Dustin Edwards

@dustinedwards

I study the unmet promises and lived harms of extractive technologies.

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Dustin Edwards@dustinedwards· Jul 26

Writing to cancel my NCTE membership and demand a refund.

Top image: Man on top speaking on a corded orange phone. The words "Go to hell" are on the bottom.
Bottom image: a hand is hanging up the phone on a Garfield receiver.

Dustin Edwards@dustinedwards· Apr 13

Looking forward to talking with folks at UMD this week! My talk is "Accelerate or Die? Digital Damage After AI Acceleration"

Flier for zoom event. Text reads:
Accelerate or Die? Digital Damage after AI Acceleration
The motto “accelerate or die” encapsulates an ideology lurking behind the rapid buildout of AI data centers across the planet. In this talk, after tracing Big Tech’s swift turn from so-called sustainable development to fossil-fueled acceleration, Dustin Edwards will insist that this moment of AI acceleration is not a foregone conclusion. In contrast to the techno-optimist ideologies that have fueled the recent AI data center boom, many frontline communities opposing data centers insist on a different vision for our collective futures—one rooted in place, attuned to uneven vulnerabilities, and dedicated to slower and more transparent processes of democratic decision making.

Dustin Edwards@dustinedwards· Apr 3

All this to employ maybe 200 people and emit more carbon that the whole state of New Mexico. I hope the bubble bursts tomorrow.

A visual depiction of the money going into Project Jupiter. There are 12 circles—depicting different companies—that are overlapping.

Dustin Edwards@dustinedwards· Mar 31

researching the financial arrangements (shell companies, political consultants, law firms) of the Stargate Project (openAI/Oracle) has me wrecked

Charlie Day meme: a scattering of documents pinned on a wall with lines pointing everywhere

Dustin Edwards@dustinedwards· Mar 8

Heard the good word that my article, "Weathering the Rhetorical Climates of AI," received an honorable mention for the Richard Braddock Award in the journal College Composition and Communication. publicationsncte.org/content/jour...

certificate of award: 2026 Richard Braddock Memorial Award Honorable Mention

Dustin Edwards@dustinedwards· Feb 5

Every so often you get to do really cool things at universities. This is one of them. Can't wait to facilitate a dialogue on Powering AI from the Borderlands: Organizing Against Data Centers on Feb 24th.

Flyer with event details, featuring a desert landscape with power lines running through the middle.

Powering AI from the Borderlands: Organizing Against Data Centers
Tuesday, Feb. 24 at 4 pm
Digital Humanities Center / SDSU Library
SDSU College of Arts and Letters

Panelists bios and headshots featuring
Annie Ersinghaus, award-winnign independent filmaker from Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Daisy A. Maldonado, community advocate for environmental justice, public health, and climate preservation in southern New Mexico.
Gilberto Manzanarez, community advocate and educator from Calexico, California, focused on environmental justice and government transparency in the Imperial Valley

Dustin Edwards@dustinedwards· Dec 20

The article is indebted to brilliant scholars such as @rcmeg.bsky.social, @nobugsnous.bsky.social, @jsanofranchini.bsky.social, & @ruha9.bsky.social who dare to ask us to imagine alternative, more hopeful versions of the world.

screenshot from the end of the article. Text reads "Finally, I find it imperative to amplify alternative visions of the world. I suspect many people who are actively standing against the pervasive climates of AI did not envision themselves doing this work. Benjamin, for example, expresses exasperation at being trapped within the imaginations of the artificial intelligentsia (“Who Owns the Future?”). Yet she reminds us that often we need to weed before we sow. Part of weathering the rhetorical climates of AI will entail lots of weeding: the need to talk about heavy things and attend to the here and now with a mētis sensibility, often squeezing the joy out of the room when GenAI is uncritically invoked or when it is impressed upon us as inevitable. This moment of AI oversaturation clouds our atmospheres with shiny distractions that are deadly serious in their consequences. Similar to Benjamin, I believe such distractions are designed to blot out a different kind of AI, an abolitionist imagination that demands the undoing of smothering conditions in order to envision something better. And so, the bigger, more joyful, more community-centered project remains: What can we imagine in the place of heavy clouds? That question, I believe, has long nourished the progress of plotting new dreams, technologies, and conditions of living otherwise. Weathering the rhetorical climates of AI will require weeding, yes, but it will also demand cultivating space for an imagination that lives beyond a climate that is suffocating for far too many."

Dustin Edwards@dustinedwards· Dec 20

New publication out: "Weathering the Rhetorical Climates of AI." I'm really excited that it's open access! publicationsncte.org/content/jour...

