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Matthew Remsky
I sold my car in Carvana last night. Well, that's cool.
Carvana Customer
No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. Real offer down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong.
Carvana Friend/Advertiser
So what's the problem?
Carvana Customer
That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes as smoothly. I'm waiting for the catch.
Carvana Friend/Advertiser
Maybe there's no catch.
Carvana Customer
That's exactly what a catch would want me to think.
Carvana Friend/Advertiser
Wow. You need to relax.
Carvana Customer
I need a knock on wood.
Matthew Remsky
Do we have wood? Is this table wood?
Carvana Friend/Advertiser
I think it's laminate.
Carvana Customer
Okay. Yeah, that's good. That's close enough.
Carvana Friend/Advertiser
Car selling without a catch. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up Fees may apply.
David Greene
For so many of us sports strengthen the bonds we have with our hometowns, our friends, our families. They bring us together and color every aspect of our lives. From WHYY and prx, this is Sports in America. Each week we go deep with athletes, coaches and fans. We'll take you into the triumphs, the heartbreaks and the relationships that define athletes careers and create the moments we remember. Join me David Greene on Sports in America. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.
Matthew Remsky
Hello everyone, I'm Matthew Remsky. This is Conspirituality where we investigate the roots and intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. You can follow myself, Derek and Julian on bluesky. The podcast is on Instagram and threads under its own handle and you can support our patreon and you can also find me personally on YouTube and TikTok NTIFascistDad all one word. This is a brief report on an under construction 56 megawatt data center at 3650 Danforth Avenue in Scarborough. This is about two miles from our home. It has risen on the landscape and in my consciousness in the same way. Hidden in inexorable, controlled by a small network of powerful and wealthy people and under a cone of silence and locked in to how things are always already working. I'm going to stick to a phenomenological and material conditions approach to this episode. And so I'll start with my basement office which is where my brain is constantly entangled with tech. I work on computers and devices all day and before computers it was word processors. I wrote my first book on an electronic typewriter with a white out ribbon cartridge that you could pop in after taking the black ink strip out. And then I found images to illustrate the book from old volumes in the U of T library that photocopied for a nickel A sheet. I used to have a lot of nickels because I made money by busking. I've never had a salaried job, never been part of a union, although I'm finally joining the writers union now. And so walking this endless road of freelance jobs has been all I've known and of course it's exhausting and precarious. Occasionally I have had enough money to hire a research assistant, which was a huge help when it came to the book I wrote about yoga cults. I hired my friend actually, and we had rich discussions about the material from many different angles. It was really helpful, but I couldn't afford that help on a regular basis. And about a year ago Google notified me about a platform called NotebookLM. Now I was aware of AI platforms and tools, but I hadn't paid them much mind. But within days of testing this out I realized how useful it was in terms of basic summarization, categorization, indexing and fact checking. And it saves me a ton of time. Even after I fact in the fact checking of the fact checking. Now several months ago I started using Claude for processing transcripts and as a glorified search engine. Now sometimes I wind up using two layers of these tools. The POD platform that I use for antifascist ad it's called Kastos and it automatically creates an AI transcript of the MP3 I upload. This is not an option that I chose, it just came with a service. But usually the transcript isn't very good. If I feed that into Claude and it copy edits and formats it instantly, that saves me hours and it makes the anti capitalist and anti fascist material more accessible while feeding a capitalist machine. So from the outset I'm aware of making a Faustian bargain. I'm not going to hire my friend again and with each task I'm using more energy than I ever have before in my writing life. I'm feeding my own data into the machine, but I'm also more productive than I've ever been. But I say that with no pride, but with an acknowledgment of necessity because mine is the only household income as we have a disabled child at home and my partner is doing full time care. I have spent too much time deconstructing my self perception based on productivity to have arrived where I am. But here I am. Now I also have to protect my brain from shortcuts from the assumption that summaries equal engagement. They absolutely do not. And from the super cringe sycophancy of the bots themselves. I feel nauseatingly lucky that I picked up these tools with 30 years of writing under my belt. Our 13 year old is telling us that the bots are free to use on their Chromebooks now, and he's got one teacher who uses Gemini to write entire lesson plans. I find this terrifying. I'm also aware of the political contradictions. There are many