Earlier this month, three data centers in western Russia suddenly went dark due to a “rapid unplanned disassembly,” to use euphemistic engineering parlance. They exploded, in other words. Operated by Yandex, a Russian technology company often compared to Google that offers many similar services — a search engine, online shopping, cloud computing and the like — the centers were heavily damaged in a series of coordinated drone strikes over four days by Ukraine, which saw them as a valuable target in the country’s military campaign against Russian infrastructure.

As Russia’s war against Ukraine slogs on, both sides are increasingly adopting this strategy. While power plants and oil refineries have been hit, data centers and internet facilities are becoming the latest quarry for drone and missile strikes — and not just in Europe. Data centers operated by Amazon in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have also been targeted in the ongoing Iran war.

Few Americans have probably heard of Yandex, let alone use its services, and most likely didn’t notice when many of its hosted websites became inaccessible. But after Ukraine’s attacks, many people started to claim that social media was seemingly different. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was quick to suggest his country had dealt a massive blow to Russia’s online disinformation machine, saying, “It suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social platforms. There was less hate, less division and fewer provocations.” Several reports seemed to support his claims, citing data from internet monitoring service Cloudflare, that allegedly showed “Russia’s Yandex bot traffic nearly eliminated overnight.” 

But the truth is far more complicated, as some experts have noted. Yandex did experience a crash in bot activity, but at least some of that traffic seems to be legitimate. “When Cloudflare data shows a precipitous drop in ‘bot’ traffic, that does not mean ‘automated social media troll accounts’, it means ‘software that makes automated web requests on a large scale,’” Michał ‘Rysiek’ Woźniak, an internet infrastructure expert, told The Guardian. Others noted that they haven’t seen an actual drop in online disinformation. “Our platforms are still monitoring Russian social networks across the world and there is no discernible change in their posting patterns,” said Amil Khan, the chief executive of Valent, a tech startup that tracks disinformation.

None of that has stopped Reddit and other corners of the web from celebrating and memeing the issue. If those celebrations aren’t quite justified, there’s still something to be learned from the ordeal, which digs into the so-called dead internet theory. The basic premise is that almost nothing we see online is human-generated anymore. In his 2025 book “Market-Oriented Disinformation Research,” business academic Carlos Diaz Ruiz, who has studied how disinformation spreads in social media echo chambers, describes what many of us experience online on a daily basis: “an eerie feeling that the Internet is made up of bots talking to bots, following and liking bots, and posting AI-generated content designed for machine consumption, the algorithm, not humans.”

Indeed, bot traffic makes up an increasingly large share of the internet, surpassing human traffic for the first time in history over the summer, according to a June Cloudflare report. No doubt the surge in generative artificial intelligence use is what tipped the scales, but of course, not all bots are created equal. Many have legitimate, beneficial uses, like archiving web data.

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Some people have wedged dead internet theory into a conspiracy theory that Diaz Ruiz divides into “weak” and “strong.” The weak version of the theory is that the internet is now little more than a hall of mirrors used to manipulate the masses into fighting a culture war instead of a class war. “The Internet drama keeps the population occupied and distracted, preventing them from resisting the elites secretly controlling the world,” as Diaz Ruiz says. “The ‘strong’ version of the dead internet conspiracy theory claims that online activity is entirely disconnected from human activity because our society ceased to exist some time ago. In some versions, a catastrophic event occurred in the past, triggering society’s collapse.”

OK, so we’re basically talking the plot of “The Matrix” here. The argument that humanity peaked in 1999 may be compelling, and I won’t argue against it. If reality truly is nothing more than a hallucination, dream or computer screensaver in the brain, why should we waste time disputing it? Proving a negative with such a lack of evidence is fruitless. The point is, some people may be taking dead internet theory a little too far, but that doesn’t change the fact that within the last week people felt like they got a taste of some version of it.

