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You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here. The widespread opposition to the construction of data centers is a huge opportunity for liberals and Democrats, says author and organizer Astra Taylor. In the latest episode of Right Now, Taylor argues that Americans are frustrated about data centers in part because they are being built in communities without residents’ knowledge and consent. Rural residents and Republicans also oppose data centers, making them fertile ground for politicians. Taylor also discussed her upcoming book on “end times fascism” and the importance of Democrats defending higher education and debt-cancellation programs.

Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire on Friday with the largest initial public offering in stock market history for his rocket and AI company SpaceX. The company is based in South Texas in a city controlled by Musk known as Starbase, which SpaceX has operated from since 2014. Environmental and conservation groups recently filed a federal lawsuit seeking to block a land swap approved by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that would give SpaceX more than 700 acres of a national wildlife refuge in South Texas. With Starbase, “SpaceX has already burned down dozens of acres of wildlife habitat, is dumping polluted water on our beach, has sent rocket debris into our communities, into communities in Mexico,” says Bekah Hinojosa, co-founder of the South Texas Environmental Justice Network, which is part of the lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “Elon Musk is using our impoverished community as his laboratory to blow up dangerous experimental SpaceX rockets.” While groups like the South Texas Environmental Justice Network are organizing opposition to Musk’s operations in South Texas, local officials are ignoring constituents’ complaints that SpaceX is degrading the environment and their quality of life, says Hinojosa. “We’ve seen elected officials take money from SpaceX here and lobby in favor of more bills that benefit SpaceX.”

An observatory director describes the differences between the types of rocks that fly through space.

A data center could get more solar power and be kept much colder in space, but it would be extremely difficult to repair and update.

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To win its superpower competition with China, Washington's push for superiority in space may be its best bet.

The alt-comedy-to-auteur-pipeline keeps pumping away: Jordan Peele, Zach Cregger, Bo Burnham, and now John Early. The 38-year-old stand-up and sketch-scene staple is familiar to millions for his handpicked cameo in Taylor Swift’s music video for “Antihero,” and is deeply beloved by fans of the pitch-black, premium-cable cult series Search Party, in which he played a callow, sociopathic influencer who faked lymphoma for clicks, among other things. “Oh my God, I would never lie about abuse,” says his character, Elliott Goss. “And I lied about cancer.” The perils of social media notoriety—and the dangers of dishonesty—also figure in Early’s feature directorial debut, Maddie’s Secret, an homage-slash-send-up of 1980s TV movies set in the present. The film takes its cues (and its title) from Kate’s Secret, a corny 1986 NBC production starring Meredith Baxter as an aerobics instructor struggling with an eating disorder (the film was considered a landmark for portraying bulimia on prime time; “I didn’t know if I wanted to be the one throwing up on television” the actress told the Los Angeles Times on the eve of her premiere). Early’s eponymous heroine, Maddie, is a wannabe barefoot contessa whose Instagrammed kitchen vignettes unexpectedly go viral, transforming her pretty much overnight into a big-time (though reluctant) foodie-chic influencer.The stress of keeping up appearances—and the specter of imposter syndrome—triggers Maddie’s long-submerged and potentially lethal bulimia: the secret she’s keeping unsafely at the risk of esophageal rupture or cardiac arrest. On the eve of a particularly important meeting with network executives on a restaurant-based reality show called The Boar (one vowel away from you know what), Maddie falls ill and gets checked into a hospital in-patient program. There, amid fraught group therapy sessions and dark nights of the soul, she’s forced to come to terms with her appetite for self-destruction.Early speaks a kind of humane truth about how certain physical and psychological frailties get packaged within pop culture. The sheer artificiality of Maddie’s Secret is the realest thing about it.  On its surface, Maddie’s Secret doesn’t scan as a comedy. But its surfaces, all stilted line readings and redolently cheesy dramaturgy, are what’s funny about it. They belie but don’t blot out the essential empathy on display here; these ostensible alienation effects are really gestures of solidarity, offered by a filmmaker working outside the studio system (and getting away with an uncompromised vision as a result). Far from mocking his heroine’s plight, Early uses the camp strategy of placing everything on-screen in playful, flamboyant scare quotes—the characters, the situation, the dialogue—in order to speak a kind of humane truth about how certain physical and psychological frailties get packaged within pop culture. The sheer artificiality of Maddie’s Secret is the realest thing about it.  