Concerned citizens crowding into a rec center to protest a proposed data center in El Paso, Texas. Suburban homeowners shouting down pro-data-center politicians in Festus, Missouri. Teenagers and their parents swamping a local zoning meeting to demand an end to data center construction in DeKalb County, Georgia. Conservative farmers rising up to block a data center in Howell Township, Michigan.The grassroots resistance to artificial intelligence data centers that is springing up in communities across the country outlines the kind of working-class coalition many of us on the Left have always dreamed of — a diverse, nonpartisan, top-bottom movement against Big Tech billionaires that has the potential to reshape American politics in incredibly positive ways.The most immediate, short-term policy demand driving this local organizing is a moratorium on new data centers. There are different versions of this policy — Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have introduced a national moratorium, statewide moratoria have been proposed in at least twelve states (and one passed in Maine, though the legislation was vetoed by Governor Janet Mills), and dozens of cities, towns, and counties have already enacted such laws.This pushback has drawn its own pushback. In a recent Jacobin essay, Holly Buck argues that “a moratorium on AI data centers is a terrible idea” that “poses serious equity concerns.” Such a pause, she writes, “is not a substitute for actual AI governance.”This argument — and Buck, of course, is far from the only person making it — seems to misunderstand the thrust of the data center moratorium effort, which is to stall the breakneck development of these projects so that we can enact “actual AI governance.” Buck complains that organizations supporting “data center blocking efforts should put their attention toward a broader set of solutions” — which is exactly what they have been doing. My…
