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Economies transform when certain conditions are in place. For the first time in my lifetime, we are living through all three simultaneously — and the rules of who benefits are still being written.

Since the 1990s I have been an early adopter. That led me to design a course teaching principles of sustainability and marketing through the lens of economic shifts, driven by technology. Adoption rates of new technologies have shortened dramatically over time, and yet our human capacity to adapt has not kept up. The accelerated pace of innovation spurred on by the growth of the digital age propelled business into unknown territory. To an extent, the ease of access to information led to the rise of the ESG movement, where public awareness pressured executives to assess environmental and social dimensions of their business and account for reputational, financial and sustainability risk. Shareholder activism became more powerful.

Each semester I opened my course with teachings from Jeremy Rifkin and his prediction of the Third Industrial Revolution. In the simplest terms, economies transform when three elements fundamentally change — a new way to communicate, a new way to power things, a new way to move things. That combination of communication, energy and distribution has reached an apex in relation to this digital age, AI and its lifeblood: the data center.

Rifkin’s promise was that the Internet of Things would catalyze the conditions for a Collaborative Commons — disrupting business models, shifting consumer behavior, and generating the conditions for more equitable economic outcomes. Arguably, access has improved while remaining unequally distributed. Think of the growth of the sharing economy: Lyft, Airbnb, open-access learning modules. Then layer over that the absence of multi-modal transportation where public transit is thin, the enduring lack of access to credit, and the persistent digital divide. In principle, the marginal cost of doing business approaches zero and massively shifts power and ownership. AI is an accelerated form of this system, built on massive amounts of data and resources that society has generated. Yet power and ownership have yet to shift. We are at a crossroads, working actively to understand who benefits from the hyperscaler buildout. A May 2026 Gallup survey found that seven in ten Americans now oppose data centers being built in their communities^† — and a March 2026 NBC poll found that AI overall held lower favorability ratings than ICE.^‡

The data center represents a convergence that was almost invisible until now — energy, communication, and distribution becoming one, demanding resources at levels almost beyond comprehension. It has been achieved under a handful of owners, drawing power and water from communities, lacking transparency and consent. No matter whether you are a Techno-Optimist, skeptic, or believe the great displacement will be driven not by climate change but by Silicon Valley creating a permanent underclass, the call to remake the social contract is now urgent and unambiguous. We are at an inflection point. This moment requires a conscious choice. And that choice has now been framed as a deep moral and spiritual reckoning by Pope Leo XIV.

I have been sitting with the 42,300-word encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, for weeks since its release. Like a good sermon, it tells a powerful story through two metaphors: the Tower of Babel and the building of Jerusalem’s walls by Nehemiah. Babel happens when infrastructure is built on pride and self-sufficiency — when a single language, including a digital one, is made to translate everything, including the mystery of humanity, into data and performance. The Catholic in me reacts strongly: this is blasphemy. The result is not unity. It is fracturing. And it is being met with protests and moratoriums. Nehemiah offers the alternative: Jerusalem’s walls were rebuilt section by section, each portion assigned to the people who lived nearest to it. Not a top-down infrastructure mandate — a participatory one. The community did not just benefit from the wall. They built the part they would depend on. That is the design principle that underpins the encyclical. That is also what a reforms-first approach looks like in practice.

The question this brief holds is not whether the Third Industrial Revolution has been fulfilled. It borrows from the pontiff’s own encyclical to urge us to learn from history and, with cautious optimism, begin designing an approach that puts communities at the origin of progress. This era hinges on whether we locate, power, and own this infrastructure on terms that repair communities — or on the same terms that have produced unequal outcomes. Capital deploys in PE fund cycles of five to seven years; GPU infrastructure depreciates in one to three; grid rate base lock-in runs three to four decades. Communities engaging after the deal closes are engaging on a different timeline, with pressure to slow down. The window to choose is still open. It is also closing rapidly.

