As tech companies race to build hyperscale data centers, communities are coming together to push back. Saul Levin joins Paris Marx to discuss how rising opposition to data center construction is uniting people across party lines and prompting broader conversations around what infrastructure people want instead.

How Local Activists are Interrupting Big Tech AI Investments

• Sam Altman’s “AI empire” alone is using as much power as New York City and San Diego, combined
• Google’s AI data centers are consuming massive amounts of power, with electricity use hitting 30.8 million megawatt-hours in 2024, nearly doubling since 2020 — while inking deals with the Israeli military
• Elon Musk’s xAI has constructed the world’s largest AI supercenter, Colossus, in one of the poorest neighborhoods in one of the country’s most impoverished cities

The neoliberal world order as we know it is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. But celebrations of its downfall are muted by the bleak reality of the world that is rising to take its place. Every day, our screens are flooded with images of war, genocide, and AI slop. And we all know we’re living in dark times.

So, what does this mean for us, and how do we move forward?

Our world and our access to it is increasingly structured through technological mediation: Digital platforms and systems are a massively important aspect of not just our work environments or our interactions with government entities or “the media” but also our individual interactions with one another. Our world is built around technological infrastructures that define what we see, who we can talk to and what information gets presented to us.

Surely a society of all narcissistic tech bros whose only talent is talking people into giving them money would be ideal, right guys? Right?

Explain: One of the funniest stories in history that I heard was Dostoevsky recounting some utopian thinkers among the Russian Aristocracy that wanted to make everything rational, and someone objected saying the peasants would never go for it, so they replied “then we’ll just eliminate the peasants”. As though a society of all rich people would somehow work, even though the peasants did all the work, which is sort of the one thing you actually need for society to operate. The rich people would literally just starve in like two seconds.

People sort of still have the same idea today though, like if we can just eliminate the poor somehow, everyone will be rich and live off the interest from their stocks or whatever, not realizing that stocks only go up because somewhere, someone is actually doing work. Oh right, and uh, the robots will do all human labor in like the …

A must-red Tumblr post: “Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper [On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots], and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.”

I fucking hate AI and I fucking love this page.

AI will be the death of us all.

A GNOME developer talking about why the Linux community should be using generative AI.

A podcast about AI in Español.

Good background on what LLMs are and I like that they critique LLMs not on quality but just straight up say that they’re unethical which is refreshing.