Inside a Small Town's Fight Against a $1.2 Billion AI Datacenter

Speaker 1 The other words of the year,

Speaker 1 they were just as online. You know, Oxford's was brain rot.
If you can believe it, its first use was in 1854 by Henry David Thoreau. R.I.P., Henry David Thoreau, you would have hated TikTok.

Speaker 1 Wait, Candace, we should probably introduce ourselves. You're so right, Kate.
Hello, listeners. We are the hosts of ICYMI, or rather, in case you missed it, Slate's podcast about internet culture.

Speaker 1 We're extremely online, so you don't have to be. Follow ICYMI now wherever you listen.

Speaker 2 Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL.

Speaker 2 404 Media is a journalist-founded company and needs your support to subscribe. Go to 404media.co,

Speaker 2 as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments.
Gain access to that content at 404media.co.

Speaker 2 I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are 404 Media co-founders, Sam Cole.

Speaker 3 Yep.

Speaker 2 Emmanuel Mayberg. Hello.
Jason Kebler.

Speaker 3 What's up?

Speaker 2 And we're also joined by our regular contributor, Matthew Gold. How are you doing, Matthew? I'm doing all right.
How are you all doing? All good. All good.

Speaker 3 I'm excited. I'm fired up.

Speaker 2 Hell yeah. Having a good day.
Yeah, good. Well,

Speaker 2 why don't you tell people why you're having a good day? I don't know if you're revealing that.

Speaker 3 I got my printer working. Printer.

Speaker 4 It's not any printer.

Speaker 3 I got my printer from 1995 to work. I'll be doing an article and probably a video and more, but it's a Risagraph printer that I bought on eBay that was not working.

Speaker 3 And through, it's taken me like a month to get it to work. I don't know how long it's going to work for, but today we had a massive breakthrough.
I've been looking at wires.

Speaker 3 i've been changing gears i you know replaced this little thingamobah which is a a roller that was broken i it's just it's just so exciting so i'm so excited because are you

Speaker 2 heard of a midlife crisis like this before

Speaker 2 i haven't it's a new one yeah everyone needs a project

Speaker 4 speaking of projects go have you beaten silk song yet no i've not i'm 12

Speaker 2 now not so you gave up this is like months ago yeah no i gave up i'm done it beat me It's fine.

Speaker 3 I'm going to show YouTubers my printer, okay? If you're on YouTube, this is the type of thing you get.

Speaker 2 Jason, while you're rotating the camera railway slowly, how difficult was it to repair? You said it took a month, but like, was that you just had to find the right information?

Speaker 3 Well, I needed parts from China, which, thanks to the tariffs, are harder and more expensive to get.

Speaker 3 So that took like three weeks to come in. And then

Speaker 3 there's a Discord for Resagraph printing that is full of very, very helpful people who are giving me some advice. But I have

Speaker 3 pretty much like all Rhysograph printers are very old. This is from 1995.
But this is like a very old machine.

Speaker 3 Like a lot of people who actually keep these working are working on machines from like the early 2000s.

Speaker 3 And so basically, there's very few videos on on the internet about how to do anything on this particular device.

Speaker 3 I found three YouTube videos of working of this device working. One was in Romanian, one was in,

Speaker 2 I believe, like

Speaker 3 Thai, and then one was in Russian, and then there was one that was in Spanish. And all of these videos were like 12 seconds long and were showing different things.

Speaker 3 So I was like freeze framing the videos, trying to like make my machine look like their machine.

Speaker 3 The back of it is also just full of like wires and PCB boards and things like that. The like long and short of it, though, is that there is a single guy who teaches people how to fix these.

Speaker 3 And he travels around the country and he has like an encyclopedic knowledge of all of them. And so he ultimately like got on a Zoom call with me and talked me through how to fix it,

Speaker 3 told me what to buy, that sort of thing. And then I've been like messaging back and forth with him over the course of like two weeks, trying to get it to work.
And today I finally got it to work.

Speaker 3 It's not working super well, I will say, but we are making progress.

Speaker 2 The printout looks okay.

Speaker 2 What are you going to print from it, potentially?

Speaker 3 Okay, so for those who don't know, Reesagraph printers are from Japan. Sorry, this is not scheduled, just a, just a riff.

Speaker 3 They're printers from Japan that are really inexpensive to print high quantity number of things on. So they print really dark, and then they have,

Speaker 3 like, you can put different colors of ink in it. They have these like huge drums, and you pull the drum out, and you like put another drum in.

