I am thrilled to see Jayden Nelson get out on the pitch. Big ❤️ from and for the childhood cancer community. 🥹 m.youtube.com/watch?v=Lqch...

Ward 3 Hamilton City Councillor Nrinder Nann has placed a motion onto next week's Council agendas to use the Planning Act's Interim Control powers to temporarily ban new data centres in Hamilton. Vote will be next Tuesday at Committee, then June 24 at Council. #yhmcc #hamont

While cutting all prison librarian positions. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Female professors at post-secondary schools in Toronto earn significantly less than their male counterparts. In Ontario, every major university paid male professors more than female professors, with average wage gaps ranging from 5.7% (University of Ottawa) to 13.5% (McMaster University)

Suuure.

“I reject the idea that we have to be slaves to surveillance capitalism in order to participate in the modern economy” Wab Kinew in his announcement that Manitoba would not be continuing with the Île-des-Chênes data centre.

A sober take from @shachikurl.bsky.social of Angus Reid Institute of how Canadians are not on side with Mark Carney’s enthusiastic approach to AI or data centres. They aren’t uninformed or illiterate; they simply experience the sides of AI the government prefers not to focus on.

PHOTO The audience celebrates following the Committee of Adjustment decision to deny Steelport land severance. #hamont #yhmcc

‼️ This is a success in the long process of Hamilton #hamont resisting a proposed new data centre. Please share with anyone keeping tabs on community resistance to data centres.

DENIED Hamilton's Committee of Adjustment voted 3-0 to deny the Steelport land severance application. #yhmcc #HamOnt

Huge disconnect between the federal government’s ’AI for All’ announcement today and the many, many thoughtful and well informed voices of opposition to the proposed data centre in Hamilton. Almost as if the ‘All’ are not for ‘AI’. #hamont

I would also like to say that most of the government's emphasis on First Nations and AI (as well as the leading AI institutes) is on education. I think it is paternalistic to imply that distrust of these systems stems from insufficient understanding of them.

Peak Hamilton. 💕 I am one of over 1,000 who submitted comments in writing.

Reading through the government's AI marketing strategy. Notes as I go. Starting on a positive note, the NDP under Avi Lewis is already paying dividends and exerting influence -- in this case, on surveillance pricing.

I am once again asking on whose land is all this "AI" infrastructure gonna be dependant on? ised-isde.canada.ca/site/ised/en...

In the strategy, First Nations are mentioned twice, once as a group vaguely consulted, then again as a group being served by health AI research. To be clear, all submissions made in the development of this strategy (not consultation) were analyzed by AI. www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news...

More photos inside Hamilton City Hall where hundreds of people are expressing their opposition to AI data centres as the Committee of Adjustment debates an administrative routine (from a legal/planning perspective) land severance for the former Stelco lands to facilitate data centres #hamont #yhmcc

💥 A must read report on Bill C-22, the Canadian government's "lawful access" bill (the one that if passed would cause Signal to pull out of Canada because of the federal government's forced surveillance)👇🏻 Huge kudos for your work on this @cyn-k.bsky.social @kate-ro.bsky.social @digitalprivacy.ca

New joint publication by @citizenlab.ca + @cancivlib.bsky.social! In which @kate-ro.bsky.social & I join forces w/ Tamir @digitalprivacy.ca to explain the federal govt's many... "(Un)forced Errors: Analysis of Proposed Surveillance Law Expansion under Bill C-22, An Act respecting lawful access" 🧵1/x

Imagine how many faculty they could’ve hired. The administrators who argued for this have consistently argued against paying their faculty a living wage.

Litigation and lawsuits are extremely imperfect. And, I am very here for the use of litigation as one angle to disrupt corporate surveillance networks, where governments consistently fail, or are complicit in building them.

The preliminary ruling of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal is a sobering reminder that the harms of colonialism are not confined to Canada’s past. (🧵1/4)

This is what I mean when I say that students often just need a permission structure to refuse AI. If you discuss the environmental, equity, political, economic, etc problems with them, many (in my experience) just say no. (And many are annoyed that universities are shoving it down their throats.)

magic beans for everyone!

Said with a grain of salt because this is a new story about just the draft strategy but… it remains unclear to me what the liberal government means when it refers to “AI” The focus of this strategy seems to get more generic over time. www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

“If there is a failure of surveillance, it's never that the technology itself can't solve the problems…It's that we just don't have enough of it, right?"

