I'm writing this post partially as an indirect response to a YouTube video, "Does ESOTERICA use AI?", under the channel "ESOTERICA". It's not so much a video meant for *watching*, but rather for *listening*, to a very well-written script being recited by the creator. In the monologue and the script it's based on, he makes many poetic references to William Blake, and draws on his deeper knowledge of the occult to explain why, rather bluntly and dispassionately, that AI is a "demonic" force sucking away the life of humanity. More importantly, he makes an official statement, or announcement, that the creator of "ESOTERICA" forbids himself unwaveringly from EVER using AI to produce any piece of content whatsoever on his channel. Scripts, thumb-nails, etc. will all be made without its use. The video, as of April 28th, 2026, is publicly available here:
youtu.be/v0VZvMmelN4?si=EeWs3laOjs1h1tid
Although the video is definitely worth a listen, currently I'm not as interested in the subject of AI and its implication for art, humanity, etc. as much as I'm interested in the *class relations* for which this video is a microcosm of, and an expression of. Specifically the creator of "ESOTERICA" briefly mentions *another* subject that's been weighing on me very heavily recently, which is the growth and production of large data-centers across the United States. He says:
"The material reality is that these data centers are planted, without consent, in largely working-class neighborhoods, like the one that I grew up in"
It needs to be noted that the production of data centers in the US is nothing new, and AI isn't the sole contributing factor contributing to their production. But why this is important is because to me, there hasn't yet been any kind of cold, cohesive, thorough assessment of what implications data center production has for the future of humanity in the long term (e.g. the next 50-100 years). Nor has there been any objective assessment, any predictive analysis, of the circle of Silicon Valley elites slowly gaining power in the White House through its control of alternative media and back-channels to advisors like Elon Musk and JD Vance.
Rather, the response to this ongoing "coup" (for lack of a better term) of America's productive force, has been, on the surface, extremely moralistic, vacillating between extreme levels of nihilistic fatalism and violent subjectivism which is historically highly characteristic of the petty-bourgeoisie. In this case it happens to be related to the fact that alternative media and the mainstream media is *itself* dominated by petty-bourgeois urban intellectuals who've become comfortable with passively working W2 jobs and accumulating 401ks, while doing the same work that *AI is meant to replace*. Unfortunately, it's a tall order to task these same journalists, whose source of income relies on the suppression of AI technology, with writing objectively about America's ongoing economic development -- to write about big tech without resorting to opportunistic moralism and fear-mongering out of basic desperation.
This is not to argue that the ongoing situation in America's economy isn't tragic; The past half century of exporting finance capital through the IMF and World Bank, for America to extract rents from the rest of the world has contributed to a trade deficit that none of America's elites have any ability or intention to solve. It's tragic that America's been so deindustrialized to the point where the only remaining opportunity for the industrial working class is to build data centers. It's tragic that these data centers are consolidating mass surveillance data which will be used enslave the same people building them. But nothing I mentioned so far really tells us what's actually, really, going to happen.
To do that, a serious circumspect effort needs to be made to separate the objective from the subjective -- separate the inevitable from matters of personal agency -- and I'm hoping to lay the groundwork for that task in writing this.
Firstly, we need to figure out where these data center rigs are actually coming from to figure out where this is all headed. It isn't just AI: What they actually represent is a *centralization* of the productive capacity of computer technology into large warehouses. Before these things existed, a large amount of computing was relatively decentralized: If I wanted to start a website, I would have to buy a computer, fill out some forms online to buy a domain and then register it to the IP address that points to where my computer's sitting (usually an office or garage). Now, because of data centers, all I have to do is make an account on AWS or Google Cloud without buying a computer, and I simply pay a fee for the computing power "on the cloud". The "cloud" being used in question is no longer *somebody's* computer, as much as a small slice of a larger computer in a giant warehouse.
But why? Wh