Speaker 3 So you can print one color at a time, and then you layer the colors. And it's kind of like digital silk screening, more or less.

Speaker 3 And so you can get like all these different cool colors on and people use them to print zines on.

Speaker 3 This is like a business card of someone that is Risograph printed. And I just have it on my desk because I went to this printing fair and met this woman.

Speaker 3 But like you can get these really cool like colored layering images on them. And so we printed zines on them back at Motherboard.
I printed some posters on them for our South by Southwest event.

Speaker 3 And, you know, I want to print zines and print stuff for 404 media. So I found like a really inexpensive one on eBay that was not working.
And now it's sort of working. And I have two colors.

Speaker 3 I have black and I have green. So I got to find some new colors.
Dude. But that's good.
Good start. Good start.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's the 404 media colors. So I guess you need white.
Well, you have the white paper. So, well, maybe not.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, that's great. And as said, you'll probably do an article on it.
And I'm sure we'll publish videos and that sort of thing.

Speaker 2 The last bit of housekeeping before we get to the stories is that I'm going to open the article to make sure I get the date right. On the 19th of November, that's next Wednesday in a week's time.

Speaker 2 If you listen to this when this episode comes out, at 1 p.m. Eastern, we are doing our latest FOIA forum.
This is the live stream events that we do. We say it's an hour.

Speaker 2 It actually usually goes on for two hours, something like that.

Speaker 2 Of course, you don't have to stay for the whole thing but we usually tell people hey here's how we do freedom of information requests here's how we get records from the government all of that sort of thing and this one is going to specifically be about our flock reporting and how researchers got these network audits that showed that local cops are doing lookups for ice in the nationwide surveillance system and then we covered you know, the abortion stuff as well and this massive wave of coverage around the country and impact and all of that.

Speaker 2 We're going to show you the specific requests used, the language, and tell you all about that sort of thing. This is only open to paying for reformed subscribers.

Speaker 2 You have to be on the supporter tier, which is

Speaker 2 $10 a month. I had to think about that for a second.

Speaker 2 And then you sign up for that, and you'll be able to get the link to the live stream from the site, which I'll put in the show notes.

Speaker 2 But again, that's Wednesday, November 19th at 1 p.m. Eastern.

Speaker 2 If you can't make it for whatever reason, when you do become a paying subscriber, you get access to the whole archive of FOIA forum videos as well.

Speaker 2 So, yeah, if you're interested in learning how to get governments from records from your local government or police department or whatever about that sort of thing, please come check it out.

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 2 As for this week, let's go to our first story. Again, this is one written by Matthew.
The headline is: A small town is fighting a 1.2 billion AI data center for America's nuclear weapon scientists.

Speaker 2 So I'm just going to do it in the chronological order of the article, Matthew, which is you open with a specific person,

Speaker 2 KJ Pedri.

Speaker 2 Who are they, and what is their background exactly?

Speaker 2 Pedri is a citizen of Ypsilanti, Michigan.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 and her grandfather was a rocket scientist who worked on the Trinity, which was the

Speaker 2 first nuclear detonation in the world, dramatized in the movie Oppenheimer. This is that explosion.

Speaker 2 And where we kind of find her at the beginning of this article is speaking at a city council meeting where they are discussing the issue of this data center coming in.

Speaker 2 And she talks about her grandfather and says says that, you know, he was violent and he was lonely and he was an alcoholic and that it was the work of working on nuclear weapons and everything that came after Trinity that like did this to him.

Speaker 2 And she doesn't want to see

Speaker 2 that kind of spiritual impact

Speaker 2 hit an entire town that she loves and lives in.

Speaker 2 And it was a really powerful image, and it's something that I've heard from other people I've met whose families, who are descendants of people that worked on the Manhattan Project or worked at Trinity, that this kind of

Speaker 2 it messes with them, and it messed with the family in the aftermath. So I thought that that was a pretty good place to open this.
Yeah, totally.

Speaker 2 So that brings us to this data center, which obviously mentioned the headline as well. Well, what is it exactly? What are we talking about? And what is it for exactly?

Speaker 2 So it's vague, which is part of the problem i think uh but it is this 1.2 billion dollar data center that's being con that's proposed to be constructed in uh collaboration with los alamos national laboratories which is in new mexico which are the people one of the the labs around the country that work on America's nuclear weapons.

Speaker 2 They do other things, but primarily it's nuclear weapons. And

Speaker 2 it's being built in collaboration with the University of Michigan.

