Local Luddism - The Quiet Front

I'm inherently biased towards the everyday forms of resistance, because it's what I research, but even allowing for there does seem to be a growing sense that the best battles to fight when it comes to big tech are the local ones.This case of push back against AI enabled surveillance in a (very) small Colorado town is indicative I think. AI with its data centers and their auxiliary of surveillance infrastructure are both pretty vulnerable to local, certainly more so than the national or global, attempts at resistance. As we've repeatedly seen here in the UK (1, 2) it's easy for governments and credulous/corrupt leaders to drive towards unquestioning AI adoption as a centralised assertion rather than involving anything so messy as public opinion. For all the cyber-utopian fantasies of the disembodied cloud and its distant assertions of progress however most AI technologies are, in one way or another, inherently tied to the mundane, ground level existence we all live in. Data centers…