The first time we see Maddie—played by Early wearing a blonde wig and prosthetic breasts—she’s bouncing her way through sunny Los Feliz to what sounds like a synth-thetic cover of Hot Fudge’s “You Keep Me Hanging On.” The risks here are real, and they’re spectacular; like much else in Maddie’s Secret, Early’s performance—all fluttering eyelids, wan smiles, deep-chested breaths and a mild vocal fry seemingly derived from the Aaron Spelling Televisual Universe—is suspended between deadpan rigor and earnest expressivity. To paraphrase Sontag on camp, Maddie is very much “a woman” in quotes, but she’s also an intrepid, endearing, and desirable heroine whose talent is emphasized alongside her decency, and whose pain is never played for laughs. Early’s decision to cast himself—inspired by the legendary drag queen Harris Glenn Milstead—feels like an unveiling of aspirations and influences from the bad-taste extravaganzas of John Waters to Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls to the postmodern brinkmanship of Todd Haynes, whose shadow falls over Maddie’s Secret and then some. Todd Haynes’s controversial 16 mm short Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) used a series of strategically carved Barbie dolls to dramatize the singer’s battles with anorexia. The film’s miniaturized melodrama style invited pearl clutching while winning critical plaudits. Haynes was inveighing against the kind of prime-time docudrama dreck that sought to reduce artists and celebrities to their afflictions. Maddie’s Secret isn’t as stark or as confrontational as Superstar, but it’s obviously a spiritual descendant of sorts, adopting a hyper-specific form for the express purpose of demolishing it. Early’s mash-up of allusions and straight-up see-what-sticks goofiness is novel, like a bold combination of Haynes (whose critically acclaimed movies are often very funny) and the deadpan alt-comedy pastiche master David Wain, venerated by creators of Early’s generation for superbly skewering glossy, popular genres like summer-camp sex farces or big-city rom-coms. (A corny portmanteau for those in the know: Wet Hot May December.) But Early isn’t simply cracking in-jokes; instead, he’s inviting fellow campers and normies alike to revel on his particular, slippery wavelength.   “I swear to God, Maddie, it’s like you’re out of some modern-day fairy tale,” says Deena (Kate Berlant) to her work bestie as they clock in for dishwashing shifts at the premium cooking brand GourMaybe. The avidity of the line reading is amusing in and of itself while establishing the very real—and inherently perilous—happily-ever-after stakes of the narrative to come. Like most princesses, Maddie is a bit oblivious: She can’t tell, for instance, that Deena regards her as her own personal thirst trap, an infatuation that manifests in increasingly aggro-platonic postures. The more that butch lesbian Deena brags about her other sexual conquests, the clearer it is she wants to stick her tongue down her hetero pal’s throat—a shameless genre cliché that Early and Berlant take giddy pleasure in pushing to the breaking point. The pair have been working together for more than a decade now in shorts and sketches, and their chemistry is positively pharmaceutical; Berlant, who’s got a touch of wild genius, weaponizes her lanky limbs and angular jawline every time she walks into frame, as if Deena were trying to puncture the invisible bubble of the friend zone with her body.Deena is transparently jealous of Maddie’s sweetly and sweatily ursine husband, Jake (Eric Rahill), the main beneficiary of his love’s off-the-clock cooking talents. “Did you throw away the mango pickle from the Indian we ordered?” Maggie asks after sashaying home, one of many delectable lines that turn the low-hanging fruit of TV-movie dialogue into gourmet fare. Another one, after Jake gently suggests uploading footage of Maddie’s culinary skills to the cloud: “I just wanted to make my husband some dinner, and now I’m in postproduction.”Maddie won’t cook or eat meat, because of a childhood trauma around food and body image. “The camera adds ten pounds,” chides Maddie’s mother, Beverlee (Kristen Johnson), when her daughter calls her to talk about the possibility of her becoming a brand ambassador for her company—a “Gourmaybe Girl.” Early’s stricken reaction shot on the other end of the phone—blue-hued in the moonlight, and held for an extra beat beneath a tinkling piano score—perches firmly at the precipice of winking excess without tipping over. Every aspect of the film exhibits this level of discipline, from the writing and directing and acting to the mise-en-scène; the wonderfully stylized cinematography is by Max Lakner, who keeps floridly color-coding the characters’ psychological states. We get blood reds and deeper purples; enveloping shadows and ring-light halos; ghostly window reflections and heart-to-hearts. The food that Maddie prepares looks variously appetizing and ersatz depending on whether we’re in her home kitchen or at the fluorescent Gourmaybe offices. There are plenty of less stridently artificial movies that could benefit from a small fraction of such expressivity.As the plot develops, Early includes all kinds of superfluous shtick, like interludes in a queer-dance group that are basically an excuse for cast frolicking on the clock. Still, he keeps an admirably tight handle on the various character dynamics, including Jake’s yearning to become a father, a plan held in check by Maddie’s mommy issues. Crucially, Early refuses to trivialize Maddie’s recovery in the hospital scenes, even as he populates the ward with killer supporting performers like Vanessa Bayer and Leah Hennessey. Sad moments are played straight, despite the absurdist flourishes around them, as when another patient, Connie (Hennessey), eulogizes a fellow patient who didn’t make it: “Your existence was inconvenient to me because you were the living embodiment of the parts of myself I’ve tried to obliterate.” Simple tear-jerking is easy, but the articulation of genuine angst—especially in this context—takes real sensitivity and nerve. For anyone who might still be disoriented by the way Maddie’s Secret plays with tone, the eulogy sequence wipes the smirk off the movie’s face—or their own—once and for all. The abruptness of Maddie’s Secret’s ending underlines Early’s desire to create something stranger and more bracing than expected.Early’s softheartedness is winning, but he’s hardly edgeless. Besides working through his nostalgic ambivalence for the shock tactics of Kate’s Secret and its ilk, he’s taking aim at the lifestyle-brand fakery of GourMaybe and its craven head honcho, Zach (Connor O’Malley), who addresses his staff megalomaniacally, like a true believer. “Play nice, we’ve got content to make,” he bellows, with O’Malley torquing his delivery as if he knows the line is destined for future screencap-meme status. It’s telling that a comedian like Early, who developed his skills and following in an extremely online setting, would cast the internet in such ambivalent terms; crucially, Maddie’s catharsis bypasses the zone of public performance altogether. The question of whether Maddie will get another chance to be famous for her cooking is one of several loose ends that Early leaves conspicuously dangling; others include the fate of her marriage to Jake (Rahill is given plenty of directorial leeway in a part with more bruised dignity than expected) and Deena’s mental health (Berlant is intrepid enough to survive being the only member of the cast treated in the end like a cartoon character; the movie loses a bit of spark when she’s sidelined in the home stretch).The abruptness of Maddie’s Secret’s ending is in sync with its TV-movie inspirations, but it also underlines Early’s desire to create something stranger and more bracing than expected; to swap out a benign, crowd-pleasing sort of cognitive dissonance for a sometimes disorienting ambiguity. Maddie doesn’t hold onto all of her secrets—she can’t—but she’s still finally a woman of mystery. The highest compliment that Early can be paid is that even when the movie ends, Maddie seems to exist beyond the final (freeze) frame.