Every New Thing Starts With No

In 1865, British law required the most advanced machines on the road to follow a man on foot carrying a red flag. Today, AI data centers draw the same first reaction those machines did: fear of something large, new and unfamiliar. History shows how that reaction ends, and what the communities that say yes gain.

The Locomotives Act required that person to walk at least sixty yards ahead of every road locomotive with the flag constantly displayed. It capped speed at four miles an hour on highways and two miles an hour through any city, town or village.¹ The rule made sense to the people who wrote it. The machines were loud, heavy and unfamiliar, and nobody had lived alongside one yet.

Thirty-one years later, Parliament changed its mind. The Locomotives on Highways Act of 1896 freed light vehicles from the old restrictions and raised the limit to fourteen miles an hour.² Human nature did not change in those three decades. Experience did.

Caution comes first

When railroads reached America, canal interests and their allies condemned the new technology on every count. Critics called it dangerous, unworkable and against nature.³

Electric light met the same welcome. After electricity reached the White House in 1891, President Benjamin Harrison and First Lady Caroline Harrison refused to touch the light switches for fear of a shock. The staff turned the lights on and off for them.⁴

These reactions came from sensible people facing something they had never seen work. Caution arrives before the evidence.

When the machine came to work

The deepest fear has always been for work itself. On March 11, 1811, framework knitters in the English village of Arnold, workers who made stockings on knitting machines called frames, broke 63 of those machines in a single evening, and workers destroyed more than 100 frames across nearby villages within two weeks. They acted during a severe slump, with high unemployment and rising prices, and they believed the new machinery would push down their wages.⁵ Parliament answered in 1812 by making frame-breaking a capital offence. In his maiden speech against the bill, Lord Byron told the House of Lords that "nothing but absolute want" had driven the workers to it.⁶

A century and a half later, the same fear reached Washington. In 1964 Congress created the National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress and ordered a comprehensive study of how technological change affects jobs and communities.⁷ Its 1966 report found that the high unemployment of the postwar years was not the result of accelerated technological progress. It concluded that "technology eliminates jobs, not work."⁸

The mail and the road reach the farm

In the 1890s, the Post Office proposed Rural Free Delivery: mail brought directly to farm homes instead of held at a distant post office. In 1892, a House committee balked at the $6 million price tag, and in 1893 the Postmaster General cited a cost estimate of $20 million. One Kansas farmer worried that home delivery would make rural people lazy.⁹

Rural Free Delivery began anyway on October 1, 1896, in three small West Virginia communities. Within a year, 44 routes ran in 29 states, and rural residents filed more than 10,000 petitions asking for routes of their own. The service became permanent on July 1, 1902.⁹ It also required passable roads, and farmers who had resisted paying for road improvements became enthusiastic advocates of good roads once their mail depended on them.¹⁰

The wire reaches the farm

Rural electrification followed the same path. At the end of 1935, 89 percent of American farms still had no central station electric service. Farm families worried about debt. Some believed a line easement meant mortgaging the farm to the government. Some balked at the $5 membership fee. One Kentucky woman, by the federal government's own account, waited weeks before she plugged in her new electric iron.¹¹

Then the lights came on, and the argument ended. By June 1949, more than 78 percent of farms had service. By 1957, only 5 percent remained without it.¹¹

The internet and the job losses that never came

Six decades after the farm wires went up, a new network raised the old fear in a new form. In 1998, the Commerce Department studied the emerging digital economy and concluded that "millions of jobs will likely be created, while millions of others will be lost."¹² The report noted that few store personnel would be involved in an online sale, and that jobs built on passing information along would see routine tasks like order taking disappear.¹² The worry was reasonable. If customers could buy directly from a screen, what would happen to the clerk, the agent and the store?

The record since then answers the question. U.S. nonfarm payroll employment stood at about 117.3 million in June 1995 and about 159.0 million in August 2026, a gain of nearly 42 million jobs.¹³ Retail trade employment rose from about 13.9 million to about 15.5 million over the same period.¹⁴ Warehousing and storage, the work of moving online orders, grew from about 447,000 jobs to about 1.84 million.¹⁵ Computer systems design and related services grew from about 613,000 jobs to about 2.36 million.¹⁶

Stores did not disappear either. E-commerce accounted for 0.6 percent of retail sales at the end of 1999¹⁷ and 17.1 percent in the second quarter of 2026.¹⁸ The internet became part of daily life instead: 22.2 percent of Americans used it in 1997,¹⁹ and 90 percent of households had a broadband subscription by 2021.²⁰ The jobs changed. The work multiplied, just as the 1966 commission said it would.

Money without a middleman

In the fall of 2008, a developer writing as Satoshi Nakamoto announced a new form of electronic cash that could move between two people with no bank in the middle.²¹ Money that bypasses the bank raises an obvious question for banks, and the early reaction followed the familiar script.

The resistance came from the top of the industry. Testifying before the Senate Banking Committee in December 2023, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase said he had always been deeply opposed to crypto and Bitcoin, and added: "If I was the Government I would close it down."²² Regulators were cautious too. In 2022 the FDIC warned that crypto activities may pose significant safety and soundness risks and required banks to notify it before engaging in them.²³ In 2025 the agency released letters showing it had asked banks to pause such activities, and its acting chairman acknowledged that bank requests had been almost universally met with resistance.²⁴

Consumers shared the unease. A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found 63 percent of Americans had little or no confidence that crypto is reliable and safe. The gap by experience told the story: 82 percent of those familiar with crypto but never invested lacked confidence, compared with 39 percent of those who had invested.²⁵ Fear ran highest among the people who had never tried it.

