Policymakers treat critical infrastructure as physical: power grids, communications networks, transportation systems, and satellites. In the age of generative AI, writes Rachel A. George, another kind deserves equal attention: the institutions that determine what governments believe to be true.

‘Polarization’ has become the master concept for diagnosing our current democratic crisis. But this is not polarization. It is the radicalization of the political right. By misdiagnosing it, we risk becoming complicit in the crisis. 🧵 Just out in Perspectives on Politics doi.org/10.1017/S153...

“Across democracies, the central dynamic is not two poles drifting apart but the transformation of the political right into authoritarianism, norm breaking, and openness to political violence”

Will you be at #POLLEN2026 in Barcelona next week? Join our session: Global Climate Change Solutions and Shrinking Civic Space in Southeast Asia Monday 29th June 15:30pm #PoliticalEcology @pollenetwork.bsky.social

I am shocked and flattered that this paper won the Best Paper Award (Honourable Mention) at #FAccT2026!

Excited for POLLEN 2026! Antulio Rosales and I organised two panels on #Extraction, Digital Infrastructures + #Nature. @pollenetwork.bsky.social Program here: lnkd.in/grA9wuRB

We are at POLLEN 2026! Join us on Thursday 02/07 at 11 am to examine how Aragón (Spain) is set to become the third major data centre hub in Europe. We will discuss how to explore alternatives to the massive expansion of data centres in the Iberian Peninsula. @pollenetwork.bsky.social

"Above is a fictional weather forecast for August 18, 2050, broadcast by French television in 2014, intended to warn against the disastrous consequences of global warming. Below is the weather forecast for June 22, 2026.” #ClimateChange has accelerated much more quickly…" - Pauline von Hellermann

In an analysis of about 3,600 climate-related lawsuits filed since 2015, the latest annual review of climate litigation by the LSE found a growing number of cases challenging the energy sources, water consumption and air pollution of datacentres: www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Watching BBC News and they just did 5 minutes with a doctor about how this heatwave is life threatening and the interviewer closed it with "well, it's just an opportunity to have ice cream for breakfast!!". Amazing clip of how the BBC seems just blissfully unaware of what is happening

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

London Climate Action Week is well underway! Today is the start of the @ox.ac.uk #LCAW2026 series. Check out the full calendar here: luma.com/calendar/cal.... All events in the series are taking place at Toynbee Hall in east London. Oxford Net Zero is co-hosting 3 public events today (🧵):

3 in 4 people globally are concerned about the generational risk to safety - of life & livelihoods - from the changing climate. This is the highest level ever recorded in the World Risk Poll launched today. www.lrfoundation.org.uk/news/global-...

AI coverage 1, Climate coverage 0: In comparison to AI, climate change barely received any media coverage as of late. open.substack.com/pub/felixsim...

Beijing imposed new export controls on 10 U.S. firms — including two companies at the heart of D.C.’s efforts to diversify away from Chinese rare earth metals — in retaliation for the blacklisting of dozens of Chinese tech companies from the U.S. military.

Recruiting: We're hiring a Departmental Lecturer in Computer Science to be responsible for teaching and supervision of undergraduate and graduate students within the department. Details & applications: my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

Much of Europe is sweating in an exceptional heat wave. Heat in Europe has increased 4 times more than in other mid-latitude areas, which has been linked to the Atlantic #coldblob in several studies. #AMOC Slide from a talk I'm about the present at London Climate Action Week #LCAW2026. 1/

La AEMET mantiene la alerta roja, de peligro extraordinario por altas temperaturas, en el interior de Bizkaia y Gipuzkoa, donde van a rondar los 40 grados hasta las 9 de la noche ▪️También hay aviso naranja por calor en otras 11 comunidades 🎙️Alejandro Losada

BBC article about Brian Ripley of the #RStats Core team given this week's excellent news concerning 2026 Rousseeuw Price for Statistics recognition for him and the core team. www.bbc.com/news/article...

New work from my lab! @teagrjohnson.bsky.social built a 12-dimensional narrative framework, annotated Dolma (no small feat given its extreme diversity), and analyzed narrative features across pretraining subsections. Highlight: pretraining data space displays strong narrative organization!

Picket schedule for Friday 19th! Come along!

According to this, a house built using the materials commonly used today (brick, steel, concrete, synthetic insulation etc.) will still be harmful to the climate in 1,000 years’ time. Even if it has a sustainability certificate.

