Dustin Edwards

YouTube video by Digital Humanities Initiative Powering AI from the Borderlands: Organizing Against Data Centers

Last week, I had the immense honor (and responsibility) of facilitating a dialogue about organizing against AI data centers in the US-Mexico Borderlands. I am very pleased to share a recording of the event www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E43...

"I don't want to shame students. I want to shame Jeff Bezos" is something I said during a presentation I gave today. But really that's my politics when it comes to GenAI: recognize the social and cultural force of AI boosterism. Soft on people, hard on structure (and billionaires).

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

Data centers are everywhere these days, so what better time to announce that @melhogan.bsky.social, @dustinedwards.bsky.social and I are expanding our #CriticalDataCenterStudies article into a book at @routledgebooks.bsky.social! Here’s our article for a teaser: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Here's one thing we can do: share this video w the folks on our campuses who need to hear it the most!

"Powering AI from the Borderlands: Organizing Against Data Centers"

In this episode of The Data Fix, Daisy Maldonado, Annie Ersinghaus, Gilberto Manzanarez and I discuss on-the-ground opposition to two data centers being built against the will of local residents:

Felt so honored to host this dialogue yesterday! What I couldn't help but think, however, is that the people on my campus who needed to hear this most did not attend. A strategic choice to keep AI environmental concerns abstracted.

Let’s play a game. Which of these are data centers, and which are ICE detention centers?

Flyer with event details, featuring a desert landscape with power lines running through the middle. Powering AI from the Borderlands: Organizing Against Data Centers Tuesday, Feb. 24 at 4 pm Digital Humanities Center / SDSU Library SDSU College of Arts and Letters

Panelists bios and headshots featuring Annie Ersinghaus, award-winnign independent filmaker from Las Cruces, New Mexico. Daisy A. Maldonado, community advocate for environmental justice, public health, and climate preservation in southern New Mexico. Gilberto Manzanarez, community advocate and educator from Calexico, California, focused on environmental justice and government transparency in the Imperial Valley

Every so often you get to do really cool things at universities. This is one of them. Can't wait to facilitate a dialogue on Powering AI from the Borderlands: Organizing Against Data Centers on Feb 24th.

RSVP - Powering AI from the Borderlands Join us for a dialogue with community organizers standing against AI data centers. When: Tuesday, February 24 at 4 pm Where: the Digital Humanities Center in Love Library at San Diego State Univers...

SDSU people, please come out on Feb 24 at 4 pm in the Digital Humanities Center. And if you are not local or can't make it, you can RSVP for a video recording. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Flyer with event details, featuring a desert landscape with power lines running through the middle. Powering AI from the Borderlands: Organizing Against Data Centers Tuesday, Feb. 24 at 4 pm Digital Humanities Center / SDSU Library SDSU College of Arts and Letters

Panelists bios and headshots featuring Annie Ersinghaus, award-winnign independent filmaker from Las Cruces, New Mexico. Daisy A. Maldonado, community advocate for environmental justice, public health, and climate preservation in southern New Mexico. Gilberto Manzanarez, community advocate and educator from Calexico, California, focused on environmental justice and government transparency in the Imperial Valley

Every so often you get to do really cool things at universities. This is one of them. Can't wait to facilitate a dialogue on Powering AI from the Borderlands: Organizing Against Data Centers on Feb 24th.

DHS AI Surveillance Arsenal Grows as Agency Defies Courts A Department of Homeland Security AI inventory contains details on new tools used by ICE and border patrol agents in Trump's deportation campaign.

I took a close look at the latest Department of Homeland Security AI use case inventory, which details over 200 applications across DHS component agencies, including CBP and ICE. DHS is rapidly deploying these tools in US cities, while increasingly engaging in violence and defying court orders.

The problem is that blue states are fully committed to “return on investment” analysis and are fully committed to undergrad business degrees and whatever the latest tech trend is. There is no theory of holistic education supported by democratic leadership.

Immigration Officers Descend on Meta Data Center, Arrest Drivers Federal immigration officers targeted a construction site in rural Louisiana where Meta Platforms Inc. is building its largest data center, leading to the arrest of two individuals, according to local...

