Of course, one industry’s decline often begets another’s ascendance, each with their own generational harms. However, in this AI race, PA needs to act more decisively to avoid cementing its own history alongside other global stories of industrial extraction for supposed AI gains.

You’ll hear more myth-busting in a piece @tamigraph.bsky.social and I are releasing next week. We’ll also soon be publishing more about what we found at Three Mile Island, in Pittsburgh, and across PA.

Though notably imperfect, the steel, coal, & glass industries bore strong local unions, community reinvestment, & a certain type of cohesion. Today’s proposed economic wins primarily benefit private tech companies, militarized infrastructure, and a race for global AI dominance.

We already know that all such investment in data centers can endanger cities’ right to self-determination, access to water & energy, & betray the meaning of dignified labor. In PA, this AI-centric vision may be extending this already traumatic history of land, labor, and power extraction.

We have been researching post-industrial PA as it shifts under the weight of this new vision. These cities built the industrial revolution only to be left behind when these sectors crashed. The question for today: Are industrialists using PA again at its own peril?
datasociety.net/points/digit...

Hi Teddy! Great question. Please feel free to shoot us an email at jobs@datasociety.net and it should make its way over. Thanks very much!

Many thanks for our friends along the way, including Uncle Johnny, @bobgradeck.bsky.social, @alicetiara.bsky.social, @tamigraph.bsky.socialm the National Museum of Industrial History, the Heinz History Museum, and everyone between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh who left their yard signs up

Are you doing similar work on this? Organizing around these questions? Just want to be in touch? Please fill out our form at the bottom of this piece or shoot us an email at trust@datasociety.net. We really want to meet you too.

TI is building work deep in these communities, trying to understand our social ties, our unions, our institutions, and our power, as these companies race to trade our communities for their visions of the technofuture. As much about what oligarchy takes as it is about what we build in return.