🚨 Football fans are taking on an oil giant.
In an open letter spearheaded by Fossil Free Football, a coalition of fans are speaking out against the deal between FIFA and the world's largest fossil fuel company Aramco. 🧵 1/6
Inspired by #QuitGPT, please join me for what is already the largest boycott of anything in history of all humanity: the #QuitCoke campaign
Already, fifteen million people have considered the thought of signing a pledge to #QuitCoke
Here's a video, with some discussion of alternatives to consider!
The 2 excellent Bianca Hall reports on WoodCIDE's intense lobbying from ACF FOI efforts
Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://help.ft.com/faq/gifting-and-sharing-an-article/what-is-a-gift-article/. https://www.ft.com/content/09fa5c20-2c8f-4f41-9d91-c78476eaac20 Drone strikes on Amazon Web Services facilities this week in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain highlight the vulnerability of cloud facilities — prominent symbols of US tech power in the region and hard to defend against air attack. Fars News Agency, an outlet affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said on Thursday that Iran targeted Amazon and Microsoft facilities in recent drone strikes. Experts say Amazon’s facilities were likely targeted by Iran. Microsoft said it had not experienced any outages in the region. The strikes mark what is believed to be the world’s first military attack against the US “hyperscalers” that dominate the global cloud computing market. That could create a chilling effect on the UAE and Saudi Arabia’s plans to spend billions of dollars on local AI infrastructure in the coming years, a crucial plank of the oil-rich states’ efforts to diversify their economies. “The Iranians view data centres as part of the conflict,” said Matt Pearl, a director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank.
Iran acknowledges they are targeting AWS and Azure data centres. "The Iranians view data centres as part of the conflict,” said Matt Pearl, a director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
there was this report a few days ago bsky.app/profile/jose...
“The new calculations reveal that following a relative sea level rise of 1 metre, it is estimated that 37% more coastal areas will fall below sea level, affecting up to 132 million individuals.” Oops!
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Another great article featuring our research published in @nature.com
Many heat-stressed tropical insects are reaching their limits | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...
@science.org
Here's @lucyham.bsky.social with a great piece of research about the local right-wing establishment social engineering operation occurring of late.
"Powerful right-wing regressive weirdos gather to plot at Atlas-linked conference in Australia"
Fri 6 Feb
FOI drops this wk revealed WoodCIDE's intense lobbying of the @albomp.bsky.social gov that secured them favourable approval conditions for the North West Shelf carbon 💣
Good thing Labor's been forced to kill their detested FOI secrecy bill
Burns continues to be useless 4 #ClimateAction
🧵 Shares always appreciated, my visibility on this site has plummeted in the last year or so (that large follower count is mostly dead accounts left by Bluesky's ethnic cleansing of Palestinian users). Thank you 🤍
"16 members have quit"
The Toronto Film Critics Association faces collapse after Indigenous filmmaker Elle-Máijá Tailfeather returned her trophy, the president resigned and 16 members quit. All this due to zionists’ attempt to censor Tailfeathers’ pro-Palestine speech.
Antidote - ta-da!
How the Guardian is using GenAI Chris Moran Wed 4 Mar 2026 13.15 GMT Prefer the Guardian on Google Over the past three years AI has triggered a societal shift and we are sure that many of our readers are using it in their own lives or work. News has been at the forefront of these discussions. It is impacting our business model as AI summaries start answering news queries on search engines and chatbots. It is also raising questions about truth, veracity and plausible deniability, and debate about how – or whether – news organisations should use AI in their journalism. Here at the Guardian, there has been extensive internal discussion about how we can benefit from this fast-developing technology while protecting our authenticity and our values. We take pride in our bylined journalism, grounded in the human experience. However ‘intelligent’ AI may appear, it doesn’t experience the world as we do. That lived experience is our unique contribution, and an authentic response is what our readers, supporters and staff expect and deserve. However, as AI becomes integrated into everyday computer software, phones and other devices, often without users realising, it is important that we engage with the technology in a deliberate, constructive way. This extends beyond the newsroom to explore potential opportunities to make our systems and ways of working more efficient. So what are we doing? Educating staff - While our staff can choose whether or not to use GenAI in their work providing it is in line with our published principles and editorial code, we want everyone at the Guardian to understand the technology, and know how to use it safely and responsibly. We’ve rolled out a mandatory training course for all our staff that goes beyond dos and don’ts - explaining how AI works and the science behind it - so our staff can make informed decisions. We’ll keep updating our training as the technology evolves. Creating in-house tools that incorporate Guardian values - We are intr…
Guardian posted today genai principles and even the gentle doubt here is completely off planet bonkers
"However ‘intelligent’ AI may appear, it doesn’t experience the world as we do"
WHAT
IT DOESN'T EXPERIENCE ANYTHING AT ALL
NEITHER DOES MICROSOFT EXCEL
FMD
www.theguardian.com/help/insideg...
