You may have seen us at the farmers' market, at festivals, local coffee shops, or wherever people gather, with a sign proclaiming “ban mega data centers” and with our clipboards at-the-ready. We're gathering signatures for the Conserve Ohio petition; it is formally known as the Ohio Prohibition of Data Center Construction Amendment. It needs 413,488 valid signatures from at least 44 of Ohio's 88 counties by July 1, 2026 to get on the November ballot.

Last year, Merriam-Webster named “slop” its Word of the year to describe the AI-generated digital junk swamping social media. As defined by experts, AI Slop is a pejorative term for “digital content made with generative artificial intelligence that is perceived as lacking in effort, quality, or deeper meaning, and produced at an overwhelming volume.” AI slop is content churned out in bulk, often mindlessly, to fill feeds and farm clicks. Learn how slop is made and how to av

John Donne’s Meditation XVII, best known for the line “for whom the bell tolls,” argues that no person stands apart from the rest of humanity. What happens to one part of the whole eventually reaches the rest. I work in software engineering. I am part of the problem. I understand why data centers exist, and I benefit from them like everyone else. The cloud isn’t some kind of metaphysical thing… it sits somewhere, on land, tied to power and water and people. But I also live