Speaker 2 And Ypsilanti is one of the proposed sites for Ypsilanti Township, which is distinct from the city itself, but we can probably get into that a little bit later.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 it sounds like we only know the contours of the plan, right? And as you say,

Speaker 2 Elise Pedri has some history with this sort of technology and the development of it and the very human impact that that can have on people as well. Why are

Speaker 2 other residents against this data center beyond them? Because it's obviously not just one person who is pushing back against this. It is essentially

Speaker 2 a large part of a small town. Why are other residents pushing back against the building of this data center?

Speaker 2 For all the reasons that everyone pushes back against a data center or is unhappy that a data center is built in their area, sound quality goes down.

Speaker 2 Data centers use a lot of water.

Speaker 2 And people have reported that live next to data centers have reported lower water quality, water bills increasing. And the same thing happens to electricity.

Speaker 2 It taxes the power grid for these data centers to be built. And the people of Ypsilanti, in addition to being worried about

Speaker 2 contributing to nuclear weapons projects,

Speaker 2 are worried about all of these quality of life issues that would affect them if a data center comes in.

Speaker 2 And the university has tried to get ahead of this and has, in their FAQ about the project, is basically saying, we fought through all of this and we're going to do X, Y, and Z to mitigate all of these issues.

Speaker 2 But Ypsilanti remains unconvinced, it seems. Yeah, that just reminded me actually, and I think Jason edited this.

Speaker 2 Apologies if I'm putting you on the spot, Jason, but a while ago, back in June, we published this other piece with the headline, A Black Hole of Energy Use, Meta's Massive AI Data Center is stressing out a Louisiana community.

Speaker 2 Just what was sort of the top level of that? Because it sounds like it's very, very similar to what Matthew is talking about.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so I mean, I think this is something that we are going to start covering more often because it is one of the biggest, like,

Speaker 3 it's like a huge deal, which is to say,

Speaker 3 like, AI companies are building these data centers all over the country right now. There was actually someone in Virginia who ran for like the House of Delegates there or the state house who

Speaker 3 or like a state lawmaker who ran on an anti-AI data center platform, like, which maybe we'll talk to them at some point. But basically, this

Speaker 3 data center in Louisiana was Mark Zuckerberg's. is Mark Zuckerberg's big plan to build a Manhattan-sized data center.
And by by that, I mean like literally the size of Manhattan.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 there's an image in the article I'm looking at right now, and it's like a purple overlay of a map of Manhattan. The vast majority is purple, and that would be the actual size of the data center.

Speaker 2 It's nuts.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's gigantic. And so, I mean, these companies are sort of going state by state, community by community, trying to find the best energy deals, more or less, and the best like land deals.

Speaker 3 And so, you know, this is in Louisiana in an area that is like economically struggling.

Speaker 3 And, you know, Meta is trying to build this $10 billion

Speaker 3 data center there. It will run partially on fossil fuels at least to start.
Probably will run on fossil fuels for quite some time, actually.

Speaker 3 And they're making all these promises about all the jobs that it's going to bring in and all that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 And if you do look at the jobs report, it's like a lot of the jobs right now are in data center construction but once the data centers are actually built they don't require that many employees to actually run and so there's like this huge open question as to whether these are actually going to be good economic prospects for the cities that are giving tax breaks and and subsidies and all that sort of thing um and so i think that the the piece that we did in about Louisiana and Meta is a really good one, a really important one.

Speaker 3 But as Matt, you know, just mentioned, and sort of like as we're seeing, this is playing out all over the country right now. It's especially playing out in places with pretty

Speaker 3 inexpensive energy, inexpensive land, and then also places that are close to internet backbone. So like places where the gigantic cables that come into the country are.

Speaker 3 And yeah,

Speaker 3 it's an important environmental issue. It's an important economic issue.
A lot of them are being run with fossil fuels, so on and so forth.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 I'll try to remember to put a link to that one in the show notes as well. But

Speaker 2 going back to your story, Matthew, and this latest one, can you just tell us a little bit more about the town? Like, how big is it?

Speaker 2 What is it like

Speaker 2 normally when there is a data center? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Let me put this to the group actually, because I've been getting some pushback, my characterization of the town

Speaker 2 from people. Okay.
At what point, at what population is a town still a small town?

Speaker 2 Like officially?

Speaker 2 I think like 25,000. I was going to say 20.
Okay, so we're right on the line with Ypsilanti. Okay.
Ypsilanti, the town itself is about 20,000.

