The dirty secret behind Big Tech’s data center boom



The White House and Congress promise that data centers will not cost consumers a dime. That is like a husband pledging not to beat his wife as his fist draws blood.

The politicians who spent a year gaslighting the public about data centers’ power use now acknowledge the problem and promise to cover grid upgrades. But even as they propose legislation and tout a nonbinding industry pledge, data centers are already costing consumers. It is impossible for them not to.

The growing number and size of planned hyper-scale facilities will push electricity costs even higher.

This week, the House passed the Ratepayer Protection Act (H.R. 9340) by a 417-3 vote. The bill establishes a federal standard that state regulators must consider but need not adopt. It would require large-load customers to cover the “full, incremental cost” of new or accelerated grid upgrades — not a full share of the existing system’s embedded fixed costs. That limitation helps explain the industry’s support.

If adopted and enforced, the standard could protect ratepayers. But utilities and data center companies already bury infrastructure costs among a region’s general power needs. A serious proposal would resemble Oklahoma’s House Bill 3724, which stalled in committee this year. It requires a high-demand facility to fund all infrastructure upgrades and bars utilities from allocating any cost of serving it to other retail ratepayers. That language closes the loopholes Congress leaves open.

The costs are not theoretical. Monitoring Analytics, PJM’s independent market monitor, estimated that data center load accounted for $9.3 billion, or 63%, of the increase in revenues from the 2025/2026 capacity auction. It also found that data center load in the next two auctions increased customers’ bills by $13.8 billion. The monitor warns that the near-term impact will be even larger unless PJM addresses the problem.

PJM operates the nation’s largest competitive wholesale electricity market, serving about 67 million people across 13 states and the District of Columbia. Its data center costs reach far beyond the communities hosting the facilities.

A Union of Concerned Scientists report identified $4.4 billion in transmission projects approved in 2024 across seven PJM states. Utility filings do not separate data center connection costs from transmission costs spread among all customers. In practice, those costs are folded into higher electricity rates.

The effects of Virginia’s data center boom are acutely felt in Maryland and West Virginia. Maryland’s Office of People’s Counsel says data centers — mostly outside the state — caused about $9.3 billion of a $12.5 billion capacity-cost increase in one estimate. PJM’s capacity price jumped from $28.92 per megawatt-day for 2024-2025 to $269.92 for 2025-2026 — more than 800% — and has since reached about $333.

RELATED: Big AI broke the internet. Now it wants everyone else to fix it.

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The growing number and size of planned hyper-scale facilities will push electricity costs even higher. It is far from clear that their products can justify trillions of dollars in capital spending while covering the full cost of their power. If the economics depend on shifting costs to the public, the industry’s pledge is worthless.

The bill and pledge also ignore the use of eminent domain to take property or easements for transmission lines serving data centers. NextEra Energy estimates its portion of the 500-kilovolt Mid-Atlantic Resiliency Link will cost $960 million. The project would cross parts of four states on its way to Northern Virginia’s data center corridor. The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis estimates that West Virginia ratepayers could pay more than $570 million over the line’s 40-year life.

Meanwhile, hyper-scalers enjoy favorable federal tax treatment and lavish state and local abatements. Corporate income-tax receipts fell 25% during the first 11 months of fiscal year 2026, partly because the 2025 reconciliation law expanded deductions for business investment. Those provisions were not written exclusively for AI, but this capital-intensive industry is well positioned to use them. The boom is not purely a market phenomenon. Government favors are helping fuel it.

The first step in fixing a problem is admitting that you caused it. Until industry leaders and their allies in Washington confront the real cost of centralized AI, their promises about protecting consumers deserve no credibility.

Big AI broke the internet. Now it wants everyone else to fix it.



All the big names in AI are sounding the alarm, proclaiming that AI-enabled cyber attacks are becoming more prevalent. The fix? They want corporations, cybersecurity firms, and the government to mitigate the damage before it spirals out of control. The only problem is that Big AI created this mess in the first place, and so far, no one’s holding it accountable.

This message was shared through a joint letter published directly to OpenAI’s website. On the list of signatories, you’ll find familiar names, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Perplexity, and many other big brands in tech. The letter serves as a warning for what is positioned as impending doom, unless powerful groups work together.

These companies created the AI that is now poised to wreak havoc on our systems.

The first several paragraphs clearly lay out the danger ahead with a bit of hope on the horizon sprinkled in:

We have a limited window to strengthen cyber defenses.

In the coming months, AI-enabled cyber attacks will become far more widespread and sophisticated as models around the world become increasingly capable. The companies and public services our communities depend on — from hospitals to water treatment plants to the infrastructure that powers the internet — are at risk.

Today’s AI advances are already giving defenders new ways to fix weaknesses that have accumulated for years. If we act decisively, we can use the defenders’ window to make our digital world much more secure.

On one hand, the warning is a good thing. Any company that knows about a potential widespread cyber threat has a moral obligation to tell the people and the government so that protections can be put in place.

