@zgtcooper
Assistant Professor of Digital Media & Film at St. Lawrence University | Affiliate @datasociety.bsky.social (Climate, Technology, and Justice group). Internet infrastructure and sustainability researcher. www.zanegriffintalleycooper.com
Interesting to note that the entire genre of the “western,” as popularized by Owen Wister in 1902’s The Virginian, is largely about how men on the East Coast have gotten soft and the real American Man is out in that hardened, mythical wEsT. American masculinity has long been insanely fragile.
Monograph. Similar format to article but more in depth and updated for (gestures wildly) all of this nonsense.
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....
If there were ever a reason to never use Canvas again, this would be it: www.cnet.com/tech/service...
A friend pointed out that the ones with the huge HVAC systems have to be data centers because they wouldn’t build that sophisticated temperature control for humans. And he’s absolutely right 🫠🫠🫠
Don’t worry. They already thought of this for sure.
Let’s play a game. Which of these are data centers, and which are ICE detention centers?
Drop an album that was important to you when you were 19
“the most widely shared Moltbook content, the posts that drove headlines and speculation, often came from these theatrical accounts rather than verifiable autonomous agents. Viral consciousness debates were overwhelmingly human driven.” www.forbes.com/sites/ronsch...
Melania is apparently The Minecraft Movie for brainwashed psychopaths.
ICYMI A profoundly out of touch Darren Aronofsky has a new AI production company and just released an AI-animated "series" about the Revolutionary War. No one actually wants this. The intended audience is venture capital: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZDn...
Fuck this monstrous complicity into the sun.
This is mentioned briefly in the article, but the entire hiring and promotion process for academics has been ensnared by this shit. Publishing 7 articles and a book in five years in order to get tenure is insane. Research contribution should be measured by quality not quantity.
Once again tapping the sign: datasociety.net/points/the-n...
I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that the price of Bitcoin started rising to its highest point since early December a couple of hours directly before the U.S. invasion of Venezuela
Greenland’s prime minister has been on top of this, but U.S. media has been less nuanced on the distinction, often taking Trump’s words as fact, which is always a mistake. The admin has designs on Greenland but how real are they? This is still in question: bsky.app/profile/chad...
It’s important in this mess to distinguish between rhetoric/imaginary and on-the-ground reality. For these folks Greenland isn’t a real place with people and things, but more of an empty fetish object on which to project future imaginaries. I talk a bit about it here: datasociety.net/points/the-n...
I'm researching the relationship between humanoid robots and data centers, and I'm looking for resources that detail the cloud infrastructures of robots. Generally interested in relationships between these emerging robotics companies and AWS/Azure, etc. Any pointers would be much appreciated!
I completely forgot that movie existed but now suddenly I remember everything about it.
Student projects were inspired by Brakhage, Deren, Dorsky, Parajanov, and many others. Dorsky was an all-around favorite last semester. As was Brakhage's Passage Through: A Ritual. Students loved the absence of image. Very proud of them for diving head first into some very difficult material.
I haven't been posting a lot lately, but I wanted to share the syllabus for my Experimental Cinema course I ran last semester. A transcendent experience. Their final films were incredible. Here's the syllabus and some project screenshots: static1.squarespace.com/static/5d5ef...
It’s the most criminally underrated horror film of the 80s
Any tech that doesn’t help directly address ongoing genocides, income inequality, the climate crisis, and the rise of global fascism is nonsense and should not be funded.
As an aside, if any editor out there wants to pay me to write a piece on why measuring the immense social and environmental impacts of AI is getting us nowhere, and how we can reframe the discourse, I have a number of things brewing. Plus I’m poor and need some extra cash plzzzz.
In regards to modes of extraction in grad school and western research practices, I’m gonna leave this here. @maxliboiron.bsky.social always has lessons to teach us about methods, research ethics, and how to produce (or at least endeavor to produce) just knowledge: discardstudies.com/2021/01/18/f...
As an aside, I’ve now noticed EBSCO providing AI summaries of its articles, which undermines the entire business model of academic publishing. This follows the death of close reading and how grad students are taught to read extractively. Why read any article ever again? Now we don’t have to!
In terms of art, there are SO many great artists thinking critically about AI and its place in society. @eryk.bsky.social is one I consistently recommend as an artist who sees value in expression through the kinds of ecosystems of noise through which AI models articulate. Fascinating work.