“Water…..is a human right”

We have grown accustomed to headlines about billionaires, agribusiness empires, and multinational corporations treating water as a strategic asset—from T. Boone Pickens’ groundwater acquisitions in Texas, to the Resnicks’ role in California’s water politics and infrastructure, to Nestlé’s controversial groundwater extraction projects.

And now a new claimant has entered the competition for freshwater: the so-called AI economy, where large data centers are increasingly drawing scrutiny for their water demands on local communities as governments and technology companies race to build the infrastructure behind artificial intelligence.

This work asks a simple question: should access to water be governed primarily as a public trust or as a private asset?

Lapiz’s new mural was painted recently at the former NSA/British spy station Teufelsberg, Berlin. The site is a holy land for graffiti writers, street artists, and all manner of creative crews and tourists. And those little gold bits that you see in the mural? The artist tells us that parts of the mural were gold-plated wth a composite.