{"id":62,"date":"2026-05-22T22:39:35","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T22:39:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/summitrelocationtimess.com\/?p=62"},"modified":"2026-05-22T22:39:35","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T22:39:35","slug":"capitalism-without-humans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/summitrelocationtimess.com\/?p=62","title":{"rendered":"Capitalism Without Humans"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Around the United States, the rebellions against President Donald Trump\u2019s militarized Immigration and Customs Enforcement invasions\u2009\u2014\u2009bolstered by other agencies including the National Guard and, at least in one case, actual Marines\u2014continue. National headlines have mostly skipped over Memphis, perhaps because it\u2019s a\u00a0smaller city in the South, far from the headquarters of national media. On the ground in Memphis, local policy organizer Amber Sherman explained, the fear\u2014 and resistance\u2009\u2014\u2009are similar to what we see in bigger\u00a0cities.<\/p>

Read more Worker Organizer Abducted By Federal Agents in Minnesota<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not so much the National Guard, she said, but around the city, there are some 1<\/span>,500<\/span> federal agents from the so-called Memphis Safe Task Force working alongside existing police and using traffic stops\u2009\u2014\u2009reportedly more than 35<\/span>,000<\/span>\u00a0in two months\u2009\u2014\u2009as a\u00a0way to get their hands on people. This is the very issue\u2009\u2014\u2009pretextual stops\u2014 that Memphis activists organized against so effectively after police killed artist and skateboarder Tyre Nichols two years ago. \u200b\u201c<\/span>It\u2019s just scaring the hell out of people,\u201d Sherman said. \u200b\u201c<\/span>A lot of people just aren\u2019t going anywhere, and that\u2019s really impacting all the economics. No one is going out to buy anything. People aren\u2019t taking their kids to\u00a0school.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Unlike Illinois and California, Tennessee has a\u00a0governor who is thrilled to have Trump\u2019s troops. Gov. Bill Lee led the charge to overturn the police reforms that Memphis activists like Sherman had fought for, as I\u00a0wrote in 2024<\/span>. Cities under attack by the state government is a\u00a0common story in the South, but the Memphis activists are also disappointed in their city government, which has offered to cooperate with the federal\u00a0agents.<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/span>We\u2019re threatened constantly, and some people are susceptible to those threats,\u201d Sherman\u00a0said.<\/p>\n

Activists in the city have fought for social services and youth programs that effectively lowered violent crime to a\u00a025<\/span>-year low\u2014 according to the police themselves. But too often the governor and state legislature overturn that work or its\u00a0funding.<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/span>Our mayor doesn\u2019t want to push back because he knows that they\u2019ll not fund or not give us grants for different programming,\u201d Sherman said. \u200b\u201c<\/span>That\u2019s how they keep us in\u00a0check.\u201d<\/p>\n

What Memphis does have in common with most other cities on Trump\u2019s list is Black leadership, a\u00a0large Black population and powerful activist communities. And it\u2019s beginning to fight back, too, against the tech takeover, embodied in Memphis in the form of Elon Musk\u2019s xAI data center. So Trump sent in the task force\u2009\u2014\u2009which had, between Oct. 1<\/span>\u00a0and early December, made more than 3<\/span>,100<\/span> arrests, and it won\u2019t disclose who it has arrested or why. Local outlet MLK50<\/span> analyzed one day\u2019s worth of arrest data to find that, despite the governor\u2019s claims that the force is arresting violent criminals and gang members, \u200b\u201c<\/span>most of the people arrested were not charged with a\u00a0violent crime, and immigrants are being arrested on administrative\u2009\u2014\u2009not criminal\u2009\u2014\u2009warrants.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/span>It is meant,\u201d Sherman said, \u200b\u201c<\/span>as a\u00a0way to quell\u00a0dissent.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Trinity Williams (center) rallies Memphis protesters for \u201copportunity, not occupation\u201d on Oct. 4, 2025, standing against an xAI data center and the local deployment of the National Guard. PHOTO BY AUSTIN JOHNSON \/ AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES<\/span>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The rebellions have, so far, given us two iconic images of resistance. In Portland, Ore., we have the inflatable costumes\u2014beginning with the frog and expanding to a\u00a0whole menagerie. In Los Angeles, the indelible image is that of a\u00a0string of automated Waymo taxis, put to the\u00a0torch.<\/p>\n

