Some rando trying to sell AI grading systems made the mistake of cold emailing me at work and I had prosecco for dinner so I replied with a link to @danmcquillan.bsky.social's "the role of the university is to resist AI" 🤷‍♀️

Papier-mâché Mussolini

Perhaps the mistake was talking about the 'digital commons' as if a separate, unsullied space could host the social relations we were long robbed of, when we should have been talking about 'commons digital'; real common ownership of the infrastructure lock, stock and barrel?

Oxford showing its raggedy arse

#defendexeteruni c.org/sffZcfYxMw

Advocating for "AI sovereignty" is another way to call for a war economy.

Let's just stop pretending that calculative prediction is a valid framing in most social settings. Dump the ML, invest in people. #FAccT2026 #decomputing

As media opinion increasingly tries to discredit data centre opposition for being reactionary populism, it's important for campaigns to squash any possible far right infiltration by explicitly declaring themselves as anti-racist and anti-fascist.

If you're interested in this talk but can't make it today, I'll be re-hashing a version with more emphasis on care services for the Newcastle Youth Studies seminar tomorrow (Wednesday) at 9am GMT. Registration here www.eventbrite.com.au/e/from-resis...

Very late notice, but I'll be doing an informal talk and discussion for SPINE (Speculative Inquiry into Ethics) tomorrow on 'AI, Decomputing and its Discontents'. Open registration events.teams.microsoft.com/event/efc27d...

So...the originators of the nudity detection software which UK gov mandated today say this is all God's doing, so it's a good thing there isn't a Christofascist regime anywhere looking for technology partners or anything like that. www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkPm... h/t @owenboswarva.bsky.social

It's bizarre that 'transparency' remains part of Responsible AI narratives. This is the most mask-off moment in decades; the technopolitical hegemony is very transparent about the fact that we & the rest of the biosphere are disposable accessories to their desire for domination.

Having already fast tracked resistance to these products as terrorism, the next step is to frame resistance as a form of discrimination.

thesis: people's councils are the militant wing of the pluriverse

"Salvia Women's Therapy Centre provides mental health services for women who would not normally have access due to poverty, ethnicity or learning disability. Their experiences include trauma from domestic abuse, trafficking and FGM." #fundraiser www.justgiving.com/charity/salv...

This seems like an important initiative. 'Archaeologists Resisting Far-Right Appropriation' archaeologistsrfa.wordpress.com @a-rfa.bsky.social (h/t today's 'Teaching Anti-Fascism' workshop at ilcs.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...)

The belief that tech==progress seems to me to be one of the deepest colonialisms.

Big tech has spent literal trillions of USD on datacenters. Governments and others many hundreds of billions. To do what exactly? What hungry child is fed by onlining another GPU? What peace is achieved by way of chatbots? Is the bottleneck for a better world really 'not enough computer'?

Virtual Assembly of the Critical AI Network, 27th-29th May, online. 27 amazing talks + 3 keynotes + plenary discussions. AI/Education, AI/Law+Politics, AI/Environment. Registration & network sign-up: cpct.uk/2026/05/09/p... Full programme: docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Virtual Assembly of the Critical AI Network, 27th-29th May, online. 27 amazing talks + 3 keynotes + plenary discussions. AI/Education, AI/Law+Politics, AI/Environment. Registration & network sign-up: cpct.uk/2026/05/09/p... Full programme: docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Dear Wes Streeting, thank you for trying to force GPs in the UK to use these systems.

@olivia.science People are confident and wrong about LLMs in the same way they used to be confident and wrong about Radium paint. Like yeah it's a novel thing but maybe folks shouldn't be licking the paintbrushes

Two factors dominate UK higher education right now: 1) mass redundancies, especially in subjects that emphasise critical thinking. 2) the growing pervasiveness of AI. This is what we call 'technopolitics'.

Er, I meant to say 'only TWO weeks until...' 😳

Only one week until the first virtual assembly of our Critical AI Network “How do we break something that is already broken?”. Three days of quick-fire presentations + keynotes on AI in/as Education, AI in/as Law, Governance & Politics, The Ecology of AI/AI & the Environment cpct.uk/2026/05/09/p...

In times of acute crisis, such as our moment, it's vital to sharpen your thinking (now under assault). In this conversation, we continue providing guidance about dialectical materialism: youtu.be/7_AJwzgfilI?...