Bitcoin moves inside the system

Acceptance arrived in steps. In 2020 the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates national banks, concluded that those banks may hold cryptocurrency for customers.²⁶ In January 2024 the SEC approved spot bitcoin exchange-traded products, funds that hold bitcoin and trade on stock exchanges like ordinary shares.²⁷ In March 2025 an executive order made it the policy of the United States to establish a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.²⁸ That same month the OCC reaffirmed that crypto custody and related activities are permissible for banks,²⁹ and in April the Federal Reserve withdrew its earlier crypto guidance for banks.³⁰ In July 2025 Congress enacted the GENIUS Act, the first federal framework for payment stablecoins, digital tokens designed to hold a steady value tied to the dollar.³¹

Households followed. The Federal Reserve's latest survey found that 10 percent of adults used cryptocurrency in 2025, up two points from the year before.³² An idea that a leading bank chief once wanted shut down now sits in exchange-traded funds, bank custody accounts and federal law.

Data centers have a history too

The data center is not as new as it looks. On February 14, 1946, the University of Pennsylvania announced ENIAC, built under contract for the Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory. It filled a room of roughly 30 by 50 feet, weighed about 30 tons, used about 18,000 vacuum tubes, and finished in 30 seconds a ballistics calculation that took 12 hours by hand.³³ It drew about 150 kilowatts and ran for more than 70,000 hours before the Army retired it in 1955.³⁴ In 1951 the Census Bureau dedicated UNIVAC I, the first successful civilian computer, and put it to work on the 1950 census.³⁵

Northern Virginia's role began in a parking garage. In 1992, engineers linked fiber networks in Vienna, Virginia, creating MAE-East, the first commercial internet exchange point, a site where separate networks connect and pass traffic to one another. Major internet companies moved their headquarters to Ashburn in 1996 and 1998 and brought fast fiber with them. In 2000, Loudoun's zoning administrator ruled that the county would regulate data centers like offices. The county counted about 233 data center buildings as of March 1, 2026.³⁶

Congress took the industry's first official measure in 2007. The EPA reported that U.S. data centers used about 61 billion kilowatt-hours in 2006, roughly 1.5 percent of the nation's electricity, and use had more than doubled since 2000.³⁷ What began as one Army computer room now carries banking, medicine, logistics, entertainment and artificial intelligence.

Data centers, the newest new thing

Most people have never stepped inside an AI data center, so resistance is the natural first response. The federal data shows how fast these buildings are arriving.

Private data center construction ran at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of about $79 billion in July 2026, up from about $48 billion a year earlier and about $1.6 billion when the Census Bureau began tracking the category in January 2014.³⁸

The communities with the longest experience show what that investment does. Loudoun County's adopted FY 2027 budget projects $1.3 billion in data center revenue, about 40 percent of the total budget.³⁹ The county's real property tax rate fell from $1.145 per $100 of assessed value in tax year 2016 to $0.805 in tax year 2026, and the county credits data center revenue with funding school budget increases, the Sheriff's Office, Fire and Rescue, libraries, parks, mental health services, and capital projects such as schools, roads and bridges.⁴⁰ The FY 2027 budget fully funded the School Board's requested $105 million increase, bringing the school operating budget to $2.1 billion, and pays for a replacement Hamilton Fire Station and an average raise of 8.75 percent for sheriff's deputies.⁴¹

Virginia's nonpartisan legislative auditor estimates the state's data center industry supports 74,000 jobs, $5.5 billion in labor income and $9.1 billion in GDP each year, with about 1,500 workers on site during construction. The same report found data centers generated 31 percent of local tax revenue in Loudoun and 7 percent in Prince William County, and local staff reported minimal direct costs on government services.⁴² In Prince William, data center property values rose 27 percent in 2025, against about 3 percent for other commercial property.⁴³

Beyond Virginia

Quincy, Washington, offers the clearest before and after. In 2006, the ten largest taxpayers in Grant County carried about $313 million of assessed value and paid about $4.2 million in property tax. By 2025, their assessed value had reached about $6.1 billion and their taxes about $54.3 million. Seven of the ten are data centers, six of them in Quincy. Quincy's levy rate, the property tax charged per $1,000 of assessed value, fell from $3.12 in 2006 to about $0.88 in 2025. Over those years the community added new schools, a new high school, a new hospital, a new fire station, a new city hall and a new wastewater plant. Sidewalks now line about 80 percent of streets, up from about 5 percent, and data centers support about 900 direct jobs. In nearby East Wenatchee, the levy rate on one analyzed parcel fell from $9.82 per thousand in 2023 to $7.82 in 2025.⁴⁴

In Hillsboro, Oregon, data center-related entities paid about $61.1 million in taxes in 2025. Their agreements include a school support fee directed to local school districts and the State School Fund, and related fees have funded college aid for about 4,648 first-generation and low-income students. Data centers account for about 1.76 percent of the city's water demand.⁴⁵ In West Des Moines, Iowa, the city planned to pay for the final link of a major parkway through tax increment financing, which uses the added property tax from new development to fund public projects, with that revenue generated by the data centers themselves.⁴⁶

From no to yes

Resistance to the new is not a flaw in a community. It is a community doing its job, asking hard questions before it commits. Experience supplies the answers.

The communities that host data centers today are writing the next chapter: lower tax rates, funded schools, stronger public safety and growing local economies. Every new thing starts with no. The good ones do not stay there.