Officially released today!💥Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine💥 Tracing the refusal that haunts the history of tech, my book offers a source of inspiration for those looking for a new tech politics beyond reform/acceleration. www.upress.umn.edu/978151791773... Buy w/ discount👇

Job announcement: Three Lecturers in Digital Media and Culture at the University of Manchester Details, including the full job description and person specification, are available here: www.jobs.manchester.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

What the hell www.newyorker.com/culture/prog...

fun times to be a journal editor these days...

Alarmingly this isn’t the only AIEd booster paper that’s been retracted recently. As Ben rightly points out, this stuff will likely stick as convenient affirmation for uncritical thinkers. AIEd is always complex so be skeptical of putative clear cut breakthrough outcomes.

De sidste ti år har der været stor begejstring for at bygge datacentre i de danske kommuner. Men det er på tide at få en national debat om konsekvenserne for især den grønne omstilling. Læs lederen her: www.information.dk/indland/lede... Tekst: Otto Lerche Kristiansen Foto: Jakob Dall

New technologies have long been expected to solve social problems. In the 19th century, the telegraph was sold as a way to end war by reducing misunderstanding between nations. Today we are launching Techno-Optimism Archive, which collects historical press materials documenting old tech promises

Today, Palantir posted their manifesto to millions. I published an analysis of exactly this text in @sciasculture.bsky.social, arguing it functions not as political theory but as a corporate manifesto for the nationalist-militarist faction of the tech oligarchy. www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

The publication of this article has managed to get all the white men academics on X really really angry--even if they do not actually do qualitative research and are not qualified to comment. Once again, why are the AIbros so ANGRY when we refuse? journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Didn't think I would be reposting Pope Leo today, but here you go

Microsoft and other US tech companies successfully lobbied the EU to hide the environmental toll of their data centers, Investigate Europe reports in collaboration with Tech Policy Press and other media partners.

“The researchers found that 40% of workers had encountered workslop within a month, and then spent an average of 3.4 hours a month dealing with it – which the study estimates adds up to $8.1m in lost productivity for a 10,000-person organization.” www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

"Unsettling a field, a theory, an epistemology seems so insignificant when genocide has become ambient, when the field we operate in has chosen not to reply, to defer their outrage to a safer future, to wait for things to blow over." doi.org/10.1093/ccc/... Very powerful piece @icahdq.bsky.social

Wikipedia now has higher standards than all universities

Edinburgh staff urge university to ditch OpenAI deal: www.timeshighereducation.com/news/edinbur...

"AI cannot coexist with education. It can only degrade it."

Everything old is new again. Except this isn't that old, and we should really listen to the lessons of the past 25 years. Most of the solutions to these problems aren't going to be technical. They are going to be normative and cultural and political, just like the social media questions were.

A California jury just found Meta and YouTube negligent for designing their products be addictive to children: www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

The Trump administration has agreed to pay TotalEnergies almost $1bn to pull out of offshore wind in the US and invest instead in oil and gas production. Tax payers’ money to ensure continued demand for oil and gas. Complete madness. www.ft.com/content/ae51...

"ChatGPT, one of the most widely used models, covered distinctive content in 54% of responses but almost never credited the originating newsroom." www.niemanlab.org/2026/03/chat...

kind of seems like the people saying data center energy use is overstated were full of shit

To everyone out there who defends and encourages reliance on generative AI: I want you to explain to me how software systems that do this is not just defensible but something good and to be encouraged. Go on. Explain it to me, right now. www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

Happy to have a chapter in this fabulous book co-edited by Crystal Chokshi and Robin Mansell. 15 chapters argue how and why to rename tech, including the smart city, ChatGPT, and, in my case, predictive technologies. Beautifully illustrated by Doan Truong. link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

🌐🏫 #AI is rapidly transforming #HigherEducation, but who governs it? 📚 At last week's joint ETUI-ETUCE book launch, scholars, researchers and trade unionists explored how artificial intelligence is reshaping universities. 🔗 Access the new book here: etui.org/437 @etuce.bsky.social

yesss shove it in my veins Chapter 11 Strategies for organising against AI in higher education Robert Ovetz and Lindsay Weinber > the future of AI in higher education is not a foregone conclusion. Academic workers can organise to contest, refuse and ban extractive AI

Although AI consumes a lot of water and energy, its biggest environmental impact is that it reproduces values that got us into the climate crisis in the first place: extraction, productivity, and efficiency. I spoke to @paulschuetze.bsky.social about his research on this!

