Episodes
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In this episode, Shannon Wait — Alphabet Workers Union-CWA organizer — speaks with me about the labour conditions for data center and AI workers. We talk about contracts, sub-contracts, sub-sub-contracts, NDAs, invisible labour -- and how all of this leads to unions, solidarity, and a fight for tech workers’ rights globally. Recorded May 8, 2025. Released June 2, 2025.
Interview with Shannon Wait, Alphabet Workers Union-CWA Organizer (2024)
https://poweratwork.us/shannon-wait-interview
A union of Alphabet workers in the U.S. and Canada
https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/
Google Raters Participated in Historic Action at Google HQ to Demand Google End Poverty Wages for 5,000 Workers
https://code-cwa.org/news/google-raters-participated-historic-action
The woman who took on Google and won (2021)
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56659212
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Allison Carruth and I talk about her new book which gets at some of the material infrastructure and social systems that have made the US a settler state ever obsessed with new frontiers, including space. We talk about tech imaginaries, worlds remade, and better futures — a vision that invites confronting the state of things head-on, a slower redoing, and is based on connection, love, and friendship (maybe with aliens, too). Recorded May 7, 2025. Released May 19, 2025.
Novel Ecologies: Nature Remade and the Illusions of Tech (2025)
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo239362741.html
Allison Carruth
https://allisoncarruth.com/
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Missing episodes?
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In this episode, Dani Shanley and Gemma Milne walk me through "hype" -- what it means in various technological contexts, how it works, what it is definitionally, how it feels in the body, who it serves, who it harms, and how we might need to nuance our relationship to it, especially as critical (tech) scholars. Recorded May 1, 2025. Released May 5, 2025.
https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/gemma-milne/smoke-mirrors/9781472143655/https://radicalsciencepodcast.com/https://brainreel.substack.com/https://hypestudies.org/https://www.biss-institute.com/en/abouthttps://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/news/new-technologies-heroes-or-villainsHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Dustin Edwards and I discuss the damage caused by digital infrastructure and its extractive requirements. We talk about data centers and copper mines, but more than this, we delve into the what a decolonial, feminist, anti-racist approach can look like for white settler scholars grappling with their inheritances and obligations to the landscapes and to the stories they tell themselves, as we make (new) worlds. Recorded Apr 8, 2025. Released April 28, 2025.
Enduring Digital Damage: Rhetorical Reckonings for Planetary Survival
https://www.uapress.ua.edu/9780817322472/enduring-digital-damage/
The making of critical data center studies
Dustin Edwards, Zane Griffin Talley Cooper and Mél Hogan
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13548565231224157
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In this episode, I ask Jasmine McNealy about the role of consent online, from social media exchanges to the circulation of deep fakes. Who gets to define harm? Who is responsible for the damage? Does anyone have to take accountability? We also talk about surveillance, sonic privacy, and the many data trails the body leaves behind. Recorded Apr 4, 2025. Released April 14, 2025.
Sonic Privacy.
Yale Journal of Law & Technology/Yale ISP-Knight Foundation Public Sphere Series.
https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/area/center/isp/documents/mcnealy.pdf
Consent (Still) Won’t Save Us
Chapter from: Feminist Cyberlaw
https://uplopen.com/chapters/e/10.1525/luminos.190.p
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Collin Bjork and I discuss the double (triple?) meaning of "extractive AI". Collin explains Otter.ai -- an AI powered voice-to-text transcription software, and the capitalist logics that enable it -- vs. Maori-led Te Hiku Media, based on principles of stewardship, community and collaboration. Collin also explains how rhetoric is about togetherness more than persuasion. Recorded Feb 12, 2025. Released March 24, 2025.
Mentioned in ep:
Bad Ideas About Writing (Ball & Loewe); Extractive AI and Its Challenge to Technical Communication (Bjork; forthcoming, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, October 2025); "The Acousmatic Question and the Will to Datafy" (Sterne & Sawhney); "Big AI Companies Need Higher Ed...But Does Higher Ed Need Them?" (Bjork); "ChatGPT Threatens Language Diversity" (Bjork); Te Reo Māori Speech Recognition (Te Hiku Media); Abundant Intelligences - Indigenous AI (Jason Edward Lewis, Hemi Whaanga, et al...)
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In this episode Hagen Blix and I talk about how the fear of AI, from the non-billionaire CEO class, comes from the threat of deskilling workers. Recorded Mar 5, 2025. Released March 17, 2025.
Tech Workers Can Still Fight Silicon Valley’s Overlords
by Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer
https://jacobin.com/2025/02/tech-workers-silicon-valley-trump/
Why We Fear AI: On the Interpretation of Nightmares Paperback – March 21 2025
by Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer
https://www.commonnotions.org/why-we-fear-ai
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In this episode I speak with Kane Murdoch about the perils of contract cheating. As an integrity officer, he frames what's happening with "cheating" as an unlearning that we should all be paying attention to if we care about education. Recorded Feb 6, 2025. Released March 10, 2025.