The costumes have quickly been seized on and replicated around the country, most visibly at the massive No Kings marches in October 2025<\/span>. But as Julia Carrie Wong wrote in the Guardian<\/em>, clowning in a\u00a0frog suit is a\u00a0de-escalatory tactic, designed to make masked agents of the state appear\u00a0ridiculous.<\/p>\n

By contrast, the flaming Waymos express something else: a\u00a0targeted defiance of tech-enabled Trumpism with material consequences. If you\u2019re going to treat our neighbors as disposable, the burned-to-a-crisp robotaxi says, we\u2019re going to make you\u00a0pay.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Waymo is, after all, a\u00a0privatized, automated taxi run as a\u00a0subsidiary of Alphabet (Google\u2019s parent company) and rolled out in high-tech hubs like San Francisco, Phoenix and Austin,\u00a0Texas.<\/p>\n

Tech journalist Brian Merchant saw the husks of incinerated Waymos firsthand in Los Angeles and reported, \u200b\u201c<\/span>Protesters were reportedly calling them \u200b\u2018<\/span>spy cars\u2019 as they were vandalized and set ablaze, and some noted how the cars can share data with the\u00a0LAPD.\u201d<\/p>\n

Merchant goes on: \u200b\u201c<\/span>ICE raids are carried out using data provided by Silicon Valley companies. \u2026 Whether directly or through third party contractors, much of big tech, including Google, has made deals with ICE,\u00a0too.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A Waymo car burns in the street as smoke billows during protests in Los Angeles, California, on June 8, 2025. Following a series of aggressive federal immigration operations in Los Angeles, tensions escalated when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents conducted a high-profile raid on a Home Depot location. The raid sparked widespread protests across the city, where demonstrators decried the targeting of immigrant communities and the separation of families. Clashes soon broke out between protesters and federal agents, prompting U.S. President Donald Trump to deploy 2,000 National Guard troops to the city, a move harshly criticized by California officials, including the governor, as “purposefully inflammatory.” (Photo by DAVID PASHAEE\/Middle East Images\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/span>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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A photo posted of one Waymo, presumably before it was put to the torch, showed it splashed with graffiti, \u200b\u201c<\/span>Eat the Rich\u201d and \u200b\u201c<\/span>Tech Fuels\u00a0Fascism.\u201d<\/p>\n

The same tech hubs in which Waymo has so proudly unfurled its service, after all, were also increasingly unlivable before the camouflaged gun-toting goons marched in, where homelessness is rampant and gig workers sleep in their (non-self-driving)\u00a0cars.<\/p>\n

Driving for one of the various rideshare and delivery apps was one way that working-class people, immigrant or otherwise, could maybe piece together a\u00a0living; now, robotaxis and a\u00a0horde of delivery robots cheerily automate their jobs away. The workers so recently called \u200b\u201c<\/span>essential\u201d in the days of Covid-19<\/span> lockdowns are tossed aside or fed into the deportation\u00a0machine.<\/p>\n

Communities have been disintegrating under the weight of supposed prosperity. As Eric Garcetti, then-mayor of Los Angeles, famously said in 2020<\/span>: \u200b\u201c<\/span>In a\u00a0good economy, homelessness goes\u00a0up.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Wealthy residents and visitors to LA can cruise past homeless encampments in a\u00a0driverless car, ignoring the people rendered surplus when parts of the servant economy are mechanized. California Gov. Gavin Newsom personally joined the clearance of one LA camp, ostentatiously shoving items into a\u00a0trash bag.<\/p>\n

The symbolism couldn\u2019t be clearer: When we no longer value your labor, you will be\u00a0discarded.<\/p>\n

What the Waymo represents, then, is the question of what happens in an increasingly automated economy, when more and more of us will no longer be \u200b\u201c<\/span>workers\u201d at\u00a0all.<\/p>\n

