This Machine Kills
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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...
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441. The Fight Over AI Use in Mental Healthcare (ft. Ciara Keegan, Ilana Marcucci-Morris)
We chat with Ciara Keegan and Ilana Marcucci-Morris from the National Union of Healthcare Workers about their ongoing contract dispute with Kaiser Per...
Patreon Preview – 440. TMK x CES: Return to Hell
Ed returns from his annual trip to the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. We learn about the hottest new trends and devices hitting the market. Big t...
439. Do Socialists Dream of Electric Institutions, Part 2 (ft. Aaron Benanav)
We’re joined yet again by Aaron Benanav to chat about his essays Beyond Capitalism. In this episode we discuss what it means to lay out concrete model...
Patreon Preview – 438. Bloodsport for Billionaires
We offer projections for the year to come in tech. What might happen with our big beautiful bubble of overinflated assets, overinvested infrastructure...
437. Do Socialists Dream of Electric Institutions, Part 1 (ft. Aaron Benanav)
We’re joined by Aaron Benanav to get into his magisterial essays laying out a vision of society beyond capitalism. In part 1 of our conversation, we l...
Patreon Preview – 436. Panic! Attack the User
We go through a number of moral panics about technology — vaping in schools,porn consumption online, social media use by teens — that are boiling over...
435. Schoolwork Will Set You Free
After discussing the Council of Neo-Nicaea — but like, what if Jesus was an AI? — we then discuss an incredibly harrowing story of abusive practices a...
Patreon Preview – 434. Gang Stalking Palantir
We dig into a new interview with Alex Karp as part of his ongoing Crash Out Tour and learn about the paranoid delusions of a man being sacrificed by t...
433. How to Think About Disability (ft. Becca Monteleone)
We chat with Becca Monteleone — author of The Double Bind of Disability: How Medical Technology Shapes Bodily Authority — about the critical intersect...
Patreon Preview – 432. Shadowbanned From Candy Crush
Fresh off the New Luddism conference and Luddite Tribunal in New York City, we talk shit about gamerism and the tough solutions required, then get int...
431. How Amazon Workers are Organizing for Climate Justice (ft. Eliza Pan, Dawn)
[This episode was recorded before Amazon announced its massive layoffs.] We chat with Eliza and Dawn from the Amazon Employees for Climate Justice abo...
Patreon Preview – 430. Bring the Pain
We chat about some of our favorite rubes and dolts in tech media before then getting into the massive layoffs across Amazon and Meta, how the need to...
429. The Nature of Capital and Freedom (ft. Alyssa Battistoni)
We’re joined by Alyssa Battistoni — author of Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature — to discuss her new book which is really just Marxist...
428. Patreon Preview – Antichrist Superstartup
We start by asking some questions about political control over police forces before jumping into a discussion about Erebor, the new Silicon Valley ban...
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...