The Oberlin Rose - Why You Should Hate AI

OPINION

Why You Should Hate AI

by Dante Fitts

Maybe ChatGPT makes your life a little easier; helps you write an email, summarizes a text, takes your meeting notes for you. Maybe it feels like AI is ‘already here’ so we may as well accept it as it works itself into every device and application. Before we become entirely complacent, we should examine what the cost is at home, the large-scale uses of the technology, and its ultimate fascist intentions.

Technology is a force multiplier, and there is a lot of money in information-as-data and war-making industries. The data centers being built today continue legacies of environmental racism and class-targeted pollution. The tech companies behind these data centers and energy facilities work hand-in-hand with Republican (and Democrat; see Silicon Valley) politicians to deconstruct environmental regulations and implement other destructive libertarian ‘business-forward’ policies. xAI, Meta, Amazon, Palantir, and other individual companies that make up the techno-fascist oligarchy, are structurally racist, ableist, pro-war, anti-environment, and fundamentally anti-human, from their means to their ends.

AI technology and its consumptive requirements reinforce the colonial apparatus, sharpen the tip of the imperial spear, and plunge it deeper into the earth. AI works to streamline genocide and exacerbate the health epidemics currently faced by poor and BIPOC Americans. From AI-powered drone strikes to Miami-Dade PD's self-driving surveillance car, below I summarize some articles and analyze AI’s prominent uses and impacts. Please read/listen/watch the originals if you have the time; there are further resources at the bottom.

Cost at Home: Consumption, Pollution, and Poisoning

Before its lights came on, Meta’s data center in Newton County, Georgia was already doing noticeable damage to the local community. In 2019, its construction bulldozed sections of the county’s oak forest, damaged local wells, and disrupted local irrigation. The New York Times (1) found that data centers like this one typically use 500,000 gallons of water per day. New data centers, built to train “more powerful A.I.” are set to require “millions of gallons of water a day,” according to water permit applications. Newton County’s municipal water costs have already gone up, and its water commission is on track to face a shortage and potentially become water deficient by 2030. Nine companies have applied to build data centers in Newton County, one such applicant being Amazon, while other companies hid their identities in their applications. Some of these companies are asking for as much as six million gallons a day.

More Perfect Union, a journalism nonprofit committed to ‘building power for the working class’ released footage from a Memphis public hearing regarding the approval of a city air permit for the Whitehaven xAI facility (which is currently burning enough methane to fuel a small city) (2). Whitehaven is a historically black neighborhood being used as a site for factories and energy facilities. The facility currently has no permits, no pollution controls, and operates “in direct vicinity of homes, churches, businesses, and schools. All without any public input” (3).

The 35 methane gas turbines used at this xAI facility since June 2024 release three main types of pollution: nitrogen oxides, formaldehyde, and fine particulate matter. Nitrogen oxides combine with other pollutants to cause and worsen asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), formaldehyde causes cancer, and particulate matter (soot) can pass from the lungs into the bloodstream, causing heart disease. In just one year, this xAI facility has emitted 1,000-2,000 tons of volatile organic compounds.

In the More Perfect Union footage, citizens practically beg for their right to live in their own homes: “I can’t breathe at home. It smells like gas outside”, “we are tired of going in and out of hospitals, going in and out of funeral homes…we’ve been dying.” One resident pointed out the facility's proximity to Whitehaven highschool, one of the most populated high schools in Memphis, with over two thousand students. “I’m not lying, they’re not lying, we’re not lying. We need the permit to be denied,” one resident pleas. The people’s message is clear. Like all other humans, they want the right to live.

Bill Lee, the governor of Tennessee, took a tour of the xAI facility, and found their “commitment to the community” to be “remarkable”, while residents proximate to the facility develop asthma and die of cancers and COPD from the unregulated pollution.

Richard Massey, policy advocate, community organizer and Tennessee Young Democrat concerned with helping create policy that centers working class people, delivered a speech from Memphis (4) to alert the country as to the severity of the situation in Nashville, illustrating how these are not isolated incidents but a national (and international) crisis. As Massey states, "there is a significant human cost to doing business with the richest man in the world."

