The Renewal of Liberty: Revolting against the tyranny of technology

The Renewal of Liberty: Revolting against the tyranny of technology

by David Kyler

Executive Director at Center for a Sustainable Coast

June 29, 2026

Opposition to datacenters frequently dominates news cycles from coast to coast, resistance to political exploitation by the titans of Silicon Valley that could hardly be more appropriate as America’s 250th anniversary approaches. The power of concentrated wealth held by these high-tech overlords threatens to dismantle personal liberties and economic justice through blatantly abusive activities, enabled by the morally challenged conflation of corporate political donations with 'free speech' - sanctioned through the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Citizens United.

Essentially, financial incentives firmly entrenched within U.S. institutions are undermining principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. The brazenly oppressive use of transactional power by Big Tech is thrusting us into a pivotal reckoning.

Some predict we are on the threshold of a new revolution – potentially on a global scale.

The Center for Humane Technology warns of the divisive, diversionary influences of social networking - using AI algorithms that monetize the attention of millions of people. With further development of artificial intelligence, the profitmaking potential of the attention economy is luring billions of dollars toward speculative investments, which some analysts expect to create a catastrophic financial collapse.

Aside from the threat of severe economic disruption, rampant proliferation of datacenter proposals being prompted by such speculation is creating a bipartisan national backlash against such projects.

As stated by Food & Water Watch,

• “Big Tech wants you to think its massive AI datacenter buildout is inevitable. But American people across the political spectrum have caught on to its get-rich datacenter scheme. Recent polling shows massive opposition to datacenters, and it’s growing…Data centers are a [predator] on neighborhoods, raising people’s electricity bills, taking their drinking water, and creating noise pollution. They also [release] dirty [heat-trapping] fossil-fuel emissions at [unprecedented] rates.
• "One poll finds 62% of Republicans, 76% of Democrats, and 73% of Independents think the costs of data centers are greater than their benefits. As people have learned more about the negative effects and tax-leaking strains data centers bring to communities, numbers steadily rise against them. The backlash against Big Tech has happened despite its massive spending, [including] millions on … ad campaigns [trying] to convince Americans that AI is the inevitable future.
• "But Big Tech isn’t fooling anyone. Americans have seen what data centers are doing to their communities and what unregulated AI is doing to society….” https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/2026/05/18/people-hate-data-centers-polling/

The spiking trend of investment in the attention economy seems to be driven by the values of a brutally transactional culture that created the world’s first trillionaire – who happens to be the same individual whose wealth bought the undeserved and unconstitutional political power to arbitrarily decimate vital life-support services provided by America’s humanitarian programs. These cuts are estimated to have resulted in the starvation, disease, and death of hundreds of thousands of humans worldwide, with millions more tragic fatalities to follow.

David Brooks asserts that the moral problems of the U.S. are far worse than its political ones. He argues that “modern society is suffering from a fundamental crisis of meaning, character, and moral formation rather than a traditional political divide”… and that “the loss of a shared moral order has left generations feeling isolated, leading them to use tribal politics as a substitute for community.”  [https://www.instagram.com/reel/DUs9BeMjSi1/?hl=en]

This is a compelling viewpoint, given rising discontent, worsening concentration of wealth, and the spreading chaos of AI-enhanced disinformation.

Undoubtedly, many will assert that growing resistance to datacenters is far simpler, based primarily on not-in-my-backyard opposition to the financial and environmental threats to personal property and quality of life. Even if this is true, the effects are much the same as if resistance resulted from unbridled hostility to the technology creating demand for data-storage-and-processing facilities - antagonism that extends to the tech billionaires promoting them.

Social critics and historians have drawn parallels between the growing groundswell of popular resistance to technology and the movement of those opposing the mechanization of human skills in the early 19th century, known as the Luddites.

“Neo-Luddism is based on the concern of the technological impact on individuals, their communities, and/or the environment. Neo-Luddism stipulates the use of the precautionary principle for all new technologies, insisting that technologies be proven safe before adoption, due to the unknown effects that new technologies might inspire.” [Source: Wikipedia.]

However, the current and projected implications of AI are more pervasively ominous than mere industrialization – destructive though it has been over the past two centuries. As experts have observed, AI threatens both social and economic stability, and in its advanced forms has been predicted to generate an unnerving possibility of permanently subjugating humanity. As Yuval Harari underscores, AI is not a tool like all previous technology, rather, it is an agent  with the capability of programming itself and learning things humans may not know or even apprehend.  

Furthermore, the enormous scale of energy required by the technology will cause intolerable overheating of our climate if dirty fuels are used, as proposed in the vast majority of datacenter projects.

These prospects clearly suggest at least two distinct alternatives ahead. (1) Continuing with unrestricted development of digital technology, hoping that that benefits will be maximized and equitably distributed while adverse effects can be reliably diminished, despite ample evidence of tech corporate exploitation or (2) Expediently abandon the status quo by adopting comprehensive reforms that establish prudent restrictions on technology and accountable, transparent groundrules for applying them – including rigorous monitoring and assessment, with well-corroborated authority to suspend implementation when threats are unacceptable.

Since empowering digital technology has become inherently political, its control in service of the common good must also be a political priority, as well as an economic one. Developing policies controlling AI and its infrastructure will require undeviating resolve that engages moral imperatives to prevent the abuses of wealth, using a platform of principles that restore equitable humanitarian goals and honor the regnerative limits of global environmental sustainability.

This ambitious challenge deserves our utmost attention as we ponder the profound implications of liberty and justice in the context of our nation’s 250th anniversary.