AI Stories and the Selling of Possible Futures
Artificial intelligence began as a story of a clean technology, with supercomputers ushering in an economic era of clean capitalism. Funded by government grants in the 1950s, AI originated in university computer science labs seeking to develop forms of machine learning that mimic human cognition. In subsequent decades, Stanford University became a hub for engineers and scientists trained in these labs who became entrepreneurs and among the tech titans of Silicon Valley. That first generation of lab workers was a more modest lot among the growing class of 1950s middle-class managers and professionals. The animating ethos was a shared enchantment with the futures that computer power might bring about. The coal miners, oil, gas, steel and auto workers, as well as other hard-hat laborers powering the post-war boom, ran machines in dirty industries but they also shared in post-war middle-class prosperity. Unionized workers were able to buy homes, take vacations and send their kids to colleges that were largely tuition-free.
The technological world of AI in the 21st century unfolds in a different era of American capitalism. The old bargains between the public and tech innovators are now harder to pull off. Public revolts against AI titans of industry signify something new on the political horizon.
United by worry over their own futures and the futures of their children, citizens across the country are fighting to shut down data centers. AI companies’ business plans depend on:
Massively increasing subscription revenues.
Gobbling up as much land, water and electricity as possible. This second part of the plan is where citizens find their own Strait of Hormuz in resistance to the AI empire.
Lessons from Fossil Fuel Propaganda
As a psychologist and documentarian, I have tracked through my film projects the stories that oil, gas, and nuclear industries tell about themselves to win these wagers. Much of Big Oil propaganda plays on public cognitive dissonance: We need the oil but it is killing us! They offer in response a cognitive compromise: Maybe it is not really killing you! In contradiction/cover-up of their own internal research, oil companies produced a blitz of infomercials in the late 20th century casting doubt on what had emerged as scientific consensus on fossil fuels and global warming. Another strategy of Big Oil has been to displace responsibility for the problem. British Petroleum (BP) was a true pioneer on this front with their “carbon footprint” campaign, encouraging the public to track its carbon use. Journalist Mark Kaufman describes the marketing campaign: “The company unveiled its “carbon footprint calculator” in 2004 so one could assess how their normal daily life — going to work, buying food, and (gasp) traveling — is largely responsible for heating the globe. A decade and a half later, ‘carbon footprint’ is everywhere.” And fossil fuel consumption is also everywhere and climbing at an alarming rate.
In my documentaries on the fights against oil pipelines in North America over the past decade, from the proud Standing Rock Sioux Tribe actions to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline to organized civil disobedience in opposition to Line 3 in Minnesota, even the strong and sustained alliances of these campaigns could not withstand the black boots of federal military force in lockstep with the pipeline companies. The tragic defeats of these campaigns were aided significantly by oil and gas workers, as well as some tribal leaders, who staked their own fortunes on the survival of the oil and pipeline companies. The nuclear power industry, with its endless claims of undergoing a “renaissance,” has some organized labor on its side as well but primarily promotes itself as the work of engineers. The industry also enlists an old boundary between dirty (bad) and clean (good) energy.
Purity, Pollution, and the Politics of Energy
In Purity and Danger, anthropologist Mary Douglas argues that all cultures draw boundaries between pure and impure. In many cultures, menstruating women are viewed as unclean and excluded for periods of time from contact with men. Douglas goes further to explain how groups that perform “dirty work,” from day laborers, coal miners and garbage collectors to many immigrant and marginalized groups, carry this stigma. Since the 1950s, American bourgeois/middle class culture has leaned heavily into this boundary. Advertisers endlessly promote products that psychologically fuse unrelated phenomena: cleanliness, whiteness and moral purity. Gwyneth Paltrow’s products embody this fusion to a level of absurdity that makes her a favorite target for lampooning.
Unlike the oil industry, proponents of “new nuclear” and their proposed fleet of small reactors enlist this bourgeois boundary and its implicit warding off of the dangerously unclean. Proponents make the case for reviving dying nuclear plants and building a seemingly modern fleet of baby reactors by positioning nuclear power as the clean alternative to polluting sources of energy. (It should be noted, FYI, that nuclear power has a heavy carbon footprint, from the long fuel cycles, extraction and processing of uranium, construction costs and over-runs, through the eventual decommissioning of old reactors.)
