Americans, this is your chance to slap down the tech broligarchs

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“The world should accept some bad things happening,” Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, said recently, “for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.” Like so many things tech oligarchs say, it’s incoherent, since Altman would like to deny the world and the people in it the agency to decide whether or not we should accept his bad things. Surveys show that most Americans would like to pause AI; opposition to AI datacenters is a factor in many races in the midterm elections. People are outraged and anxious about what tech hath wrought, mad enough to fight back in what is coming to seem like a human v machine battle.

I’ve been a fan of the film Terminator 2 forever, the one where a badass female protagonist leads the action-movie-style spectacular destruction of Skynet, the massive computer system that will otherwise go rogue and pit itself and a plethora of advanced weapons against the human race. We’re not in a film and we’re probably not going to solve the problems big tech creates through spectacular violence, although the guerrilla campaigns to take down, disable or destroy Flock cameras have some action-movie charms (wading through the bureaucratic process of getting cities to reject or take down the surveillance technology is probably more effective.)

A few months ago, I was surprised to find myself using the term “beautiful hatred” to describe the nationwide revolt against datacenters, Flock cameras, AI, and tech corporations and the oligarchs (or broligarchs) they’ve spawned. It is beautiful because behind fierce opposition to a destructive force is something you’re trying to protect from destruction, something you care about, even love. Behind this revolt against big tech is concern about many things, from the climate to democracy to mental health and humanity itself.

Like the Trump administration, the tech overlords have proceeded on the assumption they can ignore or override the will of the people. The will of the people is in the process of proving them wrong, at least to some extent, and the midterms will be, among other things, a referendum on the GOP’s alignment with predatory tech giants over the public they’re supposed to serve and, arguably, humanity itself. It’s sometimes said only a common enemy can unite a country, and in that sense Silicon Valley has provided something useful at last, because across the political spectrum people hate datacenters and are working to stop them. Datacenterwatch.org reports that at least 142 activist groups across 24 states have organized to block datacenter construction and expansion.

Often the foregrounded concerns are about local issues – effects on land, water, electricity prices, noise – since datacenters offer a lot of negatives and, arguably, no real positives, not even more than a handful of local jobs. But behind that is beautiful hatred of the high-handed efforts to bludgeon communities into accepting something for which they’ll get little in return but trouble – and of AI itself. A nine-year-old I spend time with recently remarked: “I don’t trust AI,” more or less out of the blue, and I think she speaks for a lot of us. Never mind my nine-year-old; the pope is speaking up against it, too, saying in a recent social media post: “Algorithms lack the spark of humanity” and calling on us to “safeguard our humanity” against tech’s incursions.

The tech leaders onstage with Trump at his second inauguration thought they’d turn him into their golden escalator up; the current revolt suggests they could follow him on the golden escalator down. In San Francisco, more than 1,000 nurses and community members came out in a march in September to demand that hospitals cut ties with Palantir, Peter Thiel’s sinister surveillance corporation that also aids Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Nurses in the march noted that the software makes significant errors, violates patient confidentiality and the president of the California Nurses Association and National Nurses Organizing Committee said: “The violence and destruction unleashed by immigration agents and enabled by Palantir is a total violation of nursing values of care and compassion.”

Recent news stories, following former Anthropic safety employee Jacob Coxon’s statements about AI’s near-term apocalyptic risks, were further reminders of the absolute amorality of Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei. The documents for Anthropic’s IPO acknowledged AI models could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity”, and the sheer arrogance of choosing to make profit-driven private decisions about the collective future is another reason to loathe and oppose them. Although there are useful and legitimate applications of this technology, the people pushing it on us are pursuing its more dangerous and corrosive uses, even as their products again and again prove harmful and unreliable. In recent weeks another AI safety employee quit, OpenAI’s David Robinson, with a statement noting: “The future depends on wisdom that Silicon Valley lacks.”

We will not see anything as dramatic and decisive as the explosion of Skynet, but we are seeing enough of a grassroots opposition going after so many aspects of tech, that maybe history will remember it as the beginning of our war against the machines. A new organization called Mothers Against Media Addiction (Mama) is going after the effects of the internet and smartphones on children. Other encouraging developments include New York City’s decision to ban AI for students through eighth grade, and the most recent round of lawsuits against Meta for what Instagram and Facebook do to children. Meanwhile congressional Democrats, spurred on by their constituents, are stumbling toward regulation of the tech industry that protects human beings against machines and the owners of those machines.

Another new organization, called the Association for Human Mathematics (AHM), founded in September, declares that it “protects mathematics as a human endeavor against the threat of artificial intelligence”. AHM seems to have been founded in response to OpenAI claiming it solved one of the longstanding problems in mathematics. Since then it has gone after many more, much to the dismay of mathematicians. The mission statement recognizes, as many creative workers do, that the process of thinking, struggling, creating, learning, writing is at least as important as the product, that in doing the work we form ourselves as well as arrive as results. “Why surrender our agency (that amazing ability we have to reach across time and space, with our strange, idiosyncratic phenomenon, and land within the sensibility of another human being) to something that, by its very design, pushes the individual sensibility aside?” said novelist George Saunders of AI.

The spiritually bereft rhetoric of AI, like so much tech rhetoric, insists that doing things is hard and we don’t want to do hard things. As the brilliant tech critic Sherry Turkle points out, AI as currently promoted and used threatens to “deskill” us both intellectually and emotionally, if we depend on it for a sycophantic pandering to our egos in place of the challenge of human relationships, if we make it do our mental labor for us. Like physical strength, emotional and intellectual strength are achieved through efforts tech would like us to abandon in favor of outsourcing the work to their products. A third new anti-AI organization, launched by longtime climate activist Phil Aroneanu, is called Irreplaceable.org, and while its main goal is to regulate AI, its premise is that we need to protect our incomes, our rights, our freedom, but also our humanity against the tech corporations pushing AI.

These new developments point to something that’s going to be important in the resistance to big tech: as it seeks to literally dehumanize us and argues for replacing human beings (and at its most extreme, humanity itself), we must define and cherish and defend what does make us human and what makes being human joyful, meaningful, dignified and honorable. It’s a more nuanced, undramatic job than, say, going after Flock cameras, but not less important. I began this essay talking about beautiful hatred. It is only beautiful if it knows what it opposes because it knows what it loves and endeavors to defend. In this case, we’re defending nearly everything, including democracy, human creativity, human nature and nature itself. Terminator 2’s subtitle is Judgment Day; judgment day in 2026 will be election day, and I’ll be rooting – and voting – for humanity against oligarchical technology.

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility

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