University administrators two years ago: we can’t allow social justice movements to change the university as we know it University administrators today: in order to accommodate the new probabilistic bullshit generator no one likes we must change everything about the university

Not just lobbying! our new paper maps 27 mechanisms of regulatory capture used by Big AI + 11 narrative framings that rationalise capture. “Big AI’s Regulatory Capture: Mapping Industry Interference and Government Complicity” will be presented at #FAccT2026 next month arxiv.org/abs/2605.068... 1/

Wrote about the proliferation of metaphors of "empire" and "colonialism" to describe digital capitalism and what it might get wrong about both empires and digital capitalism. I suggest there are three missing Cs: comprador, creole, counter-colonization. www.theideasletter.org/essay/digita...

“For three years, everything that happened in the entryway of Willie Banks’ Westbrook home was captured by his neighbor’s security camera.” “What he didn’t realize until recently was that a state drug officer was using the camera feed to watch him in real time without first obtaining a warrant.”

The only good A.I. would be one that finds the phrase “pick your brain” in people’s emails and replaces it with something less gross like “get your input” or “hear your thoughts.”

A new Amnesty International briefing connects the approval of two Canadian-owned lithium mining projects to Indigenous rights violations in Nevada.

OpenAI was sued this week over a mass shooting in Florida and the overdose death of a college student in California. They are among two dozen cases filed in the last year that claim ChatGPT should be subject to consumer product safety laws: www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/t...

The Canadian Senate is undertaking a study on "the impact of artificial intelligence on human rights and economic security in Canada." I was grateful to speak to intersections b/w hype, capital, colonialism, racism, surveillance, and labour (intro 16:12) senparlvu.parl.gc.ca/harmony/en/p...

"Refusal of dangerous products must always be an option"

The Canadian Senate is undertaking a study on "the impact of artificial intelligence on human rights and economic security in Canada." I was grateful to speak to intersections b/w hype, capital, colonialism, racism, surveillance, and labour (intro 16:12) senparlvu.parl.gc.ca/harmony/en/p...

Jack..

the best part of post-tenure academia has been having the career space to slow down. the damage done by the contraction of tenure track positions + poor security/working conditions of non tenure track faculty + quantification of academic contributions is incalculable

lolsob🥲 “Hey you by the car on the sidewalk – this area is private property,” the camera said authoritatively. “Yeah, you and your light blue sweater and dark blue pants, I saw you standing there. This means you too. Move out there or police will be called!” windsorstar.com/news/local-n...

"OpenAI ***did not adhere to Canadian privacy laws*** when it trained its immensely popular ChatGPT tool, resulting in the collection and use of sensitive personal information, according to a joint investigation.” 👀 (*emphasis is mine) www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

"For our administrations, then, AI is another method to privatize the public good of education, not just in the sense of who owns the institution but in the social atomization of the collective educational enterprise," writes Daniel Greene.

This has been the case forever. Already been dystopia. From a submission my colleagues at @citizenlab.ca did nearly 10 years ago, for the UN Special Rapporteur on on violence against women. You know it's bad when a whole skin-crawling term exists for it. citizenlab.ca/wp-content/u... Also, >>

👀

Art.

We're not starting at operations and talking about AI, which would make sense. We're starting at AI, then talking about operations, which doesn't. newsletter 5: time-and-space-studios.ghost.io/meeting-hype...

New from @ntusikov.bsky.social and me. Carney's reckless decision to introduce AI, in all its flavours, into government while simultaneously slashing the public service is a recipe for disaster. We know this because it's happened elsewhere, including in Canada. It's a matter of when, not if.

Among many other things, generative AI is a labor rights issue. Professors are right to reject it and students are right to join the rebellion.

Oh no a huge number of professional scientists are copy-pasting fabricated information into their work, how can we possibly figure out how to stop this www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I'm glad the conversation about FIFA-mandated surveillance and mission creep is continuing. Grateful to have an opportunity to speak with CBC about new details Vancouver has shared re data access & retention. But... www.cbc.ca/listen/live-...

I do wish it was better understood by now—especially by folks in the media—that these "warnings" from large AI corporations in fact function as "advertisements" www.axios.com/2025/04/22/a...