From Reality TV to Reality Check: Why Jacob Roloff is Fighting the AI Boom In Hillsboro, Oregon

Forward:  Thoughts On A Young Leader On The Rise -Jacob Roloff Featured In Voices Of The People

In the mid-1990s, when I was roughly twenty-nine years old, I found myself standing in the dirt of the Sunset Corridor. Back then, we weren’t fighting the “Cloud”; we were fighting a literal prison. We were a group of young, fired-up residents who refused to let the industrial future of Washington County be dictated by distant bureaucrats without a fight for the soul of our valley. We stopped a prison from being built here to protect the livability and beauty of this place we call home. I will never forget the glow of that win and how it formed me into something more than I was before, or something I did not know I was.  A leader.

I look at Jacob Roloff today, and I see that same fire—tempered by the quiet, rhythmic perspective of a man who makes his living from the Helvetia soil.

For years, I have covered the growth of this county. But having Jacob’s perspective to reflect off my own has been a refreshing, if not vital, jolt to the system. He sees what many of us—blinded by the “inevitability” of progress—often miss. He adds a layer of nuance and a historical richness to our shared conflicts that we desperately need. As my own star begins to move further out toward the horizon, I find an immense sense of relief and excitement seeing his investment in this valley on the rise.

Jacob isn’t just a “former reality star” or a “new farmer.” Yes, being the youngest child of Matt and Amy Roloff meant that he spent his entire youth on TV, whether he wanted to or not.  The undeniable appeal of Little People Big World put his family and Helvetia on the map.  But to me, the guy who sold them the farm and got to know them all, he is just a local kid from the Tualatin Valley.  But he is so much more than any of that. He is a writer of profound depth and a representative of a rising generation of Washington County citizens who refuse to be gaslit by the shiny promises of the billionaire class.  I said it – and he and those like him will move this County forward in a much different direction. A better direction, because what is happening right now is not working the way it was.

In the essay that follows, Jacob takes on the “Silicon Forest” with the precision of a historian and the heart of a neighbor. He reminds us that the Luddites weren’t ignorant; they were simply the first to ask: Who is this for, and what is it costing us?

As we face the expansion of data centers, the loss of our power grid, and the rezoning of our precious rural reserves, Jacob’s voice is a clarion call. He reminds us that “innovation” without democratic consent isn’t progress—it’s a forced march. I am honored to share his words here, and I am even more energized to see the youth of our county getting involved to protect the land we all call home.  Read this excellent piece – 29, just remarkable.

AI and 21st Century Luddism in Hillsboro, Oregon – by Jacob Roloff

Data centers, the circulatory system behind AI and cloud computing, are approaching towns and cities nationwide with promises of huge economic and, for Hillsboro, Oregon, geopolitical benefits. But the ferocity and disruptiveness of their growth needs calibrating.

AI is lauded by its owners and shareholders as having the ability to “liberate humanity” from regular toil; to usher in a golden age of lower work-week hours, free us from mundane tasks, and even cure cancer.

While there is a proven utility of AI throughout the world (AI-supported breast cancer screening), we are still a long way from the AI liberation, unsupported by humans, that the owners claim for their quarterly reports.

Indeed, at a 2024 event hosted by Tesla to showcase its “autonomous” humanoid robot, Optimus, reviews fell flat when the revelation emerged that the robots were controlled remotely (Tesla Optimus robots were remotely controlled by humans). Even still, as of late 2025, when Musk said they would be in “limited production,” they are training these robots with POV-style videoed human actions and using teleoperation. 

These two examples are crucial. The medical promise of AI, and in some parts of the world it is more than a promise (World’s first AI Hospital), is greatly emphasized when people like Elon Musk or Sam Altman are on a stage, but the promises of larger social benefit never seem to come to fruition. Instead, we are encouraged to buy into AI by adopting it into our everyday lives–as consumers of it, not socially collaborating with it.

Another common application of AI, so far removed from human liberation, is in surveillance and military spaces. Palantir (named for the all-seeing crystal ball used by the main antagonist from The Lord Of The Rings), Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft’s Azure, and Anduril (also malignantly borrowed from The Lord of the Rings) are barreling toward full integration into the U.S. military and federal operations of ICE. Despite a safety policy disagreement leading Trump to claim cutting ties between Anthropic and the federal government, Anthropic’s AI technology was used in the initial U.S. joint strikes on Iran on February 28, 2026 (U.S. Strikes in Middle East Use Anthropic). Sam Altman’s OpenAI was capable of navigating the federal government’s policies and has already supplanted Anthropic at the Pentagon (OpenAI announces Pentagon deal).

Between these varied applications of AI, the socially beneficial medical promises are used to launder these companies’ reputations so they can get on with the supposedly placeholding work of securing tens of billions of dollars in Defense Department contracts (Microsoft’s Military AR Headset Project).

On the outskirts of all these use cases is the distracting but costly “popular use” in generative AI and LLM models. ChatGPT is the most ubiquitous, but Grok (from xAI) and Claude (from Anthropic) are also popular. These models mainly scrape the internet plagiaristically to consume all human-made art and wordsmithing in order to approximate a recreation at the whim of any user. What this has done is flood the internet with fake images, false connections, and obvious mistakes (AI hallucination). Unless equipped with the keenest suspicion and up to date on any new models or updates, it has become very hard to distinguish whether anything we are seeing online is real. Extended use of these easily accessible tools can change the way we think, focus, remember, and reason (Your Brain on ChatGPT).

All of this begs the questions: What is this social disruption costing us? And is it worth the tradeoff?

