Data centers, drought, and dispossession: The real nightmares in Ari Aster’s ‘Eddington’
The film “Eddington” opens at night while the Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) is in his Chevy Tahoe on the edge of a desert of the New Mexico. In service, he is bathed in blue light, watching YouTube: a video on how to convince your spouse to want a child. More cops stop, the tribal police of the fictitious pueblo santa and tells him that a mask mandate is active on their land. Joe pulls his mask on his nose until they leave, then gets it stuck immediately.
Located in the first days of the COVVI-19 pandemic in 2020, “Eddington”, directed by Ari Aster, a mixture of elements of horror, westerns and satire that explore how we treat such an overwhelming event half a second. But its secondary intrigue on the development of a nearby massive data center explores how this volatile landscape has become profitable for technological societies, while engaging with contemporary vignettes of native life where indigenous communities exist along the border, haunting the history and politics of the city.
In the film, the mayor of the city of Eddington, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), plays the high power policy at the best of his capacities in a small town, in particular the collaboration of the Ténébre Solidgoldgikarp technological society. The company proposed a “development of a hyperscal data center” and the mayor Garcia boasts the idea as a boon of the local economy, creating jobs. Sheriff Cross, however, sees it differently. For him, the world and his mask mandates have violated his city and his life. Consequently, he decides to run against Garcia for the mayor.
From there, the action is set in motion. Defying that masking orders are used for social media points, while young militants, mainly white activists, engage in online activism by invoking the long march of Navajo and calling stolen land ownership points which work more as a currency than a real desire to engage with their neighbors of Pueblo. Eddington, in his heart, is a Western. Like the other westerns, he evokes a moment of discovery and unleashed him on the public of the public. John Ford Westerns locates the founding mythologies of what drives the American identity among the red buttons and the diligence. Even in Twin Peaks, David Lynch’s revealing vision of the first atomic bomb exploded in the New Mexico desert offers a view of the origins of evil. In “Eddington”, alienation animates the story, supervised on social networks, zoom meetings and the technological infrastructure which pushes the community in all possible ways.
This infrastructure, of course, exists out of screen and in our lives. Earlier this month in southern Arizona, nearly 1,000 people in Tucson went to a meeting of the municipal council after local journalists revealed that the officials had secretly planned an Amazon web services installation in their community. During a public meeting, angry residents cited that the city’s drought model would not meet the water needs of the data center. In Tennessee, residents of a southern district of Memphis reported respiratory problems due to nitrogen oxide emissions from fossil fuels on fire used to supply Elon Musk’s servers, to manage the resident chatbot of Grok, X.
Due to the speed of development of the AI data center, the tribes have only just started to fight against this trend and threats to water, earth and energy capacity. The Tonawanda Nation Seneca filed a complaint against the construction of a data center in New York State at the beginning of the month, arguing that the site would hinder the rights of treaties, including hunting and rally. Last year, Arizona Corporation Commission Commission, a public services regulator approved an increase in rates of 8% to respond to energy demands caused by the growing number of state data centers. To a separate extent, the Commission rejected a set to extend electricity to residents of the Navajo nation, where nearly 13,000 households do not have access.
“While these data centers move into their communities, people are starting to realize that there are enormous physical manifestations to all this artificial intelligence and to all this information that we have managed to accept in a way in our daily life,” said Deborah Kapiloff, political advisor for defenders of Western resources. “It will start to be much more decline in communities because they understand what it means for them in terms of changes to their communities and these data centers that are located.”
At the end of the film, there is an opening ceremony of the center. In the area, alongside the character of Phoenix who is now physically invalid, is also a chief of Santa Lupe Pueblo, symbolically invalid. He revealed that the State has invested millions of dollars in clean energy projects on its land and is rented for their partnership and their participation with the data center. We do not know if the efforts were motivated by the Pueblo, or what kind of say that the nation had in the agreement. As credits roll, the center shines against dark blue earth, almost breathing.