Guerilla Warfare
https://www.guerillawarfare.net/
Ellis, C., & Murdoch, K. (2024). The educational integrity enforcement pyramid: a new framework for challenging and responding to student cheating. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 49(7), 924–934. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2024.2329167
Lures and violent threats: old school cheating still rampant at Australian universities, even as AI rises — The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/aug/01/lures-and-violent-threats-old-school-cheating-still-rampant-at-australian-universities-even-as-ai-rises
Ghost writers helping UNSW students to cheat on assessments, leaked report reveals
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/cheating-unsw-students-hire-ghost-writers-from-messaging-site-wechat-to-complete-work-20200505-p54q3f.html
Cheating found at UNSW up by 2000% as new detection methods used
https://www.smh.com.au/education/cheating-found-at-unsw-up-by-2000-percent-as-new-detection-methods-used-20190814-p52gz4.html
University students caught paying others to do their work at record levels
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/university-students-caught-paying-others-to-do-their-work-at-record-levels-20221025-p5bsrx.html
The Rise of Plagiarism: Contract Cheating
https://www.turnitin.ca/products/originality/contract-cheating
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AI images are circulating more and more online and sometimes we can't tell the 'real' from AI-generated. But as I discuss with the inimitable Gillian Rose and Roland Meyer, we need to think about AI images beyond their indexicality, i.e. the idea that a photograph is a direct representation of the subject it captures. In this episode, we grapple with AI generators that are part of extractive, colonial industries, and how that shapes the affect of AI visuals. Recorded Jan 29, 2025. Released Feb 24, 2025.
It’s a flat world. The Synthetic Realities of Sora
https://rrrreflect.org/special-issue-1/its-a-flat-world-the-synthetic-realities-of-sora
“It’s a flat world. The Synthetic Realities of AI Video” by Roland Meyer at Hidden Layers 24
https://vimeo.com/1011342969
The New Value of the Archive
AI Image Generation and the Visual Economy of ‘Style’
https://image-journal.de/the-new-value-of-the-archive/
“Generic Pastness. AI Image Synthesis and the Virtualization of the Archive”
https://vimeo.com/873978726
Models All The Way Down by Christo Buschek & Jer Thorp
https://knowingmachines.org/models-all-the-way
Gillian Rose, Professor of Human Geography
Fellow of the British Academy and Academy of Social Sciences
webpage: https://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/staff/grose.html
bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/profgillian.bsky.social
blog: visualmethodculture.wordpress.com
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In this episode Jathan Sadowski discusses the 'risk industry' as imagined by FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) and the asymmetries they create. Recorded January 15, 2025. Released February 10, 2025.
The Mechanic and the Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism
https://www.ucpress.edu/books/the-mechanic-and-the-luddite/paper
This Machine Kills: A podcast about technology and political economy
https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod
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Charles Logan is the go-to person to talk to about how AI is infiltrating the many layers of education, from K-12 to universities. In this conversation, we learn our lessons; we talk about what Ed Tech is, its promise and hype, and (ultimately) how to refuse it as professors and teach students to resist it as well. We also wonder about 'AI-proofing' the classroom and wether this is the way to deal with its onslaught. Recorded January 14, 2025. Released January 27, 2025.
Applying the Baldwin Test to Ed-Tech
https://www.civicsoftechnology.org/blog/applying-the-baldwin-test-to-ed-tech
The Captivating Creature from Educaria and Other Scary Stories
https://www.civicsoftechnology.org/blog/the-captivating-creature-from-educaria-and-other-scary-stories
Iggy Peck, Architect Is an AI Doomer and Other Things I Struggle to Talk with My Kids About
https://www.civicsoftechnology.org/blog/iggy-peck-architect-is-an-ai-doomer-and-other-things-i-struggle-to-talk-with-my-kids-about
Lessons on How to Practice Everyday Resistance and Refusal
https://www.civicsoftechnology.org/blog/lessons-on-how-to-practice-everyday-resistance-and-refusal
You need to talk to your kid about AI. Here are 6 things you should say.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/09/05/1079009/you-need-to-talk-to-your-kid-about-ai-here-are-6-things-you-should-say
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In this episode I speak with Dillon Mahmoudi and Anthony Levenda about the relationship (feedback loop) between data and urban planning. We focus on the idea of 'storying' data to make it compelling and to get past the inertia of data delivered as mere stats or numbers that have little resonance and don't (or no longer) move people to action, towards better living conditions. Recorded January 13, 2025. Released January 20, 2025.
