US midterms put tech oligarchs in the political crosshairs

The local fight has a national shape

At least 142 activist groups in 24 states have joined efforts to stop new data centers or expansions, according to Datacenterwatch.org. Their immediate concerns are concrete: land and water use, electricity prices and noise. Solnit argues that the facilities offer communities little in return, including only a few local jobs.

Source: theguardian.com

The dispute is also about who gets to make decisions. Residents are resisting what Solnit describes as arrogant attempts to impose projects that bring them little benefit and substantial disruption. For some, opposition to data centers is also opposition to AI itself.

That sentiment is reaching into other institutions:

The common thread is not a single policy or political identity. It is the growing sense that the costs of technology are being pushed onto people who had little say in adopting it.

The argument is about what people lose

AI’s risks are part of that resistance. In its IPO documents, Anthropic acknowledged that AI models could create “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.” Solnit sees a deeper problem in private companies making decisions about the shared future in pursuit of profit. The technology has useful applications, she argues, but its promoters keep pushing uses that are more dangerous and destructive, while the products repeatedly prove harmful and unreliable.

Recent accounts of Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic safety employee who spoke of imminent apocalyptic risks from AI, have renewed Solnit’s criticism of Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei. In recent weeks, David Robinson, another AI safety specialist at OpenAI, resigned. In his statement, he said Silicon Valley lacked the wisdom on which the future depended.

Other opposition focuses less on catastrophic risk than on children, work and human skills. A new Association for Humanistic Mathematics (AHM), founded in September, says it is “protecting mathematics as a human activity from the threat of artificial intelligence.” Its formation appears to have followed OpenAI’s announcement that it had solved a longstanding mathematical problem; the company has since taken on others, to mathematicians’ displeasure.

Solnit connects that concern to a broader question: whether people will give up the effort of thinking, learning and creating because a machine can produce an answer. Technology critic Sherry Turkle has warned that current AI development and use could deprive people of intellectual and emotional skills, as they turn to AI for flattery instead of difficult human relationships or hand over mental work to it.

I think this is where the political case against AI becomes more than a list of harms. A data center’s effects can be measured in land, water, power and noise; the loss of skills is harder to count, but it reaches into how people learn and relate to one another. Solnit’s argument is that the effort itself matters, not just the result.

The ballot is one front

Solnit points to a new organization, Irreplaceable.org, founded by longtime climate activist Phil Aroneanu. Its central aim is AI regulation; its premise is that people need to protect their income, rights, freedom and human nature from corporations promoting AI.

That puts the coming midterms in a wider frame. Solnit argues they will test whether the Republican Party stands with technology corporations over the people it is meant to serve. Democrats in Congress, under pressure from constituents, are gradually moving toward regulation intended to protect people from machines and their owners.

There is no dramatic Skynet explosion on the horizon. The resistance is less cinematic: campaigns against data centers and surveillance cameras, new advocacy groups, lawsuits and pressure on elected officials. Solnit’s comparison to Terminator 2 is less a prediction than a way to describe the scale of the conflict she sees taking shape.

My guess is that the harder question is not whether people can oppose a particular company or system. It is whether they can say what they want to preserve: democracy, creativity, human relationships and the natural world. Solnit calls resistance a “beautiful hatred” only when people know what they love and want to protect. The tension is that the political fight may be easier to organize than that deeper account of what a human life should be.