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 12 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.Perry Bacon: We have a great guest today: Astra Taylor, one of the smartest people I know. She’s done documentary filmmaking, she’s written a ton of books, she’s an organizer with the Debt Collective, and she’s a person who’s just studied and is very thoughtful about a lot of different subjects. So Astra, thanks for joining me. Welcome.Astra Taylor: Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.Bacon: So we’re going to start with the topic of the year, millennium, decade—I want to talk about AI for a bit, because you wrote a piece I’m interested in. The title’s in The Guardian: “The fight against data centers isn’t just about tech, it’s about democracy.” But let me start with a basic premise here, which is: Are data centers inherently bad, and is AI inherently bad? So talk about those things first.Taylor: Oh, those are some big questions. Are data centers inherently bad? No. And data centers aren’t new. They’re new in the news. But data centers, 20 years ago, before we were talking about AI—data centers are where we store our data. We were storing our data for old-fashioned social media usage or streaming services. So data centers have been around for a long time, and there was a big boom, a data center build-out during Covid, actually, when internet usage exploded and there was a lot of access to low-interest capital that facilitated the build-out. One way of thinking about data centers is they’re the backbone of the internet. It’s where the cloud comes to earth. But they’re obviously much more prominent now, and they’re just being built at a different scale—hyperscale, to use the term.Bacon: Let me come back to that, though. Data centers themselves have existed a long time. That’s what I wanted to get at.Taylor: Yeah. They’re not inherently evil.Bacon: It’s new in the news, but it’s not new. We’ve had data centers. That’s what I was trying to draw out a little bit.I want to ask—a lot of people, on the left, are very AI-skeptical. And I wonder—we can talk about the economics of it and the growth of it, but is AI inherently bad itself? It’s a very broad question, but I’m curious what you think.Taylor: I think AI in this economic model, in this political economic paradigm, is veering towards inherently bad. You cannot separate the technology from the economics. This is a point I’ve been making since my first book, which is called The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, which came out in 2014. That was essentially a political economy of the old-fashioned, pre-AI internet. And my argument there was that you cannot separate technology from the underlying business model of these firms. That just seems to me like one of those basic eternal insights we should not lose sight of. In a sense, this is the same movie but on steroids. The AI boom is happening in a period of much more intense wealth concentration.So the “inherent” question—people like to say technology is neutral. I think that’s a bit wrong. Yes, you can use machine learning to assist a robust scientific infrastructure, or you can use machine learning to enhance a drone that is engaged in a genocide.Bacon: That’s what I’m getting at. Could there be a world where AI is used nicely?Taylor: Technology is flexible. But we would need very different societal conditions and be operating under a different government with a lot more constraints. On the “neutral” point: You can use a knife to kill someone or to make a sandwich, but that doesn’t mean it’s neutral. It’s a tool that cuts things.The AI that is being designed right now is being designed for specific purposes. OpenAI—the definition they have of AGI, artificial general intelligence, that they’re looking towards is a tool that can do economically valuable labor. In other words, they’re trying to build a human worker replacement engine. So I don’t think this technology is neutral, but I also don’t think it is inherently bad or good. It’s embedded in societal conditions.Bacon: So we’ve talked about data centers and now AI. Now we’re talking about AI data centers. How did this happen? You’re in North Carolina, but it’s nationwide. I feel like … in the last 18 months, you’ve had AI data center protests, bans, really [in] almost every part of the country—rural, urban, suburban. Not really urban, because data centers are mostly in more spread-out areas, but how did this happen?Taylor: It’s actually becoming more urban. There are protests in the streets of Vancouver right now over a big data center. Seattle just issued a moratorium, which is interesting because Seattle is a big tech hub.So absolutely this movement is growing, and there are different reasons for it. One is people don’t like this infrastructure. It has all sorts of negative consequences. These are absolutely massive build-outs. They often have real consequences for people in the vicinity—incredible noise that keeps people up at night, that makes people want to move, but by that point it has destroyed their property values. They’re often run on what should be temporary power sources—gas turbines, methane turbines that have very immediate consequences for the air people are breathing. Sometimes it smells bad. Even if you can’t sense it, there is extra pollution. Depending on the locality, there can be strains on the water supply. They often raise utility bills.And