Eleven years ago, Eric Schmidt heard a warning about pitchforks and dismissed it. Last week, ten thousand graduates booed him off the stage. The country he helped build is sending him a message — and he is not the only one receiving it.
In a private dining room in 2015, the DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman gave a presentation to Google’s board called The Pitchforkers Are Coming. He argued that artificial intelligence would, within a decade, displace tens of millions of jobs, explode disinformation, and produce a public fury that would make every previous tech backlash look like a rehearsal. He told the room that Google — and the broader industry — would have to share the wealth with the people whose livelihoods the technology was going to consume.
Larry Page, in his customary whisper, said AI would create more jobs than it took. And then Eric Schmidt — the man who had run Google for a decade, who was at that moment one of the most influential technologists alive — told Suleyman, in so many words, that the worry was overblown.
On May 14, 2026, eleven years almost to the month later, Eric Schmidt walked onto a stage at the University of Arizona’s commencement to address roughly ten thousand graduating seniors and their families. He began the AI portion of his remarks. “If science is not your passion, if you don’t care about science, that’s okay, because AI is going to touch everything else as well,” he said. The crowd began to boo. He pushed forward. “When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.”
The boos grew louder. “The question is not whether AI will shape the world,” he declared — and the heckles rose again. University marshals urged calm over the loudspeakers. The graduating class of 2026, the cohort whose entry-level jobs are right now being absorbed by the technology Schmidt was selling them, sat in the desert sun and booed the former CEO of Google for eight straight minutes.
This is what it looks like when a forecast comes due.
The forecast comes due
The Arizona scene was not an isolated outburst. Earlier in May, the real estate executive Gloria Caulfield was booed at the University of Central Florida’s commencement after telling graduates “the rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.” Stanford students protested Sam Altman at a campus appearance the same month. Last month, someone threw a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s San Francisco house and another person fired a gun at his property a few days later.
These incidents are no longer surprising. They have become a recognizable category. Jasmine Sun, writing in The New York Times Magazine, called them AI populism’s warning shots — the noises a community makes before the ground gives way. The 2015 dinner is the hinge. The 2026 boos are the consequence. Between them sits a decade in which the people best positioned to govern the technology decided, instead, to ship it.
The Arizona reception is particularly worth dwelling on because of who Schmidt is and what he was trying to do. He was not an outsider trying to provoke. He was a billionaire former CEO, an invited honored guest, giving the kind of broadly optimistic commencement speech that has been part of American academic ritual for a century. He told students that being skeptical of an AI-driven world, even fearful, was understandable, but argued that people still had choices about how the technology develops. He urged them to embrace open debate and the immigrant tradition that made the country great. He said the future was unwritten and was theirs to shape.
None of it landed. “Critics and attendees later described the message as ‘AI cheerleading,’” while the graduates in front of him were preparing to enter a labor market that the speaker himself had spent his career helping to remake.
The graduating class understood something Schmidt apparently did not. The choice he kept urging on them — help shape the technology — was a choice that had already been made, in rooms they had never entered, by people who had not invited them. They were being told they had agency over a future whose terms had been set without them. The boos were not a rejection of AI in some abstract sense. They were a refusal of the bargain in which the costs are distributed to one group and the benefits to another, dressed up as a graduation gift.
Why this anger now
It would be a mistake to read the Arizona scene as a momentary mood. The class of 2026 is graduating into a labor market whose contours their parents would not recognize. According to data cited by recent campus surveys, 52 percent of 2026 job postings require AI familiarity, entry salaries for humanities majors fell 8 percent year over year, and 61 percent of students surveyed across seventy campuses said they fear automation displacement.
These are not the numbers of a generation that misunderstands the technology. These are the numbers of a generation that understands it exactly.
The understanding extends well beyond college campuses. An Axios analysis in January 2026 found that the country is splitting into three distinct economic realities — the Have-Nots, who are stalling; the Haves, who are coasting; and the Have-Lots, who are rocketing to greater wealth through exclusive access to private AI deals, massive investment power, governmental connections, and equity stakes that ordinary investors cannot touch.
The Have-Lots are not a marginal phenomenon. Among the fifty richest Americans, the median 2025 increase in net worth was nearly $10 billion — a 22 percent median gain in a year when the S&P 500 rose 16 percent and Treasury bills returned less than 4 percent. Elon Musk’s wealth rose by $187 billion in a single year, to over $600 billion. During the AI bounce of the past two years, the top 10 percent of households saw their wealth increase by $5 trillion in a single quarter, while the bottom 50 percent gained $150 billion.