What happens when U.S. capitalism simply needs fewer\u00a0humans?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The idea of people being superfluous isn\u2019t new, but it\u2019s become a\u00a0dominant structure of feeling in recent years. Over and over, when I\u00a0was reporting on the Covid pandemic, workers told me some version of, \u200b\u201c<\/span>They say we\u2019re essential. What they really mean is we\u2019re\u00a0expendable.\u201d<\/p>\n

They felt this way in the middle of lockdown, when suddenly the importance of grocery store clerks, delivery drivers, line cooks and farmworkers was made abundantly clear. Immigrant-dominated industries were suddenly so important that the president demanded they keep working; meanwhile, undocumented people were excluded from most of the benefits offered to Americans to survive the crisis. Five years on, with the government shut down for some six weeks and SNAP benefits for more than 40<\/span> million people only recently restored, those suspicions of expendability have been proven correct, and not only about immigrant workers. Sherman noted that Tennessee has a\u00a0rainy day fund of more than $2<\/span> billion, and it would have taken only a\u00a0fraction of that to cover food aid for the 700<\/span>,000<\/span> estimated residents of the state who rely on\u00a0SNAP.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Nurses at Little Company of Mary protested in front of the building in Torrance, CA on April 17, 2020 to demand proper personal protective equipment for nurses treating COVID-19 patients. Photo by Brittany Murray\/MediaNews Group\/Long Beach Press-Telegram via Getty Images<\/span>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Nurses protested at Rikers Island Prison in New York City on May 7, 2020 over the threat of COVID-19 on prisoners. By this time, more than 1,300 people in the city’s jail system tested positive for the disease. Photo by Giles Clarke\/Getty Images<\/span>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The United States has a\u00a0long history of absorbing workers, particularly from Latin America, when demand is high, and removing them when demand falters. As I\u00a0recently wrote for In These Times<\/em>, ICE enforcement can be scarce in the months after a\u00a0disaster, only to swoop in after\u00a0cleanup.<\/p>\n

But this story goes back\u00a0further.<\/p>\n

Famously, there was the Bracero Program, established in 1942<\/span>, which brought guest workers from Mexico for the farming season, issuing millions of temporary visas. There was the also the overlapping, repugnantly named Operation Wetback, a\u00a0crackdown by border agents to deport people back to Mexico or push them into the Bracero\u00a0standards.<\/p>\n

Guest workers were preferable because they could not stay\u2009\u2014\u2009they were sent back as soon as the need for their labor was\u00a0done.<\/p>\n

This same reason is why Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have advocated for expanded guest worker programs in tech\u2009\u2014\u2009cheaper workers are easier to remove if they make trouble. In low-paid farmwork, the excuse is that \u200b\u201c<\/span>Americans won\u2019t do this work\u201d; in tech, the argument is Americans lack the skills. Both arguments offer cover for the continued desire for cheap and easily controlled\u00a0workers.<\/p>\n

Since the end of the Bracero Program, the United States has tightened the border more. Presidents of both parties have targeted Mexican and Latinx immigrants, fast-tracked deportations, and, in Daniel Denvir\u2019s words in All-American Nativism<\/em>, \u200b\u201c<\/span>us[ed] undocumented workers as\u00a0leverage.\u201d<\/p>\n

The result is the continued dehumanization of migrants\u2009\u2014\u2009at best, valued as units of labor power rather than human beings, and, at worst, demonized for simply daring to exist in the United\u00a0States.<\/p>\n

Today, it seems, the Trump administration\u2019s smash-and-grab approach to deportations might finally have changed the calculus. Beyond just keeping migrants super-exploitable to drive down wages for us all, ICE has become the shock troops of a\u00a0regime led by a\u00a0man who posts AI-generated slop of himself raining shit on the people he governs; they arrest and brutalize citizen and migrant alike, grab children on their way to school, terrorize people in their homes.<\/p>\n

