Designing socially useful computing, together

Today I gave a short talk at a teach-in on the politics of data centres. The teach-in was part of the Stop Dirty Data Centres European Days of Action on 6 and 7 November, when local groups across Europe protested and called for a moratorium on large data centres. The teach-in took place during a support demonstration organised by Fossiel Vrij at the Plimsollweg in Amsterdam Sloterdijk. That’s the site where Pure DC is building a hyperscale data centre for Microsoft, despite the city’s ban on hyperscales. Fieke Jansen and Charis Papaevangelou organised a line-up of Dutch university teachers, each of whom had five minutes, outdoors and without slides, to explain one part of what is at stake. Thanks to them for inviting me, to Fossiel Vrij for organizing the demo and to Geef Tegengas for their direct action. A rough abstract of what I said: I don’t need to convince anyone at a demo like this that we should resist the buildout of big corporate AI. The question I asked was: what could…

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