Letter to Columbia County, Pennsylvania

We are David; Big Tech is Goliath

A different version of this column appeared in the Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania Press Enterprise on May 22, 2026.

A Central Columbia High School classmate is posting on Facebook that many Pennsylvanians are alarmed by the proliferation of data centers. He tells me that one might even come to Mifflinville, my late father’s town.

So I write with a warning about Big Tech.

When I first arrived in San Francisco in 1990, rents were reasonable. I could always find a room in a shared apartment in our Bagdad by the Bay. I moved into my current rent-stabilized apartment in 1996. The dot-com boom arrived soon after, and housing costs for homes that are not rent-stabilized, and vacant rent-stabilized units, skyrocketed. A second tech boom brought Airbnb, which further depleted housing by converting those once abundant rooms into more lucrative hotels. Then, private, tech shuttle buses got “get-out-of-jail-free” placards to operate, illegally, in public bus stops, ferrying well-paid tech employees to and from Silicon Valley jobs — they might otherwise have found housing in Silicon Valley or taken public transportation. Other tech products – Ubers, Lyfts, and now autonomous Waymo robotaxis – congest our streets and compete with public buses for passengers.

Above, a tech shuttle bus is obstructing a public transportation bus. The tech shuttle has a placard issued by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. The placard means the tech shuttle can break the law, California Vehicle Code 22500.i, without being fined.

Here, a Waymo has pulled into a public bus stop to pick up passengers, also violating CVC 22500.i. Starting on July 1, 2026, traffic enforcers will finally be able to ticket autonomous vehicle companies for violations.

Corporate Democratic office holders and their regulatory appointees approved these products and policies without environmental review of impacts to housing availability, public buses (our most sustainable form of transportation), or to air quality, including the exacerbation of global warming. (One corporate Democrat who voted against requiring an environmental review of tech shuttle buses, Scott Wiener, is running for Congress to succeed Nancy Pelosi.)

Now San Francisco has 2,000 artificial intelligence companies – AI – and more multi-millionaires. Corporate Democrats and Republican politicians nationwide are embracing AI, even as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has warned of the potential for bad actors to capture AI and weaponize it against humanity. (Sam Altman has contributed to Scott Wiener’s campaign for Congress.) AI also appears to be doing exactly what its venture capitalist funders intend: fueling massive layoffs. Simultaneously, housing prices in San Francisco are skyrocketing again, and Bay Area income inequality is soaring.

A Bloomsburg friend visited recently and warned against destroying my neighborhood’s charm and its views of the Marin Headlands, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Pacific Ocean with taller buildings. But that corporate Democrat running for Congress has a solution to the Big Tech-driven housing affordability crisis – rezone my street, chock full of small businesses, for greater heights, incentivizing the demolition of those businesses and the housing currently above them.

Clement Street, in San Francisco’s Richmond District. This street has been rezoned for taller buildings, potentially incentivizing the demolition of hundreds of small businesses and the housing above those businesses.

Meanwhile, San Francisco teachers (including me) recently went on strike. We won, and now our district has a $183 million question: how to pay for our wins. Big Tech multi-millionaires and billionaires haven’t offered to increase their taxes to support education (with the exception of gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer). In fact, our new Big-Tech supporting mayor advocates cutting social services, while simultaneously opposing an upcoming ballot measures to tax billionaires and companies with overpaid CEOs.

Here is the connection between San Francisco wealth inequality and Northeastern Pennsylvania: rural data centers process San Francisco-designed AI. Those data centers hog water and electricity and will exacerbate climate change – not to mention their collection of our personal data, its concentration in the hands of a few billionaires, and the widespread unemployment that AI may lead to. (Erin Brockovich is mapping the locations of data centers; Northeastern Pennsylvania has quite a cluster proposed.)

Many Pennsylvanians have called for a moratorium on data centers, and Hemlock township even passed one that expires in August. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders also supports a moratorium, as does my preferred congressional candidate, Connie Chan. So we should fight for that. Other people have succeeded in similar fights before us.

In 1973, during the Arab Oil Embargo, tycoon Aristotle Onassis tried to build an oil refinery in New Hampshire. Opponents organized and defeated Onassis, then the richest man in the world.

In the 1950s and 1960s, San Franciscans organized the Freeway Revolt against planned highways. They succeeded in stopping the construction of a freeway through one of our parks. They were not able to block the Embarcadero Freeway, but it was so badly damaged during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that it was demolished and not replaced.

Save the Bay got its start in Northern California in 1961 when three women organized to protect the San Francisco Bay from development and to clean it up. This organization is still going strong today.

And in the early 1990s, my aunt, a college biology professor, led the opposition to a highway bypass in Millersville, Pennsylvania. Plans for the bypass had been underway since the late 1960s, and the state had already allocated $2.2 million to the project. The bypass would have destroyed a natural area — The Bush — where she took her biology students. Opponents organized for nearly five years, and eventually they won.

Here, my aunt holds a copy of the student newspaper announcing the defeat of the bypass. (After the defeat, opponents held a “Dead Bypass Party”. The Bush is now a biological preserve.)

The battle against billionaire-controlled data centers is a David versus Goliath battle. Perhaps the San Francisco Davids can unite with the Northeastern Pennsylvania Davids in this struggle. The fate of democracy and the planet are at stake.