The urban-tech feedback loop: a surveillance and development data-walk in South Lake Union
https://dillonm.io/papers/the-urban-tech-feedback-loop/
The Amazon Warehouse
https://dillonm.io/papers/the-amazon-warehouse/
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I got to speak with the brilliant Ali Alkhatib about his blog post "defining AI" -- an object, subject, metaphor, and discursive formation used amongst all of us trying to figure out how to grapple with AI's ownership, deployments, and impacts. Who gets to define AI? Is it just computer scientists? What are the stakes of having it defined only technologically? Recorded December 23, 2025. Released January 13, 2025.
Ali Alkhatib (website)
https://ali-alkhatib.com/
Defining AI
https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/defining-ai
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I start the new year with an episode on "data colonialism". I had the great pleasure of speaking with Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry about our contemporary relationship to corporations, about the idea that there’s no capitalism without colonialism (and vice versa), about how human lives are being exploited these days, and about data being a cheap resource. Recorded December 16, 2024. Released January 6, 2025.
Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo216184200.html
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Such a delight speaking with Déborah López and Hadin Charbel, incredible artists-architects-scholars as investigators of future possibilities in light of climate change rapidly changing arctic (and other) landscapes. We discuss a range of art projects, from large installations to projections to speculative fiction, and how these modes and conditions can help us think and feel about alternate endings -- in our teaching and in our day to day embodied, lived realities. Recorded Dec 12, 2024. Released Dec 30, 2024.
Artists website
https://pareid.com/
Artists Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/pareid.architecture/
Pareid creates organ-like installation from corrugated plastic tubes in Madrid
https://www.dezeen.com/2022/04/20/pareid-everywhere-nowhere-installation-urvanity/
Re: Arctic
https://vimeo.com/469736816?&login=true
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In this episode, I spoke with Chris Gilliard (@hypervisible) about AI’s encroachment on universities and what this means for collaboration — i.e. learning, writing, thinking and feeling. This conversation puts out a warning of sorts to universities adopting AI given that, as a technology, it is built off of stolen materials, relies on extraction and colonial labour practices, is racist, misogynist and transphobic in its outputs, and terrible for the environment — all issues the university claim to value and fight against? Recorded Dec 11, 2024. Released Dec 16, 2024.
“ChatGPT Should Not Exist” by David Golumbia (Dec 14, 2022)
https://davidgolumbia.medium.com/chatgpt-should-not-exist-aab0867abace
“Practico-inertia” by Rob Horning (March 1, 2024)
https://robhorning.substack.com/p/practico-inertia
“Critical keywords of AI in education” by Ben Williamson (November 8, 2024 )
https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/
“Big AI Companies Need Higher Ed … but Does Higher Ed Need Them?” by Collin Bjork (Dec 2, 2024)
https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2024/12/02/universities-must-beware-reliance-big-ai-opinion
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It was a real honour and joy to speak with someone whose work has so significantly shaped my own (and many of us writing about data centers): Jennifer Holt joined me for a chat about US cloud policy. The Cloud is understood in this episode through the lens of policy, which means we grapple with who owns data, its infrastructures and our data futures. We also talked a bit about what the latest US elections might mean for Big Tech... Recorded Nov 20, 2024. Released Nov 25, 2024.
Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262548069/cloud-policy/
CMSW podcast: Jennifer Holt, “Cloud Policy: Anatomy of a Regulatory Crisis”
https://cmsw.mit.edu/podcast-jennifer-holt-cloud-policy-anatomy-regulatory-crisis/
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Listen to the data center's hum with your feet first... on this episode, Trent Wintermeier and I discuss what it means to absorb sound through the body and "hear" vibrations with and through your limbs and ears. We discuss what this means for folks living near data centers, especially in places imagined as kinds of sacrifice zones. Recorded Oct 9, 2024. Release Nov 11, 2024.
Trent Wintermeier
https://trentwintermeier.cargo.site
Affective Footprints
https://www.heliotropejournal.net/helio/affective-footprints
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In this episode, I have a conversation with Remmelt Ellen from AI Safety Camp. We discuss AI safety and his 44-page book Artifical Bodies outlining AI harms from the perspective of someone really grappling with the ethics, hype, and harms of the industry and beyond. Recorded Oct 4, 2024. Released Oct 28, 2024.
Artificial Bodies
https://workflowy.com/s/artificial-bodies/znDloerXJaEQvKF6#/846236876b45
AI Safety Camp
https://www.aisafety.camp/
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Everyone should read Lisa Yin Han's Deepwater Alchemy! It's a stunningly well written book about how we come to value the ocean through various extractive mediations. Recorded Sept 27, 2024. Released Oct 14, 2024.
Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor
How underwater mediation has transformed deep-sea spaces into resource-rich frontiers
https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517915940/deepwater-alchemy
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