About Reboot

Editors’ Welcome

In May 2026, a group of organizers involved in data center struggles across the US discussed the idea of producing a publication. You hold the result in your hands.

Reboot is our collective response to the current surge of data center site fights uniting communities across the country and the world in shared struggle. Inspired by the creativity and perseverance demonstrated by our powerful mounting resistance, we offer Reboot in recognition of the relentless work people are doing to defend their communities. Despite sketchy claims made by powerful people, we know the data center boom underway is not building us any community-serving infrastructure. Our fight to reject it is a fight to determine for ourselves what is truly community-serving infrastructure.

This publication is a compilation of articles, graphics, and resources with the intent to inspire, inform, and empower you. Consider Reboot a gift, a prompt, a challenge, an invitation crafted to support you in your local fight.

Over the last year, our feeds have been flooded with news articles, reports, and essays on data centers and their growing push-back. It’s impossible to keep up. We’ve had a hard time sifting through the mass of information to find what is practically useful for our organizing campaigns. Quantity does not always equal quality. We also noticed most writing out there fails to center the perspectives of real grassroots anti-data center organizers. We think sharing stories directly from local people on the front lines of this fight can offer important lessons.

Like you, the Reboot authors and editors feel a deep connection and responsibility to our communities in the places we are rooted. We have experienced the lying, the gaslighting, the financial sleight-of-hand, the political posturing, the secrecy, and the insulting idea that opposing data centers makes us anti-tech extremists, or even domestic terrorists.

Consider Reboot a gift, a prompt, a challenge, an invitation crafted to support you in your local fight.

We are not anti-technology. In fact, we use technology every day. Reboot would not have come together without the suite of open source tools that allowed us to collaborate, coordinate, and connect across time zones.

Instead, we believe in technology that is made to serve people and communities, rather than surveil and extract from them. We think decisions about how technology is developed, who it serves, and where our data goes should not be left to an elite minority.

By sustaining our deep connection to place and to each other, we build up the strength necessary to combat forces that seek to divide, conquer, and control us. By scaling up, skilling up, and sharing out between and across struggles, we're growing an international movement against a global opponent.

Often times when a system crashes, the first thing it needs is a reboot. The current volatile moment calls us to collaborate in common cause for long-term community health. A reboot is coming and Reboot is here. Please share.