If we lift the hood on some of these conspiracies, we can understand what people are really afraid of. Last December in the journal Computer, Hal Berghel, a computer science professor at the University of Nevada, argued the dead internet is more than a conspiracy and should not be dismissed, writing, “There’s certainly evidence of the distortion of the internet from the original concept as a liberating, self-healing, packetized purveyor of useful and important information: the original commitment to net neutrality is on life support, the goal of a shared public information repository is constantly compromised by paywalls, the content has moved from valuable scholarship to a sub-cerebral landfill, and the users are subjected to a mind-numbing cacophony of digital threats: spam, phish bait, spyware, malware, online bullying, online fraud, extortion, hacking, VoIP 911-swatting, doxing, slander, pretexting, etc.”

In other words, there’s a good reason so many people find dead internet theory attractive. Once a zone of promise and connection, the web has not only rotted and enshittified, it’s turned into a literal warzone. There really are algorithms out there, unleashed by governments actively dropping bombs on one another, that are designed to infect our minds and prejudice our ability to perceive the truth. It’s one of the many ways modern warfare has become invisible, pervasive and endless. No wonder social media is making so many people depressed — it can be a form of assault.

“In tandem with proxy warfare, cyber operations have become a central pillar of modern statecraft. Cyber warfare enables states to conduct aggressive acts; espionage, sabotage, infrastructure disruption without engaging in kinetic violence,” philosophers Oluyemi Opeoluwa Adisa and Kareem Shwan Adham wrote last year in a study published in the International Journal of Scientific Research and Management. “The strategic advantage of cyber warfare lies in its stealth and ambiguity. Because it blurs the line between war and crime, attribution becomes difficult, enabling perpetrators to operate with minimal consequences.”

How do we even tell how much of the dead internet theory is true? Perhaps through that old tech-support adage: Turn it off and back on again. And no, I don’t mean bombing more data centers, though we’re likely to see more of that, for better or worse. If everything feels fake, maybe we’re better off getting outside and experiencing something real for a minute. Yeah, yeah, we’ve all been told to touch grass so much that such advice is routinely mocked, and anyway, not everyone can easily do that.

But here’s your daily reminder that humans are primates whose still-evolving brains are exponentially outpaced by technological advancement. Being in nature is essential because we are nature. There’s a certain reset available in the presence of trees, birds and clouds. Even more important is connecting with real humans: family, friends, neighbors. Socialization is the essence of the primate brain too. You don’t have to uninstall any apps or delete Facebook, though you could try it too. Off, on again. 

And when you are online, which is unavoidable for many of us, try to remember that you are probably interacting with fewer humans than you might think. So don’t take it so seriously. Temper those outrageous emotions, the ones the algorithms have gotten so good at teasing out of us. Maybe instead we can fortify them into weapons to attack the real problems we face, like widening wealth gaps, destruction of the environment and the rise of authoritarianism. 

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Before it became reality, the biggest fear around a second Donald Trump administration was an increased level of competence. The candidate and his team displayed shocking measures of discipline and consistent messaging throughout the 2024 race, with much of the credit going to campaign manager Susie Wiles, who became his White House chief of staff. As a result, some feared that the shambling jankiness of his first term would be replaced by an efficient, experienced administration that would carry out a ruthless, quasi-fascist platform with few hiccups. 

That hasn’t happened. Once in office, Trump replaced the GOP’s establishment scolds who curtailed his worst impulses in his first term with loyalists who were just as green as him. The result has been constant outrage over blatant graft and executive overreach, as Trump is unable to stop blabbing about his — possibly illegal — dealmaking and unconstitutional policy goals. But look to the Republican Party’s backbenchers: You’ll see what MAGA could do with a figurehead who can keep their trap shut. 

A loyal Trump acolyte, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry has happily deployed bored-looking National Guard troops to New Orleans and the U.S.-Mexico border for little more reason than pleasing the president. He has successfully pushed a law to require the display of the Ten Commandments in schools, and he rarely shies away from red meat conflicts with his state’s few Democratic strongholds. Little surprise, then, that Landry was hailed as MAGA’s next-generation hero by Rolling Stone in 2024.

But when the time comes to pass Republican policies he truly cares about, or to hand out contracts and favors to his preferred businesses, Landry goes eerily quiet. Unlike Trump’s premature crowing over his massive ballroom or countless would-be Iran ceasefires, the governor has a tendency to let his work speak for itself. 

