Data Centres: Castles of Subjection

We’ve watched as industrial jobs have been scythed away and young people face life as shelf-stackers or on the dole.

Now technology is coming for the knowledge workers and many in the middle classes will feel the cold wind of insecurity blowing around their ankles. Quasi-intelligent machines with vast memory banks will take over many functions where experts and skilled managers used to be needed.

There is a building boom in “data centres.” The State of Ohio has 250 of them planned or under construction; Texas has 962.

They also have the capacity, and it will be used, to monitor and control the people and shut down dissent. Technology multi-billionaire Larry Ellison, chairman of software company Oracle, said in 2024:

“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on.”

They are like the chain of castles (the “Ring of Iron”) built by Edward I in Wales, to keep the Welsh down. Their modern equivalent will be needed to oppress a people increasingly poorer and less free.

In the two years before that Ellison’s personal foundation invested $130 million in the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) and has pledged $218 million since then. Blair is a firm advocate for digital ID and has been photographed “living the dream” on Ellison’s yacht “Rising Sun”:

(Picture from Alamy via this Substack article)

Blair is a fantastic narcissist:

(Image: GQ magazine 2 May 2021)

- but there is no reason why we should be cast in his Matrix-type dreams (do PM Keir Starmer and Labour not share them?) and every reason not to.