We are not asking for agreement with our solution. We are not asking for funding or endorsement. We are asking one question per problem: do you believe this is actually happening? Tell us where you disagree — specifically.
When a large tech company builds a data centre in your area, the electricity bill lands locally and the profits leave. Your community hosts it. Someone else owns it. We’ve seen this pattern before — with oil, with quarrying, with the power stations. Same infrastructure, same story.
The apps most people use to talk to each other are built to keep you scrolling, not to help you think. That’s not an accident — it’s how they make money. When communities try to organise, discuss, or decide something together, they’re doing it on tools designed to distract them.
AI is built from everything people have ever written, said, made, and shared. The moment you put something into the system — a message, a photo, a conversation — it becomes raw material. The communities whose words and knowledge feed it have no claim on what gets built from them. That’s not a bug in the current system. It’s how the current system is designed to work.
Scotland has some of the best wind and tidal energy in the world. The data centres and AI infrastructure being built right now are not going there. They’re going where the land is cheapest and the tax breaks are biggest. The places with the energy advantage are being overlooked.
People have been arguing for years that there’s a better way to build digital infrastructure — owned by communities, not corporations. But there’s no working example anyone can actually visit, examine, or copy. Until there is, it stays an idea. Ideas without proof don’t change policy.
Most people in the UK already pay a premium on their energy bills to fund renewable infrastructure. Most people support the transition to clean energy. But the infrastructure being built with that money — the data centres, the grid connections, the compute — isn’t being built for the communities paying for it. The consent was given. The money left. The benefit is not coming back yet and we are being asked to give more.
Should we take the small window of opportunity to pause and at least weigh up the options and see if we can provide a better future for the bairns?
Earth. Who named it. The garden where the mycelium grows.
A postcode, a city, a country, a continent — or Planet Earth. Any granularity is welcome. This is for the map, not the record. Your votes are already counted. We're just rather glad you're here.
The temperature check above is signal. If you have a specific objection — a flaw in the architecture, a better solution, a reason one of these problems isn't real — that belongs in a conversation, not a toggle.
The Matrix room is where that happens. Your name on it. Your reasoning in the record. Serious critique gets forked into the VRS permanently, with attribution. Under the accord.
→ Join the conversation