Necrology 2008–2026
Latest Articles & Research
A curated Friday selection of new papers and substantive analysis on AI, social media, neoliberalism, computationalization, algorithmization, coding, resource use and the global extraction system from South to North.
Friday selection
September 25, 2026
Four independently verified sources on ecological limits, extraction, AI labor and institutional dependence.
Earth systems and ecology
Planetary Health Check 2026
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research — September 2026
The latest planetary-boundaries assessment finds seven of nine boundaries transgressed, with particular attention to carbon sinks and novel entities. The combined picture is more useful than treating climate, biodiversity, pollution and freshwater as separate crises. A boundary crossing signals increased systemic risk; it is not a prediction of collapse on a specific date.
Contribution to the agenda: A compact Earth-system reference for the ecological context of Necrology and the interaction among its pressures.
Global extraction system
DRC: ‘We didn’t come to play’
Amnesty International research briefing — September 21, 2026
Documents killings, torture, forced labor and pillage by M23 at the Rubaya coltan and Lomera gold mining sites in eastern Congo. It follows the violence at places where minerals enter wider supply chains, giving the extraction system a specific human and geographic account rather than an abstract flow of materials.
Contribution to the agenda: Read in full for the documented conditions at the mining sites and the pathways by which coltan and gold leave the region.
AI, labor and development
AI adoption in Latin America and the Caribbean: projected gains and wage risks
Inter-American Development Bank — September 2026; findings from a forthcoming report
The IDB projects a possible 5.1% regional GDP gain after a decade under broad AI adoption, while its scenarios put wages as much as 20.9% lower if displaced workers cannot move into expanding jobs. These are conditional model projections, not observed outcomes. The split between aggregate growth and workers’ income is the point to investigate.
Contribution to the agenda: Track who captures productivity gains and how the costs of occupational change are assigned; return to the full study when it appears.
AI and institutional dependence
Why We Need an AI-Resilient Society
Thomas Bartz-Beielstein and Eva Bartz, revised working paper — September 10, 2026
Argues that generative AI can weaken independent judgment and institutional competence when people rely on its fluent but fallible output. Its proposed response includes cognitive sovereignty and retaining human agency at critical decision points. The paper is a conceptual working paper, not causal evidence that institutional erosion has already occurred.
Contribution to the agenda: Selected sections may help frame questions about thought, agency and dependence in the algorithmic phase.
Friday report
September 18, 2026
Six sources selected for their direct contribution to the Necrology research agenda.
Environmental infrastructure
The AI datacenter buildout’s coming e-waste wave
Basel Action Network report, covered by The Guardian — September 16, 2026
The most useful new material this week for connecting algorithmization to its material afterlife. The report projects that rapid datacenter expansion could generate up to 13 million metric tonnes of AI-related electronic waste annually by 2030. Its importance for Necrology is the full circuit: accelerated computation requires accelerated extraction, shortened equipment life, toxic disposal and the transfer of damage toward poorer communities.
Contribution to the agenda: Use it to extend the account of AI beyond electricity and water into planned obsolescence, toxic residue and unequal disposal.
Labor and automation
Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence
Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory, Anthropic — March 5, 2026
Introduces “observed exposure,” combining theoretical task capability with actual workplace use and weighting automated uses more heavily than augmentation. It finds no broad unemployment effect yet, but detects tentative evidence of slower hiring for workers aged 22–25 in highly exposed occupations. The decisive point is methodological: AI’s effect may first appear through blocked entry and altered occupational reproduction rather than mass dismissal.
Contribution to the agenda: Useful for distinguishing visible job loss from the quieter restructuring of who gets admitted to professional work.
Global extraction system
Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2026
International Energy Agency — July 2026
Maps the growing demand, geographic concentration and supply vulnerability of the minerals underlying electrification and digital infrastructure. Read against its policy vocabulary, the report supplies an unusually concentrated empirical map of the physical substrate that AI discourse routinely conceals: mines, processing capacity, chokepoints and the geopolitical struggle to secure material throughput.
Contribution to the agenda: Use the data to anchor the South-to-North transfer of matter beneath the supposedly immaterial computational economy.
Algorithmic social power
Reranking partisan animosity in algorithmic social media feeds alters affective polarization
Tiziano Piccardi et al., Science — November 2025; newly active in 2026 discussion
A platform-independent field experiment showing that feed ranking can alter affective polarization. This matters beyond the narrow polarization frame: it provides causal evidence that an algorithmic ordering system does not merely select among prior preferences. By changing the informational environment, it participates in producing the emotional and political subject who encounters it.
Contribution to the agenda: Strong empirical support for the claim that algorithmization structures thought and feeling rather than simply delivering content.
Global South governance
What Global South civil society wants from AI governance
CIPESA — July 8, 2026
Places data work, content moderation, critical minerals, land, energy and water in one political field. Its value is precisely that it refuses the North’s usual separation of AI ethics from the labor and resource systems that make AI possible. It also records demands emerging from African civil society rather than treating the South as a passive site of impact.
Contribution to the agenda: A direct bridge between algorithmic governance and the extraction architecture of Necrology.
Cartography and global power
‘A map is never neutral’: meet the cartographers who took on centuries of western bias
Oliver Holmes, Ana Lucía González Paz and Pablo Gutiérrez, The Guardian — September 18, 2026
Reports on the UN’s adoption of the Equal Earth projection and shows how Mercator’s familiar map enlarges northern landmasses relative to Africa. Its interactive comparison makes the politics of representation visible: a technical convention can shape what the world seems to look like.
Contribution to the agenda: A concrete example of how a widely accepted visual model can carry historical assumptions about global importance into everyday perception.