This Machine Kills

00:07:40

Patreon Preview – 438. Bloodsport for Billionaires

This Machine Kills ·

2025/12/30

We offer projections for the year to come in tech. What might happen with our big beautiful bubble of overinflated assets, overinvested infrastructure, and overhyped technology? Plus, we speculate about what if we did bloodsport, but for billionaires?Standing Plugs: ••• Order Jathan’s book: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520398078/the-mechanic-and-the-luddite ••• Subscribe to Ed’s substack: https://substack.com/@thetechbubble ••• Subscribe to TMK on patreon for premium episodes:

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01:24:08

437. Do Socialists Dream of Electric Institutions,...

This Machine Kills ·

2025/12/23

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 lay out his incisive analysis of how capitalism is a powerful system built on the obsessive, relentless optimization of one criteria: production for profit maximization. All other criteria are subordinated to this logic to the detriment of all priorities, values, or goals that we could pursue. The failures of previous alternatives to capitalism can be

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00:08:55

Patreon Preview – 436. Panic! Attack the User

This Machine Kills ·

2025/12/17

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 right now. In each of these cases, real problems have been identified and real policies have been implemented, while their real causes and concerns have been ignored. Instead, the critique of technology is used as a trojan horse for ramping up regressive forms of social paternalism and moral conservatism, which set strict boundaries and burdens on

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01:26:42

435. Schoolwork Will Set You Free

This Machine Kills ·

2025/12/09

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 at Alpha School, charter schools structured around AI authoritarianism where personalized learning software enact a cruel regimes of punishing metrics, where any humanity is replaced by the cold logic of optimization, where kids are indoctrinated early into the harsh reality of a control society.••• Parents Fell in Love With Alpha School’s Promise

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00:06:29

Patreon Preview – 434. Gang Stalking Palantir

This Machine Kills ·

2025/12/02

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 the new pagans of a global woke religion — all while his own family won’t talk with him. If you spend enough time targeting individuals, eventually you too will become a targeted individual.••• Alex Karp Goes to War https://www.wired.com/story/alex-karp-goes-to-war-palantir-big-interview/ ••• Moira Weigel — Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School

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01:22:45

433. How to Think About Disability (ft. Becca...

This Machine Kills ·

2025/11/25

We chat with Becca Monteleone — author of The Double Bind of Disability: How Medical Technology Shapes Bodily Authority — about the critical intersection of disability and technology. Among many things, we get into the politics of how knowledge about the effects, experiences, and treatments for disability are produced, who has the authority to produce that knowledge, and who must be compliant to the power of that knowledge.••• The Double Bind of Disability How Medical Technology Shapes Bodily

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00:05:00

Patreon Preview – 432. Shadowbanned From Candy Crush

This Machine Kills ·

2025/11/19

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 into the deeply sinophobic China envy that motivates the liberal wonks and prevents them from embracing the light of Luddism.Standing Plugs: ••• Order Jathan’s new book: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520398078/the-mechanic-and-the-luddite ••• Subscribe to Ed’s substack: https://substack.com/@thetechbubble ••• Subscribe to TMK on patreon for premium

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01:18:11

431. How Amazon Workers are Organizing for Climate...

This Machine Kills ·

2025/11/12

[This episode was recorded before Amazon announced its massive layoffs.] We chat with Eliza and Dawn from the Amazon Employees for Climate Justice about their organizing campaigns and how they are holding Amazon to account for its promises about sustainability and applying pressure on Amazon’s leadership to make them recognize important issues that they otherwise ignore. We get into the ways that the roll-out of AI and build-out of data centres has catalyzed critical discussions among Amazon workers

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00:08:13

Patreon Preview – 430. Bring the Pain

This Machine Kills ·

2025/11/06

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 continue over-investing into AI capex is driving the gutting of opex in the form of labor costs, and why the bubbly cycles of capital investment and accumulation at all costs will continue until Silicon Valley is made to feel the pain of their own mistakes.••• Exclusive: Amazon targets as many as 30,000 corporate job cuts, sources say

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01:30:30

429. The Nature of Capital and Freedom (ft. Alyssa...

This Machine Kills ·

2025/10/27

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 political theory at its finest. We get into capitalism’s relationship to nature, the ways in which capital absorbs and subsumes so much of our world into its systems, restructuring and controlling so many social/natural processes through its logics. But also even more importantly, the great many ways that capital engages in withdrawal and retreat from

