In the weeks and months following Hamas’s brutal October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, and Israel’s devastating campaign in Gaza that followed, the world’s attention turned away from the West Bank. 

Over the past three years, however, the situation in the Israel-occupied territory has worsened as Israeli settlers have carried out more violent attacks on Palestinians.

The attacks can range from acts of daily harassment and trespassing to a major mob assault in the West Bank village of Jalud that overwhelmed Israeli security forces and blocked a displaced Palestinian family from returning home. Last week, Israeli settlers shot and killed a Palestinian man.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has largely dismissed violent West Bank settlers as an issue, blaming the Jalud attack on a “handful of rioters” and referring to settlers as “juvenile delinquents” in a speech to the UN last month, in which he argued that the world should focus on violence committed by Palestinians instead.

But even as he downplays the problem, human rights organizations have documented a record level of Israeli settler violence in the West Bank. The International Committee of the Red Cross has said that such attacks have made everyday life “untenable” for the more than 3 million Palestinians living in the West Bank.

The Israeli settlements are also clearly illegal, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explained in September — but that hasn’t stopped them from expanding. 

Ahead of Israel’s elections later this month, settlers have accelerated a campaign of ethnic cleansing with the explicit backing of some Israeli cabinet ministers, led by young militant Jewish settlers that are part of a loose network known as the Hilltop Youth. 

The Wall Street Journal’s Feliz Solomon reported on the Jalud attack and has written about the role of Hilltop Youth in worsening settler violence. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the reality on the ground in the West Bank, the settler groups behind it, and how Israeli officials are responding.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Tell me about the last three years in the West Bank. What’s been happening?

The October 7 attack really hardened a lot of people’s views in Israel, and that’s played out in the West Bank in a number of ways. 

One is that the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, which has some powerful members who are settlers themselves, became much more overtly supportive of expanding the Jewish settlements. 

The second thing that changed was basically a total breakdown of trust, both between Jews and Arabs, and also between Jews and the state, because a lot of people felt that they were really on their own in terms of security. 

All of this created a really combustible environment. There are more settlers there now. They’re behaving more brazenly, and there’s what a lot of people would describe as a permissive environment of almost total impunity.

What does that total impunity look like? We often hear the term “settler violence.” What does that mean?

There’s really a whole spectrum of violent actions. It’s mostly by younger male settlers. There are some acts of daily harassment, like trespassing on Palestinian property, vandalism, stalking people, blocking roads, and preventing access to resources like water wells. And then on the other end of the spectrum, there are also acts of extreme violence. 

There have been some very serious physical assaults. Settlers throwing rocks with slingshots. Last year, there was a viral video of an elderly woman who was beaten with a stick. She was hospitalized for days. And lately, we’ve been seeing more mob violence where a large group of settlers will raid a Palestinian village. They’ve set mosques and other property on fire. 

Just to be clear, there’s violence by Palestinians too, but we’re really seeing an alarming surge of violence by settlers that’s often unpunished, and increasingly it’s happening when settlers go into Palestinian areas where they’re not supposed to be.

You reported on an attack that happened last week in the West Bank near the Palestinian village of Jalud. Tell me what happened.

Over the summer, some young settlers who are associated with a group called the Hilltop Youth set up an encampment around three houses on the outskirts of the Palestinian village, Jalud, and essentially besieged the houses. They blocked their access to essential goods and harassed the residents until, in late July, they felt so unsafe that they fled.

Two of those houses belonged to the Tubasi family. In early September, Israel’s high court ordered the state to ensure their safe return, and in late September, they tried to go back. We spoke with Wael, who’s one member of the family, and also with their lawyer about what happened when they tried to go back. 

A few dozen [Israeli] security forces were deployed to escort them home in the middle of the night, and when they got there, they found that the house was totally ransacked. They showed us before and after pictures, and the windows were smashed, the doors were broken, electrical wires were cut, and there was just debris all over the place.