Screenshot with text of an abstract. "In a relatively short time, market and political forces have intensified the reach of artificial intelligence (AI). AI has become, in a word, climatic—not only a discrete technological system but also a creeping assemblage of ideological, material, and political forces. This article tracks these forces by developing rhetorical climates of AI as a conceptual framework. In doing so, I aim to (1) link the harms of climate change with the rapid buildout of AI infrastructure and (2) shift the frame of the conversation by emphasizing the extractive, exploitative, enclosed, and knotted supremacist conditions that have been prerequisites for building AI systems at scale. While these pervading rhetorical climates may seem unchangeable, I track how microclimates of resistance have developed, in the past and in the present. In particular, I emphasize the importance of bodily intelligence in navigating asymmetrical conditions of power felt in the AI industry. The article concludes by discussing how rhetoric and writing studies can weather the unfolding rhetorical climates of AI by diagnosing conditions, seizing moments, and plotting futures to imagine a less extractive and less harmful world."

Dustin Edwards@dustinedwards· Nov 4

Promo for Enduring Digital Damage. Image is the book cover sitting in desert landscape with blue skies with the following blurb: "Enduring Digital Damage is well researched, well synthesized, and truly graceful in reckoning with unsettling theoretical 'truths' accepted in digital, rhetorical, and posthuman theory. --Jennifer Clary-Lemon, author of Nestwork: New Material Rhetorics for Precarious Species."

Dustin Edwards@dustinedwards· Oct 30

A dear student and writing tutor extraordinaire preordered my book and happened to get her copy before I got mine. Then, she asked me to sign it 🥹🥹🥹. My first and probably last (lol) book signing!

Dustin holds a copy of his book and smiles.

Dustin smiles and opens a book with a pen.

Dustin Edwards@dustinedwards· Jul 21

Getting real real: book cover has LANDED.

Book cover includes an image of a computer server sitting in a desert landscape writ sharp mountains in the background. The title—enduring digital damage—is written in big, white, and capitalized letters in the sky. The subtitle—rhetorical reckonings for planetary survival—is in smaller font at the bottom of the page.

Dustin Edwards@dustinedwards· Jun 30

Finishing a project detailing how prehistories of refusal in a copper mining community can inform responses to AI inevitability. And I’m struck by how relevant this *1914* Western Federation of Miners Union preamble is:

We hold that there is a class struggle in Society and that this struggle is caused by economic conditions.
We affirm the economic condition of the producer to be that he is exploited of the wealth which he produces, being allowed to retain barely sufficient for his elementary necessities.
We hold that the class struggle will continue until the producer is recognized as the sole master of his product.
We assert that the working class, and it alone, can and must achieve its own emancipation.
We hold, finally, that an industrial union and the concerted political action of all wage workers, is the only method of attaining this end.
Therefore, we, the wage slaves, employed in and around the mines, mills, smelters, tunnels, open pits and open cuts, have associated in the Western Federation of Miners.

Dustin Edwards@dustinedwards· Jun 25

Writing and doing great!

Screenshot of a Google doc with a phrase highlighted in yellow: quote from that one whack book.

Dustin Edwards@dustinedwards· Jun 20

More is up on the University of Alabama Press website about my book, including blurbs(!!), a description, and a contents page. www.uapress.ua.edu/978081736219...

Screenshot of chapter titles with the below text:

Acknowledgments

Prologue: The Open Pit and Stories from Somewhere

Part I. Inheriting Worlds

Chapter 1. Dwelling with Digital Damage

Chapter 2. The Deep Conditions of Digital-Material Rhetoric

Part II. Storying Worlds

Chapter 3. Data

Chapter 4. Mining

Part III. Inventing Worlds

Chapter 5. Invention at the End of This World

Chapter 6. After Damage

Postscript: To Keep a Story Going

Notes

References

Index

Dustin Edwards@dustinedwards· Jun 17

To see an uncontained fire inch closer and closer to the copper mine near my hometown in Grant County, NM is heartbreaking, but also an apt visual encapsulation of what years of extraction does to a landscape and community

A screenshot of a Google earth image showing the proximity of the trout fire to the mine pit.

Dustin Edwards@dustinedwards· Jun 7

You’re worried about the negative health effects of smoking, join in and start smoking 3 packs a day. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/t...

A screenshot from a NYT article. Text reads: “Some universities say they are embracing the new A.I. tools in part because they want their schools to help guide, and develop guardrails for, the technologies.

“You’re worried about the ecological concerns. You’re worried about misinformation and bias,” Edmund Clark, the chief information officer of California State University, said at a recent education conference in San Diego. “Well, join in. Help us shape the future.””

Dustin Edwards@dustinedwards· May 7

Update: I hit the send button

Star Wars meme of the chancellor looking tired in his mask

Dustin Edwards@dustinedwards· Apr 24

Led a faculty workshop today 😈

Screenshot of a slide with question: “what does it take to make AI at scale?” Text follows and leads to an acronym: EEEK!

Extraction: removing and reusing finite resources to support infrastructure (minerals, water, energy)
Exploitation: IP theft, unfair labor practices (data labeling, model training, mining/smelting work to make GPUs, etc.)
Enclosure: atmospheres of surveillance, militaristic uses, funneling of wealth, concentration of power/control
Knotted Supremacist Ideologies: white mainstream English as default, eugenic desires (AGI), myths of “neutrality” in output

Dustin Edwards@dustinedwards· Mar 31

Joseph Weizenbaum in 1995, describing the men who have pursued artificial general intelligence