Three (Joyful) Surprises About the Fight Against Data Centers
If you’re reading this, you’re likely someone who has been a part of a struggle against the ways in which Big Tech and consolidated media have changed our lives and our democracy. This is a newsletter, after all, read by many who loved, fought beside, or were part of the organizing family of Brandi Collins-Dexter, one of the seminal media and tech justice street fighters and strategists of our generation. I’m one of y’all. I campaigned with her, and I’m grateful that she let me coax her into processes where the rest of the sector could benefit from her brilliance and her unique ability to forecast the future.
If Brandi was here now, one of the things I’d love to get her reflections on is the wild organizing coming up against the massive expansion of data centers across the country. I’ve gotten close to it, with the threat of a data center here in my hometown of Philly. I’m also working with burgeoning basebuilding projects across the South, Midwest, and West hungry not just to win against Big Tech, but to build organizations that fight for the vision of the world we want.
Your generosity fuels our newsletter and research, strengthening the movement for media, tech, and information justice.
Donate now and join the revival today!
As someone who has been in this work for over 25 years, there are some particular aspects of the data center fights that have surprised me — how people see tech as a force in their lives, how it relates to their most material needs like housing, air, work, and safety, and what might be possible because of the leadership that thousands if not millions of everyday people are taking against the tech oligarchy. Here are some of them:
- The power of tech as a world-changing force is visible to millions. We do not need to sell that idea to folks facing the impacts of data centers.
Data centers aren’t new — they’re big warehouses filled with computers powering the internet, and have been around since the mass consumer and business expansion of the internet decades ago. But they are proliferating at lightning-speed in the past few years with the expansion and growth of generative AI and crypto, and require huge amounts of land, electricity, water, and data to power the billionaire dreams of tech oligarchs.
That means that infrastructure that was previously visible to a narrow segment of the population is now very very visible to millions. Far more people know who and what is to blame as our electricity bills climb to brutally unaffordable levels, our water is guzzled up by data centers, and our data is captured by companies like Palantir and OpenAI to feed the vicious government targeting of us and our neighbors. As a result, more people are rising up against Big Tech than ever before in my lifetime.
That means we get the benefit of talking to people at their doors and in the streets who are very clear what Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk are doing to their air, their town, their kids. This isn’t a “single issue fight” that a traditional advocacy campaign can encompass. Our organizing needs to change accordingly — to meet those people where they’re at, support them in their fights to win, and work with them to increase their connections with their neighbors and aim their frustrations at the real villains of this wild political moment: the billionaire-fueled tech system.
- Tech is a gateway for diverse kinds of people to understand authoritarian consolidation, and to come together to fight it.
My organization (People's Tech Project) and volunteers working with us have joined basebuilding groups to knock on thousands of doors in communities across the country that face deep impacts from data center development. We’re ready to knock on thousands more. And so, so many amazing groups locally, regionally, and nationally are doing the same.
When we get into conversation with these community members — whether they are working-class Black people facing generational divestment in Memphis, white farmers in eastern Washington State, or multiracial youth in the collar counties of Philadelphia, they are able to grapple deeply with the big impacts data centers will have in their neighborhoods. They tell us of the ceaseless droning noise of humming servers processing generative AI and water impacts that threaten entire livelihoods and ways of life. In long conversations on their porches or couches, they demonstrate extraordinary clarity on how the billionaires that profit from those data centers are deepening and exploiting historic divisions in our society.
In my experience, the tech and media oligarchs underpinning so much of our economy, controlling access to information, and hoarding global power are invisible to those of us on the ground. Because data centers make very visible the web of how tech holds up the global economy, it means that the marriage of local concerns to national and international issues of governance is clear. This can be a deep part of effective and scalable political education.
With rising anger across the political spectrum — and the ability for us all to see that anger in elections this year — we have lots of opportunities to make stopping tech oligarchy and the dark plans billionaires have for our world a part of what we’re fighting for on the most local and personal of levels.
- The people are ready for far bolder, riskier action to stop data center incursion, and see it as the only way to gain the power they need to win a truly dignified future and a thriving world for their kids.
Across the country, thousands are packing zoning board meetings, birddogging greedy investors and developers, and knocking on the doors of their neighbors to stop data centers from flooding every kind of community. They are willing to lie down at the gates of data centers under construction and to interrupt previously sleepy meetings. They are engaging in the kind of sustained coalition-building and organizing that transforms communities’ sense of their own power.
