In Loudoun County, Virginia, a woman named Karen speaks at a zoning board meeting about the hum. Not a metaphorical hum — a literal one. The data center proposed for a site near her neighborhood would run diesel backup generators, draw millions of gallons of water for cooling, and produce a low-frequency drone that residents of similar facilities in neighboring counties describe as constant and maddening. She is not a foreign agent. She is not confused. She has read the environmental impact filings, and she knows the name of the developer. She does not want this next to her children's school.
Republican lawmakers, OpenAI executives, and at least one prominent tech investor have spent the last several months suggesting that community opposition to data centers across the United States is the product of Chinese information warfare. The framing is familiar to anyone who has watched power explain away dissent: the people resisting must be manipulated, because no reasonable person would object to progress. The intelligence community has identified some Chinese-linked social media activity around data center disputes. But researchers who study the actual opposition describe something far more ordinary: people who live in places being asked to absorb industrial-scale infrastructure without adequate input, compensation, or honesty about the costs.
They want agents in the server rack and obedience in the living room. - The Itchy Dispatch
When the Powerful Need You to Be a Foreign Plot
This rhetorical move — dismissing local resistance as foreign interference — is not new, and it is not limited to data centers. It is a template. If you have spent any time covering Palestine, you recognize it immediately. Palestinian civil society organizations that document Israeli military operations have been designated as terrorist fronts by the Israeli government — not because the designations hold up to scrutiny, but because the designations make it possible to ignore what those organizations are saying. The mechanism is identical: you do not answer the objection; you disqualify the objector.
OpenAI's Chris Lehane — a Democratic operative turned tech lobbyist — told reporters that foreign adversaries are "weaponizing" local opposition. The language is precise and deliberate. "Weaponizing" transforms a neighbor at a zoning meeting into a national security threat. It elevates a corporate land-use preference into a matter of geopolitical defense. And it does something else, something quieter: it makes the question of whether the data center should be built disappear entirely, replaced by the question of who is asking.
This is the same substitution that has powered decades of humanitarian gatekeeping. When Gazan engineers propose locally designed water filtration systems, international donors often route funding through foreign contractors instead — not because the engineering is inferior, but because the system requires the people affected to be recipients, not agents. The moment they become agents, they become inconvenient. The moment Karen in Loudoun County becomes an agent with legitimate standing, she becomes inconvenient too.
The Comfort of Ordering the World
Meanwhile, a parallel industry has emerged to serve men who have decided that the problem with modern life is that women have too many choices. Matchmaking firms now charge $25,000 or more to find "traditional" wives for tech entrepreneurs and CEOs — men who, by their own description, want partners who will organize domestic life around male authority. These are not fringe figures. They live in San Francisco and Austin. They build AI products. Some of them sit on the boards of companies now deploying autonomous agents at scale.
There is a through-line here, and it is not subtle. The same cohort building systems designed to remove human judgment from decision-making — AI agents that interact with other AI agents, executing tasks without human oversight, as Google DeepMind's researchers now warn could produce dangerous emergent behaviors — also wants human relationships structured around hierarchy and control. They want agents in the server rack and obedience in the living room. The vision is consistent: a world optimized for the preferences of the people who own the infrastructure, with everyone else arranged accordingly.
Google DeepMind's Rohin Shah has publicly flagged the risks of millions of AI agents interacting autonomously — cascading failures, emergent manipulation, systems pursuing goals their operators never intended. These are real concerns. But the paper's framing assumes the danger is accidental. It does not adequately address the possibility that the danger is structural: that the people deploying these agents have already demonstrated, in their politics, their hiring, their zoning battles, and their marriages, a preference for systems in which power flows one way and accountability does not flow at all.
What Dignity Looks Like Here
Dignity, in Loudoun County, looks like a zoning process where the developer's economic projections are weighed against residents' health data and water table studies — and where the residents do not have to prove they are not Chinese operatives before their testimony counts. It looks like environmental review that is completed before ground is broken, not after.
Dignity, in the AI agent ecosystem, looks like mandatory human-in-the-loop requirements before autonomous agents can execute financial transactions, modify other systems, or interact with other agents at scale. It looks like liability that attaches to the deploying company, not to the abstraction of "the algorithm."
And dignity, in the broader culture these men are building, looks like refusing the premise that efficiency is the highest value and control is the natural shape of a household, a community, or a network. The people who want to automate judgment out of public life and obedience into private life are telling you what they want. The question is whether the rest of us are going to keep pretending the pattern is too complicated to name.
It is not complicated. It is a preference for power without friction. And the people who hold it would like you to believe that anyone who objects has been compromised by a foreign government, is too emotional to understand the economics, or simply needs to be matched with someone who will stop asking questions.