Abstract
This essay advocates a critical pedagogical orientation to AI guided by a politics of refusal. I pursue this advocacy by, first, showing how the social and environmental harms of AI technology outweigh any promises to its social good and then, second, locating resonances between our contemporary technological situation and similar inflection points in the histories of labor organizing and environmental justice activism. Together, these material implications of the emergent technology help form a pedagogical framework for how communication educators can advance critical literacy about AI in the classroom as a constructive counterpoint to its uncritical adoption in the learning process. The title of the essay takes overt inspiration from Andreas Malm’s (2021) environmental activist manifesto How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a text advocating direct action in the form of literal destruction of climate change’s greatest infrastructural contributors. While my essay neither explicitly advocates property destruction nor pedagogical approaches that direct students toward specific forms of political action, its ethos is in keeping with Malm when he writes: “Recognising the directness of the situation, it is high time for the movement to more decisively shift from protest to resistance” (2021, p. 70).
DOI
10.31446/JCP.2026.1.14
Author ORCID Identifier
Tyler S. Rife: 0009-0008-6841-2841
Recommended Citation
Rife, T. S. (2026). How to blow up an AI data center. Journal of Communication Pedagogy, 10, 153–159. https://doi.org/10.31446/JCP.2026.1.14
