Data centers #2

Over the last year the emergence of data centers and the push to advance AI have accelerated. Communities across the state are facing serious questions about land use and access to resources.  

This week DTE asked for another  $474.3 million electric rate hike. This request comes just three months after the Public Service Commission granted a $242-million hike. In an unusual move, DTE said it would pause additional rate hikes if the Oracle data center in Saline opens by 2027.  Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel likened the move to “blackmail” and is challenging the rate hike and its connection to data centers. 

This is an indication of the relentlessness of corporate interests to advance these centers.

What is the driving this push to accelerate the development of these centers?

No small part of the answer is found in the inauguration of Donald Trump and his primary backers—the techno billionaires. A recent article in the New York Times noted, “Since its early years, OpenAI believed that A.G.I. would transform the global economy and generate untold wealth for its creators.” But for most people, life would become poorer as “A.I. systems would be able to do almost any job a human could and thus would shift power from labor to capital.” The result is that most people will find themselves “worse off than they are today.” 

But there are deeper shifts happening in our world, shifts that are being accelerated by AI, but flow from deeper systems collapse. As the systems around us are dying, those who would protect and advance their own profits and privileges are moving toward authoritarian, fascist futures. AI and data centers are essential to fascism as they enable tactics of control and force to be used against those who would resist such a future.

Technologies are not neutral. Under racial finance capital, every new technology has ultimately been used to protect power and privileges of a few. 

And just as the rate of data centers is accelerating exponentially, so too are the inequalities imbedded in it.

The current levels of economic inequality in our country are staggering. For example, Over the past two years, 19 households added $1.8 trillion to their coffers, roughly the size of the entire economy of Australia.

The introduction of massive data centers will make this worse.  A recent analysis explored the impact of this concentration of wealth not only on the quality of our lives but on our systems of governance, explaining: 

The impact of this kind of shift in wealth alters the basic premise of democratic systems. For any society in which this much wealth gets concentrated in so few hands, and is then so easily parlayed into political clout, the question becomes one not just of economics but of basic civic standing. At some point soon, we will no longer share in self-government.

This inequality has accelerated over the last 50 years.  

In the early 1960’s, James Boggs predicted that the advance of automation would create a permanent underclass, people not only displaced from the workforce but who would never have access to jobs as machines replaced human beings in the processes of production.

Boggs also predicted that computers were developing in ways that incorporated skills and thinking into machines, arguing that our future would see skilled workers, from teachers to doctors, being displaced as machines took over their functions.

A recent article in the New York Times affirmed this view:

As A.I. transforms anything …The jobs most at risk… are administrative and office support staff, sales, and lower-level computer programmers — all roles with salaries of $40,000 to $100,000. One-quarter of computer programming jobs disappeared in 2023 and 2024. 

Human beings are no longer needed to produce goods and services. We can now produce more than we need or could consume. But if we do not need human beings for labor, then WHAT ARE HUMAN BEINGS FOR?

If we are not needed to produce goods, write plays, or develop ideas, why do we need each other?

This loss of a sense of purpose, of meaning for our lives, coincides with the very real possibility of our extinction as a species. Shifting climate, ecological collapse, and intensified warfare are no longer science fiction scenarios.

This question of our purpose is ripping through our societies, creating a sense that people are disposable. Our young people are not able to see a future of joy and meaning.  

This is why the community struggles against data centers are so important. They are providing an extraordinary opportunity for us to reimagine together our obligations to one another and our planet.