By Nicholas H. Tucker
This is the reality of Mzanzi – you live in a “squatter” community where 30 communal taps are shared by 6000 residents. For the best part of 13 days in any given month these taps go dry. On top of that you are constantly bombarded with bill-boards, flyers, radio and TV broadcasts that tell you to “be water-wise”. Your local municipality claims that there is a “supply issue”, and it is not their fault. As for electricity, you like almost every other resident, has to make do with candles and paraffin for lighting and cooking. Meanwhile, 10 to 15 kilometres away, a foreign-owned corporation is building something massive. A modern hyper-scaled data centre, a building which is essentially a super-massive warehouse filled with hundreds of thousands of powerful computers that will consume up to 100 megawatts of electricity and 4.4 billion litres of water every year, that should rightfully be yours.
That’s enough water to serve 200,000 households and enough electricity to power 100,000 households, for a full year, but you and your community will not get the benefit of any of it.
Now for the harsh reality, those hyper-scaled data-centre’s are getting water and electricity at below-market rates, meaning that they pay far less for it than you do. All of this while your water and electricity tariffs just jumped by another 15%.
The Promise vs. The Reality
When these companies came to town, they brought big words and bigger promises.
“We’ll create jobs.”
“We’ll bring investment.”
“We’ll make South Africa AI-ready.”
The reality on the ground is that “our” government officials rolled out the red carpet for these “new colonialists”. Rezoning gets rapidly approved, grid connections are fast-tracked, environmental assessments are shelved to some vague future date, because they are deem non-urgent. We get told that all these “smallanyana” (small and meaningless) issues will be sorted out after the contracts/agreements are signed. We somehow know that they never will be signed, but we still hope for a miracle.
All of this is familiar, and it is part of the same playbook that the giant mining companies used for over a century. Promise prosperity, extract resources, and disappear while leaving a royal mess in their wake.
Now, here is the real back-end deal that they do not tell us about and hope that we are to stupid to ask about:
Most of those “promised jobs” involve temporary construction work. Once the data centre is built, they only need a handful of highly skilled technicians. Maybe a handful of “mantshingelanes” (security guards), because they believe that the communities that they “voerwaai” (used and discarded) have a propensity for thieving, thus the security. That’s it, not even a cooldrink for our thirsty ‘squad cars’.
The electricity they consume? That’s electricity you cannot afford and you cannot use. During load-shedding the multi-nationals have preferential use, while the hospitals, clinics and other emergency services you urgently need for your community has to run on generators with almost no diesel or petrol.
The water they drink? That’s water your children can’t drink. And the profits? Well, by now you must have realised that you will not be getting any of that, as all profits are repatriated to distant shores, they don’t stay here. They go back to headquarters in California, or Amsterdam, or wherever.
Data Mining is the Same as Gold Mining
Lets break it down for you:
- They promise jobs and investment.
- You approve the project without asking hard questions.
- They extract your water, your electricity, your land.
- You pay for the strain on your grid, your water system, your environment.
- They mine your data across the entire country and they get to keep it.
- They repatriate the profits overseas.
- They repeat the cycle with the next town.
This isn’t development. It’s extraction that is no different to the old colonial mine ownership, where migrant labour was used then tossed aside when the gold, coal, etc. ran out.
And we’re letting it happen because we’ve been told it is “inevitable”. That if we don’t build these data-centres, South Africa will “fall behind” in the AI race. But who says we need their kind of AI?
First the Coloniser, now the Oligarchs Doing our Thinking
Of course they are not going to tell you this, it is part of their carefully guarded business strategy. These data centres aren’t just storing your photos and emails, they are powering AI systems that are already making decisions about you.
Who gets a loan, who gets hired, who gets medical treatment, who gets denied insurance, and who is suitable to be on their payroll.
All these decisions happen inside what is called “black-box” systems. You and I can never get to see the inside workings of these systems, and you cannot ask them why they decided against a certain person, you cannot challenge their logic and you cannot even see what data they used.
When you’re desperate, when you’ve just lost your job, or your child is sick, or you’re drowning in debt, and you turn to an AI for help, it doesn’t ask: “What are you really asking?”. It just gives you an answer. Fast. Fluent. Authoritative. And if you are in crisis, you more than likely will believe it, even if it’s wrong, even if it’s dangerous.
This happens more often than MSM (main stream media) alerts you to. To illustrate this phenomenon – a short fictitious story:
“A man finds himself alone, desperate and hard-pressed to find meaning in life. Sitting in his squalid shack beside a river, he recalls his mother’s words to him: ‘When the world seems wrong, turn to your Bible, my child.’ He rummages through his few possessions and retrieves a tattered Bible, opening it at random. He reads:
‘…and Judas threw the silver into the temple and left. Then he went and hanged himself.’ (Matt. 27:5)
Startled, he drops the book. When he picks it up again, it randomly flops open to another page:
‘Go out and do likewise.’ (Luke 10:37)”
Now imagine what happens with an AI that speaks with the confidence of a god, but has the wisdom of a spreadsheet, and millions of us begin to act on it’s instructions.
A Working Class Solution
Always bear in mind that it was the working-class that build this world from the ground up and here is what we are proposing:
Distributed, community-owned data infrastructure.
Not hyper-scaled server farms that drink billions of litres of water, but smaller, air-cooled facilities that can run on solar power. Facilities that use closed-loop cooling systems that don’t touch the municipal water supply.
Local ownership.
South African data, stored on South African infrastructure, owned by South Africans, not foreign corporations that treat our resources as standing reserve.
Real transparency.
Before any data centre gets approved, they should have to prove:
- Why they need that much power and water.
- What happens to the community if things go wrong.
- Who actually benefits.
And the community should have the right to say no.
The Choice Is Ours
We are told that this is progress, that we can’t stop the AI revolution, that we have to accept the costs if we want the benefits.
But that is the big lie, we can choose infrastructure design that serves us, that protects our water, our electricity, our land. AI-infrastructure that is engineered to respect our dignity and our right to understand the decisions being made about us.
We can choose infrastructure that’s owned by communities, not corporations. Choosing elegant architecture that is distributed, not monolithic. AI systems that are accountable, not “black-box” and opaque.
The question isn’t whether we can afford to say no to hyper-scaled data centres, the real question is whether we can afford to say yes. I would rather drink water than drown in bullshit data. Let’s make sure we remember that.
Nicholas H. Tucker – The Symanthesist Research Initiative – http://symanthesism.org