What a Conference!
Civics of Technology Announcements
Last call for Merch: This is your last chance to guarantee a Civics of Technology shirt or hat. Our pre-order ends this Wednesday, August 12th. Purchasing merch supports our operations and programming! Order here.
September Book Club: We will be reading the new book, “Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools” by our conference keynote speaker Natasha Singer on September 29th at 8:00 PM EST. Register here and pre-order the book here so you have it when it releases on September 8th! We will discuss the book for 45 minutes and then be joined by Natasha for a 30-minute Q&A.
October Book Club: On Thursday, October 22 at 8:00 PM Eastern, we’ll be discussing Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis. Read Kelsey Stoke’s recent blog post about the concept and register here.
From the Library of Babel Group: On Tuesday, August 18 at 9AM PT, the Library of Babel Group's AI Resisters series hosts Common Knowledge of the Second Kind, a Conversation with Dave Bella, exploring his and Jonathan King's 1989 thought experiment on how supercomputers might reshape trustworthy knowledge in education, now our reality. Facilitated by Tim Reierson. Read the paper in advance and bring questions. Register here.
By Jacob, Marie, and Dan
On Thursday and Friday, we gathered together the Civics of Technology community for our fifth annual virtual conference: Against Tech Hype. We want to extend our deepest gratitude to everyone who made this conference possible. Our truly excellent keynote speakers, all of our session presenters, our Zoom room hosts, Loyola University Maryland’s Center for Research and Evaluation for supporting the keynote honorariums, and of course all of our attendees. Civics of Technology is a community, and it was amazing to see so many people, both familiar and new.
Across all of our presenters, we heard a range of views, suggestions, and responses to technology (especially AI). There was some spirited debate and disagreement in some of the sessions, which we consider a good thing! One of the functions of a conference is to bring people together to debate ideas, offer alternative perspectives, and get into the conceptual weeds with one another. We were left with plenty of questions and provocations at the end of the conference, and we hope that you were as well. (Perhaps your conference experience has given you the motivation to articulate some ideas and arguments as a blog post. If so, you can propose it here!)
If you weren’t able to attend some or all of the conference, we are currently working on getting recordings and presentation materials posted to the conference page. If they aren’t up yet, just give us a few more days! And also please note that we only recorded our sessions when our presenters asked us to do so.
Resources from the Conference Chat
We aimed for generative conversation throughout the conference. Our chats weren’t downloadable in order to encourage discussion without surveillance. However, there were some great resources mentioned, and we combed through the chats to share them out here. In no particular order, and without exposition, we’re sharing the links and titles of works that folks indicated were useful to them in their work Against Tech Hype.
“Leading from the Library: Questioning AI Through Zine-Making” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_oiWIElDpY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageNet
Helpful resource from Jessamyn West about turning off AI in Zoom and other platforms: https://www.librarian.net/NoToAI/
I found Dr. Broussard’s book, Artificial Unintelligence, to be so helpful and accessible in terms of how computer software works, especially what’s called AI. The first three chapters are basic explanations and exercises of computer coding and language models.
Love this op-ed from Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom arguing that AI is mid: https://archive.ph/l7sro
Are we automating racism? (describes how AI is used in facial recognition but gives some general AI explanations too) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok5sKLXqynQ
“The AI Democracy Projects” https://www.ias.edu/stsv-lab/ai-democracy-projects
If you are interested in using audits or teaching with them, we have curriculum on tech audits here https://www.civicsoftechnology.org/edtechaudit
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-openai-gpt-hiring-racial-discrimination/
Want to buy Dr. Broussard’s books? You can find them here https://meredithbroussard.com/books/
I’ve written a blog post asking for precision when we talk about different types of AI: https://calvium.com/ai-through-precision-we-can-have-it-all/
Angus Andrea Grieve-Smith (he/she) to Everyone: I wrote about how even the things we call "successes" - transcription, translation, spell check - aren't really very good either: https://grieve-smith.com/blog/2023/05/the-supposed-successes-of-ai/
Therefore “poisoning AI” will continue to be an issue… https://theconversation.com/what-is-ai-poisoning-a-computer-scientist-explains-267728
“AGAINST THE UNCRITICAL ADOPTION OF ‘AI’ TECHNOLOGIES IN ACADEMIA” https://hcommons.org/?get_group_doc=1005140/1757881623-Guest_etal_2025.pdf
"She is describing ‘techno-fascism”": https://www.resistandheal.com/what-is-techno-facism
I'm planning on quoting UC Berkeley Law School's genAI policy in my syllabus this year. https://abovethelaw.com/2026/05/uc-berkeley-cracks-down-on-ai-use-with-new-policy/
I'm liking Ellipsus https://ellipsus.com/ for word processing [that does not have extensive AI built in].
In addition to data centers, microchip manufacturing for AI computing is also quite bad and is being reshored through the CHIPS and Science Act, resistance here: https://stopheavyindustry.com/
Interesting research about data centers contestation:
Rone, J. (2024). The shape of the cloud: Contesting date centre construction in North Holland. New Media & Society, 26(10), 5999-6018.
Rone, J. (2022). The politics of data infrastructures contestation: Perspectives for future research. Journal of Environmental Media, 3(2), 207-214.
Great group organizing in Memphis against xAI data center environmental racism. https://www.memphiscap.org/
FYI I’m taking notes from this conference in a Google Doc and sharing them, here’s the link: https://wfryer.me/cot26
This Bluesky thread from Dr. Miriam Posner has a number of helpful links to explainers https://bsky.app/profile/miriamposner.com/post/3ljq5j7tk4k2i
"Can someone link to Prof Fiedler and Epps’ handles...":
A hilarious campaign to raise awareness of the environmental impact of AI https://savethe.ai/
I love Melanie Mitchell’s Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. It’s a bit technical but it’s so helpful for understanding how these things work
https://controlassociatesinc.com/blog/data-center-water-pressure-karen-hao
ACM Book Club Interview with Author Melanie Mitchell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsOfSiDhSXk
Husk.irl (a young man) on Instagram does fantastic work in short videos with “breaking” ChatGPT’s voice AI model. He gives short prompts (for example, “telling AI I was swallowed by a whale”) and exposes the utter silliness, or computational limits, of language models. It’s really funny and instructive! https://www.instagram.com/husk.irl/?hl=en
Stop talking about AI - start talking about techno-fascism - Freedom News
Sam Altman actually was asked to respond to one of his videos. He dissembles, of course. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VRgk7_X7oc
https://thecon.ai/ and also Dr. Bender’s and Dr. Hanna’s program Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 https://dair-institute.org/maiht3k/
https://datasociety.net/research-library/scam-gpt-genai-and-the-automation-of-fraud/
The Nerd Reich by Gil Duran
A good documentary about AI scams is “Scam Slave: From Hell to Home” by Timothy Blackwood https://anthemfilmfestival.com/films/scam-slave-from-hell-to-home/
In case anyone is interested, see this non-exhaustive collection of worth-reading books on topics strongly related to Critical AI https://monettdiaz.com/books-critical-ai.html