Allbirds shares jump over 400% on plans to pivot to AI from sneakers Shares of Allbirds surged more than five-fold on Wednesday after the footwear maker said it was raising capital and pivoting towards AI computing infrastructure.

San Francisco punchline inside a San Francisco punchline like a slop turducken

Register for our Data Center Policy in Practice training series, kicking off April 22. Each session dives into a specific policy area (zoning, water, energy, taxation), with real-world strategies from local and state organizers.

bit.ly/policy-in-pr...

Imagining Possible Futures. Portland. Saturday April 11, 1pm--3pm. 3639 N Mississippi Ave Portland, OR

🔇🔇🔇 Are you in the Portland area? Looking to exercise your imaginative muscles and take a break from doom scrolling?

Join our in person Possible Futures workshop with Data & Society Research Institute.

⏰ This Saturday April 11, 1pm-3pm.

☘️ Register at www.eventbrite.com/e/dair-data-...

BREAKING: Digital Gateway suffers another blow in court The Prince William Digital Gateway – a controversial plan to allow 37 data centers at the edge of the Manassas National Battlefield Park – suffered another major blow in court Tuesday, when the Virgin...

Organizers in Virginia just beat back a GIANT complex of 37 (!!) data centers that would have strained the state's power and water supply.

www.princewilliamtimes.com/localnews/br...

25th amendment. Impeachment. I will support any avenue to remove Donald Trump from office. We cannot leave this man in charge of America’s nuclear weapons as he threatens to end an entire civilization. And Congress must not fund this reckless administration.

Obsessed with this cover

Silicon Forest Artists, media theorists, scientists, and science-fiction writers explore the reciprocity between ecology, industry, technology and consumption.

Coming later this year: a transdisciplinary collection of work on ecology, industry, and technology in Oregon's Silicon Forest.

My piece is on the history of the transition from a timber economy to an (unexpectedly still extractive/polluting) digital economy. www.sternberg-press.com/product/sili...

The Inattention Economy Revealing the unheralded contributions of women of color to the foundation and development of the digital economyThe Inattention Economy challenges the wides...

Here's the link to the free pdf of my new book The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet. Access is so important and I'm grateful that the press is platforming it as one file that is easy to download. www.upress.umn.edu/978081669906...

Raging Against the Machine: A Popular School Against AI - YouTube Cohosted by Hagen Blix, coauthor of WHY WE FEAR AI, Raging Against the Machine: A Popular School Against AI will address the problems, possibilities, and pol...

@commonnotions.bsky.social presents:

Raging Against the Machine: A Popular School Against AI!

Thanks to @danmcquillan.bsky.social, @zeerak.bsky.social, @ali-alkhatib.com, @melhogan.bsky.social, @tamigraph.bsky.social, @olivia.science, @irisvanrooij.bsky.social, and @notnaughtknot.bsky.social!

I’m not an academic anymore and that means I won’t be revising academic essays or reviewing papers when I’m on the *disability leave* part of my maternity leave. No one outside of academia is asking me to do shit btw

Based on the participants, I would imagine so

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: The Data Center Frontier. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar. This virtual roundtable brings together Indigenous land defenders, scholar-activists, and grassroots organizers to examine how the rapid expansion of AI and cloud infrastructure is driving new waves o...

On 4/15: “This virtual roundtable brings together Indigenous land defenders, scholar-activists, and grassroots organizers to examine how the rapid expansion of AI + cloud infrastructure is driving new waves of fossil fuel dependence, mineral extraction, land dispossession + environmental injustice”

photograph or a poster on cream colored paper. "Dear President Ambar, we are writing to you on a typewriter that is over 70 years old. This is a machine that we all know well. With it, we misspell words without the crutch of spell check or generative AI and we think intently about every phrase we pound out. As we force ourselves, for once, to slow down, we engage in a cognitive dialogue with ourselves. We do not seek perfection because we know that education is about the growing and challenging of our young minds' potential, not the chasing of institutional 'gold-star' approval. We do not believe that your so-called 'Year of AI Exploration; providing enterprise ChatGPT and Google Gemini subscriptions to every Oberlin student aligns with our college's founding principles. You claim that this year will be one of experimentation, not adoption. But even just one semester of accepted (encouraged even) chat bot use will jettison our student body down a lazy and irredeemable tunnel of intellectual destruction. We are a college grounded in learning and labor, which now risks straying from these rooted ideals. With ChatGPT at the helm, our emails, essays,and discussion posts will be generated for us, not by us. And let's not fool ourselves. This is precisely what these platforms will be used for by our busy, anxious student body. We see your vision for this year as.advancing the college's 'businessification'--an alarming trend also seen in the takeover of our beloved library cafe by a 'bookstore' with no books in stock and an app replacing customer service. In one instance, the college assumes we want efficiency at all costs through automated rather than hand pulled coffee. In the other lies the false belief that we simply desire to turn in an essay, regardless of how little we've written of it." there's more that doesn't fit in the 2000 character limit :(

