Mél Hogan / The Data Fix
@melhogan.bsky.social
Canadian critical media studies scholar and podcaster interested in the meanings we make of perpetual tech promises. Bilingue. Focused on the environment. I typo a lot. 😷🏳️🌈 🎙️ thedatafix.net 📝 heliotropejournal.net
Time to stop buying AI industry hype about inevitability..it's more of a death-drive cult.
Puff the Magic Hater@mskellymhayes.bsky.social · 2h agoI've read most of the books on @tressiemcphd.bsky.social's proposed reading list and plan to read the rest. These are excellent recommendations. In fact, @gilduran.com (author of The Nerd Reich) will be a guest on Movement Memos soon.
The company behind a proposed data centre in Olds has hired former government insiders to lobby on its behalf. zurl.co/CbpiC
The SpaceX IPO only put 5% of its shares on the market. Another 20% were scheduled to unlock after the Q2 earnings call. That call was yesterday. In the meantime, the stock has fallen over 40% from its initial days of trading. $SPCX 📉 9.25% in pre-market trading as shareholders offload this junk.
SpaceX shares sink after first earnings report reveals huge AI spending plans
Elon Musk told investors that people were "underestimating" his company.
bbc.com
That is not counter-insurgency, that is anti-insurgent. And it explains a lot of the failure of military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mél Hogan / The Data Fix@melhogan.bsky.social · 5h ago“he observed one speaker comparing his experience promoting data centers to counter-insurgency tactics the speaker used during military service in Iraq and Afghanistan, such as “going undercover in bars and churches to gauge a community’s potential for resistance to a data center development.”
"TikTok’s algorithm pushed him thousands of videos about suicide, sadness, hopelessness and loneliness, right up until he killed himself."
TikTok Withheld a Safety Feature From Millions. One Died by Suicide
A confidential document says an algorithm adjustment was kept from many users “by design,” as part of an experiment to measure engagement.
bloomberg.com
“Employees who voiced honest, informed objections to AI in the workplace were passed over for promotions or targeted for layoffs.”
T. Ryan Gregory 🇨🇦@tryangregory.bsky.social · 6h ago“he observed one speaker comparing his experience promoting data centers to counter-insurgency tactics the speaker used during military service in Iraq and Afghanistan, such as “going undercover in bars and churches to gauge a community’s potential for resistance to a data center development.”
Justin Hendrix@justinhendrix.bsky.social · 5h agoAs opposition to data centers grows across the United States, the tech industry is "pulling from tried-and-tested playbooks" to bypass it, write Dean Jackson and Samantha Totoni—from nonprofit front groups to super PACs to tightly managed public forums.
QUESTION: is there any footage of data centers IN Canada and their noise output that you know of that’s legit? please send me the info if you do!!
Hamilton's mysterious data centre reversal haunts other municipalities www.nationalobserver.com/2026/08/04/n...
Hamilton's mysterious data centre reversal haunts other municipalities
All but one of the 16 elected officials in the city had voted in favour of a bylaw that would put a pause on new data centres in the city for a year. Then, at a council meeting the following month whe...
nationalobserver.com
How many of these mega-datacenters are owned, operated, controlled and contracted entirely through Enron-style style LLC shell companies to default on environmental, power, water commitments, no liability from the FAANG companies that benefit? [Facebook Apple Amazon Nvidia Google Microsoft Oracle]
Mél Hogan / The Data Fix@melhogan.bsky.social · yesterdayworking on a talk for late fall and wanted to share some *older* texts that anyone writing about data centers today should know about!
working on a talk for late fall and wanted to share some *older* texts that anyone writing about data centers today should know about!
Last call for the free, online @civicsoftech.bsky.social conference happening this week! Registration closes tomorrow, Wednesday, August 5, at 12pm ET. For more information on the sessions and to register, go to: www.civicsoftechnology.org/2026conference
QUESTION: is there any footage of data centers IN Canada and their noise output that you know of that’s legit? please send me the info if you do!!
Then came ChatGPT. Suddenly, tech companies said we needed data centers everywhere, and fast. The boom is now spreading to Europe: London recently approved one for Brick Lane, one of the city's busiest areas, despite being in drought. www.wired.com/story/how-da...