great analyses of extractive AI logic and the spell it casts. I'm going to let Jodi Dean summarize here. She writes I I'll start with the level of the personal user that AI is. Capital means that when you talk to an LLM, you are talking to capital. Claude is not a person, not your friend, not your therapist. Claude doesn't care about you. Claude is capital, and capital is an acephalous process of accumulation. When an LLM helps a user commit suicide or redesign their living room, it is utterly indifferent to the meaning of the tokens it is producing. They are just tokens, like commodities are just commodities, whether they are bullets or baby dolls. That AI is capital also signals to us that the efforts to build it are efforts to invigorate capital. This should be obvious. The developers, the supporters, the governments, they all say this all the time. AI will drive new manufacturing, create new efficiencies, unleash productivity, and all the rest. The goal is strengthening capital. Now, earlier in my life, these paradoxes, like a paragraph like that, would have paralyzed me emotionally. But at this point there are too many survival tasks in play and too much awareness of how compromised I am already by social media algorithms and surveillance capitalism. This might be a final boss layer, but at this point I can't actually take the time to tell. Now, all that said, on May 19, news broke that Google is abruptly overhauling its search window, replacing the familiar list of links format with an expansion of their AI interface that will monitor the web, execute tasks, and build mini applications on the fly. As in, you can ask it. You'll be able to ask it to create a bot that monitors stuff for you and brings it to what they call the intelligent Search box. This is an input field for text, images, files, video, and whatever Chrome tabs you have open now already with their AI Summary tool, which is pretty hit and miss in terms of accuracy. People are ending their searches on Google's homepage 60% of the time, which locks them into Google's advertising impressions. But that's not good enough for Google. The intelligent search box will force that percentage up to the point where web publishers will have decreasing incentives to maintain their website and assets. Now if they begin to abandon updating their websites, as I will do for my own small website, the AI generated returns from those sites will degrade in terms of quality, and eventually the extractive colonizing process initiated by the intelligent search box will destroy the viability of its own inputs and begin to pump out garbage. Now, this is not my hypothesis. It's called model collapse or data cannibalization. It's analyzed by a bunch of people, including Cory Doctorow and many others, as a feature of what he calls inshitification. So if I'm ruthlessly clear about what's going on here, LLMs have been trained on our labor. My name and book titles did not turn up in the class actions against Anthropic, but I have no doubt that because all of my work is available in PDF form on hacking sites, that it has been hoovered up for training. That happened without my consent, as quickly as TikTok recently announced that all of our video archives are now theirs to feed into their AI video generation. And if you want to opt out, you can do so video by video, but not en masse. That means that for people who have thousands of videos, they can't possibly do that unless they hire somebody on Fiverr to do it. Now, TikTok is within their rights to create a full avatar of me and to mimic my content or turn it into furry porn. So I created a market for my books through hundreds of essays posted to my old site, which Google is now a scraping for AI summary returns and B not sending me any traffic. So not only did I do that work on spec to increase my readership with virtually no pay, that labor is now appropriated by the search engine that would have pointed users to me, a real human being, so that it can hold users for longer to view ads from Amazon. And why has all my labor been stolen? Because that's what capital needed. And where will they get more? I'm not going to publish directly to Google unless that's what's happening when I use NotebookLM. And if I don't update my website, I will probably never pay my wonderful web designer again. This is my neighbor in this city and in my life. This is someone whose politics I share and whose life I want to support. And our professional relationship is now severed by Silicon Valley. All of which is to say that I believe I am immoral in participating in AI usage, but I would be more immoral not to use it in ways that enhance and speed up my ability to persuade those around me to agitate for a more sane world And I'm not comparing myself to Marx here, but I'm sure there were someone telling him that he shouldn't use the British Museum at the center of Empire to do his work. So all of that is going on in my basement. Now, when I walk up into the garden that I'm late in tending. Increasingly, I'm having a split thought about the weather. It used to be wow, that's a nice breeze. Or it's a little chilly outside, or oof, it's going to be a hot one today. Now, especially with predicting a hot day, the immediate parallel thought is Is it supposed to be this hot? Is this normal? Now this morning I'm heading out to investigate the building site of a Stack Technologies data center that's about two miles away. I found out about it not through any professional reporting, but through an Instagram account called ClimateFast Action, which is a nonprofit organization that's been operating since 2012. Now, fun fact, I'm sure that some AI process within Meta fed this account into my feed. Here's the Keep an eye out on this 56 megawatt data center by the beaches in Toronto. How much is 56 megawatts worth? 