a map of openai's influence on other media companies
Amazing site here via @timnitgebru.bsky.social - a map of big tech influence on media and media companies.
imo this goes a decent way to explaining why coverage of AI specifically has been so shockingly bad recently. Very useful resource!!
nananwachukwu.github.io/media-captur...
As the Joint Statement on Fairer Data Centres in Australia says, the 1st of 8 minimum requirements Data Centres should comply with is to "be powered by 100% additional renewables"
If inability to comply means no cloud services, I'm good with that
carbonzero.org.au/joint-statem...
A new documentary film on the devastating “ecocide” happening in West Papua is screening as a world premiere in NZ this weekend. The 90min feature, Pesta Babi (“Pig Feast”), is about deforestation and militarisation.
davidrobie.nz/2026/03/deva...
because the rest are cowards
Here’s a full draft of the upcoming second edition of my “Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction”: socviz.co
When the Chair brings the organisation into disrepute...
Public ed is good for social cohesion. Public funding for religious private schools divides us.
It's extremely depressing how our system & pol leaders encourage a belief that sending your kids to private, esp "Christian" schools gives them a better future. We need pride & investment in public ed
What impact does AI have on young people's perception of the future and their perceived power to influence it? Our paper (@jsiebold.bsky.social, @awitschas.bsky.social & @rainermuehlhoff.bsky.social) introduces AI resignation as a structurally produced future sensibility among young people.
When the Future Feels Foreclosed: AI Resignation and the Power to Act Jan-Philipp Siebold, Annemarie Witschas, Rainer Mühlhoff First published: 18 February 2026 ABSTRACT This article develops the concept of ‘AI resignation’ to capture how young people encounter AI not only as a helpful or flawed tool, but as an overpowering and seemingly inevitable force that can foreclose their sense of political and personal power to act in relation to the future. Building on qualitative work with high school students in Germany (ages 15–18), we conceptualize AI resignation as a future-oriented sensibility that emerges at the intersection of pervasive data-driven infrastructures and hegemonic narratives of AI inevitability. Drawing on Foucault's late work on subjectivation and subjectivity, as well as extensions in media and affect theory, we identify four contradictory pulls that structure adolescents' everyday engagements with AI—between enthusiasm and dependency, effortless access and eroded learning, self-governance and repeated failure, aspiration and foreclosed futures—and show how these double binds gradually hollow out experiences of self-efficacy. We further argue that AI resignation fulfils a strategic affective function within digital capitalism: by naturalizing dependence on predictive AI infrastructures and normalizing diminished expectations of the power to act, it stabilizes the very sociotechnical structures that produce it. The article concludes by outlining implications for re-politicizing AI and education, emphasizing power-critical curricula and collective spaces of reflection that enable young people to meaningfully participate in shaping sociotechnical futures.
📢 New Publication 🎉
We are excited that our latest article has just been published with Wiley @futurehumanities.bsky.social:
“When the Future Feels Foreclosed: AI Resignation and the Power to Act”
👉 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
Turns out there's a pretty good story to how the Albo Labor govt's detested FOI secrecy bill came to its ignominious end
The great news for today: that the Albanese Government pulled its “friendless” Freedom of Information Amendment Bill.
Read @thepointau.bsky.social's "3 reasons to be glad the Government's FOI changes have been scrapped" --> thepoint.com.au/explainers/2... #auspol
As an ant scientist, I… I’m not even sure what to do with this.
seems like all consumers—ant scientist or otherwise—are on their own now...
