On August 27, the Essex community of East Orange voted no to the construction of data centers under Ordinance 26.
On Friday, September 11, Hudson County’s Secaucus had thousands of gallons of No. 2 diesel spill from its data center into the Anderson Creek owing to what spokespeople are calling ‘a glitch.’
Anderson Creek is a 52-acre wetland that feeds into the Hackensack River.
According to 12 New Jersey, the Secaucus Equinix data center dumped approximately 5,500 gallons of No. 2 diesel.
Essex functions as a city, and so does Hudson; in fact, much of Hudson and Essex share two congresspersons, Mejia and McIver. New Jersey’s home rule and neighborhood-as-city framework make regulating data centers arduous, and that is the point: local politics, especially as constructed in New Jersey, are meant to distract through what Herbert Marcuse calls repressive tolerance. In Essex, local politics matter, but not nearly as much as you think; risks of data centers are hidden when people are under the impression that zip codes work like forcefields (they don’t).
(If you ever said, “ Race is a distraction,” wait until I tell you about zip codes!)
If Secaucus and Newark had data centers, then Essex and Hudson would, too; the issue spreads across county lines, and the local debate matters if you connect it to the larger story: the county is a city. The functional boundaries matter more than the imaginary boundaries in one’s head.
And what happens when there is an environmental fix for this issue? Will we still recognize the threat of handing our art, security, and social life to a machine? Machines owned by maybe (if we’re lucky) two or three private corporations; this is the broader threat behind the data center debate.
We’re just now recognizing the dangers of manufactured consent; what happens when we no longer need the middle management and handmaids of capitalism and have —Artificial Consent? This is the larger question driving the episode.
In this episode, we also discuss the proposed Data Center in Nutley on its ON3 campus.