56 megawatts is equivalent to providing electricity to around 56,000 homes located at 3650 Danforth Avenue, Scarborough, right next to Birchmount Park, Rosetta, McLean Gardens, Scarborough Bluffs and other amazing parks and beaches. So I went to check it out. I drove out of my 1920s neighborhood and up to the junction of Victoria park and Danforth, which rolls out east away from Toronto and into the low slung sprawl of Scarborough. I roll past mosques and masjids to start and then a patchwork of auto shops, used car lots of some low rise residential apartment buildings, tiny strip malls with convenience stores and diners and jerk chicken shops and nail salons that serve the small web of bungalow neighbourhoods. There are still a lot of these zones in Toronto and just beyond these memories of the 1950s, not yet gentrified, built for big cars and driving with the radio on am. As I get closer to the address, the development thins out and there's more green on either side and till the south I can feel the coolness of Birchmount park and the Google map. AI tells me to turn right from the front face of the corner lot of the data center. It looks like any newer corporate tech building. So I pull into the drive and up to the black metal barrier in front of a largely empty parking lot. I press the intercom button and ask the security guard if they give tours? Of course not. How can I find out more about the facility, I ask? Well, if you Google Stack Technologies in the US you'll get something. The security guard says, So I do. Stack launched in 2019 and it was branded and sponsored by an investment company called IPI Partners. It's headquartered in Denver. It employs approximately 1,075 staff. The CEO is a guy named Brian Cox. And the company has raised more than 36 billion in capital globally as of July of 25th, with over 6 billion in green financing secured during 2025. It's a hyperscale corporation, so the campuses are huge. In North Virginia, there are six of them that total over 700 megawatts. There's a one gigawatt plus campus in Virginia proper. There are campuses In Phoenix, that's 250, Portland, 200 Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Silicon Valley, Tokyo, Melbourne, Johor, Bahru in Malaysia, and in Seoul, Korea. The total planned global capacity for stack technologies is 10 gigawatt hours. Now, as I drove around the south side of the campus, I could see that the current building is only occupying about a quarter of the security fenced acreage. But the back end that points west, it's standing unfinished. The available info on the center is that it's currently operating at 8 megawatts out of the projected 56, but it's clear that the construction is just rolling along. But instead of the typical backhoes and pickup trucks, I see two almost like space aged giant vehicles with these extending cranes. And I think what I saw was that they were lifting prefab modules onto the concrete footings, filling out the parcel like one Lego brick after another. So this is an enormous project, but it's also somehow inconspicuous, just part of the modern industrial landscape. That fades into the background of my feeling about the city that things are always changing. I'm never sure what's going on, and I often have a dissociative and ironic attitude towards these buildings, as though alienation would defend me from what's inside them or what they do. But there's no avoiding the enormity of what these buildings are, what they represent. Now, it's not clear when the full 56 megawatts will be online, but when it is, this center will draw the continuous equivalent of 42,000 to 56,000 Ontario homes, permanently, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Now, just for comparison, this amount of electricity is, is more than what is used by the University of Toronto's entire downtown campus, which covers dozens of city blocks. It's more than what's used by the Scarborough Town Center. This is a huge local shopping center. It's 200 stores, 1.3 million square foot, and it's more energy than the Scarborough Town center uses by a factor of five. 56 megawatts is about a third of the entire Toronto subway system's peak demand, and all coming from a 19 acre site. Now, one of the most beautiful things about where we live is that when we walk down to the beach from the upper beach, we're walking down into the ancient Great Lake Basin. Down our road, the incline is actually, you know, San Francisco steep. It's 150ft vertical. And in the summer, it's always a sweaty walk up. And in the winter, the ice can be impassable. One time I slid all the way down with all season tires and I had to swerve left into a pickup truck to avoid rear ending the cars in front of me. But always as you descend, there's an optical illusion that Lake Ontario's horizon, sometimes turquoise, pale blue, sometimes slate gray, depending on the season, is somehow right at your eye level. And just to the east of the bottom of our road is a depression era art deco water treatment plant that supplies about 30% of the city's water. Now, we don't know as yet whether the Danforth data