This is occurring at a\u00a0time of skyrocketing inequality, when decent jobs and affordable housing are harder and harder to come by. White Americans, particularly men, who are used to being first in line for the good stuff, are now feeling the loss in status. Meanwhile, demagogues aplenty are telling them their loss has been immigrants\u2019 gain. The reality is that the capitalists, in tech and other industries, care little for any of our lives: White workers, as well as immigrants, are disposable, and the investments being poured into so-called artificial intelligence are in the hope that more expensive workers\u2009\u2014\u2009whether skilled coders held up so often as the ideal, or Hollywood writers, or journalists\u2009\u2014\u2009can be replaced by an\u00a0algorithm.<\/p>\n

The gigification of so many jobs by the app-based economy (the Ubers and Lyfts) laid the groundwork. As Emily Bender, co-author of The AI Con<\/em>, explained, \u200b\u201c<\/span>If the work can be broken down into little replicable units that people can slot into, then you don\u2019t need to see workers as people with expertise, with careers, with relationships. They are just providers of content or annotations or labeling or, in big scare quotes, \u200b\u2018<\/span>intelligence.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s Taylorism for the 21<\/span>st<\/sup> century, and there is no industry that the tech overlords would not like to apply it to. Whether we are deskilled (and devalued), or literally packed off to prison or a\u00a0deportation flight, capital will keep flowing into the pockets of the Zuckerbergs and Musks. (Musk, we should recall, is also rolling out supposedly self-driving taxis.)<\/p>\n

Rooting for Trump to deport all the immigrants is a\u00a0desperate bid to stave off one\u2019s own expendability. The better solution, as striking Hollywood writers proved, is organization. Or, as the people of LA and Chicago and everywhere else remind us, to raise\u00a0hell.<\/p>\n

The flaming Waymo, then, is not a\u00a0symbol of nebulous or even misdirected rage. It is a\u00a0symbol of the way that more and more people are being rendered surplus, through organized abandonment or deliberate removal. As Merchant wrote, \u200b\u201c<\/span>The Waymo contributes to congestion, surveils neighborhoods, replaces the Uber or cab driver, and sends any resultant future profits upstream to a\u00a0tech company in Mountain\u00a0View.\u201d<\/p>\n

The protesters know exactly why\u2009\u2014\u2009and for whom\u2009\u2014\u2009it\u00a0exists.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We are in a\u00a0new age of uprising, as Joshua Clover wrote in Riot. Strike. Riot.<\/em> These rebellions are often kicked off by state violence, spurred by a\u00a0recognition of the racial dimension of this disposability. From Memphis, Minneapolis and Ferguson, Mo., to Los Angeles and Chicago, police murder a\u00a0Black person and are granted impunity; ICE stuffs someone who looks Latinx into an unmarked van as community members film and shout and sometimes succeed in pulling their neighbors back. The forces of so-called order operate above the law, and more and more of us know\u00a0it.<\/p>\n

As Clover also stressed, the return of the riot comes as profitability and \u200b\u201c<\/span>economic growth\u201d have stagnated. He noted that capital\u2019s \u200b\u201c<\/span>tragic flaw\u201d is that, in Marx\u2019s own words, \u200b\u201c<\/span>it presses to reduce labor time to a\u00a0minimum, while it posits labor time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth.\u201d Capital needs us, even as it needs to replace us. It automates the labor, rendering more people surplus, even as it captures their skill in the machine and the algorithm\u2009\u2014\u2009what Marx referred to so famously as \u200b\u201c<\/span>dead\u00a0labor.\u201d<\/p>

Read more Global Trade at Gunpoint<\/a><\/p>\n

So-called generative AI is a\u00a0clearer illustration of this principle than Marx could have imagined. As Molly Crabapple and others wrote in an open letter, playing on his words, it is \u200b\u201c<\/span>vampirical, feasting on past generations of artwork even as it sucks the lifeblood from living\u00a0artists.\u201d<\/p>\n

More prosaically: Machine learning sweeps up vast swaths of existing works of art, literature, journalism and scholarship, and vomits it back out in a\u00a0fraction of the time it took to create the original, but mashed together, sometimes deliberately imitative. As we create and our work is made public, it is vacuumed up by the machine\u2009\u2014\u2009a machine that requires ever more computing power, electricity and water. Trump uses AI to express his contempt for protests and, by doing so, expresses his contempt not just for the value of human labor but for the\u00a0planet.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, people are rendered surplus along manufactured, racialized lines: the prison, the police killing, the migrant detention center, the deportation flight. Labor\u2019s long-dear principle of last-hired, first-fired meant Black workers felt deindustrialization\u2019s sting first and fiercest, though the stories we hear today nearly always figure the redundant worker as a\u00a0white man. Factories moved overseas to wring greater profits from cheaper workers, and those left behind went into services, or gig work, or\u00a0languished.<\/p>\n

