Carried by Hand: What the AI Inevitability Argument Leaves Out
Photography, Water, and the Fight That Is Coming
Widening the Lens explores how we look at images and how images look back at us. Each week, I dig into photography, gender, visual literacy, and visual culture with essays that sharpen how we see the world, plus artist highlights that remind us why pictures matter.
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Over the past few weeks, a particular media narrative has been working hard to settle into common sense. AI infrastructure is inevitable, we are told, the data centers are coming regardless, and the only productive question is how to manage the arrival. Alongside this runs a companion argument aimed specifically at women: that AI represents an opportunity not to be missed, that those who resist or question it risk being economically stranded, that the obvious feminist position must be adoption and adaptation. These two narratives are doing related work. The first forecloses the question of whether this buildout should happen at the pace and scale being planned, and on whose land, and at whose water supply’s expense. The second tells women that their economic survival depends on serving a system they had no part in designing and no vote in approving. This kind of forced upon us narrative makes participation an opportunity and skepticism as self-sabotage. That a technology consuming water at accelerating rates and eliminating workers from their livelihoods is being sold to us as liberation is not irony, rather it is an elegant and well funded PR strategy.
When I find myself turning these questions over with nowhere to put them, I turn to my friend and colleague, photographer Ronnie Farley. Farley does not have much patience for the inevitability argument. In sharing what I had noticed with her, she answered, delivered with the directness of someone who has spent thirty years documenting women who refused what they were told was inevitable, is essentially: no. Turn it off. Apathy, she reminds me is not a neutral state. It is a choice, often a direct result of exhaustion, one of the most effective tools of the status quo. America for all its recent bluster, has a particular genius for converting outrage into resignation, and making compliance feel like common sense.
Farley's work began decades before we were told AI is inevitable, and while the technology may have changed, the resource being co-opted has not: water. Farley spent nearly two decades in the American West documenting what she calls the Earth Keepers, Indigenous women who have fought, without pause, to protect their water. She began this work in 1985, after a neighbor's connection drew her into the story of the Diné people of Big Mountain, Arizona, facing forced removal from land targeted for coal and uranium extraction. What she found, crossing more than forty thousand miles over three decades, was that women were at the front of every water fight, not as symbols but as the people who would not leave and would not stop. In many of the Indigenous cultures she moved through, women are the first environment, so protecting water and protecting women and children are the same act, against the same forces, generation after generation. The basis for this is both cultural and biological. Amniotic fluid, the substance a mother’s body produces and continuously replenishes, is the first water any human inhabits. Women are the original source. In this reading, water is not just a resource and women are the stewards. That responsibility has become an organizing force. Indigenous women have led some of the most visible water protection movements in recent decades, arguing that the health of waterways and the health of communities are inseparable.
To be told that AI is our liberation is to be asked, once again, to forget all of this. It asks us to accept a severing from the physical and spiritual relationship to earth that women have always understood and defended, and to call that loss progress. Powerful forces are behind this messaging. The fight coming over water will make every previous fight look somehow smaller although each of them have been monumental.
What draws me to Farley’s practice, and to the photographers and artists working in this space more broadly, is the way water functions not just as subject but as argument. In the context of ecofeminism, water carries an almost inexhaustible symbolic weight: it is the first environment, the commons most fought over, the resource whose privatization and contamination fall hardest on communities least positioned to absorb the loss. Farley’s 2019 work extends that understanding into new form. Walking the Watershed: Catskills to New York City, 2019 is both photograph and performance: On Earth Day 2019, Farley collected water at the Schoharie Reservoir in upstate New York alongside friends from the New York City Native community. Tuscarora singer Jennifer Kreisberg led the opening with a water song, activating the beginning of a 150-mile walk down to the city following the Catskill and Old Croton Aqueduct routes. Farley documented the walk and its participants in still and video formats, recorded the walkers’ stories and the sounds of the waters, and gave slide show presentations along the way. The resulting work, Walking the Watershed: From the Catskills to New York City, comprises over ninety images, recorded sound, and video.
Farley and participants carried the water from its northernmost source, tracing 150 miles of watershed that most New Yorkers will never see or think about. The project inspiration grew from John Francis’ memoir ‘Planet Walker’, from the Anishinaabe women Nibi water walkers in Minnesota, and from Farley’s experience at the 2016 Standing Rock Pipeline Protest in North Dakota. A water walk grows directly from the understanding, that carrying water between sources is an act of ceremony and witness. Carrying water by hand across a landscape forces a kind of knowledge that infrastructure is specifically designed to prevent. This work illustrates that one cannot walk 150 miles from source to tap and pretend the distance is not real, or that the communities along the way are not part of the same story you are.
A kind of refusal
As I write this, I am sitting in the Museum of Fishes & Greens, an exhibition presented and commissioned by Soon is Now, a climate and eco-themed arts organization founded by Eve Morgenstern, producing exhibitions, live performances, residencies, and artist-led workshops on the Hudson River/Muhheakantuck in Beacon, New York. Museum of Fishes & Greens is an immersive multimedia collaboration, made out of an exchange of ideas and art workshops between Food Studio Collective, a multidisciplinary group of artists, curators, and scholars from Kolkata and Shantiniketan, India, and women in fishing and farming communities in the Sundarbans, West Bengal. Bringing together batik sari textiles, handmade paper, a handcrafted book with data, memories, plants and recipes, and three films, this project explores the social, ecological, and cultural impact of food systems and climate change through art. The show features the handwork and personal stories of women in the Sundarbans, the biodiverse delta in West Bengal that climate change is actively dismantling.