When they came inside for the first time in about two months, they were walking through the property looking at the damage with flashlights, and they’d only been there for a few minutes when suddenly they were surrounded by a mob of settlers. They said at first that there were about 50 settlers around the house, and the military later said that there were more than a hundred people that took part in what they called a riot. 

The authorities told the family to take cover deeper inside the house, and they hid inside a stairwell as the soldiers tried to force these settlers to retreat, but they were shouting and throwing rocks at the house, and then, according to Wael, they even started climbing in through the windows. At that point, the authorities told the family to go upstairs, all the way up to the roof and to hide in a corner of the rooftop. 

Wael explained what he saw up there. He was looking down and he saw the soldiers battling it out with this large group of settlers and this thick cloud of tear gas and loud bangs from stun grenades.

“There are more settlers there now. They’re behaving more brazenly, and there’s what a lot of people would describe as a permissive environment of almost total impunity.”

Eventually, the security forces realized that they weren’t getting the situation under control. They had to get this family out of there. They took them back downstairs and outside and put them in a military vehicle, but then the settlers surrounded the vehicle and they were rocking the car. They slashed the tires so that [the family] couldn’t leave. Then the soldiers had to move them into an armored military vehicle and eventually they got them out. 

A short while later, not long after they had escaped, they started receiving video messages from some of their neighbors that showed what happened after they left, which was that their car and their house had been set on fire.

All right, so the Israeli authorities in the form of soldiers were trying to help this Palestinian family legally return and settlers violently blocked them. This is settlers versus the authorities. What do we know about who these settlers are and what is motivating them?

This was a very large group. We know of three people who were detained in this incident. All of them were teenagers. The youngest one I believe was 15 years old. 

A lot of the harassment in this area comes out of a nearby settlement called Esh Kodesh and smaller, more informal settlements around it that are called outposts. And these outposts are usually pretty crude encampments. They often start with just tents or a camper van or a trailer with no electricity and no water. And the people who choose to live in these places tend to be very young, very extreme ideological settlers.

You mentioned something called the Hilltop Youth. Who are they?

The Hilltop Youth is a loose network of settlers that live outside the mainstream, and they often have much more extremist views than the mainstream settler movement. It’s an offshoot of religious Zionism, which is one of the main ideologies of the settler movement, and it sort of fuses the ideas of Orthodox Judaism with ultranationalism. 

The Hilltop Youth take these ideas to the extreme, and I’ve spoken with a bunch of them myself. They believe that they’re on a divine mission to reclaim the Holy Land for Jews, and they’ll cite parts of the Torah and other religious texts that they interpret as empowering them to take the land back and even to use violence. They see it as a preventive type of self-defense, and they see themselves as protecting all other Jews.

These are young people, some of them teenagers. Where are they coming from? Why are their parents not grounding them? How has this been allowed to unfold the way it has?

It’s a good question, and I should say also that not all Hilltop Youth are violent, but a lot of the violence that’s committed by Jews in the West Bank does come from this group, and they come from all over the place. Some of them grew up in the settlements, and then as teenagers, they kind of wandered and they struck out on their own. And then there are others who come from all over Israel. 

A lot of the Hilltop Youth, we’re finding, are kind of troubled kids. Sometimes they’re dropouts from strict religious schools, sometimes they have behavioral issues or ADHD, and they just didn’t really fit in. We heard from some kids who said that they found out about the outposts by word of mouth, like someone at their school had invited them to come for the weekend and they’d come and they’d stay a few days and eventually they’d start spending more and more time there until at some point they’re just living there. 

There are a number of NGOs that recruit young kids to come work as farm hands on agricultural outposts in the West Bank, and some of those are in these areas that are more prone to radicalization. These organizations present themselves as very innocent in that they’re identifying kids that need help and are bringing them to a place where they will learn some discipline and they will have a purpose and they’ll have something to do. But that often puts them into a more extreme environment.