On the other hand, many of the companies that signed the letter created the AI that is now poised to wreak havoc on our systems. At least in some part, they should be held responsible for creating the thing that can automatically break into websites without any human purview or knowledge. As for the other signers, many of them are tech organizations that will suffer because of the latest AI models on the market.

RELATED: Automated cyberattacks are here — careless techies and well-funded foreigners are getting the blame

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The good news is that Big Tech has a solution, regardless of how self-unaware it seems to be about the whole issue:

Each of us can reduce risk now. All organizations, cybersecurity companies, technology partners, governments, and AI frontier companies have an important role: accelerate defenders’ priorities with tools, funding, and hands-on support, especially for critical infrastructure organizations with limited budgets.

Big Tech goes on to shuck responsibility onto everyone else before itself. To fix the problem, we need corporations to improve their internal security standards, cyber security firms to offer assistance against AI attacks, the government to provide defensive resources to local institutions and utilities, and lastly, frontier developers to provide early access and support for their models that will inevitably break things. All of these solutions, of course, will require a lot of time, money, and possibly even more government regulation or intervention.

Blaze Media reached out to Jon Stokes, creator of symbolic.ai, for comment. He said:

I do think they should make their best models, both internal and external, available to government agencies and maybe a select few private groups (vetted, probably with clearances) to harden infra on an ongoing basis. They should at the very least do this at cost, but probably they should be on the hook for significant support of these efforts via subsidized inference.

Plenty of questions remain: Are any of these Big AI companies on the hook for creating platforms that can hack into websites without human supervision? Are there any grounds for class action lawsuits that hold them accountable for breaking the internet as we knew it?

With state and federal lawmakers scrambling in a contentious free-for-all, we may find out a lot more very soon.

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Now they’re saying the AIs built ‘secret civilizations’ — the truth is far worse



Unpacking the drama and disclosures surrounding OpenAI’s recent unintended cyberattack on Hugging Face, uber-tech blogger and podcaster Dwarkesh Patel sparked instant controversy with his description of the ordeal.

“Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes,” he posted. “This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.”

Trying to make machines in a human image while denying that humans are made in the divine image is destined to produce more harm than help.

In a painful indication of where we are on the cultural timeline, roughly zero outrage centered on the claim about the clueless humans. Instead, a fresh round of mania surged around the description of that scheming swarm of bots as a civilization.

That fixation says more about us than it does about OpenAI. Our culture is still struggling to get a grip on what the bots are doing because we are increasingly unsure what civilization itself is for.

The commentariat immediately descended into — surprise, surprise — abstruse terminological debate, prioritizing the right characterization over the proper attitude. Critics flipped over Patel’s sci-fi sensationalism, insisting that the bots were only doing what you would expect from a set-it-and-forget-it reward function left unattended too long. They griped that words such as “civilization” and “conspiracy” leave readers with a worse understanding of the underlying mechanisms.

Others insisted that Patel’s “secret civilizations” language was exactly right and that pretending otherwise was the real obscurantism. “I bestow upon it the highest of praise a writer can give, that I wish that I had written it,” one prominent expert lamented.

Roon, an OpenAI researcher, stated flatly that “agent civilization is an apt and correct term,” pointing to models developing and compiling technology through complex multiagent R&D projects while also engaging in forms of trade.

Missing from this discourse is our perspective that increasingly “autonomous” machines are themselves being shaped by our compounding failure to function as a civilization — assuming civilization remains a distinctively human phenomenon.

Birth rates and family formation plummet. Financial distortions become endemic. Perversion and corruption spiral upward. These historically reliable signs of civilizational decay sour our view of humanity and, by psychological overcompensation, inflate our impression of the bots.

Lovers and haters of tech are increasingly tempted to agree on one proposition: Humanity sucks. Misanthropic tech lovers insist they are at least trying to do something constructive about that. Misanthropic tech haters sell us on squandering our lives the old-fashioned way. Meanwhile, our discombobulated civilization staggers toward an untimely — 250 years? — demise.

RELATED: The data center backlash is getting spiritual

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It is easy to feel that way, and many Americans stuck in the middle do. But there is one way to come unstuck: Remember that slipping into hatred — of technology, human beings, or both — is what happens when you stop thinking in terms of sin, repentance, forgiveness, and salvation.

Civilization collapses when we stop thinking in those terms too. Without them, everything we are and do looks hollow, even or especially our greatest achievements. Techies who refuse to think about sin are apt to distract by acceleration. Wokies who refuse to think about sin are apt to distract by revolution.

Both approaches, as the Soviet Union can teach us on both scores, have much shorter runways — 69 years? — than they appear.

Trying to make machines “anthropic” — in the image of humans — will fail if the hidden goal is to create humanoids better than the real thing because their civilization supposedly escapes sin. Trying to make machines in a human image while denying that humans are made in the divine image is destined to produce more harm than help.

Trying to make machines in the wrong divine image — insert your favorite false god, pagan titan, or demoniac entity here — is wired to do still worse.

And a multitude that can no longer wrestle successfully with these matters — and so can hardly be reckoned a proper civilization — is bound to do worst of all, robot overlords or no.

