I do my organizing with Portland DSA, and right now we are engaged in a multi-front fight against new data center development in the Portland Metro area. The western suburbs, including the city of Hillsboro, are the site of some of the most aggressive data center expansions in the country, and Oregon as a whole ranks number 3 in the nation for new data center construction. Oregon is also a state dominated entirely by the Democratic party, so the consequences of these developments can be laid squarely at their door, along with the high electricity and water rates, groundwater contamination, workforce deskilling and social degradation that accompany them wherever they go. This has been useful for us locally in some of our organizing to put forward alternative political candidates, because everybody hates data centers, and so everyone hates the establishment Democrats who have been aggressively pushing them on the local populace.

Last Saturday we held a rally at a farmhouse in the Tualatin Valley, on the edge of Hillsboro, that has been swallowed up by new data center construction. The Starr farm is an historic site (red square in above image), a farmhouse built in the late 1800s and now enveloped by a decade of rapidly built high-tech infrastructure, formless industrial blocks containing the substrate on which big chunks of Oregon’s data-processing capacity runs; infrastructure which is used by the big tech firms looking to eliminate the human workforce and generate a cyclical value engine driven by cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence. These substrates also do the processing for local firms like Sightline Intelligence, an AI startup in Portland which provides targeting services for Elbit Systems, the major Israeli weapons manufacturer. Sightline made headlines a few weeks ago after they released a promo reel with prominent Portland landscapes subbed into their targeting views, after which Portland DSA’s BDS and Palestine Solidarity campaign started aggressively agitating for the company’s public disgrace and censure.

I painted a “Data Centers are Disasters” banner and brought along the Big Hammer, a paper-mache prop that I made for people to use as a metaphor for how they relate to destructive technologies (and as a nod to famous labor organizers the Luddites). At Starr farm we were able to muster a pretty impressive crowd to hear from insurgent campaigns against the establishment Democrats who run the region, mc’ed by DSA member Jacob Roloff, a local pumpkin farmer who has become a figurehead for local resistance to this catastrophic infrastructural expansion. Candidate for statehouse Tammy Carpenter, another DSA member who has made opposition to data centers a central plank of her socialist platform, also spoke, along with Myrna Munoz and Kipperlyn Sinclair, candidates for local city council looking to unseat the democrats who voted to permit these developments.

The rally had an angry edge to it that felt a bit incongruous on this bright and flowery morning- people really hate data centers and they are ready to fight about it! All over the country a movement is rising to push back on this apocalyptic vision of a shitty future that only benefits billionaires. Tucson AZ successfully prevented a new data center project, along wiht cities and towns in Missouri, Indiana, and Virginia, while Monterey Park CA has banned them outright, and the state of Maine was the first state in the country to vote to declare a permanent moratorium on new data centers (see a partial list of proposed and enacted moratoria here). People engaged in this fight know that it connects the local to the international, with the majoritarian sense of solidarity with Palestine against Israeli terror and violence, along with a growing popular understanding that the rich own both sides of the political orthodoxy. We are going to need new political forces to win this fight- and we also need to want those forces to win, to want to wield the power they can build, and to take the fight to our class enemies on every front we can find.

Banner image shows Dr. Tammy Carpenter, Farrah Chaichi (Oregon State Rep) and Angelita Morillo (Portland City Council), all members of DSA and leaders of the insurgent socialist movement in the Portland Metro.