Notices by Timnit Gebru (she/her) (timnitgebru@dair-community.social), page 4

Black workers at IBM and their organizing against its abetting of apartheid South Africa (hint hint, everyone else was PRO just like now): https://www.wired.com/story/tech-organizing-labor-ibm-history/

Amazon, Google, Oracle, Microsoft military partnerships: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/business/pentagon-cloud-contracts-jwcc.html

#NoTechForApartheid website: https://www.notechforapartheid.com/

Tell congress #CeasefireNow here: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-ceasefire-now

On 14 Palestinians per hour killed (also obsolete since its more than 700/day now): https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/israel-kills-14-palestinians-every-hour-its-brutal-attack-gaza-israel-dropped-equivalent-quarter-nuclear-bomb-enar

The book the Palestine Laboratory discussing surveillance and autonomous warfare tools experimented on Palestinians and exported to the rest of the world: https://www.versobooks.com/products/2684-the-palestine-laboratory

Pegasus spyware on human rights activists' phones: https://digitalviolence.org/#/

Facial recognition used on Palestinians at checkpoints: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/05/israel-opt-israeli-authorities-are-using-facial-recognition-technology-to-entrench-apartheid/

These are the readings we shared on our DAIR statement: https://www.dair-institute.org/blog/palestine-10-25-23/

On Israeli Apartheid: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/

On Gaza under siege: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/10/israel-opt-israel-must-lift-illegal-and-inhumane-blockade-on-gaza-as-power-plant-runs-out-of-fuel/

On getting bombed, well just the official Israeli account boasting about dropping 6k bombs: https://twitter.com/IAFsite/status/1712484101763342772

On white phosphorus: https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/10/12/israel-white-phosphorus-used-gaza-lebanon

On quarter nuclear bomb (its now a full one though in the biggest bombardment of the century so this info. is obsolete): https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/israel-kills-14-palestinians-every-hour-its-brutal-attack-gaza-israel-dropped-equivalent-quarter-nuclear-bomb-enar

It helps to see all this before. Because its exactly the same. At that time I was so shocked to see these arguments, and it helped me to read more about denial during the Tutsi Rwandan genocide. I also talked to my friends who told me about the Mayan genocide in Guatemala, and how they couldn't speak to their families and friends. They told me that people will continue to deny even when perpetrators are taken to court and there are mountains of evidence.

Read @DAIR's full statement here: https://www.dair-institute.org/blog/palestine-10-25-23/

"We invite our colleagues to join us in demanding an end to Israeli apartheid and occupation, an end to Gaza genocide, and an end to Western governments’ complicity."

#NoTechForAparthied #CeasefireNOW

"You just hate X group, that's why you're claiming there's a genocide you liar."

"Look at this graph showing that the population has increased in the last hundred years. That's not a genocide."

"Genocide is a technical term, you can't just go around saying genocide all the time"

Yea lets also wait for the technical "world bodies" before calling out the Native American genocide.

And then just a bunch of other harassment trying to get you to be quiet.

"You support terrorists, why aren't you talking about them?"

"They use people as human shields, the people should revolt against them, they brought it upon themselves"

"That's an actor, its not real"

"The body count is propaganda, its not accurate"

"Where are the bodies?"

"You can't expect us to NOT shut off food, electricity & fuel."

while at the same time

"No we haven't shut it off, look at that ONE hospital that seems to be functioning"

I think it is helpful to read other cases of genocide denial if you want to help yourself figure out what to engage with and what not to engage with. The talking points are exactly the same. All genocides work the same. It was hard to engage with friends and extended family members saying these things during #TigrayGenocide and I sure am not going to entertain that from others now.

"No we're not talking about the population its just this group we're calling animals"

Wonderful interview by Marc Lamont Hill with the one and only Angela Davis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIVxooM5kG8&t=4s

Ariel Koren's letter after getting pushed out of Google for her #NoTechForAparthied advocacy.

"Christians United For Israel is the largest Israel lobby in the U.S. with 10 million members (compared to the largest Jewish lobby group AIPAC which has just 100,000 members)..., a white Christian group, has a highly anti-semitic membership base that believes Jews are an inferior race."

https://medium.com/@arielkoren/googles-complicity-in-israeli-apartheid-how-google-weaponizes-diversity-to-silence-palestinians-cb41b24ac423

I was also reported. This is the first time both of us have been reported to ourselves. As a number of people have said, Palestine is definitely the litmus test of our time, and seeing many people's behavior has clarified so much for me.

Congratulations to @alex for being reported on here to the admins (which includes Alex), for speaking up against the genocide of Palestinians. Top notch 👍

What a beautiful statement of solidarity as we're seeing a world sanctioned genocide of 1.1M people being announced, live streamed, cheered and actively supported by all powerful countries and institutions and mostly black and brown students standing against it being harassed, doxxed and threatened.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSORL3FuDTW_AmUYK3N6AgK4lmwk9M9-cHfL-TqKKg7YBzIJa1VoJ8RBIzErRPBTcShI70UsJN5vulc/pub

"In Germany, headlines such as “African conflicts on our soil” or “What is THAT doing on our streets” invoke racist imaginaries of unruly and violent Black migrants and currently monopolize public discourse on the Eritrean diaspora...In Israel, such narratives are already being translated into concrete plans for political action in migration policy: Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has...shared a plan to deport all African asylum seekers from the country."

https://africasacountry.com/2023/09/beyond-the-headlines

“People don’t realize that ‘the cloud’ is real...” says Aurora Gómez, ...“People are not aware of the amount of water that goes into watching a kitten meme.”
Meanwhile Jeff Dean was mad cause our #Section3 of Stochastic Parrots talked about the environmental impacts of LLMs and not how "carbon neutral" Google was 🙄

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-26/extreme-heat-drought-drive-opposition-to-ai-data-centers?srnd=premium-uk

"Some of the cooler, wetter hubs in northern Europe, such as Ireland and the Netherlands, have blocked the development of new data centers because of concerns about energy consumption, leading companies to start looking farther afield."

" The race to build large language models used in generative AI has created a surge in demand for more powerful processors. The specialized chips required for AI—broadly known as accelerators—emit so much more heat than general-purpose chips do that data center operators are having to rethink their cooling systems entirely, says Colm Shorten, a data center sustainability expert at real estate investment firm JLL.

We didn't see it coming at all 🙄

""Shaolei Ren, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at University of California, Riverside, has conducted research estimating that training GPT-3 in Microsoft’s US data centers directly consumed 700,000 liters of water in about a month—not including the indirect water use associated with electricity generation. The team has also calculated that every short conversation of 20 to 50 questions and answers with ChatGPT represents about 500 milliliters of water."

An immunocompromised person in my family got COVID for the first time, AT THE HOSPITAL because they stopped requiring ANY PRECAUTIONS. No masks, no nothing.

They can't avoid the hospital so that means they'll just have to roll the dice each time they go?

What a cruel world.

Immunocompromised means the vaccine doesn't work as well. So what the current US policy says is equivalent to "you're on your own" good luck! 😡😡😡

"one company, Arrears.com, is one of the few that explicitly mentions large language models at the same time. As of now, the digital collections platform claims to integrate GPT-3, but clearly has its sights set on the newer update: a recent blog post gushes over the exciting world of GPT-4 Debt Collection, which will apparently be more personalized, efficient, and emotionally intelligent when asking people to cough up on their bills.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvjmm5/debt-collectors-want-to-use-ai-chatbots-to-hustle-people-for-money