The Future of the Saline Data Center and the Harbingers of Technocracy

Hello members of The Saline Post, I am Caleb Adams. If you've ever wondered who was walking all the way from the Riverview mobile homes all the way down Michigan Avenue: that's me. For my whole two-decades-long life I have lived in this town and I have only recently felt the urge to participate in Saline's community. This is mostly because there is in fact a pressing matter that I actually can comment on; the proposal to build a data center in this town. 

While I am aware the zoning decision was denied — which I am thankful for — Related Digital has taken the township to court over this. Not only that, but today I received a knock on my door from two of their messengers. I was kind to them and they were to me; they're just people after all. But a bit after I had let them pet one of my fugitive cats there was a brief crack in the soothing rhetoric that has since left me a bit dazed. "It's going to get built one way or another," or something along those lines of the data center being inevitable was uttered to me before they left. 

I am young, I am inexperienced, and that lends the words I write here a lot less leverage than someone who knows about zoning and its associated laws. However, if after you're told no by the city and your first move is to not only file a lawsuit but send Techno-Jehova Witnesses door to door? I think something is up. When I see a company talking about using Artifical Intelligence as a tens of billions of dollars pipeline I get upset that those billions of dollars in that pipe aren't going to anyone but a select few men that have less decades in their lives than the number in the ten billion spot for the project. The people who run Related and Related Digital are big shots from private equity firms, other Silicon Valley trust fund corporations, and real estate. These are the types of people who view populations and employees as spreadsheets to be optimized. I am terrified because I know that the power these people have — especially in their legal teams — is so large that they can just bully smaller facets of the government into getting what they want.

Here's my opinion: we have got to get ready for a — hopefully non-violent — fight against corporate greed in this town on every front. No matter how much they tell us that their center will be quiet and renewable, benefit tax revenue, or whatever other illusory utilitarian twist they can deceive you with, it's ultimately to serve AI and capital, not you or the town. Unless the source of energy for that data center is a small scale nuclear reactor, Related Digital's data center will contribute to a hypothetical energy crisis. Most data centers take up more power than entire cities and provided enough of them are built, these buildings will begin to compete with other businesses and even homes for the ultimately finite resource of electricity. In case you think I'm incredibly deranged and speaking of an apocalypse that will not happen I suggest you watch this video by Hank Green – a figure consistently used in my education at Saline Schools. I would also go into why generative artificial intelligence is also culturally damaging but I fear this long rant filled with grammatical errors beyond my expertise has gone on long enough. Right now I am really only finding security in the fact that the community of Saline and its council have been against this development, but I get the feeling we'll have to do more. 

P.S. If you want pictures of the cat they pet I can probably upload them at some point.