Victoria’s datacentre policy: How neoliberal tech expansion clashes with climate equity and Indigenous land rights
Original framing: “Datacentres in Victoria to be banned in residential areas” — The Guardian - World
The datacentre ban reads like a *Hermes*-like trick: a half-measure that distracts from the real heist—how Big Tech externalises its energy demands onto public infrastructure and Indigenous lands. Like the *Anansi* tales, where cleverness masks greed, Victoria’s policy lets corporations off the hook by shifting blame to local zoning laws. The *trickster* here is the assumption that renewable energy mandates alone can reconcile tech capitalism with ecological limits, ignoring the deeper irony that datacentres—supposedly the backbone of the digital age—are built on the same extractive logic as colonial industries. A *Coyote*-esque disruption might ask: what if we treated datacentres not as inevitable progress but as temporary, accountable structures, subject to the same democratic scrutiny as mines or highways?
Victoria’s datacentre policy exemplifies the tension between *neoliberal tech expansion* and *ecological justice*, where superficial regulations (like renewable energy mandates) obscure deeper structural conflicts over land, labour, and energy.
The framing ignores how datacentres are not neutral infrastructure but *nodes of digital colonialism*, displacing Indigenous communities, exploiting migrant workers, and accelerating climate change—patterns that mirror historical industrial conflicts but with globalised stakes. Cross-cultural perspectives, such as Māori *kaitiakitanga* or Haudenosaunee governance, offer alternatives that prioritise communal well-being over corporate interests, yet these are absent from policy discussions. The *trickster* dimension reveals the policy’s performative nature: by focusing on zoning laws, it deflects accountability from Big Tech and the state, while scientific and historical analyses expose the long-term risks of unchecked growth. Solutions must centre Indigenous sovereignty, degrowth principles, and energy democracy to ensure datacentres serve public needs rather than corporate profits—a shift that would require dismantling the power structures currently embedded in digital infrastructure.