Without semiconductors there are no electronics and without sufficient water, there are no semiconductors. New research published in iScience provides a global analysis of semiconductor manufacturing locations and the projected future water stress they are […]
Key concept: Upstream
Data centers are becoming politically potent infrastructure. But what happens before the severs they house are even put in place?
Key concept: worlding
‘Worlding’ is a concept that offers an analytical foothold for researchers trying to understand how seemingly unlike elements of a broader situation do or don’t hang together.
PFAS and Geographies of Forever: semiconductor and data centre edition
I’ve just finished reading two important write-ups done for Chips Communities United on the use of PFAS chemicals in the tech sector, one about their presence in wastewater outflows from a semiconductor manufacturing site in Washington state (Siegel 2026b) and another about their use for cooling of data centres (Siegel 2026a). There’s a lot going on in both of these write-ups, so I want to draw out a few key points from each of them.
Writing the next book
I’ve started writing my next book.
Delete / Ignore: What Counts as ‘Waste’ and ‘Work’ in the New Global Politics of Disposability
This is a text version of a keynote talk I was invited to give at an international symposium at York University in April 2026. I have included images of my slides that accompanied my talk. […]
Experiments with ‘local AI’
Given my broader research interests and the non-consensual inclusion of my work into AI data training sets, I figure I have some license to play around with these tools to get a sense of what […]
A recipe for finding and mapping data centres
Geographers like me are really interested in understanding landscape changes. I’ve been doing some research on how the infrastructure of digital life (e.g., data centers or semiconductor fabs) is inscribed into real locations, what that […]
Defamiliarizing ‘Tech’
In our book, Discard Studies: wasting, systems, and power, Max Liborion and I write about defamiliarization and problem framing. in the context of the book we’re talking about how personal experience with garbage and waste […]

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