The Brooklyn Rail

Collecting, sorting, and storing massive amounts of data has long been the work of the Information Age, but these activities are now going into a quantum stage that could have a disproportionate, some say catastrophic, impact on the physical plane.

Right now, 7% of all US energy consumption is due to Data Centers now being built to provide the energy needs of Artificial Intelligence. This number is going to rise precipitously as more Data Centers go online. Data Centers are projected to comprise from 6.7% to 12% of US electricity by 2028. The price of electricity in the US already went up by 13% in Trump’s first year in office, and natural gas prices went up by 30%. The power needs of AI are going to explode the cost of energy for consumers in the future.

The cost of upgrading transmission lines, transformers, and substations for new Data Centers is passed on to local ratepayers by the utilities. In regions with especially high Data Center activity, wholesale electricity prices have risen as much as 267% over the past five years.

If “information wants to be free,” why is it said to be fueling the next economic boom?

At the same time, Trump is preparing for a similar quantum leap in the collecting, sorting, and storing of large numbers of human beings. These human beings are unwanted in Trump’s America and have been characterized by him as essentially human waste. Trump has said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and so must be sequestered and expelled. They are to be kept in these storehouses for an indefinite period of time, without trial or due process, producing political energy. But this political energy is turning against the Trump administration, with many people objecting to these black site prison camps being built in their communities. The Republican Governor of New Hampshire, Kelly Ayotte, is under fire from her constituents for refusing to take a stand against one of these camps planned for her state.

The Washington Post reported on February 13 that Trump is planning to spend $38.3 billion (allocated in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act) to buy and build warehouses all over the country to be used as Detention Centers for immigrants. Initially, sixteen of these will be processing centers to hold 1000 to 1500 detainees before being transferred to eight huge centers that can hold 10,000 detainees apiece for longer periods of time.

These are effectively concentration camps, built and run by private prison companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group. CoreCivic reported total revenue of $538.2 million during its latest second quarter earnings call, a 10% increase from the same time last year, and GEO Group, which is ICE’s largest contractor, reported second quarter earnings of $636.2 million.

If Trump is successful in building this gulag archipelago infrastructure, it will be difficult to dismantle it when and if he’s no longer in power, since the deportation business is being sold as lucrative for local governments as well. The Brennan Center for Justice reported that some local governments are already building jails that are bigger than they’ll ever need with the expectation that they’ll be able to sell the extra space to ICE at a profit.

Trump continues to characterize the people being rounded up by ICE as murderers and rapists, but DHS documents show that less than 14% of the 400,000 immigrants arrested in Trump’s first year had either convictions or charges for violent crimes, and less than 2% of them were either charged or convicted of murder or rape. Instead, there have been thousands of illegal arrests of longtime residents, families, and asylum seekers. Thousands and thousands of people being picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection in these raids and subjected to brutal conditions in poorly planned detention facilities have not been convicted of any crime. People who have overstayed their visas are not guilty of any crime, since their original entry wasn’t illegal. Also, ICE has detained at least 3800 children since Trump came back into power.

Trump is trying to gain control of legacy media in the US before the next elections. If Trump makes it impossible for Netflix to take over Warner Discovery and makes it possible for Paramount Skydance to do so, it will give Trump control of Fox, CBS, CNN, and TikTok.

CBS obeyed in advance this week, bending the knee to Trump’s henchman and chair of the Federal Communications Commission Brendan Carr by warning Stephen Colbert not to air his interview with James Talarico, running for the US Senate from Texas, but Colbert wisely put his interview with Talarico on YouTube, where many more people saw it. In the interview, Talarico, who is a seminarian, confronted the claims of Christian Nationalism on behalf of Trump. “There is nothing Christian about Christian Nationalism,” he said. “It is the worship of power in the name of Christ, and it is a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.”

In the Gospels, Jesus always identifies with the stranger, the foreigner, the refugee, and says kindness toward strangers is equivalent to kindness toward him. And when we all come to Judgement Day, he will say, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.” And “As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” There is no ambiguity in those words.