The People's Consultation on AI has released the submissions it received! Posted below and available in a shared dropbox. I took a peak as they rolled in, and it was really heartening reading how much it meant to people to have this chance to engage with the issues & provide meaningful input. #PCAI

Yani Kong will be reading from our chapter “Reimagining Networks: Speculative Thinking for Low-Carbon Research Networks” at the April 6 event. Looking forward to it!

This is really very good and reminds me yet again of how we need to start pulling together an Actual Political Economy of AI.

This is a hell of a good article. It lays out the history of failures leading up to the horrific bombing of Iranian school children and demonstrates that what they have in common isn’t any single technology but the unreflective push to speed up targeting selection at the expense of getting it right.

Stockholm: Join us April 1st for a seminar on AI before the ruins! Anne Pasek, visiting us from Trent University where she is associate professor, will dive into what might happen to the massive rollout of datacentres when the AI bubble bursts www.kth.se/anthropocene...

"What you made with Sora mattered" is one of the least true things that has ever been written

We're doing an online book launch for our new book on climate action, equity, and research methods. Register for whichever date works best for you + tune in for some short readings, further musings, and good company :) April 6: trentu.zoom.us/meeting/regi... April 7: trentu.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

🎥 Video essay “Latent Heat” is out now in [in]Transition. It reappropriates technical imagery from the digital cooling industry—turning it into a critical tool. intransition.openlibhums.org/article/id/1...

once you learn how much training data images of women come from porn, it illuminates so much. this is more than bad to look at, it's the rot of misogyny in full display. arxiv.org/pdf/2110.01963

Angine de Poitrine, please help me meet my deadlines this week www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoCs...

It's Open Panel submissions season for 4S and @thehanopticon.bsky.social putting on a sweet one!

this is in no sense how it should have happened. but it is precisely because we find ourselves in a situation that requires war, death, and destruction to get well positioned political actors behind accelerating energy transition that we should demolish fossil capital as decisively as we can

Read on for interesting geopolitical constellations plus weirdly gorgeous shipping container glow up photos?

my very cool colleague, who has written a book about the online left, is now also making video essays about them! www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgzh...

Open Access pub featuring some thoughts on sustainable academe: www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-p... Thanks for seeing this through @apasek.bsky.social and @swatimehta.bsky.social !

Spending today, in part, making zines about an AI girlfriend forum reacting to the end of the AI bubble (+ thus cheap compute + thus their girlfriends getting deleted). I like my job!

My public online talk next Fri 20th March 5pm GMT hosted by the Starling Centre for Just Technologies and Just Societies is titled 'AI is a Morbid Symptom of the Interregnum' and will also make the case for decomputing. Details and signup here: www.uwo.ca/events/2026/...

I have a chapter in this with the wonderful Yani Kong! It's been a minute since the workshop that led to this book, but I still dig our exploration of constraint through slow and decelerated media as we wrote together. Thanks @apasek.bsky.social for collecting and editing us ✨

Iconic writing, iconic hating www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Our book is out OPEN ACCESS. Please enjoy a FREE BOOK on how we could remake academic research methods for climate action, and fix a lot of inequities in the process. www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-p...

Here ruining my life with Dutch bike infrastructure. Look! At the bike parking garage! At the Amsterdam central train station! That is under a canal! And has a little bike escalator!

someone at the pentagon frantically typing “Claude, open the strait of Hormuz for me, quickest possible strategy, make no mistakes.”

there's so much bad in the world but there's also people who lift up and carry an elderly bat around every day so he can pretend he's flying again, and that's the part of the world I think is worth fighting for

Google is eating its seed corn

linux heads were always right. time to sit my dumbass down and learn

Big new beautiful subsea cable map! submarine-cable-map-2026.telegeography.com

It's fascinating how, in trying to source a quote (Gelsinger's “God decided where the oil reserves are, we get to decide where the fabs are," cited imprecisely (😡) in Chris Miller's Chip Wars) I've isntead found a bunch of LinkedIn posts plagiarizing it badly. What's up with you LinkedIn? Why?

New Gorillaz album is a delight. More flute! More sitar! Yasin Bey and Omar Souleyman together! A big beautiful hand animated music video! It leaves me just so pleased that people like to create things.

Do you find yourself growing grim about the mouth? Is it a damp, drizzly November in your soul? Do you find yourself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral you meet?

DIY Methods is back!! this conference is really the ideal way to engage in/with research: via zine exchange! this year there are three streams: conventional, risograph, and self-published/experimental. i'm so excited to be a part of it again! :) check out what it was like in 2024... 🧵

DIY Methods, our little conference-by-zine about unconventional approaches to research, rises again! Maybe you'd like to make a zine on your weird/cool approach to methods, and receive a bundle of similarly weird/cool zines in the mail? Pitch submissions are due April 20th. diymethods.net

I’m so happy this is out in the world, and I feel like people might enjoy a TV ad for TAT-8. Yes, a subsea cable with TV ad youtu.be/KklN1DCRmCU?...

The conference schedule for Cables of Resistance is up! programm.infraunited.org/cableresist2...

Our book is published!!! mitpress.mit.edu/978191598348... There is supposed to be an open access version available, which does not seem to be actually available, and which I am doggedly pursing, but for now: hurrah! Print enjoyers, get your copies!

I like to imagine somewhere there's an old dev from Ask Jeeves who's equally self-congratulatory and pissed off about the shift from traditional search to LLMs.

Does anyone happen to know the origin story of the whole "AI is the new electricity" slogan? I've found it in so many places (and plagiarized by so many people) that this might be a doomed quest...

Great read! @alondra.bsky.social has some real bars: "What [the Trump administration] has advanced is not the absence of AI regulation but its rearrangement, often by caprice..." www.science.org/doi/full/10....

gotten to the point in the research process where I think I just need to write speculative fiction

In a literal way, the platforms are building a bespoke reality around you designed to maximize your misery, in which everything costs the absolute most you can afford. They are taking the clarity of the price signal—the one virtue of the free market system—and replacing it with a hall of mirrors.

I dream of a future where a subculture called 'Pat face' takes off (everyone gets surgically altered to look like the same person--Pat--in order to do the obfuscation trick of a group of people using the same loyalty card)

In case my thumbnailed Zoom facial expression failed to convey this on a recent panel, I would like to take the opportunity to express my great skepticism that we will solve our environmental problems by putting data centres in space or on the moon.

My new article on Canada's recent AI strategy consultation. Lightning-fast engagement, dubious data protection measures, black box analysis, & AI-generated summaries from made-in-USA LLMs are not a winning strategy for building public trust betakit.com/canadas-new-...

Canada, on the Bad Bunny halftime show: It's an honour just to be considered.

After extensive study and gay-hockey-drama-influencing, I have come to the well-formed opinion that Wolf Parade is a good band and I'll Believe Anything is a good song.

Let's go Bryce!

Canada did a consultation on a new national AI strategy, formed an expert task force to write 32 reports, then used AI to analyze the responses & reports. The result is a summary that strings together 100s of vague action items & flattens nuance and policy trade-offs into false consensus

One thing about moving from North America to Europe is that the bulk of my morning posts are my old friends and acquaintances demented night posts. Hello demented night friends! I think you should go to bed!

say what you will about being compelled to take vows and join a monastic order it was a better way of dealing with disgraced powerful men than 100k-word substack posts

Much of the talk of powering AI data centers with next-gen nuclear & fusion is misdirection. The sector will be past its hype scaling phase by the time any of those are operating. In the meanwhile, they're largely being powered by new gas plants, which can easily continue operating well past 2050.