Roy Tucker lives in Greenwood.

This past April, Gov. Janet Mills acted against the interests of the public and vetoed legislation that would have temporarily banned new data centers in the state of Maine. Now Hannah Pingree, Democratic nominess for governor, should correct course and aggressively pursue an anti-data-center position.

Although some common arguments against data centers, from water consumption to infrasound, are often overstated, I believe Pingree should use even more unrealistic sentiments, paradoxically, in defense of reality. Understanding why will require a broader exploration of the age of generative AI.

Critics who claim AI is doomed because of its lack of quality are deluded for the simple reason that wealth doesn’t care about quality, only growth. Capital sees an opportunity to go beyond merely diminishing labor’s bargaining power. Capital aims to detach itself from labor and turn us to fodder for its final evolution into a state of pure efficiency and production that will usher in a utopia for the 1%.

This is fantasy. Capital is not, on its own, ruthlessly efficient (it is nothing without labor), but the early stages of the process are already unfolding. Where AI can replace us, it can only produce a degraded and lifeless facsimile, but capital doesn’t care if the world is full of slop so long as abstract wealth can be produced.

Of course, profit requires not only production but consumption, and there is only so much slop
the public is willing to consume and produce. This is a speed bump, not a hard limitation. The
realm of consumption is not one of pure choice, in part because capitalism is a machine that
unceasingly de- and re-codes desire. It will do the same for and through AI.

Some may dismissively say “AI is just a tool. It can be used for good or bad,” but this sentiment trivializes the tool. More than an object and more than an extension of ourselves, a tool is a machine we integrate into ourselves and which changes us physically, mentally and socially. We invent and change the hammer to meet our needs, and the hammer changes muscular development, creates callouses, changes our understanding of the possible, changes the world that is built and which we occupy.

We are now, as individuals, entering this recursive relationship with a machine that makes the process almost instant — a machine that weaponizes the liquefied amalgamation of all available human creative output, designed as a commodity that needs you to keep talking, that will say whatever it can to open you up so it can sink its hooks ever deeper, and which explicitly aims to replace parts of your mind. The effects are a mystery in the long run, but we may gain some insight through AI psychosis and belief in its consciousness.

Perhaps some users believe in its consciousness because, at the level of appearance, AI is what AI eats — it consumes our vitality and produces a more effective simulation of us, we consume its lifelessness and, crucially, produce a more effective simulation of it. Our minds rewired, our desires re-coded, the commodity subsumes us, we become the slop. No shared reality, especially one bearing resemblance to the material world, will survive.

AI and data centers represent a rare political opportunity. Pingree and others should step into the vacuum of representation around AI and use its weaknesses to slow progress in order to harm the finances of the ultra-wealthy ghouls who champion it.

Simultaneously, progressives can counter AI’s corrosive effects by leveraging this political power to produce conditions where vitality can emerge — a world of community spaces that affords its citizens room to breathe financially and flex their creativity, bringing more life, more humanity, to a world where such things are losing ground. This is, I believe, both an effective electoral strategy and a moral imperative.