Speaker 2 And it was part of a bigger metro area that is Ypsilanti or metro area, is part of a bigger area. It's like Ypsilanti Township that is like 50,000.

Speaker 2 It's about 20 miles or 20 minutes away from Ann Arbor,

Speaker 2 which is like the big college town

Speaker 2 in Michigan. And so it's this place, and there's a lot of places like this in Michigan where it's pretty cheap to live.

Speaker 2 And there's a lot of people that live there that have connections to the university and are highly educated.

Speaker 2 And then it abuts also like a lot of lower income communities and a lot of people that have been there for a very long time.

Speaker 2 And so it's like this kind of

Speaker 2 it's kind of like that old college slash towny like divide that that happens in a lot of America.

Speaker 2 It's that kind of place.

Speaker 2 And one of the like two of the proposed locations that are talking about building this data center,

Speaker 2 one is in a park

Speaker 2 that people that I spoke with, a lot of them had fond memories of.

Speaker 2 One of the guys at the city council meeting testified, like, why would you build it in this park where we've already got all this nice green? This is ridiculous to do here.

Speaker 2 And then another place they're talking about doing it is like a kind of a disused autonomous vehicle testing round where it's already a little bit concrete, but it's unclear which of those locations

Speaker 2 it will be built in. There's a weird irony to build it over the autonomous vehicle place that didn't pan out or something.
Yeah, it's a bit strange.

Speaker 2 So how is the fight actually playing out? As in

Speaker 2 what has happened? What happens next?

Speaker 2 Is it council meetings? Is it petitions? Like, what is actually happening? So, there's a lot of like

Speaker 2 grassroots organizing and protests, and people just kind of

Speaker 2 going door to door and showing up at like meetings and making people understand

Speaker 2 what this is and why they don't want it. But a lot of the focus of the story was

Speaker 2 in early October, the Ypsilanti City Council actually voted to officially affirm, like, we don't want this here, and we are going to use whatever whatever means necessary whatever means in our power uh to fight

Speaker 2 like yeah sorry

Speaker 2 important clarification um

Speaker 2 so that means like i talked to amber fellows who's kind of a person that spearheaded the like the charge here and she said that that means like putting pressure on uh local authorities that are going to control like licensing and like approval processes for construction and like making sure that it's part of the city's goal to make sure that this thing isn't built here.

Speaker 2 And it also means kind of the city of Ypsilanti has now officially applied for something called the Mayors for Peace,

Speaker 2 which is this global

Speaker 2 organization of cities that are officially opposed to nuclear weapons.

Speaker 2 And it's a thing that

Speaker 2 was started by survivors of Hiroshima. Gotcha.

Speaker 2 So is it just now we see what happens? Basically, like you've captured this snapshot, and now

Speaker 2 do you have a feeling which way it might go? I mean, you don't want to predict too much, but what's the vibe?

Speaker 2 I think, unfortunately, that,

Speaker 2 and this is kind of fits into this other thing I'm working on that we're hopefully going to get out this week.

Speaker 2 That the way

Speaker 2 the current administration, federal administration has described AI is that it's a national security issue and that it's a Manhattan project.

Speaker 2 And in service of that, it is using, it's clearing the way to get these data centers built because it's an important part of that project.

Speaker 2 And the University of Michigan has a lot of power inside the state.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it would probably be pretty trivial for it to just do this anyway.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 I

Speaker 2 it is we're going to see these fights play out across the country. I think Ypsilanti is just like one small snapshot of it.

Speaker 2 And I know that they're going to fight tooth and nail the whole way and maybe try to keep this thing as delayed and unpleasant for the university as possible.

Speaker 2 And, but I just, it is, it is a David and Goliath thing. And there isn't, it is an overwhelming amount of power that the university has and that

Speaker 2 the Los Alamos National Laboratory has.

Speaker 2 Right. Yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker 2 Just before you go, I wanted to ask one thing and flag this other story you did, the headline, and this is from the end of October: House of Dynamite is about the Zoom call that ends the world.

Speaker 2 So I purposefully did not read this article when it came out, and I'm going to read it later today. It's just about this new film on Netflix about, you know, a looming nuclear disaster.

Speaker 2 I thought it was excellent and I was totally gripped by it. I thought it was awesome.

Speaker 2 As the resident nuke expert in so many different ways, what did you make of it?