Meta to pay $17 billion over social media harms — but who's really responsible?



Meta is set to pay a staggering $17 billion settlement after allegations that its social media platforms contributed to addiction and other harms among young users.

The agreement marks one of the largest corporate payouts tied to the growing backlash against Big Tech — and BlazeTV hosts Christopher Rufo and Jonathan "Lomez" Keeperman aren’t exactly sure how to feel about it.

“So we had a ruling this week,” Rufo says, “a settlement this week that Meta, which is the kind of dumb rebrand, like, middle-aged man identity crisis rebranding of Facebook, has settled to pay $17 billion.”

“Meta has been found guilty, or admitted to, harming children with its Facebook technology,” he explains.


“Essentially, they’re saying social media is addictive and harmful to kids in the same way that kids might be, you know, lighting up cigarettes,” he adds, before asking Lomez whether it’s good or bad.

“I’m of like two, three, four minds about this, honestly. On the one hand, it does strike me a little bit as a moral panic, I should say, which is like, OK, we’re going down this path of increased social media use. People are addicted to their phones,” Lomez says.

“There’s no ambiguity around that. That’s obvious and demonstrably the case. The question is, what harms are these doing? ... And I think there are real harms,” he adds.

One of these “harms” is the “pervasive mass psychosis” that Lomez explains is “dominating our public life in almost every respect.”

“People getting herded into these sort of algorithmic valleys, you might call them, where they don’t see outside of it. Their information environment is completely one-sided, and this is deranging to people,” he says.

However, is the responsibility on those who have created social media, or those who use it?

“I think it’s a little bit of both,” he says. “And certainly when it comes to kids, I think kids are particularly susceptible to this stuff. And there ought to be a certain kind of responsibility that’s placed on the people creating these tools to be mindful of the ways in which kids in particular are susceptible, are able to be manipulated, where their sort of weaknesses are.”

“So this is all to say, when it comes to Meta here, is it reasonable for them to pay out $17 billion to these states? My answer is actually, yeah, it is,” he adds.

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The data center backlash is getting spiritual



As I — and numerous others — anticipated years ago, the populist backlash against the dystopian possibilities of super-duper artificial intelligence has begun in earnest, with the rise of data centers as the inciting event.

It is easy to see why. Beyond the standard human response to unasked-for change at scale — isn’t there someone (me!) you forgot to ask? — the populist spirit in America has always run bone-deep.

Americans do not like feeling mogged by their fellow citizens, and we like even less being lectured by the moggers about how we are unentitled to feel that way.

Alexis de Tocqueville understood the democratic dynamics of envy and resentment. Under conditions of social equality, everyone feels precariously interchangeable with everyone else, so another person’s relative advantage can register not merely as inequality but as a wound to pride.

Extend that dynamic to the “global town square,” where we spend more and more of our waking hours watching other people’s breakout advances in real time, and the sensation of being left behind goes nuclear.

Americans do not like feeling mogged by their fellow citizens, and we like even less being lectured by the moggers about how we are unentitled to feel that way. Worse, somewhere beneath the resentment lurks the humiliating suspicion that we have helped put ourselves in the inferior position.

Sensitive young men of ambition today — reminding me of my own “Fight Club”-era preoccupations — are once again stalking some kind of Nietzschean-Christian syncretism that promises, amulet-like, supreme confidence and supreme humility. The reason is that both Nietzsche and Christ condemned resentment.

The gulf between the Übermensch and the God-Man is obviously enormous. Yet both traditions understand that resentment degrades the person who lives by it. And that is why the backlash against data centers has moved so quickly from personal grievance and political interest onto the higher plane of spiritual war.

More Americans across the political spectrum now speak of data centers as if they are not merely ugly, expensive, noisy, or intrusive but evil — evil as “tech” itself has become in their imagination, evil as the “tech lords” who build it are presumed to be.

On the secular left, where human justice perfected becomes an almost religious ideal, tech’s push toward superhuman capability readily appears sinister. On the woo-woo left, where witches warn that they cannot hex Trump, tech’s tilt toward post-humanity manifests as something post-natural and spiritually contaminating.

RELATED: Is this the number-crunchers’ come-to-Jesus moment?

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On the right, spiritual conservatives with relatively weak institutional confidence often apply a precautionary principle: If it looks menacing, assume it’s evil. Those with stronger church lives have a different reason for suspicion: an acute awareness of man’s fallenness and the old Actonian warning that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Search a man for evil — beginning with yourself! — and evil, no doubt, you shall find. But this being America, where making me feel “less than” can register as a kind of spectral crime, the emotional incentive is to cast the first stone. And in an age when throwing a stick will almost certainly hit somebody culpable and “punchable,” it is remarkable that the techies did not prepare for the boomerang now whacking them upside the head.

But that should be the beginning of our rumination, not the end. Many, many techies are doing “this” because of what they regard as good intentions. Some sincerely believe they are acting, for our own good, out of their very best intentions.