Pause on those two numbers. Five trillion to the top tenth. One-thirtieth as much to the bottom half. In a single quarter. This is what an “AI boom” looks like at ground level. It is what the graduates in Arizona were responding to. It is what the residents in Tremonton, Utah are responding to when they show up at county commission meetings by the hundreds to oppose data center projects in their towns. The technology has become inseparable from the wealth concentration that is funding it, and the wealth concentration has become inseparable, in ordinary perception, from the technology.
In the third quarter of 2025, the top 1 percent of U.S. households owned 31.7 percent of all U.S. wealth — roughly as much as the bottom 90 percent combined, the widest gap since the Federal Reserve began collecting the data in 1989. The billionaire investor Ray Dalio has warned that this kind of concentration produces, in his words, irreconcilable differences that democratic order is not equipped to handle. Peter Mallouk, who runs a $700 billion wealth management firm, has called the current distribution “100 percent completely unsustainable as a society.”
This is not the language of the radical left. It is the language of the people who have done extraordinarily well from the current arrangement, looking at the numbers, and concluding that the arrangement will not hold.
Even some of the AI builders themselves have begun to say so. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei announced in late January 2026 that he and his co-founders would give away 80 percent of their wealth, writing: “The thing to worry about is a level of wealth concentration that will break society.” Amodei noted that Elon Musk’s nearly $700 billion net worth already exceeds John D. Rockefeller’s at the height of the Gilded Age — and that, he argued, is before most of AI’s economic impact has even materialized.
That is a striking admission from someone running one of the three largest AI companies in the world. The concentration is already historic. The technology that is going to drive most of the additional concentration has barely begun to be deployed. And the man saying so is the CEO of the firm doing the deploying.
The graduates in Arizona were not booing a misunderstanding. They were booing a description of their own future delivered by one of its principal architects.
The geography of the anger: the data center revolt
The Arizona commencement was a national event because it happened on camera. But the Arizona boos, however striking, are a relatively low-stakes version of what is now happening in hundreds of communities across the country, where AI has stopped being an abstract policy debate and has become a concrete proposal to put a fenced industrial compound, drawing as much electricity as a small city and as much water as a midsize town, next to where people live.
The opposition is real. It is well-organized. And it is winning.
A platform called Data Center Opposition is now tracking 268 local protest groups across 37 states, representing roughly 360,000 followers, with the dataset updated monthly. Since 2024, dozens of community-led campaigns have emerged in opposition to AI data centers, driven by concerns about energy use, energy costs, noise pollution, water consumption, and air pollution. In 2025 alone, local opposition led to the delay or cancellation of projects totaling $156 billion.
In the first four months of 2026, more than 70 data center projects were rejected or restricted by local authorities — more than in all of 2025 combined. The numbers do not include projects withdrawn before formal rejection. Compass Datacenters withdrew plans for an 800-acre project in Prince William County, Virginia, last month after facing intense pushback from local residents. A February analysis by Sightline Climate estimated that 30 to 50 percent of the data center capacity expected to come online in 2026 may not be delivered on schedule, citing power availability, permitting challenges, and increasingly organized local opposition.
In Tremonton, Utah, on May 4, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the Box Elder County Commission meeting to oppose a massive AI data center project backed by, among others, the television personality Kevin O’Leary. The commissioners approved the project anyway. Rural residents are now organizing to put the question on the November ballot. Outside a similar meeting elsewhere, 300 protesters chanted “No data center” and “We want water.”
The Spectator’s Robert Bryce, who has spent years tracking opposition to renewable-energy projects and has a reasonable claim to being one of the country’s better-informed observers of energy-siting politics, made the following observation about the new data center fights: “The rage against data centers is different, not least because it is more widely shared. People all across the US are angry. They don’t like the super-rich tech oligarchs, they don’t trust Big Tech and they are ready and willing to fight to stop AI data centers from coming into their cities, towns and rural areas.”
This is the political fact that should be giving every state legislator and every governor pause. The data center fights are not a typical NIMBY dispute about property values and views. They are the leading edge of a broader populist refusal — bipartisan, cross-regional, organized — of the entire bargain that the AI industry has been trying to impose on American communities.
The bargain, as the industry has presented it, runs roughly like this. We will build a billion-dollar facility in your town. We will pay almost no local taxes because of incentive packages your state already gave us. We will draw enormous quantities of electricity and water from systems your residents depend on. Your household electric bill will go up because the grid is now serving us. We will provide, in exchange, perhaps a few dozen ongoing jobs, most of them not for people from your community. The benefits of what we build will flow to shareholders thousands of miles away. The risks will be borne by you.
When that bargain is described in plain language, the political result is not surprising. It is the inevitable. “Now add in distrust — or even outright hatred — of Big Tech and fears about AI destroying jobs, and you get a dream issue set for activists across the political spectrum,” Bryce notes. He is right. The data center opposition is not a left or right phenomenon. It is the place where left and right meet because they are both being asked, in their own communities, to host the infrastructure of an economy whose returns they will not see.