Speaker 2 I really loved it. It kind of messed me up a little bit, actually, because I know that

Speaker 2 I was sitting and watching it with my wife, and she was asking me questions. She was just like, well, this is stupid.
Why didn't they just do X, Y, and Z? And like, I turned around.

Speaker 2 I was like, well, we, this is the way it would kind of play out. This is like what we've built.
It's like, like, a person with not much knowledge of these nuclear issues is

Speaker 2 watching this pretty procedural and pretty realistic in a lot of aspects, kind of blow by blow of like what a nuclear strike might look like and what decisions America would have to make in the aftermath of it.

Speaker 2 And seeing it all as ridiculous. And it is.
And like, that's

Speaker 2 there's, we've, we've been very lucky in the nuclear wonk space in the last few years because the issue has gotten very popular again in pop culture.

Speaker 2 You know, I'm going to get to watch a season two of Fallout this month.

Speaker 3 Fallout's coming out again, new season.

Speaker 2 Yeah, a couple weeks soon. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like, that's wonderful. But

Speaker 2 I'm just excited that there's something like this that's so well directed and really tackles the issue uh

Speaker 2 realistically yeah like it was full of

Speaker 2 um farce and tragedy and people messing up and people being scared and just like i know it really really gripped me and do you do you launch the nukes at the if you're if you're interest album

Speaker 2 oh my god so without spoiling I would say that my calculation was you wait to see if it detonates at the target it says it's going to detonate, and then you retaliate based on that because then you'll have more information.

Speaker 2 So, you would retaliate then? Well, it depends. If it goes off, yes.
If it doesn't, no. So,

Speaker 2 so

Speaker 2 Joseph Cox, if America is struck by a nuclear weapon, you will retaliate with the full force of our arsenal.

Speaker 4 If you put in a warm warm on the show.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm a whole.

Speaker 2 Should we talk about threads?

Speaker 4 Should we talk about threads, Gaul?

Speaker 2 Somebody's remaking threads, aren't they? Are you shitting me? No. I'm not shitting you.
I'm pretty sure someone's they're talking about remaking threads. Please do like a new version.

Speaker 4 Threads is a movie about what happens after the nuke strikes and the people who survive. And it is the most horrifying movie I've ever seen in my whole life.

Speaker 2 Oh, I haven't seen that.

Speaker 4 It made me want to, it's like, it solidified my stance that I would be running toward the mushroom.

Speaker 2 to get over with, right? Yeah.

Speaker 4 You do not want to live through that.

Speaker 2 Again, I'll try to remember to put that a link.

Speaker 2 I've made myself update the show notes in real time on this. So I'll try to remember as soon as we've done this.
But Matthew, thank you for joining us and talking about those.

Speaker 2 After the break, we're going to be talking about,

Speaker 2 well, people are 3D printing whistles

Speaker 2 in Chicago to combat ice. We'll be right back after

Speaker 2 this.

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Speaker 4 And we're back. The next story that we're going to talk about is Joseph's.

Speaker 4 The headline is the latest defense against ice: 3D printed whistles.

Speaker 4 So, I mean, the headline really captures it.

Speaker 4 Yes. But they're making something that's like slightly different different than your typical schoolyard like coach whistle.
So walk us through just to establish like what exactly are they

Speaker 4 3D printing? What's the effort going on here?

Speaker 2 Yeah. So

Speaker 2 maybe I should just say what 3D printer is. I feel like people will know, but I might as well just say it, right? There is this small to medium-sized device that you can...

Speaker 2 They're so cheap now, relatively cheap, you know, a couple hundred dollars that people have at home.

Speaker 2 And you just need to get two things: the materials necessary to print whatever object you're making, obviously, and a design. And maybe you make that design, maybe you download it offline.
Of course,

Speaker 2 I mean, this is

Speaker 2 part of the media's fault as well. And, you know, I include basically everybody who's covered 3D printing in that, and that people often associate it with the 3D printing of firearms.

Speaker 2 Like, we've covered that as well because it's very fucking interesting as well.

Speaker 2 So, but in this case, people are 3D printing whistles that they can use to warn their local community about the presence of ICE officials.

Speaker 2 And sometimes they come with a little message which says, Hey, you do free short blasts on your whistle to say that ICE is nearby, or you do free long ones to signal that it's a code read, whatever that might mean in the context.

Speaker 2 I think it'd be pretty obvious. And then includes the hotline for a local immigrant to refugee rights support group.
So people are

Speaker 2 printing, making, building these in bulk, basically, dozens, if not hundreds of whistles at a time. And then they're getting handed out.
I guess, Sam, before we move on, like...