center is using evaporative or closed loop water cooling. If it uses evaporative coolers, the draw on that old plant from the Data center uphill 150ft vertical through a network of pumping stations could reach 400 million liters annually, or up to twice the combined water use of all three main Scarborough hospitals, with the infrastructure costs of that strain distributed amongst all the ratepayers. So that's 1.1 million liters per day that would evaporate into the air above Birchmount Road. And that brings me back to the heat. In that hourly temperature check I find myself doing every few hours when I step outside, it's the heat that confuses and bothers me most. The slow drive I described out of my neighborhood to Birch Mount is quaint and unassuming. But it's also dominated by asphalt and concrete. And over the last few years, I've noticed these surfaces becoming increasingly enraged with rippling heat. More and more days during the lengthening summer. Toronto heat warning days have roughly tripled over the past decade, from about 5 annually in 2013-15 to 16 to 23 days per year since 2022. Now, it's obvious that these data centers will add heat to the city. But how much? The first solid research on air temperatures in residential neighborhoods downwind of operational data centers was due, just published this spring, to give you a sense of how everybody's just catching up to this stuff. And what they found is that thermometer increases of up to 2.2 Celsius were registered at distances of 500 meters from the centers, regardless of how they are cooled. So as I admit, I don't know whether this data center is going to be drawing that 1.1 million liters up the hill to to cool in evaporative cooling. But if it uses evaporation or a closed loop system, the heat remains regardless. And a Cambridge University working paper also provides some evidence here and insight, because it analyzed NASA data across 6,000 global data centers and it found that average land surface temperature increases of approximately 2 degrees centigrade prevailed, with some extreme cases reaching 9 degrees centigrade. Now, the new Danforth center is just about 200 meters from the greenery of Birchmount park. And parks tend to run about 4 degrees cooler than commercial and industrial land, which turns them into thermal refuges during hot spells. Now, I know that there are a number of care homes for the disabled and the marginally employed around Birchmount park. And I've seen folks hanging out among the cool trees when it gets really hot. So what we have is a permanent industrial heat source adjacent to a big park that takes that cooling function away. Toronto neighbourhoods with low tree canopy cover make five times as many heat related ambulance calls as those with higher cover. And except for the parks, the Danforth Birch Mount corridor has low canopy cover. So I think that those parks, it's reasonable to say, are preventing ambulance calls, but maybe they won't anymore. So surely the government is keeping tabs on all this, right? No, no. Ontario regulation requires waste heat monitoring, reporting or recovery. And the Stack Corporation has announced no heat mitigation program. Now, when I ask myself why, as a politically informed journalist, I wasn't aware of the construction of this center so close to my home, I have this kind of ashamed feeling that somehow I wasn't tuned in, I wasn't paying attention. But then I go to look for reporting on GTA data centers and there's not a lot out there and none of it is local, none of it goes and talks to residents. It's nobody's fault. There just isn't enough labor power out there to do it. And everything is moving so fast. And AI isn't going to report on itself, is it? There's also a political and oligarchical cone of silence covering the entire subject and just how fast this building is moving. The Province of Ontario has no public approval process for the building of data centers. Grid connections are granted without requiring municipal notification, public comment or environmental assessment in many cases. So Stack announced the project in May of 2021 with the endorsement of right wing Mayor John Tory. Local residents learned about it from a newspaper. So that's one instance in which some local reporting did something. And then phase one opened in September of 2023. But with no public recording on energy draw, water use, noise or emissions, phase two is close to completion, again without community consultation. Toronto City Council has responded with the speed of one of our rental pedal bikes, passing a motion only this past March, five years after announcement and three years after this data center opened, that requests a staff report on basic questions about grid impact, water use and regulatory framework. So the representatives who are closest to the people who are impacted by this have operated without any systematic understanding of data center impacts throughout the entire boom of this construction cycle. And as of today, no independent monitoring of the Danforth site exists for any environmental issue. And we don't even know who the tenants of the data center are, which companies are buying that computer power and what they're using it for. It could be anything from medical research in the positive zone to the evil zone of robotics training that eliminates labor or guidance software for autonomous drones. Now, in leftist circles, it's common to reduce these workflows to. Well, capitalists