This Machine Kills
364 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 15 hours ago -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
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Episodes
*Unlocked* – 333. JSOC for the Environment
April 28, 2024 22:47 - 1 hour - 159 MB[Jathan got married last weekend! So no new shows until next week.] 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 Un...
Premium – 337. A History of Fossil Empire in Palestine, Part 2
April 24, 2024 21:05 - 6 minutes - 12.2 MBWe continue our discussion of Andreas Malm’s new, giant, magisterial essay, which lays out a longue durée analysis of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, situating it in a history of fossil empire, colonial annihilation, and ecological catastrophe that stretches directly back to 1840. The project of settler-genocide today is one that kicked off nearly two hundred years ago. ••• The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth | Andreas Malm https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/...
336. A History of Fossil Empire in Palestine, Part 1
April 23, 2024 11:03 - 1 hour - 181 MBWe start with the announcement of Jathan’s new book, plus direct attention to a new special issue on ideologies and power in AI. Then we send our solidarity and support to Jodi Dean and others who are being punished for speaking out for Palestinian emancipation, before digging into the main subject of this episode and the next one: a giant, magisterial essay by Andreas Malm which lays out a longue durée analysis of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, situating it in a history of fossil empire, colo...
Patreon Preview – 335. Seto Kaiba is My Role Model
April 19, 2024 01:41 - 9 minutes - 18.1 MBFirst 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 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-05/...
334. Israel’s AI Kill List: “Once you go automatic, target generation goes crazy.”
April 14, 2024 03:07 - 1 hour - 196 MBIn 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 t...
Patreon Preview – 333. JSOC for the Environment
April 10, 2024 21:33 - 4 minutes - 8.61 MBWe 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 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
332. Opening the Vicious Circle of Risk Rating (ft. Ariel Bogle)
April 06, 2024 07:42 - 1 hour - 165 MBWe 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 d...
Patreon Preview – 331. TMK BC5: Mute Compulsion, Ch. 13
April 04, 2024 21:23 - 10 minutes - 19.5 MBWe 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 ...
330. The Silicon Empire in Eastern Europe (ft. Erin McElroy)
March 30, 2024 05:20 - 1 hour - 186 MBWe 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 – Sili...
Patreon Preview – 329. Surging Forward
March 27, 2024 20:11 - 8 minutes - 16.8 MBIn 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 Jour...
328. The Universal Science of Advertisement (ft. Lee McGuigan)
March 23, 2024 23:20 - 1 hour - 190 MBWe 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 i...
Patreon Preview – 327. TMK BC5: Mute Compulsion, Ch. 12
March 19, 2024 23:32 - 6 minutes - 12.7 MBWe 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 ...
326. The Problem With America’s Ban on TikTok
March 16, 2024 21:08 - 1 hour - 155 MBWe 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...
Patreon Preview – 325. Medium Anxiety
March 13, 2024 05:53 - 5 minutes - 10.5 MBWe 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 https:...
324. Dune Dudes 2 // Evicting RENTMaximizer
March 11, 2024 20:37 - 1 hour - 167 MBWe 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 h...
Patreon Preview – 323. The Supermarket into Prison Pipeline
March 07, 2024 07:43 - 9 minutes - 17.4 MBWe 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’ ...
322. Nvidia: 2 Boom 2 Bust
March 02, 2024 05:38 - 1 hour - 177 MBFirst 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,...
Patreon Preview – 321. TMK BC5: Mute Compulsion, Ch. 11
February 27, 2024 20:46 - 9 minutes - 18.3 MBWe 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 M...
320. How the World Became Uninsurable
February 24, 2024 04:42 - 1 hour - 194 MBWe 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 ...
Patreon Preview – 319. A Visit from the Smiling Man (ft. Ed Zitron)
February 21, 2024 06:35 - 6 minutes - 12.7 MBWe 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! http...
Premium – 319. A Visit from the Smiling Man (ft. Ed Zitron)
February 21, 2024 06:35 - 6 minutes - 12.7 MBWe 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! http...
*Unlocked* – 312. Not Paid Content for Jungle Jim’s
February 16, 2024 14:11 - 1 hour - 169 MBWe 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 https://vay.io/press-release/vay-l...
317. The Art and Science of Communism, Part 1 (ft. Nick Chavez, Phil Neel)
February 10, 2024 21:18 - 1 hour - 177 MBThis 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 kno...
Patreon Preview – 316. TMK BC5: Mute Compulsion, Ch. 10
February 07, 2024 01:16 - 5 minutes - 11.1 MBWe 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...
315. Net Zero Change in the Tech Sector (Ft. Mel Gregg)
February 02, 2024 07:52 - 1 hour - 176 MBWe are joined by Mel Gregg – an anthropologist who worked at Intel for a long time before becoming an industry consultant for sustainability in the tech sector – to discuss the deficiencies in how the tech sector is thinking about sustainability, the corporate governance regimes and net zero dashboards that manage how change does (and does not) happen, the paradoxes of green software and engineering for efficiency, and why we need to insert more social science and local activism into the tech...
Patreon Preview – 314. Cops Love Forensic Pseudoscience
January 31, 2024 04:51 - 10 minutes - 20.2 MBWe start with a story designed to hit so many of our pressure points all at once: police have been using pseudoscience machine learning to render 3D avatars of suspects from DNA samples, sometimes from decades ago, and then running these 3D avatars through facial recognition. Then, ending with less horrific and more absurd, we get into an interview between Peter Thiel and John Gray where we learn a surprising fact about Thiel. ••• Cops Used DNA to Predict a Suspect’s Face—and Tried to Run Fa...
