The results of the American midterms spelled a unified resistance against the wave of massive data centres spreading across the country. Ravenous in their appetite for water and energy, data centres have been quickly constructed in the backyards of many rural and vulnerable communities across the United States who have been quick to feel the material impacts of Big Tech's vision for our collective future: droughts, dust and doom. The data centre mania was also helping to power the A.i bubble making Trump and his cronies rich as they decreed our dependence on a technology which has so far cost more in the way of economic and material resources than it has given.

Data centres, and the development of A.i despite public apathy towards the technology, felt unstoppable. Then the election results rolled in, revealing a public backlash at having lands, well-being and autonomy stripped from the American dream. Americans breathed a sigh of relief, even as the market initially tanked. Then, being the market of a corrupt society, it rallied again. Lest we forget the Democrats were the party of Big Tech for decades. It has been suggested that plans to build data centres will simply move to states with sympathetic governors. Obviously, such moves cannot be made overnight—but they can certainly be made faster in a regime whose President is determined to cut the red tape that stands between him and his fortune.

Much has been written over the last week, since the results, about data centres and what comes next for the United States. Remembering who it was that Kamala Harris raised hundreds of millions from Silicon Valley, I am not particularly convinced that what comes next will be all that different. Our economies depend on material-intensive industries in order to generate GDP. In a post-industrial society, flagging under the weight of its own nihilism, "artificial intelligence" is, quite literally, a godsend (which perhaps reveals the penchant for comparing A.i to the return of Jesus). Unless future leaders in either party are willing to embrace a completely alternative manner of structuring the economy—around sufficiency and sustainability—then the resources of our global society will still be consumed faster than they can regenerate until Earth can no longer provide the substance of our greed.

I do not think the election results speak to a particularly different future. However, I do think they speak to a collective psychological experience which the climate movement has long sought after. For years, activists worried that the world would not realise the severity of the climate crisis until the Minority World suffered a huge climate event. We needed to experience loss, destruction, powerlessness on our own shores in order to grasp the reality of Earth's breakdown. Needless to say, millions displaced in Pakistan and hundreds dead in Nepal due to floods would not be enough to trigger the West to take action. But then again, neither have been the increasingly violent hurricanes which sweep the Caribbean coast of America's states. The problem with the climate event hypothesis was the very fact of it being localised: How can we change the world without a global event?

The other problem was this: climate events look an awful lot like the weather.

You know what doesn't look like a naturally occurring phenomenon? Data centres.
Data centres are the emblem of Man-made problems inflicting suffering upon the rest of mankind. They are trophies of the insularity of the world's elite and monoliths to the rejection of democratic decision-making. Data centres are greedy, guzzling, wasteful palaces which house, we are told, the superior intelligence of the future. Data centres are the evidence of this century's colonisation.
Data centres are the climate event we've been waiting for, causing a universal experience of violent colonisation at the hands of the few in order to construct a future we have no say in, a future which strips us of our communities, our roles, our landscapes, our very freedom—what little we have left of it. Data centres herald destruction, loss and powerlessness. Their very existence has created a universal identity: colonised.

White Westerners do not often experience what is, tragically, commonplace for peoples all over the world. This visceral gulf prevents finding common ground and a common tongue with those with whom we share space and time. Rural conservatives and urban populations have been deliberately and increasingly alienated from one another so that those with power may continue to hold onto it. And that's within national borders. How, then, could those with privilege begin to understand the experience of the indigenous Penan in Malaysia?
Here's how: When you lose your land, livelihood, culture and future to a foreign project which exists to line the pockets of a nameless elite and further their grip on power. The visceral experience of the MAGA farmer who can no longer water his herds is felt in bodies all over the world. What we need to do now is find language for it. We need to create a common tongue for our shared experience. And then we need to mobilise against this induced powerlessness.

Whilst I do not have hope in a United States led by corporate Democrats, it is of vital importance that we celebrate the resistance inspired by these data centres. Struggling is as important as winning, for it closes the void that opens up inside ourselves whenever we feel powerless. The gulf between powerful and powerless holds entire worlds; that we now find ourselves in a world alongside most of humankind inspires thoughts of a future which previously seemed unimaginable.
If colonisation seems like too glib an analogy for the development of A.i, think of how rapidly our culture is changing due to the forced adoption of a technology we neither need nor invited: reduced literacy; mass lay-offs; targeted drone executions; hyper-surveillance; mass murders planned and suicides encouraged. These are the casualties of what Trump has tried to rebrand as "super intelligence", insistent that the future of global society lies in our ability to power these algorithms. Backed by capital and governance, the world as we know it is being swept aside to make room for a technology and a worldview utterly disconnected from our shared reality. We are literally losing lands, livelihoods and ideologies to the desperate collaboration between Silicon Valley, the military industrial complex, and world governments to secure themselves in an insecure future. We are being colonised—not by A.i., but those who choose to put their faith in technology instead of humanity. Then they give the robots names as if we can't tell the difference.

We've been waiting for a climate event in the hope it would wake up those in the halls of power to the reality of their decisions. They are awake. And they have made it very clear what they've chosen. Data centres are the material manifestation of their will to power. Our resistance to them is a manifestation of our collective will to live.

Make it count.