Townships, AI, & Democracy
“Without the institutions of a township a nation can give itself a free government, but it does not have the spirit of freedom. Fleeting passions, the interest of a moment, the chance of circumstances can give it the external forms of independence; but despotism suppressed in the interior of the social body reappears sooner or later on the surface.” – Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835
Over the last year, I've mentioned to everyone I've spoken with that the latest generation of compute marketed as AI is an issue reshaping American politics. With information technology ingraining itself in every aspect of our existence, the politics of AI concerns many, if not all, issues, creating an opportunity for a much needed rethinking, a first thinking for that matter, on the issues of the politics of technology, democracy, societal control by a handful of corporations, energy, land and water use, air, noise, and light pollution. Life in the 21st century you might say.
Over the last few years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in a little community in southern Michigan. There's a number of old, cheap golf courses, where you can walk 18 for as little as a dozen bucks. One morning, one of my sisters told me plans were afoot for a data center to be built relatively close. I volunteered to help and honestly, for an old political hack, it was quite a fascinating and inspiring experience. I discovered a faint, though vibrant democratic pulse in the American body politic.
Southern Michigan remains primarily agriculture, dotted with small lakes. Across the 20th century, it also hosted a fair number of small manufacturers, many closed or off-shored over the last fifty years. Thus, the area is heavy Maga, with Trump winning 67% of the vote in 2025. In this community, the data center opposition came together amazingly quickly.
First and foremost, people were concerned with the issues of electricity and water, but underlying everything was a concern of what this technology meant. After news started spreading, in less than week a first meeting was put together. One hundred and thirty people showed up with little organizational effort. As someone in another life who spent three decades in and following American politics from the local to presidential level, getting a 130 people to a local political meeting, much less with little effort, is impressive. I'd call that an issue like none before encountered.
The place to start and stop the data center was with the Penn Township Board, five locally elected trustees. The data center needed agriculture land to be rezoned industrial. Just as a now well established pattern across the country, the data center builders came in stealthily, buying land and trying to get zoning changes and agreements before the public knew what was happening. A first step was to get many people long estranged from local government to understand what a township is and how it works. Communicating with the trustees and getting a large group of people at the township meetings would gobsmack Trustees use to sparse citizen involvement.
A week later, 150 people showed up, overflowing the usual township meeting hall. The board voted an immediate 30 day moratorium, calling a planning commission meeting three days later to devise a longer stay. 250 people showed up at the planning meeting, who recommended a year moratorium passed by the board two days later watched by another packed house.
It was amusing observing the officials. Previously, no doubt, if ten or so people came to most meetings that’d be a lot. For myself, who hadn’t attended any such meetings in a long time, it was an intriguing perspective. (I figured the last such meeting I attended was an Oakland, California City Council meeting in 2000, where over months, I helped usher a successful vote to switch city facilities to renewable electricity generation.)
The meetings offered a great mix of people. There were a handful of “activists,” a term I always hated. Activists are a symptom of democracy not working. Me, I’m for citizens not activists. Everybody needs to play a role helping define their communities and the world, and thus, their lives. Call it not just a right, but in the political values of Simone Weil, an obligation. That’s democracy. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of activists are very good people, many attempting to push Sisyphusian rocks up not just steep mountain slopes, but cliffs. Not a great way to spend this life. Of course any good activist reveals themselves immediately. A couple parachuted in from outside the township with no understanding of the local political action activated by many residents communicating and helping the trustees get a moratorium passed.
There were also a number of business folk. Southern Michigan has long been a vacation destination for Chicago, many people with vacation homes. After Covid, a number moved up year-round. Amusingly, many of the business people's first impulse was to “lawyer-up.” However, at this point, there was no need for lawyers. The deal was to work the old democratic township institution and for that, no lawyers needed.
In the assembled citizenry, there was an atmosphere, not misplaced, of mistrust of the board. It is a putrid nastiness blanketing all America's political and government institutions, again, in too many ways not undeserved. However, the best advise I gave was not to approach the board in a hostile manner, but as a concerned community, getting the board to play their role as representatives. It was great to hear people talk at the meetings. You got ten well thought and articulated positions to every knucklehead. This was democracy.
The thing about democracy, it doesn’t take genius, elites, experts, but every day people taking time to educate themselves, talk with each other, and come to a decision. Democracy is work. It needs to be valued as such, only more so. This is the only way democracy in America will be revived.
Currently, the great void of AI politics at the state and federal levels is deafening. In Michigan, the Governor supports unrestrained data center development, backing “legislation to grant total exemptions on sales and use taxes for large-scale data centers, arguing that they would deliver ‘jobs and economic development, to the state.” Yet, outside an initial and short influx of construction jobs, data centers offer few jobs. After all, automation is getting rid of jobs, that is compute's alpha and omega when valued only economically and to this point it's the only way compute's been valued. What is also clear in regards to development, data centers give local communities the bill for the centers' massive electricity and water needs.
Today, massive corporations control the states and federal governments, removing decision making, the unalienable Rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, from the citizenry. Yet, at the local level, using township and county governments, data center opposition has rapidly spread like a political prairie fire across the landscape with over fifty stopped and a hundred more presently contested.
It is a simple twist of fate that the foundational democratic structures of our two and half century old republic stand up to the 21st century’s most undemocratic, powerful corporations. Political power was largely removed from these local agrarian era institutions as technology created vast new networks – railroads, telegraphs, electricity, manufacturers, broadcast media, and now compute – subverting local control and placing it in state capitols and DC. If anything, data center construction foretells complete and total local subservience to concentrated corporate power.
Reviving and evolving these local structures requires two things; citizens repopulating existing and new face to face assemblies and these local structures networking together to become a new force in American politics and governance. From such small beginnings, a desperately needed revival, reform, and evolution of democracy in America can commence.