This wonderful egalitarian person, like billions of others, wants real, not fake, democracy. The AI tech honchos want tyrannical power to install their data centers against the will of the vast majority of people. Go here to see 500+ photos of more wonderful egalitarians in my postal zip code.
Please restack this if you want more people to read it.
Heatmap.news reports:
Americans are presently trying to stop these data centers by legal means, such as electing politicians who will deny permits for them. The AI tech giants have the enormous power of Big $ to overcome this popular opposition.
What will Americans do to stop the data centers if legal means fail?
Well, I do in fact have a crystal ball (a gift from my son) that predicts the future.
Unfortunately, it came with the instructions in Chinese and I’ve only so far been able to make it predict just 20 minutes into the future. :)
Kidding aside, what will Americans do about these Satanic instruments of tyranny?
As just one example of this tyranny, take a look at this Guardian article about how Uber in Europe is using AI to analyze the personal data of Uber drivers to figure out for each individual driver separately, based on knowledge of their weaknesses, the minimum amount they can be paid to drive a particular rider somewhere. It’s truly diabolical!
This illustrates that when the rich are in power then AI will be used to benefit the rich at the expense of us, the have-nots. I elaborate on this point in my earlier Substack titled, “AI Overall HARMS and Not Benefits Us, the Have-Nots of the World. AI does obviously harmful things. Many of the supposedly beneficial things are also harmful. Our rulers are foisting AI on us, and they make the harmful things NOT optional. Let’s say NO to AI!” Most Americans understand this.
So, what’s going to happen if legal methods fail to stop the data centers?
I predict, based on history, that the proverbial pitchforks will come out: illegal methods will be used.
When Americans turned against slavery, which was of course totally legal, opposition began with illegal actions1 to prevent northern state governments from returning captured runaway slaves, which the states were required legally to do not only because of the Fugitive Slave Act but because of the U.S. Constitution itself. Next Americans used military violence—the Civil War—to emancipate the slaves from their bondage to the slave-owning planter class of the South, a class that, by the way, was hated by most southern whites during the Civil War as I discuss in detail here.
The Southern planter class after the Civil War re-imposed a kind of slavery on black people by enacting the racist Jim Crow laws. Black opposition to these laws eventually led to the Civil Rights Movement with its famous illegal sit-ins in violation of the segregation laws, and marches in violation of law enforcement orders, and an increasingly revolutionary discourse, all of which frightened the ruling class and made it fear what would happen (revolution) if it did not abolish the Jim Crow laws. This—as I discuss in some detail here—is why the notoriously racist president Lyndon Baines Johnson got Congress to abolish Jim Crow with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Many people wrongly think that legal action alone abolished Jim Crow. No! It was pitchforks.
The Vietnam war ended because U.S. GIs used a modern version of pitchforks, namely hand grenades or fragmentation bombs, the device used for “fragging” (killing) gung-ho officers who ordered the GIs to fight the Viet Cong. Read here in great detail how the illegal actions of GIs in resistance to the war and the military brass caused the military brass to tell president Nixon in 1975 that the war could not continue because the GIs were refusing to fight it.
The ruling class today has good reason to fear the pitchforks coming out if it continues to flaunt its tyrannical Big $ power to shove the Satanic data centers down the throats of us, the have-nots. I hope the tech tycoons are afraid, very afraid!
Here are links to my other posts about AI
“Constitution or no constitution, law or no law, we will not allow a fugitive slave to be taken from Massachusetts.” Read here about how this was the slogan of people in Massachusetts who fought (literally) to prevent runaway slaves from being sent by the state government back to their owners in the South.
Very prophetic in my opinion.
Corporate Day is Everyday.
Of course, Labor Day was embraced by the US government as an alternative to the more radical and global May Day.
As inequality has skyrocketed, we’ve not sufficiently examined some of the underlying reasons for that. One is the dominance of the corporate model. Corporations are hierarchical, basically fascistic, social structures and have been absurdly granted legal “personhood” by the courts as Richard Grossman stresses below. They are out to maximize profit and thus supercharge the power of capital, leaving labor in a ditch.
Efforts to deal with corporate power have largely done so only at the margins, regulating and litigating some of its most brazen excesses.
What we should be considering is how to redefine and displace. Rather than forming an amoral beast and then trying to constrain it in a few ways, we should be creating structures which help build up society in positive ways.
Corporations are chartered by the government, which professes to represent We the People. They were originally set up for a particular time and purpose. Now they are basically immortal — and the political system is often merely a shadow of corporate power.
Instead, we need to organize ourselves in ways that more strongly challenge corporate dominance.
Greenbelt is an interesting experimental community that was part of the New Deal. It has one of the oldest and largest housing cooperatives in the United States, a large food coop and a facilitating tool library. We should be fostering these and other even more visionary experiments to be developing a much more humane society and meaningfully challenge the corporate model’s dominance of our priceless lives.
Sam Hussani
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I Wanna Be Sick in America, I Wanna Come to America . . .
https://paulokirk.substack.com/p/i-wanna-be-sick-in-america-i-wanna