Insight into both questions can be found in an analysis of data centers, and it begs another: Who exactly is cosigning the explosion of AI and data center construction? Is there anyone against this? When does it stop?

In Brian Merchant’s “Blood In The Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech”, he recounts the history of Luddism and reshapes the conventional misunderstanding of Luddites as “against all technology”–usually attached to a notion of the inherent ignorance of that position. On the contrary, they were explicit in their grievances and proposed more democratic methods of implementation. As a final demand at being heard, they destroyed some of the machines at very specific factories that were mortally disrupting their lives.

Cotton from the slaveholding republic was arriving by boatload, and the textile industry in the midlands of England was booming. Attentive and ambitious businessmen purchased, rented, and sometimes stole further automating machines for weaving and cutting wool and cotton. These men would go on to found the first bona fide factories of the Industrial Revolution. Clear-cutting for smoke stacks, and usually with a private militia protecting it. The struggles between these politically entangled and powerful men with the working people of the local towns and cities would presage many of our own modern labor struggles.

The grievance was not merely at the existence of these new machines, but about the manner of their adoption, about ownership and wages, and the lack of credit given to the weavers and cutters that the machines’ actions were synthesizing.

Merchant’s book excellently frames this as an origin story of resistance against “Big Tech,” a term that we all recognize, for these early factory entrepreneurs were both the class prototype of privately owning the means of social disruption, and consequently originated the ethos of disruption for its own sake ipso facto profit that controls Silicon Valley today.

Hillsboro, Oregon, has parlayed the AI boom into resurrecting its significance in the national tech sphere, as well as new bragging rights to the name “Silicon Forest” that it has held since the 1980s. It also happens to be the receiver of 8 internationally important undersea fiber cables, and boasts, according to the city, 28 data centers of small and medium size in the city, as well as BESS battery facilities, with many more on the way.

They attracted this concentration of data computation companies by exempting them from property taxes for at least 5 years and, if another bill in the Oregon House passes (4084), as many as 10 in the so-called “Enterprise Zone”. Oregon also has no sales tax to subject them to, and with so few permanent jobs, they would pay very little in payroll taxes. For data center operators, it’s a fire sale deal. So they’ve been lobbying for more land.

The State is asking, in Senate Bill 1586, to rezone 1,700 acres of rural reserve farmland and fold it into the industrial Enterprise Zone. Sponsors of the bill are touting language that prevents any “standalone data centers”, but as ever, there are loopholes (Senate Bill 1586 Definitions). And it is the insertion of such superficially satisfying but toothless language that signals there is already known local discontent with the scale and speed of data center construction.

Several local groups, including Stop The Sprawl, Save Helvetia, Washington County DSA, and 1000 Friends of Oregon, are involved in opposition to this bill, and the non-organized support is far greater. State representative candidates are including data center resistance in their campaign language. Public testimony in opposition to SB 1586 outweighs those in support by a factor of one hundred to one.

While Silicon Forest developers have their roots in entrepreneurs from the Midlands of England in the 1800s, these local groups and the mass suspicion of this technological growth can be traced back to the Luddites of the same era. There is–not ignorance–awareness; a real and felt loss of agency when 2,000 acres of farmland and wild things can be paved over with the blink of an eye, with very little consideration of the long view, or of community history.

No technological advancement happens “of itself”, but firstly through actions taken by individuals, and then through persuasion by society. But what if persuasion is skipped? Or democratic involvement of any sort? What if community disruption is a feature, and not a bug, of company profits?

As Merchant says in the Afterword,

“If ordinary humans and working people are not involved in determining how these technologies reshape our lives, and especially if those outcomes wind up degrading their livelihoods, time and again the anger will be acute and far-reaching.”

And to be a Luddite is to be totally cognizant of this reshaping of life that can be done differently and not gaslit into thinking it must happen one way for mere profit.

Again from Merchant,

“The Luddites assessed fully the implications of how a particular technology would impact their lives and … illuminated the crises gathering for working people everywhere … There was no natural, united drive toward progress; it was a forced march, with winners and losers.”

It doesn’t seem that people have the stomach for losing to the 21st century’s billionaire class on this issue. Locals nationwide are demanding representation in their daily life and how it is shaped, and they aren’t distracted by an “AI companion” whose parent company might double as the State’s panopticon. They want answers for what they are getting, and they want to decide whether they want it, in exchange for the disruption of their community (Bipartisan local backlash to data centers halts $64B in development).

Blackrock, Microsoft, OpenAI, TikTok, Meta, and xAI, among others, all have their foothold in the industry and in Hillsboro, and they are raking in profits through user-subscriptions, government contracts, tax breaks, and energy use discounts. What the community gets in return is virtually nonexistent with no tax income, no socially useful product, and no long view from a city planning perspective. What they are losing is farmland, water, and democratic involvement in the fundamental structure of their locality. Not only are they not receiving benefits, but they are actively losing money, having it extracted from them, by being forced to subsidize energy grid upgrades that wouldn’t have been necessary for decades. 

Finally, Merchant asks, “Are we not ingenious enough to ensure that advancing technology benefits all, and not just a few?”

Jacob Roloff is a writer, photographer, and farmer based in Helvetia, Oregon. A lifelong resident of Washington County, he stepped away from a high-profile youth in the public eye to cultivate a life rooted in the soil and the study of local ecology. His work focuses on the intersection of technological disruption, land use, and the preservation of rural history.

Visit Jacob and Isabel’s #HelvetiaMarket  https://www.instagram.com/helvetiagardens/