When it was published, Landry’s profile in Rolling Stone made hay out of his ability to go dark. Lately, though, when he gets quiet, it’s out of legal necessity. His administration has proven remarkably open to signing non-disclosure agreements while working out public deals with megacorporations.

According to a report from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Landry administration has signed nearly 300 NDAs since he took office in 2024. The Gulf States Newsroom uncovered a further 100 NDAs between the governor’s office and its employees, restricting what they can share about their time on the job. Reporter Drew Hawkins, who spoke to employees of former Louisiana gubernatorial administrations, said the broad gag orders on public employees was unprecedented.

“[T]hey’ve never seen anything like this,” Hawkins told New Orleans television station WWL. “They don’t know about anybody else signing them. They never signed them, and then you know one of them reviewed it and went through it point by point and talked about just how wild this would be to enforce.”

The result of all these hush-hush agreements is most noticeable in recent headline deals with SpaceX and Meta. The former was given the OK to build a massive spaceport in coastal Louisiana in between two wildlife refuges. While the under-wraps deal was being worked out, Landry signed laws exempting aerospace operations from property taxes, nuisance liabilities and public records requests. The final deal, approved in a public meeting of a new development board announced just 24 hours before, granted SpaceX more than $24 billion in tax breaks to build a rocket-launching facility no locals had even heard about.

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A similarly tight-lipped dealmaking process led to Meta’s announcement of its largest data center to date in rural Northeast Louisiana. The project, dubbed Hyperion, will cover six square miles of Richland Parish. The tax breaks granted to Meta, again without public input, total more than $3 billion.

For his part, Landry kept quiet about the agreements until the last possible moment. But once the ink was dry, he was downright boastful about them. “I have no problem letting the people in the state of Louisiana decide whether what we put together was worth it,” he said, telling the Times-Picayune that he was motivated by pragmatism and a desire to drag his economically underperforming state into the future. “You don’t do these deals in the public,. At some point, you have to give the people elected to lead this state the opportunity to lead.”

Since Louisiana’s have a habit of ending up in prison, some level of backroom chicanery is to be expected in the Bayou State. At the moment, Landry’s NDA-heavy approach is largely a Louisiana phenomenon. But the ethically dubious practice of burying public-private deals under NDAs could be put to use elsewhere. 

Landry’s down-low dealmaking offers a blueprint for post-Trump Republicans looking to push through potentially unpopular agreements and policies, including those involving data centers and artificial intelligence. While the president may no longer be able to harness the support he enjoyed by virtue of being loud-mouthed himself, his followers can work quietly to carry on his project under a blanket of keep-quiet agreements — springing them on the public when the deals have already been made.

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Fox News is confronting an awkward problem of its own making. Conservative media has spent years teaching its audience to distrust the institutions building artificial intelligence, but now those same institutions are working with Donald Trump and Republicans nationwide to secure billions of dollars in public infrastructure, regulatory favors and political protection to build the physical machinery that makes AI possible. So the network is now trying to discipline a conservative backlash it helped build by recasting public anger as a threat to Trump’s economic agenda and America’s rivalry with China.

The shift was gradual. The network did not simply move from being skeptical of AI to becoming enthusiastic about it. Instead, it changed the question. What began as a story about whether AI was “woke” became a story about whether the U.S. could afford to not dominate its development. 

Over the past three years, as Trump’s alliance with tech oligarchs deepened, network hosts have seemingly dropped their culture war suspicion of AI, which at first centered on ChatGPT and accusations that the chatbot, produced by OpenAI, was “woke” and exhibited an “anti-Trump bias.” They have now adopted an aggressive defense of the industrial buildout behind the technology. What began as a moral panic over Silicon Valley chatbots and censorship has turned into a desperate campaign to douse the flames of a conservative grassroots rebellion against AI data centers.

When ChatGPT exploded into public consciousness in early 2023, network hosts used its standard culture war playbook to raise the alarm against generative AI. Jesse Watters complained on “The Five” that AI would discriminate against conservatives and said he feared machines would become another mechanism for censorship. Laura Ingraham held up the news that Vanderbilt administrators had used the chatbot to draft a message after the Michigan State shooting as proof that intellectual standards were collapsing. Tucker Carlson, then still on the air, gave Elon Musk a platform to voice apocalyptic warnings about where the field was heading. 