then people don’t really like what it’s about. There used to be a compact, which was, OK, we’re going to do industrial development, but you’re going to get some jobs. Maybe you’ll get a few hundred jobs. You may get a few thousand jobs.These data centers—sometimes they’re billion-dollar build-outs, and there are 30 jobs, 100 jobs. There’s a company now that’s offering robot security dogs to replace the human security workers that were guarding these places. So the jobs that are permanent tend to be low-wage security jobs or janitorial jobs. The higher-paid work is temporary—it’s in construction or building the actual computers. It’s a bum deal. People are also finding out that they are being built with incredible tax incentives that often don’t benefit the community. So there are all sorts of reasons that people are questioning this.Then there is the bigger context of: Hold on, what does this portend for our collective future? Do we want to live in an AI world? And then amazingly, something as amorphous as AI or the cloud—you go, Oh, it’s actually in my backyard. They’re trying to build it here.And people are realizing that they can fight back. I’m on some Signal chats, one with people from 45 states, who are fighting back against these developments and definitely seeing themselves as part of a bigger push. I wrote the piece in The Guardian with Saul Levin, a longtime environmental organizer—he’s from Michigan, and he’s been on the data center beat for a long time. We were actually replying to those folks who were like, Oh, is that really the best way to fight AI? It’s kind of whack-a-mole.Our point is: We’re on incredibly complicated political terrain. It’s actually amazing that there is a space where people can gather, find each other, and push back. And when people do gather, they’re finding out, Actually, we might not have voted the same way. We might not have a lot in common in terms of culture war issues. But we actually all object to this. It’s creating these new solidarities. The physical space that these data centers offer is actually providing an incredible opportunity for organizers.Bacon: I want to ask: How did this get politicized? The reason I want to ask this is because it appears the Democrats have decided they oppose them now, but they followed—Taylor: Not all Democrats.Bacon: Yeah, some of them are. But what I’m getting at is: It seems to me that AI data center proliferation was fine with most elites in media, business, politics, both parties. Yet a groundswell of people started opposing it. So I’m curious—it’s unusual in our culture today. You often find political movements are top-down. Sometimes they’re bottom-up, but usually … Black Lives Matter, there were at least active civil rights groups that existed for a long time. So I’m curious: How did these people figure out, Oh, this is something we can oppose? Because a lot of these cities, the city council was trying to hide the tax credits from them. It was not very transparent. A lot of places where the media’s not very strong. So how did people get informed on this?Taylor: That’s a really interesting question. I do want to just linger on your point about the lack of transparency, because that’s a huge element that is pissing people off.Bacon: That also causes that. Yes.Taylor: All of these deals are under the cover of these NDAs, where often much of the city council doesn’t even know what’s going on.Bacon: The government in the city has decided either to cover it up, or they don’t know themselves. The mayor or whoever has done it without them knowing.Taylor: I did some reporting in Memphis, where Elon Musk has built his Colossus supercomputer—there’s actually now three of them in Tennessee and Mississippi, all in this area—and just, absolute secrecy. That’s part of what created this incredible outrage. As people dug, they realized they’re secret for a reason, because it’s these temporary polluting turbines and because he’s not keeping his other promises.That’s a big part of it. There are a lot of reasons. On the progressive side, one is that on Inauguration Day, there was the phalanx of tech executives and the sense that tech had gone MAGA. And so suddenly people were like, Hold on, what side are you on? Now you want to totally merge with the U.S. government and build this AI dystopian future.That doesn’t really explain what has happened on the right. On the right, big tech has been their enemy. For years, Silicon Valley was this techno-democratic formation, and—in the views of the right—they felt social media companies were censoring the truth, whether it was about Covid or about election conspiracies. There was a lot of animosity to big tech.Then you have these AI executives going, In the future, we’re going to be eliminating half the jobs, maybe all of them. And by the way, we’re building a transhumanist digital God. And people were like, We don’t want to be replaced. We hate that. They just haven’t built up a lot of public goodwill on either side.And even though the populism of the right is fake, there’s an anti-billionaire vibe. These guys are like, We don’t even want to be billionaires. We want to be trillionaires. We are talking in a moment when Elon Musk, on paper, is a trillionaire. We have entered a new phase of oligarchy, a new phase of plutocratic power. Today is a tragic day. The vast majority of people who have two brain cells are not for this. It’s just the perfect—Bacon: Also, in this case, it went local to national as opposed to the opposite. Usually so much of our culture is national to local, and in this case, I think it bubbled up. The New York Times did not invent the data center rollback. In some ways, it was covered in a local paper first.Taylor: Part of this is, people [say], My utility bill is being raised, and I don’t like the noise from this thing, I can see this ugly thing. But there’s also part of it that’s like, These billionaires from Silicon Valley want to replace us, and we don’t like that. It’s both at the same time, and that is powerful. But I don’t think the Democrats have polarized against this or taken this opportunity to the degree that they can or should, given how it’s shaping up to be such a huge issue.Bacon: So “the fight against AI centers isn’t just about tech, it’s about democracy.” We use this word “democracy” all the time, and usually it’s a predictable