When Extraction Produces Deep Solidarity
Gab Lisi
In Part 1, I argued the data “cloud” is not weightless. Rather, the cloud is grounded in data centers—forms of fixed capital that reorganize our land, water, energy, and public policy in ways that often end up shifting costs onto our local communities. As those costs become visible and felt among our communities, resistance begins to emerge. But resistance never begins as a unified movement. It rarely starts with shared language, shared ideology, or even shared goals.
Across the United States, opposition to data center expansion is continuing to develop and expand in diverse and sometimes unexpected coalitions. Residents are concerned about noise or land use. Farmers and landowners are facing the transformation of their land into industrial infrastructure. Environmental advocates are fervently tracking water withdrawals and energy demand. Local officials are now beginning to question the long-term fiscal impacts on their communities. And the 99 percent are now navigating the gap between promised economic development and what is actually playing out in their hometowns. And of course, religious leaders cannot ignore the concerns, fears, and hardships in their communities.
Structural Alignment vs. Ideological Difference
Most of these groups may seem unrelated because they operate in different spheres, use different institutional languages, and often hold conflicting political views. What brings them together is not shared ideology but shared exposure to extraction. Data centers create intense demand for land, water, and energy, reshaping local economies while delivering uneven or delayed benefits. Different groups experience this pressure in different ways but from the same underlying process. This distinction matters because their alignment is structural, not ideological. Interestingly, it doesn’t depend on ideological agreement to be effective or produce real outcomes.
In sum, convergence emerges from how groups are positioned within systems of capital expansion, not from what they believe. Data center development reorganizes infrastructure in ways that expose multiple communities to risk or dispossession. What appears fragmented in discourse is often unified in structure. This explains why resistance can feel both unstable and powerful: unstable because it lacks a single ideology, but powerful because it is rooted in shared material conditions that bring people together despite real differences in identity and belief.1 For example, people with different political commitments may oppose or question a project for entirely different reasons, yet still find themselves responding to and concerned about the same extractive dynamics.
Deep Solidarity and Uneven Positions
Deep Solidarity
This is where the concept of deep solidarity becomes relevant. Deep solidarity doesn’t require sameness. In fact, it thrives on difference. It emerges when groups recognize their distinct struggles are connected through shared systems of extraction and accumulation (capitalist world ecology). And in the case of data centers, this begins when people see their situation not as an isolated issue (like a zoning dispute), but as part of a larger structural pattern. This kind of realization becomes possible when people shift from understanding their situation as individual inconvenience or localized conflict to knowing that it has been structurally produced.
Building this recognition takes relational work: spaces to share experiences, acknowledge differences, and name connections without flattening the inherent tensions. Deep solidarity is the capacity to act together across difference and use those differences to imagine and build alternatives. It is grounded in a shared awareness that current systems prioritize profit for a few over the well-being of the many.
Uneven Positions Within the 99 Percent
However, any serious account of solidarity must grapple with an uncomfortable reality: the 99 percent are not uniform. Data center expansion makes this clear, especially within the labor movement.
Some workers, particularly in labor unions (electrical, plumbing, etc.) benefit directly through higher wages, job creation, and stable employment. For workers and their unions, supporting these developments is not only understandable, but it is often a rational response to immediate material needs and an expression of hard-won commitments to workplace democracy. At the same time, data centers rely on a low-labor model long term. Once built, jobs decline, while corporations capture most of the value. Communities, meanwhile, bear ongoing costs like environmental strain, increased utility demand, and loss of local control over resources.
This creates tension across and within groups. Data centers can strengthen efforts to build workplace democracy through employing union labor in the construction and maintenance of the building. This demonstrates a gain for workplace democracy in the short term while undermining environmental and economic democracy over time. Workers may help build systems that ultimately concentrate wealth and power against their own long-term interests.2 These are not simply competing opinions but unevenly distributed benefits and harms. Some gain immediately; others bear long-term costs, and frankly, many will be and are currently experiencing both. These divisions are often exploited by corporations and policymakers to fragment opposition through promises of jobs and growth.
Recognizing this dynamic is essential. Without it, calls for solidarity turn into mere moralizing and fail to account for real constraints. They fail to account for why people make the choices they do within real constraints and obscure the deeper challenge: how to hold together commitments to workplace dignity, environmental sustainability, and economic democracy rather than forcing them into competition. Putting ourselves into competition with each other will only serve the 1 percent as they lobby for less regulatory oversight and more access to resources.
Solidarity as Emergent and Constructed
Solidarity does not arise automatically. It is both emergent and constructed: shaped by shared conditions but sustained through relationships and practices across difference. Religious communities illustrate this well. They often bring together people from different social and political positions who are already connected through shared local life. At their best, they don’t erase difference but help people remain in relationship and navigate tension. If deep solidarity acts as a glue for the resistance to continue extraction and exploitation, then it must be fostered in our communities. The key question becomes: which spaces can sustain it? For the Wendland-Cook program, we believe religious spaces where differently positioned members of the 99 percent already gather offer a critical starting point.
Resistance reveals both the fractures and the possibilities within the 99%. The question is how those differences can be held together and organized into something lasting. Part 3 turns to where that work is already beginning.
Gab (she/they/he) is the Assistant Director of the Wendland-Cook Program at Vanderbilt University and Vanderbilt Divinity School. Gab resides in Columbus, OH and their dog, Franklin (or Frank). They hold an M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary, an MSL from The Ohio State University, and a B.A. in Theology and Criminal Justice from Xavier University (Cincinnati, OH). They are curious about power analysis, class analysis, and Catholicism. In their spare time, you can find them at home reading, camping with Frank, or hanging out with friends.
1 This does not mean that all differences should be bridged or that harmful beliefs (such as racism, homophobia, or other forms of exclusion) must be accepted or tolerated. For example, this does not mean opposing data center development by aligning with groups that promote exclusion or by directing frustration toward marginalized communities, rather than toward the structural forces driving extraction. Nor does it place responsibility on marginalized or oppressed groups to educate those who benefit from or are complicit in these system (labor that has historically been unevenly and unjustly imposed). Rather, this highlights that relationships grounded in shared material conditions can create openings for change across identity and belief. When undertaken with accountability, this work involves challenging beliefs, setting boundaries, and supporting processes through which people and groups take responsibility for their own growth.
2 Of note: What is being accumulated is not only capital but also the data itself. It is being collected, stored, and monetized at massive scale. In many ways, our personalities and lives have become the product. This accumulation is made possible through infrastructures that extract from the many while consolidating value for the few. The result is a deepening contradiction: workers help build facilities that ultimately reinforce the very inequalities that constrain their long-term power and stability.