How Data Centers Broke American Politics
What the Unabomber, Steve Bannon’s tech guy, and Bernie Sanders taught me about the great data center backlash of 2026.
wired.com
left deepseek in an agent loop for a million tokens with permission issues keeping it from running commands and it penned a lengthy essay called "the grief of machines"
“just think of hyperscale AI data centres as ‘digital refineries’!” albertapolitics.ca/2026/08/albe...
Alberta propaganda push suggests UCP is encountering stiffer opposition to AI data centres than it expected - Alberta Politics
The United Conservative Party Government must be encountering stiffer opposition than it expected to its plan to make Alberta North America’s dumping ground for the Artificial Intelligence data centre...
albertapolitics.ca
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Oracle are spending so much on developing AI and delivering it to customers that they’re expected to bleed cash in the coming year, according to a Post analysis of data compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence.
One chart shows the incredible reversal at American tech companies
The AI bet by the country’s leading firms is torching their cash.
washingtonpost.com
Sending Networks of New York to the printer tomorrow or Wednesday aieeeee look at all the graphic designing I did
i resent the idea that we somehow helped create the ai industry. nothing more depressing than this ai era
Elizabeth Warren@warren.senate.gov · 2d agoDo you use Instagram or Gmail? You could be helping to train AI. Big Tech has turned what all of us helped create into a trillion-dollar industry. It’s time to tax AI so you can share in its success.
Cool new project from @mxdylanp.bsky.social and Natalie Rae and their lab: it’s a blog series titled, "Unearthing the Cloud: Civic Action in the AI Era”. The first post explores the question, “'[W]ho gets to have a voice in decisions that shape the places where people live?'"
Unearthing the Cloud – AI & Data Infrastructures Learning Lab
sites.psu.edu
☀️ U T O P I A N ☀️ M E D I A ☀️ S T U D I E S ☀️ I am so proud of this work w/ Convergence. Kemper & I make the argument that many media scholars use utopian approaches in their research. But we just need to reflect on how to do it together, and do it well. journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10....
‘Palantir’s market capitalisation has risen to $320 billion, 150 times earnings. The 𝘌𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘰𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘵 has speculated that “Palantir might be the most overvalued firm of all time.”’ @petergeoghegan.bsky.social and @lucasamin.bsky.social on Palantir’s NHS contract. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin · ‘This looks absolutely rubbish’: Palantir and the NHS
A decade ago Palantir was largely unknown in the UK. It now holds public contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds...
lrb.co.uk
Dan sees and articulates the role of AI very clearly so this is a good discussion
Politechs@politechs.bsky.social · 2d agoWe're joined this week by @danmcquillan.bsky.social to talk decomputing, dehumanisation, dealignment, and some things that don't start with de- as well! politechs.dev/episodes/s02...
Great piece on Oracle, the most highly leveraged of the hyperscalers and the one most vulnerable to a burst AI bubble. @asad09.bsky.social: “We are making trillions of dollars in investments on the back of tens of billions of dollars in revenues.”
Larry Ellison Bet It All on the A.I. Boom. Will He Be the Face of the A.I. Bubble?
Inside the 81-year-old billionaire’s risky, debt-fueled scramble to transform his data empire into an A.I. juggernaut.
nytimes.com
"Microsoft warns that consumers aren't buying enough of the thing they don't want."
The Irish Times@irishtimes.com · 7mo agoAI boom could falter without wider adoption, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella warns
Let’s be clear here, when scientists say mistakes were made at the start of the pandemic, we DO NOT mean that we did too much. We mean not socially distancing quickly enough, not making tests widely available, and not acknowledging COVID is airborne and distributing N95 masks to everyone.
“Harvard paid McKinsey & Company at least $250,000 to consult on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ staff restructuring efforts, according to internal documents obtained by The Crimson.” www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...
Harvard Paid McKinsey $250,000 For FAS Consultation, Internal Documents Show | News | The Harvard Crimson
Harvard paid McKinsey & Company at least $250,000 to consult on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ staff restructuring efforts, according to internal documents obtained by The Crimson.
thecrimson.com
sakura christmas@prof-christmas.bsky.social · 6d agoUnsurprising that all these cuts being made to #Harvard —from the Office of Student Services to the Writing Center to now the Dudley Co-op—are happening with input from McKinsey, a firm made up of The Second Worst People I knew in college there