In the most desolate, American techno-fascist story one can imagine: ICE descends on a data center construction site in Louisiana to abduct workers.

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

The vibe I bring to the function:
week 9: addressing technologies of distortion and control
week 10: SPRING BREAK 😜

I deeply regret having those big fall 2025 plans to reimagine my spring 2026 class.

My first MLA, I feel a little Fancy Pooh Bear

Excited to be headed to Toronto for MLA where I will be presenting with great folks on GenAI Refusal. I will be presenting "After Accelerationism: A Collage of Community Testimony from the AI Supply Chain."

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"We Reject the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence for Reflexive Qualitative Research"
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

I refuse to believe that that many people watch these????

Sometimes I think I have a good pulse on what's happening in the world, but then I look up and see the newest Avatar has grossed past 1 billion

Nicolás Maduro Charged With Felony Oil Possession

Nicolás Maduro Charged With Felony Oil Possession

Reading beautiful and brilliant writing in a review—what a treat!

Find me a piece of ed tech from the past thirty years that's genuinely more about student learning than it is about extracting more labor from fewer teachers. Can't be done!

the academic version of me saying: REAL SICK STUFF

WHAT IS CAUSING THE RISING DEMAND, CNN

Thanks, Collin! I wish I had a better answer, but it was a total surprise to me that it was open access. Really grateful for it, though!

Screenshot with text of an abstract. "In a relatively short time, market and political forces have intensified the reach of artificial intelligence (AI). AI has become, in a word, climatic—not only a discrete technological system but also a creeping assemblage of ideological, material, and political forces. This article tracks these forces by developing rhetorical climates of AI as a conceptual framework. In doing so, I aim to (1) link the harms of climate change with the rapid buildout of AI infrastructure and (2) shift the frame of the conversation by emphasizing the extractive, exploitative, enclosed, and knotted supremacist conditions that have been prerequisites for building AI systems at scale. While these pervading rhetorical climates may seem unchangeable, I track how microclimates of resistance have developed, in the past and in the present. In particular, I emphasize the importance of bodily intelligence in navigating asymmetrical conditions of power felt in the AI industry. The article concludes by discussing how rhetoric and writing studies can weather the unfolding rhetorical climates of AI by diagnosing conditions, seizing moments, and plotting futures to imagine a less extractive and less harmful world."

New publication out: "Weathering the Rhetorical Climates of AI." I'm really excited that it's open access!
publicationsncte.org/content/jour...

also: if the anonymous reviews were any indication, this may not be *everyone's* cup of tea 😈

Anyway, the only AI I want to be talking about from here on out: an abolitionist imagination!

screenshot from the end of the article. Text reads "Finally, I find it imperative to amplify alternative visions of the world. I suspect many people who are actively standing against the pervasive climates of AI did not envision themselves doing this work. Benjamin, for example, expresses exasperation at being trapped within the imaginations of the artificial intelligentsia (“Who Owns the Future?”). Yet she reminds us that often we need to weed before we sow. Part of weathering the rhetorical climates of AI will entail lots of weeding: the need to talk about heavy things and attend to the here and now with a mētis sensibility, often squeezing the joy out of the room when GenAI is uncritically invoked or when it is impressed upon us as inevitable. This moment of AI oversaturation clouds our atmospheres with shiny distractions that are deadly serious in their consequences. Similar to Benjamin, I believe such distractions are designed to blot out a different kind of AI, an abolitionist imagination that demands the undoing of smothering conditions in order to envision something better. And so, the bigger, more joyful, more community-centered project remains: What can we imagine in the place of heavy clouds? That question, I believe, has long nourished the progress of plotting new dreams, technologies, and conditions of living otherwise. Weathering the rhetorical climates of AI will require weeding, yes, but it will also demand cultivating space for an imagination that lives beyond a climate that is suffocating for far too many."

The article is indebted to brilliant scholars such as @rcmeg.bsky.social, @nobugsnous.bsky.social, @jsanofranchini.bsky.social, & @ruha9.bsky.social who dare to ask us to imagine alternative, more hopeful versions of the world.