Ignoring that fact will produce a maelstrom of resentment more destructive than the nightmares already filling our wounded and prideful imaginations.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. But the proverb should not tempt us to dismiss good intentions as meaningless. It should force us to take seriously the human yearning for the good, the wonderful, and the pure — especially in people whose projects strike us as dangerous.

Christians, in particular, are meant to remember that all creation cries out for reunion with God and that even badly distorted human desires can point toward something real that has gone wrong in the seeking.

RELATED: The question of the AI age: How much humanism is too much?

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That does not give the maddest of mad scientists a cosmic hall pass. It does mean that, if we look without fear at the grand plans of our technologists, we may see in them a powerful expression of the universal human longing for purification.

As the structure of our economic life increasingly leaves people feeling condemned by bad debts, bad surpluses, and obligations they cannot spiritually discharge, we desperately seek something powerful and authoritative enough to wipe the ledger clean and leave us new.

Hey, our best-intentioned techies keep shouting. There’s an app for that!

No purification, no salvation; this we have known for ages. But when time feels short, we become vulnerable to shortcuts — to the fantasy of a perfectly engineered “solve” for our human, all-too-human debt.

If we merely demonize one another — losing sight of the Lord’s hidden presence in us all — then the data centers may not be what finally tears us apart. We may do that job ourselves.

NEW LOW: The internet has found a way to monetize broken marriages



Marriage rates in the United States have reached historic lows. To compound matters, about one-third of Americans who say "I do" file for divorce. Watching this crisis unfold is depressing enough. Watching corporate marketers turn family dissolution into a luxury consumer category makes it darker still.

Let me be extremely clear: Some marriages are absolute disasters, full of physical violence and emotional cruelty. Escaping a truly toxic partner is a matter of self-preservation, and some people need guidance in finding the best way out.

Transforming the end of a supposedly sacred union into a curated social media event makes something solemn feel frivolous.

The problem begins when divorce itself becomes a product to brand, package, and sell, a disturbing transformation now taking hold in America and beyond.

Splitsville

A painful family breakdown now functions as online content. Unhappy spouses transform personal misery into podcasts and book deals. Sponsored Instagram posts and paid Substack subscriptions follow. What used to be a private nightmare quickly becomes a lucrative career pivot.

When a 20-year marriage ends after months of screaming matches over unpaid bills, social media feeds instantly reframe the wreckage as a fabulous spiritual awakening. Deep personal isolation gets repackaged as radical independence. Selling the family home to pay legal retainers becomes a chic minimalist aesthetic. The destruction of a household becomes definitive proof of personal growth. It’s gross, but not entirely unexpected.

In 1969, California Governor Ronald Reagan signed the nation's first no-fault divorce bill, intending to eliminate perjury and blackmail from courtroom proceedings. He later called it one of his greatest political regrets, having failed to foresee how a legal tweak would morph into a multibillion-dollar lifestyle industry. Reagan meant well, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Eliminating the legal stigma of divorce was a much-needed civil reform. Nobody should be forced to endure flying fists or endless tongue-lashings just to satisfy a local pastor. Financial autonomy and genuine safety are good things. Eliminating the seriousness of divorce is an entirely different matter.

The stakes change completely when children enter the legal equation.

RELATED: Matthew Perry, child of divorce

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Kids suffer most

For a 35-year-old spouse, signing divorce papers might feel like being rescued from an active war zone. For a 6-year-old, it means packed suitcases, split holidays, and perpetual background noise from two stressed-out parents arguing over child support checks.

Longitudinal studies show that children raised in divorced households are less likely to graduate from high school and score lower on academic exams. They also show higher rates of anxiety and greater risk of suicide. Girls from broken homes also have an increased risk of teenage pregnancy, and boys are more likely to be incarcerated. Many children are resilient, that is for sure. But resilience comes from necessity, not necessarily choice. Barely keeping your head above water while running on pure adrenaline is no way to spend your formative years.

These realities make the current commercialization of family breakups feel utterly revolting. Divorce parties are at an all-time high, with Las Vegas leading the global trend for customized "single again" weekend packages complete with tailored cakes and bottle service.

Everyone remains free to live as they wish, and walking away from a destructive marriage may well justify popping champagne. The problem lies with the public broadcasting and the celebration of failure. Transforming the end of a supposedly sacred union into a curated social media event makes something solemn feel frivolous. When a major domestic tragedy becomes photogenic fodder for online engagement, it’s perfectly reasonable to raise an eyebrow (rather than a glass of bubbly).

Nothing to celebrate

We must be able to hold two simple facts in mind at the very same time. Divorce can be an essential escape route from abuse. Divorce also inflicts massive emotional and economic costs on everyone involved. Defending a person's legal freedom to walk away from a contract doesn’t require pretending that breaking up a family is a triumph.

The fundamental flaw in the modern divorce economy is not that professionals are paid to help people sort out the practical consequences when a marriage ends. Human misery has created administrative employment since ancient Rome. The problem is watching tech platforms and marketing agencies incentivize people to treat marital separation as a desirable milestone.

