On a recent episode of This Past Weekend, Theo Von welcomed environmental advocate Erin Brockovich for a conversation that began with the infamous Hinkley, California groundwater contamination case and moved into what both guests see as an equally urgent crisis: the rapid, largely secretive expansion of AI data centers across the United States.
Brockovich, who became a household name after helping win a $333 million settlement against Pacific Gas and Electric in the 1990s, now runs a self-reporting registry at BrockovichDataCenter.com, where citizens across the country, and in eleven other nations, have been flagging data centers appearing in their communities without warning.
She described the pattern as eerily familiar: communities kept in the dark, local councils signing non-disclosure agreements, and resources quietly being consumed before residents had any say.
As the conversation deepened, Von pulled back from the environmental specifics to offer a broader take on what he believes is driving the relentless push for AI infrastructure. His words were direct and unsettling.
“I believe they want a place where you go for everything, for all your information, where you go to communicate… to become your friend, your lover, your liaison,” Von said. “And they want to create like a God. They want that thing to become like the new God, as opposed to us like tapping into ourselves internally and tapping into the connection that we have with God in our hearts and in our spirits.”
Von argued that making this connection entirely external strips something essential from human beings.
“Once they have that out of us, we’re animals,” he said. “And that’s what I believe the builders of these AIs are trying to do. They want to be the God. They believe that that’s possible. And by doing that, they want to extrapolate, almost do an exorcism of the good that’s in us.”
Brockovich did not push back on the spiritual framing. Instead, she brought it back to what she sees on the ground: people in communities across the country waking up to find their farmland, water supplies, and natural landscapes being consumed by facilities they never approved and barely understood.
Her self-reporting map, she said, crashed twice in its first 72 hours after going live because the volume of reports was so large.
“It wasn’t one town reporting the same thing,” Brockovich said. “It’s the whole country.”
Both Von and Brockovich found common ground in something more fundamental than legislation or litigation: people showing up. With over 120 municipalities now under pauses, moratoriums, or outright bans on data center construction, and 15 states actively considering statewide measures, the opposition is growing.
As Von framed it, something has to matter enough to bring people together, and for now, that something appears to be the land, the water, and the sense that what makes us human is still worth protecting.
