Rania Masri, NCEJN Director of Organizing and Policy
We are in a moment of clarity: the veil has fallen. The U.S. federal administration today is openly and brazenly showcasing its plans—renaming the Department of Defense to the more honest Department of War, dismantling agencies that once offered meager support to marginalized communities, and fortifying ICE as an openly racist and unconstitutional force. What was once hidden behind bureaucratic language is now declared policy.
This exposure is both terrifying and clarifying. It reveals the stakes, and it underscores the urgency to organize with precision, creativity, and vision.
Within this landscape, one harm is spreading rapidly, and it also unveils the intersection of many harms at once: the proliferation of data centers. Data centers are marketed as engines of the digital economy, but their reality tells a different story. They consume massive quantities of water and energy, often in drought-prone or resource-scarce regions. They accelerate housing displacement and gentrification as land is rezoned and communities are priced out. They expand the surveillance state, feeding data streams that empower ICE, police, and the military-industrial complex. They attract philanthropy and “Big Green” endorsements that mask extraction behind promises of innovation.
Yet, this very convergence of harms is also a profound opportunity for intersectional organizing. Data centers link environmental, racial, economic, and technological justice. They make visible the relationships between digital infrastructure and extractive capitalism, between surveillance and displacement, between energy policy and militarism. If we organize around them with intention, they can serve as a wedge issue that unites campaigns rather than fragments them.
Imagine: communities across the state, across the country, that are now fighting isolated battles—over water rights here, zoning there, surveillance elsewhere—come together to develop a shared vision of what just, sustainable, community-owned digital infrastructure could look like. Imagine a future where data is not a tool of extraction but a commons; where the energy that powers our technologies is locally controlled and renewable; where the infrastructure that undergirds our digital lives serves people, not profit; and where, together, we stand in the face of militarization, wars, and genocide.
The challenge ahead is immense: corporate consolidation, state repression, and the seductive narrative of technological inevitability. But the opportunity lies in our ability to organize across sectors, geographies, and struggles, to transform reactive campaigns into proactive visions, and to use the very harm being imposed on our communities as a platform for coalition and creativity. Let’s contribute to building that kind of movement—one that resists, yes, but also imagines and builds a world in which our data, our land, and our futures are held in common, not controlled by a handful of corporations and their enablers.