OH MY HEART...the Oberlin Luddites Reject "The Year of AI Exploration"! 💚

AI as a War Issue, War as a Workers’ Issue The fight against the University of Michigan–Los Alamos data center.

new writing from @tisjune.bsky.social @shreyachowdhary.bsky.social and myself on AI, nuclear weapons, worker power, and the "biggest, baddest, fastest computer in the world" being built by UMich and los alamos national labs

www.aaup.org/ai-war-issue...

Hey this is great!

Re: Kaiser and AI overall, someone tried to reassure me when I was in labor at Kaiser Oakland last week by telling me that an algorithm had determined how much of a particular medicine I could take safely before risking death. Worst person you could say that to lol

2,400 Kaiser mental health professionals strike in Northern California over AI concerns About 2,400 Kaiser Permanente mental health workers are striking in Northern California over fears the company will replace therapists with artificial intelligence.

“About 2,400 Kaiser Permanente mental health professionals were striking Wednesday in Northern California over concerns that the health care giant is replacing therapists with artificial intelligence.”

I had forgotten about the cognitive dissonance of pumping while sending professional emails

Yes!!!!!!!!! 🎉🎉🎉

PDF of book proofs: SEEING LIKE A SUPPLY CHAIN The Hidden Life of Logistics MIRIAM POSNER Yale University Press New Haven and London

*breathing into a paper bag*

I don’t think the most cartoonishly evil people running the worst governments in the world should be able to turn other countries into living hellscapes for no reason

How It’s Made: A 7,000-Word Story on Coal in Oakland “This is the only time in my entire life, I think, where I wrote long and someone was like, ‘Well, could you make it longer?’”

People said they wanted more culture pieces on Bsky, right? For COYOTE, I interviewed the @oaklandreviewofbooks.org and @meganwachspress.bsky.social for a behind-the-scenes account of how Megan's 7,000-word feature (!) on coal in Oakland came to be—a phenomenal work of longform journalism.

Dr. Strangelove looking less like satire with every passing hour

Are you living near a data center? Our interactive map shows where construction is skyrocketing. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta are rapidly building data centers amid the AI boom. Our interactive map shows where they are.

A really cool example of investigative reporting from @businessinsider.com, mapping (the often undisclosed) locations of US data centers by tracking permits for the diesel back-up generators they use: www.businessinsider.com/data-center-...

My research is on working class women and AI and the ONE consistency among all of the interviews we’ve done so far is concerns about data centers and environmental impact. We do not bring it up - they do. Every single one.

US Critical Mineral Aggression Abroad Connected to Data Center Fights at Home We must phase out fossil fuels—not endlessly reshuffle environmental sacrifice zones around the planet, write Hannah Lipstein and Tamara Kneese.

"Mounting a principled opposition to the resource grab for AI allows us to fight for just distributions of green technologies," write D&S program associate Hannah Lipstein and affiliate @tamigraph.bsky.social. www.techpolicy.press/us-critical-...

WSJ reporting that the U.S. used Claude for the air strikes in Iran. Centcom has been using Claude "for intelligence assessments, target identification and simulating battle scenarios" www.wsj.com/livecoverage...

BREAKING — 51 Iranian children are dead after a strike hits Minab girls elementary school in Iran.

Men studying a dragon

ENDOWED PROFESSORSHIP IN HISTORY OF SCIENCE
My home department at Uppsala University is advertising an endowed professorship in the history of science. This is the best position in the field in Sweden, and probably in all of Scandinavia. Apply before 30 April 2026. www.uu.se/en/about-uu/...

These fascists are so incompetent and delusional that they’re going to make tech woke again