Communities Resist Forced Datacentres Over Energy Strain
The story frames the datacentre boom as natural consolidation - the necessary infrastructure of a maturing digital age, no more sinister than the laying of railway track. But look at what is actually being fenced: the electricity grid, the water table, the shared atmospheric budget that villages in Scotland and towns across India have depended upon and helped steward for generations, now claimed as feedstock for machines few of those villages will ever operate. The question the framing skips is who benefits from the fence - and whose access it removes.
Communities did not build these datacentres, but they built, through generations of unglamorous cooperation, the very commons now being requisitioned: the maintained grid connections, the managed aquifers, the atmospheric stability that costs nothing to enjoy and everything to lose. This is mutual aid that never makes the register books - engineers, farmers, water boards, generations of quiet stewardship - dismissed the instant a hyperscale contract needs signing.
The pretext offered this summer, as protests spread from the Scottish lowlands to districts across India, is the oldest one in the enclosure’s toolkit: that cashing in on AI requires concentration - vast centralised facilities, sited wherever land and power are cheapest, because any distributed or community-governed approach to computing infrastructure would supposedly be too slow to keep pace with an economic race the country cannot afford to lose. Note the structure of the claim: it does not argue that concentration serves the community; it argues that the community’s objection is the obstacle to a growth that will presumably benefit it later, on terms it did not set and will not be asked to review.
Ask instead who is actually cashing in on AI, and the enclosure resolves into simple arithmetic. Big tech companies gain the compute; governments gain the investment announcement and the jobs figure for the press release; the community gains a facility humming through the night on power it now competes for and water it now rations. The claim that datacentres are essential is not false in the way propaganda usually is - it is essential, for the specific model of AI development that concentrated capital has already chosen. It is not essential in the way the framing implies, as though no other arrangement of the same resources could produce the same intelligence at a smaller cost to the people living beside the fence.
Picture a resident in a village outside Edinburgh, watching the transmission lines that once fed the school and the dairy now routed, by priority agreement, to a windowless building that employs almost no one from the village and answers to a board thousands of miles away. That image is not incidental to the story; it is the story, stripped of the language of progress. The same scene repeats near drought-pressed districts of India, where water drawn for cooling towers is measured against wells already running low, and the datacentre’s contractual seniority carries more weight than the well’s history of communal use.
None of this requires believing that cooperation is frictionless, or that every objection at a planning hearing is wise; some resistance to infrastructure is parochial, some is captured by rival interests entirely, and a fair audit of mutual aid has no patience for sentimentality about that. But the warning that these facilities threaten energy supplies and the climate is not hysteria to be managed with better public relations - it is the commons registering, in the only language available to it, that it is being spent down by parties who will not be present to pay the deficit. Governments weighing planning permissions this year are being asked to choose between the fence and the field, and calling that choice inevitable is the fence’s oldest trick, dressed this season in the vocabulary of the artificial mind.
The lights stay on in the datacentre. Somewhere upstream, a valve closes on a well that used to belong to everyone.