AOC just introduced the AI Data Center Moratorium Act, which bans the construction of data centers until Congress addresses all impacts of AI on our society and planet.

A new toolkit is out on data centre fights in Canada! It is very good! aicivilsociety.ca/ResistingAID... Read on for key info, tactics, and case studies, written by academics and activists in the trenches. #AI #Canada

honestly i welcome the data center lobby just openly saying climate goals needed to be trashed so the tech industry can build ai — intense heat waves, record forest fires, worsening natural disasters be damned

At the end of the term I asked my college creative wriing students to submit anonymous thoughts on AI. No real surprises: Mood ranges from resignation to despair, capitulation from embittered erosion of standards to total, feelings of betrayal from deep to furious. 1/

NEW: the US government intervened Monday on behalf of xAI in a lawsuit over its gas turbines, claiming that the company needs to run the turbines in order to power Grok, which is "vital" for national security lots of wild stuff in the filing:

3520 cases analysed. Conclusion: Meta is actively suppressing Palestinian content. “not the result of isolated errors, but reflects recurring patterns in policy application, enforcement practices, and communication with affected users.” 7amleh.org/post/meta-su...

Fascinating age split on this one. Young people are both more likely to use AI and more likely to want it to disappear.

The cost of data centres—New FoE Ireland report by CUSP fellow @seanfearon.bsky.social models how the growing data centre demand on the Irish electricity grid is pushing up electricity prices for households across the state. → cusp.ac.uk/themes/aetw/... cc #postgrowth #energy

French proposal to introduce the label 'without GenAI' in HE. This to guarantee that acquired competences are robust, autonomous and independent. It can also signal to certain employers that their recruits have real competences and are not reliant on an LLM to complete certain tasks.

Hvorfor opfordrer @politiken.dk ikke sine læsere til at underskrive borgerforslaget »Afskaf Palantir i Danmark«? #dkmedier #dkpol www.borgerforslag.dk/se-og-stoet-... 🎁

Using public funds to purchase our own deaths. Data centers that will emit more CO2 than the entire nation state of Jamaica.

AOC: This is what drinking water in Georgia looks like after Meta began data center construction in the community.

The Swedish 🇸🇪 Parliament just approved a law that would create a tiered citizenship scheme, with a 1st class (mostly for the native born) that cannot be revoked and a 2nd class (mostly for the naturalized) that can: www.svt.se/nyheter/inri... Only two parties (Left and Green) voted against.

Today @dairinstitute.bsky.social is releasing the Luddite Lab Resource Hub. The hub hosts case studies, resources, and political education for unions, labor organizations, and workers who want to fight “AI” and automation at work. labor.dair-institute.org

Good piece by Jefferson Pooley on how LLM-powered “research” tools like Google’s “Deep Research” and Elsevier’s “AI Discovery” likely strengthen the “Matthew effect”: highly-cited authors are amplified while undercited (often female) authors are increasingly ignored: blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

What happens when you feed a blank PDF to Google’s fake podcast maker? This.

Interesting article about the latest and ongoing Danish university reform: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/PR5YXJ...

This is a very bad take from Olga Tokarczuk. Writers, be careful: if your work is full of the tics and tells of a specific era of AI product, your legacy will end up wrecked, whatever level you started from. (Quoted from mycompanypolska.pl/artykul/olga...)

Anthropic is running a continuous research project inside real classrooms at scale and Google DeepMind is doing an RCT of an AI chatbot with 1500 UK schoolkids. Big tech is now all about evidencing AI effects through classroom experiments. The big question is... newsletters.qs.com/6a04954386e7...

The Kenyan government halted talks on a Microsoft AI data center after it became clear that the project would consume half the country's daily power output www.tomshardware.com/tech-industr...

Meet the academics refusing to use generative AI Researchers say they have their reasons for avoiding AI tools — and they’re sick of arguing about it. www.nature.com/articles/d41... h/t @maartenp.bsky.social

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."