By CHRISTINE MARIE

The rapid buildout of data centers designed to support generative AI has alerted many working people in the U.S. to the tech industry’s threat to the quality of life for working people. The intrusion on the landscape of over 4000 giant, environmentally damaging centers for large language model training have fueled outrage and organized opposition across the country. Similarly, AI-enhanced surveillance via license plate tracking and Palantir products that allow unprecedented monitoring of everyone’s daily lives have sparked a growing movement with fights in hundreds of towns.

The use of this new surveillance capacity to target immigrant workers and those trying to protect them has motivated many local campaigns against the cameras. Environmentally destructive data centers and automated license plate readers are, however, just the most widely acknowledged manifestations of a much more substantive attempt by this super-rich part of the ruling class to completely reorganize the economy and society to the great loss of working people.

The tech billionaire game plan includes a dramatic bid to drive down wages through the threat of massive layoffs, qualitatively enhanced workplace discipline, and 24-7 surveillance of the workforce off the job site. They talk openly of reorganizing as much work as possible onto platforms, individualizing wage negotiations, and reducing the capacity for the onsite organizing of unions. Their plan includes lowering the offerings of public education for non-elites and subordinating the availability of health services to computerized decision-making.

Their popularization of a kind of eugenic thinking called “longtermism” is meant to provide an ideological excuse for gutting the conditions of life for the low-waged, the underemployed, and the oppressed. Increasingly, they have been integrated into the Pentagon, where they have stimulated more spending on autonomous weaponry. This war spending, of course, will lead to ruling-class demands to more deeply gut social programs.

Such big dreams require a political game. Big tech CEOs regularly pine in print for a political system in which they would not be impeded by the democratic norms that working people have won in struggle. To this end of narrowing of political rights, they make outsized donations to MAGA candidates, but also to friends in the Democratic Party.

Currently, there is no unified movement to push back against the rapid-fire series of attacks implemented by Big Tech. In Connecticut, activists are working toward a remedy for that (see ad on page 2). Activists from many arenas of struggle are coming together in a panel on Dec. 5 to explore the roots—economic, political, and ideological—of the tech billionaire offensive, to learn from each other, and to consider the possibility of a united fightback.

The Connecticut State AFL-CIO president, Ed Hawthorne, will speak to the federation’s efforts to pass legislation to protect workers from replacement by AI tools. James Saccardo, the political director of Amazon Labor Union, International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Local 1, will explain how Amazon uses AI-enhanced surveillance of warehouse workers’ “productivity” and firings to try to destroy the union. Leslie Blatteau, the president of the New Haven Federation of Teachers, will share her knowledge of the cognitive damage to students wrought by the industry’s coercive integration of generative AI tools into schools.

A leader in the Beacon Falls, Conn., fight against a data center project will be partnered with a Sierra Club volunteer leading a campaign for a state moratorium. A member of Surveillance Off Our Streets will report on the “No Cameras. No Collaboration. No Compromise” state day of action on Nov. 12. Dan Piper of the Connecticut Civil Liberties Defense Committee will present the global economic and political situation driving this offensive against working people and introduce plans for a state winter conference open to all activists called Standing Up to the Tech Billionaires.

Unifying these struggles and moving toward democratically shaped mass protests that are independent of the corporate political parties is an important next step. Ultimately, working people need to develop the political power to turn this industry into a public one—run through worker and community control bodies that could decide what new tech creations truly serve humanity and the planet, and which ones belong in the garbage can of history.