My AI-As-Pollution talk is now up on OBVIA's youtube page: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ClE... Enjoy my survey of the hellscape that confronts us, plus some thoughts borrowed from discard studies on how to know and act on digital waste.

Finally, if you can get through the paywall this piece from earlier in the week illuminates how the experience above is just a tiny part of an industrial-scale, global, and sector-wide catastrophe of AI and citations to nonexistent papers in academic publishing bsky.app/profile/mile...

Checking my inbox this final afternoon before winter break

Pedagogical musings: I think the next time I teach a media art/research-creation/critical making kinda final project, I need to include a "it didn't fucking work" option where students document incompletes, reflect on the insurmountable obstacles faced, and what failure does for them analytically...

Good news this week: after my fellowship in Germany, I'll be spending April in Sweden with the fine folks at Digital Futures. Please send recommendations and rumours for life in Stockholm. Currently my list includes: - seeing Anna Högberg Attack in concert? - pilgrimage to big ikea

The kids are alright

This semester I made a lot of optional zine assignments for students. Some highlights below! We start with a lovingly handmade pamphlet endorsing digital piracy (but play safe kids!)

This was great! www.youtube.com/watch?v=27BH...

🚨 New today! In "Turning the Tide: Climate Action In and Against Tech," @tamigraph.bsky.social examines how, in a time of AI ascendance and data center accelerationism, climate-conscious tech workers and larger coalitions have attempted to reform the industry. 1/3 datasociety.net/library/turn...

I will always pop for electoral reform!

Some rare good news: Journalists at the PEN Guild won their arbitration case against Politico, which deployed two separate faulty AI products (a "report builder" and a headline and summary generator on the homepage) without their knowledge or input. That violated their contract, the arbiter found.

I'm taking over an Intro to Social Theory class for our Interdisciplinary Social Research PhD program. Anyone got any favorite 'wait, what they heck is theory/'the social'' readings they'd recommend including on such a syllabus?

How to Get Into Fights with Data Centres is now available in Portuguese, thanks to my amazing translator Louise Karczeski // How to Get Into Fights with Data Centres já está disponível em português, graças à minha incrível tradutora Louise Karczeski emmlab.info/Resources_pa...

Thanks, I hate it

How to Get Into Fights with Data Centres is now available in Portuguese, thanks to my amazing translator Louise Karczeski // How to Get Into Fights with Data Centres já está disponível em português, graças à minha incrível tradutora Louise Karczeski emmlab.info/Resources_pa...

The markets are staying afloat right now on the hope that AI will destroy American workers. What a bleak thing. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/25/b...

I'm a committee member a v. cool PhD on GPU e-waste/thermocultures, which includes some research-creation elements. This means that I got an atari punk synth in the mail made out of old GPU boards, with a fan/light sensor element added in. Shout out to Cyrus Lognonné-Khalatbari---this is so joyful!

The big news today is that there's a bunch of jacked firewomen in NZ who have put together a calendar to fundraise for breast cancer research: www.breastcancercure.org.nz/calendar/wah...

Hello Internet. The Taste of Things (2023) is a very good movie in which the majority of the screen time is given over to silently (occasionally, huffingly) preparing amazing french food in a beautiful kitchen. Two thumbs up. 👍👍

The diagram for what Palantir does is like if Richard Scarry got super paranoid and did an Apocalypse picture book

Guess who just got access to a primary care physician for the first time in 8 years and so will be doing preventative medicine again! :)

When I say that the concept of the "digital commons" was always a facade made up by politically illiterate toddlers this is what I mean

Fun times with Canadian AI Policy. The federal government wants to do consultation in a 30 'sprint.' That's probably very unwise, plus the survey itself is full of leading questions. A bunch of folks (including me!) are calling for a different strategy: bccla.org/policy-submi...

Sneaky bastards

Looking at spending some time this spring either in New Bedford (Moby Dick fantasy) or the Maritimes. Send recommendations if you've got them! I want to divide my time between writing, eating, biking, and looking at tide pools.

Time for me to start baking multiple batches of cookies to assemble into giant variety packs to give away for the holidays (I am intense about this). Anyone baked any banger recipes lately?

AI development should consider its deeper environmental, technical, and sociopolitica infrastructures for the sake of sovreignty, sustainability, and fairness (not endless imaginary scalability!) - we argue for this (and many more) in this piece. So glad it's now out!

Strategic nationalism continues! policyoptions.irpp.org/2025/10/ai-m....

Anyone have a screenshot of the (I hope real?) joke-y post that said something to the effect of "let's make a mastodon instance to discuss the challenges of configuring mastodon instances"? I need it for a slide deck!

Yesterday my students did 'dead media autopsies' in class. It was pretty neat to look at electronics across a range of decades, and parsing when things stopped being soldered, and then largely assembled, by hand

So excited to see it out and honored to be part of this group!! Rare opportunity to learn about the real-world entanglements between policy and AI's pasts and futures. My special gratitute to @apasek.bsky.social and Kelly Bronson for their guidance.

This summer I got a bunch of smart academics together to think about anti-extractive Canadian AI futures. Our white paper, which parses good and bad AI policy directions for the federal government, is out now! www.uottawa.ca/research-inn...

Peak butch moment: friend asks to borrow my tools

I love his writing and all, but sometimes I wonder if David Graeber would have offered a slightly different account of bureaucracy and organizational relations if he hadn't noped out of all his service work at his university...

I am going to talk to a bunch of lawyers at Yale about AI Trash. Yes, I will be showing them the bad AI slop picture of a scientific illustration of rat testicles (?).

U.S. regions more exposed to AI saw faster emissions growth, more reliance on fossil fuels, and dirtier electricity generation. cepr.org/publications...

I'm going to be in NYC in a week for a hot second! What should I do (besides catch the Tega Brain & Sam Levine show at Pioneer Works obvs)?

I'm making my environmental media class vote in Fat Bear week today with me. Also: Look at this unit. Justice for 901! explore.org/fat-bear-week

Wrestling is good

i hope hangman is down at the bata shoe museum looking at the rough & ready exhibit

This is good satire: alignmentalignment.ai

Mind-blowing post detailing how xAI is not only building a massive new fossil fuelled power station for the second data centre to power X's Grok, it is doing it across state lines to avoid regulation Remind me again how it's all fine bc a single query is small... semianalysis.com/2025/09/16/x...

Happening in about 30 min!

Finally got my shortwave collective radio receiver to work!!!

an article asking whether it's feminist to use AI? i will get right around to reading that, but first, would you join me in the cellar for a moment? i have a lovely new cask of sherry of dubious origin i'd like your opinion on

Interested in environmental justice & how gender inequalities are embedded in technology infrastructure? Join us for the 4th Gender & Tech webinar, Sept. 29 11am EDT, with Paz Peña Ochoa & @tamigraph.bsky.social. Free & open. Registration: virginia.zoom.us/webinar/regi... Co-org w/ @yasmincurzi.com

I’m sorry but let me unbury this lede: *the genAI industry is literally the financial engine that is powering the fascist regime in the United States* I hadn’t even made this connection and now I’m even more horrified by this tech than I have ever been. Boosterism == fascism, literally

My noise band is playing with some very talented folks next week. Come for good times! Come for loud times!