are silencing democracy to kill off labor and extract as much capital as they can from the planet. And in the passion of the argument, some people like to personalize it to, say, Doug Ford, the Premier here in Toronto, and PM Mark Carney. They're rigging the laws so that their buddies can profit. And these reductions aren't wrong at all. But if you begin to follow the money threads, something more vague and impersonal and frightening emerges. A system evolved to reinforce itself through multiple layers of power and influence and networking, with each layer enlisted in the project of wealth hoarding in this impersonal way that actually feels a little bit like AI and just a process. Note here, when I say follow the threads, I mean to the extent they aren't hidden, to the extent that you don't have an investigative budget and team or the time to submit FOIA requests and have them approved or denied. And when I say hidden, I mean openly hidden. Because here in Ontario we know that Premier Ford has cut many of his most corrupt deals with land developers through negotiation on his personal cell phone, and that when his cell phone records were subpoenaed, he used his majority government to push through new legislation during a midnight vote to shield all phone records dating back to 1984 from Foy requests. So when I say follow the threads for an episode like this, I wind up with a fuzzy tangle seen from a distance. But at the same time, even if I had the budget and resources to get around this new law shielding public scrutiny, the work it would take to nail down a forensic paper trail would last for months and months. By which point the Danforth Data center would have broken ground on its final construction stages and and basically have gained permanent squatters rights in my neighborhood in the Origin of the Family Private Property in the state. In 1884, Friedrich Engels wrote that the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another. In 1917, Lenin wrote in the State and Revolution that the state is a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. And in the granular details of this job site, these observations show their clarity, in my view, and again disabuse that part of my liberal brain that surveys how this happened and thinks, well, surely this was wrong. We should be able to tattle on stacked technologies. Surely they're breaking the rules. But the truth is that at almost every layer of government above the local councilor, and they too can be in the pocket of the wealthy, the state is facilitating all of it under the COVID of regulating it on behalf of the public. The most cynical view might be that the belief you can appeal to the government just provides buffering time that allows the speed of industry and extraction to accelerate. Now, I don't want to paint too bleak a picture. This past week, Karen Howe, author of Empire of AI, gave two interviews in which she said that US data center protests stalled over 100 billion in projects during 2020. Now, that figure is consistent with Data Center Watch's independent tracking, which documented 64 billion blocked between 2023 and March of 2025, and 98 billion in just three months of mid 2025. And so this means that community opposition has stalled roughly 24% of US data center investment in 2025. $1 in every 4 of planned investment was stalled or blocked by organized local resistance. But we do have to note that stalled does not mean canceled. Howe has also launched something called the AI Resist List, which is a global database that tracks resistance to AI centers. And her key observation is that the opposition cuts across political lines. It unites environmental, working class and anti oligarch groups. But currently no similarly sizable resistant network has emerged in Canada to oppose the eight hyperscale projects currently in development. There are local bright lights. So here in Ontario, residents of Milton discovered planned hyperscale development and they're now building some resistance on the local council level. Emily Lohan is the leader of the British Columbia Green Party. They only have two seats, but she's building a cross partisan, multi level coalition of Greens, local councillors and community activists to pressure the province's NDP government to levy a data center moratorium and eventually binding regulation. In Alberta, the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation. Because first nations have led the charge on many things at this point, especially in Alberta, they issued a cease and desist orders and pursued legal challenges against the Wonder Valley development project under Treaty 8 rights. But that was dismissed by Alberta's Environmental Appeals Board. In Saskatchewan, Bell Canada had a 1.7 billion data center slated for construction near Regina and it was approved this past April. Despite 200 protesters at the legislature, they collected 13,000 petition signatures against the data center. There were council interruptions, there were even buildings vandalism incidents. But the council approving it had a majority of members recently appointed by the Conservative provincial government. Which brings me back to money and government. And the image I have here is that of the Thaumotrope, that Victorian era optical illusion toy. That was a paper disc that had a different image on each face attached to two strings that were looped and would twist. You would twist the disc, right? And then you'd