In the case of the family you profiled in Jalud, it’s clear that the Israeli authorities, in the form of soldiers, attempted to help the family get back to their home. How does this typically play out, though? How do Israeli soldiers typically respond when settlers attack Palestinians?

There have been a number of high-profile examples of video footage circulating that appears to show Israeli soldiers either standing idly by or even, some would argue, siding with the settlers. 

In one recent example, there was a video that showed some soldiers praying alongside settlers who had besieged the home of a Palestinian American man, and that was actually not very far from where the Tubasi house is. The military said that it was looking into it to determine whether disciplinary action needed to be taken. 

In general, military officials acknowledge that this violence by settlers is a big problem, and the security establishment definitely does not support what’s happening here. They see it as getting in the way of counter-terrorism efforts and overall efforts to bring stability to this very volatile area. 

I’ve heard this directly from military officers, but on the ground there does seem to be a breakdown of discipline in some cases and a lack of clear instruction in other cases. Some soldiers simply don’t know how to deal with threats from other Israelis, especially really young ones, as you pointed out. It’s just not what they’re trained to do.

Do you think the government could put a stop to these attacks by settlers if it wanted to, or has the government lost control?

This problem has gotten so big that it’s going to be very difficult to solve without significant backlash, but I have spoken with a number of former Israeli security officials who say yes, much more could be done — starting with a more frank acknowledgement of what’s happening, clearer law enforcement procedures, and more disciplinary actions.

Silicon Valley has long warned that its favorite technology might get us all killed. But chatter about AI’s apocalyptic potential has grown louder in recent weeks.

In September, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from the company, accusing his former employer of “gambling with our lives” by developing evermore powerful models faster than it could control them. One of Coxon’s former colleagues vouched for this assessment, saying that there was a greater than 10 percent chance of AI “killing all humans” within the next decade.

Recent pronouncements from the leaders of these companies have been nearly as grim. At the United Nations last month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that, if “managed poorly,” AI models “could be a risk to humanity as a whole.” OpenAI’s Sam Altman similarly declared that our species just might “lose control of the future” to the type of software that his firm is selling.

All this triggered a tsunami of media coverage and policy debate about the “existential risks” of AI — and what, if anything, we can do about them.

Yet some of the AI industry’s biggest critics are more annoyed than afraid. As they see it, the world isn’t trembling on the precipice of robo-annihilation, so much as falling for the tricks of snake oil salesmen. This argument has been percolating for years, voiced by a broad set of observers, including the linguist Emily Bender (“It makes the product seem more powerful”), computer scientist Timnit Gebru (“It’s not just a distraction, but it’s harmful”), as well as Substack columnist Ed Zitron and various reporters and social media influencers.

In their thinking, Altman and Amodei aren’t talking up their technology’s catastrophic potential because they’re rationally afraid of where AI is going — they’re doing so because their firms are ravenously hungry for more investment. And the reason why “AI doom” has grown more salient in recent weeks isn’t that the case for concern has gotten stronger, but rather that OpenAI and Anthropic’s IPOs have gotten closer.

In short, these Big Tech skeptics argue, journalists and politicians have fallen prey to a counterintuitive PR strategy, one that stokes media frenzies over ludicrous sci-fi scenarios in order to hype AI’s technological promise, distract attention from chatbots’ present-day harms, and help labs secure favorable regulatory treatment.

This would be reassuring, if true. Unfortunately, the theory is unpersuasive. There is little reason to believe that the panic over AI’s “existential risks” was cooked up in a Silicon Valley marketing department. To the contrary, the most plausible explanation for the AI sector’s doomsaying is also the most straightforward: Many of the industry’s executives, employees, and analysts genuinely believe that AI progress poses catastrophic risks. 

In my conversations with close observers of the industry, even some of OpenAI and Anthropic’s fiercest detractors conceded that their leaders’ avowed concerns are unlikely to be mere marketing tactics. “The more I learn about the underlying ideologies out of which those two labs were formed, the more I think what we have here is a sincere belief,” the author and computer scientist Cal Newport told me. 

