Data centers are becoming politically potent infrastructure. But what happens before the severs they house are even put in place? (read more)‘Worlding’ is a concept that offers an analytical foothold for researchers trying to understand how seemingly unlike elements of a broader situation do or don’t hang together (read more).I’ve just finished reading two important write-ups done for Chips Communities United on the use of PFAS chemicals in the tech sector, one about their presence in wastewater outflows from a semiconductor manufacturing site in Washington state (Siegel 2026b) and another about their use for cooling of data centres (Siegel 2026a). There’s a lot going on in both of these write-ups, so I want to draw out a few key points from each of them… (read more)This is a text version of a keynote talk I was invited to give at an international symposium at York University in April 2026. I have included images of my slides that accompanied my talk. My talk was about thinking through what counts as ‘waste’, what counts as ‘work’ in what the symposium’s organizers called the ‘new global politics of disposability’ (read more here).Given my broader research interests and the non-consensual inclusion of my work into AI data training sets, I figure I have some license to play around with these tools to get a sense of what they do. So I decided to experiment with what is sometimes called ‘local AI’… (read more)The ‘end of geography’ has been part of the Silicon Valley tech mythos and marketing for decades. With the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, old-timey ‘capes-and-bays’ geography has come roaring back… (read more)
