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.

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.

That is the risk now. If AI, AVs, and data center companies treat public resistance as a messaging nuisance instead of a legitimacy problem, they can win the technical argument and still lose the social one. Nuclear is the reminder that being right about the technology is not enough. Once public consensus hardens against you, politicians follow it, regulators encode it, and the future you thought was inevitable becomes impossible to build.

In my recent talk, It’s Time to Market at the Ride AI Summit, I tried to show the historical framework for how other companies, and their marketers, helped overcome the fear of new technology. Refrigerators, electricity, and seat belts were adopted when someone made the technology culturally legible.

Refrigerators became about cleanliness and responsible parenting. Electrification became the modern home certification. Seat belts became “you can learn a lot from a dummy” from two crash test dummies, Vince and Larry. That is the work in front of AI, AVs, and data center companies now.

Facts matter, but facts alone will not carry this. The job is to build a more honest social contract around the technology.

What marketers can do

Stop selling the future for some.
People often hear “the future” as “someone else gets rich while I absorb the risk.” Sell continuity instead: safer roads, more reliable services, better schools, lower friction, less waste, and more capability close to home.

Admit the real tradeoffs first.
Do not tell communities that data centers have no cost. Say what the cost is, who bears it, and what they get in return. More on what that might look like below. 

Separate fear from misinformation.
Rates, land use, safety, jobs, and privacy are legitimate concerns. False claims should be corrected, but treating all opposition as ignorance only makes the opposition stronger.

Make the infrastructure worth seeing.

Data centers should not feel like punishment for hosting the future. In a Stripe Sessions conversation with Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, Gross (not related to this author) made the practical point: beauty will not fix the politics by itself, but these buildings can be made pleasing to the eye without massive extra spend. Friedman’s broader point was even more important: beauty used to be treated as a public good. Marketers should push for that standard now. A data center should feel like a civic asset: quiet, well-designed, embedded in the landscape, and visibly connected to local benefit. The CopenHill project where you can ski on top of a power plant is a fun inspiration.

Pay communities visibly.
People are rational, and people also like to get paid. If a community is absorbing real cost and real disruption, there needs to be a visible return. Think about it like any other funnel problem: what does it cost to acquire trust?

Create experiences, not rebuttals.
AV companies need ride programs, caregiver stories, drunk-driving prevention narratives, senior mobility demos, and neighborhood-level safety proof. AI infrastructure needs workplace examples where people can see the tools helping them.

Change the messenger.
The credible messenger is not the hyperscaler CEO. These messages should come from “the jobs little kids love and want to be”. Teachers, nurses, parents, firefighters, construction workers, and local leaders who can explain in ordinary language what changed and why it mattered.

The public can believe the benefits are real and still reject the bargain. That is the part the industry keeps missing. When tech companies say progress, people hear extraction. When they say safety, people remember years of warnings that these same technologies might be dangerous. When they say infrastructure, communities see massive facilities built for distant companies, not for them.

That is how good technologies lose. Not all at once, and not always because the critics are right. They lose because no one did the work of earning trust before fear became consensus. Clean nuclear energy is the warning case study. If AI, AVs, and data center companies want a different outcome, marketing must lead. It has to make the bargain honest, local, emotional, and visible, so people can see not just what they are being asked to accept, but what they actually get in return.