The engine: inequality as the underlying motivation
It is tempting to read each of these stories — the Arizona commencement, the Tremonton county meeting, the Prince William County withdrawal — as a discrete event with a local cause. That reading is not wrong, but it is partial. Beneath each individual confrontation runs a single, larger current, and that current is the perception, increasingly grounded in documented economic data, that AI is functioning as a wealth-concentration engine of historic proportions and that ordinary Americans are being asked to subsidize the engine while being excluded from its returns.
This is why the anger is not satisfied by the standard reassurances. AI will create more jobs than it takes. (Schmidt said this in 2015. Page said it in 2015. They have been saying it ever since. The graduating class of 2026 has been told to expect those jobs their entire post-pandemic lives. The jobs have not arrived. The lay-off announcements have.) The benefits will be broadly shared over time. (Over how much time? Shared by whom? Through what mechanism? When the mechanism is left unspecified, citizens are entitled to assume the mechanism does not exist.) The technology is too important to slow down. (Important to whom? Slowing it down is exactly what the affected communities are now demonstrating they have the political capacity to do.)
The disconnect between elite messaging and public perception is not a failure of communication. It is an accurate read by the public of what the messaging is actually for. Anthropic, which launched its competitor to ChatGPT in March 2023 at a $4.1 billion valuation, was valued less than three years later at $350 billion — an 87-fold increase. OpenAI, in the same period, surged to a $750 billion valuation. Last year alone, global billionaire wealth jumped by 16 percent to $18.3 trillion — the highest level in history, according to Oxfam.
These valuations and wealth surges are happening inside an economy in which median household wealth has barely moved, in which entry-level white-collar hiring is contracting in the very fields AI is best at, in which the cost of housing and healthcare and child care has decoupled from wage growth for a decade, and in which the rationale offered by the system’s beneficiaries amounts to a request for continued patience.
The patience has run out. That is what last week in Arizona was about. That is what Tremonton was about. That is what the Molotov cocktail at Altman’s house and the gunfire that followed were warning shots toward.
What the AI industry is not understanding about Schmidt’s reception
The most striking thing about the Schmidt commencement is not that he was booed. It is the apparent surprise of the people around him that he was booed.
Schmidt gave a speech that, in a different era — perhaps as recently as five years ago — would have been received as inspirational. Embrace the future. The future is yours to shape. Some perspectives are uncomfortable but worth hearing. America is at its best when ambitious people want to come here. These are the platitudes of the American technological optimist tradition, recited with the practiced ease of a man who has given some version of this speech a thousand times.
The platitudes failed because the audience now hears them differently. Embrace the future sounds, to a young person whose first job has just been automated, like accept what we have done to you. The future is yours to shape sounds, to a county commissioner staring down a $14 billion data center proposal, like take responsibility for the consequences of decisions you did not make. When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat — you just get on sounds, to anyone who has been paying attention, like exactly what the billionaire class would say to people whose only available role in the project is to provide the launch pad.
The speech failed for the same reason the 2015 dinner failed. The people delivering the message do not actually inhabit the world to which the message is being delivered. They live in a separate America — geographically, economically, socially, in some cases legally and politically — and their estimates of what the broader country will tolerate are systematically miscalibrated. Schmidt was making a case for human agency over software, the trade publication WinBuzzer observed afterward, while many people in the stadium were closer to the practical question of who gets hired first, who gets trained first, and how much junior work remains once software takes over routine tasks.
That is the gap. The man on the stage was making an argument about whether AI would shape the future. The people in the seats had already conceded that it would. Their question, the only question that mattered to them, was who would shape the AI — and on whose terms, and in whose interest, and at whose cost.
Schmidt had no answer to that question, because the answer he might honestly have given is not one he is in a position to deliver. The honest answer is that AI is currently being shaped by approximately the same several hundred people who shaped the previous two decades of the platform economy, that those people are accountable to almost no one outside their own boards, and that the institutions that might once have provided that accountability — Congress, the regulatory agencies, the press, the universities — are either captured, paralyzed, or themselves dependent on the industry they are supposed to oversee. The graduating class of 2026 knows this. That is why they were booing.
What an adequate response now looks like
A reader of these essays could be forgiven for asking, at this point, what exactly anyone is supposed to do. The polling is hostile. The technology is being shipped. The wealth is concentrating. The institutions are sluggish. The data center revolt is winning in particular places but is not yet adding up to a national framework. What do you actually do?
Several things, none of them sufficient on its own, all of them building toward the kind of public infrastructure that could absorb the technology without breaking under it.