The Clean Machine Aesthetic
AI companies and their investors work this same boundary with supercomputers humming along and quietly colonizing farmland and extending into the vast tech “Enterprise Zones” that circle urban areas and occupy rural lands around the country. The corporate boxy towers, warehouses and distribution centers that are now a central feature of these zones are visibly clean and neo-brutalist in design.
The aggressive expansion of data centers required to power AI has these same aesthetic features. The enormous gleaming structures—typically white or silver—sometimes are circled by rows of new trees. Their low carbon footprint is evident in the small number of cars in their parking lots, a visual reminder of the small number of people working there. The most enduring jobs may be as security guards.
Last weekend, my photographer friend, Friderike Heuer, and I drove by some of these massive AI data centers in Hillsboro, Oregon, 16 miles from where we live in Portland. A city of around 110,000 people, Hillsboro was regularly on the Portland TV news last fall for student led protests against ICE Raids on the Latino community there. Hillsboro, known as the Silicon Valley of Oregon, is once again on the local news for community led outrage over the expansion of data centers on to tracks of farmland and for sucking up resources in this agricultural region. Packed meetings with city council members in May and June featured locals demanding answers as to why these leaders allowed fast-track permits for eight companies before the June 6th State moratorium against data center permits went into effect. Hillsboro Herald has been a beacon of independent media in following this unfolding story.
Capitalism and Enshitification
Coined by author and activist Cory Doctorow in 2022, enshitification describes the lifecycle of platforms as they transition from being genuinely useful to sucking users into degraded, degrading and addictive platforms. The term now circulates widely to describe the AI ecosystem as well with degradation of existing chatbot services and the flooding of the internet with AI slop. As an idiom that works between the registers of academia (something-itifcation) and street talk (shit) enshitification lands most loudly on the dirty side of Mary Douglas’ anthropological divide.
The term may also be apt in describing our current advanced age of capitalism. The transformative technologies that powered industrial revolution from the 19th century through the late 20th century had what Karl Marx called “use value.” But from the railroads, radio and telegraph, electric lights, the automobile, airplanes, computer technology and the world wide web, technologies also often brought death, destruction and the displacement of workers.
The monopolistic and inexhaustible reach of corporations and investors created economic crises, recessions and depressions. But the technologies themselves—often funded by government contracts—held demonstrable uses.
The railway bubble that led to a major stock market crisis and depression in the US in the 1870s is often cited as historical reference for the current AI bubble. There were deaths associated with rail. The earliest neurotic conditions treated by doctors in the US were for a condition termed “railway spine.” People claimed to suffer debilitating neurological conditions, often after merely witnessing a derailment.
When History Feels Uncanny
But as frightening as rail may have been and as enormous as the costs of the investment mania, the use value of rail was never really in question (aside from their role in the genocide of Indigenous peoples). And unlike the major AI companies today who proclaim helplessly that their products may destroy most jobs and potentially all of humanity, railroad executives would never have said that their trains may blow up your town, but you have to build the stations anyway.
The bizarreness of our current situation is brought into relief by these historical comparisons. Freud’s concept of the uncanny also comes to mind: a response to a current situation that is simultaneously familiar in evoking something from the past and hauntingly strange.
In addition to use value, Marx introduced the concept of exchange value in his theory of the driving forces behind capitalism. Profits accumulate through a system of commodity exchange by extracting as much value as possible from human labor and natural resources while keeping costs of production as low as possible. Labor (and we might add, Nature) pushes back in various ways against this intensive exploitation, for example in the late 19th century fight of workers for the eight-hour day. Marx predicted an era when periods of crisis—which are structural characteristics of capitalist growth—reach their limits and workers would usher in an era of socialism and liberation from the alienating labor of capitalist production. This era, as most historians agree, has not yet come about. There is a rich history of experiments and social movements to draw on, however, as potential signposts for futures yet to be realized.
In addition to one of the most influential political economists and philosophers of the modern era, Marx continues to be studied because of the eloquence of his writing. Published in 1848 and co-authored by Frederik Engels, The Communist Manifesto remains on many college syllabi because of the lyrical beauty of its prose. A line from the introduction speaks to the capitalism of that era and perhaps to ours: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
Certainly, AI has ushered in a world of horrifying commerce where what had seemed solid in the past now melts into air. We are compelled to soberly face our current conditions, to imagine a different future, and to organize in bringing it about.
💬 Share Your Thoughts
Do you think the AI boom carries symbolic weight in public thinking that differs from technologies of the past? What is your assessment of current opposition to data centers?