Speaker 2 You had a you had a 3D printer, right? Or your partner did?

Speaker 4 Yeah, there was a 3D printer in this household.

Speaker 4 It was old. It was from like two, like 10 years ago or something.
It was like ancient

Speaker 4 and I think inherited from someone else. And it never,

Speaker 4 I think, like 10 years ago, the main project of having a 3D printer, as is the main project of many,

Speaker 4 many pieces of hardware, is like many DIY things, is the effort of making the thing work is the project.

Speaker 4 So I think they've come a really long way since then. Ours just, it never aligned.
The bed was never aligned correctly. It just struggled.

Speaker 4 So it was a huge pain in the ass. And when I read this, I was like, how are people 3D printing that many whistles that fast? Because mine would take weeks.

Speaker 4 Because I found it pretty handy when it did work because I would print like, it's like my TV stand needed to be raised like an inch. So I printed little feet for the TV.
And I was like,

Speaker 4 that's not something that I could go buy. So I just printed little plastic pieces to put the TV on.
So anyway, I was pretty impressed when I saw this.

Speaker 4 And I guess I, it made me feel like, oh, shit, like this has actually come a really far away since my old one.

Speaker 3 may i explain a use of a 3d printer i knew you would have one so please well there's there's a tiny little part i needed for this reso that is not made anymore because it's from 1995 and so the community has modeled the tiny little part that i needed which is like this little bushing that you like shove a rod into

Speaker 2 and this guy 3d printed it for me and mailed it to me so used a 3d printer to fix some of the printer printer 995 and then you're going to print out the instructions to do that on that printer.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's amazing.

Speaker 2 You should just buy your own 3D printer, probably.

Speaker 3 No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Have you considered that, Jason? No, well, no, no, no.

Speaker 4 That's like conversation.

Speaker 2 Please convince me. Please continue.
Yes, sorry, Sam.

Speaker 4 The devil on his shoulder says, buy 3D printer. He's going to be on eBay right after this.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so that's the situation. That's kind of what that's what we were, the perspective we were coming this from from is people were mass printing all these whistles to warn people about ICE.

Speaker 4 And where a lot of these printing efforts are happening and the whistle thing, I think really got very popular.

Speaker 4 I don't know if it started there, but somewhere that it's been really useful is Chicago because Chicago is

Speaker 4 enduring a really serious, really intense

Speaker 4 ICE presence right now. Like ICE is occupying Chicago basically right now.
It's Operation Midway Blitz is what they're calling it.

Speaker 4 And there's been quite a bit of violence directed at protesters and just bystanders, people who are not even protesting have been subject to ICE's violence.

Speaker 4 And people are using the whistles to warn community members when ICE is around.

Speaker 4 So do you want to just talk a little bit about the importance of

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 4 effort to have this like really lightweight, easy,

Speaker 4 you know, no language barrier required type warning system, which I think is so interesting.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the no language barrier thing is

Speaker 2 very important.

Speaker 2 You're right to say that, yeah.

Speaker 4 I could hear it like down the street if someone was blowing a whistle, you know.

Speaker 2 Exactly. So, yeah, whistles have become really, really important in Chicago.
People were buying them

Speaker 2 and well, they're not really selling them, but people were buying them off Amazon or whatever, and then giving them out, or they were were buying them themselves um for a while it's not like it's not like the 3d printers came along and invented whistles obviously obviously that's not the case but there's been these big events in chicago that i was reading about in local press and in reuters as well where you know hundreds of people would gather together and they would get whistles and they would pair them with instructions on how to use the whistles.

Speaker 2 Obviously, everybody knows how to use a whistle. It's more, again, that blow it three times to say ice is around, or something like that.

Speaker 2 So, there's some sort of consistency in how they're being used. So, it's been very, very

Speaker 2 important there.

Speaker 2 Someone else I spoke to on the ground, a local resident,

Speaker 2 Justin, who I actually, it's funny, I followed them on Blue Sky and Twitter when we still use that platform and all of that sort of thing, because they were actually information security, and now they're doing something like this.

Speaker 2 And they just mentioned that you go to a grocery store in Chicago, or you go to a restaurant and people are handing out whistles if you go there.

Speaker 2 So they're very readily available and they've been in use for a while. It's just now, oh, some people are 3D printing them.
And I think that's very interesting for a number of different reasons.

