About

What this site is

The Hum is the civic-action arm of Cancel Clankers — the place where the anti-clanker argument shows up in the room where the substrate gets approved. We tell you where the next county zoning vote on a data-center facility is being decided, and how the room is run when you get there.

Editorial posture

Cancel Clankers makes the case that the humanoid replacement of human workers is the line. The Hum brings that case into the rooms where the infrastructure of replacement gets approved — Virginia county zoning hearings on data-center facilities, the warehouses that train the next generation of automated systems. We do not name elected officials in attack copy. We give the procedural facts and trust you to make your own argument.

What we cover

• Upcoming county Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors hearings in 8 active VA counties
• Public-comment windows for those proposals
• External press coverage of Virginia data-center fights
• How public comment works — what counts, who hears it

What we do not cover

• State-level proceedings (SCC dockets, General Assembly hearings) — deferred to a later phase
• Opinion content, op-eds, feature essays — out of charter
• Organizing tools (RSVPs, carpools) — deferred

Masthead

Edited by M. Reyes. A Cancel Clankers project. Contact: hum@cancelclankers.com.

How "marquee" hearings are designated

A small number of hearings each month are marked marquee. On the map these read as filled rust-colored discs rather than the routine surveyor's cross. On the home page and the upcoming hearings list, marquee items are flagged with a section marker (§) beside the date.

An event is marquee when its agenda packet identifies at least one data-center-related item that meets at least one of:

1. It is at the Board of Supervisors final-vote stage.
2. It has triggered organized community opposition — at least one published opposition letter from a named local group, or at least one prior contested Planning Commission vote on the same parcel or applicant.
3. It is a precedent-setting procedural vote — for example, a county's first by-right data-center ordinance, a setback-rule rewrite, or a comprehensive-plan amendment.

The designation is a judgment call by the editor, applied consistently. A hearing is not marquee because it is controversial in the abstract; it is marquee because something specific is decidable in the room that night.

How rows get added

Hearings are added manually each week by reading the published agendas of the 8 covered counties. News items are added when a relevant story is published. The site is built statically from CSV inputs — no scrapers, no live ingestion.