The Right to Refuse, and the Bill

Guest Opinion by Alicia Boothe Haggermaker

Part 4 of a four-part series

Assembled With Dependency — Part 4

The final part of a four-part series. Part 3 followed the money and the water. This part turns to what happens when communities try to say no, what the boom costs at the level of a single household, and who is left holding the tab. The complete version appears at unprecedentedtimes.org.

The Right to Say No

The Texas counties in this story are the exception, not the rule — and that is the part worth sitting with. Van Zandt and Hood County still had a ”no” to give: a local lever, a commission that could vote a moratorium and make it hold. In a growing number of states, that lever has been removed.

West Virginia took the explicit route. The state limited local authority over data center and microgrid siting and paired it with Freedom of Information Act exemptions for data center projects — so the public cannot read the terms of what is being built beside them. Michigan stripped municipalities of authority over large-scale energy projects through a 2023 law now bleeding into how townships can respond to data centers; as one official put it, the communities "weren't playing nice," so the state came in and told them they had no choice. Pennsylvania is assembling the same machine through proposed legislation that would override local land-use law, leaning on the theory that a municipality cannot entirely ban data centers — meaning an ordinance trying to keep them out would be deemed unconstitutionally exclusionary, which would then let the developer build essentially anywhere in town.

Read that again. The argument is that saying no is itself illegal.

A University of Virginia lab reviewed more than 700 federal, state, and local data center policies and found the landscape shifting out of a period of aggressive economic incentives and into one of intense scrutiny, restriction, and community-led resistance. Translation: the communities woke up. And where they woke up, the response from above has increasingly been to take the alarm clock away.

Which forces the question this whole accounting has been circling. Is America its people, or is it now its business interests? Because those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is being legislated into permanence in real time. When a state preempts a county's right to refuse, exempts the project from open-records law, and recasts a local *no* as unconstitutional obstruction, it has answered the question. It has decided that the resident, the ratepayer, the family three miles from the substation, is not the constituency. The infrastructure is.

A country that strips its own people of the right to decide what gets built in their own backyard — to host infrastructure they will not own, cannot inspect, and will be billed to maintain — is not protecting its people. It is processing them.

The Questions That Haven't Been Asked

The precautionary principle used to be the default for infrastructure at this scale. Study before you build. Understand the downstream effects before you create the upstream conditions. The WPA built post offices with murals and courthouses that told people their civic life had dignity and permanence — infrastructure intended to outlast the builders because the builders had a stake in what they left behind.

The data center going up on the edge of a Texas county will belong to a company headquartered somewhere else, maintained by a supply chain controlled by someone else, and governed by a return-on-investment calculation that has nothing to do with that county's long-term interests. When the calculus changes the county will be left with infrastructure it did not build, cannot maintain, and that was never designed to serve it.

Detroit did not collapse because the city stopped caring about its factories. The factories collapsed because the companies that built them were never structurally obligated to stay. When the return on investment compressed below the threshold, the logical business decision was exit. The institutional knowledge of how to make the thing left with the factory. The tax base left. The people left. The city was left holding assets sized for an economy that had moved somewhere more profitable.

We keep recreating this loop because we keep building community dependency on entities that have no structural incentive for loyalty. Loyalty requires stake. Stake requires ownership. The people who build something and live among the people who use it have a reason to keep it standing.

Here are the questions the documented record raises that have not been answered before the building happened:

What is the atmospheric effect of concentrating this much evaporation at point sources, at a scale and velocity the hydrological cycle did not evolve around?

What is the combined environmental load of rapidly expanding cooling tower infrastructure on Legionella transmission at population scale?

Who governs autonomous AI infrastructure in international waters, and what accountability mechanism exists when something goes wrong?

What happens to the communities hosting this infrastructure when the return on investment shifts and the entity with no structural loyalty makes the logical business decision?

Who owns the liability for the infrastructure left behind?

Why are the people who would fund the research into these questions the same people who would be implicated by the answers?

These are not partisan questions. They are not fringe questions. They are the questions responsible infrastructure development has always required before the concrete gets poured.

The concrete is already poured. The questions haven't been asked.

What It Costs at the Counter

Make this small for a moment, because the abstraction does the powerful a favor.