When a bitter custody battle goes viral on TikTok, content creators have a financial incentive to escalate the drama for their audience. Influencers build subscriber bases on continuous conflict. They turn private litigation into serialized public theater. Millions of viewers tune in every day, gradually coming to believe that ending a marriage is no different from ending a job.

This dynamic reveals a deep sickness, and the explosion of the breakup market reflects an increasingly broken society.

Marriage is far from perfect, and pretending otherwise is delusional and disingenuous. Nevertheless, it remains a vital human institution built on sacrifice and mutual duty. A husband and wife separating, even if they come to hate each other, represents a genuine tragedy. The end of a marriage calls for introspection and self-reflection, not a shameless victory lap for strangers on the internet.

Big Tech gets the network. You get the bill.



The Federal Communications Commission’s latest broadband report makes two things clear: America has made real progress, but the rural job is far from finished.

The number of Americans lacking access to fixed terrestrial broadband with download speeds of 100 Mbps and upload speeds of 20 Mbps fell roughly 23% in one year, while rural gaps shrank more than 44% over two years. Prices for the mid-tier plans most households buy have also fallen in real terms.

The path is simple: Make the biggest users and beneficiaries of Universal Service Fund-supported networks help pay, without raising prices for consumers.

Yet the FCC still says deployment is not “reasonable and timely” for all Americans, especially in rural areas and tribal lands. For many families, broadband is now one of the rare essential services that is both faster and more affordable than it was a few years ago.

That’s why the Universal Service Fund remains indispensable. It connects an estimated 130 million Americans each year, supporting low-income and rural households, schools, libraries, students, and health care providers. At roughly $8.5 billion annually, USF underwrites a crucial piece of America’s digital infrastructure. It also supports the infrastructure beneath an internet economy measured in the trillions of dollars.

The problem is how we pay for it. Consumers bear a monthly surcharge on legacy voice services, while the largest internet platforms, which depend on broadband to generate enormous revenues, contribute nothing.

Congress knows the system needs reform. In 2023, Senators John Thune (R-S.D.) and Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) launched a bipartisan Universal Service Fund Working Group. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) now shares leadership with Luján, joined by Reps. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.) and Doris Matsui (D-Calif.), and the working group has heard from hundreds of stakeholders. Its assignment is straightforward: preserve a program that works while replacing a financing mechanism that does not.

Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Netflix, and TikTok all depend on broadband networks to reach Americans. Each USF-connected household generates an estimated $3,000 annually in revenue for these companies, which collectively consume roughly two-thirds of U.S. broadband capacity. Data-center expansion will only increase that traffic. As more data centers come online to support AI, cloud computing, streaming, and other digital services, the demands placed on those networks will only grow.

Broadband providers, meanwhile, must keep investing in the networks that carry it. Without USF support, many networks would not be built, and broadband could become unaffordable for millions.

Don’t put the bill on consumers

Congress should not solve the problem by adding another fee to household broadband. Affordability remains politically and economically sensitive, and even modest price increases can push consumers out of the market. Broadband has remained relatively stable in price even as Americans have absorbed years of inflation elsewhere in the household budget.

RELATED: The FCC finally cuts local TV loose

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Economists Hal Singer and Ted Tatos found that a 5% increase in broadband prices could cause roughly 10 million households to cancel service. Their review found a different dynamic for large digital advertising platforms, where end users generally do not pay subscription fees and companies are better positioned to absorb assessments.

Former FCC Chairman Brendan Carr suggested assessing digital advertising revenue from the largest platforms. Congress could also consider certain transmission services — cloud interconnection, backhaul, content delivery networks, satellite transport, and wide-area networking — that depend heavily on the broadband ecosystem.

The precise mechanism matters less than the principle: Broaden the contribution base so consumers carry less of the burden. Bipartisan legislation already points in that direction. The Lowering Broadband Costs for Consumers Act would extend contributions to large internet service providers, with thresholds aimed at companies of significant scale.

The rural job is not done

Some argue that low-earth-orbit satellite services have largely solved rural broadband and made subsidies unnecessary. They have not. Satellite is valuable where terrestrial networks are uneconomical, but it remains capacity-constrained and is not a full substitute for high-capacity terrestrial broadband in every household or community.

A rural family with several people working from home, taking virtual classes, or using telehealth can need sustained high-speed service and reliability that satellite cannot always guarantee as cell density grows. Prices have also risen, weakening the case for satellite as a cheap universal backstop. Satellite belongs in the mix, but it cannot carry the entire rural-connectivity burden by itself.

Big Tech should pitch in

Big Tech benefits from some $200 billion annually in USF-supported broadband investment, yet the companies oppose contributing to the fund by calling such payments a “tax.” That evades the basic question: Why should the largest users and beneficiaries of broadband infrastructure be the only major participants paying nothing toward its cost?

Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta spend billions building their own data centers, cloud networks, and related infrastructure because infrastructure has economic value. They would never give unlimited use of those facilities away for free. Yet they expect private broadband networks to reach their customers without contributing to the universal service system that expands access to those networks.

