Absolute must read on the AI bailout-in-progress: apparently it's not enough that lifetimes of human ingenuity and creativity have been stolen and enclosed to create generative AI and balloon billionaire wealth - much more public looting is in store...

"The question now is whether democratic societies can recognize this formation for what it is—and build alternatives before the infrastructure of control becomes too deeply embedded to dislodge."

The situation in Tanzania is worse than we realised. Some journalists have managed to smuggle information out of the country. Current death toll is close to 1,000 by some reports. A harshly enforced curfew is in place.

what exactly is "winning the AI race? environmental destruction, labor extraction, ever more intrusive surveillance, mass manipulation, and unprecedented power for the handful???

To conclude: my silver lining hope is that AWS going down can be a learning moment, in which the risks of concentrating the nervous system of our world in the hands of a few players become very clear. And that this can help us craft ways of undoing this concentration and creating real choice ❤️ 13/

Concerning, bc it indicates that the extent of the concentration of power in the hands of a few hyperscalers is way less widely understood than I’d assumed. Which bodes poorly for our ability to craft reality-based strategies capable of contesting this concentration & solving the real problem. 2/

👇 'The result is a surplus of individual exposure to information and a deficit of shared context or mutual understanding of how decisions are made and who makes them.’

"reports on AI pay lip service to the idea that our collective future alongside AI must be determined through public engagement"... but we need more than that. In this piece, @annacolom.bsky.social and I make the case for structurally embedding public voice into the UN's new spaces of AI governance

“This trial exposed their true aim: to intimidate and silence anyone who dares oppose them,” he added. “If we fail to fight back, Trump’s thought police won’t stop at pro-Palestinian voices – they will come for anyone who speaks out.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

“To be a good scientist, I have to take emotions out of work. Still, I would say looking at this data, when I allow myself to connect to it emotionally, then I am afraid. This really scares me” - Dr. Levke Caesar, co-lead of Planetary Boundaries Science Lab

Academics are under unrelenting pressure to accept the narrative of the inevitability of #generativeAI & to embrace it in teaching & learning. We resist - because it is ecologically destructive, ethically corrupt, & because it undermines the thinking abilities that make us both human & intelligent.

I enjoyed this podcast conversation with Josh Glover and Ray McDermott following my talk at Heart of Clojure last year 'From hype to responsibility: who decides what matters in data and AI?'. You can listen here: zencastr.com/z/d_wGkrPd Also looking fwd to their new politechs.bsky.social series!

Pausing my summer social media break to share this excellent new investigation into Big AI's environmental footprint - across Chile, Mexico, and Spain - by @pjarandia.bsky.social. Check it out (español): elpais.com/tecnologia/2...

'For the colonial conqueror, it was not enough to introduce an additional language to any community. Imperial languages had to be planted on the graveyard of the languages of the dominated.' www.theguardian.com/books/2025/a...

New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41... We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance 1/

'At least 16 people killed [by police] and 400 injured in Kenyan protests'. Enough of the killings, arrests, disappearances and media blackouts. Heartbreaking and enraging - thinking of friends and colleagues 🙏 www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

A young Kenyan activist has been arrested for launching a website to allow people to follow the legislative journey of this year’s finance bill. She has been denied bail. Public participation is enshrined in the constitution. #Kenya

So long, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o www.bbc.com/news/article...

"We were excited to have a panel accepted on the role of technology in genocide in Gaza at this year’s Computers, Privacy & Data Protection (CPDP) conference in Brussels. However, CPDP then requested that Access Now & others remove the word “genocide” from panel titles & descriptions. We declined."

"LLMs do not distinguish between fact & fiction. They are not designed to tell the truth. They are designed to persuade, yet they are implemented in sectors where truth & detail matter, e.g. education, science, health, the media, law, & finance." My interview @washingtonpost.com tinyurl.com/2e7253ja

"For me, the answer now lies in refusal, the withdrawal of participation from systems that require dishonesty as the price of belonging." Today I am resigning from the National Science Board and the Library of Congress Scholars Council. I wrote about my decision in TIME. time.com/7285045/resi...

Next up, @annpettifor.bsky.social writes on the collapse of globalisation. Sure, the liberal economic order has failed. But Trump’s radical rewiring of the system will only make it worse. www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/econom...

This is a really helpful report, congratulations @ievaces.bsky.social Felipe Rey and Santiago Niño-Aguilar and Democracy R&D network - thanks for providing this overview!

In this new article @martapoblet.bsky.social and I propose a polycentric democratic governance approach for Europe's digital future. Some of the main points in the thread below 👇 medium.com/@TheDataTank... #democracy #digitalsovereignty #datagovernance #eurostack

Today is the World Day of Glaciers. It is almost 15 years since I made this documentary in the Everest region to film the Imja lake and document the risk posed by the melting of glaciers like Imja. The film was commissioned by Minority Rights Group @minorityrights.bsky.social vimeo.com/annacolom

Segons el periodista @pjarandia.bsky.social , quan fa més de 🌡️29,4 °C, Amazon activa sistemes que gasten milers de litres d’aigua… 👁️ Qui controla el consum?