Is unquestioning, mindless support for the international law-violating, illegal US-Israeli warmongering also sovereignty, Minister Bowen❓
Is unquestioning, mindless support for the international law-violating, illegal US-Israeli warmongering also sovereignty, Minister @chrisbowenmp.bsky.social❓
A rocket launching company the previous Labor government invested more than $5 million of public funds into has gone into liquidation, with the Chief Minister mocking Labor again for their poor investment decisions, but refusing to answer questions about whether she would now call a public inquiry…
02 NOT ALL AI IS EQUAL A spam filter and GPT are not the same problem ★EXPLAIN IT LIKE I'M 5 A bicycle and a jumbo jet both get you places. But comparing their "fuel use" as if they're the same thing would be ridiculous. L.1801 recognises that Al comes in four very different types and their environmental footprints are not even close to each other. Before measuring anything, the standard requires you to classify what kind of Al you are assessing. Section 6.3 defines four technology types with fundamentally different hardware, data, and energy demands. This classification is the starting point of every L.1801 assessment. TYPE 01 Expert Systems Medical diagnosis, fraud detection, energy optimisation-rule-based, human-defined logic Energy Data TYPE 02 Machine Learning Email filtering, product recommendations - learns from statistical patterns in data Energy Data TYPE 03 Deep Learning Image recognition, CNNs, RNNs-multiple layers of neural networks Energy Data Hardware: CPU + GPU TYPE 04 Highest Impact Generative Al LLMs, image/video generation, multi-modal models - generating new content at scale Energy Data Hardware: Significant GPUs and/or TPUs Hardware: CPU only Hardware: CPU + GPU Key insight: The standard explicitly classifies GenAl as "comparatively high" in both energy and hardware demands - a level above all other Al types. When people debate "Al's environmental impact," they are mostly talking about Type 04.
03 THE FOUNDATION Count the whole story, not just the ending ★EXPLAIN IT LIKE I'M 5 Before you say your toy is eco-friendly, you have to count the mine where the metals came from, the factory that built it, the truck that shipped it, and what happens when you throw it away. Not just whether the box is recyclable. L.1801 is built on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) the internationally recognised methodology for environmental accounting, standardised in ITU-T L.1410. The core principle: measure the full life of the system, from raw material extraction to end-of-life treatment. For Al that means four stages. Click each stage below to see what the standard actually requires you to count. ↓ Click any stage to expand its data requirements STAGE 01 STAGE 02 STAGE 03 STAGE 04 Make the Hardware Before training begins Build & Train The expensive phase Run It Daily Inference & operation Retire It Decommission & e-waste Key insight: Most Al companies today report only Stage 3 - inference electricity. The standard requires all four stages. Stages 1 and 4 in particular are almost universally missing from current Al environmental disclosures.
07- WHAT WE MEASURE It's not just about carbon ★EXPLAIN IT LIKE I'M 5 A car isn't bad for just one reason. It burns petrol, needs metal to build, uses water in its engine, and takes up space. Al is the same. Measuring only carbon is like judging a car only by how loud it is - you're missing most of the picture. L.1801 mandates one impact category and recommends four more. In practice, the recommended categories are likely to be skipped by most organisations unless required by regulation. Click any card to see what it measures and why it matters. MANDATORY RECOMMENDED RECOMMENDED RECOMMENDED RECOMMENDED Climate Change GHG emissions across full life cycle Water Use Cooling systems + energy generation Minerals & Metals Rare earth elements for hardware Fossil Fuels Energy source matters enormously Biodiversity The one almost nobody measures yet ← Key insight: Only carbon is mandatory. Water, minerals, fossil fuels, and biodiversity are all optional. This means most organisations will report carbon and stop there - which the standard is designed to evolve beyond as measurement methodologies mature and regulation catches up. STANDARD Section 8.1.4 + 8.1.6-LCIA categories and reporting requirements
"ITU-T L.1801 is the world's first standard for measuring how much AI systems actually cost the planet — from GPU mining to your last query. This is what it means, layer by layer"
Very useful new standard from the ITU with some VERY useful explanations
l1801framework.netlify.app
