Small Voices in the Jungle: An Ode to Horton the Elephant and the AI Resistance

When my son was three years old, he insisted upon hearing Horton Hears a Who! every night. Twice. As this lasted for several months, I got pretty good at reading quickly, tearing through the opening page in one breath—"On the 15th of May, in the Jungle of Nool, In the heat of the day, in the cool of the pool"—so that the words ran together, like a kind of Dr. Seuss verbal soup. Horton is a sweet story about a keen-eared elephant determined, against all odds,to save the diminutive Whos, despite being ridiculed because no one else could hear them.

Given all the great picture books around, this restrictive reading diet left me perplexed. Was its appeal that it was set on May 15, the day before my son’s birthday? (To this day we all mark “Horton’s Day” with a round of silly texts.) Or that it was the teensiest Who whose off-hand “yopp” finally nudged Whoville past the aural threshold? Perhaps it was Horton’s stalwart conviction that "a person’s a person, no matter how small," a sentiment that must have enchanted a small boy stuck in a land of grownups. I venture it’s all three.

The feeling the story evokes so well—that of being invisible, and, in this case, inaudible—is universal. Everyone who was once a child has been there. Despite writing a bunch of books and giving all sorts of talks, this feeling now resonates far more than when I was a young mom speed-reading to my toddler. For you don’t need to live on a speck of dust to know that today, more than ever, little people aren’t seen and their concerns rarely get heard.

We are all Whos now.

There is indeed a crescendo of voices railing against the spoilage and surrender of nature for tech.

One scenario that really makes me feel like a Who—pounding brass pans so that someone, anyone, listens—is the way new technology buildouts are harming the natural world. Here in New England, forests and once-productive farms are being cleared for solar, while water-hungry data centers claim chunks of land in areas vulnerable to drought. Around the globe—from India to Mexico, Papua New Guinea to Mongolia—entire areas are rendered toxic due to mining the metals that animate our devices. In several places, most notoriously Congo’s cobalt mines, children as young as six spend their days in tunnels plying ores with their bare hands.

In the book, Horton is repeatedly mocked for tending the particle upon which the Whos live. The mama kangaroo and her joey say, "Humpf!" and the gang of monkeys calls the existence of Whos “nonsense”—before conspiring to drop the speck in a sea of clover. Here in our jungle equivalent, hostility to tech infrastructure is derided as “NIMBYISM” and those opposed to it scorned as Luddites. Expanding computation and energy capacity is vital for progress, even marquee environmentalists tell us. As for the ecological and human cost, well, we can’t achieve a “green energy transition” without making a bit of a mess.

We also hear from our political reps, many of whom stand to benefit handily from AI expansion, that the spread of resource-intensive computational apparatus is “unstoppable” and “not going away.” Really? The truth is: People don’t want this. At college commencements, tech titans called in to inspire new graduates about AI’s rosy future have been met with boos. But you have to listen hard, past the din of machines and the money—a bunch of zeros on a screen—that feeds them. It seems the plan is to ram all this development through so that a critical mass are dependent on the technology and the rest of us have no choice but to use it. “Inevitable,” indeed.

We need to keep listening—and we need to keep speaking. For we don’t know whose “yopp” or “yapp” or any other utterance will break through the racket. It could be the cries of juvenile sea turtles that drift about the Blake Plateau, a biodiverse undersea basin now eyed for mining nodules rich in rare metals. Or the weeping of Gullah-Geechee ancestors, thousands of whom died here during the Middle Passage en route to Charleston. Or the plaint of hundreds of villagers in a 1,000-year-old Scottish village gathered to call bullshit on claims that a massive new “hyperscale” data center would serve the community. Or the high-pitched cackle of the Andean Flamingo: outrageously pink on stick-thin legs—Dr. Seuss would have had fun drawing them. The birds are lamenting that their wetland habitat in the Atacama Desert highlands is being pumped to produce the lithium essential for energy storage.

There is indeed a crescendo of voices railing against the spoilage and surrender of nature for tech. Just like the townsfolk of Whoville, we need all of us to exclaim, "We are here! We are here! We are here!"