I have to get off the internet. Besides the absolute drain on time — doomscrolling has become second nature — my feeds are overrun with AI. Busy AI event flyers, completely fabricated stories, profile photos that look nothing like the people they portray, groups and pages with more and more AI-written content. Folks are using ChatGPT to draft their emails for them. People are sharing AI-generated songs with AI-generated music videos as if they’re something special, not a single note performed or line drawn by a human. Every Google search provides an AI summary, which more often than not is incorrect (and meant to sway you). It’s becoming more difficult to find verifiable information, or confirm photos or stories are real.
And all of this comes at a cost many still aren’t comprehending. Your stupid AI photo, lazy event flyers, and soulless “music” are destroying the environment and depleting our water supply. I’ve written about how AI is making everyone dumber, and I stand by that. If you can’t write your own Facebook post, there is something wrong, and having a robot think for you won’t fix it. A lot of folks clearly don’t care about thinking, but they should very much care about breathing clean air and having water to drink.
As you’ll read in this week’s cover story by David Waters, Colossus used 25 million gallons of Memphis’ aquifer water in March alone. The going data suggests each AI search uses about a bottle of water, and each center uses a million or so gallons of water a day. On April 3, 2026, the supercomputer’s Grok chatbot posted on X: “At Colossus in Memphis, we’re using ~3 million gallons of treated municipal wastewater per day for cooling (via our new Colossus Water Recycle Plant, which went live recently). This fully offsets any aquifer draw.”
Within that same week, plans for construction of the wastewater recycling plant, which was originally announced in October 2025, were put on hold indefinitely.
There are in the neighborhood of 4,000 data centers operating or in progress in the U.S., making up nearly 50 percent of such facilities worldwide. In early May, Politico reported that a data center in Fayetteville, Georgia, drained 30 million gallons of drinking water without initially paying for it, with residents only becoming aware when their water pressure trickled. “… Officials discovered two industrial-scale water hookups feeding a data center campus located 20 miles south of downtown Atlanta. One water connection had been installed without the utility’s knowledge, and the other was not linked to the company’s account and therefore wasn’t being billed.” An hour away, Morgan County, Georgia, residents are reporting highly contaminated well water.
We have seen here in Memphis how quickly these centers move, how loose the regulations are, and how money is more important than community concerns or input. Citizens across the United States are fighting back. As I write this, on Tuesday, Monterey Park, California, was set to be the first city in the nation to vote on a permanent data center ban. And in Middle Tennessee, the city of McMinnville’s mayor requested a special meeting for Wednesday to consider a moratorium on such facilities, days after plans for a 96,000-square-foot Hixson Data Center there were announced.
Renowned activist Erin Brockovich has also joined the fight against data centers, saying in a recent episode of The Jim Acosta Show that communities are upset these projects have been “shoved down their throat in secrecy.”
And that’s what it feels like being online now. AI is being shoved down our throats at every turn; yes, sometimes in secrecy.
I have to get off the internet. But seeing as how that’s impossible with this job, at this time, in this technology-dependent world, I’m finding ways to quiet the noise. Besides turning off every AI tool, I downloaded the DuckDuckGo search engine, which offers an AI-free experience — and alerts you to the many internet trackers it blocks as you browse. It feels like the old internet — no AI summaries, no sponsored or algorithm-fueled search responses. Comparing results between this and Google was … astonishing. DuckDuckGo produced results I couldn’t replicate on Google — as if the latter was muffling info and shuffling what it wanted me to see to the top.
I want to get off the internet. And while these centers muddy our waters, strain our power grid, and dirty our air, I’m disconnecting as much as I can. I dusted off my CDs to reduce Spotify use. Revisited my DVD collection to pivot from streaming. Purchased magazine subscriptions to feel the pages and sit with a human voice telling human stories rather than scrolling through whatever gibberish has crowded my screens. Nothing artificial here. I’m seeking real creativity, real heart, real intelligence in this increasingly artificial world. Join me.
Shara Clark
shara@memphisflyer.com