'When it comes to our common future, we are all experts.' www.buergerrat.de/en/news/citi...

I could also have titled this 'From Chicago Boys to Silicon Valley Bros'...

"AI technology appears to outperform humans. But a closer look reveals that these games are rigged. The competitions do not actually ask machines to perform human tasks; it’s more accurate to say that they ask humans to behave in machine-like ways as they perform lifeless simulacra of human tasks."

New co-authored piece. PS. So pleased that @techpolicypress.bsky.social coincidentally chose one my all-time favourite illustrations of @betterimagesofai.bsky.social! @martapoblet.bsky.social @timdavies.org.uk @justinhendrix.bsky.social

Worth spending some time on this comprehensive piece of work: 'Information Ecosystem and Troubled Democracy: A Global Synthesis of the State of Knowledge on News Media, AI and Data Governance' observatory.informationdemocracy.org/report/infor...

The Ostbelgien Model for an institutionalised citizens' assembly (a deliberative mini-public): lessons learned five years on: www.publicdeliberation.net/the-ostbelgi...

READ EVERY LETTER: America is on the cusp of competitive authoritarianism. The Trump administration has already begun to weaponize state institutions and deploy them against opponents. The Constitution alone cannot save U.S. democracy ↘️ www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...

Denying refugees citizenship simply on the grounds that they arrived here “illegally” on small boats *when there are no legal routes* for most to use takes cynicism to new heights. If Govt thinks such performative cruelty will see off Reform, they’re wrong - it’s more likely to strengthen it

Exactly, but also, to me the UK is signalling being ok to support or be submissive to an unfolding authoritarian regime or a tech-enabled coup. Whichever label we use as events develop, the point is the UK signals being ok with what is clearly a serious democratic backsliding to put it lightly.

Exactly this is how I've felt from the start of the Summit. No naming of the 'monsters in the room'. And soon we will ask ourselves what did we do and say when tech enabled fascism was unfolding. Thanks for the podcast @alixdunn.com @abeba.bsky.social @ambakak.bsky.social Nabiha Syed Astha Kapoor.

🚨As leaders gather for the Paris #AIActionSummit, they must confront a stark reality: rapid deployment of AI in the public sector is deepening inequality, expanding mass surveillance, & violating human rights. Our analysis in @techpolicypress.bsky.social 👇

Two new civil society statements on the planetary impact of unfettered (generative) AI expansion released this week in the run up to the Paris AI Action Summit. While the two statements are different in terms of scope, audience and political demands, they strongly complement each other.

It was a real pleasure to speak at SPUI25 in Amsterdam alongside the authors of a really great report (lnkd.in/dQqRw_e5 ). Cool venue, great audience & a wonderful group of academics I was lucky to meet or reconnect with. Watch it here 👇 #datagovernance #datacommons spui25.nl/programma/un...

European and British leaders should observe what is happening, turn immediately to their own digital dependencies, an act. We have critical digital infrastructure owned by the same people. This is a big deal.

Friends, for something to be open source, we need to see 1. The data it was trained & evaluated on 2. The code 3. Model architecture 4. Model weights. DeepSeek only gives 3, 4. And I'll see the day that anyone gives us #1 without being forced to do so, because all of them are stealing data.

Same ‘invisible hand’, isn’t it - the one that would ensure neoliberal market imperialism would ‘trickle down’ (lol), is the same leading Big Tech’s narrative that AI needs unregulated growth and resource depletion for it to one day solve the crises in our planet and our public services. Old tricks…

With the market & AI mythos reeling post-DeepSeek, it seems like a good time to reup this year-old paper, on the perils of the "bigger is better" approach to AI, coauthored with @sashamtl.bsky.social + @gaelvaroquaux.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2409.14160

Wait a minute. You mean to say that we don’t need to blanket the earth with data centers and coal & gas plants to maybe arrive at a future where we can wave a magical AGI wand to make all of the consequences of that go away? Yes. This is a false trade off. Let that sink in. 16/

it’s mad to me how big tech and AI companies dumps their trash into the world and it is up to everyone else (academics, civil society, educators, regulators, etc) to deal with it…. to assess the merit/usefulness, clean up their mess, and come up with alternatives

This. And journalists must not allow them to have us calling civil rights DEI, because that is part of the propaganda.

Pixelfed, the open source and decentralised alternative to Instagram has now its own apps in both Android and iOS. I had tried it when it was still in beta testing and I have now joined the official app. It's great. There is also a kickstarter if you want to help. www.kickstarter.com/projects/pix...

"there actually has been a really important right-wing strain in Silicon Valley for decades at this point. And a lot of what we’re seeing right now is that coming to fruition, really reaching an apex, rather than emerging out of nowhere." -- @beccalew.bsky.social