Why we love them
We love Pull the Plug for taking on one of the fastest-moving and least accountable frontiers of power: AI. While much of the conversation remains abstract or speculative, they push for AI to move out of the hands of billionaires and into democratic control. At a time when development is accelerating faster than any meaningful oversight, and companies are racing ahead despite growing risks, Pull the Plug insists that this trajectory is not inevitable. Like any system of power, it must be contested, opened up, and ultimately brought under collective control.
What they do
Pull the Plug organises to confront the unchecked expansion of AI and the concentration of power behind it. They bring together people to challenge the idea that this technology should be developed and controlled by a small group of corporations, without democratic oversight or consent. Through public actions, campaigns, and movement-building, they make visible the infrastructures and decisions usually kept out of sight — from data centres to corporate influence — and create pressure for change. Central to their work is the demand for people’s assemblies on AI, creating spaces where ordinary people can collectively deliberate and decide how these systems should be governed.
How They fit in the Movement Ecology
The Pull the Plug campaign sits at an intersection addressing employment justice, intergenerational justice, environmental justice and social justice. The “theft-tech” of AI erases jobs, leaving a generation facing a bleak future of unemployment and redundancy. The energy-gobbling data-centres destroy our countryside and climate, while the in-built biases of corporate AI marginalises women, people of colour, and groups who are already disadvantaged by the structural discrimination at the core of Modernity. As one of the earliest groups to campaign for justice around AI, Pull the Plug are providing an outlet for so many of our voices that are crying out in pain, horror and rage at the AI-fueled world the Big Tech Bros forcing the world towards.
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