Laura Flanders: Faiz, how would you describe the degree of protest?

Faiz Shakir: There’s a fleecing of America by the oligarchs who want to position and plant data centers in communities they deemed they can exploit. They felt that rural communities and places like Louisiana, Indiana, Missouri, Arizona, they don’t have political power. You have nondisclosure agreements with many of these communities. You have them taking electricity and raising rates, you have them exploiting water and a lot of other land issues. The communities, thankfully, are not taking this lying down. They know what is going on, and increasingly they’ve been showing up by the hundreds at local town council meetings. What should give us hope is that that’s what democracy is, a sense that we have power, economic democracy. There’s more and more pushback, which hopefully portends the possibility that a lot of these communities can strike better deals if they are going to have data centers. There’s no reason why we can’t be asking that teachers are well paid, that electricity rates don’t go up, that we have decent affordable housing in those communities.

LF: Coming to you John, you quote people in your book who say this digital tech could be as transformative, not to mention as disruptive, as the steam engine. How so?

John Cassidy: Most economists think we’re living through the early stages of a new industrial revolution. They compare it to the first Industrial Revolution in late 17th-, early 18th-century Britain, which was based on the steam engine. What that did was displace generations of skilled artisanal workers in the north of England. From a technological perspective, it was revolutionary. From a financial perspective, it was revolutionary because it enabled the rise of factory capitalism. We’ve seen technological change before in various junctures of history. But I think what’s got economists concerned this time is the sheer scale of this. A lot of economists and technologists think this is what they call a general-purpose technology, a transformative technology on the scale of nothing we’ve seen before.

LF: Faiz is talking about the kind of requests, demands, expectations that people have had in the past. They haven’t always been met, but it’s a good opportunity to remind people that the Luddites didn’t just break up machines. They had ideas.

JC: This sort of struggle over the impact of technology goes back to the very beginning of capitalism, and the first major incident was the Luddites in Northern England, who were skilled artisanal workers, handloom weavers being the most famous ones. Factories came along with power looms, displaced them en masse. But despite that, the first response from workers wasn’t to start smashing things up. It was actually to take political action. As things got worse, the workers took it into their hands and a sort of spontaneous mass movement arose, the Luddites. They started threatening some factory owners and actually smashed up some of the machinery. “Luddite,” when I was growing up, was a term of abuse. It was people who were sort of antediluvians and didn’t understand the modern world. There was actually a lot of logic behind the Luddites’ actions from their point of view. They understood the modern world as it was perfectly. And they saw it was moving against them and the political system wasn’t coming to their defense.

LF: Faiz, you have drawn parallels to the fights around NAFTA, which I have to remind people weren’t won by labor and the critics of that pact, and that pact did transform our lives and the lives of people around the world. Not in positive ways for the most part. What makes you think this could be a transformative moment of a different kind?

FS: Laura, it needs to be a transformative moment. Certainly, whether politicians rise to the challenge and show integrity and understand what’s at stake is a question that remains to be answered. We are seeing at least voices speak out. No surprise to any of us that Bernie Sanders has been a leading voice in calling for a data-center moratorium. But in addition, on the right, you have had people like Ron DeSantis and Marjorie Taylor Greene and a few others express reasonable concerns. And that these data centers, by the way, are getting huge tax breaks, and the community benefit is very little to marginal. I think this next presidential cycle, 2028 will be in part a referendum on the direction of AI in this country.

JC: I’ve been talking to economists and technologists for years, and I think they foresaw that there would be political opposition to the job losses associated with AI. You saw people like [Sam] Altman and even Elon Musk trying to get out ahead by saying things like, “We may need some sort of a universal basic income program accompanying the rise of AI.” Of course, they never volunteered to pay wealth taxes to finance the UBI. But the thing that surprised them, and it surprised me to some extent as well, is the sort of preemptive opposition in the form of this local opposition to the data centers. I don’t think the tech oligarchs really foresaw that at all. And especially the fact that Faiz mentioned, it seems to be bipartisan. When AI was originally advertised a few years ago, I don’t think most people realized the immense power demands it would place on the system. Then you’ve got Microsoft restarting a nuclear plant, this is something new in the world.

LF: Three Mile Island to be clear. Now we have seen several billion dollars’ worth of these data centers actually either blocked or delayed, Faiz. There is some good news on this front.

FS: You’re right that there have been communities in Tucson, Indianapolis, St. Charles, Missouri, a few others who have said no. That number is ticking up by the month. I want to also make sure viewers understand that when people are talking about buying and invading Greenland, what is that about? It is related to data centers. In addition, you have bitcoin mining, and you have copper mining, you have all kinds of resource allocations and extractions. One of the ways you want to think about solutions is if you are not a crass, greedy capitalist like Donald Trump, but you were someone who was interested in raising the working-class standards of this country, then you’re doing some of the same tactics with different results. If you were going to take Intel share, which he has done, or take shares in rare earth mineral companies as he has done or in any of these data-center development corporations, then benefits from that should then create a dividend of going back into working-class hands. That is one way in which you execute some kind of a share of a worker compact. In addition, the government is also going to have to get invested in the mission of creating jobs where many are going to be displaced and believing that we need teachers for the future and doctors of the future. Many in the AI industry will tell you we don’t need any of those people and it will be a governmental role to say, “No, we actually do,” because there’s a whole swath of lower-income, middle-class workers who are going to be left out in the cold if the rich make the rules and govern the economy of the next 50 years.

LF: Your book, John, is both great in that you hear all the critiques, and you end with, maybe somebody will come up with the road that is taken. Your final chapter is “Capitalism Beginning or Ending?” Which is it and what are our options in this moment?

JC: The way I look at it in historical terms is that we’re now in a sort of interregnum period. We had this sort of postwar, what I call managed capitalism, social democracy, which broke down in the 1980s basically with the election of Thatcher and Reagan. We then had a 30-year experiment in neoliberalism and what I call “hyperglobalization”—let the markets rip. That’s produced a huge backlash, both in the rise of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on the left of the Democratic Party, but also a lot more ominously with Trump and right-wing economic populism in the United States but also in other places around the world. The big question now is, where does it go from here?

Whatever you think of Donald Trump, he’s got a very clear policy out there. Economic nationalism, throw out the immigrants, protect American businesses, America first, let the oligarchs rebuild the economy. On the left, I think it’s unclear what the options are. We’re still sort of groping toward them. If AI is going to produce a huge maldistribution of income even more than we see now, there’s going to have to be some sort of socialization of the AI wealth. We need, I think, a big discussion on the left and the center left about what’s the alternative paradigm we’ve got to offer in this new age.