pull against the twist of the strings and the disc would spin and blend the two images into one. I'm sure you saw this as a kid even if you weren't from the Victorian era. I mean, they've been around for a long time. But you would have a bird on one side, this is the famous one, and a cage on the other. And if you spin the thing, it appears as though the bird is in the cage. Mark Carney served as Brookfield Asset Management vice chair until 2024. Brookfield is the country's largest private infrastructure investor, managing over a trillion dollars in assets globally across real estate, renewable energy infrastructure and private equity. STAC's Canadian development partner is First Gulf. And First Gulf is led by a CEO who came from Brookfield Financial. Now another major source of Canadian investment comes from the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. And their money runs through Iconique Capital, which is a secretive wealth manager for Silicon Valley billionaires that manages approximately 80 billion in assets. And Iconique is Stack's original co sponsor. So working Canadians retirement savings are now flowing into the ownership structure of the company. Building unmonitored industrial infrastructure in my neighborhood, that will probably impact labor in a negative way. And on the provincial level, Invest Ontario is the government agency that attracts foreign business investment and navigates provincial regulations. And Invest Ontario has been quietly assisting US hyperscalers without public disclosure while legislating away the oversight tools. So it's a juggernaut with inconceivable amounts of capital plowing the earth to colonize each brain, multiple reinforcing systems of silence, obfuscation and efficiency that preempt deliberation and prompt the working person to look around at the new landscape and say, well, I guess this is what we're doing now. The news coverage and local activist networks can barely keep up. And then on top of everything else lies a thick haze of vague promises, because when you look at the press releases and government announcements, you get the feeling that the powerful are using a single optimized PR bot. Stack's tagline is the world runs on data and data runs on Stack, which turns its industrial warehouses into some like substrate of civilization. Mark Carney calls AI the railroad of the 21st century, which unfortunately is a metaphor rooted in Indigenous dispossession and indentured labor. Provincial politicians describe these US owned facilities as protecting Canadian data on Canadian soil, which is absolute bullshit because we have no idea what data is circulating through these centers. And of course the company itself is transnational. The keywords they use are transformative sovereign nation building, long term prosperity, moral imperative. So these terms all convert private capital extraction into a kind of destiny and all opposition to it into backwardness. So now I'm back in the basement office. It's almost eight o'clock on the third morning I've worked on this. The glass door and high wall window face west into the garden that we'll be planting up this Saturday. As this is published I think I can tell from the tint of the sunlight that it's going to be on the warm side today. Too warm. I don't know. My feeds are also flashing with news of the coming super El Nino. So I wonder if I have to re examine what varietals I'm planting, whether we need more heat resistant plants. And so here I can pause and wonder what about this condition I find myself in. I find my neighborhood in my neighbors in prevents me prevents any of us from going full qanon. It is obvious that a few people in power are overpowering the rest of us with massive resources that degrade our humanity. They couldn't care less about the outcomes and they are being hand waved through by government officials who at best are playing traffic cop. What prevents me from taking the gaps left by this deliberately self obscuring power and filling them with false answers as well as my rage? I have enough education to to recognize what it means to scapegoat others and not want to do that. I have enough education to locate the enemy, not in people so much as in capital itself. I have enough skill at emotional regulation most of the time to not let absolute hatred distort my capacity to think clearly. Are these the only things that separate me from the anons? However, also in my feed is a viral surge of commentary on Pope Leo's AI encyclical. So that's next on the research agenda as we prepare our episode for this coming Thursday. So I'll finish by saying that for me, the overwhelming consequences of AI as tech and infrastructure and human degradation often seem larger than any hyperobject I have ever pondered. And so it seems that a response that foregrounds the universal, even the mystical, is appropriate in terms of scale, even if, and maybe because it admits that it doesn't have any answers yet.
Liberty Mutual Representative
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Carvana Friend/Advertiser
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Liberty Mutual Representative
Oh no, we help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.
Carvana Friend/Advertiser
Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.
Liberty Mutual Representative
Anyways, get a quote@libertymutual.com or with your local agent.
Matthew Remsky
Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty.
