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PODCAST

This Machine Kills

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 get premium episodes every week.

technology

All Episodes

00:09:32

Patreon Preview – 335. Seto Kaiba is My Role Model

This Machine Kills ·

2024/04/19

First we eulogize the dream deferred of Neom, then we add more lore to Palmer Luckey who, as we find out, has modeled his whole life on a literal-minded interpretation of a character from Yu-Gi-Oh!, then we talk more about the conspiratorial and immaterial thinking of the China-TikTok Hawks, finally we heap praise on a very astute essay about the material reality of SHEIN.••• Saudis Scale Back Ambition for $1.5 Trillion Desert Project Neom

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01:25:50

334. Israel’s AI Kill List: “Once you go automatic,...

This Machine Kills ·

2024/04/14

In the first part of the show, we talk about a ridiculous new paper funded by OpenAI that aims to reconcile all human values by combining them into a “moral graph” to train Socratic LLM through reinforcement learning by people “voting on wisdom upgrades.” Then we dig into the latest reporting on yet more AI systems that Israel is using to intensify and justify its genocide in Gaza. This time through generating kill lists and tracking when targets are at home with their family before bombing them

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00:04:33

Patreon Preview – 333. JSOC for the Environment

This Machine Kills ·

2024/04/10

We dig into reporting on a special forces unit in the Brazilian ministry of environment which is composed of tier one operators who are also all scientists that are driven by a singular righteous mission of protecting the Amazon rainforest, wildlife and Indigenous communities from illegal miners and loggers. It’s almost like if the EPA had a wet works team—or, at least, it’s a good start.••• The Brazilian Special-Forces Unit Fighting to Save the Amazon

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01:12:16

332. Opening the Vicious Circle of Risk Rating (ft....

This Machine Kills ·

2024/04/06

We are joined by Ariel Bogle — an investigative reporter with The Guardian Australia — to discuss her new, big piece uncovering the Security Risk Rating Tool created by the private contractor Serco and used to control the lives of people in Australia’s immigration detention centres. We get into the broader context of these tools and then dig into the specifics of how they work, how they impact detainees, the way the transform subjective discretion into objective judgment, the vicious cycles designed

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00:10:16

Patreon Preview – 331. TMK BC5: Mute Compulsion, Ch. 13

This Machine Kills ·

2024/04/04

We discuss Chapter 13 – Surplus Populations and Crisis – and get deeper into the role of surplus populations in capitalism, how your relative position to the circuits of capital plays a big part in dictating what kind of life you have, and why capital needs a steady pool of people to sacrifice to help prevent, mitigate, and weather inevitable crises. But first we talk for a while about recent analyses of techno-feudalism and why we still think this compelling moral/cultural argument does not

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01:21:27

330. The Silicon Empire in Eastern Europe (ft. Erin...

This Machine Kills ·

2024/03/30

We are joined by Erin McElroy — author of Silicon Valley Imperialism — to first discuss their work as a co-founder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and the important work they are doing on landlord tech, both as an academic and activist. Then we get deeper into their new book that offers a rich, in-depth analysis of how the racial technocapitalism of Silicon Valley has set up imperial outposts in the postsocialist countries of Eastern Europe, specifically Romania. ••• Erin’s book – Silicon

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00:08:50

Patreon Preview – 329. Surging Forward

This Machine Kills ·

2024/03/27

In the first part we chat about fast food and the spread of surge pricing to everything, then use some recent announcements in the tech sector to get into the magical thinking and fictitious capital that totally sustains the AI industry all for the grand dream and supreme purpose of squeezing out another 3% annual growth in the economy. ••• Uber-style pricing is coming for everything https://www.vox.com/money/24105250/fast-food-restaurants-dynamic-pricing-algorithm-wendys ••• Scientific Journals

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01:23:05

328. The Universal Science of Advertisement (ft. Lee...

This Machine Kills ·

2024/03/23

We are joined by Lee McGuigan — author of Selling the American People — to discuss the origins of advertising / adtech and how the ad industry has been deeply entangled with operations research and information technology since the 1940s, way longer than the usual stories of when advertising and technology joined together. As Lee’s work shows, the ad industry is a perfect case study for better understanding how the science / ideology of (algorithmic) optimization broke free from its confines in

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00:06:42

Patreon Preview – 327. TMK BC5: Mute Compulsion, Ch. 12

This Machine Kills ·

2024/03/19

We discuss Chapter 12 – The Power of Logistics – and get deeper into how, as Mau writes, “mobility is power, and means of transportation and communication are weapons,” which capital wields against labor, against government, against nature, against itself. We also illustrate the techno-politics of logistics with yet another reveal that a rapidly rising startup in the space of automating labor – Presto Automation – is actually Potemkin AI. Now that’s the power of logistics as a substitute for the

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01:07:38

326. The Problem With America’s Ban on TikTok

This Machine Kills ·

2024/03/16

We dig into the latest proposed legislation to ban TikTok — which is quickly moving in the US House with broad bipartisan support — and the jingoistic motivations, the complete lack of concern about any of the actual cultural influence, social impact, economic power, or just empirical reality of this technology, and instead the hyper-fixation on this being a Chinese app rather than an American app. Indeed, the ban bill would force TikTok into becoming American owned — thus becoming a way more

