YES, AND…

YES! Magazine has been a source of information and inspiration to me for twenty years. Although it stopped publishing new content in 2025, it lives on as YES! Media, under the umbrella of The Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism, and offers a monthly newsletter featuring articles from other sources alongside select pieces from its own archives that have stayed evergreen or taken on new relevance in the context of current events.

In the past weeks, publications and broadcast outlets across the U.S. media landscape have finally caught onto the story that people don’t want data centers in their communities. A few began reporting on public opinion last winter, but active resistance has gained both visibility and momentum as more build sites get targeted, more evidence is gathered about centers’ deleterious effects on public health, and the economics become clearer (e.g., ratepayers are footing the bill for electricity from overtaxed infrastructure while the multi-billion-dollar AI bubble grows closer to bursting).1

I recommend checking out this issue of Peace & Riot, a collection of 20 stories on climate leadership from the grassroots in the context of the 250th anniversary of 1776 and whatever that may mean to you. It often seems that not enough nonprofits and foundations are talking about climate, not merely as an “issue area,” but as the inescapable physical context for everything we do. EVERY. THING.

Against that backdrop, YES! Magazine contributor Juliet Kunkel’s 2024 article “We Keep Our Data Safe” reads as both prescient and a reminder that resistance is about community and our power is collective. Writing about the rise in AI-enabled biometric surveillance, Kunkel points to the biases built into these technologies that are essentially “converting white supremacist social structures into algorithms,” and argues that while they disproportionately affect some of us, we are all part of their datasets—and when they can target one of us, they can target any of us.

The article was written two years ago, but it feels immediate to what we’re living right now while white supremacists and eugenicists who own social platforms and AI properties prey upon us and our data.

The common theme tying together collective resistance to surveillance and the growing movement in opposition to data centers is that our liberation is bound up together. The message is that fighting back against technologies created to enable social control and concentrate wealth requires more from us than an individualistic act of merely “opting out”—it requires that we act collectively to protect each other and our communities.

The insidiousness of everyday algorithmic technologies and tools offered to us under the guise of convenience or entertainment—all the while harvesting and generating data about us and the worlds we inhabit—is that we ourselves are helping to build the system. Let’s stop being so helpful!

“When we are embedded in these systems, our answer has to be something beyond opting out.” – Juliet Kunkel

We are in this together.

I just saw this illustrated in bleak outline in AI and Assembly: Coming Together and Apart in a Datafied World, edited by Toussaint Nothias and Lucy Bernholz (Stanford University Press, 2025). In her chapter, “Machine-Made,” Bernholz—who has tried to help us understand these things for oh, only the past TWENTY YEARS—describes how the tech that surrounds us every day uses math to group us with others in a kind of forced digital assembly-slash-association outside our view and beyond our control:

“Our digital tools assign us to different groups of people through ongoing processes of pattern recognition. These processes act at lightning speed, are based on relationships that matter mathematically (but perhaps in no other way), include information on other people about whom we know nothing, and may use or even prioritize characteristics of a data set that have little to do with how we see ourselves. We have no control over how we are clustered, and we may only wonder at the whole system when it serves us something we do not understand or recognize.”

These fabricated groupings shape our lives in real ways, determining what “choices” get shoved down our throats online and whether we get flagged as bad bets or security threats for lenders and law enforcement. We may find ourselves with some strange bedfellows, sorted into invisible baskets to be weighed, measured, and found WANTED:

“You may have nothing more in common with a serial killer than the time of day at which you check social media, but that alone may be significant enough to cluster you together.”

Whether we are a serial killer or kindergarten teacher, being conscripted together by opaque algorithms and unregulated tech infringes on our right of free association and assembly (Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as Bernholz cites), making us “objects of the association, not its subjects.”

We may just have to come together to defend our right to be apart.

Beyond Blueprints…

Look, I’ll be upfront and admit I understand less than half of what Lucy Bernholz’s scholarship and analysis has offered the sector, but it’s enough to know that it still speaks—no, SCREAMS—to this present moment. Since the unceremonious shuttering of the Digital Civil Society Lab by Stanford last year and her shift away from work for health reasons, I have been missing her voice and still find great value in her published work, interviews, and talks. In addition to the above-referenced book, items of interest may include her 2021 interview with Katie Yoon, "Where Civil Society and the Digital World Collide” and her blog, Philanthropy2173.

I would have liked to have reached out to Ms. Bernholz about this writeup, but respect her privacy and need for rest and restoration. If anyone is still in contact with her, please convey my gratitude and good wishes.

Keeping it (or deleting it) real. Written with Lisa Jervis.

While the nonprofit sector navigates the heady space between AI hype and hate, it may be time to ask the more mundane question of: How are our everyday data practices doing?

For example, the question of what data we keep and what data we get rid of rarely gets the attention it deserves.

Lisa Jervis, consultant and principal of Information Ecology, helps nonprofits work through practical decisions around data retention and deletion. Observing that this is somewhat of “an undeveloped skillset in our sector—especially among movement organizations,” Jervis partners with groups to develop their knowledge and practices. She and her team have also provided cohort trainings hosted by capacity building intermediaries.

As a complement to this work, Information Ecology has developed an open-source Data Retention and Deletion Toolkit. Downloadable in both English and Spanish, the toolkit sets the stage for why this work is important and offers worksheets, templates, and key terms to help organizations build their understanding and make informed decisions.

This is not only a matter of operational efficiency or compliance (both important in their own right)—it also has security and safety implications. As the current administration escalates attacks on political opponents (e.g., FBI targeting of voter protection organizers and criminalizing protest in Prairieland, Texas and Minneapolis), it is especially important to be mindful of the potential impact of records requests that come from government agencies. A policy and set of practices ensuring the deletion of information that is no longer needed for operational or compliance purposes can help organizations be better prepared, should they find themselves targeted.  

Another piece of advice she shares offers both a challenge and inspiration to nonprofits: Use the tools that are already in your hands to keep information contained where you want it contained. This means paying attention to your settings and terms of use for web-based services, mandating strong passwords and multifactor authentication, and keeping up your basic cybersecurity awareness. It also involves managing tradeoffs in operational friction, balancing how much protocol staff can handle while still maintaining best practices.

While Big Tech stripping us of our data along with our rights demands collective action, Jervis reminds us that we also need to focus on our internal operations—because “if your password is ‘password,’ you cannot secure your data.”

Jervis says that much of her work with clients focuses on document management and choices about things like email archives, but that even these decisions can be nuanced and complex. She also notes that data retention and deletion is just one slice of the broader practice of data governance, which poses a range of questions like: What do we collect? How do we collect it? Where do we store it? How do we communicate about it? What do we share and with whom? How do we keep evaluating and evolving our data to keep it clean and useful?

1. “Energy is a Human Right: A Photo Essay on Energy Affordability and Environmental Justice in Memphis,” by Candice Fortin, in Peace & Riot, a co-publication of Nonprofit Quarterly and Counterstream Media, August 2026.)