A few months ago I needed memory for a home setup. Not a server. Not a gaming rig. Basic storage and headroom for the kind of work an ordinary person does at a desk. I got lucky — found 32GB open-box from someone local for $125. When I went back a week or two later for more, the only place I could find it was China, through eBay, for over $170. Same 32GB. Two weeks apart.

That is not bad luck. That is the statement arriving at my own desk.

The same AI data center boom this entire series is about is eating the memory supply alive. AI data centers are projected to consume around 70% of high-end DRAM production in 2026. Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron shifted the overwhelming majority of their combined output to high-bandwidth memory for AI servers, leaving a fraction for the ordinary RAM in consumer devices — and DRAM prices surged roughly 90% in the first quarter of 2026 over the prior quarter alone. The relief is not close. The new fabs will not meaningfully change supply until around 2028, and the major producers are already selling their 2027 and 2028 capacity in advance.

Sit with the loop, because it closes on itself. I build my own infrastructure precisely so I do not have to depend on systems I cannot see or control. And the buildout I am warning about is the reason I could not buy basic memory for that independent setup without routing the purchase through China, at a markup the boom itself created.

The data center did not just take the water, the grid, and the local vote. It took the parts an ordinary person needs to build the alternative. The chokepoint does not only sit upstream of the hyperscalers. It now sits between a person and her own keyboard. That is what "more dependent" actually feels like when it reaches your hands.

What You Won't Maintain

I build and maintain a community platform by myself. One person, a refurbished Dell, a stack I debug at my own kitchen table. So I know what a system looks like when someone who has to live with it is keeping it — and what it looks like when no one is.

A couple of months ago I reported a metrics problem to a social platform — numbers that didn't add up. They asked for permission to access my account to investigate. I granted it. The restriction started after that — no sharing, no posting to groups, no reacting to a group post. I asked the obvious question: could the restriction be connected to their accessing my account? I never got an answer. The ticket was routed to a "dedicated team for further investigation" and closed. That team never surfaced, and the metrics have only gotten worse since.

Three weeks later, a different representative gave a different explanation entirely — the restriction was "likely" triggered by "excessive use of certain features," couldn't say which, and I should simply stop using the features they couldn't name. Two tickets, two incompatible explanations for the same unsolved problem, both closed, both followed by a survey asking if my issue was resolved.

I told one of them I had worked in customer service and tech, that I understood the limits placed even on supervisors, but that somewhere there ought to be a formal accountability process or an honest look at how this works — and asked them to pass it up to whoever would hear it. The answer was a closed case.

And the entire time — through every restriction, every closed ticket, every contradictory explanation — my account status showed ”no restrictions.” The system was enforcing one thing and reporting the opposite, about itself, on my own screen. You do not need my testimony for that part. The platform contradicted itself in writing. One hand restricted me; the other swore it wasn't happening; and no one anywhere was positioned to notice the two hands belonged to the same body.

Meanwhile I cannot log into my own postal service; the password is correct, the same one the system made me reset yesterday to the password it already was, and it fails again every morning. A hat I ordered was flagged as counterfeit postage, relabeled, then vanished from tracking entirely.

What I can show you is the pattern: systems so unmaintained that the people inside them can no longer give a consistent account of why they do what they do. The story changes because no one is keeping it. The front-line worker isn't lying — he genuinely doesn't know, and neither does anyone above him. A problem reported, logged, and closed keeps getting worse, because closing the ticket is the moment everyone stops watching. I'm not going to assign a motive I can't prove. To the person standing at the counter, the cause barely matters — the lights are off either way.

And it scales. The same unkept systems that lose a hat and lock an account no one can unlock are the ones that build a data center before the grid that feeds it, a chip strategy before the fabs that supply it, a nuclear plant on a river that now runs too warm to cool it. When a single strait closed this spring — and as of this writing it is still closed, the conflict escalating by the week — the helium, the sulfur, and the chips this entire buildout depends on spiked at once, because we built infrastructure hostage to chokepoints we have no power to keep open.

