Showing all posts tagged billionaires

In Culture, Environment, Identity, Nurture, Parenting, Politics, Relationships

A Renewable Human Future

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

I dream of a future that uses renewable energy and focuses on the needs of human beings. For a long time now, I’ve been searching for a way to state this dream in a simple, straightforward sentence. Finally, at long last, I think I’ve found it in this phrase: A renewable human future.

My heart pounds with excitement to realise that loads of other people are coming to the same dream, at the same time. For decades, so many of us have been disheartened and then outright enraged by the technofascist push toward generative AI with no regard for the cost to humanity through lost jobs and the deliberate destruction of the environment.

It’s easy to be pissed and hard to know where to start to fight back with something like this. Climate change is the key existential threat of our lifetime, as our planet is heating up and the oceans are boiling, but the elected leaders in charge of these regulations have caved to billionaire pressure and rolled back so many environmental protections.

So we despair and recycle and do what we can in our small corners of influence, while the only planet we have to live on falls apart around us due to greed and stupid decisions. But then came the data centre construction, and now it seems we’ve got a physical enemy to focus on. I can feel the uniting hatred for the billions of dollars being spent on these abhorrent and destructive buildings around the world, and I think it’s finally bringing us together.

In Canada, where I live, our Prime Minister Mark Carney made a big announcement on June 4th called AI for All. The outcry on Bluesky was swift and immediate. Canadians like me who loathe AI and want zero investment in it. CBC followed up with a story about how public trust in Canada is among the lowest in the world for AI and the companies who provide it.

Trust should be low when the product fucking sucks. Canadians are smart in this area. It’s enraging that our elected leaders are so out of touch when it comes to announcing this strategy for AI as though Canadian citizens will embrace this awful tech with open arms. Data centres use a shitload of water and electricity. They are loud and damaging to the earth. No one wants a data centre built near them. I don’t want them built at all.

My response to Mark Carney’s excited announcement on Bluesky read “I dream of elected leaders who actually listen to what the people who elected them want. NO AI. Please, don’t think about money for just a moment. How about human jobs for human beings. Renewable energy. A future where we can breathe and drink water and grow food in our soil. Please. NO AI.“

I followed that post up with a longer letter to the Prime Minister, the AI Minister, my local MP, and the Premier of my province. I was going to write twice, once to express my disdain for the AI for All policy, and once to express my opposition to the way the Liberal Government is quietly dismantling our environmental laws and protections, but then I realised these two issues are really one issue.

The fight to stop any more data centres from being built is the fight to save our environment, and do away with this chokehold the tech oligarchs have placed on society with forced use of AI. This fight is one of the biggest issues of our time, and it’s happening right now. We cannot wait. Our planet is in peril, and it’s the only place we have to live. Please, join us in this fight.

Get loud. Write to the officials in charge to say NO AI DATA CENTRES. Sign every petition you can find, like this one to halt the proposed Vancouver data centres, and this one to pause AI in BC schools. Wherever you live, search for petitions on data centres and sign them to send a message to elected officials. In Vancouver, people are taking to the streets to protest loudly, and I plan to join them.

It’s healthy not to trust those who lie to us. The technofascists have lied, again and again and again, so I will not trust them when they promise that these new data centres will be different. We don’t need AI. What we need is renewable energy to heal our ravaged planet, and a future that centres human beings and not company profits or chatbots. We need to prioritise our human lives over money and computers.

To me, the environment matters more than anything else. If my kids and their future kids cannot breathe clean air or drink clean water or grow food to eat in the soil, and if they have no access to inspiring work that celebrates humanity instead of robots, then they have no liveable future. It’s up to us, right now, to imagine and then build a future that we can be excited about.

One that is renewable and human. The time is now, and this work is urgent.

In Books, Culture, Identity, Nurture, Personal Growth, Politics, Relationships, Writing

Privacy is Valuable

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

I did something this month that I once thought I’d never be able to do: I deleted my Facebook account. I tried to delete it earlier this fall, then caved and reinstated it. Not because I missed it, but because I worried about not notifying the two-hundred-plus people who had liked my writing page and been with me since the beginning of my return to writing in 2010.

Worrying about telling people on Facebook was silly, but I still panicked about the length of time it took to build up those readers and cheerleaders, only to hit the delete button fifteen years later and walk away. Facebook used to be a fun and fast way to stay in touch with people. Real, human people. Remember at the beginning, when there were no ads or sponsored content and the only thing you saw in your feed were posts from actual friends and family members?

Somewhere along the line, Zuckerberg and others monetised the whole place. They offered it to us for free, which seemed like a bargain, until we eventually realised that if there’s no fee, we ourselves are the product. I got tired of being sold to, day in and day out, and consuming posts I had no interest in seeing. I became weary of volunteering to be a product for a bored and immoral billionaire. So I pulled the plug.

My privacy is valuable. So is yours. For so long, I fell into the trap Zuckerberg et al had set for me: that I would be missing out if I wasn’t on their social media platforms. Long after it ceased to do what it initially promised (connect me to my loved ones near and far), I continued to log on, worried about being left out or left behind.

But now, a few weeks after I actually deleted my account, I feel so much freedom. And joy. It felt so damn great that I deleted LinkedIn. Now I’m left with my two websites, this one and Ruby Finch Books, plus Bluesky and Substack where I host my monthly newsletter and podcast. That’s it. I deleted Instagram earlier this year, and now I’m reading more, writing more, staring out the window more.

I reached out to a few friends to be sure they had my cell number before I pulled the plug on all social media other than Bluesky and Substack, and I’ve been setting up some actual phone calls with friends to catch up like it’s 1992 again. Much more real than hitting “like” on an infrequent status update. Easing back into a mostly analog world feels like such a good idea to me in 2025.

It’s an act of resistance, against the billionaires who mistakenly believe that human beings long for AI trash to replace human creativity. These morally bankrupt guys offered us shitty less-than versions of everything: connection, relationships, shopping, entertainment, a cure for loneliness. It took me fifteen years, but better late than never to recognise that I’d been conned.

The real world offers me so much more. It’s rich with texture. Nature is where we find true inspiration and beauty. Sunsets and ocean waves and birds calling to each other in the trees. Recapturing time offline feels like coming back to myself. Unlike the internet and AI, the physical experience is housed in a body, not free-floating somewhere unattached to anyone or anything. One is real. Embodied. The other is simply an idea, one ripe for exploitation and designed as a rip-off of the real, human entity it’s based on.

I know I’m not the first person to have these thoughts about privacy, recapturing our time, and deleting social media which has become corrupted and destroyed by billionaire oligarchs. This is a big cultural theme at the moment. But I know for sure that privacy has value. So does our human experience, as messy and unpredictable as it’s always been. Right now, I’m loving the choice to live more wholeheartedly in the analog world, instead of the digital one that looks shiny and inviting but has instead proved itself to be hollow and unsatisfying.