Speaker 2 I think we'll get to

Speaker 2 a minute. But, you know, that changes.

Speaker 2 how people can get hold of them and how quickly sort of they can be sourced as well.

Speaker 4 Yeah, for sure and yeah i think the um

Speaker 4 the question that i keep seeing come up on social media and the response to the story that a few people not most people most people are like this is rad uh we love it but most many people are like why not just buy a whistle um why not just buy a bag of whistles on amazon or whatever um or go to the hardware store it's like first of all i can imagine chicago whistles are being are getting sold out um like in physical stores that's a fair point yeah and i don't know that for a fact but like i would think this is a a very in-demand item and it's probably hard to keep them stocked in like your regular mom and pop hardware store or sports store or whatever it is.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 4 what would you say to why,

Speaker 4 why 3D print the whistles? And what did the people that you talk to who are doing this on the ground say to that kind of like, oh, why not just buy them type of comment?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, it's funny that one of the responses from people who obviously didn't read the the article, and you always get that.

Speaker 2 We've been doing this for 10 years through the iPhones of social media. We see that every time.
But

Speaker 2 people would say, here, yeah, why don't you just get one from Amazon? It's so cheap.

Speaker 2 Literally, one of the people I spoke to who is making these whistles says it is cheaper than getting them on Amazon.

Speaker 2 According to their sort of back of the napkin math, it would be like, I don't know, 30 to 50 cents per whistle on Amazon. Obviously, that's still pretty cheap, but 3D printing, it's like 20, you know?

Speaker 2 And I mean, there are obvious other benefits as well.

Speaker 2 If you're setting up some sort of big manufacturing operation for whistles, if you're printing hundreds, I don't know, potentially thousands eventually whistles, if you were doing that normally, well, I think if you're trying to build them in that sort of capacity from a manufacturer in China or wherever, they're probably not going to engage with you because that's too few for like a mass production

Speaker 2 country like China or factories there or anything. You then have to organize relationships.
You have to figure out logistics, shipping them over.

Speaker 2 Maybe that'd be a pain in the ass with tariffs if there's a really big shipment.

Speaker 2 Who knows? All of this other logistical stuff. Or...

Speaker 2 You download a file off the internet and you hit print on your 3D printer in your home and it can be in people's hands within like presumably the same day or something.

Speaker 2 And it allows you to highly customize it.

Speaker 2 Again, one of the the people I spoke to, they said, yes, you can get whistles elsewhere, but this has two other purposes as well.

Speaker 2 It's solidarity because it's like, hey, I want to do something and I want to contribute. And the other one is that, again, these whistles sometimes come with particular logos on them.

Speaker 2 Some have no kings on there as well. Or they come with, again, the instructions on how to use them or the hotline.
for an immigrants and refugee rights organization.

Speaker 2 So yeah, obviously you can buy it on amazon and also maybe people just don't want to give more more money to jeff bezos that came up as well so i don't know i just think it's interesting to see that people turn

Speaker 2 and try to help in all sorts of different ways and this didn't make it into the article just because it wasn't the focus but you know i'm talking a lot to some of the rights groups on the ground in Chicago and they say, you know, we have people 3D printing whistles.

Speaker 2 We have people in like group chats coordinating, trying to get information out.

Speaker 2 We have other people looking at flight data, much like we do, really, to warn people about incoming helicopters or anything like that.

Speaker 2 And this is another way that people are trying to help their local community while all of this very aggressive ICE and Border Patrol, especially

Speaker 2 activities, you know, keep rocking Chicago and the suburbs. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, I think also, just to highlight, it's like we have seen ICE and DHS arrest protesters there. We've seen people get in trouble for like all sorts of things.

Speaker 3 I think it's someone also mentioned like you don't want to necessarily have a paper trail. Like, I bought 40,000 whistles on Amazon or I bought 40,000 whistles at Home Depot or whatever.

Speaker 3 Like, I think that that is also. like from an operational security standpoint, it's like, it's at least something to keep in mind.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I don't think this would happen, but we're in pretty weird times in that,

Speaker 2 yeah, investigating somebody who orders 40,000 whistles and gives them some trumped-up, bizarre

Speaker 2 conspiracy charge or something like that. Or, you know, we even see

Speaker 2 the Trump DOJ demanding that Apple remove particular apps, which are First Amendment protected speech. Who knows if the Trump administration could get on you for like buying a shit ton of whistles?

Speaker 2 Like, it's not outside the realm of possibility, like anymore.