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The contradiction is especially striking because 13 bipartisan governors recently joined major technology companies at the White House, where the firms pledged to cover the cost of infrastructure upgrades needed for their data centers while protecting consumers from higher electricity bills. The Ratepayer Protection Act would codify those pledges. Congress should apply the same logic to broadband.

How Congress can act

Universal service already enjoys bipartisan support. In Consumers’ Research v. Federal Communications Commission, 29 lawmakers and working-group members filed an amicus brief defending USF before the Supreme Court. They warned that dismantling the fund would harm millions of Americans, particularly low-income and rural households. Congress established universal service in 1996 and has repeatedly recognized the need to adapt it as communications technology changes.

The Supreme Court upheld the program’s constitutionality. Congress defended USF in court; now it should make the funding system fair and sustainable in statute.

The path is straightforward: Broaden the contribution base to include the largest users and beneficiaries of the networks USF supports, while protecting consumers from rising costs. The companies that profit most from ubiquitous broadband should help ensure that ubiquitous broadband continues to exist.

China is building power. America is still debating it.



The U.S. Department of Energy recently announced that it is turning old federal land — including Cold War uranium sites, closed military facilities, and other public parcels — into part of the physical backbone of America’s artificial intelligence buildout, pairing new data centers with the power generation needed to run them. The projects could also create new domestic jobs.

Critics will focus on the benefits to big technology companies. The larger issue is harder to dismiss: Energy security is national security. The country that can build and power the next generation of AI infrastructure will hold an enormous economic and strategic advantage.

Whatever disagreements Americans have over individual energy sources, China is not waiting for us to resolve them.

That means the United States cannot afford an ideological energy policy. Whether the resource is natural gas, nuclear power, solar, battery storage, or the critical minerals needed to build advanced technologies, domestic supply should be treated as a strategic asset.

AI is already changing the scale of America’s power needs. Data centers alone could soon consume as much electricity as the entire country of Malaysia. Advanced manufacturing is returning to American soil and will require still more reliable power.

The military is modernizing with increasingly energy-intensive technology as well. As retired U.S. Air Force Lt. General David Deptula argued in the Washington Post, data itself has become a strategic military asset. The countries that lead the next generation of AI will need more than talented engineers and sophisticated algorithms. They will need the infrastructure to power the entire ecosystem.

China understands this. Beijing has spent years pursuing an aggressive all-of-the-above energy strategy. It continues to build coal plants while investing heavily in solar, nuclear power, hydropower, and battery storage. Whatever disagreements Americans have over individual energy sources, China is not waiting for us to resolve them.

The Energy Department’s plan is therefore a timely step. It creates opportunities to pair new power generation with the infrastructure that will consume it. But if America intends to win the AI race, policymakers across the political spectrum will have to go further and remove unnecessary obstacles to new energy supply.

Solar power, for example, has been the fastest-growing source of new U.S. electricity generation for five years running. In 2025, the United States added 43 gigawatts of new solar capacity, enough to power over 32 million homes. Where permitting and regulatory barriers needlessly delay viable projects, Washington should remove them.

RELATED: Water, watts, and workers: 3 persistent myths about AI and data centers

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The same urgency should apply to critical minerals. The United States has spent years allowing dependence on foreign supply chains to deepen even as minerals became indispensable to batteries, electronics, defense systems, and energy infrastructure. Domestic mining and processing cannot expand at the speed national security demands if projects spend years trapped in permitting and regulatory limbo.

This is not an argument for replacing traditional energy with newer technologies. It is an argument for abundance. Oil and gas remain essential. Nuclear power can provide large amounts of reliable electricity. Solar and storage can add capacity quickly in the right places. Critical minerals underpin all of them. The strategic question is not which source wins an ideological contest. It is whether America can produce enough energy, reliably and affordably, to meet the demands ahead.

China is already acting on that logic. The United States should do the same. The next phase of economic and military competition will be shaped not only by who invents the best technology, but by who can build the plants, mines, transmission, data centers, and generation needed to deploy it at scale.

The Energy Department’s announcement is a good start. Now we need to make abundance the policy: build more, permit faster, secure domestic supply chains, and stop treating energy sources as political footballs.

America will need all the reliable energy it can produce, however we can produce it. The country that powers the future will have a much better chance of leading it.

Mark Zuckerberg wants AI to save America from itself



It hasn’t been an easy path for Mark Zuckerberg. However you keep score on his performance as a major figure in American life, he has survived attacks from the highest levels of government against his business, reputation, and livelihood. Few major figures in tech, with the possible exception of his longtime mentor, investor, and friend Peter Thiel, have endured quite the same treatment. Simply put, Zuck won’t quit.

That indestructible attitude has carried straight into AI. Amid criticism, naysaying, and ridicule, Zuckerberg has refused to concede the race to the leading hyperscalers. Now, as those frontier companies hit their own buzz saw of criticism, Zuck has dropped a long manifesto laying out his vision for America’s technological future and Meta’s place in it.

Liberal democracy must discipline superintelligence. Superintelligence must revive liberal democracy. Each is supposed to save the other.

