MADISON COUNTY—The race is on to  colonize our minds with the correct knowledge so we see only reason around data centers. But first, get off that wretched Facebook and tuck in your slobbering emotions so I can be sure I have your full and reasonable attention, please. 

What am I talking about, you wonder. It’s to do with data centers. But it’s also to do with the same old same old in Kentucky: the arrival of know-it-alls who command us to heed what the story ought to be rather than what we know it is. Twice in one week locals have been publicly schooled on how to behave and what to think if they are to be smart about data centers. 

The rectification began when Madison County’s Fiscal Court agreed during their latest regularly scheduled monthly meeting, to explore how best to implement a moratorium on data center development in the county. As The Edge reported, this was a reversal. Why? It’s possible that County officials considered the implications of recent election results and admitted it was better to accommodate the will of the people than meet them with “We know better”.

Do current planning and zoning laws in the County give enough protection against extractive data center development? Judge Executive Reagan Taylor thinks so, but has agreed to move forward with a moratorium anyway. This is wise. It’s shrewd, even: it signals “I hear you”, affording Taylor and the magistrates enormous political capital, which in their lame duck condition can only help, and which is gained at no cost to anyone, at least anyone that the public currently knows about.

By not having adopted a moratorium sooner, members of the Fiscal Court missed their chance to plug into this currency before the election in May. Had they not waited, we can only speculate if the returns might have been different. But that is not the point here.

During the public comment section of the meeting, county resident Michael Frazier came to the mic to leverage the Fiscal Court’s decision to blast the local citizens action group, Preserve Madison County, which in the aggregate has not always been popular, but since its formation in 2024, has been the leading voice in demanding the Fiscal Court members act, not just talk, when it comes to enforcing community values-based planning and zoning regulations. 

Many of them happened to also be in attendance at the meeting, and so were present for Frazier’s lecture on what he deems their unseemly social media behavior. Since Frazier led with his disdain rather than the compelling points of his argument—and he did have compelling points—the take-away was not how to approach data center development sensibly, but simply that many local people are idiots.

"Here we are having conversations about moratoriums on data centers that's led by hysteria and feelings," Frazier read from a prepared statement. "Over the last several months, social media has been flooded with speculation, rumors and worst case scenarios…”

His objections to people’s behavior is ironic, given that he is a Libertarian lobbyist for the Goldwater Institute and sometimes for Americans for Prosperity, which ordinarily would signal he is a “live and live” kind of guy, so long as you leave free markets alone. 

“Growth is happening regardless of if we are ready…the question is whether we can manage the growth intelligently, transparently, and in a way that protects tax payers and respects property rights…you either raise taxes or grow the tax base…” he said. And I can’t disagree with any of it. Why didn’t he just say that bit?

Then on Thursday night, as PMC hosted its second data center forum this year, they were told off again for being on Facebook, this time by an invited guest, former 6th Congressional District candidate, Erin Petrey (D.), who since losing her bid for office has been trading off her experience as a former employee of AWS, one of the handful of hyperscale data developers in the US.

“Facebook is the worst place to get your information. Please do not do that. Go to actual sources. Always trust but verify. Always do that…always make sure you know where you are getting your information from. Double check your sources. That gut feeling you have when you think, ‘I hate this. I’m just gonna share,’? Hold up. Because the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation, especially around this issue, is significant,” she ranted. 

The gist of Petrey’s message is clear and unimpeachable: don’t believe and or react to everything you have an emotional reaction to. But the thing is, Facebook is where people are going to get their information no matter what Petrey or Frazier, or anybody else thinks about that. And, social media being what it is, many people will act like dumb clucks while they’re on it. 

Chastising people for using social media is demeaning, and frankly, is akin to the same finger wagging of all the clueless elites that set the national agenda until Trump arrived on scene to burn it all down, which goes to show you that politics is irrelevant when being the smartest smarty pants in the room is the real agenda.

“And my goal in this, my engagement in the data center in general, is to make sure that we have meaningful regulation that is not driven by emotion, but by facts and economics. Because you will not get regulation by saying how much you love someone’s cows,” Petrey concluded. 

I was the target of that quip, having just spent 20 minutes as a featured panelist at the forum explaining my theory of specificity that helps people understand the importance of place-based values. In my presentation, I’d spoken about how much I love living near a cattle farm, how I view the cows as my neighbors, and I care about their well-being. I therefore am interested in any policies that will impact the farmer. 

Briefly, I have been piloting a grant-funded program centered on the premise that when people are aware of what it is they love about a place—and most importantly, when they know that they have this in common with their neighbors—then they don’t need talking points when pressed to act according to their values so they can protect said place. 

That matters when land and other extraction speculators and developers come to town with their shuck and jive stories about why and how the community will just whither and die if they don’t seize the big, bright shiny opportunities these money men offer. “Growth is happening regardless of if we are ready…” as Frazier said. I suggest we be ready from the ground up, not the top down. 

Petrey went on with a long list of policy agenda items that need to be considered if we are all to be protected from AI, cows notwithstanding. I had quit listening, just like Petrey wasn’t listening, like Frazier wasn’t listening. They were telling. Telling you, telling me what we are supposed to do, when I already know that policy is generated from what matters most--the question is to whom the policy matters most. The only choices are extractors or sharers.

The extractors colonize our minds with their thoughts and agendas, until we feel dumb for "not getting it" and to avoid feeling ashamed, we go along with it. But I have to wonder, why the hell anyone would think they have the right to tell me what I am supposed to value and how I am supposed to act upon those values. If Some Guy can answer that question with anything other than because they want the power to dictate what we have and how we have it, I’m quite interested in hearing about it, because I don’t believe there exists any other reason.

These two incidents do not make a trend, but it's two incidents at the tail end of a long line of incidents too many Kentuckians know full well. A long line of living under top-down agendas for how to act and what to value. There are poor and shrinking communities all over resource-rich Eastern Kentucky that were told what was good for them when the people could see full well that it wasn’t. But they didn’t get to control the outcomes of Some Guy’s tall tales because those stories weren’t place-based and the values surrounding them weren’t either.

Coal field Kentuckians know this old tale, and soon so will residents of many other counties where their elected officials have been caught flat footed by data center developers who think the old paradigm of Some Other Guy With Lots Of Money will have the answers. The communities that will prevail in this data center boom are the ones who organically derived their story, not acted according to someone who told them what was important to them.

When we are left to follow our hearts toward what we love, we already make space in our minds to contemplate why and how we value those things. We don’t need to be told by Some Guy. We will naturally align with our neighbors to fight tooth and nail to protect what we collectively love.

My theory is that the more specific we are about what matters to us about the actual place where we live, the more we feel connected to our landscape, our land, and our communities, thus the more readily the stories about who we are will emerge. People don’t live in the data, they live in their stories, where the characters are always reflections of their core values. Then comes the data. And so often, the stories and the data will be shared on Facebook, the very swamp itself.

Knowing these stories, our own stories, forms the basis for place-based governance, and it sure makes it easier to direct policymaking so that it benefits locals than trying to accommodate Some Guy from Somewhere.

Besides, knowing every head of cattle in my backyard is real data, too. It’s observational, but it is still data, and it informs my decisions.

It's so often the observational data that ultimately becomes the basis for randomized, clinical data, the gold standard smarty pants people prize.