“So many people come to this issue because all of a sudden, overnight, there is a data center proposal or a facility going up in their community often with very little notice, without their knowledge, without any meaningful transparency or public decision-making,” Alli Finn, partnership and strategy lead at the AI Now Institute, said. “And the impacts are material and, in many cases, immediate: pollution and traffic from construction, air pollution from operation of diesel generators.” Finn pointed to water use, as well as the “most immediate” effect for many: “raising their electricity bill.”
But these are also fights about class power, as is abundantly clear in a beautifully granular Politico article about a data center fight in Northern Virginia, which shows the lengths that those who profit from data centers must go to circumvent local democratic governance. Says Finn, “There’s a bigger context of how decisions are made and by whom, to serve whom. Who this buildout is serving, who’s getting these tax breaks, where these public dollars are being spent. And many people correctly see that it’s not for them, that it doesn’t serve them, that they are being shut out of critical conversations about how the resources in their community are used.” Asking even bigger and even more disturbing questions, Finn says, many are wondering, about the tech oligarchs and corporations, “what this future is that they have chosen for us?”
Read the article here.
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