The introduction of AI has sparked an intense wave of opposition across the very country into which trillions of dollars have been cascaded for this swell to take hold. Local residents have organized against the immense scale of water and energy extracted from their communities. Environmental activists, often in odd alliance with renewable energy opponents, have cited the ecological disruption, on top of the resource extraction, rampant in data center construction and maintenance. Artists and creators have stood at the vanguard against the enclosure of knowledge commons that forms the basis of AI’s superintelligence. Indeed, as reported by Heatmap News, the construction of at least 25 data centers has been cancelled in 2025, and as local and state governments begin to provide support to these movements, we can expect the opposition to continue into the foreseeable future.

One of the areas in which opposition to AI seems to overlap with even its most ardent supporters is that its introduction will inevitably create job loss and insecurity in a vast number of industries. Such predictions are how so many automation theorists, among others, have come to embrace universal basic income as a means of offsetting the potential economic impact. Without a doubt, AI, as in the case of other automation technologies throughout modern history, will disrupt industries and create job loss. But there’s a much bigger picture missing from these analyses on both sides of the spectrum: the global economy is actually experiencing declining rates of growth.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean the economy isn’t growing, both in total output and productivity, but rather that the rates of output and productivity growth are slowing down. In his book Automation and the Future of Work, Aaron Benanav attributes this to the phenomenon of persistent overcapacity, in which global businesses are locked in ever-greater competition with an increasing number of competitors, resulting in lower prices for consumers, but also a decline in output for the industry at large. In order to maintain or expand their market share, these businesses intensify worker exploitation by reducing or stagnating wages, triggering layoffs, forcing speedups, and investing in automation. In the end, however, only the firms with the highest concentrations of capital survive these trends, and any industry that monopolizes in this way over time is ultimately unable to create lasting job growth.

Worse yet, there are no new industries to replace the output loss of these declining sectors, thus, no means of absorbing this increasing supply of unemployed or underemployed labor. However, because productivity rates are slowing at a slower pace relative to output rates, which are slowing even faster, a perception arises that productivity is actually rising, when all evidence points to the contrary. Automation theorists and techno-futurists attribute the supposed increase in productivity to exponentially advancing technologies, like AI, an analysis which neatly explains the rapid scale of job loss and the decreasing availability of well-paying jobs overall. But as Benanav’s book clarifies, the falling opportunities for profitable investment from capital’s perspective are, in fact, not due to technological progress or economic efficiency, but rather due to overcapacity and falling global output.

We thus arrive at some perspective with regards to the sudden proliferation of AI. Its arrival is merely in line with the type of automation that occurs when an industry begins to stagnate and contract, as we are now seeing with the long overdue tech industry, while the dizzying scale of its dissemination can only be possible in the same capitalist economy that would trample over individual rights, community infrastructures, environmental protections, and legal barriers in the name of gobbling up greater market share. Automation, after all, isn’t new to the capitalist mode of production, but rather integral to its very survival. Therefore, our inquiry must necessarily focus not on how technology got us to this point of job loss and insecurity, but instead on why capitalists need technology and automation so badly in the first place, and why today they’ve chosen to throw their whole weight into the investment and unchecked development of AI.

The aforementioned reasons for AI opposition should be sufficient to justify resistance tout court. But without the context of global job loss, and without the line of inquiry that would implicate the capitalist mode of production at large, it becomes easy to slip not only into normative appeal when voicing opposition, but also into the reactionary trap of questioning workers themselves for their alleged role in AI proliferation, as does this WIRED article interviewing several electricians behind data center buildouts. The temptation is understandable: nearly two centuries of modern labor organizing have taught us that workers are uniquely situated to be the protagonists of major sociopolitical change. In the case of the AI boom, workers in industries like electrical, construction, and plumbing have direct leverage over the industry’s dependence on physical data centers, which gives those who are unionized an even greater bargaining chip when struggling for better pay, benefits, and working conditions. Some have taken advantage of the high labor demand to turn down work on projects that face intense local opposition, for example, or even require concessions for public services and improvement projects in exchange for their labor.

However, within a faltering global economy where there are fewer good jobs, thus rendering survivability, much less organization, more difficult and urgent, an individual worker’s prospect of turning down any remaining work that pays well becomes next to impossible, if not outright incorrect as a strategy. The same tragedy of the commons appears in nearly all facets of capitalist life, through what Søren Mau calls “mute compulsion.” By depending on the profit imperative as mediated through market economies, the capitalist mode of production, rather than any single capitalist, wields an abstract power over all aspects of social life and reproduction, including work itself. This invisible economic pressure subjects workers to the very dilemma broached by the WIRED article, where their choices seem to split into a strict binary: join the workforce or die.

Even the edge workers have through their unions runs into limits, since union density today continues to languish at historic lows, despite recent waves of mobilization and organizing, and union power, as a result, is generally scattered and inconsistent. As Heatmap News reports, “Data center cancellations aren’t evenly spread out across the country. Texas is a hotspot for new data center proposals, and more than 150 gigawatts of data centers have asked to hook up to its grid. […] That’s probably because it’s difficult for residents to cancel any project in Texas, which has no state-level zoning rules.” Furthermore, what Labor Notes refers to as “ransom deals” does buy time for workers to go on the offense by raising the costs of introducing AI, but these elevated costs haven’t hampered development when the industry continues to devastate job opportunities and the construction of data centers proceeds apace, with only intense questioning at best.

As of yet, there hasn’t been a large-scale, organized pushback against the existence of AI overall, precisely because the clarion calls for atomized praxis don’t converge into actionable strategy. Indeed, it is incorrect to pressure individual workers to engage in prefigurative politics, if the workers aren’t directly tied to that larger organization to dismantle the very cause of their problem, that is, unchecked capitalist growth. This organization can take various forms. At the level of the worker, the resurgence of union movements, irrespective of AI backlash, provides an opportunity to harness this rising concentration of labor power and exert it against the injustice of capitalist automation. As citizens, we can also organize into local activist and environmental groups that apply a nearly equal amount of pressure onto development projects, with cancellations quadrupling in the past year because of such grassroots efforts.

The north star for all of these organized forms must be a pause or moratorium on AI, if not for the entire global economy. Not only are the aforementioned reasons for opposition sufficient to justify resistance, but there also must be a concerted effort to reconcile the universal desire of stable work with the larger global trend of job loss, which would only serve to implicate the capitalist mode of production as a whole. The ways in which we consider growth in our economies, assign value to our commodities, and assess a separate set of values for commodity exchange, and the ways in which these abstract forces come to bear not only on the individual worker, but the individual itself, must all be dissected, re-examined, and refashioned into a more equitable system of production and consumption.

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