If you only listen to (or read) this IG transcript/link today it's worth it [View all]

[live love laugh]

This impassioned speech by an Ohio citizen opposing data centers is indescribably wonderful.

Hello, my name is Will Hollingsworth. I work at Reed Memorial Library and thank you all for hearing me today.

I'm not a cynic when it comes to technology. My love for it started when my uncle first sat me down at a beige Windows 95 computer and began teaching me HTML. I will never forget the first thing I googled. It was an image search for pigs flying. I wanted to see if the Internet could make the impossible real.

This love of the digital shaped my career as I went on to become a programmer and a professional content creator. For the last decade and a half I have been …learning burgeoning technology. In my last job, I was the digital artist … feeding mid journey prompts to create the perfect commercial, training the very machine that would eventually replace me as 3 months later they would lay me off. I didn't just watch it happen, I was holding the tools when the tools turned on me.

I want to stress I don't stand here as an enemy of progress. The thing is, when I look at the data center proposal, I don't see progress. I see a gamble where the big tech companies get the gold while Portage County foots the bill. Now, I know there are good faith arguments for this project. There are people in our community, informed, honest people who will tell you that the modern data centers use what's called a closed-loop system. They say the water is filled once and recycled forever. In a laboratory that might be true, but we aren't living in a laboratory, we're living in Ohio.

I can tell you that as the chips get smaller and AI demands get larger, the heat these machines generate is outstripping the closed-loop theory. To keep servers from melting, a data center has to bleed the lines to remove toxic sludge —AKA forever chemicals —and bleeding water needs to be evaporated. It does not stay in the loop, it evaporates into the sky by millions of gallons.

The very place that laid me off was an organic mattress company and while working for them, I actually learned a lot about forever chemicals. I got to see how the sausage gets made. I saw the inside of those so-called regulations. I saw how rigorous studies are often self funded--a pay-to-play model where if you've got the cash, they'll give you the certificate. If a trillion-dollar company is funding the study that says their forever-chemical runoff won't hit our water table, they aren't giving us the science, they're giving us a sales pitch.

We're told that we have to accept this because we need big employers. We're told that if we don't say yes, we're driving away the future. But that's a false choice.

A big employer who uses the water of 50,000 people, which by the way, is a combination of both Kent and Ravenna, and only hires about 10 people, is not an employer. They are an extraction.

We're being asked to fund a 21st century luxury with a 19th century resource heist. We're being asked to sacrifice the lifeblood of our city so a trillion-dollar company can save a fraction of a cent on its margins. We're being asked to drain our reservoirs so a chat bot can write a poem or story. A sheriff can generate a picture of himself standing next to Bigfoot. Which, by the way, of course, he made himself look taller.

They want us to trust a trillion dollar industry that tells us with a straight face that they can suck 5 million gallons of water out of our ground a day, use it as a liquid heat sink, and return it to our rivers without a single consequence. They are asking for a measured approach while they hide their actual usage behind secret contracts and NDAs.

Ohioans have seen this trick played before. We know what happens when massive utility interests and black box energy deals get fast tracked behind closed doors. We're still paying the bill, literally for the first energy scandal. We were told these bailouts were essential and measured too and it turned out to be the largest racketeering plot in the history of our state.

So when a trillion dollar company asks for our water, our electricity and our silence, we shouldn't just be asking for the facts, we should be asking who's really getting the kickback and why is it our reservoir that's on the line.

There is a reason the Ohio House just voted 88-0 to pause and study this industry. It wasn't an act of cynicism, it was an act of stewardship. They realized we cannot let these ghost towns move in then before we understand the damage they do to our grid and our water table.

We are the county seat. We are the stewards of the Great Lakes Basin. Let Ravenna be the city that had the wisdom to say no to the bubble and yes to the basin. I am not a cynic when it comes to technology. I am a believer in community. I believe that a drop of clean water for a Ravenna child is worth more than a billion AI generated images.

Let us choose the child. Let us choose the community. Let us choose to keep our water where it belongs.

Thank you.

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