Make the bargain explicit and democratic. The fundamental problem with the current AI rollout is not that it is happening. It is that it is happening without any negotiated bargain between the public and the firms doing the rolling out. A democratic society can absorb a great deal of disruption when the terms of the absorption have been agreed to. It can absorb almost none when the terms have been imposed. Every major industrial transition in American history has eventually produced a bargain — the New Deal labor settlement, the postwar GI Bill, the environmental and consumer protection regimes of the 1960s and 1970s. The AI transition has not yet produced one. Building one is the central political task.
Tax the concentration. Some portion of the extraordinary returns being captured by the firms and individuals at the top of the AI economy must be redirected, through public mechanisms, toward the workers and communities absorbing the costs. The specific instrument matters less than the principle: automation taxes, public wealth funds modeled on the Alaska Permanent Fund, productivity dividends, excess-profits levies during the transition years. The argument that the underlying science was publicly financed and the returns should be at least partially publicly shared is not a radical argument. It is the same argument that produced the workers’ compensation system and the antitrust framework, both of which were called radical in their day and are now considered the floor of a functioning industrial society.
Govern the data centers as the public infrastructure they actually are. The current siting regime, in which a single private firm can negotiate the terms of an enormous power and water draw with a single county commission, is not adequate to the scale of what is being built. State-level frameworks — like those now emerging in Illinois, Texas, Colorado, and Virginia — that require host-community benefit agreements, ratepayer protections from grid impacts, environmental review at the scale of the actual project, and meaningful local consent are the minimum. The communities now doing this work by their own organizing have demonstrated that the political capacity exists. The legal and regulatory frameworks have not yet caught up.
Fund worker transitions at the actual scale of the displacement. A $90 million federal allocation against a projection of 300 million globally displaced jobs is not a policy. It is a gesture. A GI Bill–scale commitment to retraining, portable benefits, automatic safety-net stabilizers when displacement metrics cross thresholds, and serious income support during transitions is what the moment calls for. The federal vacuum on this question is being partly filled by states. It needs to be filled by Congress.
Build the civic infrastructure that translates anger into governance. The data center fights work because hundreds of local groups have organized themselves into something larger. The same kind of organizing, at higher levels of abstraction, is what produced the labor movement, the consumer movement, and the environmental movement of previous American generations. The energy is currently present. The infrastructure that turns energy into legislation is being built in real time, by ordinary citizens, in counties and states across the country. The work is not glamorous. It is the work that has, in every previous democratic course-correction, made the corrections possible.
None of this is finished. None of this is guaranteed. But none of this is impossible either. The graduating class of 2026 has just demonstrated, at very high volume and on national television, that they understand what has been done to them and are not interested in pretending otherwise. The communities organizing against data centers have demonstrated that they can win — not always, not everywhere, but often enough that the developers have begun to notice. The numbers on wealth concentration are now visible enough that even the people benefiting from them are warning, in public, that they will not hold.
This is the raw material of a democratic course-correction. The question is whether the country can organize it in time.
Eleven years
Eric Schmidt had eleven years to choose differently. He was in the room in 2015. He heard the warning. He had the position, the platform, and the resources to act on it. He chose, instead, to call it overblown and to continue building.
The graduating class of 2026 cannot make his choice for him. But they can decline to applaud it. They can decline to accept the rocket-ship metaphor. They can decline to be told that their only available role is to embrace whatever future is delivered to them by people who do not share their condition.
That is what last week in Arizona was. It was not the failure of a commencement speech. It was the beginning of the political response that the 2015 dinner declined to organize. Eleven years late, but not too late.
The pitchforks are not coming. The pitchforks are here. The question now is whether the country uses them — in the historical, democratic sense — to compel a renegotiation of the bargain, or whether the people holding them, finding no functioning channel for their grievance, eventually pick them up in some other sense altogether.
That is the choice in front of us. It is not the choice of the men in the bunkers. It is the choice of the rest of us — in counties and states and union halls and church basements and yes, in commencement audiences willing to make noise — about what kind of country we are going to be on the other side of this.
The boos at Arizona were not the end of something. They were the beginning. The people who heard the 2015 warning and dismissed it are about to find out what eleven years of not listening cost them. And the people who have been doing the listening — quietly, locally, in every place where a data center proposal has been refused and every commencement where a billionaire has been heckled — are about to find out what they can build with the political capacity they have already proven they possess.
Suleyman was right. Schmidt was wrong. And the country, at last, is awake.
Moonshot Press is a project of the Institute for Salutogenesis and a cornerstone of the Democracy, Opportunity and Citizenship Moonshot. We are nonpartisan, constitutionally grounded, and committed to the proposition that an informed citizenry is not a luxury of democratic life — it is its precondition.
This is the third essay in our AI series, following “The Pitchforks Are Here” and “The Promise and the Peril.” Subscribe at thriveinmontco.substack.com.