Data centres, summer picnic, and more | August 2026
In this month’s update: Data centre construction sabotage, a picnic in the late summer sun (or the comfortable shade of the party tent), as well as news and events of interest to tech workers in the Netherlands.
Table of Contents
New & upcoming #
‘We used acid to sabotage Microsoft hyperscale data centre construction’ #
Amid growing worker opposition to AI facilities in the Netherlands, climate action group Extinction Rebellion attacks Microsoft data centre construction site in Amsterdam.
Join tech worker picnic on 16 August #
Come join a relaxed afternoon with fellow tech workers. At 2pm there’ll be a unconference (= freestyle, impromptu, DIY conference) about any tech work-related topic you fancy. Feel free to bring a coworker, child, partner, friend, or pet. Just no bosses, people managers, or strike breakers 🙂
Upcoming events #
Want to meet other tech workers? Join one of the upcoming events:
- 3 August, 7:00-8:00 pm - Organizing meetup, online
- 4 August, 7:00 pm - Strategy working group: Goals AMA live session, online
- 6 August, 7:30 pm - Summer book club: A Radical Enterprise, ch. 6, online
- 7 August, 3:00 pm - Friday Fika, online
- 14 August, 3:00 pm - Friday Fika, online
- 16 August, 12:00-4:00 pm - Picnic + chill, Jagersveld, Zaandam, including:
- Unconference session → bring your favourite topics!
- Closing session of Summer book club: A Radical Enterprise
- 17 August, 7:00 pm: Organizing meetup, online
- 21 August, 3:00 pm - Friday Fika, online
- 28 August, 3:00 pm - Friday Fika, online
- 31 August, 7:00 pm: Organizing meetup, online
Also feel free to add any interesting events to the calendar.
On the radar #
Some news items that caught tech workers’ attention this month:
- Dutch workplaces aren’t prepared to offer safe working conditions amid rising heat, labour union CNV concludes based on a survey of 1,500 on-site workers.
- “It is inherent in a system like AI that it wants you to become obsessed with it, whether in a positive or negative sense. We must prevent that.” Tech worker Olivia Guest and coworkers criticize Radboud University’s offering of chatbot-driven writing course that doesn’t meet academic standards, and undermines workers’ expertise.
- Workers in various industries in the Netherlands are withholding their labour to protest against government-proposed cuts to social security. On 3 July, workers at large companies in the Eindhoven region, including ASML and DAF, went on strike. Transport workers are planning to do the same on 9 September.
- Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has destroyed Amazon’s central data hub in Bahrain in retaliation against US strikes on Iranian infrastructure. The IRGC has warned 18 United States-based tech companies, including Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, and Google, that they’re legitimate targets.
- Workers at Wikimedia have unionized. Wikimedia says it won’t voluntarily recognize the union.
- “I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and it’s impossible to have rational conversations with them about it.” Nikhil Suresh on how AI mania is eviscerating global decision-making.
- Lacking a moat to prevent their customers going elsewhere, vendors of closed-source LLM tools issue a warning against using open-weights models.
- Did you know that data centre capacity already outstrips demand by factor 15? And still companies are preparing to build more of them in the Netherlands…
- How can information retrieval be a force for societal good? Talk + slides by Bhaskar Mitra encouraging workers in (AI-assisted) information retrieval to be more conscious of the political dimension of their work.
- Managers are mandating the use of a technology that many workers are actively avoid, or even sabotaging. Here’s some tips from fellow tech workers on resisting LLM mandates.
- New Dahabflex just dropped!