Democrat saying Trump is bad. But you have written about democracy before the Trump era and thought about it deeply. So what do you mean when you say this is a fight about democracy? Because you mean something more than just “Trump bad.”Taylor: Yeah. I mean, Trump is bad. Bad, bad man. [laughing]Bacon: Yeah, I know.Taylor: For me, it comes back to political economy. You cannot have democracy under conditions of incredibly concentrated wealth or oligarchy. One of my favorite definitions of democracy comes from Aristotle, who said democracy is the rule of the poor, because the poor outnumber the rich. If democracy is the rule of the majority of people, then it should not be the rule of the super rich. And again, this is a pivotal day in terms of the history of oligarchy.Bacon: Did Musk just today become a [trillionaire]? Is that what you’re—Taylor: Yesterday, the SpaceX IPO. I was just reading this Guardian piece, and it said that for somebody who’s a trillionaire, $100 million is the equivalent of $19.27 for the median American. And I was like, “Can that be right?” That is so mind-boggling.But democracy means that people have a say in the conditions that affect their lives, and it also means they’re not ruled by the super wealthy. The AI fight is absolutely connected to both of those things. We weren’t asked whether we want this AI revolution. It is being forced on people. It’s being forced on people at their jobs. It’s being forced on people in their search results. The government is essentially backstopping—the way that Trump has fully merged with Silicon Valley, he is putting an incredible amount of government force behind this industry and bet his presidency on it in a sense, because it’s been floating the stock market. So that’s absolutely a democratic issue.And again, what direction is this tech going? Are we building tech that serves humans’ needs? Or are we building tech that aims to replace a lot of human jobs and human relationships, to further concentrate wealth? Are we building AI as a wealth-siphoning straw, or something that could help people?I’ve been thinking about what it would take to have the best iteration of this technology, and fundamentally, I think it requires a robust welfare state, it requires labor protections, it requires environmental protections. Those are things that are not on the table with this administration. So in a sense, this AI revolution is happening in the worst of all possible worlds.But this gets to very fundamental issues about who has power in our society. The last thing I’ll say on that is: To me, democracy is not just the political sphere. It is something broader than that. To go back to the labor issue—the fact that AI is being sold as something that can do economically valuable labor, the dream of a one-billion-dollar company with only one employee—Bacon: The nightmare, in my view, but the dream to them.Taylor: Yeah. Sam Altman has said that he has a chat with his executive buddies betting on when that will happen—when they’ll finally have this employee-less company. This tool is being developed to degrade labor, but also to further erode what power American workers have. These are companies that are backing lawsuits against unions and would love to get rid of the NLRB and all of that. So that just seems deeply undemocratic to me. And I’m very happy that people from all walks of life are rising up against this.Bacon: You said the Democrats are not seizing this issue—Democrats in the parties. So let’s talk about that, because one of my favorite writers, Tressie McMillan Cottom, has a column in the Times today, and the headline is, “This Could Be the Winning Issue for Democrats”—talking about AI data centers and AI more broadly. Is the answer to this question very simply that the rich like data centers and AI and the Democratic Party is captured by the rich? Is there anything more to say than that?Taylor: There’s a lot of that. I haven’t read Tressie’s piece, but I fully endorse it in advance because I know that she’s right on about this.That’s a huge part of it. The reason billionaires and trillionaires are a threat is in part because there are no rules, or very minimal rules, on how much they can spend on elections and how much they can spend to buy off politicians. We know that there’s a lot of dark money flooding into races at every level right now. That’s part of it. A lot of Democrats are looking to either tap into those resources or actually to just not trigger a huge spend, because they’re fighting really dirty.Bacon: Crypto companies defeated Sherrod Brown’s functioning. It is a real thing.Taylor: Yeah. Or there’s the New York congressional primary that Alex Bores is in. This is a guy who worked at Palantir and then quit, because he had—I wouldn’t say a moral awakening, because he’d been involved in labor and other causes before—but left in protest due to some of their dealings with Trump 1.0. These super PACs funded by Silicon Valley are now trying to use that against him: Oh, he’s a Palantir employee. In other words, they’re shameless. They are willing to absolutely punch below the belt, and they’re funding millions of dollars into this, and that’s just one race.So politicians are afraid. I think, though, a lot of voters are tired of fear. They’re tired of fearful politicians. And the way to cut through the noise is to stake a clear moral position, name the proper enemies, speak to this discontent, and believe what the tech executives have been saying. Believe them when they say their agenda is to replace human workers and to replace our relationships. They want to be our bosses, and they want to be our girlfriends and our boyfriends. And believe them when they say that they’re willing to risk ending the world.A lot of what they say about their superintelligent machines and stuff is sci-fi. But I believe Dario Amodei, and I believe Elon Musk when they both say they think there’s a 20-to-25 percent chance that AI will annihilate humanity. I don’t think their computers are as good, as great, as conscious as they think they are. But I do believe them when they say that’s an acceptable level of risk. That’s what I believe. And that is demented.Bacon: I interviewed somebody who’s made the same point of just, Listen to what they say. That person’s name is Bernie Sanders. Sanders has come up with this idea of a sovereign