For a moment, the right-wing media apparatus seemed positioned to critique AI as an anti-human concentration of corporate power. But when Carlson was ousted only days after the April 2023 interview, he took that strain of populism with him to the political periphery, joining voices like former Trump adviser and podcast host Steve Bannon in expressing sustained alarm over AI from the right. 

But as Salon’s Amanda Marcotte has documented, the politics surrounding the technology changed as the money got bigger. Tech companies began pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into data centers. After the federal government’s own assessment estimated that data centers consumed about 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023, and could consume between 6.7% and 12% by 2028, conservative voters who distrust Silicon Valley and resent rising utility bills collided with Trump-aligned officials who want to build the technology and its data centers at breakneck speed. A July Fox News poll found that 70% of Americans opposed data centers being built in their communities. Faced with a genuine populist uprising against corporate extraction, the network seems to have stepped in to perform damage control for Big Tech and the Trump administration. 

By August 2026, “Fox & Friends” began reassuring viewers that local opposition was not an authentic community defense but rather a deceptive plot orchestrated by the “far left.” Host Brian Kilmeade suggested that calls to slow down AI expansion could “tank” the economy ahead of the midterms, effectively warning viewers that defending their local water source was an act of economic sabotage. On “The Five,” Greg Gutfeld picked up the same talking point, arguing that Democrats were weaponizing local opposition to AI development as a sneaky way to undermine Trump’s economic numbers. Will Cain’s program has similarly cast local opposition as a Democratic weapon for stirring outrage in swing districts. 

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Fox reached for establishment gravitas and deployed heavyweights from the national security state like former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to sell the data centers buildout under the banner of “techno-optimism.” Dismissing concerns over sweeping job losses on Monday, Rice framed the issue around international competition. On Fox Business, Larry Kudlow has argued that opposing data centers amounts to promoting China, and Charles Payne has described a New York moratorium as part of a Democratic war on AI. In May, Payne went further on “Jesse Watters Primetime” when he accused Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., of working with the Chinese to kill the American AI industry. 

An incident involving businessman and television personality Kevin O’Leary is the classic cautionary tale taught in journalism schools. In May, the “Shark Tank” investor appeared on former Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo’s show promoting his proposed Utah data center when he claimed that local groups and residents opposing it were proxies for the Chinese government. The allegation was subsequently repeated across Fox programming. O’Leary later acknowledged that he had no evidence that the organizations or individuals he identified were funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party. Fox News Media eventually issued an on-air apology.

This campaign to pacify the conservative base culminated in Trump’s direct intervention. Characterizing fears of existential risk from AI as a “hoax,” Trump made it clear that corporate expansion would take priority over local or environmental concerns. After returning from a golf tournament in Illinois over the weekend, Trump openly boasted to reporters at Joint Base Andrews about his late-night dinner with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, illustrating the strange politics of this moment. Anthropic has become one of the most prominent companies arguing that powerful AI systems require safety measures and public oversight. Amodei himself has warned that AI could pose a risk to humanity if developed badly. 

On Tuesday, ahead of a scheduled lunch with industry executives to discuss the technology, Trump announced the launch of America.gov, a government chatbot billed as a research tool for public services. “We do not surrender to fears about what technologies will do to us,” he said. “We decide that those technologies will do for us some very, very incredible things.” Using his preferred moniker for AI, the president added. “This kind of innovation in government is just a preview of what is possible with super intelligence.”

Trump’s rhetoric and actions underscore that his role in selling AI to a skeptical public is central. He has dismissed existential AI fears as a “hoax” and made expanding data centers a centerpiece of his agenda. That is why Fox was so quick to abandon the rural and suburban communities facing the real-world fallout from data centers, choosing instead to lecture its audience on the national security duty of surrendering their power grids and backyards to Big Tech.

UPDATE: This column has been updated to include President Donald Trump’s announcement that the government is launching its own chatbot, America.gov.

