What Now

You know that Norman Rockwell painting, “Freedom of Speech”? A working class man stands up in a town hall setting amongst his fellow citizens and speaks his mind about an important issue? It’s now a great meme. But it’s also a big lie.

A while ago I watched a video on Instagram showing police attacking a woman speaking at a town hall on data centers. I “liked” it and now the algorithm across the Metaverse is trained to show me more videos of citizens speaking their minds to town councils about not only data centers, but also ICE, gerrymandering, and other dangers to their community. The result is always the police arresting them in some violent manner. In one video the crowd comes to the defense of a skinny 14 year old girl, one man yelling at the cops, “Don’t touch her!” She was untouched but still forced out of the room. In another a man is forced to the ground and zip-tied. His crime? Clapping.

Town councils use the police to protect themselves from potential harm by the public and to maintain order. In theory this seems reasonable, except that the public has only an eventual vote to protect themselves from the town council. The data center problem seems to have exacerbated the situation, as town councils do a lot of work behind closed doors to strike up data center construction deals with big tech companies and invite as little public input or oversight as possible. Councils will hold mandatory public comment sessions, but allow only two minutes for speakers to say their peace and refuse follow up questions. Anyone who over extends their time gets kicked out of the room or arrested by the thugs in blue.

The vote recourse itself is also under threat. Recently in Missouri a town held a recall vote to remove half the members of its council, yet the council refused to leave, citing a technicality that maintained the county had to be included in the vote. I have no idea if the council is right, but it seems pretty strange that a vote could be held at all if it didn’t follow procedure.

There are many reasons I oppose most of the AI-related activity we have seen over the past few years: plagiarism, impacts on workers, water consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, hallucinations, slop, Flock cameras. Now add undermining our democracy and civil liberties to the pile.