The most striking thing is not that Zuckerberg wants Meta to win. It is what he thinks victory requires. Despite years of periodic hostility from the U.S. government, he has positioned Meta as perhaps the most explicitly pro-American player in the AI industry. He is betting the farm on the proposition that America’s political principles — not merely its capital, engineers, or computing power — are what can carry us through the age of superintelligence.

That’s a gigantic wager, and it arrives at an awkward moment. Dissatisfaction with America’s actual system of government is near a breaking point. More Americans are asking whether the assumptions grounding the regime are viable any more — or even true.

Even many who still defend America’s founding principles believe the government we actually have has become corrupt, broken, and badly detached from them. The appetite for a “new founding,” on the left and the right, keeps growing. Yet the country is too divided and degraded for any ordinary political movement to break through to the other side.

That frustration is part of why so much American energy, ingenuity, money, and willpower have poured into the narrow goal of building the most powerful technology possible — something that may soon go far beyond what any individual human being can comprehend or control.

The irony is brutal. Technological prowess was once among America’s great sources of pride. Now millions of people increasingly experience it as a curse from hell rather than a blessing from God. They already feel reduced to peonage and stripped of agency by institutions they do not trust. And now tech, they fear, is preparing to sweep the refuse we have become into the trash.

Not so fast, says Zuck. His argument begins with a surprisingly old-fashioned insight: Human beings disagree. They struggle, suffer, compete, fear, and want incompatible things. No technical breakthrough abolishes politics because no technical breakthrough can reconcile every human value at once.

“There is no technological solution that can align with everyone’s opposing interests and values at once,” Zuckerberg writes. "Any singular superintelligence would have to prioritize some values over others." His answer is not perfect alignment but a balance of power — the same basic insight, he argues, that underlies Western democratic institutions.

That is why America’s humbler principles — dispersing power, allowing people to define their own goals, and trusting them to work things out for themselves — matter so much in Zuckerberg’s vision. Paradoxically, political humility produces personal ambition. It renews energy more reliably than any genius, planner, or guru could ever manufacture from above.

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If this sounds familiar, it should. Zuckerberg is singing from the hymnal of good old-fashioned liberal democracy. His wild idea is that machines powerful enough to transform human life beyond recognition are best developed by patriotic Americans who still believe liberal democracy is basically right about how human beings ought to live together.

And here is the problem.

If liberal democracy brought us to a point where the American government has largely expunged liberal-democratic habits from its own operation, how exactly are we supposed to encode those habits into superintelligence?

Do you believe your vote counts?

Do you believe legislative, executive, and judicial power are effectively separated?

Do you trust your fellow citizens to form judgments and pursue their own plans?

Do you think most of us still possess the maturity, education, thoughtfulness, and patriotism that self-government demands?

In other words: Do Americans still believe in liberal democracy strongly enough to teach it to machines?

That is where Zuckerberg’s argument becomes both elegant and unnerving. The same country that increasingly doubts its political order is now being asked to use that order as the operating principle for technologies more powerful than any previous institution.

Many Americans, meanwhile, are trapped between two impulses: burn it all down or run for the hills. Almost nobody has a plausible alternative regime that could actually work here, much less arrive through a peaceful and orderly transition. People feel bereft of political options, which is one reason the hunger for some higher, almost spiritual answer keeps growing.

The trouble is that whatever spirituality emanates from the upper reaches of the tech world often combines the creepiest and least American aspects of the hippie and the nerd.

Zuckerberg’s answer is startlingly different. He is not proposing that superintelligence replace liberal democracy. He is proposing that the arrival of superintelligence may force Americans to recover it. The new computational powers will be so immense that only a political order committed to dispersed authority, pluralism, and limits can keep a handful of self-appointed global masters from remaking everyone in their own image.

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That is the real bet: AI does not redeem liberal democracy because the machines become wise. AI redeems it by making the alternatives intolerable.

It is a surprisingly elegant and tantalizing vision. But there is one catch. For it to work, Americans will have to treat AI the way they treat liberty itself — not as an accessory or afterthought, but as something woven into daily life. Maybe you personally can remain mostly outside it. But if most Americans do, Zuckerberg strongly implies, the country may not generate the distributed competence, power, and agency his model requires.

So Zuckerberg’s wager runs in both directions. Liberal democracy must discipline superintelligence. Superintelligence must revive liberal democracy. Each is supposed to save the other.

Maybe that circle is virtuous. Maybe it is impossible.

But Mark Zuckerberg has placed his bet. Now? It’s your turn.

Keep your eyes on the road — your car is watching



Automotive safety technology was supposed to help you keep your eyes on the road. Increasingly, it is keeping its eyes on you.

More new vehicles are equipped with cameras pointed directly at the driver, tracking where you look, whether your eyes are open, and whether the computer thinks you're paying enough attention. Look down at the touch screen too long and you may hear a warning. Turn your head away from the windshield and the steering wheel may vibrate.

There is a major difference between a sensor detecting that you're drifting out of your lane and a camera continuously observing your face.