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When MS NOW heads to Arlington, Texas, on Saturday, Sept. 26, for “MS NOW Live: Together in Texas,” host Chris Hayes will be stepping into an environment he finds both familiar and necessary. For Hayes, host of “All In with Chris Hayes” and author of “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource,” gathering face-to-face with his audience isn’t just network promotion — it’s nurturing the one thing he has left in a media environment defined by change.

“I love live events,” he told me in an interview ahead of the event, describing having “a head start” on the live-events model with book tours and podcast live shows. “There’s a great energy that comes from being in a room with people. I think it’s a different energy than anything else, particularly true and truer every day in the increasingly screen-based and mediated world.”

Held at the College Park Center at the University of Texas at Arlington, MS NOW’s day-long fan event brings together 15 of the network’s top anchors — including Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell and Jen Psaki — for in-depth conversations with thousands of Texas viewers ahead of the November midterms.  

Hayes will arrive in Texas with a deep respect for his viewers, whom he calls “sophisticated and informed” about the issues — from Democratic hopes surrounding state Rep. James Talarico’s Senate campaign to fights over data centers, development and the future of Texas communities. But he will also be bringing a theory of what’s been happening in the Lone Star State over the past several years. Describing the state as, “on its own terms,” perhaps the country’s most successful laboratory for right-wing policy, Hayes said that Texas’ long-running Republican experiment has produced a contradiction: Policies that helped make Texas affordable, fast-growing and attractive to newcomers are also changing the electorate and straining the coalition that built the model in the first place.

“There [are] certain parts about the Texas model that have genuinely been successful,” Hayes conceded. “Housing is pretty cheap. It’s been pretty fast-growing, and in that cheap housing and fast-growing, it’s a place that’s diversifying, and a lot of immigrants have made a life there.” 

But the state’s Republican leadership has to face reality: “If people want to move to Texas, which a lot of people do, then the state’s composition is going to change,” he said. The same in-migration fueling the Texas boom is also, in some measure, quietly padding the GOP’s own coalition. “[The state GOP] have a very ambiguous, ambivalent relationship to that.” 

This tension surfaced most recently in the backlash to social-media posts by former Tarrant County GOP Chair Bo French, a candidate for the Texas Railroad Commission, a state agency with a remit that goes beyond its name, regulating oil, gas, alternative fuels, pipeline safety, and surface mining and reclamation. French posted a photo on X after Texas’ upset win over Ohio State showing University of Texas students — many of them South Asian — in the stands, and appeared to condemn a changing, more diverse Texas. Hayes said the response from prominent Texas Republicans, including Sen. John Cornyn and former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove, was partly about the political consequences of alienating the growing number of South Asian Texans, some of whom may already be conservative or Republican-leaning.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the people in the photo are Republicans,” Hayes said, referring to the image French criticized. “This is Texas.”

Hayes sees Talarico as a serious test of whether that opening can be exploited into statewide electoral gains for Democrats. “Talarico, I think, is a strong candidate, and I think he’s got a real shot,” he said. Texas Democrats still need “a whole bunch of things to break the right way” to win statewide, he cautioned, calling Texas “the great white whale” of statewide Democratic politics — a state the party hasn’t won in three decades. But this cycle, Hayes argued, offers real structural openings. Ken Paxton, he said, is “a worse candidate” than even Sen. Ted Cruz; he isn’t an incumbent and lacks basic retail political skills. “He’s a real dud on the campaign trail,” Hayes noted, adding that Trump himself may be reassessing his endorsement calculus in real time. 

Against that backdrop, Hayes was direct about Republican efforts to turn Talarico’s faith and masculinity into political liabilities. “They are all but calling him a gay slur,” he said of the GOP’s campaign against him, adding that the assault on Talarico’s masculinity “reeks of desperation.” 

Hayes did not dismiss the possibility that Paxton and the GOP’s attacks on Talarico could work with some voters, particularly in a polarized environment where campaigns often seek less to persuade than to cement partisan loyalties. “You just need to snap people back to their fundamental, their partisan fundamentals,” he said. A Republican voter who may have doubts about a candidate can still be nudged toward the familiar conclusion: “I don’t really like the Democrat. Those aren’t my people.’”