wealth fund where the government controls how these companies—I’m not sure how I feel about it. It’s an idea that’s out there, and I’m glad he’s pushing stuff, but I’m not sure that’s where I want to land. I’m curious what you think.Taylor: I’m with you. What worries me about it—and you can see this in OpenAI’s openness to some version of this—these companies are not against it. They have very inflated stock valuations at this point. They might like to have—they’ve been seeking to merge with the federal government.Bacon: Sure.Taylor: They’re like, Let’s do it. Let’s get married. I don’t love a scenario where the American people have even more exposure or investment in these firms and this technology being, quote-unquote, profitable—the profit is, at this point, based on very socially pernicious consequences. The displacement of labor, the burning of immense amounts of fossil fuel. The climate dimension of this is just incredibly critical. There was just a very reputable academic study that came out that said due to the build-out of new crypto and AI data centers, the demands of the energy sector could increase by almost 30 percent in the next four years alone. I don’t want the American people to have a piece of a toxic asset. That’s it.Industrial policy, though—Trump has shown that industrial policy is possible. Under different conditions, in different countries or with different leaders, you can use those tools in really powerful ways. You can say renewable energy only. You can say labor protections. You can say privacy protections. You can say accurate data sets. You can say all sorts of things using the power of the state. But the proposal on the table is not going in that direction.I also think one of the biggest bulwarks against this technology is investing in social services. In other words, the more excellent our health care is, the less we want an AI doctor. The better funded our schools are and the lower the teacher-to-student ratio, the less we’re tempted by the idea of plugging every kid into a Google-controlled iPad.In this book with Naomi Klein that we have coming out in September, that’s part of it: We need to make the real human living world irresistible and supportive and secure enough that part of the appeal of these virtual tools is diminished. Right now, people are turning to AI because sometimes it’s the only option. That’s the vicious cycle that we are in, where the diminishment of public services feeds a demand for tools that further degrade those services and also further enrich the people who own them.Bacon: You mentioned the book you’re doing with Naomi Klein. The title is End Times Fascism. So tell me what “end times fascism” is.Taylor: Yeah. The subtitle is And the Fight for the Living World, so it’s not all negative. “End times fascism”—it’s our attempt to understand what kind of fascism we are living through, what has changed. It’s based on a piece that we wrote for The Guardian that came out not this April but the April before. Essentially, it’s looking at the main constituencies of this far-right alliance. Fascism historically is always a weird amalgam. That’s what the word “fascism” comes from—it’s a bundle. It’s always contradictory. We’re looking at what is making up the reactionary right today. The tech sector is a major prong, as well as the religious right and this ethnonationalist front as well.Bacon: Let’s pursue one piece. What is the “end times” part? I think people know what fascism is.Taylor: The “end times” part is that this is an alliance that is flirting with the end of the world. They’re so comfortable in the sense that we will make it. On the tech side, this is just part of being alive today: You’re like, Oh, there’s another bunker. There was a recent piece about Peter Thiel going to Argentina, and part of it is he loves Milei and his libertarian policies, and also, if there’s a nuclear war, maybe it’ll be OK there.Or we have people leading the charge into these wars in the Middle East thinking that they’re going to hasten Armageddon, because they’re in these biblical narratives.We are operating in a moment of unprecedented global crises. The climate crisis, as much as we’re not talking about it these days, is very real. The threat of artificial intelligence—my idea of what the threat is might not perfectly align with what Musk is saying, or Altman, or Amodei, but there are very real dangers here. The dangers are real, and we have world-destroying tools that our species has not had before. So we’re trying to think about what that means for our politics and how the hell we get out of this.Bacon: You and I met in 2022 or 2023. You were working at the Debt Collective, and the thing you all were working on then was getting the Biden administration to forgive—you always said “don’t say forgive”—Taylor: Don’t say “forgive.”Bacon: Cancel. It’s an important distinction. Cancel student debt. I want to ask you about—we’re about to start this Democratic primary. Why Biden lost and why Biden wasn’t popular—I think the narrative the Democratic Party has concluded is that he was a little too left on economics and a little too focused on the college grads and not focused on the working class. And the embodiment of bad ideas was canceling student debt. I think you’re going to hear 15 candidates say a version of that, even the quote-unquote progressive ones. So respond to the [idea that] the student debt policy was emblematic of Biden’s bad instincts.Taylor: Certainly an idea, and it’s being pushed by the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, mostly.Zooming out—I helped found a group called the Debt Collective, which is the first union of debtors. We have been organizing people—student borrowers, also medical debtors, people with back rent debt—to fight, inspired by the example of the labor union. Essentially, people who lack wealth need to have power in numbers. We need to have solidarity in order to push for political change.We never talk about forgiveness because we don’t think that people need to be forgiven for going into medical debt, or going into student debt, or going into credit card debt. If you live in a state where the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, I don’t really think it’s your fault if you end up having to borrow to make ends meet.Yesterday, there was news that the Trump administration