While thousands of these data centers already exist and thousands more are in the pipeline, billions of dollars’ worth have been stopped in their tracks. Communities are banding together and taking giant swings to slow down or stop data center development for years, or even permanently. Organizing and advocacy partners that flank these groups are learning fast that embracing their vision of blocking data center development and instead building the kind of rich community resources that keep us thriving and safe — rec centers and job training and community spaces — is what turns thousands out, and keeps them in organization and action for the long haul. We can’t hold them back, and we are served far better when we follow their lead.
- - -
I wish I was knocking doors with Brandi in the summer air, and learning from her deep understanding of how the stories of our people can transform what is possible in our communities. I will keep her in my heart and her strategic clarity in my mind as we continue to explore how digging deep on data center fights can change what is possible for tech fights, and for fights to win the democracy we truly deserve.
###
Hannah Jane Sassaman is executive director of People's Tech Project. She has over 25 years of experience campaigning at the intersection of technology, race, inequality and power. She lives with her family in Philadelphia.
Additional links from TRL staff:
- Consumer Reports: “AI Data Centers: Big Tech's Impact on Electric Bills, Water, and More”
- More Perfect Union: “I Took AOC to Deep Trump Country. They Agreed On One Thing.”
- AI Resist List
- US Law Enforcement Warns of ‘Anti-Tech Extremism’ as AI Hatred Grows — Daniel Boguslaw, WIRED, May 26, 2026
This article reports findings from unpublished federal government papers showing plans to widely surveil and target protestors and advocates opposing data center construction or even expressing skepticism about tech and AI. This effort seemingly extends from a Trump admin security memo and counterterrorism strategy focusing on what the government characterizes as left-wing extremism. … Recommended by Eesha
- The Workers Who Defy Gravity — Alvaro M. Bedoya, Washington Monthly, May 20, 2026
Former Federal Trade Commissioner Alvaro M. Bedoya pens a powerful reflection about what’s driving the push for AI and who we can best learn from as we stand up to it. In this case, he’s talking about workers who, in some cases, literally defy gravity. (Washington Monthly is a magazine dedicated to promoting bold, progressive ideas to preserve American democracy. Subscribe to Washington Monthly here.) … Recommended by David
- Can Treating Journalism Like Public Infrastructure Fix Our Broken Media? — Parker Molloy, DAME Magazine, May 20, 2026
In reaction to widespread defunding of outlets, media capture, and attacks on journalism as a field, Molloy draws from current models and historical precedent to put forth a possible proposal for funding local news. (DAME Magazine is a reader-funded publication covering politics and culture. Support their work here.) … Recommended by Eesha
- Block It!: A Mini Toolkit to Take Action to Disrupt the ICE Kidnapping, Detention, and Deportation Machine — Interrupting Criminalization
This resource from Interrupting Criminalization is updated monthly and includes the latest ways you can help stand up to the terror wrought by the immigration enforcement machine. The latest resources focus on supporting the hunger strikers at Delaney Hall in New Jersey.. (Interrupting Criminalization is a movement resource hub working toward a world free of criminalization, policing, punishment, and violence. Donate to them here.) … Recommended by David
- Be You at the Bijou — Charlie Kolodziej, Chicago Reader, June 5, 2026
As Pride Month kicks off, the Chicago Reader takes a look at an iconic Chicago institution, the Bijou Theater, and how it shaped the city’s queer underworld. (The Chicago Reader is a community-supported publication that has served the city for decades. Donate to them here. ) … Recommended by David
The Revival Lab envisions digital spaces as extensions of the connections we build in real life, rather than as poor substitutions. We hope you see this recurring segment as us rummaging through the shelves under the TV or leafing through a CD case to hand you what we’re watching or listening to.
This week, maybe consider some family-friendly animated movies made by filmmakers clearly interested in reckoning with the role tech companies and products play in our lives, though they might reach different conclusions. Watch together and start a multi-generational discussion about the dangers of technosolutionism and the importance of community!
- Ron’s Gone Wrong (2021): Lonely child Barney is thrilled when his father buys him a B-Bot, the latest robot product all his classmates are obsessed with. B-Bot algorithms are designed to make them ideal social companions, but Barney’s, which his father got at a discount after it fell off a truck, seems to be slightly different from the rest.
- The Mitchells vs. The Machines (2021): The Mitchell family, including a technophobic father and a passionate filmmaker teenage daughter, must save the planet from a robot uprising.
- Big Hero 6 (2014): A young robotics prodigy bonds with his older brother’s healthcare robot while mourning a tragic event. Cue a tech-powered superhero story.
Breaking news from Seattle...
People’s Tech
The World Cup kicks off tomorrow. Experience it together with this engaging new organizing tool that is designed to “make sure this moment belongs to the people — the fans, the families, and the communities who make the game beautiful.”