Tesla has been cited over 110 different times for air quality violations in Freemont, California, xAI has blatantly violated the Clean Air Act in Memphis, and SpaceX has polluted wetlands in Boca Chica, Texas. The Boring Company has been cited for illegally discharging storm water in Bastrop, Texas, has installed tunnels twice with no permits, and has been caught by state and local environmental regulators dumping untreated water into the sewage system in Las Vegas. Workers of the Boring Company have filed several complaints to OSHA citing “ankle deep water in the tunnels, muck spills, and severe chemical burns.” Massey rightly connects this to Musk’s involvement in the election and the subsequent crippling of the EPA, FAA, Department of Labor, and “several other agencies that monitor this scale of misconduct.”

The testimonies of the victims of these data centers and energy facilities echo a resounding motif: ‘people over profit’. Part of me naively hopes that this will incline some Americans to see the similarities between their experiences and those of the Global South, whose living conditions become increasingly deplorable due to similar corporate interests (and similar corporations).

There are victims across the world of ‘the speed of business’. The American South has been victimized by underdeveloped education and social nets, and their ‘backwardness’ has been the butt of many democratic campaigns. I think this serves to dehumanize the south, and allows ‘bicoastal elites’ to laugh when their cities flood or power grids fail. As we chuckle at our mimosa brunches, Republican leaders continue to push business forward policies to ‘modernize’ their cities and give their states a veneer of capitalist ‘progressivism’ (see Austin, Texas and Ted Cruz; Memphis, Tennessee and Bill Lee). All the while, furthering divides with culture wars to distract both sides to the fact that Democrats and Republicans alike are working with these tech companies and have no issue picking and choosing who suffers for it, including Americans.

As our country descends further into dictatorship, I feel one of the most important things we can do right now is to build allyship between communities. Elon Musk/xAI (as well as other major tech companies) are providing us with an opportunity to carve a bit off from the right wing and potentially weaken the forces (ICE, police, etc.) that utilize their support and bodies – the faltering facade of the techno-fascist right reveals an almost comically supervillainous anti-human shared enemy whose defeat promises intercommunalist liberation.

xAI provides a clear example of a corporation's willingness to deceive and murder, illustrating the necessary willingness of local, state, and federal government to facilitate these injustices. An anti-AI stance is bound to an anti-billionaire stance; anti-business-forward politics (a palatable, bi-partisan American way of saying anti-capitalist) could lead to pro-environment, pro-healthcare, pro-human perspectives – which could provide a logical throughline to anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, and pro-Palestine perspectives. As leftists, we should utilize this common ground to grow our community and push our talking points.

Those who know imperialism know that what happens overseas will eventually come back home. So what are AI’s impacts overseas if we are already seeing deleterious effects at home?

Large-Scale Uses and Ultimate Intentions: War and Surveillance

War Abroad

Israel has been using AI in Gaza to ‘turbocharge mass bombing’ according to Vox, the New York Times, and an investigation done by the Israeli magazine +972 and Local Call. Some of the AI systems being used are ‘The Gospel’ used to “mark buildings and structures”, ‘Lavender’ which marks people and “puts them on a kill list", and ‘Where’s Daddy’ which is used specifically to “track targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences."

+972 Magazine’s investigation reports that according to six Israeli intelligence officers who have first hand experience with AI during the current genocide, “Lavender has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians…its influence on the military’s operations was such that they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision…during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible air strikes.” The system targeted individuals while they were in their homes, "usually at night while their whole families were present…the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians.”

The shocking part of this is less the depravity of the Israeli military, and more the cutting out of the human element in military operations. Technology allows inhumanity to be streamlined, with humans acting as “rubber stamps” and taking “20 seconds” to review an execution machine with at least a 10% error rate (and what could that mean to an institution that calls children, medical workers and journalists ‘Hamas’). B., a senior officer who used Lavender, reported to +972 and Local Call that “officers were not required to independently review the AI system’s assessments, in order to save time and enable the mass production of human targets without hindrances. Everything was statistical, everything was neat — it was very dry.”

