Big news for HYPERSCALE less than two months out from release: It’s longlisted for the FT’s Business Book of the Year Award, got some great reviews, and I’m narrating the audiobook!

Plus, get great tech reads you might have missed in the Disconnect monthly recap.

https://disconnect.blog/hyperscale-is-longlisted-for-an-ft-award/

#tech #newbook #datacenters #reading

“The Senate GOP campaign arm, in a private memo to top AI companies, warns that toxic views of U.S. data centers are killing the party's chances of holding a vital seat in Ohio.”

https://www.axios.com/2026/08/19/gop-data-center-memo-ai-election

#tech #datacenters #politics #midterms

definitely curious about the doc. it could be great, but the article also makes it sound like it will be filled with very lib-brained takes and give credibility to people who don’t deserve it, like using a crank like geoffrey hinton to suggest musk might use AI to manipulate US elections.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/elon-musk-alex-gibney-documentary-1236686790/

#tech #elonmusk #hbo #documentary

Google has now renamed Lake Ontario for US users. They don’t even show the real name in brackets.

I used a VPN to compare: Apple hasn’t renamed it (at least not yet), nor has Dutch service Here WeGo or OpenStreetMap.

Yet another reason to ditch Google, and US tech more broadly.

#tech #lakeontario #canada #cdnpoli #tariffs #digitalsovereignty

Big news! HYPERSCALE made the longlist for the FT/Standard Chartered Business Book of the Year Award.

They call it a “a polemical on-the-ground investigation into the rapid spread of data centres and their impact on the environment and the communities where Big Tech is building them.”

#tech #datacenters #ai #generativeai #artificialintelligence #reading #books

In the 2010s, we were told new tech would revolutionize transportation.

As BMW faces backlash for sticking a Spider-Man ad on its center console, we can see what it really amounted to: cars that collect vast quantities of data on us and which automakers are desperate to use to push ads on us too.

https://disconnect.blog/bmws-in-car-spider-man-ad-is-a-warning-sign/

#tech #bmw #transportation #transport #cars #driving #spiderman

Bernie Sanders is leading the charge against data centers, but his AI policy leaves a lot to be desired.

As Sanders follows the hype, AOC is taking a different tack by targeted the real harms of generative AI. We need policy that takes on the reality of AI, not the industry’s exaggerations.

https://disconnect.blog/bernie-sanders-has-ai-policy-all-wrong/

#berniesanders #techindustry #artificialintelligence #politics #aoc #generativeai #openai #claude #anthropic #chatgpt

“More and more people are questioning whether this industry is actually thinking about the kind of social benefit of their technologies or just about what they, at the end of the day, want to get out of it.”

I spoke to CBC News about the backlash to influencers going to an OpenAI retreat.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/openai-influencers-summer-camp-controversy-9.7296991

#tech #ai #openai #politics

What if our feeds were filled with uplifting and wholesome content?

Before getting into this month’s recap, I talk about some of the videos that came across my feed recently that made me feel good — and almost made me want to try to train my algorithm to get more of them.

https://disconnect.blog/a-more-wholesome-algorithm/

#tech #instagram #socialmedia #touchgrass