This cycle is familiar, and within it, the ICE raids\u2009\u2014\u2009like the ar – rests of protesters with the movement to end the genocide in Gaza\u2014 work, as historian Robin D.G. Kelley told me, like a\u00a0lynching: a\u00a0public demonstration to instill fear and compliance. The ICE raid is a\u00a0tool of discipline. And the bigger the surplus population, the more discipline\u00a0needed.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s rebellions have usually faced down the state, Clover noted, because \u200b\u201c<\/span>the state is near and the economy far.\u201d The strike was the tactic of choice for the proletariat in the days of industrialized production because most people could reach out and touch the economy. But many cannot do so directly now because they are locked out entirely or their manager is an algorithm, an app, a\u00a0ghost.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In rural Saline, Mich., on Dec. 1, 2025, residents decry a fast-tracked $7 billion Stargate data center, which they say will raise their electricity rates while endangering their water supply. PHOTO BY JIM WEST\/UCG\/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES<\/span>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The riot is, as Clover argued, a\u00a0struggle that \u200b\u201c<\/span>unfolds in the context of consumption, featuring the interruption of commercial circulation.\u201d Protesters have, over and over, in the uprisings of recent years, taken to the streets, shut down transit, destroyed cars and looted shops, taking things because why do they deserve less than the rich? What Clover called the \u200b\u201c<\/span>surplus rebellion\u201d mucks up circulation to be\u00a0heard.<\/p>\n

As humans are increasingly closed out of circulation, the targeting of tech makes more sense. As Brian Merchant noted, tech companies like automation \u200b\u201c<\/span>because it promises not just to remove labor from the equation, but accountability. There is no driver to blame if something goes wrong with the self-driving car, it\u2019s a\u00a0glitchy algorithm; or better yet, it was probably somebody else\u2019s fault because Google\u2019s algorithm is safe and sophisticated, even if it won\u2019t tell you how that algorithm actually\u00a0works.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The protesters, though, turned that setup on its head: \u200b\u201c<\/span>There is no one around to stop them from hailing a\u00a0Waymo car and destroying it.\u201d The tech company has created a\u00a0place where they can touch\u2009\u2014\u2009and torch\u2009\u2014\u2009what\u2019s killing\u00a0them.<\/p>\n

The destruction of the Waymo also recalls an earlier period of transition, from the first round of riots to the strike. In the early days of industrialization, workers would smash the machine that replaced (or sped up and deskilled) their jobs. The Luddites were the most famous, and a\u00a0series of books (by Gavin Mueller, Merchant himself, and Jathan Sadowski) have brought them back to public consciousness. The Luddites, far from opposing technology for its own sake, were well aware of who controlled the tech and how their labor was being encoded into it. Breaking the machine was not a\u00a0symbolic action, but a\u00a0direct one: The smashed machine can\u2019t work, and the burned car doesn\u2019t\u00a0run.<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/span>[M]achine-breaking,\u201d Clover wrote, \u200b\u201c<\/span>is what the swing from riot to strike looks\u00a0like.\u201d<\/p>\n

You may not be able to destroy the algorithm, but its avatar, roaming your streets, is still, necessarily,\u00a0tangible.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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AI is not produced out of nowhere. The Cloud is a\u00a0bad metaphor. All of those searches we plug into ChatGPT or Midjourney are carried out on physical machines, and the mad rush to build more data centers means one of them is likely coming to a\u00a0community near\u00a0you.<\/p>\n

In Memphis, there are no Waymos, but Elon Musk\u2019s Colossus supercomputer has drawn the ire of many who are angry about its gas turbines and the pollution they bring to already-bad air. \u200b\u201c<\/span>They really weren\u2019t ready for the level of pushback they would get,\u201d Sherman said. The company is building another center and \u200b\u201c<\/span>they have all these private security guards that are everywhere\u201d due to protests, she\u00a0said.<\/p>\n

