Xander dows a good job of showing how the infrastructure itself not only drives structural inequality, but is a technique for control, counterinsurgency, ans genocide-ecocide.
So the difference between AI data center and windfarm is not all that different — both are industrial techniques that destroy land for profit, and one being “green” or not is more a marketing gimmick.
Planet of the Humans was one documentary that pissed a lot of people off. White feminism as an imperial appropriation of equality might wish to ensure industrial tech is everywhere, and only time separates us from more efficient turbines/electrical power, but it is a neocolonial technique that undermines traditional relations to land, culture, etc.
You can argue AI data centers are a huge problem because the energy they require, but green tech requires all that too, or that they will be better and better so it’s not a problem.
The issue is that the industrial technology ans infrastructure itself demands vast energy, and whether it’s greenwashed or not, the problem is ever increasingly efficient industrial technology deployed for profit, and this infrastructure driving ecocide and genocide.
Thats the conundrum, when electricity and electrical systems depend on extracting rare earth minerals in the name of equity while technically doing the opposite.
Right, infrastructure is never neutral. It carries logics of control, ordering, and power, whether it arrives as a data center, a wind farm, a dam, or a highway. I can't wait to dig into Xander’s work here, especially if they are pointing to how material systems often double as political ones. The grid is not just wires… it’s governance, etc.
At the same time, I’m hesitant to collapse all infrastructures into a single moral category.
Industrial systems can absolutely (and more often than not, do) displace, extract, and undermine existing relationships to land and culture. That has happened repeatedly in colonial and postcolonial contexts, often under the banner of progress or equity. But it doesn’t follow that every technological intervention is structurally identical in intent or outcome, even though that's the tendency these days.
"Green vs not green” isn't the distinction I try to keep in my head or in my writing, since that can easily become marketing language, as you note. It’s whether an infrastructure deepens extractive logics or begins to reconfigure them. Intent can be difficult to discern, but impacts often speak truths to those.
Some projects scale domination and enclosure, but others (however imperfectly) reduce dependence on older regimes of combustion, toxicity, and centralized control. Wind and solar are not innocent, but they are also not equivalent to fossil systems in their ecological trajectories or long-term atmospheric effects (and I hope AI will help us develop more effective, efficient, and less extractive means of producing panels since our tree kin have been living off of the sun's "free" energy for far longer than we have been around). EV's, on the other hand... I have little hope.
The deeper issue, as you point out, may be the industrial metabolism itself. Modern infrastructure tends to demand continuous, sustained growth and throughput of resources in the pursuit of efficiency and capitalistic gains. AI simply adds a new layer to that pattern, tying cognition into the same energetic circuits that already shape global inequality.
All of that to say, I think the question(s) is less about choosing the “right” technology and more about how infrastructures are governed, situated, and constrained.
Who decides where they go?
Who benefits? (not just thinking of humans here but also our tree kin, rivers, forest ecosystems... all "personhoods" of being that we should take into consideration)
Who bears the material burden? (same as above)
And can they be designed in ways that support local resilience rather than erode it?
Those are still open questions in places like here in Spartanburg or the Carolinas, where systematic racism is still a driving answer to some of those questions. I'm interested in shifting these local conversations from just impact to also orientation… not necessarily to defend or condemn any particular project, but to make visible the fact that these systems reorganize land, attention, and power in ways we need to see clearly before we normalize them (Stein's empathy before ethics).
Of course, I wouldn't mind treating data centers, AI, and computers in general like the Kesh people in Always Coming Home if I had my preference.
You may enjoy this researcher: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=bXsLn9UAAAAJ&hl=en
Appreciate that! Writing a longer paper on all of this now, so that's definitely a good connection to make!
Xander dows a good job of showing how the infrastructure itself not only drives structural inequality, but is a technique for control, counterinsurgency, ans genocide-ecocide.
So the difference between AI data center and windfarm is not all that different — both are industrial techniques that destroy land for profit, and one being “green” or not is more a marketing gimmick.
Planet of the Humans was one documentary that pissed a lot of people off. White feminism as an imperial appropriation of equality might wish to ensure industrial tech is everywhere, and only time separates us from more efficient turbines/electrical power, but it is a neocolonial technique that undermines traditional relations to land, culture, etc.
You can argue AI data centers are a huge problem because the energy they require, but green tech requires all that too, or that they will be better and better so it’s not a problem.
The issue is that the industrial technology ans infrastructure itself demands vast energy, and whether it’s greenwashed or not, the problem is ever increasingly efficient industrial technology deployed for profit, and this infrastructure driving ecocide and genocide.
Thats the conundrum, when electricity and electrical systems depend on extracting rare earth minerals in the name of equity while technically doing the opposite.
Right, infrastructure is never neutral. It carries logics of control, ordering, and power, whether it arrives as a data center, a wind farm, a dam, or a highway. I can't wait to dig into Xander’s work here, especially if they are pointing to how material systems often double as political ones. The grid is not just wires… it’s governance, etc.
At the same time, I’m hesitant to collapse all infrastructures into a single moral category.
Industrial systems can absolutely (and more often than not, do) displace, extract, and undermine existing relationships to land and culture. That has happened repeatedly in colonial and postcolonial contexts, often under the banner of progress or equity. But it doesn’t follow that every technological intervention is structurally identical in intent or outcome, even though that's the tendency these days.
"Green vs not green” isn't the distinction I try to keep in my head or in my writing, since that can easily become marketing language, as you note. It’s whether an infrastructure deepens extractive logics or begins to reconfigure them. Intent can be difficult to discern, but impacts often speak truths to those.
Some projects scale domination and enclosure, but others (however imperfectly) reduce dependence on older regimes of combustion, toxicity, and centralized control. Wind and solar are not innocent, but they are also not equivalent to fossil systems in their ecological trajectories or long-term atmospheric effects (and I hope AI will help us develop more effective, efficient, and less extractive means of producing panels since our tree kin have been living off of the sun's "free" energy for far longer than we have been around). EV's, on the other hand... I have little hope.
The deeper issue, as you point out, may be the industrial metabolism itself. Modern infrastructure tends to demand continuous, sustained growth and throughput of resources in the pursuit of efficiency and capitalistic gains. AI simply adds a new layer to that pattern, tying cognition into the same energetic circuits that already shape global inequality.
All of that to say, I think the question(s) is less about choosing the “right” technology and more about how infrastructures are governed, situated, and constrained.
Who decides where they go?
Who benefits? (not just thinking of humans here but also our tree kin, rivers, forest ecosystems... all "personhoods" of being that we should take into consideration)
Who bears the material burden? (same as above)
And can they be designed in ways that support local resilience rather than erode it?
Those are still open questions in places like here in Spartanburg or the Carolinas, where systematic racism is still a driving answer to some of those questions. I'm interested in shifting these local conversations from just impact to also orientation… not necessarily to defend or condemn any particular project, but to make visible the fact that these systems reorganize land, attention, and power in ways we need to see clearly before we normalize them (Stein's empathy before ethics).
Of course, I wouldn't mind treating data centers, AI, and computers in general like the Kesh people in Always Coming Home if I had my preference.
Thanks for engaging this so seriously!!
https://fairytalesfromecotopia.substack.com/p/interviews-illness-and-environmental?r=2frou4&utm_medium=ios