is now thinking about further eroding the Affordable Care Act, but offering people loans to cover their medical emergencies. So debt’s not always a choice.What we are saying at the Debt Collective is, again, a clear and moral position. Guess what? People should have the right to be educated. We live in an incredibly complicated society. We at some point decided that public education, K-12, should exist, and that people should be able to go to school and get that level of education. We live in a more complicated world. Let’s add four years.This is how higher education in the United States actually began, if you go back and you look at the GI Bill and the building of these incredible public institutions of learning and research. These were public goods that became privatized over time and became financed by tuition, which means financed by debt. That is a new development. So that’s our proposition: Let’s cancel student loans and let’s make college free as a public good.That feels to me all the more urgent right now in this moment of AI. It’s actually very connected to the AI discussion. When we’re talking about, Oh my God, what is knowledge? What is truth? How do we discern fact from fiction?—the fight for public education is actually incredibly urgent.And the right knows this! Why is the right laser-focused on attacking education, attacking academic research, attacking funding for science? Because they know that it is a threat to their oligarchic and racist and misogynist ambitions. In fact, the Heritage Foundation released a report recently that said, Too many women are going to college because they get subsidized student loans and there’s federal investment. And when they do that, they just don’t have enough of the right kind of white babies that we want them to have. This should be a Democratic Party issue. And instead they’re—Bacon: When you said “this,” you mean free college, higher education, defending colleges.Taylor: Defending it as a public good, not, Oh, you’ll get job training. Maybe we’ll fix the economy with some education. No. Education is something that matters for a democratic society and that people should be able to access.Biden should have listened to us, because we laid out a way to cancel student debt quickly and efficiently. If I had been in charge, I would have also canceled all the debt owed to veterans from military hospitals and created an alliance, presented it as solidaristic. Instead there was a lot of misinformation about the demographics—who is a student debtor. There was always this idea as though they all went to Harvard or something. No—if you go to Harvard, you actually don’t graduate with student debt, because there’s this huge endowment that is owned by this tiny little university. Most people with student debt went to for-profit colleges, to vocational colleges, to public schools. Forty percent of people with student debt don’t have college degrees because they couldn’t manage to get through school because they worked three jobs.So this is definitely going to be a live issue. Right now, the Debt Collective is continuing to fight. We think there should be another payment pause, because people are in such a financial emergency and the Trump administration has thrown the student loan system into such incredible disarray. Debt is exploding under Donald Trump because cost of living has not come down, because of the changes to the student loan system. They’re attacking programs like the SAVE plan, which listeners probably know about. They’re attacking subsidized student loans looking forward.This is going to be, unfortunately—it’s very tragic to say—more of an issue and more of a pain point for the American people. Instead of running away from this issue, the Democrats should own it and say, We’re going to do it, and we’re going to do it right this time, and we’re going to understand why the right has made higher education such a focus of their attacks.The last thing I’ll say is: If they don’t, the right is going to take this issue. Just like the Democrats risk the right owning the data center issues and the antiwar space, I have spent the last year listening to right-wing podcasters. I have taken in so much Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and Nick Shirley. You name it, I’ve listened to it.Bacon: Bless you, because I’m not going to.Taylor: They talk about debt all the time. Tucker Carlson took the stage at CPAC, the big conservative conference, and said, We need debt strikes against credit card lenders. Nick Shirley—why are people believing this kid when he’s doing these investigations into the welfare state? [Because] he’s like, We’re all mad because we have student debt. This is an issue in American people’s lives. People are in debt. They cannot pay.And the problem is … when the right takes these issues, guess what? The problem isn’t the economic system at large. It’s not capitalism. No, it’s the Jewish bankers. It’s the immigrants somehow driving up the cost of something, so you have to borrow more. It’s incredibly dangerous for the Center for American Progress—or name other names—to run away from this issue, because they are then ceding very real pain and a very real problem to faux-populists who will only deepen the problem.That is something I’m worried about. What does it say about a party when you can’t just say, People deserve education. We stand behind education as a public good. We want people to use their real minds. We want people to learn things?Bacon: So last question. I got an early edition and mostly finished reading this book called Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisers, and Israel’s War in Gaza. The author’s name is Akbar Shahid Ahmed. He was at the Huffington Post for a while and is now at a place called NOTUS. He was one of the leading reporters in the behind-the-scenes accounts of the Biden administration ignoring federal law in terms of arming the Israelis and allowing the genocide to happen.The question I’m going to ask you in a democracy sense is: What do we do with a political party that I’m going to be voting for that legitimized the genocide? There’s talk now about how the people who worked for Biden, who were involved in the policy, should not get jobs in government in the future. I’m not really sure—if Jake Sullivan can’t be secretary of state, I’m not sure what that