By Tabitha Evans Moore
Editor & Publisher

Let me be upfront about something before I make what might sound like a political argument: I am not a partisan person. I cast my first vote in the 1992 presidential election for George H.W. Bush. Since then I’ve voted for both Democrats and Republicans. Nothing about me bleeds deep red or deep blue. I am decidedly purple.

That mindset gets beaten into you in journalism school, and by every editor you’ll ever work for — or at least it used to be, before the era of partisan media. A good journalist can’t afford personal political allegiances. I have colleagues who don’t even vote, unwilling to introduce any preference into their thinking.

But you don’t have to be partisan to see what’s coming. AI data centers may well be the issue that reshapes Tennessee politics in the midterms — and if not then, certainly by August. Nowhere will that be more true than in rural communities.

Lynchburg has, until very recently, been largely insulated from the kind of corporate development that reshaped so much of the rest of the country. The strip malls, the big box stores, the industrial corridors that consumed the outskirts of town after town — they largely passed us by. That wasn’t just luck. It reflected something about this place: a community with deep roots in its land and a quiet wariness of outside interests arriving with promises of prosperity. Then, in what feels like the span of a breath, we got a solar farm, an anaerobic digester, and a tiny home community. Each of those can be debated on its own merits. But the pace matters. Lynchburg went from no significant new development to several — and now data centers are circling in rural Tennessee.

This is not a new story in Tennessee. Ask anyone who actually comes from Appalachia. The Appalachian people have been displaced and dispossessed for generations — their land taken in the name of progress, their communities hollowed out once the extraction was done. That happened here locally with the building of the Tims Ford Reservoir and the Awalt Community that now sits at the bottom of it. There is a particular ethic in rural culture, one that outsiders sometimes dismiss as sentiment, that understands land as something you enter into a relationship with. You take what you need. You steward what remains. You leave it better than you found it, or at least no worse.

AI data centers represent the structural opposite of that ethic. Think of them as a neighbor — because that’s what they’re asking to be. Imagine someone who moves into your community, takes up an enormous footprint, draws from the shared water supply at a rate no one else would dream of, runs at full power around the clock, and when you knock on the door to talk about it, hands you a press release. Everyone in town knows they’ll be gone in four years anyway. They’ve already done it to three other communities before yours.

Now ask yourself: would we tolerate that from one of our own? Of course not. A local who behaved that way would face immediate consequences — through conversation, through community pressure, through the thousand quiet ways that small towns enforce their values. The social contract in a place like Lynchburg is unspoken precisely because it doesn’t need to be written down. You don’t take more than your share. You show up when someone needs help. You don’t make decisions that affect your neighbors without talking to them first. People who are truly *from* a place have internalized those norms so deeply they don’t experience them as rules. They’re just how you behave.

That’s the meaningful distinction — not between locals and outsiders, but between people who come to belong to a place and those who expect the place to belong to them. Some of the finest community members in any small town came from somewhere else entirely. Moore County’s State Volunteers of the Year, Robyn and John LaCook, aren’t from around here, but you’d be hard pressed to find better citizens. They arrived with humility. They learned the rhythms. They earned their place. The data center doesn’t do that. And neither does anyone — from wherever they come from — who arrives having already decided that their way of doing things is the upgrade this community has been waiting for. We don’t need saving — thank you very much.

Moore County has been paying attention. Our Planning Commission and Metro Council recognized months ago that we were a prime target: accessible transmission lines, a new solar farm, and a lake full of water. They acted, putting a five-year moratorium on data center development within county borders. That was foresight. I hope the rest of us use that window wisely.

To understand why the data center industry is so aggressive about expansion right now, it helps to look at where we’ve seen this movie before. Cast your mind back to the early days of social media. Facebook didn’t monetize for years. Twitter gave the product away. The pitch was always the same: scale first, revenue later. We know how that ended. The monetization, when it came, was us — our attention, our data, our psychological vulnerabilities packaged and sold. The product was never the platform. The product was always the people using it.

AI is running the same play, just faster and with higher infrastructure costs driving more urgency. And critically, the industry is trying to scale without absorbing the risks of scaling. Instead, they’re asking local communities to absorb those risks for them — strained power grids, depleted water resources, roads and infrastructure bearing loads they were never built for. The upside flows to Silicon Valley. The downside stays here. It is a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose proposition dressed up as economic development.

The dependency question is the one that deserves more attention than it’s getting. When AI becomes embedded in healthcare decisions, legal filings, small business operations, and local government — and then the companies decide to monetize access — who pushes back? Appalachian communities couldn’t fight the coal companies once the economy was built around them. The Awalt Community didn’t stand a shot against the TVA. Rural communities with less institutional infrastructure to push back may be the most exposed when the bill finally comes due. Getting dependent on a tool before you understand its true cost is an old trap. It doesn’t get less dangerous because the tool is new.

None of this is an argument against technology. A tractor didn’t destroy farming communities — the financialization of agriculture did. The tool is rarely the problem. The values of the people wielding it, and the economic structures they build around it, are. AI is no different. Used well, on a community’s own terms, it can be genuinely useful. I use it myself, as a research assistant, a way to check quotes against the transcript, or find typos. It’s a screwdriver in my toolbox — handy when I need it, not the only tool I own.

The question was never whether to use the tool. The question is who controls it, who benefits from it, who bears its costs, and whether the community had any say in those decisions. That’s the same question rural Tennesseans have always had to ask when outside interests arrive with something powerful. And we’re asking it again now.

Rural Tennesseans are polite. We’re generous. We’re deeply community-minded — the Volunteer State didn’t earn that name by accident. But we are also deeply rooted in our land, in what it produces, and in what it means. We know the difference between a neighbor and a raider. And we know what to do when we can’t tell them apart at the door.

I think that’s going to show up at the polls. I could be wrong. I sometimes am. •

About the Tabitha Evans Moore: Tabitha Evans Moore is a Lynchburg native who graduated from Moore County High School and studied English Literature and Journalism at Tulane University. She’s covered Lynchburg and Moore County for over 20 years. She’s served as editor of Creative Loafing Birmingham and The Moore County News before launching The Lynchburg Times in 2019. She believes small towns deserve real journalism — and she’s building the business model to support it. You can support her work by clicking here.