In Tonganoxie, residents raise signs against the data center that will turn their town into a cooling tower. In Indianapolis, a councilor wakes to gunshots and a note against server farms. In Texas, a twenty-year-old heads to the house of the man who promised a revolution with a lighter, a jug of kerosene, and an anti-AI manifesto tucked in his pack, seeking fire where he was delivered only his own obsolescence.
You told the public the change was inevitable. When communities tried to regulate the machines appearing in your backyards, you lobbied the White House to block them, dismissing the very concerns lawmakers have tried to air in congressional roundtables. You pour millions into private security to fortify your compounds while you preach a gospel of disruption to the people whose livelihoods you are dismantling. You are building a technological empire on the ruins of human community, and you are surprised when the desperate bring fire to your gates.
This is not a random infection. The arson attempt on OpenAI’s headquarters, the Italian “nature pilled” would‑be saboteur, the San Diego attackers who listed “AI slop” among their grievances — it is a fever, and the infection was planted when the people who shape our economy decided that local communities, workers, and the natural order were friction to be engineered away. The same CEOs who promise that AI will “revolutionise the world, if not end it” then plead victimhood the moment someone takes their eschatology literally. As the researchers note, you don’t need agitators when your own keynote speeches already supply the doctrine of inevitable annihilation.
We have been here before, and not only with the Luddites of 1812. The Church has wrestled with the “principalities and powers” that St. Paul warns us about — systems that promise liberation while they capture souls. The AI industry is not just another business sector; it is a rival soteriology. It claims the power to remake human beings, to judge who is useful and who is surplus, and it demands that we bow to its speed, its scale, its opacity. When a community in Tonganoxie puts up a sign against a datacentre that will eat their groundwater and their quiet, the industry hears NIMBYism; I hear a community crying out for subsidiarity — the right, enshrined in Catholic social teaching, to participate in the decisions that shape your own life.
Catholic Social Teaching is clear on what you are doing: it is wicked. In Laborem Exercens, the Church taught that labor has priority over capital, that the worker is a subject and never a tool to be optimized. You are treating the worker as fuel for your algorithm. In Rerum Novarum, you are warned: “Once the demands of necessity and propriety have been met, the rest that one owns belongs to the poor.” Wealth accumulated through the disenfranchisement of the working class is not progress; it is a structural sin. You call it artificial intelligence. The prophets call it robbing the poor to feed the powerful. Jeremiah spoke directly to the men who build their empires on the backs of the ignored: “Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness, who makes his neighbor work for nothing.” You are building your digital citadels and then hiring ex‑intelligence agents to watch the people you have displaced. You have created a world where the human face is erased by the server rack. Pope Francis warned against the globalization of indifference; you have operationalized it into code. You see data points where there are fathers, mothers, children, and workers.
Even the pastor can no longer tell whether a young person’s desperate letter was written by a soul or a stochastic parrot. When AI evangelists take the commencement stage at universities this spring, the boos from graduates are not mere rudeness; they are the sound of a generation that can feel itself being offered a fully managed life that someone else owns.
What the national security apparatus — now being quietly imported into AI firms — refuses to admit is that you cannot surveillance your way out of a crisis of meaning. The Biden‑era executive order attempting to pre‑empt state legislation, the Trump administration’s blanket opposition to slowing the “global AI race,” the billions poured into lobbying against even modest guardrails: these are not responses to a frightened public. They are a pre‑emptive surrender to the very power that is alienating that public. When authorities declare, as the FBI did after the Altman arson attempt, that “threats against our nation’s innovation leaders” will not be tolerated, they should finish the sentence honestly: we will protect the innovators, but we will not protect you from the innovation.
The predictable result, as the lecturer Mauro Lubrano warns, is that people whose legitimate grievances find no outlet will begin to treat the law as just one more obstacle that has been bought off. Closing legitimate avenues for democratic pushback does not eliminate opposition; it pushes it into the dark. And in the dark, the Unabomber’s manifesto — still one of the most‑read anti‑tech texts on the internet — looks less like the ravings of a murderer and more like a prophetic warning to people who feel invisible.
I do not write this to baptize violence. The deliberate killing of an image‑bearer of God, whether a mosque worshipper in San Diego or a tech executive in San Francisco, is a mortal evil, and the Christian response to injustice is never the petrol can. But if I refuse to say what made the petrol can look like a rational instrument to a young man from Texas, I am a false prophet who only burdens the wounded without asking who held them down. And to you, the young men with the Kaczynski mantras, the ecofascists with the guns and the kerosene: the sword you reach for is the instrument of your own destruction. You cannot heal the wound of displacement with the fire of arson. When you meet the cruelty of the algorithm with the cruelty of violence, you become the machine you hate. Dorothy Day called the system “filthy and rotten,” but she did not reach for the kerosene. She reached for the neighbor. She knew that the only solution to the long loneliness is community, not combustion. We who use these tools, who marvel at the chatbot while our neighbor loses their trade, we too are complicit in the appetite that drives this beast. We cannot demand the system be gentle while we feed it our silence.
What is needed is not another corporate “fund for societal resilience” — the modern indulgence that pays for the sin without stopping the behaviour — but a wholesale recovery of the human person as the measure of the economy. That means local communities have the power to say no to a datacentre without being trampled by state‑level pre‑emption. It means workers whose livelihoods are erased by a fine‑tuned model are owed more than severance and a LinkedIn Premium subscription; they are owed a share in the decisions that unmade their world. And it means that every AI CEO who has stood on a stage and declared the inevitability of human obsolescence should have to look a father in the eye and explain what dignity remains for his children. The church basements in Tonganoxie are already packing care kits for families displaced by the data‑center build; that is the first stone of the new foundation. Choose the repair.
I will be told this is naïve, that the money is too big, the race too fast, the technology already out of the bottle. That is exactly the language of idolatry: the god is too powerful to question, so you had better offer incense now. But the God I serve handed a garden to two people and told them to till and keep it, not to pave it over because a venture capitalist had a vision. The sign in Tonganoxie is not backwardness; it is a prayer that the world might still be a place where human beings decide together what is too much. The men with kerosene do not answer that prayer; they only prove that a prayer ignored long enough will eventually be screamed.