The protest against AI, data centers and Flock cameras is an American revolt against corporate control, monopolies, elite impunity and the increasing surveillance of everyday life. Americans are rightfully furious at the political and economic conditions that are making their lives a living hell.
Matt Stoller details the anger–“…the public wants something very different now. Americans don’t trust our institutions or our leaders, and that’s the right attitude, because our institutions and our leaders are malevolent liars. Fortunately, we have the honor of living in a democracy, which means the voters have the ability to fire their leaders. And that is about to start, in a big way. So happy oligarch day. I have a sneaking suspicion that this loss doesn’t suggest the collapse of a democratic order, as that collapse happened a long time ago. I think it may actually represent one of many death rattles of an old order that Americans correctly despise.”
I think the protests are a modern day Tea Party.
No, not the one in the wake of the 2008 Wall Street Crash after Obama, bailed out the banksters rather than American homeowners. That Tea Party was an astro-turf, faux protest where conservative activists highjacked anger at Democratic complicity in an extractive financial system, that morphed into a political movement that steered anger away from corporate abuse and towards the Obama Administration which they labeled “socialist”.
Such is the absurdity of American political consciousness, but of course the corporate media willingly played along. The whole thing still infuriates me, and is one of the chief reasons that Trump sits in the White House. If only Obama had used his historic mandate for change on something other than sanctifying the continuation of the worst surveillance and military policies of the Bush/Cheney administration, the biggest destruction of Black wealth in American history, the insurance industry protection racket–the Affordable Care Act–a fascist coup in Ukraine, genocidal attacks on Yemen, Libya and Syria, and ensuring not one bankster did a single day in jail for the historic looting operation.
The original Tea Party in Boston Harbor was aimed at the East India Company as much as at the British. It was a protest against huge corporate tax cuts for the British East India Company, the largest multi-national corporation then in existence. It was a revolution against nascent corporate power. And now we have a revolt against data centers, Flock spy camera’s and the tech-corporations predatory behavior. Some things never change.
In a year replete with protests against big tech, data centers, and AI, one company seems to be the most reviled–Flock. Over the past decade the surveillance corporation has been building out a massive network of spy cameras across the nation. The images those cameras record are uploaded to a central database, and can be accessed by law enforcement and federal authorities.
Abuse of the system has been rampant. Police have used Flock’s Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) to stalk exes and to track women seeking abortions across state lines. ICE has accessed. Flock data to assist in crackdown on immigrants. Innocent people have been wrongfully imprisoned after being flagged by the system.
So, ordinary citizens are fighting back. They’re flocking to city council meetings, organizing protests, and pressuring local officials to cancel Flock contracts. In multiple states, Americans are dismantling and destroying Flock cameras that conduct warrantless surveillance, and whose data is shared with ICE.
What’s gratifying is that the opposition the burgeoning surveillance state is bi-partisan. More than 60 percent of Americans, including 47 percent of Republicans, say they are opposed to the construction of data centers in a poll released by The New York Times last week. In August, the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent a private memo to AI companies sounding the alarm on how voters perceive data centers, warning that “campaign or party committees can not fix the toxic brand of an entire segment of the economy.” Last week, GOP strategist Tony Fabrizio issued a memo to the party’s candidates claiming that “unqualified support for building more AI data centers is a losing position.”
But the GOP has a big problem: Trump. In recent weeks, facing mounting scrutiny on his policies and support for the industry, Trump has doubled down on his support for data centers and AI. Recently he wrote in a Truth Social post that only communities that wanted to be “backwards and poor” would refuse data centers coming to town.
I’m pretty sure this is not the winning formula the president thinks it is but I’m hopeful for a political awakening where MAGA comprehends that corporate power is just as harmful as government power; while liberals realize that the ongoing protests are a revolt against the Democratic insiders as well as one against Trump. Furthermore, I hope this is the start of a sustained revolution against an American government that has been repurposed by corporations and financiers.
