NYT's Cottom: AI Is a Political Theory 'Gobbling Up' Democracy

A New York Times opinion columnist arguing that AI is not really a product at all is the kind of framing that sounds like a rhetorical flourish, and then keeps working on you after you close the tab. Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom writes in The New York Times that "artificial intelligence is not just a market product or a scientific achievement. It is a political theory. And it is gobbling up our democracy."

Her move is to relocate the argument. The technology, in her telling, "isn't just large language models or agents or data centers." It is "the backbone of a superstructure that merges regressive politics with unchecked economic power in the guise of technological innovation." She names the underlying phenomenon "data politics," and boils the concern down to a plain sentence: "there is too much money, some of it too untraceable, giving a small group of unelected people too much power over the people."

Why this lands as more than an academic point is that Cottom has been reporting alongside the argument. Her earlier NYT column, "Democrats, Join the Data Center Resistance," cited a Gallup poll from May finding that 71 percent of Americans would oppose a data center being built in their area, and pointed to temporary construction moratoriums in Tulsa, Birmingham and New Orleans, alongside a statewide pause in New York with Maryland and Michigan reportedly considering similar moves. That is the ground truth she is generalizing from: organized rural and urban constituencies who already treat AI infrastructure as a political fight, not a tech story.

The honest caveat is that this is an opinion column, not reporting, and it is a framing argument rather than a policy proposal. Cottom does not sketch a legislative agenda in the passages available, and none of the coverage I could pull quotes an AI industry response to the political-theory framing. If the coalition she is describing holds together across rural conservative and urban progressive constituencies, it is a real electoral force. If it fragments once moratoriums start affecting local tax revenue, jobs and cheap power, the framing may age faster than the buildout does.

The forward-looking piece worth watching is whether state legislators turn the backlash into permitting rules that channel data-center growth rather than block it. That is the version of Cottom's "data politics" where a critique becomes governance, and where the AI industry either gets a seat at a real table or loses the argument outside the room.