It isn't Misinformation it is a Miss of Marketing

I have to keep reminding myself not to dismiss people’s fears of new technology, especially when I want it to succeed. It is easy to look at the backlash against data centers, autonomous vehicles, and AI and think the public just does not understand what is being built. But that is usually too convenient. People understand enough to know they are being asked to absorb real changes in their towns, workplaces, roads, and daily lives. They may not know every technical detail, but they know there is a bargain being made. And right now, too many of them do not trust the people making it.

That is where marketing has to do actual work. Not marketing as promotion or spin, but marketing as understanding the market, naming the fear honestly, assuming people are rational, creating proof that life can be better, and making the bargain visible.

Data centers create local costs: construction, power demand, water concerns, noise, land use, and the feeling that a distant tech company is extracting value from your town. Autonomous vehicles ask people to accept a new kind of road failure: being hurt by a machine no one in the car controlled. We already tolerate human error on roads, but machine error feels less familiar and less accountable. AI arrives with job fear, copyright fights, hallucinations, deepfakes, and years of existential threat rhetoric attached to it.

Some of those concerns are exaggerated, some are wrong, but most of them are rational.

How Technology Loses the Public

Big Tech helped create the mistrust. Ben Thompson at Stratechery made this point in “Attenuating Innovation,” arguing that some of the loudest AI alarm came from the companies best positioned to benefit from regulation. The message to Washington was basically: think of AI like nuclear weapons, while also letting us keep building it.

This is why the nuclear analogy matters. We have already seen what happens when a powerful technology loses the public and then loses the politicians. Nuclear should have been one of the great abundance stories of the last century: cleaner air, cheaper energy, more resilient grids, less dependence on fossil fuels. Nuclear did not lose because every fear was irrational. There were real accidents, frightening images, and institutional failures. The failure was that the industry and its political defenders never made the safety case legible enough, or the public bargain attractive enough, to preserve consensus. Fear hardened into politics, politics hardened into regulation, and an abundance technology became almost impossible to build.