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.

Outrageously pleasant feature of my CAIS office: There is always a puzzle in the kitchen you can pick contribute to when you need a little break/while waiting for your tea to steep

new publication! HOW #TRANSPARENCY WORKS check out my chapter "transparency and the meaning of #sustainability" in an excellent collection of essays that take an anthropological approach to transparency, out now & #openaccess from @universitypress.cambridge.org www.cambridge.org/core/books/h...

This one is going to be an interestingly divergent set of perspectives!

Tomorrow's #LunchTimeTalk: #CAISfellow Prof. Emily West (University of Massachusetts Amherst) explores how platforms like Google, Microsoft and Amazon act as climate governors in the age of generative AI. 🗓 Jan 28, 1:30-2:30 CET Join us at CAIS & online 🔗 www.cais-research.de/en/event/lun...

‘But what stood out to me as I listened to the recorded conversation between Nadella [CEO Microsoft] and Fink [CEO Blackrock] is that they have largely given up on organic adoption by consumers. They have moved on to a new dream of forced adoption mandated by government and managerial coercion.'

Delicious to me

I really like the new Anna Högberg Attack. Adding heavy guitar to free jazz squaks is a exactly my thing. I really hope I can somehow catch her + her band in Stockholm? annahogberg.bandcamp.com/album/ensams...

Couple'a thoughts on the staging of public history in Berlin and whether immersion is the best thing to aim for in a museum: sabbatical-ing.blogspot.com/2026/01/publ...

Reminder to self: When you say, nah I'll just write a new talk about that, you are conservatively committing to writing about 6,000 words...

I had a lovely time watching a 4 hour documentary on the history of (mostly subsea) telegraph cables, analogized through the 90s sitcom Home Improvement www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmyB...

"A US regulator ruled on Thursday that Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company had acted illegally by using dozens of methane gas turbines to power massive data centers in Tennessee." - @darakerr.bsky.social

I'm going to Cables of Resistance, a movement conference for anti-fascist/anti-climate delay tech activism in Berlin in April. Anyone else I know planning on being there? cableresist.de#overview

🎤 Join us for our first #LunchtimeTalk of 2026! Prof. Dr. Anne Pasek, newly started CAIS Fellow, will talk about "Examining the role of the digital sector in shaping climate policy". 📅 January 14, 2026 | 1:30 PM 📍 At CAIS in Bochum & online www.cais-research.de/en/event/lun... @apasek.bsky.social

I've started a blog (!) about life on sabbatical: sabbatical-ing.blogspot.com

The fight against fascism is also a fight for a shared sense of reality. We see demagogues twisting the facts and blatantly lying, while legacy media are keen to present every story as a matter of conflicting interpretations. With social media drowning in #AIslop, this is only going to get worse 1/

I'm finishing up a week as a tourist in Berlin, before heading on to Bochum for my fellowship. I think I'm going to start an honest-to-goodness blog to dump all my public thoughts in, but for now, please enjoy this 👌 painting, hung in the national gallery on the same floor as Caspar David Friedrich

What they don't tell you about sabbaticals is that you get to do an evil villain laugh while deleting calendar invitations to department meetings

Another inglorious addition to contemporary #WarroomStudies

much of fitness culture in the US was developed by people who literally entered sports and physical education instead of going to therapy and the attitudes around intensity and effort kinda reflect that. the smiling Jazzercise folks were right and your football coach / PE teacher was wrong

I LOVED this episode!

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! :)