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I was in Atlanta the week the encyclical dropped, moderating a panel at EMERGE 2026: “Building for All: Access Is a Design Choice.” The question underneath every exchange was the same one I hear echoed in discussions about AI, its algorithms and its demand for resources: are we building in a way that finally breaks the cycles of inequity and concentration of power, or are we cementing the bias we have not fixed yet?

The numbers ground the answer. $450 million is extracted annually from Black and Latine borrowers through algorithmic pricing — not through fraud, but by model design. $80 billion in public benefits goes unclaimed every year because the systems are too complex to navigate. One in five American households still operates outside the financial system in 2026, after decades of financial inclusion work. Who is accountable for the gap?

Accountability is the word none of us fully answered in Atlanta. When a family gets denied by an algorithm, nobody is accountable. When a product was never designed with a community in mind, nobody is accountable. When $80 billion in public benefits goes unclaimed, nobody is accountable for ensuring those funds reach the people they were intended for. The design question and the accountability question are the same.

Martin Luther King Jr. named this structural problem on April 4, 1967 — exactly one year to the day before his assassination. At Riverside Church, in a speech that cost him significant political support, he said:

“When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”^§

These words feel prophetic today. He was not speaking about artificial intelligence. He was speaking about the structural conditions that allow any technology — any system — to perpetuate exclusion in the language of efficiency and progress. Those conditions have not changed. They have scaled. And new business models are working to change that dynamic.

Esusu, a Black-owned fintech valued at $1.2 billion and founded by the children of immigrants, made one observation: 110 million Americans pay rent every month, and less than 10 percent of that payment history shows up in their credit scores. The data existed. The transactions were happening. The payments were being made faithfully, month after month. What was missing was the accountability structure that said: someone is responsible for connecting these two things. Esusu reported on-time rent to all three credit bureaus. The result was nearly 200,000 new credit scores and over $30 billion in mortgages unlocked — for people who had never been the problem. The design had failed them. That solution did not come from a large bank or lender — it came from people who understood the gap because they lived in proximity to it.

While I am not a practicing Catholic, I was raised in the tradition. I treasure the community that raised me, and I have come to question authority rather than submit to it. I have spent my career at the intersection of capital, community, and systems change — working to question the status quo and name what needs to evolve. The encyclical goes further than I expected. In some ways it reads as a policy playbook, raising questions every leader should be asking — of themselves, and of tech CEOs, policymakers and government officials.

Here is the parallel from Pope Leo’s encyclical to Dr. King’s Beyond Vietnam speech worth sitting with:

“In a world where data, computational resources and regulatory influence remain in the hands of a few, to speak of the common good means exposing this new form of epistemic, economic and political asymmetry and naming the new monopolies of AI. To speak of subsidiarity calls for protecting the ability of communities to make choices and corrections, rather than confining their role to mere oversight after the standards have been set elsewhere.”¹

Epistemic, economic and political asymmetry. That is not theological language. That is a structural diagnosis. The opaque nature in which data center projects are being developed deepens that asymmetry — it creates the conditions for opposition rather than participation. The question is whether we change that before the next deal closes.

Information asymmetry — what I call the Knowledge Gap — is the gap I have written least about in this series, and the one I now believe is the most foundational. Pope John Paul II recognized that unemployment is a grave evil,² and so a disruption as significant as AI to the business sector — one that risks leading to massive unemployment — frames not just a moral imperative but an economic argument that we cannot afford to ignore.

The encyclical identifies three dimensions of this gap.

The first is environmental opacity. The encyclical states plainly that large language models demand “enormous energy, water, data centers, and hardware networks” and that sustainable solutions are a moral requirement, not a nice-to-have.³ In AI data center negotiations, energy use projections and water consumption agreements are routinely sealed under nondisclosure agreements. Communities hosting these facilities — often in counties already under stress — do not know what is coming for their electricity bills or their water tables. The information exists. What is sealed is the community’s right to know.