This might be one of the funniest chart about energy scenarios I’ve seen. You can hardly see “actual” for gas

That's it. We face a contradiction when digital sovereignty and AI economic benefits are instrumentalised to justify environmental damage and increased carbon emissions: techcrunch.com/2026/06/16/d...

Britain will use AI to assess ages of asylum seekers in a world-first, with other countries likely to follow suit But our investigation, based on a leaked report and our own algorithmic audit, finds the technology is deeply unreliable

I got sent 11 expert scientist reactions to Australia's Bureau of Meteorology officially declaring a strong El Nino, and not a single one of the comments mentions fossil fuels, coal, gas, climate policy, power stations, transport, targets - nothing. Of course the media is going to take that lead..

Friendly reminder:

"Critical Data Studies in the Anthropocene" A chapter where I revisit the concept of the Anthropocene and its contributions to critical data studies. I also analyse two case studies in Spain and Chile by investigating how the Anthropocene helps to critically interrogate the materiality of data.

My prediction is that we will never have enough CO₂ removal (CDR), so overshoot is not a thing. We will hit 1.5°C global warming by 2030, and every tonne of CO₂ we emit will make the world warmer. Where we stop is entirely up to us, but there’s no dialing down the temperature after that.

Well, with this official Vatican + Anthropic mandate, I guess it was only a matter of time when the religion of effective altruism, worshipping so-called artificial general intelligence, merged with entrenched religious institutions.

There is A LOT of evidence for my claim. Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Larry Page, and just about everyone within the TESCREAL movement (William MacAskill, Toby Ord, Nick Bostrom, etc.) believe in this eschatological vision. From MacAskill's 2022 book "What We Owe the Future":

“Enjoyable doc” “also serves as a very useful, straightforward primer on AI history, touching on a dazzling array of colourful, often crazed figures.” FOUR STARS FROM THE GUARDIAN! www.theguardian.com/film/2026/ju...

Canterbury! Come out to the Gulbenkien Monday June 15th 7PM! Get your tickets today! thegulbenkian.co.uk/events/ghost...

The Nature Festival is back, courtesy of @biodivoxford.bsky.social 🥬 Oxford folk, ready yourselves for the last week of June, with nature walks, talks, workshops and activities (including those from the @oxon-mammal-group.bsky.social). The programme caters to all ages. 🧪🌏 thenaturefestival.org

Tomorrow, the House of Commons will debate the risks and opportunities of data centre sustainability. Read the written evidence that academics at @ox.ac.uk have submitted: committees.parliament.uk/writtenevide... committees.parliament.uk/work/9651/ri... @oii.ox.ac.uk @oxfordnetzero.bsky.social

Why we should rethink causal mediation, and what to do instead? Come to hear the answer from Vanessa Didelez at the next CIIG seminar! The seminar will be hybrid. If you are in London, come join us in person at UCL! Otherwise, you can join on Zoom as usual. Registration links in comment below.

Technically we're all data centers. We just run on 20 watt hours and 8 cups of water per day

I don’t know why I took the time to do this

El Papa, Percival Everett y A.G. Sulzberger vs. Tony Blair y otros palmeros de la IA. Escribo un artículo de la opinión sobre quienes no se están rindiendo sin más a lo que impongan unas pocas empresas en manos de unos pocos y poderosos multimillonarios www.eldiario.es/opinion/zona...

Is Anthropic a morally good AI company? (Spoiler: no) #ai #tech #anthropic #claude #pope

Data centres, the warehouses of servers that power AI and other digital services, consumed 448 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity in 2025. If data centres were a country, their consumption would have ranked in 11th place -- just under France with 468 TWh. www.france24.com/en/live-news...

‼️Updates on AI environmental impacts in the European context: I was interviewed by 3CAT.info about the environmental footprint of AI gigafactories. Governments are taking an ambiguous approach which risks jeopardising their own sustainability goals. www.3cat.cat/3catinfo/lim... @oii.ox.ac.uk

⏰ Status: Collapse 2030 and extinction approx. 2080. We can discuss where to fly - not weather to fly. We can discuss what to eat but not who not to eat. We pretend that life necessities that affect us all are private and personal decisions. We have privatized our lives, not individualized them.

Friendly reminder:

"The public has swung 49 points against data centers in just nine months" lol heatmap.news/politics/ame...

If you're wondering how we got here with the prolific data centers crap. chloehumbert.substack.com/p/trickle-do...