Sometime after midnight on a Monday in April, a man in Indianapolis emptied 13 rounds into the front door of city-county councilman Ron Gibson. His eight-year-old son was asleep in the house. Tucked under the doormat was a handwritten note. It read: “No Data Centers.” One hesitates to draw grand conclusions from a single individual with a grievance and a firearm. But the note is the thing. The shooter did not want money, or revenge for some private wrong. He wanted, apparently, to register a policy preference about server infrastructure. And he is not, it turns out, alone.

US law-enforcement officials have lately begun reaching for a new phrase to describe what is bubbling up: “anti-tech extremism.” Two months before the Indianapolis shooting, a man in Illinois was arrested for threatening to murder a developer who was planning a data center near his home, as well as city officials involved in the project. In California, a lawsuit between a developer and a campaign group trying to block construction revealed online comments cheerfully proposing that the developer’s chief executive be dispatched “like Luigi did with the United Healthcare CEO.” For the blessedly unaware, this is a reference to Luigi Mangione, who is accused of murdering Brian Thompson in December 2024 – an act that a disconcertingly large share of the internet treats as a folk triumph.

Tesla has become a national target after Elon Musk attached himself to the Trump administration. The FBI logged arson, gunfire and vandalism against Tesla dealerships, charging stations and showrooms across at least nine states, as well as Molotov cocktail attacks in Oregon and Colorado and the torching of seven charging stations outside Boston. A showroom in Albuquerque was hit with homemade napalm and........

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