danmcquillan.org

Abstract for the forthcoming paper ‘Beyond AI: Infrastructuring the Common Good’.

My abstract for the workshop on ‘Teaching Anti-Fascism Today: Developing and Shaping Practices’ to be held at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

My speaker notes from the ‘Resisting Big Tech Empires’ conference, Sat 25th April 2026.

new preprint: ‘AI, Decomputing and the Interregnum’ cite as: McQuillan, D. (2026).

This is the abstract for my Rogers Chair Public Lecture for Western University on 20th March 2026 at 5pm GMT, hosted by the Starling Centre for Just Technologies and Just Societies.

Video, Speaker notes & slides from the panel on ‘Resisting GenAI & Big Tech in Higher Education’, an event co-organised with the Climate Justice Universities Union (CJUU).

My opening statement to the Irish Parliament (Oireachtas) joint Committee on Artificial Intelligence.

An abstract for the European University of Technology’s (EUt+) webinar series on digital transformation.

A talk for the Low Carbon and Sustainable Computing (LOCOS) seminar series at the University of Glasgow.

This is the text of a talk given as part of the lecture series “Unstitching Datafication”, organised by the Media for Cooperation research centre at the University of Siegen.

I have a new piece out in the Berliner Gazette: ‘Resisting the Techno-Fascist Takeover: Are We Ready for Decomputing?

This is the text of a seminar given at the Goldsmiths Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought on June 11th 2025 I would like to thank the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought for inviting me to give this seminar.

I wrote this Q&A to help me prepare for a TV interview about AI and disability.

Thanks to POLITICO Pro Morning Technology UK for asking me to respond their weekly Q&A for the Friday 13th(!)

This is the draft abstract for my research seminar at the Goldsmiths Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought (CPCT), as part of the 2024-2025 series ‘On Truth and Lies in the Extramoral University’.

I was fortunate to have the chance to debate with staff from Anthropic in an event at the Tate Gallery.

This is a placeholder for the open access chapter on ‘AI Infrastructures, Total Mobilisation and Decomputing’ which will be coming out soon in the volume ‘AI Infrastructures and Sustainability’ edited by Anne Mollen, Fieke Jansen, Sigrid Kannengießer, Jul…

This is the full version of the article that was published in Computer Weekly on 14-1-25.

I was interviewed by Diyar Saraçoğlu, translator of ‘Yapay Zekâya Direnmek’ (the Turkish edition of ‘Resisting AI’), for their series on The Political Construction of Artificial Intelligence, which gave me an opportunity to add some reflections on the cur…

This is the introduction to a longer article which has been published in Computer Weekly.

Abstract for a forthcoming chapter in an open access volume on ‘AI Infrastructures and Sustainability’, to be published by Palgrave The advent of generative AI has thrust aspects of AI infrastructure into popular awareness, not least its seemingly insatia…

My piece in the Scottish left Review: A Just Transition Means Resisting AI

My article on Bellacaledonia, a follow-up to my participation in a panel on AI at Holyrood: Betting on AI will take Scotland backwards not forwards

A talk given at the The 2nd Ecology of AI Workshop in June 2024 One of the concepts I introduce in this talk is the idea of ‘decomputing’, as a 50:50 hybrid of decolonial and degrowth approaches.

(Abstract for a chapter which will appear in ‘The Handbook of Critical Studies of Artificial Intelligence and Education’, published by Edward Elgar Publishing in 2025) This chapter will argue that education is vulnerable to capture by AI because it has al…

At the same time that UK political parties vie in their condemnation of the Post Office scandal, they unite in their promotion of AI as the answer to tricky social problems.

It’s tempting to see the recent UK AI Safety Summit as a damp squib, preempted by an Executive Order on AI from the Whitehouse and roundly criticised by civil society for excluding everyone but tech execs.

Some quick notes on the EU’s AI Act.

Executive summary Large language models contain foundational flaws which mean they are unable to live up to the hype and make it likely that the current bubble will burst.

Opening remarks for the panel on ‘Political Interventions in Data and AI’ at #DataJustice2023 is a social movement to resist AI, because a real challenge to algorithmic violence requires structural change.

Large language models (LLMs) like the GPT family learn the statistical structure of language by optimising their ability to predict missing words in sentences (as in ‘The cat sat on the [BLANK]’).

Chapter abstracts for ‘Resisting AI - An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence’ Available from Bristol University Press chapter 0 - introduction The introduction starts by grounding AI, for the purposes of the book, as the computational methods…

A talk given to the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on the History of AI, University of Cambridge, June 23rd 2021 It’s time to talk about the Ludding times.

The speakers notes for a 6.5 minute talk given at the Data Justice Lab in Cardiff, June 7th 2019. 1. not transformation but intensification The introduction of process automation and predictive analytics via machine learning is not a transformation, it’s…

A talk given at the launch of the ‘All Access AI’ network at Goldsmiths, Unversity of London 1st April 2019.

This talk was given at the conference ‘Rethinking the legacy of 1968: Left fields and the quest for common ground’ held at The Centre for Cultural Studies Research, University of East London on September 22nd 2018 http://rethinking1968.today/ There’s a de…

Voice as Biomarker ‘You sound a bit depressed’ we might say to a friend Not only because of what they say but how they say it Perhaps their speech is duller than usual, tailing off between words Lacking their usual lively intonation There are many ways to…

The Manifesto on Algorithmic Humanitarianism was presented at the symposium on ‘Reimagining Digital Humanitarianism’, Goldsmiths, University of London, Feb 16th 2018.

What is the relationship between citizen science and change?

[This reflection on the first year of Science for Change Kosovo was commissioned by Datashift and released under a CC-BY-SA license.]

A talk for the panel on ‘Resilience and the Future of Democracy in the Smart City’ at the 25th anniversary conference of the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster, 7th Nov 2015 I want to start by looking at what resilience and the s…

I propose we look at data science through the historical lens of phrenology.

Presented at the London Conference on Critical Thought in June 2015 graffiti art of Hannah Arendt by Patrik Wolters (alias BeneR1) in collaboration with Kevin Lasner (alias koarts) I want to warn of the possibility that algorithmic prediction will lead to…

I propose Data Luddism as a radical response to the productive power of big data and predictive algorithms.

An opening provocation to the ‘DIY Science: the challenges of quality’ at the European Commission Joint Research Centre, Ispra 16-5-15 DIY science doesn’t happen inside walls with armed guards [note: this refers to the workshop venue] the question of qual…

This is my statement concerning the events of July 2001, where I was one of 93 people arrested, beaten and tortured following the demonstrations against the G8.