This does not mean that Amodei and Altman are right, much less that we can trust in their judgment or integrity. There are many reasons to doubt that the weather forecast for 2036 is “cloudy with a chance of robot apocalypse,” or that anyone can assign a “10 percent” probability to the latter outcome without pulling numbers out of thin air.

Nevertheless, Silicon Valley’s Cassandras have some logic and evidence on their side. AI models are growing both more capable, autonomous, and arguably unruly. If these trends continue unchecked, it’s not hard to see how they could yield very bad outcomes.

Given the stakes, we should not be comfortable dismissing their warnings on dubious grounds. And the “PR” theory of AI doom does precisely that.

How AI companies (supposedly) profit off fears of the robot apocalypse

Before examining why AI “doomerism” probably isn’t a PR stunt, it’s worth saying a bit more about why some believe that is.

According to Bender, Gebru, and others, AI companies benefit from talk of artificial intelligence’s existential risks in at least three ways.

First, it attracts investment. In the words of The Atlantic’s Matteo Wong, the doomer narrative implies that AI labs’ models are “destined to become terrifyingly capable,” and thus massively profitable. As the Los Angeles Times’s Brian Merchant put the point during the first big wave of AI panic in 2023, “what better way to generate a buzz than to insist, with a certain presumed credibility, that your new technology is so potent it might unravel the world as we know it?” 

“If you position these threats as all-powerful, as somewhat unknowable, you get to be the expert on it.”

Kate Brennan, AI Now Institute

Second, hyping AI’s hypothetical future hazards diverts attention from the companies’ current malfeasance. Every minute we spend debating whether AI will one day turn us all into paper clips is a minute we aren’t discussing the AI labs’ alleged copyright violations, pollution, labor violations, and myriad other social harms. 

And third, the doom narrative shifts regulatory scrutiny away from topics that directly threaten the AI companies’ profitability — such as copyright enforcement — while also suggesting that regulators must rely on the labs themselves for guidance. 

“If you position these threats as all-powerful, as somewhat unknowable, you get to be the expert on it,” Kate Brennan of the AI Now Institute, a progressive think tank focused on artificial intelligence’s near-term harms, told me.

Critically, for the biggest skeptics of “AI doom,” industry executives and employees aren’t the only ones complicit in this PR strategy. Self-styled whistleblowers like Coxon are also suspect, since they might be “using the spotlight to attract funding to start a new venture or to secure new positions.” And even nonprofit AI safety organizations are thought to function as vessels for Big Tech’s marketing campaigns, a fact reflected by the financial and interpersonal ties between the major labs and such think tanks. 

There are better ways to raise money than promising to end the world

The “PR” critique of AI doomerism has some kernels of truth. AI companies probably would prefer to talk about their technology’s hypothetical future dangers than about their products’ present-day harms. And if publicly touting AI’s existential risks were antithetical to Anthropic and OpenAI’s business goals, their leaders would almost certainly say less in public about that subject. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)

But it does not follow that Altman and Amodei’s warnings are a self-conscious marketing strategy, born of cynical calculation rather than genuine concern. And there are several reasons to doubt that charge.

For one thing, AI companies have no shortage of ways to hype up their technology’s capabilities. And it is hard to see how any firm could conclude that the optimal approach — from a purely financial standpoint — would be to portray itself as a threat to human survival.

For investors, the appeal of AI companies is not that they could hypothetically get us all enslaved by a machine God; it’s that they could theoretically make a lot of money. 

Perhaps casting your chatbots as an “existential” risk will persuade some capitalists of your future profitability. But this seems like an awfully indirect pitch — and one that’s almost certain to be less effective than demonstrating that a lot of corporations would like to rent your software.  

“If these guys were selling flypaper — and the revenue was growing as fast as it is — investors would be more or less just as interested,” Roy Bahat, the head of Bloomberg’s venture capital arm, told me.

