by Buddy Bell 

There are numerous similarities between colonialism and the rollout of artificial intelligence, as has been noted by journalist and author Karen Hao, who wrote the bestseller, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. I think it is a useful allegory for both identifying and overcoming the AI industry’s contradictions.

In the first place, both empires and AI companies simply take property not their own. That doesn’t only include stealing intellectual property, hogging scarce sources of power and clean water. Also the labor power of humans is stolen. For example, gig annotators in low-income countries are doing critical work to label content in pictures and videos for less than $2 per hour. They sometimes suffer trauma from labeling violent and pornographic content. They are forced by subcontractors to jump through hoops to achieve payroll, and that’s if the subcontractor did not up and disappear in the meantime.

HARM DONE TO AI SUBCONTRACTORS

Ephantus Kanyugi, of Kenya: “You have to spend your whole day looking at dead bodies and crime scenes… People develop eyesight problems, back problems, people go into anxiety and depression… then despite working so many hours, you only get poor pay, and you might also not get paid.”

Some of the 1.2 million platform workers in Kenya have formed the Kenya Union of Gig Workers (KUGWO), which has been organizing protests at the national Senate and the Ministry of Labor, sending them its own reports (unsolicited) about what rule changes are needed to address the ways that “digital platforms were fundamentally changing the nature of work.”

The other similarity cited by Hao is that both colonizers and AI pushers stake a claim on a moral imperative, a manifest destiny where this technology must be allowed to proceed because it will cure cancer and eliminate poverty. This is the line touted in Congressional hearings or when addressing potential regulation. And yet as Hao noted in an interview with the Intercept, the AI industry touts “the bicycle version, while they actually build the rocket version.”

The antisocial comments of someone like Elon Musk are illustrative of Hao’s point. Supposing AI could conglomerate all the transportation paths and potential paths of the daily commutes of all workers in a major metro area, maybe it would have something useful to contribute about building up mass transit in a logical and efficient way. Several years ago, Musk tweeted about public transit, “It’s a pain in the ass. That’s why everyone doesn’t like it. And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of whom might be a serial killer, OK, great.” This happened back when Musk’s pet project du jour, paid for in surplus value extracted from his employees, was to bore holes in the ground for individual transport capsules. The tunnels being too impractical, what we now have left are robo-taxis.

COMPANY’S LAST CONCERN: WORKERS

Yao Xinnong, a taxi driver in China, took a pay cut of 40% when a fleet of robo-taxis was allowed to begin operations in 2022. These changes led to a major protest of taxi drivers in Wuhan in 2024, though it was promptly censored. A traditional taxi company which had published a note critical of the government was later told not to speak to media on threat of detention. The note said: “The recent rise of autonomous ride-hailing vehicles has allowed technology to monopolise resources and take away the livelihoods of people at the bottom of society.”

As the 2026 News and Letters Committees’ Draft Perspectives thesis mentions, AI has stunted “hiring and creation of new jobs, which is harder to track than layoffs.” Besides that, in the gig economy, people would simply walk away if their wages fell too low due to AI automation, and the media might never hear about it. Workers who still remain in formal employment are expected to be more productive than ever with nary a raise in pay. Veteran workers in computer engineering are asked to use AI more often.

A San Francisco company called “Artisan” sells a large language model. Their advertising spiel: The right destination for the productivity gains AI is unlocking is more time for people, not more output for companies. Too bad this mantra does not describe capitalism, in the U.S. or anywhere else. The law of motion of capitalist accumulation stops for no rhetorician. Everyone from hospital nurses to food service workers have experienced steady increases in workload because companies have decided that when one worker calls it quits, the company can simply redistribute the work over fewer employees, thereby increasing the amount of surplus labor extracted.

If “leisure as moral imperative” helps sell a product to people who can afford it, then “competition” (with China, or between “our children” and their children in the suburbs… in another state) streamrolls opposition to data center construction because we better get it built quick! But the brazenness of the pushers and the sheer weight of what they are asking people to sacrifice has inspired those people to apply the brakes, through collective action that has blocked about $60 billion worth of data center projects as of earlier this year.

PROTESTS AGAINST AI DATA CENTERS INTENSIFY 

The AI data centers gobble up local clean water, which is siphoned off from the drinking supply and from the reserve needed to grow food. Potable water is needed to cool the equipment because other sources could cause corrosion or promote bacterial growth. Water is also typically necessary for the process of generating electric power, of which the data centers need wattage similar to an entire city. In a predominantly Black part of Memphis, Tennessee, Elon Musk’s 69 methane gas turbines on the border with Mississippi pollute the local air with 2,500 tons of airborne particulates each year. After a supposed emergency energy shortage in Michigan, a coal plant set to be decommissioned had its life extended by Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. Worldwide, 15 new nuclear power plants are expected to come online by the end of this year, compared to only two in 2025.

Then, the tech companies expect to be paid for the damage wreaked. In the area surrounding Chicago O’Hare airport, data centers already have incentives in the form of ready access to fiber lines for data transmission and plenty of space to build sprawling facilities. Still, 18 data centers in the northwest suburbs went town-shopping and received tax breaks from local officials, from Cook County officials, and from the state under Gov. Pritzker. An analysis by the Chicago Tribune indicated that a total of about $2 billion was reduced from assessments of the taxable property value of the facilities, including the omission of the value of separate but expansive chillers. According to the Tribune, the average homeowner in the suburb of Northlake would have saved $2,000 per year if these tax “incentives” were not offered and the companies had paid their fair share of property tax.

In Virginia, no state sales tax or use tax has ever been levied on the tech industry since 2010. A split in the Democratic Party over repealing this rake of corporate welfare led to a state budget impasse last March. “How much electricity will a data center use? How much water will it use? Where will it come from? Who will pay? Us or them?” are among the questions asked by a Virginia watchdog organization called Power in the Dark. Their elected officials had signed NDAs when approving the data centers and have used these NDAs as a convenient cover to evade speaking about their missteps.

But in asking the (rhetorical) questions above, making explicit the contradictions in AI as manifested in the current objective reality, members of the communities affected by data centers are reaching toward a collective action of transcendence of these contradictions through negation. This echoes the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who wrote: “The process of carrying forward this form of knowledge of itself is the task which spirit accomplishes as actual History.”[1]

The transcendence, far from simply removing the AI industry’s power and that of their sycophants in government, also involves finding a way forward to institute technology in a way that aligns with a philosophy of humanism. New applications of AI should be useful for human society and not come at too high a cost to sustainable living.

“One thing that makes my head explode is when people go around and say, ‘We need to teach our children to use AI responsibly.’ Really what we need is responsible products to be on the market,” says teacher and author Rebecca Winthrop. Her observation and similar ones could become a “new point of departure”[2] when enough people burned by the current iteration of AI can self-determine within organization.

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