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. Released July 28, 2025.

The AI Con

https://thecon.ai/

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 [email protected] 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.

• 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/about
• https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/news/new-technologies-heroes-or-villains

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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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