“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

— George Orwell

Silicon Valley wants to control every single aspect of your life. They want to tell you what you can and can’t think. They want to control your movements. They want to monitor your every word. They want to strip the masses of their critical thinking skills, and to be able to crush any sign of dissent with the push of a button. They want us to be totally and helplessly dependent on them.

And now they’re coming for our communities.

The large-scale data center buildout we’re seeing spread across the country like a particularly virulent strain of plague is the latest mechanism through which big tech seeks to expand its empire of control over us lowly consumer peons. These data centers are, of course, being built to facilitate the ubiquitous and largely unwanted insinuation of artificial intelligence into every conceivable facet of our lives.

There’s a deeply perverted irony to the fact that tech giants are seducing their way into communities by promising data center job booms through one side of their mouths, while proudly boasting about how artificial intelligence is expected to eliminate entire workforce sectors with the other.

Said CEO and AI consultant Elijah Clark, in an interview with Gizmodo last year: “CEOs are extremely excited about the opportunities that AI brings. As a CEO myself, I can tell you, I’m extremely excited about it. I’ve laid off employees myself because of AI. AI doesn’t go on strike. It doesn’t ask for a pay raise. These things that you don’t have to deal with as a CEO.”

As for the purported jobs we’re to expect will come rolling into town with the construction of these facilities? In one pitiful instance reported by Cleveland.com back in March, a $136 million data center in Northeast Ohio receiving a $4.5 million sales tax exemption was slated to create a whopping ten new full-time positions. And this is supposed to somehow even remotely compensate for the immense damage being done to our communities by these resource hungry behemoths?

The buildout of data centers is rapidly becoming an ecological catastrophe. Environmental tolls from these facilities can include cancer-causing forever chemicals, the draining of critical water resources, infrasound and light pollution, wildlife habitat loss, deadly air pollution including smog and acid rain, along with a vast array of other issues. That includes, most notably, a massive explosion in greenhouse gas emissions, with WIRED recently estimating that dirty power sources for planned data center facilities could emit some 129 million tons per year — handily eclipsing the greenhouse gas outputs of numerous entire nations.

Famed Epstein associate Bill Gates at one point went to great lengths to style himself as some sort of benevolent climate savior, even authoring the best-selling book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster” in 2021. Then, all at once, he appeared to have an abrupt change of heart in October of last year.

“Although climate change will have serious consequences – particularly for people in the poorest countries – it will not lead to humanity’s demise,” he wrote. “This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives.”

Suddenly, it seemed, reducing greenhouse gas emissions in order to avoid a climate disaster wasn’t all that important to Gates. It’s surely no coincidence that Microsoft was now stumbling headlong into the AI race, with the company currently poised to abandon its 2030 clean energy targets as a result of increased energy demands. I would also be remiss not to point out that around this time, Microsoft’s AI was being implemented by Israel to carry out its barbaric campaign of genocide and ecocide in Gaza — a chilling portent of how we can likely expect these dystopian technologies to be used once conflict and social unrest brought on by environmental collapse begin to manifest in ernest.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp, whom I genuinely believe to be a sociopath, was pressed last year about the unconstitutionality of the Trump Administration’s horrific attacks on Venezuelan fishing boats, blatant war crimes carried out with the aim of invading the country and pillaging its 300 billion barrels of oil.

“Part of the reason why I like this questioning,” Karp replied, “is the more constitutional you want to make it, the more precise you want to make it, the more you’re going to need my product. So you keep pushing on making it constitutional. I’m totally supportive of that.”

Palantir, for the uninitiated, is a nefarious tech company with its tentacles in everything from healthcare to mass surveillance, farmland management to autonomous weapons, the CIA, the U.S. military, and more. In March, Palantir’s Anthony Bak and Mehdi Alhassani published a column in the billionaire-owned Washington Post entitled “Don’t forget who wins in the fight against data centers,” arguing that “Bipartisan efforts to stop the build-out will make AI accessible only to the wealthy.”

“The surest way to guarantee that artificial intelligence becomes a tool of the wealthy elite,” they claim, “is to block the infrastructure that would make it cheap for everyone else. Across the country, though, a growing coalition of activists, local officials and leaders on both the left and right are fighting explicitly to halt data center construction, restrict energy development, stop microchip production and slow the build-out of the backbone upon which cheap AI will depend.”

In other words, these two stooges for the wealthy elite, writing in a propaganda rag owned by the wealthy elite, truly think you’re stupid enough to believe that they have your best interests at heart. The best way to shield ourselves from being exploited by the wealthy elite, they argue, is to welcome them into our communities with open arms.

I don’t know about you, but the future these people are creating for us is not a future I want to live in.

I don’t want data center hubs leaking PFAS into the water supply so that my government can spy on me. I don’t want to be exposed to constant air, noise, and light pollution so that half the country’s jobs can be replaced by artificial intelligence. I don’t want to see ecosystems and natural resources destroyed to help companies like Palantir and Anthropic commit large-scale massacres of Iranian schoolchildren. I don’t want to cede the precious last fumes of Earth’s remaining carbon budget so that an elite cadre of megalomaniacs can reign supreme over the tattered remnants of our world.

And that’s why I’m doing something about it.

I’m proud to say that I’m a part of the aforementioned “growing coalition of activists fighting explicitly to halt data center construction.”

Everyday people across Ohio are engaged in an ambitious effort to amend our state’s Constitution, in order to ban the construction of large scale data centers that consume over 25 megawatts of energy per month. Under the banner of Conserve Ohio, volunteers are working hard to collect signatures that would put this initiative on the ballot to be voted on in our November election.

Together, we hold the power to prevent Silicon Valley from steamrolling small communities to enact their dystopian vision of the future.

For more information on where to sign the petition, or to get involved in our efforts, please visit conserveohio.com. The petition is also available to sign during business hours at Cobbler John’s in Marietta.

Aaron Dunbar is a member of Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action.