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00:06:17

428. Patreon Preview – Antichrist Superstartup

This Machine Kills ·

2025/10/22

We start by asking some questions about political control over police forces before jumping into a discussion about Erebor, the new Silicon Valley bank founded by Palmer Luckey and Joe Lonsdale with backing from Peter Thiel, which leads us nicely into an exegesis of Thiel’s deeply scholastic interpretation of the biblical revelations contained within One Piece—plus some choice bits from Antichrist lecture series.••• US approves new bank backed by billionaires with ties to Donald Trump

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01:18:17

427. Many Worlds of Extraction (ft. Laleh Khalili)

This Machine Kills ·

2025/10/13

We chat with Laleh Khalili — author of Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy — about the different systems, footsoldiers, and circuits of extraction that are essential to capitalism. We take a tour of the great many worlds of extraction: from sand mines and oil fields, to management consultants and chemical engineers, to surveillance systems and genocidal colonialism — all of which are connected together by the imperatives of extraction. Marx said that

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00:07:46

Patreon Preview – 426. The Road to Hell is Paved with...

This Machine Kills ·

2025/10/08

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 AI productivity paradox and the fact that nearly every company is excited about AI, but none of them can figure out how exactly it is beneficial or profitable. Second, this includes the companies making AI, which is why they have fallen back on the one thing they know how to do: surveillance for targeted advertisement. Third, a nasty down-stream effect

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01:35:37

425. The Oxymorons of Green Capitalism (ft. Thea...

This Machine Kills ·

2025/09/29

We are joined by Thea Riofrancos — author of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism — to chat about the many frontiers, tensions, and futures of green capitalism. How do we understand a system that is oxymoronic in its contradictory nature? How do we trace the political economies, material infrastructures, and extractive industries that are in the process of defining a planetary path dependency? Why do we need to spend a lot more time thinking about lithium? With the help of Thea’s sharp

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00:08:05

Patreon Preview – 424. Me and My AI

This Machine Kills ·

2025/09/23

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 thoughts, worries, and ultimate embrace of AI. But as with most personal essays, we end up learning more about the foibles and anxieties of the authors than anything material about the thing they are writing about. Big shout out to the excellent piece in N+1 we discuss in this episode, which turns the sights of literary criticism on this genre of

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01:20:26

423. Violence, Fast and Slow

This Machine Kills ·

2025/09/17

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 avenge a martyr, by left-wing groups who want to kick off years of lead, or perhaps as simply another immense yet ephemeral moment in a strange world where “our whole life is surrounded by an immense accumulation of spectacles.” Then we segue expertly to talking about a new essay on “the weaponized world economy,” which adds great detail and depth to our

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00:06:38

Patreon Preview – 422. Demon Valley

This Machine Kills ·

2025/09/10

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 Burning Man. There is soul-corrupting psycho-politics everywhere for those with eyes to see.••• ‘Demonic’: Silicon Valley Billionaire Blasts Burning Man https://www.thenerdreich.com/demonic-silicon-valley-billionaire-blasts-burning-man/ ••• The Baby Died. Whose Fault Is It? https://www.wired.com/story/the-baby-died-whose-fault-is-it-surrogate-pregnancy/

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01:22:33

421. To AGI, or Not to AGI, That is the Question

This Machine Kills ·

2025/09/03

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 in Silicon Valley. There are those who worship at the altar of AGI and believe any other position is an intolerable impediment to innovation. There are those who want the tech sector to focus on using existing AI systems for everyday economic applications. And there are those who see AI as a techno-realpolitik power struggle over who is gonna kick

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00:06:27

Patreon Preview – 420. Long Live the Moron Kings

This Machine Kills ·

2025/08/27

We got a fun one as we chat about a contemptuous profile of the fringe futurists, biohacker kooks, wealthy technocratics, and wannabe philosopher kings who have combined their vast resources and grand dreams to pursue a single mission: immortality.••• How to Live Forever and Get Rich Doing It https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/08/11/how-to-live-forever-and-get-rich-doing-it Standing Plugs: ••• Order Jathan’s new book: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520398078/the-mechanic-and-the-luddite

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01:18:27

419. The Launch of a Stillborn God

This Machine Kills ·

2025/08/20

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 industry, propelled by grand social forces of capital accumulation, are ultimately producing “normal” or “mid” technologies. Plus, we get into the productivity paradox that plagues AI.••• Does AI really boost productivity at work? Research shows gains don’t come cheap or easy

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