Back in September, OpenAI released a paper showing that ChatGPT will always make things up. Not sometimes. Not until the next update. Always. It's how the system fundamentally works. Which means there is no "fix."

Tired of AI hype posts? You might like my sober assessment of whether AI-generated summaries are suitable for studying and research. Spoiler alert, they are not. The text is primarily aimed at students and researchers, but has much broader relevance. So share freely!: www.tue.nl/en/our-unive...

My university might be OK with it de-skilling students but I am certainly not going to let it de-skill me

“Rejecting or resisting a commercial technology designed to attempt a mass wealth transfer and to erode public institutions is a valid political position.”

It's U.S. foreign policy that the whole world must serve up our data to the AI giants that are now an arm of the U.S. government. www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

The launch of every piece of AI-driven surveillance/security/criminal justice software basically goes like this: AI COMPANY: this is an error free, bias free, state of the art, highly intelligent software system Two Weeks Later: …aaaand it’s racist

just spitballing but some of it might have something to do with 15 years of sociopathic behavior culminating in the enthusiastic embrace of violent fascism

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!

Anthropic was supposed to be the "good" one, right?

After 10 years and no evidence that it ever worked for crime prevention the Dutch police has decided to stop using their predictive policing system CAS!! amsterdam.raadsinformatie.nl/document/165...

This (about the 'new' Grammarly AI toolset) is absolutely terrifying, not because the tool is good, but because it is an easy, all-in-one, way to avoid thinking any thoughts or doing any work at all *and 3000 universities say its OK to use*. www.carleton.edu/ai/blog/gram...

OKAY BIG ONE FOR YA NEW report out today: I dig deep into how big tech has been muddling tech types and overstating evidence to claim "AI" will make global emissions drop like a stone.... Not only will it not, it seems to be verifiably doing the opposite!! ketanjoshi.co/2026/02/17/b... + 📼+🧵>

Palestine Action have WON their judicial review in the High Court! A massive victory for free speech, freedom of association and the right to protest. A massive defeat for the draconian attempts by Keir Starmer's government to curtail our fundamental rights.

OpenAI has disbanded the team it formed in 2024 to advance the company's stated mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. They’re speed running the rise and fall of Google’s reputation down to when they got rid of “Don’t be evil” as a company motto.

Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post is now saying Trump is right to roll back climate science and pollution protections at the EPA.

The Real Cost of the UK’s ‘Free AI Training for All’ is Democracy via @elinorcarmi.bsky.social and co. Thank you for writing this. www.techpolicy.press/the-real-cos...

Google are *proactively* supporting ICE by voluntarily providing data without legal requirement to do so. Look at this list: "Google also turned over Thomas-Johnson’s IP addresses, phone numbers, subscriber numbers and identities, and credit card and bank account numbers linked to his account." 🧵

The role of #GenAI in children’s development is ambivalent, and their opportunities (scaffolding learning) can easily turn into harmful consequences (deskilling and disempowerment). Read more here researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/13... #SaferInternetDay

As these teens describe, AI can diminish human relationships; devalue art; threaten the environment; lead to laziness; give unreliable results; pose privacy concerns; and be misused. So, please, stop with the narratives of inevitability and let's embrace a pedagogy and politics of refusal.

Not just any journalist, she won the goddamn Triple Crown of broadcast journalism (an Emmy, a Peabody, and a Murrow) in 2024 for her reporting on Gaza. This is textbook censorship of the highest degree