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Women talkin' 'bout AI

Women talkin' 'bout AI

By: Kimberly Becker & Jessica Parker
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Two women examining AI through a lens of power, not just capability. Why deepfakes target women. How bias gets baked in. What tech companies aren't saying. Kimberly brings corpus linguistics; Jessica brings strategy. Both bring skepticism, feminism, research expertise, and a refusal to take the hype at face value.

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Episodes
  • AI Data Centers Are Coming to Your Backyard

    AI Data Centers Are Coming to Your Backyard
    Jul 2 2026
    AI doesn’t live in “the cloud.” It lives in buildings: large, energy-hungry, water-dependent facilities that require land, cooling systems, backup power, utility agreements, zoning decisions, and public infrastructure.We’re re-releasing this conversation because the issue has become urgently local. Across the United States, communities are debating whether proposed data centers are good economic development, risky infrastructure bets, or something in between. Here in Ames, Iowa, the City Council is reviewing a proposed data center. The City of Ames says the proposal is still in the early review stage, with no final decision made, and that the full buildout could require up to 25 megawatts of electricity.Kimberly recently wrote an open letter to the Ames Mayor and City Council asking them to slow down, require independent review, and make sure ratepayers are protected before any binding commitments are made. Read it here: “Open Letter to the Ames Mayor & City Council: Re: Proposed Lightedge Data Center on Aviation Way.”This episode originally focused on 3 of AI’s environmental impacts, energy consumption, water use, and e-waste. But the larger question is civic: who pays for the infrastructure behind AI, who benefits from it, and who gets a say before it shows up in their community?Kimberly and Jessica talk with Jon Ippolito and Joline Blais about the physical infrastructure behind AI and the local consequences of the data-center boom.We discuss:Why AI is not abstract, weightless, or magically floating in “the cloud”What data centers are and why they require so much electricity, cooling, and landThe difference between individual AI use and concentrated industrial infrastructureWhy “innovation” can become a rhetorical wrapper for public risk and private profitHow data centers can affect utility planning, municipal water systems, noise, land use, and local tax policyWhy communities should ask hard questions before approving long-term leases, incentives, or infrastructure commitmentsThe Lewiston, Maine, data-center fight and what other communities can learn from itWhy “AI infrastructure” is not just a tech issue, but a local governance issueData-center debates are spreading across the country. The National Conference of State Legislatures reported on July 1, 2026, that lawmakers in 15 states are considering bans or pauses on new data-center development while they study community impacts, grid resilience, and local costs. And nationally, more than 500 organizations from 47 states have called for a moratorium on new AI data centers until stronger protections are in place around energy, water, pollution, electricity rates, and community impacts.Kimberly’s open letter argues that the Council should require independent review before making commitments around a lease, sale, rate classification, or incentive package. The letter specifically asks the Council to protect current utility customers, evaluate the proposal against Ames’ climate and planning commitments, and require evidence around jobs, tax revenue, and community benefit before moving forward.Key questions for any community facing a data center proposalBefore a city approves a data center, residents can ask:How much electricity will it use at each phase of development?Not just at opening, but at full buildout.Who pays for grid upgrades, substations, transmission lines, and backup infrastructure?If the answer is “the utility,” ask whether that means current ratepayers.How much water will it use, and what kind of water?Municipal drinking water, industrial water, reclaimed water, or something else?What happens during peak heat, drought, or grid stress?Data centers may look different on an average day than they do during peak demand.How many permanent local jobs will actually be created?Construction jobs are not the same as long-term local employment.What tax incentives, abatements, or special rates are being offered?Public benefit should be measured against public cost.What protections are binding?Promises in presentations are not the same as enforceable agreements.What happens if the company leaves, expands, sells, or changes use?Communities need to think beyond the ribbon-cutting.How does this project fit with the city’s climate, land-use, and economic-development plans?If a city wrote those plans, this is the moment to use them. Otherwise, congratulations, we invented decorative planning documents.Who gets to decide?Public land, public utilities, and long-term infrastructure commitments deserve public scrutiny.Related reading and resourcesCity of Ames page on proposed Lightedge data center https://www.cityofames.org/News-articles/City-Council-to-Review-Proposed-Data-Center-Includes-Public-Input-ProcessIowa State Daily coverage of Ames City Council data center discussion https://iowastatedaily.com/339765/city-of-ames/city-council-discusses-data-center-proposition/NCSL: Which States Are Banning Data Centers? https://...
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    1 hr and 39 mins
  • Why Good Intentions Don't Stop Data Centers (or Bad AI Writing

    Why Good Intentions Don't Stop Data Centers (or Bad AI Writing
    Jun 24 2026

    We're back from a few weeks off (I went to Florida, Jessica bought a new house and went to a psilocybin retreat — more on that below) with a wide-ranging catch-up that ends up circling one idea: Incentives matter more than intentions. We trace that thread through a proposed data center near Ames, Iowa, through the words AI chatbots keep teaching us to use, and through our own complicated relationships with money, time, and control.

    In this episode:

    The data center fight in Ames, Iowa (Kimberly's current hometown). Ames is now considering airport-adjacent land for a data center, and we walk through what that actually means at scale, including the energy draw, the water use, the construction-jobs pitch that's more one-time than it sounds, and what a community can realistically do about it.

    Incentives over intentions. A phrase from Your Undivided Attention's recent episode on the Center for Humane Technology's seven principles of humane tech becomes the throughline for the whole episode. We talk about tech executives who don't let their own kids use their platforms and, more personally, the unsolicited advice that's well-meant but lands as criticism anyway.

    "Claudish" and linguistic capitalism. Kimberly has been tracking word-frequency spikes in a web corpus — quiet, nuanced, connective tissue, and others — that track suspiciously well with the rise of generative AI in everyday writing. We talk through Frédéric Kaplan's 2014 concept of linguistic capitalism and how an SEO-shaped corpus of web writing became the training data now teaching all of us to sound a certain way.

    Surveillance capitalism and bread and circuses. We talk about Sarah Wynn-Williams' Careless People and what it reveals about how Meta's own leadership treated their products' addictiveness, plus the older idea of "bread and circuses" — distraction and convenience as tools of social control. If you're unfamiliar with surveillance capitalism, we highly recommend this book by Shoshana Zuboff.

    Frugal hedonism (and failing at it). A book recommendation for The Art of Frugal Hedonism by Annie Raser-Rowland and Adam Grubb leads to an honest conversation about the gap between the lifestyle we'd like to want and the one we actually have.

    Pit & Peach. Beach trips, a near-drowning rescue, a psilocybin retreat in Georgia, and stepping away from a long-held academic role.

    Also mentioned in this episode:

    • Ayana Gray, I, Medusa (Kimberly's beach read)

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    1 hr and 7 mins
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