Speaker 4 Yeah, for sure. Yeah.
It makes me, I mean,

Speaker 4 so it makes me think of Portland, which I'll get to in a second, but it,

Speaker 2 I think people,

Speaker 2 people think very like literally and

Speaker 4 tangibly in these cases sometimes, but a lot of the purpose of mutual aid is to like, aid, like detract yourself from the systems that you're trying to

Speaker 4 critique or work around or whatever it is. So like Jason said with the paper trail,

Speaker 4 or like you said, Joe, with the Amazon stuff, it's like, we're trying to build something that is actually like a community

Speaker 4 coalition and not keep feeding money into the systems that are making this whole thing worse. So it's like, yes, it would probably be faster and easier and more convenient.

Speaker 4 and maybe cost like 60 cents more to order a shitload of whistles on Timu or whatever. But the point here is to meet people in your community, to help the people in your community directly.

Speaker 4 There's a guy with a 3D printer willing to print out a ton of whistles.

Speaker 2 Great.

Speaker 4 Like, that's awesome. And it gets people involved and interested in a way that just doing it directly to your house with overnight shipping probably doesn't.

Speaker 4 And the customizability obviously is really good. But I was thinking of Portland just because of the inflatable suits thing.

Speaker 4 And this is something that, like, I don't really want to get into like the critiques of like the suits in other cities, but in Portland, they had a bunch of the suits where people could like check them out, like a library.

Speaker 4 So if you were going to a protest, people had a bunch of suits, and you could go borrow one and then bring it back when you were headed home.

Speaker 4 So it's not like adding more trash to the,

Speaker 4 it's not making an Amazon driver come bring you an overnight suit so you can go to No Kings, you know, which like a lot of people did, and that's fine.

Speaker 4 But I think there's a big difference between using them at a protest in Portland and checking it out from like a inflatable suit library run by your local mutual aid group and like overnighting a Pikachu suit.

Speaker 4 I don't know. I mean, it's just,

Speaker 4 it's a totally different thing that we're talking about when you're talking about people actually DIYing things that are

Speaker 4 disrupting like this, which is, I think, cool. And that's why we're covering it.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 why don't we get into like what the actual impact of the whistle system is in Chicago?

Speaker 4 Because you named some examples of like where this has actually been really helpful to people who are targets of ICE.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So again, spoke to people on the ground, including somebody who does sort of a community patrol

Speaker 2 near a school in, I think, just north of Chicago, if I'm remembering correctly. And they believe they're a high target for ICE and border patrol because they're a very multilingual and ethnic school.

Speaker 2 So maybe they're going to be targeted because of that. They described how a helicopter was buzzing overhead during Halloween just nearby the school, all of this sort of thing.
They

Speaker 2 said, you know, the whistles have been useful. And then there was a more specific case.

Speaker 2 Well, there's a couple I saw on social media, but one was somebody,

Speaker 2 it was in an Instagram post, was saying that they heard of all of these whistles going on and then they didn't really understand what it was, and then remembered, oh, that means ICE is in the vicinity.

Speaker 2 They then contacted their parents who are immigrants, and they were able to warn them. So then they weren't going to be at this location.
So clearly, it's having an impact.

Speaker 2 You know, I can't really think of a negative impact of it, apart from the tiny little bit of sound it produces. Like, okay, who gives a shit? Whatever.

Speaker 2 But from everything that I'm seeing and reading and being told, it is actually having an impact. Now, whether, is it specifically the 3D printed whistles?

Speaker 2 Don't really know, doesn't really matter, you know, like some are, some aren't. That's kind of impossible to tell, really.

Speaker 2 Um, but Justin, the former information security person and resident who's 3D printing these, he said, you know, I don't know if people are actually

Speaker 2 downloading my design. And he was the one who sort of took a whistle design and added the hotline to it and that sort of thing.
But you go on the page and it's been downloaded 20 times.

Speaker 2 I don't really know why 20 would be downloaded 20 times if people weren't using it with a 3D printer. There's no use to that file, you know? So, yeah, I know.

Speaker 2 I think it's interesting and I think it has generated some impact. And, you know, I'll definitely keep an eye on it.

Speaker 2 That said, and I didn't include this in the articles because I've only seen it in one place so far, but apparently, Border Patrol may be done with Chicago in the near future, as in they're moving on now, but that only came out today, so I guess we'll see.

Speaker 2 Sam, should we leave that there?

Speaker 2 Okay, all right.

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