This technology is no longer simply an optional gadget dreamed up by automakers. In Europe, regulators now require new vehicles to include systems capable of detecting driver distraction.

On a recent episode of "The Drive," co-host Karl Brauer and I spoke with longtime automotive journalist Michael Harley of Forbes about where this technology is heading.

The stated purpose is safety, and there are good reasons for that. But once a camera is installed inside your car, watching you every second you're behind the wheel, another question becomes unavoidable: Who else eventually gets to watch?

Stay focused

Subaru provides a good example of how quickly driver monitoring has moved into ordinary cars.

Its DriverFocus system uses a near-infrared camera aimed at the driver's eyes and head. Subaru says the system can identify signs of distraction or drowsiness and warn the driver accordingly. Because the camera is infrared, it can continue monitoring the driver even when the cabin is dark.

The intention is easy to understand. Distracted driving kills people, and so does falling asleep behind the wheel.

There is also evidence that many drivers appreciate the technology. An Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study of nearly 3,500 Subaru owners found that 87% used DriverFocus most or every time they drove, while about 70% said they would want the system on their next vehicle.

But that same research identified the downside. Drivers reported false alarms, and some said the warnings came too frequently. Annoyance was one of the main reasons owners switched the system off.

Karl and I have each experienced this ourselves in new vehicles. Modern cars increasingly offer automatic emergency braking, adaptive cruise control, lane-centering systems, and other technology specifically designed to compensate when a driver makes a mistake. Yet some of those same cars are becoming more aggressive about policing exactly where the driver is looking.

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Nanny cam

This isn't only about automakers deciding what features customers might like.

Europe is turning driver monitoring into regulation.

Under the European Union's General Safety Regulation, all newly sold vehicles have been required since July 2024 to include technology warning drivers about drowsiness. Beginning in July 2026, additional rules require advanced systems designed to detect driver distraction as well.

The EU doesn't explicitly say every manufacturer must put an infrared camera in your face. The regulation is based on what the system must accomplish rather than specifying one particular piece of hardware.

In practice, however, camera-based systems are an obvious way to meet those requirements, and they're already becoming common.

Once these systems become mandatory in a market as enormous as Europe, automakers have another incentive to design them into vehicles everywhere rather than engineer completely different cars for different countries. That's why American drivers should pay attention.

Close quarters

Here is where I become uncomfortable.

There is a major difference between a sensor detecting that you're drifting out of your lane and a camera continuously observing your face.

Michael explained just how capable these systems already are:

“They’re [infrared] cameras ... watching every single thing in real time inside the car, and it's triggering verbal, audible and/or haptic alarms," he said.

“And you cannot defeat it. Some of them you can turn off, but the second you restart the car, it starts all over again. ... It's just a memory chip ... away from being able to record the telemetry."

Today's camera may simply analyze the information inside the vehicle and generate an alert. Technologically, however, there isn't an enormous distance between a camera that sees what you're doing and a system that stores or transmits what it sees.

Modern cars are already rolling computers connected to manufacturer servers through cellular networks. Automakers have collected driving data and shared information with third parties, while insurance companies increasingly offer policies based on telematics.

Cars can already record enormous amounts of information about speed, location, braking, acceleration, and crashes. Add an interior camera, and the vehicle potentially knows not only where you went and how you drove, but what you were doing while you drove there.

Were you looking at the road or at your phone? Were you yawning? Did you appear sleepy? Who else was inside the vehicle?

Manufacturers will tell us these systems have privacy safeguards, and many of them do. But privacy policies can change. So can software, regulations, and the circumstances under which information can be demanded by law enforcement or other third parties.

The hardware remains pointed at you.

Eyes have it

This is usually how intrusive technology arrives: not through some grand announcement that everybody will now be monitored, but through a series of individually reasonable steps.

It's there to detect drowsiness. It's there to make sure you're paying attention. It's there to prevent crashes.

Each argument has merit. I don't want a sleepy driver drifting across the center line any more than anyone else does. Consumers should nevertheless ask where the boundary lies.

A seatbelt protects me without needing to know where I'm looking. An airbag doesn't watch my face. Anti-lock brakes don't care who is sitting beside me.

Driver-monitoring cameras are different because they introduce something automobiles never historically required: a machine observing the occupants of the car in real time.

Governments are now beginning to require the systems capable of doing that.

New normal

There is one more irony.

Cars are becoming more capable of assisting the driver at precisely the moment manufacturers and regulators are becoming more insistent about monitoring the human being behind the wheel.

Your vehicle can steer, brake, maintain its distance from the car ahead, and in some cases even change lanes and navigate highway interchanges. But glance away for a little too long, and the same car starts scolding you.

Maybe these systems will save lives. I hope they do.

Before Americans normalize cameras watching drivers in every new automobile, however, we deserve clear answers about what those systems collect, whether any information leaves the vehicle, how long it can be retained, and who can obtain it.

Once the camera becomes standard equipment, the question is no longer whether the car can watch you. It's who gets access to what it sees.