thanks Jack!

📢 It's the last week for PhD students to apply for an internship with FATE (Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics) in NYC! 🎉 We welcome a wide range of disciplines (CS, STS, law, anthro, media studies, philosophy) apply.careers.microsoft.com/careers/job?...

Kate Crawford | Mapping Empires YouTube video by The Long Now Foundation

In her Long Now Talk, @katecrawford.bsky.social argues that AI has created a metabolic rift: massive data collection that acts like poor nutrition at planetary scale. However, this is something we’ve seen before, dating back to the 1500s.

Watch the full talk here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsBn...

The Hidden Costs of AI: SciCafe October 8 | AMNH Kate Crawford will explore the hidden costs of artificial intelligence and how its vast infrastructure reshapes our physical world.

Join us on Wednesday, October 8, for SciCafe: Mapping the Costs of AI. Kate Crawford (@katecrawford.bsky.social), research professor at the University of Southern California, will explore the environmental and human cost of AI systems.

SciCafe is 21+ and free with RSVP. Get tickets: bit.ly/4nB7w33

Opinion | A.I.’s Environmental Impact Will Threaten Its Own Supply Chain

This video is really important.

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/26/o...

It connects the dots between A.I. and climate disasters and is just a perfectly crafted piece of investigation and exposition.

@katecrawford.bsky.social

Thanks Jer! 💚

Intensification - Kate Crawford - Eating the Future: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop AI slop isn’t invested in the order of events or even looking like reality. The slop is not the territory: it just smothers it in synthetic goop. It’s flooding the zone with AI shit.

"Metabolic images are visual material made by consuming billions of other images to be broken down and absorbed by #AI models via a gargantuan infrastructure that absorbs energy and water, and excretes media, atmospheric carbon, and other pollutants." — @katecrawford.bsky.social

"Multiple studies have shown that AI systems degenerate when they are fed on too much of their own outputs—a phenomenon researchers call MAD (Model Autophagy Disease) [...] AI will eat itself, then gradually collapse into nonsense and noise [...] The researchers compare it to mad cow disease."

Intensification - Kate Crawford - Eating the Future: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop AI slop isn’t invested in the order of events or even looking like reality. The slop is not the territory: it just smothers it in synthetic goop. It’s flooding the zone with AI shit.

"The current approach to AI cannot sustain itself indefinitely. The question becomes not whether current AI slop economies will destroy themselves, but when."

By @katecrawford.bsky.social

www.e-flux.com/architecture...

Intensification - Kate Crawford - Eating the Future: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop AI slop isn’t invested in the order of events or even looking like reality. The slop is not the territory: it just smothers it in synthetic goop. It’s flooding the zone with AI shit.

New essay now online: "EATING THE FUTURE: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop."
AI consumes planetary resources and excretes slop, polluting environmental & information ecologies. It's a new metabolic rift - disrupting the cycles that sustain both humans and AI alike.
www.e-flux.com/architecture...

Back in print in the latest @wired.it with an interview with the brilliant @katecrawford.bsky.social. At a time when the AI industry reveals its imperialist, extractivist drive, we need critical perspectives and counter-narratives more than ever.

💚

thanks for sharing it!

Hallucinations and vibe citing - a primer for public policy in 2025 🫠

Seems like a good time to re-up @katecrawford.bsky.social‬'s brilliant coining: "hallucitations".

Register to join this timely discussion on June 2, in person or on line, with @katecrawford.bsky.social @hofrench.bsky.social @tamigraph.bsky.social and @triofrancos.bsky.social, hosted by my Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study www.ias.edu/events/raree...

US EPA plans to reduce staff to 1980s levels, dissolve research office The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced plans on Friday to slash its budget by $300 million in fiscal year 2026, reduce staffing to 1980s levels and dissolve its research and development office as part of a sweeping overhaul of the agency.

The EPA is being rolled back to the 1980s. Think big hair, WHAM, and Exxon hiding the fact that burning fossil fuels was driving climate change.

perhaps...but the incontrovertible evidence is already out there, and these kinds of cases tie up and financially ruin organizations

Trump’s FBI Moves to Criminally Charge Major Climate Groups The Trump administration is targeting climate organizations that received a Biden-era grant.

We've gone from climate change denial to climate change criminalization. First they defund the science, now the FBI is prosecuting groups like Habitat for Humanity for fraud.
newrepublic.com/post/192660/...

Meta *removed* @gilduran.com's article because it was about "topics like the ‘Network State’ concept and critiques of tech industry figures..." 👀

Yale Scholar Banned After A.I. News Site Accuses Her of Terrorist Link The deputy director of a liberal project at Yale Law School was put on leave over allegations that she is linked to Samidoun, a group the U.S. government has said funds terrorists.

And now for the latest in fresh hell...

Arresting and threatening to deport students because of their participation in political protest is the kind of action one ordinarily associates with the world’s most repressive regimes. It’s genuinely shocking that this appears to be what’s going on right here. 1/

Fighting a new invasive species: AI's impossible flora | Center for the Study of World Religions

Generated AI plants are thriving online, with fake "seeds" selling on Amazon - people gravitating to impossible flora while real plants vanish. We're enchanted with simulacra as actual biodiversity disappears.
@giovannialoi.bsky.social cswr.hds.harvard.edu/news/2025/02...

Why rare earths matter to Donald Trump and the west China dominates market in metals used in range of products, including those crucial for national security

Rare earths are central to the US administration's capture strategy: from Ukraine to Greenland. When people exclude the mineral dependencies of AI (as with most everything else) they're missing the story www.ft.com/content/65ee...

Poster showing the MPIWG Institute’s Colloquium 2024–25 program.

Next up in our Institute’s Colloquium Series “History of Science in Public”: Kate Crawford @katecrawford.bsky.social will talk on "Mapping #AI: How to See Planetary-Scale #ArtificialIntelligence.”

🗓️ Mar 25, 2025 (14:00 CET)
🔗 bitly.cx/m0KeS
📍 relocated: MPIWG Main conference room

#HistSci #SciComm

The more vexing ai alignment problem as stated by @katecrawford.bsky.social "What we saw at the summit was a different type of alignment problem, which was a misalignment from very concentrated corporate power and the interests of civil society in general.”

'AI is in its empire era' JD Vance's AI saber-rattling, DOGE's gutting of the government, and Silicon Valley's thirst for growth show how AI has become a tool for consolidating power.

JD Vance is proclaiming to the world that the US's AI industry will dominate, Elon Musk and DOGE are hollowing out the government with an AI-first strategy, and Silicon Valley's is stuck on a growth-at-all-costs AI approach.

As @katecrawford.bsky.social put it: 'AI is in its empire era'

The International Energy Agency just increased its prior growth predictions for energy demand. Data centers are one of the major drivers. Here's why that's significant: www.theverge.com/news/614356/...

The AI Summit ends in rupture. AI accelerationists want pure expansion—more capital, energy, private infrastructure, no guard rails. Public interest camp supports labor, sustainability, shared data. safety, and oversight. The gap never looked wider. AI is in its empire era.