Those members of the Israeli Occupation Forces who may hold some sympathy toward human life don’t even really have to know what they are ‘rubber stamping’, and even if they do it is hard to feel sympathy towards numbers on a screen. Perhaps this in the hopes of lessening the suicide rate amongst their ranks. Or, with goals of rendering that rate null with an entirely mechanized military that only requires politicians and shareholders of the military industrial complex.

B. further explained that the automation was concomitant with a constant “pressure” and “push to generate more targets for assassination.” With the convenience of an AI system, all that had to be done was lower the “rating threshold” (of who was considered a “Hamas operative”) of Lavender, and “we finished killing our targets very quickly” one officer reports. Another said, “in war, there is no time to incriminate every target. So you’re willing to take the margin of error of using artificial intelligence, risking collateral damage and civilians dying, and risking attacking by mistake, and to live with it.” Officers reported attacking “almost without considering collateral damage”. Is it not obvious how technology enables this detached genocidal behavior? You can kill a family from afar, without aiming, without even pressing a button, and find it “absurd” when it turns out you have killed mostly women and children. And, “because of the system, the targets never end.”

War at Home: Palantir Surveillance and Government Database

The U.S. Federal Government and Palantir (data analysis software company) plan to “centralize” data on American citizens. Palantir recently landed a $10 billion army software and data contract, and has historically focused on “national security problems”, it has since expanded into markets for defense and intelligence. Their systems provide “decision making and operational support” tools to military units with services like AI-driven targeting and operational planning. Sound familiar? Palantir has also worked closely with the Pentagon and assisted them in modernizing their software, systems, and modes of operation. Some of Palantir’s military projects include: ‘Gotham,’ a platform used by intelligence agencies and military units for “data integration, analysis, and decision support”, ‘Maven,’ an AI powered targeting system developed for the US Army being used actively in Ukraine, ‘Titan,’ a program “focused on enhancing the Army’s intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities”, ‘Gaia,’ a real time mapping platform, and NGC2 (Next Generation Command and Control), a recent contract with the Army. NGC2 is part of the “Army’s initiative to fundamentally change command and control warfighting capabilities, NGC2 will build upon the Army’s C2 Fix and Transformation in Contact (TiC) efforts, enabling commanders to make more, better, and faster decisions.” (5)

Peter Theil, CEO and founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies (Alex Karp is the co-founder of Palantir, also a sinister character) was born in Germany and raised in Swakopmund, southwest Africa, during apartheid. Swakopmund was known for its continued glorification of Nazism. Theil has also donated at least $1 million to the Tea Party PAC. Thiel alleges that the idea for Palantir was based on the realization that "the approaches that PayPal had used to fight fraud could be extended into other contexts, like fighting terrorism". He also stated that, after the September 11 attacks, the debate in the United States was "will we have more security with less privacy or less security with more privacy?" He envisioned Palantir as providing data mining services to government intelligence agencies that were maximally unintrusive and traceable. Palantir’s first backer was the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel.

That is the man behind the company who will now be partnering with the United States in creating a database which compiles all of your information,; from your medical records to your three Iinstagram accounts, your car records to the last place you were seen on a Rring doorbell. Palantir is partnering with the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, the I.R.S., the Pentagon, and is in talks with the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Health and the Human Services Department. Tricia McLaughlin, a D.H.S. spokeswoman, said Palantir “has had contracts with the federal government for 14 years.” According to the New York Times, “The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.”

According to Trump’s executive order, he wants to “eliminate information silos and streamline data collection across all agencies to increase government efficiency and save hard-earned taxpayer dollars.” Palantir is currently in talks for a permanent contract with the I.R.S. so as to create a single, searchable database. Palantir has also begun “helping” ICE, their enforcement and removal operations team in particular, and ICE signed a $30 million contract with Palantir in April “to build a platform to track migrant movements in real time.”

Palantir and Elon are linked, from PayPal to the three DOGE members who formerly worked at Palantir (and two others who worked at companies funded by Peter Theil). The data centers used to power this militant AI will continue to ravage underprivileged communities, and its technology will be used to more efficiently and effectively kidnap your neighbors, and based on your Twitter likes, gender, or disability status, maybe you.

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