In March and April of this year, with the support of the Food Studio Collective, these women made saris from their own drawings of fishes and plants, made paper from local vegetation, and recorded their recipes. The saris hang throughout the exhibition space, forming a kind of tent, loosely reminiscent of clotheslines, creating a warm and intimate environment for visitors to move through the flora, fauna, and fish of the Sundarbans. Handmade paper, made with locally foraged greens and fish parts, adds an unusual textural element, and original drawings by the women hang on moveable walls, giving the space the feeling of a working studio. Three films place you alongside the women as they forage, cook, create, and live. The result is an archive of knowledge - culinary, agricultural, and ecological - that the Sundarbans may not be able to hold much longer, translated into craft by the people who carry it.
This installation allows us, 8000 miles away, to hear directly from the women as they wade into waters while navigating crocodiles and snakes, and into the markets where they sell what they have gathered. But the water itself is changing with rising salinity, driven by the Bay of Bengal pushing inland as sea levels climb, transforming the Sundarbans from the inside. The region sits at the confluence of hundreds of rivers and the planet’s largest mangrove forest, ecosystems that have long buffered these communities from the worst of what the ocean can do. But mangroves are being cleared for aquaculture, farming, and human settlement, and an estimated 20 to 35 percent of the world’s mangroves have been lost since 1980. As glaciers melt and temperatures rise, the delta’s capacity to hold back the sea shrinks. Work is already scarce. For many women here, wading in water in service of the fishing industry is one of the few options left.
What Farley’s photographs and the Food Studio Collective’s installation share, beyond water, is a particular kind of refusal. Not the refusal of technology or progress in the abstract, but the refusal to accept that the people most affected by a system’s costs should have the least say in whether it runs. They are against being disappeared into the resource calculation, treated as a landscape feature rather than a constituency. This is what the inevitability argument struggles to absorb. When we are told that AI infrastructure is coming regardless, what is being managed is not just a zoning question or an energy question but a question about whose knowledge counts, whose water matters, and whose labor is worth protecting.
The feminist case for AI adoption tends to assume that a system, once entered, can be steered from inside. What both bodies of work suggest is that the ground-level knowledge, of a watershed walked by foot, of a fish drawn onto fabric, carries a different kind of authority than the systems built to replace it. Apathy, as Farley says, is not neutral. And neither, maybe, is the story we are being asked to receive as common sense.
Things you can do right now to protect your water:
The next time an influencer, a podcaster, a think piece, politician or technology executive tells you AI is inevitable, or sells you the fantasy that automation will finally free you from work and deliver you leisure, ask yourself a simple question. Have you gained more time, or more quality of life, since the tech industry last arrived to “help” us? Do we think the same people who are gutting public schools, social services and humanitarian aid will suddenly allow us to work less, or guarantee us safe food and clean water? The answer is your compass. Tell them how you feel.
Find out if a data center is coming to your area. Search your county or municipal planning board minutes. Data center proposals show up as zoning variance requests, often under bland corporate names. Data Center Map tracks existing and proposed facilities globally.
Show up to your local zoning meetings. This is where data center permits are won and lost. Public comment periods are real leverage points, especially in smaller municipalities where a dozen organized people can shift a vote. Your city, town website should have meeting dates, times listed. If you cannot make a meeting write a letter. Share your thoughts and how to get involved on your social media group pages.
Follow the water permit. Data centers require water withdrawal permits, which are public records. In many states these can be challenged during the comment period. Earthjustice and state-level environmental law clinics can help if you find a permit worth fighting.
Connect with existing fights. The Stop Data Centers movement has active organizing in Virginia, the data center capital of the world, but groups are emerging across the US and Europe. Indigenous-led water protection organizations are often already tracking proposed facilities near their watersheds.
Ask your utility service who their new customers are. Data centers are driving massive electricity demand increases that ratepayers absorb. Your public utility commission holds hearings, and those are public comment opportunities too.
Support journalists covering this. Local investigative reporting on data center deals is chronically underfunded. Outlets like Grist, Capital B, and local news nonprofits are doing this work.
Make art about this. Share it.
Thanks Lesly, as always, your writing gives me hope. Indeed Ronnie’s work is a living testimony, not simply a project or assignment. She has been bearing witness for decades and has put the evidence in front of us as a reminder of what we have to lose. It’s often an overlooked and lonely devotion but the time is now for us to see the long tail of this struggle against environmental degradation by hyper capitalist tech oligarchs and those who enable them.
As for Eve’s aptly named “Soon is Now” project, highlighting the Sundarbans, I want to add to the list of women environmentalist photographers the artist Laila Nahar’s book “Living with the tides - The Sundarbans” https://www.lailanahar.com/books/sundarbans
I have several of Ronnie’s books available for viewing, as well as Laila’s books for anyone interested in learning more. Reach out to me at photobookworks@gmail.com to make arrangements.
Love this Lesly - have been looking for a way to frame how I feel about AI. These stories are so tangible for me. They put it in a more holistic perspective.
And then, how AI impacts someone like me in a very small way, is through an industry that tells me AI is inevitable and I should change the way I work to keep up or be left behind. It was the same when drones came. I don't think technological progress is automatically better, and certainly not more beautiful. In resistance sometimes we are told we are stubborn and unwilling to change. But change happens in so many different ways. What if AI isn't the change we want...