The Data Fix with Dr. Mél Hogan

In this episode, Shannon Wait — Alphabet Workers Union-CWA organizer — speaks with me about the labour conditions for data center and AI workers. We talk about contracts, sub-contracts, sub-sub-contracts, NDAs, invisible labour -- and how all of this leads to unions, solidarity, and a fight for tech workers’ rights globally. Recorded May 8, 2025. Released June 2, 2025. Interview with Shannon Wait, Alphabet Workers Union-CWA Organizer (2024)https://poweratwork.us/shannon-wait-interviewA union of Alphabet workers in the U.S. and Canadahttps://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/Google Raters Participated in Historic Action at Google HQ to Demand Google End Poverty Wages for 5,000 Workershttps://code-cwa.org/news/google-raters-participated-historic-actionThe woman who took on Google and won (2021)https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56659212

Allison Carruth and I talk about her new book which gets at some of the material infrastructure and social systems that have made the US a settler state ever obsessed with new frontiers, including space. We talk about tech imaginaries, worlds remade, and better futures — a vision that invites confronting the state of things head-on, a slower redoing, and is based on connection, love, and friendship (maybe with aliens, too). Recorded May 7, 2025. Released May 19, 2025.Novel Ecologies: Nature Remade and the Illusions of Tech (2025)https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo239362741.htmlAllison Carruth https://allisoncarruth.com/

In this episode, Dani Shanley and Gemma Milne walk me through "hype" -- what it means in various technological contexts, how it works, what it is definitionally, how it feels in the body, who it serves, who it harms, and how we might need to nuance our relationship to it, especially as critical (tech) scholars. Recorded May 1, 2025. Released May 5, 2025.https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/gemma-milne/smoke-mirrors/9781472143655/https://radicalsciencepodcast.com/https://brainreel.substack.com/https://hypestudies.org/https://www.biss-institute.com/en/abouthttps://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/news/new-technologies-heroes-or-villains

Dustin Edwards and I discuss the damage caused by digital infrastructure and its extractive requirements. We talk about data centers and copper mines, but more than this, we delve into the what a decolonial, feminist, anti-racist approach can look like for white settler scholars grappling with their inheritances and obligations to the landscapes and to the stories they tell themselves, as we make (new) worlds. Recorded Apr 8, 2025. Released April 28, 2025.Enduring Digital Damage: Rhetorical Reckonings for Planetary Survivalhttps://www.uapress.ua.edu/9780817322472/enduring-digital-damage/ The making of critical data center studiesDustin Edwards, Zane Griffin Talley Cooper and Mél Hoganhttps://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13548565231224157 

In this episode, I ask Jasmine McNealy about the role of consent online, from social media exchanges to the circulation of deep fakes. Who gets to define harm? Who is responsible for the damage? Does anyone have to take accountability? We also talk about surveillance, sonic privacy, and the many data trails the body leaves behind. Recorded Apr 4, 2025. Released April 14, 2025.Sonic Privacy. Yale Journal of Law & Technology/Yale ISP-Knight Foundation Public Sphere Series.https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/area/center/isp/documents/mcnealy.pdfConsent (Still) Won’t Save Us Chapter from: Feminist Cyberlaw https://uplopen.com/chapters/e/10.1525/luminos.190.p 

Collin Bjork and I discuss the double (triple?) meaning of "extractive AI". Collin explains Otter.ai -- an AI powered voice-to-text transcription software, and the capitalist logics that enable it -- vs. Maori-led Te Hiku Media, based on principles of stewardship, community and collaboration. Collin also explains how rhetoric is about togetherness more than persuasion. Recorded Feb 12, 2025. Released March 24, 2025.Mentioned in ep: Bad Ideas About Writing (Ball & Loewe); Extractive AI and Its Challenge to Technical Communication (Bjork; forthcoming, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, October 2025); "The Acousmatic Question and the Will to Datafy" (Sterne & Sawhney); "Big AI Companies Need Higher Ed...But Does Higher Ed Need Them?" (Bjork); "ChatGPT Threatens Language Diversity" (Bjork); Te Reo Māori Speech Recognition (Te Hiku Media); Abundant Intelligences - Indigenous AI (Jason Edward Lewis, Hemi Whaanga, et al...)

In this episode Hagen Blix and I talk about how the fear of AI, from the non-billionaire CEO class, comes from the threat of deskilling workers. Recorded Mar 5, 2025. Released March 17, 2025.Tech Workers Can Still Fight Silicon Valley’s Overlordsby Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer https://jacobin.com/2025/02/tech-workers-silicon-valley-trump/Why We Fear AI: On the Interpretation of Nightmares Paperback – March 21 2025by Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer https://www.commonnotions.org/why-we-fear-ai 

In this episode I speak with Kane Murdoch about the perils of contract cheating. As an integrity officer, he frames what's happening with "cheating" as an unlearning that we should all be paying attention to if we care about education. Recorded Feb 6, 2025. Released March 10, 2025.Guerilla Warfarehttps://www.guerillawarfare.net/Ellis, C., & Murdoch, K. (2024). The educational integrity enforcement pyramid: a new framework for challenging and responding to student cheating. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 49(7), 924–934. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2024.2329167Lures and violent threats: old school cheating still rampant at Australian universities, even as AI rises — The Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/aug/01/lures-and-violent-threats-old-school-cheating-still-rampant-at-australian-universities-even-as-ai-risesGhost writers helping UNSW students to cheat on assessments, leaked report revealshttps://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/cheating-unsw-students-hire-ghost-writers-from-messaging-site-wechat-to-complete-work-20200505-p54q3f.htmlCheating found at UNSW up by 2000% as new detection methods usedhttps://www.smh.com.au/education/cheating-found-at-unsw-up-by-2000-percent-as-new-detection-methods-used-20190814-p52gz4.htmlUniversity students caught paying others to do their work at record levelshttps://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/university-students-caught-paying-others-to-do-their-work-at-record-levels-20221025-p5bsrx.html The Rise of Plagiarism: Contract Cheating https://www.turnitin.ca/products/originality/contract-cheating

AI images are circulating more and more online and sometimes we can't tell the 'real' from AI-generated. But as I discuss with the inimitable Gillian Rose and Roland Meyer, we need to think about AI images beyond their indexicality, i.e. the idea that a photograph is a direct representation of the subject it captures. In this episode, we grapple with AI generators that are part of extractive, colonial industries, and how that shapes the affect of AI visuals. Recorded Jan 29, 2025. Released Feb 24, 2025.It’s a flat world. The Synthetic Realities of Sorahttps://rrrreflect.org/special-issue-1/its-a-flat-world-the-synthetic-realities-of-sora“It’s a flat world. The Synthetic Realities of AI Video” by Roland Meyer at Hidden Layers 24https://vimeo.com/1011342969The New Value of the ArchiveAI Image Generation and the Visual Economy of ‘Style’https://image-journal.de/the-new-value-of-the-archive/“Generic Pastness. AI Image Synthesis and the Virtualization of the Archive”https://vimeo.com/873978726Models All The Way Down by Christo Buschek & Jer Thorphttps://knowingmachines.org/models-all-the-wayGillian Rose, Professor of Human GeographyFellow of the British Academy and Academy of Social Scienceswebpage: https://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/staff/grose.htmlbluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/profgillian.bsky.socialblog: visualmethodculture.wordpress.com