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Host of Tech Won't Save Us and acclaimed tech critic, author, and international speaker, Paris Marx joins me for this episode where we discuss AI futures in a Canadian context: the idea of a "sovereign cloud", an "AI minister", and much more! Recorded Oct 15, 2025. Released Oct 20, 2025.
Website
Tech Won't Save Us
Disconnect
https://disconnect.blog/im-writing-a-new-book/
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In this episode, I get to chat with the brilliant Michael Richardson on the concept of "Nonhuman Witnessing" especially in how this relates to algorithms and AI. In his book, "Nonhuman Witnessing" (Duke), he argues that a "radical rethinking of what counts as witnessing is central to building frameworks for justice in an era of endless war, ecological catastrophe, and technological capture". Recorded August 13, 2025. Released August 25, 2025.
Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Data, and Ecology after the End of the World (Duke, 2024)
https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/3310/Nonhuman-WitnessingWar-Data-and-Ecology-after-the
Website
https://www.unsw.edu.au/staff/michael-richardson
Bluesky
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Rohit Revi walks us through paranoia, care, conspiracy, capitalism, and catastrophe, in relation to technology and culture, to draw us into a deeper consideration of collective psychic resources and psychological commons. We talk about psychometry and linger on the dopaminergic. Recorded July 16, 2025. Released August 11, 2025.
Great Delirium: Culture, Technology, and Paranoia in the New Age of Catastrophe
(2025-02-24) Revi, Rohit; Cultural Studies; Murakami Wood, David; McBlane, Angus
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Emily M.Bender and Alex Hanna have been leading the charge against "AI", helping us understand it for the con that it is, and how AI companies are turning to health, education, and other social realms to try to recover their costs. In this episode we discuss LLMs vs. what the AI (and AGI) con is -- who benefits, and who loses -- and much more. Recorded July 15, 2025. Releases July 28, 2025.
The AI Con
Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000
https://www.dair-institute.org/maiht3k/
The predatory fantasy of worker empowerment in AI marketing
Justine Zhang, Su Lin Blodgett, Nina Markl
AI x Crisis: Tracing New Directions Beyond Deployment and Use workshop, Aarhus 2025.
AI isn’t replacing student writing – but it is reshaping it
https://theconversation.com/ai-isnt-replacing-student-writing-but-it-is-reshaping-it-254878
Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4
https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712
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In this episode, Paul Schütze and I pick apart the inherent contradictions of “sustainable AI”, marketing language that aims to convince the public that one of the most extractive industries can be used to solve climate change. We delve into the layers of control embedded in the logics of AI, when technology becomes the fix that needs fixing. Recorded May 20, 2025. Released July 7, 2025.
The impacts of AI Futurism
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09758-6
The Problem of Sustainable AI
https://doi.org/10.34669/WI.WJDS/4.1.4
contact paul.schuetze@uos.de and website: paulschuetze.de
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In this episode I speak with Rebecca Kilberg, Mary-Clare Bosco and Jonathan Gilmour who together use policy approaches to solve problems related to data center water usage and the various planetary and health outcomes that emerge from water consumption and extraction. They talk about how you get such data and what to do with it, and the importance of creating many local sites of resistance for a more sustainable future. Want in? Get in touch. Recorded May 19, 2025. Released June 16, 2025.
Voices: Data centers must be transparent about water usage — for the sake of the Great Salt Lake
https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2024/12/31/voices-utah-data-centers-must-be
Reducing Data Centers’ Water Consumption
https://aspenpolicyacademy.org/project/reducing-data-centers-water-consumption
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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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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.
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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
Ghost writers helping UNSW students to cheat on assessments, leaked report reveals
Cheating found at UNSW up by 2000% as new detection methods used
University students caught paying others to do their work at record levels
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
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”
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
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.
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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)
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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