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

https://parismarx.com/

Tech Won't Save Us

https://techwontsave.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

@richardsonma.bsky.social‬

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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. 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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