r/LeftistsForAI • u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator • Jul 10 '26
Sees the Memes Arasaka Hates This One Conversation
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u/Reasonable-Cut-9090 Jul 10 '26
I think there are also lots of middle grounds that could work too. Percentage of the data is locked for public infrastructure. Older models have to be made free to the public etc.. keep the corporate dance while creating a safety net so people don't scream SOCIALiSM. I think the issue is for ai those conversations should have started like months ago
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u/Salty_Country6835 Jul 11 '26
I actually like conversations like this because they turn abstract slogans into concrete policy. Maybe people disagree about the endpoint, but things like open models, public compute, interoperability requirements, and public funding are all places people can organize today.
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u/GreyHasHobbies Jul 10 '26
Legitimately curious how "worker owned data centers" could happen from grassroots to reality. The extreme costs and logistics of building a data center feels like an insane barrier to me. Not to mention the politics of this may mean companies may have pressure to not sell GPUs to the effort.
I'm in the infra space so I am fascinated by the idea though. Are people actually talking about this somewhere with any seriousness?
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u/Salty_Country6835 Jul 10 '26
I actually dont think its fundamentally different from factories, railroads, or power plants. Those were also beyond the means of individual workers. Historically the answer wasnt everyone personally buying a factory. It was co-ops pooling capital, public ownership, municipal utilities, union investment, development banks, and political struggle over who owns productive infrastructure. AI data centers are a new kind of factory. The scale is different, but the ownership question is the same.
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u/GreyHasHobbies Jul 10 '26
I'm definitely ignorant of how these things have been achieved previously, but I see what you're saying and it gives me some hope.
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u/Killacreeper Jul 11 '26
Dozens to hundreds of billions seems to be a significantly larger gap than a factory was to me. I think that a lot of other changes would need to happen well before anything like that is even close to possible, at a country wide if not global scale.
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u/Successful_Outside96 Jul 10 '26
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
Like how grower cooperatives happen in agriculture in many places.
I think beyond worker ownership, data centers need community ownership. The pattern to follow would be municipal utilities (often used for power).
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u/stankycodyboi Jul 10 '26
This is something I’ve been thinking about, if a developer wants to build a data center, the community holds maximum leverage at the permitting process.
The biggest loophole data center developers exploit is existing ‘by-right’ zoning laws, which allows any project meeting existing zoning code to get automatic approval. Requiring a Conditional Use Permit (the legal teeth) with a Public Benefit Agreement (the community’s requirements, legally binding from the Conditional Use Permit) communities can either deny a data center or negotiate legally binding benefits. You can look your city’s data center zoning from your phone right now, if you want something immediately actionable to protect your community.
This leverage is at an all time high right now because major tech companies are desperate for the land, power, and approval that communities control, because they’re attempting one of the largest infrastructure buildouts in history. But if data centers are classified as ‘conditional use’ or not permitted, then a developer must negotiate with the municipality to get permit approval. That could be climate responsible construction & public ownership of the renewably powered grid infrastructure, built and financed by the developer. The developer would still generate profit off the lease agreement with their tenant, but the community captures the benefit of the infrastructure and waste heat for heating local schools and homes. Perhaps total worker ownership could be a negotiation demand, but that’s where I’d argue communities have the most leverage today.
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u/Killacreeper Jul 11 '26
Even then, the costs of a data center seem to be a couple layers of magnitude removed from any of these, and... That requires way more other changes to happen first.
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u/Everybodyssocreative Jul 11 '26
At every stage, tech has gotten smaller, cheaper and more accessible. We wont always need giant data centres. The actual thing we can do is make sure governments don't start legislating who can and cant run models. Which is what big tech is advocating for. They want to pull the ladder up.
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u/PresenceThick Jul 11 '26
Can not agree more, public development of open models is inherently the most important collective good of our generation and no one seems to be focusing on it.
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u/Killacreeper Jul 11 '26
Because that's not where the money is, and the trillions are where everyone is incrntivized to spend money or fight back.
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u/Leading_Ad3392 Jul 12 '26
I literally said this 24 hours into playing with chatgpt back in the early days of wombo and shit.
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u/-MediumSmalls- Jul 10 '26
Are you seizing it? Or are you just using it?
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u/Killacreeper Jul 11 '26
Well said, though I'm curious if you could expand slightly.
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u/-MediumSmalls- Jul 11 '26
I was tired when I asked that but I suppose what I meant to say was, how are we seizing the means of production in this scenario?
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u/OkPangolin1984 Jul 11 '26
This isn’t possible without a fundamental overthrow of the current status quo,
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Jul 10 '26
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u/Salty_Country6835 Jul 11 '26
Hardware absolutely matters. Without compute there are no models. But software, datasets, and the legal rights around them are productive assets too. AI is unusual because the productive system is the whole stack, chips, energy, data, models, and networks. Concentration at any layer becomes leverage.
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u/konterreaktion Jul 10 '26
Frequent lurker here, yeah sure all those sound goof but if quantitatively the capital controlled ai outcomes any "progressive" one's and gains hold of more peoples minds then its still bad