On The Worldwide Crisis of Data Centers

The current moment has seen uprisings in Paris and Albania that have been able to resist  their governments largely because their energy has not been channelled along racial lines. We owe them for their clarity of purpose. But in this moment, what action do we owe them, and owe our  immediate neighbours?  

Say what you will about the ICCL (Irish Council for Civil liberties), their authoritative if  quite liberal action in protest of the government moving to break chat encryption is raising a  serious issue.  

This clearly would see a chilling effect on people's ability to protest and resist State impositions. If there has ever been a time for protest and resistance, it is now! If we allow this unopposed we may lose our ability to oppose full stop.  

If this scares you, then you should sit with that. Now is the time to be sober, assess and commit to  action. 

The anti-human policy coming out of the beast O'Callaghan is continuous with other  government initiatives in support of neo-colonialism in Ireland. We once served as the  precarious ranch of the British empire. Industrial breeding cattle in service of Empire, throttling our biodiversity and stealing our land and resources.

Now we serve as data centre storage and processing for the American empire, and its  insurgent fascist administration. There was already an attempt at an undemocratic push by the FFG government to wholesale destruction of our data protection laws in service of training AI. 

Quite literally they are butchers of the people, selling our land, our habits and our  associations to be sold back to them at a profit! 

They use the language of sovereignty to mask their moves towards colonial control. Every  person in the country who works to pay an electricity bill is made to subsidise data centre  electricity by hundreds of euros that they do not have.

They are squeezing us in service of funding our own surveillance. Our government is  pursuing economic growth in corporate and state control. Abandoning all climate targets in the Paris agreement in service of faster rollout of this move. In the US they use the archaic burning of gas  generators in poor and black areas to accommodate data centre electricity use.  

Our government is trying to build the LNG pipeline to pipe fracked gas into the Irish  market likely for this exact function.  

From continued unchecked climate destruction we risk not only natural disasters, but the  imminent collapse of the warm currents that give Ireland its mild climate as well as massive  humanitarian disaster from survival migration, foreseeable when more of the global south is  rendered uninhabitable... 

What task of the moment for Ireland? In a global order that is at once hurtling for disaster  and also all to play for. We must dispute, dismantle and discourage. What can we do for ourselves  and those brave school children fighting for each other in France, but oppose on all fronts the  supporting architecture of colonial control.  

Such admirable work is already being done to object to planning applications of data  centres. We must be relentless and in solidarity with poor and racialized areas when the state tries to put them in those places because it thinks it can get away with it. 

The capacity that already exists must be dismantled. The physical processes are disrupted and damaged in whatever way possible to do at scale. We already know Irish data centres have been  used to support the mechanised process of genocide in Palestine. Any financial investment in torture and torment is morally forfeit. 

If we ever do make it to a realized and free Ireland, whoever dismantles the most data centres can have a statue in their honour.  

We must support the people who undertake this labour directly. For every one of them it will take a hundred supporters to maintain them.  

We must discourage our communities from giving their labour to build data centres  and antisocial algorithms. If there is a job opening we spam it with bullshit cvs. If there is a vote, we set fire to effigies of the colonial administration outside the building. It is not socially acceptable to  contribute to these tools of control. We must fight this in culture as well as the material situation.