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But Talarico, Hayes suggested, may be better positioned than past Democratic efforts to resist that hyper-partisan reflex. What makes Talarico’s race worth watching this cycle, in Hayes’ framing, is less about the candidate himself than about the structural gap that’s opened up on the other side. He noted that Democrats haven’t come this close in decades: Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 run against Cruz, he noted, came down to roughly “2.3 points” — the modern high-water mark for a statewide Texas Democrat. “Talarico has run a phenomenal race, and he’s a really good candidate.”

While Hayes expects the midterms to dominate the conversation in Arlington this weekend, audience members, he said, often arrive with their own closely held theories about what messages Democrats should use — and what could stop what he called “the desecration of our country” by Donald Trump. He anticipates intense interest in artificial intelligence and the infrastructure behind it, particularly data centers. The issue, Hayes said, has become more salient to his audience in recent weeks as AI tools have visibly improved and communities are increasingly confronting the land, water, power and development demands associated with data center construction.

“The data center issue really gets something deep in people,” he said. “I think Texas is an interesting place for it.”

Along with Georgia and Virginia, the Lone Star State has become central to the national conversation around data centers. It’s become a wedge issue in at least one Texas congressional race — alongside anger over the Trump administration’s attempt, which has been temporarily halted, to build a border wall in Big Bend National Park, and broader frustration with Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. (On Monday, Abbott ordered the state’s environmental regulators to stop approving permits for the construction of new data centers pending an electrical audit.) Hayes compared the reaction to a form of territorial politics. “It’s territorial in a literal physical sense — the ground, your backyard, your community, the park that you love.”

For Hayes, the Texas event is a chance to hear directly from people confronting the physical consequences of the state’s rapid development. The event also offers Hayes an opportunity to put into practice the central concern of his book, “The Sirens’ Call,” which examines how digital platforms commodify attention. MS NOW’s live event asks whether journalism can build something more durable than a click or a fleeting social-media interaction.

“I like people,” Hayes said. “I feel energized by them.” Such direct relationships, he stressed, are the core asset of modern journalism, even as tech platforms continually insert themselves between news outlets and their readers and viewers through algorithm tweaks. “As everything gets kind of disintermediated and chopped and screwed, and the platforms insert themselves between you and the audience,” he said, “what do you have? You have the people that like and respect your work . . . Nurturing that is pretty darn important.”

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President Donald Trump is going all-in on artificial intelligence, dismissing growing concerns over AI and data centers as politically motivated “hoaxes” while promising that his administration will not “hinder or stifle” the rapidly expanding industry.

Trump announced Saturday that he is forming an “AI Force,” which he compared to the Space Force created during his first term, and will soon appoint an AI “czar.”

“We will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

The president provided few details about what the new force would actually do, including where it would sit within the federal government, what authority it would have or how it would differ from existing federal AI initiatives. Trump instead argued that harmful uses of AI could be addressed through the existing criminal and civil justice systems.

His embrace of the technology comes as some Republicans are confronting growing opposition to the data centers needed to power it ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Trump’s longtime pollster Tony Fabrizio warned Republican candidates in a memo this week that “unqualified support for building more AI data centers is a losing position.” Fabrizio advised candidates to address concerns about electricity prices, pressure on power grids and water consumption rather than offer blanket support for new construction.

Trump took the opposite tone Saturday, claiming opposition to data centers had “largely failed” because communities discovered they brought “Higher Salaries, Lower Taxes, and Safer Streets.”

Some Republican candidates have gone further than Fabrizio’s messaging advice. Michigan Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers has backed a one-year moratorium on new data centers in his state and called for slowing AI development while the government develops additional safeguards.

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Trump, meanwhile, framed rapid AI development as both an economic imperative and a competition with China, claiming the technology could eventually account for as much as 25% of U.S. gross domestic product.

His enthusiasm extends even to the technology’s name.

Hours before announcing the AI Force, Trump asked his Truth Social followers to vote on replacing “Artificial Intelligence” with “Superior Intelligence,” “Extreme Intelligence” or “Supreme Intelligence.”

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