And the largest chokepoint of all runs on a clock. China processes more than ninety percent of the world's rare earth elements — the materials inside every chip, every magnet, and every fabrication tool in this buildout. Its sweeping 2025 export controls were not repealed; they were suspended, set to expire in November 2026. The May summit produced no agreement to change that. Roughly five months from now, Beijing can switch back off the materials we cannot make for ourselves, and nothing has been negotiated to stop it. We did not break the supply chain. We built one we were never prepared to maintain — and handed the off-switch to someone else.

There is a principle under every section of this accounting, older than any of the technology in it: do not build — or break — what you are unprepared or unwilling to maintain or fix. We broke a manufacturing base we will not rebuild. We are building an infrastructure we cannot supply. Both are the same failure facing opposite directions, and the bill for both lands on the people who never got to vote on either.

The distributed alternative is not just more sovereign. It is the only version that gets maintained — because the people who build it are the people who have to live with it. You fix the roof you sleep under.

The Bill

Our labor and creation has always been our currency. The factory worker who made the Barbie used to be the person buying the Barbie. Her wages funded her own consumption. The value made a loop. When the factory went to Shenzhen the price stayed low long enough to feel like a win — but the loop broke. The wages left. The knowledge of how to make the thing left. The institutional capacity to rebuild it left with them.

The newest version of that broken loop does not even pass the savings on. The "God Bless the USA" Bible — flag on the cover, the founding documents bound in the back, sold as the only Bible the President endorses — was traced by the Associated Press to a printer in Hangzhou, China, produced for under three dollars a copy and sold for $59.99, with commemorative editions now running $99.99. The President licensed his name to it through his own company and collected around $300,000 in royalties. The same storefront sells a beer-pong set with the cups numbered 45 and 47, a presidential bicep squeeze toy, and a $1,500 guitar. And notice what the buyer actually gets: not the old bargain, where the offshored good at least came cheap, but offshore production at a premium price — because the markup is not American labor, and it is not your savings. It is the licensing fee on a name. The flag is the product. The Bible is just how it ships.

We are now building the most sophisticated computing infrastructure in human history and we cannot manufacture the transformers, the batteries, or the switchgear to build it domestically in sufficient quantity to keep construction on schedule. We passed a law acknowledging the problem. We kept buying from the country the law was written about. We appointed a Special Envoy whose private fund grew $1.2 billion in the year he advised the administration, funded 99% by the foreign governments he was negotiating with. We approved three times the previous chip export volume to a UAE entity with documented Chinese military company ties. We are moving to permanently embed a foreign nation's defense technology into our military supply chain.

The people in Hood County and Van Zandt County, Texas voting to pause data center construction in evening meetings understood something the billion-dollar policy apparatus has not acted on: infrastructure that doesn't belong to you, built on a supply chain you don't control, by entities with no structural obligation to stay, is not American infrastructure. It is American liability.

I voted for the premise that American workers and American communities should come first.

The documented record is above. Point to the America First parts. Show me where they are — in the supply chain, in the financing, in the ownership, in the bill. Section by section, the honest answer is the same: the whole thing was assembled with dependency.

I am not saying don't vote for Trump. I am not saying vote for anyone else. I am saying the premise deserves an honest accounting. And the voters who believed in it deserve to ask the question without being told they are naive or disloyal for asking.

The question is not who to blame.

The question is who is paying the bill.

And the documented answer is: not the people who built it.

Alicia Haggermaker is an investigative journalist, systems analyst, and community organizer based in Huntsville, Alabama. She publishes at Unprecedented Times and is the founder of the Mycelium Network — a sovereign community coordination platform built for exactly this kind of thinking. The complete version of this series appears at unprecedentedtimes.org.

Sources (Part 4):

MultiState and Crain's Detroit data-center preemption tracking, 2026; Pennsylvania Municipal League analysis of proposed siting legislation, 2026; University of Virginia DIGS Lab data-center policy database, 2026; TrendForce, Windows Central, and CNBC on the DRAM shortage and pricing, 2025–2026; World Economic Forum and IEA reporting on the 2026 Strait of Hormuz closure and energy impacts; DigiTimes on Qatar helium and chip-input disruption, 2026; China-Briefing and Discovery Alert on China's rare-earth export-control suspension and its November 2026 expiry; Reuters on China's rare-earth processing dominance; Associated Press investigation into the "God Bless the USA" Bible's printing in China and the licensing of the President's name (2024); godblesstheusa.com product listings (2026).

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