AI and Earth-defending Action
The distance between our realization and actualization – has changed and it is a tragic dangerous thing that you and I share. Realizing can come in many forms. With the environmental movement – the realization was the reading of Silent Spring. (For others among us, it was Edward Abbey’s “The Monkey Wrench Gang”) That book by Rachel Carson made the danger from toxic chemicals in the air, water and soil – and our bodies – very real. We saw the danger. We could imagine and fear it. We were motivated to act.
We need to study the distance between realization and actualization, between oppression and revolution, between information and fight-or-flight. That distance, the billionaires and captains of the investor class have discovered, is the key to their control.
The old belief in journalism, and in the courts, and in the common sense of democracy is – “If we have the facts, we can act.” In the United States the distance between realization and actualization has become an impassable distance. Our sensory experience of a thing has been blown up and filled with light, with attention-manipulating vibrating light, a bubble of signals the size of Grand Central Station, and we float around inside its delicious weightlessness – and we can’t kill the screen and get out of our chair.
If we become aware of the global heatwave that flared into fires and droughts in the summer of 2023 and is still overheating us, than we have before us endless pages of pixels, featuring the agony and suffering of the innocent of the world. We struggle to walk thousands of miles with climate refugees. We cry with parents of a child overcome by heat. We listen to wise biologists, as systems of natural life die and extinction looms.
So far, all this reality on the screen amounts to one big human hesitation. We keep wondering why there is no uprising against the current increasingly silent spring. We are lost in the over-developed realization of the danger. Ironically, the realization is increasingly unreal. We are growing a vivid and very convincing realization of a mass mortality event, but we can’t kill the screen and rise from our chair.
The strongmen and the billionaires are aware that AI will as never before gives us the sensation of democracy while pushing any action off the horizon. All-information all-the-time will leave us overloaded and listless. Big money learned long ago to handle the irony that in the age of AI the ordinary computer-users would know much more about the truth of their toxins and bullets, union-busting and tax-evading. But the masters of the universe are secure in the knowledge that we will stay put in our dopamine drop.
Meanwhile the revolution against the Earth-killers cannot be put off another day. The disappearance of life of all kinds is only accelerating. The climate change may be irreversible now, but if we don’t try, if we continue to put our hopes in the COP parlays with big oil; if we go on believing that our radical standing up cannot happen – then consumerism, the products and the screens and nonsense wars must prevail. Realize a dead planet with the occasional billionaire bunker…
Now is a moment in our history we cannot get wrong. And there is a battle that can set things right. The data centers multiplying now like an international rash are plundering energy and water, buying off local politicians and daring us to cross from our realization to our action. The all-partisan uprising against the ugly super-warehouses is heartening. But the State of Virginia already hosts over 600 data centers. This battle may go on for years against the might of Silicon Valley, but in the struggle we will dramatize a clear message… and escape from that cathedral size bubble of pixels. Will we escape that AI mind-prison? Will we take what we realize over into what we actually do? It’s like remembering how to love.
Rev. Billy