The second is algorithmic opacity. When AI selects who receives credit, employment, or public services without anyone bearing responsibility for the outcome, injustice wears a veneer of neutral objectivity.⁴ The encyclical is unambiguous: “We cannot consider AI to be morally neutral.” The vision of the person embedded in data and models is a design choice, not a natural outcome.⁵ The acceleration of agentic and generative AI is heightening these risks. We need regulators to maintain human accountability at every decision point — to prevent the conditions under which corporate states emerge: companies that have acquired the governance functions — data management, identity verification, access to services and opportunity — that democracies are supposed to hold on behalf of everyone.

The third is governance opacity. Pope Leo calls for “adequate regulatory instruments, independent oversight, and user education.”⁶ That third-party assessment mechanism is structurally absent from most current frameworks. For some time I have questioned how data center projects could move at such speed with little or no public input or awareness. The answer is now clear: the structures in place do not mandate transparency. Communities cannot negotiate what they do not know is coming. They cannot contest terms they were never invited to shape. They cannot enforce protections that were never written because no one is accountable for writing them. Therein lies a direct opportunity for capital allocators: fund the intermediaries.

All three are expressions of the same structural condition: when data, compute, and regulatory influence concentrate in private hands, communities arrive at the table after the terms are already written. That is not an accident of the market. It is a design choice — the Babel syndrome applied to infrastructure.⁷

The encyclical states what prudent action requires:

“Calling for prudence, rigorous evaluation and even, at times, a slower pace in adopting AI does not mean opposing progress; instead, it is an exercise of responsible care for the human family. This need is all the more urgent given the frequent imbalance between the speed of technological growth and the slower development of awareness, norms, safeguards and institutions capable of governing its effects.
It is not enough to invoke ethics in the abstract; robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility are required. Otherwise, change will be governed only by technocratic thinking and presented as necessary and inevitable, ultimately imposing rules shaped by those who control data, infrastructure and computing power.”⁸

King named the giant triplets in 1967. The encyclical names their digital successor:

“This requires restoring to individuals not only the data that describes them, but also the ability to decide how it is used, by whom and for whose benefit. Otherwise, the digital age will not be post-colonial, but colonial in another form.”⁹

That is a risk disclosure. The same communities that were redlined, systematically excluded from wealth-building in the postwar era, are now living in counties where AI data centers are clustering — not because the grid connections are best there, but because land is cheapest, opposition is least organized, and decision-making authority is often not held locally. Those communities are being asked to host the infrastructure of the AI economy without the knowledge, or legal standing, required to negotiate its terms. The New York State legislature has passed the Responsible Data Center Development Act (S10642/A11560) — a one-year moratorium on new permits for data centers above 20 megawatts. It is now awaiting Governor Hochul’s signature. If signed, it would be the first statewide data center moratorium in the country.

That is the Knowledge Gap at scale. A reforms-first approach addresses it directly: close the information asymmetry before the terms are set, not after.

What would accountability look like if it were structured into these deals the same way accountability for credit losses is structured into a lending portfolio? Not as a compliance checkbox. Not as a pilot program. As a design principle.

It would look like independent third-party environmental assessments before permits are issued, with results publicly available to host communities — not sealed under NDA. It would look like energy and water impact data disclosed to ratepayers before interconnection agreements are signed. It would look like community benefit agreements with enforcement mechanisms and funded intermediary capacity — not mandates without resources.

Magnifica Humanitas calls this the universal destination of goods — the principle that patents, algorithms, platforms, infrastructure, and data belong to the category of goods intended for everyone, not a select few.¹⁰

These are the elements of the social contract we have the opportunity to reimagine. MLK called it a revolution of values. Pope Leo used the Tower of Babel as a cautionary tale and the walls of Jerusalem as the antidote. We have the tools. We have the data. What we don’t have yet is the structure that says: if this community is not being served, someone is responsible for changing that. Not as philanthropy. As design.

We, the people, are not the problem.

We, the People, are Not the Problem

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