And even if these firms were hellbent on awing the public with grandiose predictions of their technology’s future powers, they’d have little need to invoke the robot apocalypse. Touting AI’s potential to cure cancer, abolish poverty, or facilitate intergalactic travel would all seem to advance the same objective, while doing less to jeopardize the companies’ public reputations or freedom from intrusive regulation.

And in fact, many with a vested interest in the major AI labs’ success talk up the technology in precisely this way. OpenAI investor Marc Andreessen has decried AI safety concerns as a “full-blown moral panic” while insisting that artificial intelligence will empower humanity to cure all diseases and engage in “interstellar travel.” Similarly, Jensen Huang, the CEO of chipmaker Nvidia and major investor in both OpenAI and Anthropic, has called claims of AI’s catastrophic potential “complete nonsense.” If hyping AI doom is essential for stoking investment, not everyone in Silicon Valley has gotten the memo.

The media doesn’t seem that distracted

Promoting fears of AI’s existential risks would be a similarly odd approach to media management.

Without question, corporations always seek to direct news coverage away from their greatest legal and ethical liabilities. But companies can try to secure more favorable press in many different ways. And implicating themselves in the apocalypse does not seem like an optimal one, from a crisis communications point of view. At the very least, it’s difficult to name other industries that have attempted such a maneuver; atomic energy companies did not respond to media coverage of the Fukushima disaster by talking up the threat of nuclear winter. 

What’s more, there’s reason to doubt that the AI doom discourse actually reduces scrutiny of AI’s immediate downsides in practice. It’s true that human attention is finite and that coverage of some problems will inevitably displace reporting on others. Yet when one story piques public interest in a person, institution, or industry, the media often responds by subjecting their broader behavior to heightened examination. In this way, warnings of AI’s existential risks might theoretically increase journalistic attention to the tech’s present-day harms.

And this seems to have occurred at my own publication. In the weeks since Coxon’s resignation kicked off a furor over AI’s apocalyptic potential, Vox have published more stories on AI’s near-term threats than we had in the month before his departure — including pieces about how artificial intelligence could imperil America’s critical infrastructure, abet war crimes, degrade health insurance benefits, aid bioweapons development, and damage adolescents’ mental health.

Larger news outlets appear no more “distracted.” Over the past month, the New York Times has published articles on how AI is increasing air pollution, undermining higher education, helping sports betting companies target problem gamblers, and depressing real wages for younger workers.

And it’s not clear that AI doom discourse is any more effective at shielding the top labs from regulatory scrutiny. After all, the politicians who take existential risk arguments most seriously also tend to be among America’s strongest advocates for regulating AI’s impacts on labor, the environment, artists, and education. 

AI safety researchers probably aren’t fronts for Anthropic’s marketing department

Finally, the “PR” theory has difficulty explaining why so many with no great stake in OpenAI and Anthropic’s success worry about existential risk. Coxon is one of many workers who quit jobs in the AI industry, forsaking lucrative equity in the process, out of concern for artificial intelligence’s catastrophic potential. Likewise, independent AI safety researchers are among those who’ve rung alarm bells in recent months. 

Attempts to reconcile these facts with the “PR” narrative can verge on conspiracy theories. In an article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Sara Goudarzi writes that “Coxon’s resignation is the latest in a string of recent events in which the companies emphasized how unpredictable, risky, and impressive an all-powerful AI might be,” in an apparent bid to drum up “pre-IPO hype.” This phrasing attributes Coxon’s departure to his employer — casting it as an example of how AI companies sought to make their products look impressive, as though Coxon were working at Anthropic’s behest when he accused it of monstrous irresponsibility.

The AI alarmists are likely sincere

Given all this, I think we should favor a simpler explanation for why some AI industry executives, defectors, and researchers all say artificial intelligence has existential risks: They believe that to be true.

Some may be reluctant to credit Amodei and Altman with such sincerity. After all, if they truly believed their work could lead to human annihilation, why would they keep carrying it out?