Tech companies, said Sherman, seem to be \u200b\u201c<\/span>trying to get everything that they have wanted to do done right now because they have this president that\u2019s supporting\u00a0them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just up the Mississippi, in St. Louis, local organizers are also fighting data centers. A\u00a0project has been proposed for the middle of the city, at the Armory, a\u00a0former entertainment venue located conveniently in a\u00a0district that allows tax incentives and a\u00a0lot of secrecy. They don\u2019t know whose data center it will be just yet, said Jeremy Al-Haj, executive director of the Missouri Workers Center, but they know the city helped underwrite bonds for\u00a0it.<\/p>\n

The coalition\u2009\u2014\u2009which includes organizations ranging from SEIU\u2019s healthcare local to the Democratic Socialists of America to Metropolitan Congregations United and the Missouri Sierra Club\u2009\u2014\u2009held a\u00a0town hall and packed a\u00a0local church with voices almost entirely in opposition. Their reasons, Al-Haj said, \u200b\u201c<\/span>ranged from the environmental concerns around the data center, water usage and electrical usage, the increased utility rates and the noise level from the data center,\u201d as well as \u200b\u201c<\/span>just the very idea that this should be in the center of the city. And \u2026 outrage about AI and the automation of professional middle-class jobs and human creativity that\u00a0implies.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

AI has proved a\u00a0crappy replacement for humans\u2009\u2014\u2009it\u2019s not an accident that the common term for its digital output is \u200b\u201c<\/span>slop.\u201d But it has contributed to the turning of decent jobs into lousy temporary gigs. In his book Work Without the Worker<\/em>, Phil Jones noted, \u200b\u201c<\/span>AI does not tend to create fully automated systems but rather systems that partially automate jobs and outsource certain tasks to the crowd.\u201d That crowd, he further pointed out, can be located anywhere that an internet connection can reach: automation and outsourcing continue to go hand in\u00a0hand.<\/p>\n

The Waymo car, Joanne McNeil pointed out, is a\u00a0perfect example of this phenomenon. Remote contractors do the work that the algorithm and the robot can\u2019t, but they\u2019re hidden from view in what Astra Taylor called \u200b\u201c<\/span>fauxtomation.\u201d Waymo\u2019s co-CEO, McNeil noted, denied the cars have remote drivers, but this, she wrote, contradicted the company\u2019s own filing with the California Public Utilities Commission, which \u200b\u201c<\/span>cited the remote workers in its automation chain as a\u00a0critical safety feature.\u201d Those workers can move the Waymo if the software fails; the company got its expansion approved because human involvement helps \u200b\u201c<\/span>minimize\u00a0risk.\u201d<\/p>\n

Human workers compiled and cleaned the dataset that trained those workers in the first place\u2009\u2014\u2009human drivers in Google Street View cars and humans behind computers deciding whether an object in a\u00a0photo is a\u00a0stop sign. Humans help train systems about which they know almost nothing; you\u2019ve probably helped it yourself if you\u2019ve ever had to use a\u00a0reCAPTCHA to access a\u00a0website. That data can be recycled, whether to train a\u00a0Waymo or an armed drone. Bombing raids in Gaza were guided by AI; Memphis touts its new AI-powered surveillance hub.<\/p>\n

Humans are present in every stage of the system, even as it renders them invisible, as Jones wrote. The AI is vampiric at first the way a\u00a0mosquito is: a\u00a0little nibble here and there. But mosquitos transmit viruses that\u00a0kill.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A Coco delivery robot carries comfort to some while ignoring the housing crisis in West Los Angeles on Jan. 15, 2025. PHOTO BY VICTOR LOCHON\/GAMMA-RAPHO VIA GETTY IMAGES<\/span>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The data centers are as distributed as the outsourced workers. In Mexico, communities battle the same pollution as Memphis, emitted by the same companies; electric grids falter under Microsoft and Amazon. Water shortages make people sick. The director of industrial development for Quer\u00e9taro, where many of Mexico\u2019s 110<\/span> data centers are, bragged in the New York Times<\/em> of constructing data centers that would use the same amount of energy as 1<\/span>.25<\/span> million U.S. homes. Meanwhile, the state plans to recycle sewage for drinking\u00a0water.<\/p>\n

