- Astroturf
- Manufactured support or opposition designed to look grassroots, identifiable by uniformity and opacity: on-message testimony from strangers, overnight professional signage, groups with untraceable membership and funding. Its central coordination leaves fingerprints, and its discovery destroys the credibility of every true thing the company also said.
- Ideologically aligned opposition
- Sincere, unpaid opponents whose objection is categorical, to data centers, load growth, or the AI build-out, rather than to a specific parcel. The tell is that their testimony would read identically in any county. No site-specific concession moves them, and confusing them with paid astroturf is a serious analytical error.
- Immediately affected
- Residents whose objection is physical and local because they live near the site, in view of it or over the same aquifer. Their concern is genuine and largely satisfiable through concrete concessions like setbacks, noise mitigation, and traffic routing, which makes them the most winnable wave of opposition.
- Institutionalized opposition
- A community group that has acquired permanence, a spokesperson, a lawyer, a mailing list that outlives a single project. Much contemporary opposition is such standing infrastructure, built during an earlier fight and simply pointed at the newest applicant, which is why reconnaissance on prior fights matters.
- Social license
- A community's substantive conclusion that a project's presence is, on net, acceptable to it given attached concessions and benefits. It is earned in the substance of the project and merely communicated through engagement; it cannot be manufactured, because the community evaluates its own lived experience, the traffic it sees and the water bill it pays.
- Third-party engagement firm
- A specialist consultancy hired to run local engagement, bringing relationships, market knowledge, and useful distance. Legitimate when its work would survive full disclosure; dangerous when used to manufacture the appearance of support or to keep the company permanently dependent rather than teaching it the market.
- Transparency portal
- A public website where a developer posts water, energy, noise, tax, and timeline data to fill the information vacuum opposition thrives on. It rewards genuine candor and punishes evasion, because it converts every promise-performance gap into documented, timestamped evidence a critic can screenshot.
- Trigger document
- A dated public filing, such as a rezoning application, site plan, or utility interconnection request, that gives a community a specific thing to oppose and a deadline to organize around, converting latent unease into active opposition. The date matters as much as the content.