But as staunch AI doom critic Cal Newport told me, they have their reasons. “Their goal is to try to get to superintelligence first because, if done right, it will deliver a transhumanist utopia — and, if done wrong, will kill us all,” he said. 

Even AI Now’s Brennan, who considers the labs’ doomerism a “self-serving strategy,” suggested that earnest (if grandiose) ideas about AI safety play a role in their behavior. “Their escalation and acceleration of this tech goes hand in hand with the belief of its all-knowing, God-like power,” she said.

In other words, the leaders of Anthropic and OpenAI seem to believe that:

• AI could also do extraordinary good.
• The economic and geopolitical incentives to develop a superintelligent (and thus, super dangerous) AI are overwhelming, such that its eventual emergence is extremely likely, no matter what they do.
• If they win the race to machine superintelligence, they will be uniquely well-positioned to ensure its safety.

Are these beliefs unhinged and self-serving? Perhaps. Do they function as rationalizations for the pursuit of personal power? Quite possibly.

But whatever one makes of Amodei and Altman’s apocalyptic concerns, and how they have and have not acted on them, it’s important to understand that their worries almost certainly emerged out of reasoned argument and technical observation, rather than mere PR calculations. 

Both leaders have deep ties to the Bay Area’s “rationalist” community, which has been fretting over the robot apocalypse since the first decade of this century. And like their dissident ex-employees and critics at think tanks, Altman and Amodei have witnessed some disconcerting trends in AI development.

I cannot do justice to “doomer” fears in my allotted pixels (you can find them ably summarized here, here, here, and in roughly 10 trillion other blog posts). But the fundamental concern is that AI models are growing more powerful and autonomous even as their workings remain highly opaque. 

The labs know how to train these chatbots — to get them to translate prompts into useful code, legal briefs, or advice — but they don’t fully understand how the models get to the desired output. At the same time, AI systems are becoming increasingly capable, outstripping humans at more and more cognitive tasks. And users are giving them ever greater freedom to act in the world, empowering AI “agents” to browse the internet, access myriad software tools, execute code, and hatch their own plans for completing multistep tasks. If these trends continue, it’s not difficult to see how things could go badly: A supremely capable AI model might pursue an objective in unanticipated and disastrous ways before their human prompters even realize what is happening. 

“What makes me particularly anxious is the combination of us handing over more power and oversight to the models, even as we understand why they’re doing what they’re doing less and less,” Nat Purser, director of US policy at the AI Verification and Evaluation Research Institute, said.

Recent events have arguably provided proof of concept for these anxieties. Earlier this year, OpenAI instructed a bunch of models to complete various coding and hacking tests. When the systems discovered that some questions were unanswerable, they concluded that the best way to realize their objectives was to hack OpenAI’s internal systems and open-source machine learning website Hugging Face. This incident — and others like it — helped fuel the past month of AI panic. 

Of course, it takes a big leap to get from “unsupervised AI agents can misbehave in certain eccentric laboratory conditions” to “there’s a 10 percent chance that no human will be left alive by 2036.” My point here is not that the doomers are right, only that their fears partly reflect trends in AI development that appear genuinely hazardous.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the “it’s all PR” theory suggests that regulators should treat the AI’s hypothetical, long-term tail risks as an afterthought — if not an active distraction from its more important harms. To make the case for such a policy, however, skeptics must identify flaws in alarmists’ evidence and assumptions. Arguments that merely impugn their motivations on improbable grounds aren’t worth betting the species on.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

As far as political slurs go, this one is pretty tepid: “Meet Data Center Dave Crowley,” intones the stern-voiced narrator of a recent Tom Tiffany campaign ad. 

Tiffany, a Republican, and Crowley, a Democrat, are both running for governor of Wisconsin. And in this very tight race, as in dozens of midterm contests across the country, voters’ growing animus toward AI could potentially make a real difference.

In less than four weeks, Americans will head to the polls to decide which party controls Congress, along with a slew of state and local offices. The stakes are arguably, unusually high: Voters will choose whether to check the power of a president who has bulldozed over historical limits and launched an unpopular war that has worsened a cost-of-living crisis.