This is the growth, domestically and internationally, that late capitalism offers. \u200b\u201c<\/span>Data center construction accounted for 92<\/span>% of growth in U.S. GDP this year,\u201d Al-Haj noted. \u200b\u201c<\/span>The New York Times<\/em> just reported that Amazon\u2019s planning to automate 75<\/span>% of its workforce.\u201d The Missouri Workers Center has been organizing with Amazon warehouse workers for several years, and those workers, he said, are worried: \u200b\u201c<\/span>And while they might create some small number of jobs for certain segments of the working class, for the remainder, they spell the loss of\u00a0jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n

The algorithms and the robots are driven by humans, and their deployment is a\u00a0human decision. The white supremacists who fear the so-called Great Replacement have their targets all wrong, in other words. The real great replacement they ought to worry about isn\u2019t immigrants, but man (and woman, and everyone else) with\u00a0machine.<\/p>\n

In this economy, then, expect to see more\u00a0machine-breaking.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Worker groups like the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and community organizations like Organized Communities Against Deportations have been building networks of communication, hosting know-your-rights trainings for migrants and concentric circles of activists who have documents, so they can join a\u00a0rapid response or a\u00a0more distant protest, amplify stories, serve as legal observers and more. Such groups, as I\u00a0wrote in Necessary Trouble<\/em> and From the Ashes<\/em>, capture some of the outrage from moments of rebellion and build from it in strategically necessary\u00a0directions.<\/p>\n

In Memphis, Sherman said, as in many other cities, organizers have set up a\u00a0rapid response hotline to report ICE or police activity. They\u2019re canvassing and sharing information in multiple languages. She and others are organized under \u200b\u201c<\/span>Free the 901<\/span>,\u201d and their website offers know-your-rights flyers and information. \u200b\u201c<\/span>We post warnings about the different areas to avoid,\u201d Sherman said. The group has also launched a\u00a0rideshare program\u2009\u2014\u2009the antithesis of the Waymo, a\u00a0gesture of explicit human accompaniment\u2009\u2014\u2009so people don\u2019t have to brave the streets\u00a0alone.<\/p>\n

Organizers in Missouri have found they can indeed defeat the data centers. In St. Charles, community outrage seemed, to Jeremy Al-Haj, \u200b\u201c<\/span>pretty organic,\u201d led by farmers who organized quickly. \u200b\u201c<\/span>It was also the case that the mayor\u2019s cousin owned the plot of land that was going to get purchased, and the city council and the mayor had all signed nondisclosure agreements about the project.\u201d Concerns about corruption, in other words, dovetailed with the anger at the secrecy and culminated in a\u00a0yearlong construction\u00a0ban.<\/p>\n

Capturing the energy of a\u00a0rebellion is like capturing lightning in a\u00a0bottle. It doesn\u2019t hold its form well. Not everyone is willing or able to come to weekly organizing meetings. That does not mean nothing has been learned in the streets, that knowledge-sharing isn\u2019t taking place. During the LA rebellion, social media was overflowing with such sharing: Images from Hong Kong\u2019s protests proliferated, and tips about tear gas were proffered by unlikely suspects, including one dermatologist who went\u00a0viral.<\/p>\n

In such moments, people learn the contours of their power. They learn how it feels to be part of a\u00a0crowd, to have the scary thing happen and to stand up. In LA, successive generations of workers and organizers have survived police crackdowns and showed up again. Echoes of not just the 1992<\/span> LA riots or the 1965<\/span> Watts rebellion, but the 1990<\/span> police assault on a\u00a0Justice for Janitors demonstration in Century City, could be seen in LA this\u00a0summer.<\/p>\n

