This Machine Kills
Podrobnosti kanálu
This Machine Kills
A podcast about technology and political economy /// Agitprop against innovation and capital /// Hosted by Jathan Sadowski and Edward Ongweso Jr., Produced by Jereme Brown /// Hello friends and enemies Listen anywhere that fine podcasts are distributed. Subscribe at patreon.com/thismachinekills to...
Nedávné epizody
449 epizod
427. Many Worlds of Extraction (ft. Laleh Khalili)
We chat with Laleh Khalili — author of Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy — about the different systems, foo...

Patreon Preview – 426. The Road to Hell is Paved with Advertisements
We play another game of Where in the World is Edward Ongweso — and you’ll never guess. We pull together a few stories. First, further evidence of the...

425. The Oxymorons of Green Capitalism (ft. Thea Riofrancos)
We are joined by Thea Riofrancos — author of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism — to chat about the many frontiers, tensions, and futures o...

Patreon Preview – 424. Me and My AI
We chat about the growing genre of personal literary essays about AI where the literati at places like the New Yorker pen long essays laying out their...

423. Violence, Fast and Slow
We discuss the assassination of Charlie Kirk and its potential role as a catalyst of further violence and blowback by right-wing forces who want to av...

Patreon Preview – 422. Demon Valley
Join us as we dive into the life and mind of Nicole Shanahan, a tech billionaire who is now the self-anointed demon hunter of Silicon Valley and Burni...

421. To AGI, or Not to AGI, That is the Question
With the announcement of a new $100 million Super PAC for pro-AI political influence, lines are being drawn between different styles of AI boosterism...

Patreon Preview – 420. Long Live the Moron Kings
We got a fun one as we chat about a contemptuous profile of the fringe futurists, biohacker kooks, wealthy technocratics, and wannabe philosopher king...

419. The Launch of a Stillborn God
We chat about the disappointing launch and critical reception of GPT-5 and what this massive claims-reality gap tells us about how an overactive indus...

Patreon Preview – 418. The Trump Pump
[Apologies for the tardiness, Jereme is moving house, that shit takes a lot of time and work, so it delayed production.] We first chat about how Trump...

417. Whose AI Bubble Is It Anyways? (ft. Paris Marx, Brian Merchant)
In this episode, Ed chats with Paris Marx and Brian Merchant about artificial intelligence and the political coalitions behind its development in the...

Patreon Preview – 416. The Neverending Race
We chat for a bit about Trump’s AI Action Plan – more to come on this next week – before getting into broader questions about Silicon Valley imperiali...

415. It’s Time to Build… Radical Policy for AI (ft. Sarah Myers West, Amba Kak)
We are joined by Amba Kak and Sarah Myers West — co-directors of the AI Now Institute — to discuss their excellent new Landscape Report on Artificial...

Patreon Preview – 414. Deus Ex Zuck
After chatting about Ed’s trip to Greece, we turn our sights on the incredible amount of money that Mark Zuckerberg is spending to poach big names fro...

413. ScamGPT – How AI Supercharges Fraud (ft. Alice Marwick)
We chat with Alice Marwick — director of research at Data & Society — about a new report she co-authored on how generative AI is now unleashing a new...

Patreon Preview – 412. Sweat Your Genetic Assets
We dive into Nucleus Genomics, a startup backed by the Founders Fund, that wants to help you evaluate, rank, and name your embryos in a pre-IVF dashbo...

411. Big Easy’s Big Brother
We get into a secret partnership between the New Orleans Police Department and Project NOLA, a private nonprofit organisation that owns and operates a...

Patreon Preview – 410. Palantir’s Psychohistory
We chat about Palantir and their role in enacting Trump’s executive order for a unified database across federal agencies and a master profile for ever...

409. The Breakup Meltdown
It’s a real friends and enemies episode of TMK. We get into the messy breakup between Trump and Musk, then talk about the rekindling relationship betw...

408. Synthetic Text Extruder Hype (ft. Emily Bender, Alex Hanna)
We chat with Emily Bender and Alex Hanna — authors of AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want — and pierce the veil of hype...

Patreon Preview – 407. Burn Notice
[Note: sorry for the lateness, blame sickness. Also, we are doing two premium episodes in a row to change up our schedule because we’re interviewing a...

Patreon Preview – 406. The Golden Path
We talk about Pope Le(t)o’s striking critiques of AI and the needs for luddism to be an intersectional movement. Then we get into the Republicans’ adv...

405. AI is the Demon God of Capital (ft. Hagen Blix)
We chat with linguist and cognitive scientist Hagen Blix about his new book Why We Fear AI (co-authored with computer scientist Ingeborg Glimmer) abou...

Patreon Preview – 404. The Parasites that Control Pharmaceutical Prices
We take a deep dive into the lesser-known industry of “pharmacy benefits managers” (PBMs) which are parasitical companies that sit in the middle of th...

403. Perpetual Slop Machine
It’s slop world, baby! We get into how the internet has become choked by artificial intelligence systems focused on the endless production, circulatio...

Patreon Preview – 402. Crypto Empire of the Sons
We return to an old enemy of the show by discussing the latest developments in the crypto industry. We trace how crypto has evolved from a grift large...

401. Ruled by Bastards (ft. Quinn Slobodian)
We are joined by yet another TMK favorite, Quinn Slobodian, who is author of Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. We...

400. Well, Somebody Has to Do Something! (ft. Malcolm Harris)
We have a big chat with Malcolm Harris about his new book — What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis — which takes seriously the fact tha...

Patreon Preview – 399. The Business of Management (ft. Katie Wells)
We are joined by Katie Wells — Director of Research at Groundwork Collaborative — to discuss her new report with the Fairwork Project which examines t...

398. The Treacherous Eunuch
We try to figure out what the fuck is happening in the US as we chat about the low rent car commercial at the White House, the human shields of cops p...

Patreon Preview – 397. The Silicon Valley Consensus
We dig into a grand theory that Ed is building through a series of essays on the AI industry and the Silicon Valley Consensus, or how “a bunch of inde...

396. Need to Justify? Need an Alibi? Blame the AI!
We run through a roundup of recent stories about how different types of AI are already having real, material, immediate impacts on people’s lives — in...

Patreon Preview – 395. How Workers are Building Power (ft. Eric Blanc)
We chat with Eric Blanc — author of the new book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big — about how t...

394. Who Let the DOGE Out
We dig into DOGE. After some background on what Musk and his harem of broccoli-headed bozos have been up to as they strip the copper out of federal ag...

Patreon Preview – 393. The Age of Disability Comes for Us All (ft. Sunaura Taylor)
Jathan sits down with Sunaura Taylor—author of Disabled Ecologies—in her lab at UC Berkeley to discuss her excellent work which brings together critic...

392. Deep Freak Out
Ed and Jathan are together in the San Francisco Bay Area huddled over a single mic like a fire keeping us warm as we record an episode about DeepSeek...

Patreon Preview – 391. TMK x CES x Vegas
Ed is back from his gonzo reporting trip at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. We hear all about the biggest themes, the most stupid products...

390. We All Live in the Firestorm
[Due to the relevance of this episode — and requests from listeners in LA — we decided to make this week the free episode.]
We get into...

389. The Year of Polycrisis
We round up and run down many of the big themes that we think will be important in the coming year and demand our sustained critical attention. Our an...

Patreon Preview – 388. The On-Demand Degradation of Nursing
We get into an excellent new report on the rise of on-demand platforms for nursing, which have spurred further exploitation of labor and degradation o...