Regardless of the merits of the actual issue being protested, presenting this as "poor innocent farmer arrested for going five seconds over" doesn't seem accurate.
I previously observed that of course getting arrested wasn't something he would have planned...
OTOH, given that this is the second time the "five seconds over" story has been posted to HN, seems like somebody is leveraging the 'Streisand Effect'.
> If you google "farmer [name] activist"
How do you think public hearings are supposed to work if you have hoards of hecklers exercising their "human rights" by disrupting the meeting?
Claremore Data Center will house the backbone of the internet and supports all the functions that occur on the internet.
0: https://claremore.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/02-17-2026-...
That's not incredible; many facilities do that. It doesn't say 'the entire backbone'; there are many pieces in many places, and if it does contain significant transit then it probably does support approximately "all the functions that occur on the internet."
If it's hosting systems building LLMs, than obviously the statement is false.
See also: working at unethical tech firms, fears over the rich leaving NYC, etc.
Summary: The farmer was asked to leave by an officer. The farmer acknowledges the request and then walks to the head table to start handing the members documents. He was asked again to leave a couple of more times replying with “On what grounds” and then comes the “…flat and final ‘Arrest him’” that the article mentions.
Some context was left out between the his three minutes to speak being up and the arrest.
Not his first rodeo, it seems.
Previously:
It doesn't matter what side is the one in the right, people will take sides against goonish and thuggish behavior. That can grow into a stupid PR disaster. Why would they do this? Are they that stupid or hire stupid people for enforcement?
actually I guess civil rights experienced that first a century ago
but now it's been perfected and anticipated by the establishment
I really hope November is a shocking wake-up call but not holding my breath
If dems do not also get the Senate it's just going to be all hot air
I'll grant the general public may not understand enough that they already rely on "datacenters", but there are reasonable arguments against gigawatt buildouts for AI, while still using technologies that run in datacenters in general.
Second, there is an obvious difference in scale here which you're ignoring.
Third, a website that can run on a pair of servers doesn't actually need to be, and the world would be better off if fewer were.
The level of vitriol i see in all countries over data centers is looking more and more as a proxy against ai.
You can really see how a terrawatt of ai compute in space will make alot of sense vs on earth.
Years of higher electricity price is good reason to be against. The communities gain nothing from those data centers, so it is a bad deal.
And yes, AI industry made an extraordinary achievment in making themselves hated. 10/10 success of their own marketing and PR.
The billionaires who are consolidating control over the media and social media would want nothing more.
Plenty of prominent billionaires have openly aligned with authoritarian over fairly-elected government. The fact that the media and social media properties they control promote divisive, pitchfork-y content doesn’t strike me as a coincidence.
In a violent revolution, even if successful, based on historic pattern, those billionaires would concentrate economic and political power. It was the fact pattern in the French Revolution. It’s been true for every post-WWII revolution too. It will probably get more and more true and people and assets become more and more mobile. The only exceptions were the pre-WWII Communist revolutions; that pattern ended with jet travel.
But even assuming the data center was only used for AI model training, more or less everyone who uses any electronics now either uses generative AI directly themselves or uses services whose employees use generative AI at work to create those services. AI is extremely popular and widespread now among many large and diverse groups of people.
A lot of ai usage is forced and unwanted. People dont perceive it as source of greatness, but as source of slop, cheap low quality and enshittification and crutially, existential threat.
It's a good example of why we need some form of regulation to keep corrupt or incompetent local politicians from selling a community and potentially their neighbors down the river.