Hello! There are a lot of updates this week:

• chat with Hagen Blix on Thursday
• stickers (in production)
• local stuff (including a conference)

Read on for more info.

Last week we technically finished Why We Fear AI, but we're going to have a coda to the book this week by listening to a few interviews with Hagen Blix about the book, to get us in the mindset to chat with Hagen Blix this Thursday at 8pm.

Let's listen to a couple of podcast interviews this week:

• "AI is the Demon God of Capital (ft. Hagen Blix)" from This Machine Kills with Jathan Sadowski and Ed Ongweso Jr.
• "Deskill, with Hagen Blix" from The Data Fix with Dr. Mél Hogan

If listening to these episodes, and reflecting on Why We Fear AI, gets you thinking about any questions you want to ask, please let me know. I'll try to think up a few questions to get us started, so I'd appreciate your input.

stickers!

We're getting stickers made. Here are the designs:

The stickers were designed and produced for the Stop the Data Center movement, so most of the stickers we're getting printed are going to be shared around Ypsilanti & Ann Arbor. If you're part of the STDC group, and/or you live in the area (very broadly conceived), please get in contact if you want to get a small stack of stickers to pass around.

That being said, we will have lots of stickers.

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local stuff

Some cool news:

UM Regent news

On Sunday, Amir Makled won the Democratic Party's endorsement for Board of Regents of the University of Michigan, ousting incumbent Jordan Acker. Makled campaigned against the data center and had also represented students who were prosecuted for protesting at the University of Michigan, so this comes as welcome news. From the earlier article:

"The Board can stop the momentum of these data centers," Makled said. "They have the power to put a full moratorium on further contracts when it comes to data center development, just like they voted to purchase the land and start putting on these developments. You need an advocate on the Board strategically, and that’s why my ask tonight is to help me get to that position so that we have a stakeholder." [emphasis added]

There's much more work to do, but having successfully ousted an incumbent data center proponent and successfully nominated a critic of the data center project to the Board of Regents hopefully signals to the other regents that support for this wildly unpopular proposal can ultimately come back to reach them; they don't have a blank check to antagonize and mock students and other stakeholders who care about the university, as Acker reportedly had done in the past (content warning; extremely gross sexual messages about students).

Political Economy conference at University of Michigan

On Sunday, April 26, there's going to be a conference at the University of Michigan: "The People’s Political Economy of Computing". It's free to attend!

Specifically, I'll be a discussant engaging with the papers in *S5: "Resistance and Organizing":

• Digital Infrastructural Resistance in Gaza
• Chokepoints in the Cloud: Generative Potential of Breakdown in Cloud Infrastructures
• Destruction as Design
• Digital Defense as Abolitionist Practice

... But there are a lot of other really interesting papers being presented throughout the day, so naturally I'll be there all day. Come hang out!

If you're in the area and interested in attending, it's free, but you might want to RSVP to ensure there's enough food.

Did I mention it's free?

routine stuff

If you've read these emails before, this is mostly the same stuff as last week.

format

As a reminder, there are numerous ways to keep up with the reading group:

• newsletter: I send updates on Mondays and Thursdays. In the Monday updates, I'll point to what to read (or in this week's case, what to listen to); in the Thursday updates, I'll send some reflections and an icebreaker question to think about, and a reminder of where & how to join the video chat.
• video chats: Thursdays at 8pm ET we have a video chat on jitsi¹ where we talk about that week's readings. Sometimes we'll have a guest to talk about something related to what we read that week (like this week!).
• group chat: if you want to chat with people on signal, we have a pretty active group chat. You can join the signal group chat here.

next book(s)

Our next book will be Disabling Intelligences. Please order it ASAP if you don't have it already. We'll be starting next week.

If you have suggestions for future books to read, please reach out, I'd love to hear them.

last thoughts

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, etc... please feel free to reach out. Talk soon.

Also, if you come across something you think we'd like to read, I'd love to hear about it; contact me.

Okay, that's it; see you Thursday to discuss the chapter and other reading.

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