This Machine Kills

00:08:52

Patreon Preview – 418. The Trump Pump

This Machine Kills ·

2025/08/15

[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’s Transportation Department will be “unleashing American drone dominance,” then we get into the thick morass of the Trump family’s ongoing entanglements with the crypto industry—and how both sides of this partnership are deeply, financially dependent on each other. ••• US proposes new drone rules that could lead to Starbucks, Amazon deliveries

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01:15:07

417. Whose AI Bubble Is It Anyways? (ft. Paris Marx,...

This Machine Kills ·

2025/08/06

In this episode, Ed chats with Paris Marx and Brian Merchant about artificial intelligence and the political coalitions behind its development in the United States and abroad. Are we all living in the same AI bubble? Europe, China, and America all have different visions for what their ideal global value chain looks like when it comes to AI—its raw material inputs, chips, data centers, invisible laborers, regulatory standards, data sets, models, and applications. Whose vision will win out and

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00:08:40

Patreon Preview – 416. The Neverending Race

This Machine Kills ·

2025/07/31

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 imperialism, American force projection and soft power through AI, the endlessly convenient competition against China, the impossibility of winning an AI arms race with no defined finish line, among other things. Plus a new addition to our tech freak watch.••• Come to Jathan’s book launch in Melbourne on August 14th at 6:00pm! There will be fun conversation,

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01:24:17

415. It’s Time to Build… Radical Policy for AI (ft....

This Machine Kills ·

2025/07/22

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 Power. We discuss Trump’s AI Action Day and his administration’s use of AI as an alibi to justify further consolidating wealth and power into a few hands, while making vague promises about economic growth and technological progress, without actually delivering any material benefits to everyday people. We then get into the AI Now Institute’s Roadmap for

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00:07:19

Patreon Preview – 414. Deus Ex Zuck

This Machine Kills ·

2025/07/16

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 from across the tech sector and assemble the greatest crossover event in AI history. What could possibly make this level of investment into creating the Meta Superintelligence Lab a worthwhile endeavor? We lay out the Meta logic as it seems to be playing out.••• Here’s What Mark Zuckerberg Is Offering Top AI Talent

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01:24:21

413. ScamGPT – How AI Supercharges Fraud (ft. Alice...

This Machine Kills ·

2025/07/09

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 world of scams and fraud. AI is supercharging the business of scamming by making it easier and cheaper than ever to deploy sophisticated scams at scale. Scams are now automated, ubiquitous, and dynamic. The victims of AI-fuelled fraud are not just traditional demographics like older people. We get into types of fraud like pig butchering and harpoon

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00:05:09

Patreon Preview – 412. Sweat Your Genetic Assets

This Machine Kills ·

2025/07/02

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 dashboard designed for “genetic optimization.” We talk about the junk science and wild ideologies that drive these desires to treat your genes and children like assets to be managed – with the ultimate goal of creating and enforcing a society ordered by genetic hierarchies. We then wrap up by tying these biotech visions to their AI counterparts in the

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01:25:52

411. Big Easy’s Big Brother

This Machine Kills ·

2025/06/25

We get into a secret partnership between the New Orleans Police Department and Project NOLA, a private nonprofit organisation that owns and operates an extensive network of cameras blanketing New Orleans. For years, Project NOLA has been running live facial recognition through their cameras and sending automated notifications to the police when a match is made using Project NOLA’s privately maintained list of “wanted people.” By going through an unofficial private partner, police have been able to

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00:06:50

Patreon Preview – 410. Palantir’s Psychohistory

This Machine Kills ·

2025/06/18

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 every individual — and their larger role in bringing about the glorious new age of theocratic techno-nationalism for the West.••• Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/trump-palantir-data-americans.html ••• ICE Just Paid Palantir Tens of Millions for ‘Complete Target Analysis of Known Populations’

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01:33:18

409. The Breakup Meltdown

This Machine Kills ·

2025/06/11

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 between Palmer Luckey and Mark Zuckerberg, before ending with OpenAI trying to forge a new tier lists of countries who support “democratic AI” (aka friends of America), countries who aren’t yet doing enough to support “democratic AI” but could upgrade to friend status, and countries who are “CCP-led China” (aka enemies of America), plus we learn more about

