The environmental impact extends globally. A 2024 Morgan Stanley report projected that datacenters will emit 2.5 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases worldwide by 2030 — triple the emissions that would have occurred without the development of generative AI technology.

Voting equipment company Dominion Voting Systems, a target of false conspiracy theories since the 2020 election, has been bought by a firm run by a former Republican elections official

For much of the AI boom, there have been whispers about Nvidia’s frenzied dealmaking. The chipmaker bolstered the market by pumping money into dozens of AI startups, many of which rely on Nvidia’s graphics processing units to develop and run their models. OpenAI, to a lesser degree, also invested in startups, some of which built services on top of its AI models. But as tech firms have entered a more costly phase of AI development, the scale of the deals involving these two companies has grown substantially, making it harder to ignore.

Current growth is also “not coming from AI itself but from building the factories to generate AI capacity,” he added, suggesting that the tech industry is selling a still-hypothetical future rather than delivering a real one.

It’s true that investment in AI has reached a fever pitch lately. Earlier this week, AI chipmaker Nvidia announced that it’s pouring $100 billion into OpenAI as part of a “strategic partnership” to “build and deploy at least ten gigawatts of AI datacenters” — a deal that critics immediately slammed as self-serving.

“It may not be an exaggeration to write that NVIDIA — the key supplier of capital goods for the AI investment cycle — is currently carrying the weight of US economic growth,” Saravelos argued.

“The bad news is that in order for the tech cycle to continue contributing to GDP growth, capital investment needs to remain parabolic,” he concluded. “This is highly unlikely.”

OILab is an Amsterdam-based network of interdisciplinary scholars scrutinising political subcultures on the fringe corners of the Web. It does so by conducting empirical research based on digital methods as well as qualitative theoretical research. The results are usually papers and public appearances, but also take the form of more artistic projects. For write-ups of shorter projects, we also maintain a blog.

A command-line tool to copy a thread to a Markdown file and save all the media attachments in a directory.

American Eagle's "great jeans" ad led to a media outrage cycle after conservatives on X amplified a minority of liberal posts that claimed the ad had racist undertones.

Look in src/chores.json for list of chores. The "frequency" field is parsed like so:

1m = 1 month
3d = 3 days
2m15d = 2 months + 15 days
2y5m3w6d = 2 years + 5 months + 3 weeks + and 6 days

A javascript library to transform HTML document into beautiful print-ready pdf.

(Inter)governmental efforts to deal with the climate crisis are all based on a definition of technology that makes the consolidation of two incompatible aims—economic growth and environmental sustainability—seem possible. Technology is supposed to make the decoupling of economic growth from environmental depletion a reality. Technology has become a magic word granting us a way out of the climate crisis without changing anything fundamental. This specific definition of the word is invested with a strong—and well financed—drive to keep existing power structures in place. However, the paradox at the heart of this reading of technology has not gone unnoticed. The definition of the word technology in the climate crisis has become brittle; the mismatch with lived experience and material practices makes the word ‘uninhabitable’; giving rise to many new terms associated with communities of practice which give voice and shape to different definitions and roles for technology on a damaged Earth: permacomputing, computing within limits, collapse informatics, salvage computing, slow tech, redundant technology, low-tech, feminist technology, convivial computing, disability driven development and more.
Building on Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society by Raymond Williams (1976), I describe practices giving expression to different definitions of a single keyword, technology, by quite literally seizing control over the means of communication as the means of production. These communities of practice are not only taking control over the elements of network technology within their reach, they are also actively shaping the vocabulary used to discuss this. This dissertation aims to bring understanding of how the language around these infrastructures expresses this change, bringing the means of production in line with the interests of practitioners. Each practice, when situated historically, can teach us something about their transformative character and potential, which together constitute a low theory about questions emerging from these projects, fostering experimental togetherness, a pragmatic learning of what works and how (Graeber, 2004; Stengers, 2005). Exploring the contested meaning of technology—a word which holds a pivotal position in debates about ways to tackle climate change—can provide important insight into how this position emerged and support the experimental performing of other worlds that demonstrate computing otherwise is possible and doesn’t only consist of dreams, but also tests ideas in code, hardware and community organisation.

DSEG is a free font family, which imitate seven and fourteen segment display(7SEG,14SEG). DSEG have special features:

Instant rooms where voices and files move peer-to-peer, leaving no footprints. Built for privacy and digital autonomy, and against #chatcontrol

On the dark edge of all this has been the manosphere, the network of male supremacist websites, influencers and YouTube channels. The manosphere is confusing, because it’s a place where one can find both benign advice about protein consumption and ideas that have led to mass shootings. Its theories of evolutionary biology, mostly concerning what women were ‘built’ to do, are reposted on social media by people such as Musk. It’s annoying to have to take it seriously, just as it’s annoying to have to take the Taliban’s gender theories seriously. But in recent years the manosphere has forced us to pay attention through acts of extreme violence, and many of its advocates and theories have been taken up by democratically elected governments.

Internet Cinema Loop

w/ Open Secret, Mawena Yehouessi, 0nty, Redacted Cut, Aemmonia, Eliska Jahelkova, Carmen Lin, Machine Yearning

What do people use to keep track of visual references?

Users want systems that provide confident answers to any question. Evaluation benchmarks reward systems that guess rather than express uncertainty. Computational costs favour fast, overconfident responses over slow, uncertain ones.

magic palette paint software

Les propositions de réflexions ci-dessous ont été développées à la destination principale des étudiant·es de 2e année Design graphique multimédia.

Elles s’inscrivent dans une proposition plus large visant à amorcer une approche critique du design des nouveaux médias :

appréhender la diversité des cultures numériques et des liens qu’elles entretiennent avec le design ;
construire un regard critique sur les pratiques numériques contemporaines ;
développer l’approche documentaire, la méthodologie de recherche, la capacité de synthèse et de retransmission.

Ce cours propose aux étudiants de développer leur regard et leur connaissance du monde de la création et du design numérique. Dans des champs aussi variés que le design d’interface, la typographie, les pratiques artistiques ou expérimentales, la critique et la pensée des médias, l’analyse des usages émergents ou l’histoire du design numérique, les étudiant·es sont amené·es à découvrir et à s’approprier la diversité des pratiques numériques contemporaines dans les champs de l’art et du design.

La bonne appropriation de ces questions ne va pas sans un aiguisage sérieux de l’esprit critique. Les espaces de réflexion ouverts sont donc – de manière pleinement assumée et affirmée – ancrés dans les questions politiques qui animent le monde contemporain.

The rise of climate denialism in the general population (

5% between 2019 and 2023) has been accompanied by a very significant increase in denialist activism on “X”/Twitter since the summer of 2022, and increased hostility towards climate scientists.

Through global tracking of Twitter exchanges about climate change between 2019 and 2023, as well as exchanges about COVID-19 pandemics, we analyzed this online trend and its interaction with other societal issues like politics and COVID-19 pandemics.

Beyond fact-checking, we show, through complex networks and semantic analyses, that there are structural differences between these denialist and pro-climate online communities, as well as between the circulation of false information and other climate change-related narratives.

All the evidence suggests that the behavior of deniers is designed to deceive, and that they are over-represented on social networks compared to what they actually represent offline. This is particularly true on “X”/Twitter since Musk’s takeover.

We have also highlighted the globalized aspect of this new denialism, its alignment with the interests and visions of powers such as Russia and how it has benefited from the COVID-19 pandemic.