The people’s control of modern technology

Bay Area movement takes on AI billionaires

By Ramsey Robinson

In 1972, the Black Panther Party revised the tenth point of its program to include “people’s community control of modern technology.” Sixty years after the Panthers were founded in Oakland, that demand is back on the table. This August, billionaire real estate developer Colin Behring announced plans to turn a downtown Oakland building into an AI data center. Oakland has been fighting back.

Data centers, the infrastructure powering AI, are going up across California. The billionaires of Silicon Valley are betting AI will let them run their companies with as few workers as possible, and they are pouring record sums into it.

The working class is footing the bill. Developers, landlords and tech billionaires are using data centers and AI to wipe out jobs and boost their profits. The facilities only need a handful of workers once they open. They consume enormous amounts of electricity and water, straining the grid and driving up power bills. And their backup generators typically burn diesel, polluting the air nearby.

The data center fight lays bare the reality of life under capitalism: there are two Californias. In one, billionaires hoard the wealth and decide how new technology is developed and who benefits. In the other, working people live with the consequences: lost jobs, skyrocketing rent, a looming recession and environmental devastation. Changing this means organizing to take decision-making power into the hands of working people.

Behring wasn’t the only billionaire moving on Oakland this August. Tesla signed a lease for an advanced manufacturing site in West Oakland, and Jeff Bezos’ AI startup Prometheus leased space in the same complex. Black families in West Oakland already breathe diesel exhaust from the Port and the freeways that box in their neighborhood. Now billionaires want new industry in the neighborhood and a diesel-dependent data center downtown, with no community input. That is environmental racism.

Prometheus is building what it calls an “artificial general engineer,” software that designs and manufactures complex physical products, from jet engines to new drugs. Tesla is pouring money into robots and self-driving cars built to replace factory workers and drivers.

These companies show where capitalist AI is headed: automating our jobs. Job losses won’t stop at white-collar software jobs. Any job a capitalist can automate, they will. Lower-wage jobs – held disproportionately by women, Black, and brown workers – are at particular risk. Even if no data center is built in Oakland, what Prometheus and Tesla develop here can still be used to eliminate working people’s jobs everywhere. That’s why our fight reaches beyond any one facility to the system behind it. 

That fight began within hours of Behring’s announcement, when we, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, launched a petition to ban all data centers in Oakland. It gathered thousands of signatures in a few days and grew into the No Data Center Oakland coalition, with hundreds of volunteers and leaders from the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, SEIU, the California Nurses Association, and the Church of All Faiths.

Within weeks, Councilmember Carroll Fife introduced a data center moratorium. With her leadership and dozens of public commenters across three Council meetings, the movement won a unanimous 45-day moratorium on October 6. A 10-month extension goes to a vote on November 10.

The same day, San Francisco unanimously passed its own 45-day moratorium, proposed by Supervisor Shamann Walton after a private equity firm unveiled plans for a 160,000-square-foot data center in Dogpatch, about a mile from Bayview-Hunters Point. Organizers are demanding a full ban and reparations for a Black community poisoned for decades by the former naval shipyard. From Hunters Point to West Oakland, capitalism treats Black neighborhoods as sacrifice zones. AI is the latest example. 

These movements are people’s victories, but moratoriums alone won’t stop capitalist development of AI. A loophole in Oakland’s moratorium could exempt the downtown facility. Projects like Prometheus are kept opaque to dodge public oversight. 

From San Jose and Gilroy to Pittsburg, Hayward and Richmond, working people are organizing, and moratorium fights are spreading city by city. Nationally, local opposition blocked or delayed at least 45 data center projects worth $68 billion between April and June alone, according to Data Center Watch.

J. Edgar Hoover called the Black Panthers the greatest threat to the internal security of the country. Today, federal law enforcement is warning about “anti-tech extremism” and painting people who organize against data centers as a domestic security threat. Meanwhile, AI company Palantir sells ICE the software it uses to track immigrants for deportation – this month ICE arrests in Oakland and Emeryville ended in hospitalization of our neighbors. The ruling class has always called working people dangerous when we organize to take power over our own lives. It’s on all of us to get out, get organized, and end this unjust capitalist system. As Rev. Jeffrey Parker of the Church of All Faiths has put it, we need a system where innovation serves communities, and communities no longer have to serve innovation.

We need regulations that protect our grid, water and air, and protections that keep working-class people in our homes. But as long as billionaires own this technology, we’ll be fighting them one facility or regulation at a time. Winning for good means a new system, where working people plan how our resources are used to meet the needs of people and the planet, including where AI is sited, what it’s used for, and whether a project gets built at all. In workers’ hands, the same technology billionaires want to use against us could free us from tedious, dangerous work and give us back time for our families and communities. That is what people’s community control of modern technology means to us today.

Billionaires are trying to remake society without our consent. Ordinary people are leading the way: canvassing, packing City Hall and going up against the capitalist system, many for the first time. Sixty years after the Panthers raised the demand, the fight continues for a new system where the people control modern technology.

Ramsey Robinson is a school social worker in the Bayview, an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and a former Peace and Freedom Party candidate for governor.

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