# Mass Opposition to Big Tech, and Silicon Valley's Denial (Merchant)

Brian Merchant's 27 August 2026 edition of his newsletter Blood in the Machine argues that the separate fights over data centers, Flock surveillance cameras and Meta's AI Ray-Bans add up to one movement, bigger and longer-lasting than the 2019 "techlash" over disinformation on Facebook [[silicon-valley-backlash-denial]]. His second claim is that the industry can't explain the movement, because an honest explanation would mean admitting the public rejects what the industry is building.

## The evidence

Much of the post is screenshots of headlines and poll charts, which the clipped text doesn't carry, so this page records only the figures stated in the prose. A Heatmap survey found that 75% of Americans would oppose a data center being built where they live. Only 9% of Americans are more excited than concerned about AI. US workers' share of national income fell to a new low of 53.7% this year, per Axios. Outside the polls, a grand jury in Ohio refused to indict a man caught on camera destroying Flock license-plate-reader equipment, protesters against data centers and Flock are going viral as heroes, and content farms churn out anti-tech memes because the genre is popular. Meta's glasses have picked up the nickname "pervert glasses".

[[ai-backlash-polling-2026]] records the May 2026 stage of the same trend: the collapse among under-30s, bipartisan agreement that AI moves too fast, and record data-center cancellations in the first quarter. Merchant writes three months later, and nothing has turned around.

## How the industry responded

Merchant describes two phases. In the spring, after anti-AI and anti-data-center actions made national news, industry figures were briefly contrite and settled on a messaging failure as the cause: people didn't know how useful AI could be. The industry then changed neither its message nor its business. When a new round of politicians proposed slowing or pausing data center construction and the new polls landed, the reactions he collects went much further. The movement was called a Chinese Communist Party psy-op, or psychosis, or a front for paid shills from the AI-safety world. Some argued that ordinary people should not get a say over technology in the first place. His favorite is the claim that blocking data centers amounts to genocidal population control on soon-to-be-sentient AIs. He brings out Upton Sinclair's line about how hard it is to make a man understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.

[[ceo-ai-psychosis]] makes a neighboring argument from inside companies, about executive enthusiasm that has come loose from any measurable output.

## Merchant's explanation

His reading is that nothing about this is mysterious. Tech companies have pushed into people's personal lives and public spaces with construction projects and surveillance products, with little or no democratic input, and people find the trade unacceptable. Not having been asked adds anger of its own. Each object also stands for something larger. A megaproject built under NDAs to power a job-automation product for a trillion-dollar company is a ready-made symbol for a decade of rising inequality and a disempowered working class. A camera network that logs vehicle movements and shares the data with ICE stands for an increasingly authoritarian state. People also dislike the project these things serve: the executives asking for trust have spent years promising to replace millions of jobs, at a time of low consumer confidence, inflation and a war in Iran.

So he calls the opposition rational and justified, messy and inchoate as it is, and a direct repudiation of Silicon Valley's core project of rapid expansion and the extraction of public data for private gain. An industry that tells investors to expect $30 trillion in potential revenue, as the WSJ reports Anthropic doing, can't accept "no", or even a pause, as an answer. Blaming China, psy-ops or the media is what is left.

## Where it fits

This is advocacy journalism, and it doesn't pretend to be anything else; the newsletter shares its name with Merchant's book on the Luddites. In the map drawn by [[anti-llm-discourse]] it belongs to the sociological and political strand, arguing about consent and power more than about what the technology can do. [[i-am-an-ai-hater]] reaches a harsher verdict on the technology itself, and [[enshittification]] describes the platform mechanics behind a good part of the same distrust.