Conspirituality Podcast
Episode: Brief: My Neighbourhood Data Center Conspiracy
Host: Matthew Remski
Date: May 30, 2026
Overview
In this episode, Matthew Remski delivers a personal and investigative monologue examining the rise of a massive, under-construction data center just miles from his home in Toronto. He reflects on the economic, environmental, and social implications of data center expansion—focusing on power, cooling, surveillance, and the political opacity surrounding such projects. Woven throughout are his dilemmas about AI, labor, and capital, and how these threads tie into larger systemic critiques. Remski resists easy conspiratorial thinking, opting instead for structural analysis, but acknowledges how the current dynamic breeds distrust.
Key Discussion Points & Insights
Personal Context & the Faustian Bargain of AI (01:03–08:00)
"I'm feeding my own data into the machine, but I'm also more productive than I've ever been. But I say that with no pride, but with an acknowledgment of necessity." (06:30)
"When you talk to an LLM, you are talking to capital. Claude is not a person, not your friend, not your therapist. Claude doesn't care about you. Claude is capital, and capital is an acephalous process of accumulation." (07:45)
Google's Shift to AI, Model Collapse & Labor Theft (08:00–14:30)
"If [web publishers] begin to abandon updating their websites...the AI generated returns from those sites will degrade in terms of quality, and eventually the extractive colonizing process...will destroy the viability of its own inputs and begin to pump out garbage." (12:10)
"All of my work is available in PDF form on hacking sites, that it has been hoovered up for training. That happened without my consent..." (13:15)
The Data Center’s Local Impacts: Power, Water, and Heat (14:30–28:30)
“...thermometer increases of up to 2.2 Celsius were registered at distances of 500 meters... Cambridge University...found that average land surface temperature increases of approximately 2 degrees centigrade prevailed, with some extreme cases reaching 9 degrees centigrade.” (26:30)
Political Opaqueness & Regulatory Failure (28:30–34:30)
"The Province of Ontario has no public approval process for the building of data centers...Grid connections are granted without requiring municipal notification, public comment or environmental assessment in many cases." (31:45)
Structural Power, Capital, and Resistance (34:30–37:00)
"A system evolved to reinforce itself through multiple layers of power and influence and networking, with each layer enlisted in the project of wealth hoarding in this impersonal way that actually feels a little bit like AI and just a process." (35:20)
“Stack's tagline is the world runs on data and data runs on Stack, which turns its industrial warehouses into some like substrate of civilization. Mark Carney calls AI the railroad of the 21st century, which unfortunately is a metaphor rooted in Indigenous dispossession and indentured labor.” (36:45)
Personal Reflection: Conspiracy, Disempowerment, and Counter-Forces (37:00–End)
"What about this condition I find myself in, I find my neighborhood in, my neighbors in, prevents me, prevents any of us from going full QAnon? It is obvious that a few people in power are overpowering the rest of us with massive resources that degrade our humanity." (37:05)
Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments
On technology and precarity:
"Walking this endless road of freelance jobs has been all I've known and of course it's exhausting and precarious." (04:30)
On AI and alienation:
"I have to protect my brain from shortcuts from the assumption that summaries equal engagement–they absolutely do not–and from the super cringe sycophancy of the bots themselves." (06:50)
On data center opacity and power’s self-concealment:
"There's also a political and oligarchical cone of silence covering the entire subject and just how fast this building is moving." (31:20)
On organizing potential:
"Community opposition has stalled roughly 24% of US data center investment in 2025. $1 in every 4 of planned investment was stalled or blocked by organized local resistance. But...stalled does not mean canceled." (36:10)
On resistance to conspiracy thinking:
"Are these the only things that separate me from the anons? ... I have enough education to locate the enemy, not in people so much as in capital itself." (37:20)
Timestamps for Key Segments
Tone & Language
Remski’s tone is intimate, reflective, and analytical—combining an immersive first-person narrative with leftist, structural critique. He mingles political philosophy, personal anecdote, and investigative reporting, while carefully resisting conspiratorial framing despite ample material for suspicion.
Summary
This episode unpacks the hidden impacts of wild data center expansion in Toronto, placing it in the context of global capital, technological change, AI’s labor dynamics, and environmental stressors. Remski’s personal struggle with the ethics of AI and his observations about creeping infrastructure serve as microcosms for much larger global forces. He wonders, finally, what stops us from filling systemic gaps with conspiracy and hate, and calls for responses that match the "hyperobject" scale of the emerging crisis, even if answers remain elusive.