really does for me.But in a certain sense, what should we do? How do we deal with a party that wants to say, We’re going to defend democracy in this country, but leaned into legitimizing a genocide and really won’t apologize for it even now? A lot of the leaders in the party are still much more focused on Israel is good than genocide is bad.Taylor: That’s a huge question. How do we build the power to transform American electoral politics when we are locked into this two-party, first-past-the-post system that I know you have talked about a lot with your listeners? There are major impediments in terms of just the way our politics are structured, and it’s getting worse—with the attacks on voting rights and the all-in on gerrymandering. Now you can do it for partisan purposes.Bacon: And it’s happening everywhere, yeah.Taylor: People need to get organized. Often when I give talks in public, people raise their hand and go, What can I do about all the problems you’re naming? My response is always, You have to join with other people. You have to find some political home where you are. It doesn’t have to be perfect. There is no perfect solution. There is no button that will save the world. You have to build power with people where you are.If it’s a data center fight, join a data center fight. If it’s Indivisible or a chapter of DSA, or if you have the ability to form a union or join a union. A tenant union. Join the Debt Collective. We have to join things, because they have money, and we have the many in theory, but we have to be organized to exert collective power. We need that organizational force, and then we need that moral clarity.We were told right after the 2024 election, Oh, there’s a vibe shift. Cruelty is cool now. We can say now that was bullshit, and it was wishful thinking, not just on the right, but among some in the Democratic Party.Bacon: Today is the day to abandon trans people was literally said, from November to January after the election, by all these people.Taylor: It was real wish-casting. I think, no, we’re not throwing people under the bus. We’re going to have moral clarity. Naomi and I end this book by saying: Yeah, we need to say, International law, we should try it. Universality, let’s try it. Let’s really mean it. These are principles that we take for granted. But if you actually try to enact them, they’re really radical. That’s the horizon we need to work for.At this point, on the issue of Palestine, the American people in general are absolutely opposed to what happened and what transpired. There’s still just enough democracy in our diminishing and racing-towards-fascism society that the party is going to have to respond to that.We just need the courage of our convictions, and we need to organize. That’s it. That means doing Substack Lives and talking, but it also means getting offline, meeting with people, and building those relationships and doing the annoying work of social change.Bacon: The thing I’ve been heartened by the last year—until this conversation—was thinking about the New York race where they had this unknown person who brought enthusiasm, energized people, and also had a lot of moral clarity in Zohran. But the data center fight might be a better example of the organized democracy we really need. It’s not about one person—it’s about the many.Taylor: And it is an opportunity for people to see how much they have in common with each other and to break us out of these cartoonish narratives about each other. That’s also why I stay committed to the Debt Collective, because medical debt—that’s another huge unifying point. Something like 92 percent of people, according to polls, believe that medical debt should be all canceled. There are so many issues. The issue of money out of politics. There are so many issues that people could organize around.On the electoral reform front, it’s more parties. You know what we hate? We hate the Democrats and the Republicans at this moment. A more-parties movement could actually be one way of framing a horizon—more proportional representation, money out of politics.That’s not to downplay what we’re up against. I’ve been in the trenches for a long time at this point, and it’s hard out there. The presence of a fascist trillionaire is going to make it that much harder. But that means we have to meet the moment, and we have to get organized. There’s so much to work with right now. That whole moment where they were like, Progressives are over. We’re on this reactionary train. Get on board—no. That was a total lie.There’s something bubbling up in this moment. As a result, even after writing a book called End Times Fascism, I’m not completely discouraged.Bacon: That left me thinking, is it better to be focused on one person or one movement these next couple of years? How important is it that AOC or Ro Khanna fill all our needs and runs the greatest campaign of all time? Is there any alternative to that?Taylor: To me, the electoral dimension is important. But the American political system is geographically based. Ultimately, I vote in a primary, I vote in an election, I donate to people I like. But that’s not where the work is. These people are not messiahs. AOC’s one person in a large Congress, and she’s in a party that has the minority. So it really should only take a tiny amount of my brain space.What really matters is how we are organizing in other realms to change conditions or to spread different ideas. That’s why I’ve stayed dedicated to the Debt Collective for all these years—it’s a space where I can help build power with other people and change the political conversation and maybe change the political terrain.But sometimes we spend too much time on the horse race and expect too much of people who are in these elected positions, when what we need to do is continue to work so that they actually are able to exercise more power in the ways that we want them to.Bacon: Great place to end. Astra, tell people where they can find your work—I know you’re on social media and so on.Taylor: On all of the platforms that are bad. But really, what I want people to do is: If you have debt, or if you consider yourself an ally of people who lack wealth, join the Debt Collective. That’s my top request all the time.Bacon: Astra, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it. Good to see you.Taylor: Thanks for having me.