Dr @danmcquillan.bsky.social is amongst the experts interviewed in Ghost in the Machine, a new Sundance Film Festival documentary. www.gold.ac.uk/news/2026/gh...

"In the same way it's impossible to read a human mind, it's hard to know what an AI is thinking" IT'S NOT THINKING. "It takes an AI's internal thoughts" IT'S NOT THINKING. "Just like you and me Claude doesn't say everything it's thinking" IT'S NOT THINKING. Pure 💩 get serious.

Looking forward to learning from colleagues at next week's workshop on 'Teaching Anti-Fascism Today' ilcs.sas.ac.uk/news-events/.... I'll argue that anti-fascist pedagogy can be undermined by forms of microfascism manifesting as advanced technologies danmcquillan.org/teaching_ant...

I have a 4th position on AI (not sci-fi, not productive, not normal, but diagnostic of systemic collapse). More in 'AI, Decomputing and the Interregnum' - paper zenodo.org/records/1945..., video www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh0U...

We tried to warn you about Anthropic. Now they're using xAI's ultra-polluting community-killing nightmare data centre to power your toxic claude relationship All the new paid subs from @rutgerbregman.com and @quitgpt.bsky.social's campaign, now powered by Musk 🫠 www.anthropic.com/news/higher-...

Book launch in London next week for @thomas-dekeyser.bsky.social's excellent contribution to the struggle: 'An Evening of Techno-Negativity with MayDay rooms and Thomas Dekeyser' maydayrooms.org/event/an-eve...

How very Silicon Valley / Starmer's Labour; the conduit from Big Tech who passed messages to Reeves to sabotage regulation and boost AI growth zones had a previous job where he "ran a corporate intelligence firm founded by former British spies". archive.ph/45OwE

My co-panellists on this BUP webinar will be Masoumeh Iran Mansouri ('How to be ‘anti-AI’ in the 21st century' bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journal...) and Patrick Brodie ('From the Bog to the Cloud - Dependency and Eco-Modernity in Ireland') bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/from-the-bog...

Anyone seen a good analysis of colleague-skills archive.ph/uvqBx and anti-distillation officechai.com/ai/chinas-wo...? Seems like a 'moral panic' that fuses legit fear of bosses replacing workers with hype about limited and hugely unreliable agentic AI.

RIP Ben Morea (1941-2026), still a motherfucker libcom.org/article/agai...

As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day, A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses, For the people hear us singing, "Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_a...

The video is out from my Rogers Chair lecture at Western University in March: 'AI is a Morbid Symptom of the Interregnum' www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh0U... (yes I did use an exploded view of a Gaggia espresso machine as a slide to accompany 'convivial tools')

The video is out from my Rogers Chair lecture at Western University in March: 'AI is a Morbid Symptom of the Interregnum' www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh0U... (yes I did use an exploded view of a Gaggia espresso machine as a slide to accompany 'convivial tools')

Sharing this screen grab from a friend at NIH (with permission). This is a checklist program officers have to complete before a grant can be awarded. The first question: "Is this grant All Clean/Clear in the NIH Text analysis Tool?" 🧵1/3

Thanks to Mél Hogan for this wide ranging conversation about AI in which we cover simulation, shame, system collapse and even some hopeful ways forward. shows.acast.com/the-data-fix...

'AI, Decomputing and the Interregnum' zenodo.org/records/1945...

"We need to learn from systems that support self-organisation under emergency conditions, whether it's resistance to ICE or hurricane recovery, as ways to survive what's coming as well as to prefigure alternative futures. The time is ripe for experiments in infrastructured mutuality."

"Fascism doesn't return as a tick list of characteristics. Fascism is a fluid and dynamic force which operates at the level of social desires before it appears as jackboots. We need to learn to sense it in our infrastructures as well as in our political discourse."

I posted my speaker notes from the opening plenary ('The Empire of Big Tech') and the afternoon panel ('Is This Technofascism?') danmcquillan.org/resisting_bi...

Homage to Derrida #98: Polymarket is only there to make us believe that other claims about 'the market' are real.

We don’t need to keep a human-in-the-loop, we need to get AI out of the loop altogether! The whole point of AI is to remove the frictions of individual conscience and collective refusal.