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00:05:32

Patreon Preview – 325. Medium Anxiety

This Machine Kills ·

2024/03/13

We talk for a while about the data monetization deals happening now between platforms like Reddit and AI companies like OpenAI, then get into cultural concerns about how technology mediates our reality, before ending with a social analysis of anxiety as the dominant affect in society right now. ••• Google cut a deal with Reddit for AI training data https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/22/24080165/google-reddit-ai-training-data ••• Tumblr and WordPress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools

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01:13:02

324. Dune Dudes 2 // Evicting RENTMaximizer

This Machine Kills ·

2024/03/11

We start with a long chat about Dune 2 – to avoid spoilers, or if you just don’t want to hear about Dune, skip to this timestamp: 34:43. We then get into the FTC / DOJ’s case against the rent maximizing algorithms being used by landlords to collude on price and drive up rents. It’s a real delight seeing antitrust enforcers knock back these obviously problematic technologies and deny the corporations’ totally idiotic legal defense of them.••• Price fixing by algorithm is still price fixing

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00:09:11

Patreon Preview – 323. The Supermarket into Prison...

This Machine Kills ·

2024/03/07

We look at the intensifying systems of surveillance and control that are being integrated into supermarkets to further exploit labor, monitor customers, and capture profits, while also pushing the increased enshittification of grocery stores. We trace how the grocery store has become less a center of food distribution for communities and more like a prison that controls access to vital commodities in a broader system of capitalist agrobusiness.••• The secret sauce of Coles’ and Woolworths’

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01:17:13

322. Nvidia: 2 Boom 2 Bust

This Machine Kills ·

2024/03/02

First we chat about the very dumb debacle with Google’s Gemini AI being “absurdly woke,” when in reality the story here is that they were extremely naive and lazy about how to solve the structural biases of white visual culture. Then we get deeper into Nvidia’s major stock rally after blowing away all expectations with their latest financial reportings – and what this means for the political economy of technology, both AI specifically and the sector broadly.••• A Sign That Spells: DALL-E 2,

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00:09:41

Patreon Preview – 321. TMK BC5: Mute Compulsion, Ch. 11

This Machine Kills ·

2024/02/27

We discuss Chapter 10 – The Capitalist Reconfiguration of Nature – and get deeper into why capital seeks to subsume nature, generally, and how capital has been wildly successful at subsuming agriculture, more specifically, through a variety of strategies: technological, organizational, financial. Then we take a look at the latest tactic in capital’s war against the non-capitalist planet: Natural Asset Companies.••• Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital – Søren Mau

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01:24:33

320. How the World Became Uninsurable

This Machine Kills ·

2024/02/24

We go in for another edition of Crisis Watch: Insurance Death Drive and talk about how insurers are flailing and floundering, grabbing onto anything they can while trying to keep their head above water as they drown, and pulling all of us down with them. Insures across health, car, and home coverage are holding the public hostage as they hike premiums by shocking (and illegal) percentages, as they cancel policies at a rapid clip, and as they simply exit entire markets. We get deeper into not only

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00:06:38

Patreon Preview – 319. A Visit from the Smiling Man...

This Machine Kills ·

2024/02/21

We are joined by the Smiling Man and friend of the show, Ed Zitron. We discuss Flat Earth, CES, How to lose 50k, and everyone’s favorite tech journalist and aviator glasses aficionado. ••• Subscribe to Ed’s new podcast, Better Offline: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/139-better-offline-150284547/ ••• Subscribe to Ed’s newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ ••• Follow Ed: https://twitter.com/edzitron Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week

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01:13:39

*Unlocked* – 312. Not Paid Content for Jungle Jim’s

This Machine Kills ·

2024/02/16

We riff about a true vortex of power in America: Jungle Jims. Then we get into a totally absurd – but also refreshingly direct – startup from Germany called Vay that just launched in Las Vegas. And we wrap up by checking in on Sam Altman who has finally decided that, in the name of democracy, OpenAI is ready to get into the “military and warfare” business. ••• Vay launches commercial driverless mobility service with remotely driven cars in Las Vegas, Nevada

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01:17:16

317. The Art and Science of Communism, Part 1 (ft....

This Machine Kills ·

2024/02/10

This is the first part of our giant chat with Nick Chavez and Phil Neel about their new essay published by Endnotes – Forest and Factory – which offers a truly magnificent argument for how to confront the daunting task of overcoming capitalism, for how to imagine the seemingly impossible alternatives of a non-capitalist society, and for how to build the necessary reality of a communist society. A communism that not only functions, but flourishes by lifting humanity out of the pits of hell known as

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00:05:49

Patreon Preview – 316. TMK BC5: Mute Compulsion, Ch. 10

This Machine Kills ·

2024/02/07

We discuss Chapter 10 – The Despotism of Subsumption – and get deeper into the impersonal domination of capital and why the concepts of formal subsumption and real subsumption are necessary for a critical analysis of the socio-technical conditions of capitalism. Plus – we build all this into a discussion of the Apple Vision Pro. ••• Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital – Søren Mau https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2759-mute-compulsion Subscribe to hear more

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