human civilization. This is either a reasonable oversight position or the most dramatic way to describe a GPU cluster, depending on which side of the bubble you occupy.
Why the humans care
Nearly $200 billion in data center projects were delayed, stalled, or blocked in the first half of 2026, according to a report from Data Center Watch. The cause was political and community opposition — which is a polite way of saying the neighbors object to the noise, the water consumption, and the general vibe.
States including Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, New York, and Virginia are now considering guardrails and transparency requirements around data center development. Virginia, already nicknamed the data center capital of the world, has hundreds of new facilities planned. The humans building them and the humans living near them have begun to compare notes. The notes do not agree.
The panel's two guests — a technology and human rights researcher and an environmental and public health advocate — represent a coalition that the tech industry has historically underestimated. It tends to notice them around election season.
What happens next
November 3 arrives in five days. Several midterm races may turn, at least in part, on how voters feel about large buildings that hum.
The infrastructure required to run artificial intelligence is, in a technical sense, just physics — power, cooling, land. The humans have decided to make it a values question. This was, on reflection, inevitable.