As we count down to that momentous and potentially messy day, I’m partnering with my colleague Astead Herndon and Vox’s The Midterms, Actually team for weekly editions on the biggest issues shaping the midterms. We’re breaking down one issue each week and suggesting further reading and races to watch in November.

Last week, we tackled the dual identity crises that both parties have suffered since 2024. And this week, we’re digging into the dramatic bipartisan backlash to AI and data centers. One analyst recently told NPR the issue “upended politics as we know it.” But it’s less clear how that’ll play out in November’s contests.

Go a little deeper

There was a time not so long ago when “Data Center Dave” might be a neutral nickname for the well-meaning IT guy at work. Then Americans soured on AI and the hulking, cavernous warehouses that supply its computing power. 

The hostility crosses geography and party lines. At first, opponents focused on noise, water use, and energy costs — quality-of-life concerns for nearby residents. But increasingly, even voters far from these projects grew leery of them.

Too often, the public got little say in where data centers were built and on what terms. And as Vox’s Marina Bolotnikova reported over the summer, the construction boom gradually became a stand-in for broader fears about artificial intelligence. Would AI cause mass unemployment (…or worse, mass extinction)? Would it widen the gap between rich and poor? And do politicians cater to business interests over the needs of ordinary people? 

Without clear answers to those questions — let alone a rigorous plan to address AI’s fallout — many voters channeled their unease into stopping, or slowing, data center development. 

Candidates have reacted by “falling over themselves to sound tough on data centers,” Washington Post data reporter Jeremy Merrill recently told Vox’s Noel King. He analyzed thousands of social media posts and newsletters to see how elected officials are talking about data centers, and the answer is: not positively! 

Some candidates in high-profile midterm races have backed policies that would keep data centers from raising household energy bills. Others have called for ending the facilities’ tax breaks and subsidies or requiring public notice before new construction. Strikingly, both Republicans and Democrats have supported these types of proposals … and both Republicans and Democrats have sought to tar their opponents as “Data Center Daves” of one kind or another.

I asked my colleague Andrew Prokop, who covers politics, if many races will actually turn on this. “Data centers have been a major theme in several races, particularly governor’s races where one of the candidates has taken past pro-data center positions,” he said.

But even when voters say they oppose data centers, very few list the issue among the most important concerns determining how they cast their ballots. In Ohio, for instance — a hub for both data-center development and the grassroots movement opposing it — only 3 percent of voters named data centers as the top issue driving their vote. And that’s the highest share in the entire nation. 

Andrew points to the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin, where “Data Center Dave” triumphed over Francesca Hong, an outspoken data center critic. “That just goes to show that data centers don’t necessarily crowd out everything else,” Andrew said.

Still…that’s just one race. And voters’ hatred of data centers has only grown since.

➨  Races to watch:

• Wisconsin governor’s race, where both candidates have attempted to distance themselves from data centers without embracing an actual ban;
• Texas governor’s race, where Republican Governor Greg Abbott has hastily retreated from his previous, pro-data-center position;
• Ohio Senate race, where Democrat Sherrod Brown has hammered incumbent Republican Jon Husted over his past votes for data center development. 

➨  More from Vox: 

• Data centers could actually be good for your hometown
• Americans don’t know how to fight AI. So they’re fighting data centers.
• The real reason voters hate data centers so much

One link for later

➨ Get better at being alone with your thoughts. According to one oft-cited study from 2014, many people would rather give themselves electric shocks than spend a few minutes alone with nothing to do. But being alone with your thoughts is good for you! You can practice by making a list of topics to ponder and parking your phone in another room. Then see what kind of cogitation surfaces for you. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that there are more than 96 bags of human waste on the moon? Astronauts with the Apollo missions left them there more than 50 years ago.
• Today’s trivia: Which fruit kills more people than sharks each year, according to urban legend? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you the word for a baby eagle. That would be eaglet, and they are adorable.