David Huerta was one of those who cut his organizing teeth on the Justice for Janitors campaign. Now the president of SEIU California and of SEIU United Service Workers West, Huerta was arrested attempting to protect his community when the ICE raids began June 6<\/span>. His arrest helped take the LA story national, as union leaders\u2009\u2014\u2009even those less inclined than Huerta to put their bodies on the line\u2009\u2014\u2009denounced his\u00a0arrest.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Since Huerta\u2019s arrest, ICE has escalated to arresting Brad Lander, the third-highest elected official in New York City, and California Sen. Alex Padilla, among others. Huerta\u2019s original felony charge has been downgraded, though he still faces\u00a0trial.<\/p>\n

The Watts rebellion, Kelley noted, \u200b\u201c<\/span>grew not from chaos but from a\u00a0mobilized community seeking change.\u201d There were civil rights groups but also arts collectives; after the uprising, activists created more cultural spaces and joined more radical political groups, including the Black Panther Party. They built a\u00a0network to monitor police\u00a0abuses.<\/p>\n

Communities dispersed by policing, economic displacement, deportations\u2009\u2014\u2009by all the tendrils of organized abandonment\u2009\u2014\u2009have a\u00a0harder time coming together, but history reminds us it\u2019s not impossible. We are seeing in the streets what political theorist Rodrigo Nunes called \u200b\u201c<\/span>distributed action\u201d in Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal<\/em>, as different forms of organizing \u200b\u201c<\/span>combine, communicate, relate and establish positive and negative feedback loops with one another.\u201d Such action operates at multiple scales and times; it involves the collectivities in the streets as well as the long-term membership organizations that stay when national reporters leave. There is little that is absolutely right or wrong: What matters is whether it works, not whether it proves prior\u00a0ideas.<\/p>\n

To those who ask what good setting a\u00a0Waymo car on fire does, then, we might reply, \u200b\u201c<\/span>too early to tell.\u201d But there is power when long-term organizing and battle-tested strategists come into contact with the righteous anger sparked by repression. The question is not how to organize every single person, but rather, how to prepare for the moments of explosion while focusing on what people need day to\u00a0day.<\/p>\n

We know this means protecting people in our communities when the masked agents arrive, to the best of our abilities, and that requires getting to know those people ahead of time. We know the issues that will move people to act are the ones that, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, bite into their existence: the rent, the workplace, the police, the cost of groceries. Different organizations may focus on each, and when the flashpoints come, may be able to lead\u2009\u2014\u2009or sometimes, importantly, to follow where the riot goes, and to learn in motion what it is that the people will no longer\u00a0abide.<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/span>We\u2019re doing everything we can to keep our community safe,\u201d Sherman said. \u200b\u201c<\/span>We want to make sure that we are answering the call of what people need in the\u00a0moment.\u201d<\/p>

Read more Dick Cheney: A Profile in Impunity<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As new technologies (not immigrants) replace human labor, “machine breaking” as a tactic of rebellion is taking on a renewed vitality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":55,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-feature","category-labor","category-viewpoint"],"yoast_head":"\nCapitalism Without Humans - Summit Relocation Timess<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/summitrelocationtimess.com\/?p=62\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Capitalism Without Humans - Summit Relocation Timess\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"As new technologies (not immigrants) replace human labor, "machine breaking" as a tactic of rebellion is taking on a renewed vitality.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/summitrelocationtimess.com\/?p=62\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Summit Relocation Timess\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-05-22T22:39:35+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/summitrelocationtimess.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/631733f9a3b85c6befee194800cccbde.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1200\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"630\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"25 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/summitrelocationtimess.com\\\/?p=62#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/summitrelocationtimess.com\\\/?p=62\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/summitrelocationtimess.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/78261b7043eb436872da19e7c8eda597\"},\"headline\":\"Capitalism Without Humans\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-05-22T22:39:35+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/summitrelocationtimess.com\\\/?p=62\"},\"wordCount\":4917,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/summitrelocationtimess.com\\\/?p=62#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/summitrelocationtimess.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/05\\\/631733f9a3b85c6befee194800cccbde.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Feature\",\"Labor\",\"Viewpoint\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/summitrelocationtimess.com\\\/?p=62#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/summitrelocationtimess.com\\\/?p=62\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/summitrelocationtimess.com\\\/?p=62\",\"name\":\"Capitalism Without Humans - 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