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01:19:58

408. Synthetic Text Extruder Hype (ft. Emily Bender,...

This Machine Kills ·

2025/06/04

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 by getting into how these systems actually work and, importantly, the work they cannot do despite claims by boosters and doomers alike. Think of datasets like ImageNet or LAION-5B as big vats of pink slime and LLMs like ChatGPT as “synthetic text extruding machines” that turn pink slime into nuggets of text. It’s easy to forget that these magical

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00:07:16

Patreon Preview – 407. Burn Notice

This Machine Kills ·

2025/05/29

[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 authors of a new book next week and want it to be a free one. Don’t worry, the next two episodes will be free ones to even things out.]We’ve eaten our veggies, so now it’s time for dessert as we do a full episode reading series of a new profile about Kara Swisher and learn how to dominate the podcast leaderboards by becoming new media

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00:09:03

Patreon Preview – 406. The Golden Path

This Machine Kills ·

2025/05/20

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’ advocacy for AI rights over States’ rights, which contributes to a greater hollowing out of government capacity at all levels in an attempt to usher in the great fracturing of society into zones of special economic interest. Finally we sketch a vision of a bold future of post-apartheid integration sparked by Grok’s obsession with white genocide. •••

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01:25:00

405. AI is the Demon God of Capital (ft. Hagen Blix)

This Machine Kills ·

2025/05/13

We chat with linguist and cognitive scientist Hagen Blix about his new book Why We Fear AI (co-authored with computer scientist Ingeborg Glimmer) about how the technical qualities of AI – especially LLM chatbots – take the alienation (and seemingly alien power) of capital to the next level. What happens when the social logic of capital — which appears to be a motive force with no motivator — is channeled through generative technologies that appear to be texts with no author? People see an entity

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00:08:19

Patreon Preview – 404. The Parasites that Control...

This Machine Kills ·

2025/05/07

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 the incredibly consolidated and vertically integrated market of pharmaceuticals <=> hospitals <=> insurers <=> pharmacy benefits managers <=> pharmacies. Through the simple administrative business of making lists of drugs and networks of pharmacies, PBMs have managed to carve out a multi-billion dollar rent-seeking industry premised on controlling (and

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01:23:25

403. Perpetual Slop Machine

This Machine Kills ·

2025/04/29

It’s slop world, baby! We get into how the internet has become choked by artificial intelligence systems focused on the endless production, circulation, and consumption of slop and shit. This is driven by the continual capture and recapture of deep fried forms of value, instead of actually producing anything new or useful. This leads to an internet that is hostile to human existence—where people are unwelcomed and unnecessary. We trace the degradation of the internet from information superhighway to

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00:09:48

Patreon Preview – 402. Crypto Empire of the Sons

This Machine Kills ·

2025/04/24

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 largely focused on defrauding retail investors into a grift now focused on creating financial infrastructure to facilitate very direct and obvious forms of political influence peddling. Of course, the Greater Idiot Theory still holds as many investors still think that bitcoin is a hedge against the stock market and a reservere of stable value in a volatile

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01:13:11

401. Ruled by Bastards (ft. Quinn Slobodian)

This Machine Kills ·

2025/04/14

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 discuss Quinn’s analysis of “new fusionism” or a mutant strain of neoliberalism that crystallized in the 1990s, which sought to ground and defend neoliberal policies through their own bastardization of biological sciences — cognitive, behavioral, evolutionary, genetic, and so on. They then used scientism to justify and propagate political ideas and

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01:49:28

400. Well, Somebody Has to Do Something! (ft. Malcolm...

This Machine Kills ·

2025/04/01

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 that “the whole total world is in crisis” and then seriously advances three different ways to understand, confront, and overcome these disastrous conditions. We walk through the pathways that Malcolm stakes out — marketcraft, public power, and communism — and use the bland discourse around Abundance as a foil for the far more incisive analysis he lays out

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00:05:58

Patreon Preview – 399. The Business of Management...

This Machine Kills ·

2025/03/25

We are joined by Katie Wells — Director of Research at Groundwork Collaborative — to discuss her new report with the Fairwork Project which examines the current labor conditions in the gig platform market in the US. We chat about how core features of the broader economy are becoming extremely abnormal — prices are no longer fixed and standard, income is piecemeal and unstable, people can use short-term credit to buy their fast food dinner, platform services are integrating with and replacing

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