313. The Web of Death (ft. Tamara Kneese)
January 27, 2024 01:50 - 1 hour - 208 MBWe’re joined by Tamara Kneese — author of Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond — to discuss her work on how experiences of death and dying shape the internet, the afterlife promised by digital resurrection, the strange quest to solve death, the transhumanist urge to escape death, and the entropic decay of digital infrastructure. ••• Follow Tamara | https://twitter.com/tamigraph ••• Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond https:/...
Patreon Preview – 312. Not Paid Content for Jungle Jim’s
January 24, 2024 05:21 - 9 minutes - 17.4 MBWe 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 https://vay.io/press-release/vay-l...
311. Selling Pickaxes for the AI Gold Rush
January 19, 2024 21:25 - 1 hour - 208 MBWe take a deeper look at Nvidia, a company that has — compared to software firms like OpenAI — flown under the radar for both investigative and critical analysis of AI. We discuss their meteoric rise and the monopolistic control they have over the hardware for artificial intelligence through their business for GPUs but also how they have solidified that control through the closed, proprietary CUDA system for AI development. We also get into the journalistic style of great man + myth making + ...
Patreon Preview – 310. TMK BC5: Mute Compulsion, Ch. 9
January 17, 2024 00:38 - 6 minutes - 13.2 MBWe discuss Chapter 9 – Value, Class, and Competition – and get deeper into the vertical relations between classes, the connection between domination by value and domination by class, and the universalizing power of competition as an ordering and disciplining force that compels everybody to act according to the laws of capital. ••• 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 m...
309. Does the World Feel $800 Billion Better?
January 13, 2024 02:37 - 1 hour - 164 MBWe kick off with a critical look at reporting on the peaks and valleys, upswings and downturns in venture capital and start-up exits—and ask the $800 billion question: has all this unfathomable investment and “value creation” by the tech sector resulted in a better world? Did your life in 2023 feel better? Did society seem $800 billion better? Or has it actually just felt worse? If so, then what’s the point of this innovation system and its strategies, metrics, and benchmarks? We then end by ...
Patreon Preview – 308. TMK Q&A (part 2)
January 08, 2024 01:09 - 8 minutes - 15.3 MBWe get back into the Q&A, picking up where we left off by talking about the profession of academia and working in institutions that are working against you, then get into advice for organizing in tech startups, how to counter the anti-luddite propaganda and deny the doomposting tendency, what our alternative podcasts would be about, and finally our bucket list for TMK guests. The Traditional Catholic Iceberg: https://twitter.com/PapistB/status/1741989796090974217 Subscribe to hear more ana...
307. TMK Q&A (part 1)
January 05, 2024 04:42 - 1 hour - 215 MBWe kick off the new year by answering your questions from the TMK Discord! We talk about the video game industry, our writing / composing processes, advice for trying to break into critical tech journalism, plus more. And much more to come in part 2 over in the Patreon feed, where we keep going with the Q&A. Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski)...
Patreon Preview – 306. TMK BC5: Mute Compulsion, Ch. 8
December 26, 2023 20:04 - 7 minutes - 13.7 MBWe discuss Chapter 8 – The Universal Power of Value – and get deeper into the particular social form that value takes in capitalism and the way it becomes treated as an abstract, impersonal, alien source of domination over the lives of everybody, both workers/producers and capitalists/explotiers. ••• 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 analysis and commentary in ...
305. What’s the Value of Data? (ft. Salomé Viljoen)
December 21, 2023 06:16 - 1 hour - 226 MBReturning champ Salomé Viljoen joins us once again to discuss her latest work analyzing the relationship between social data and value creation. We get into the conversion problem of turning data into money, which requires us to expand our view of data and break from the bonds of pure exchange value to also think about social data’s “prediction value.” We also talk about why our current legal regimes of data governance are unequipped and ineffective at governing the political economy of socia...
Patreon Preview – 304. How Leftist Groups Get the Blowback for Right-Wing Extremism
December 16, 2023 22:26 - 13 minutes - 25.6 MBWith Cop City as a case study, we draw together two recent articles — one on the historical connection between right-wing racism, environmental groups, and ecoterrorist actions, and one on how the massive expansion of RICO laws to target (and fabricate) conspiracies of all kinds has become a key tool of prosecutorial power — to explore how the actions of right-wing groups precipitate the creation of stronger, tougher laws which then get used to further suppress left-wing movements. ••• The ...
*Unlocked* – 303. Israel’s AI-Powered “Mass Assassination Factory”
December 11, 2023 20:24 - 1 hour - 199 MBWe dive into a new report that details Israel’s military strategy of wiping out “power targets” and “family homes,” which is bolstered and justified by an artificial intelligence system (Habsora, or “the Gospel”) that one Israeli intelligence officer called a “mass assassination factory.” The reporting is so shocking and unreal — and the critical silence about the system, by many people whose whole beat is “AI ethics,” is noticeable. This is what the lethal risk of AI looks like in its real m...
Patreon Preview – 303. Israel’s AI-Powered “Mass Assassination Factory”
December 10, 2023 01:31 - 8 minutes - 16.1 MBWe dive into a new report that details Israel’s military strategy of wiping out “power targets” and “family homes,” which is bolstered and justified by an artificial intelligence system (Habsora, or “the Gospel”) that one Israeli intelligence officer called a “mass assassination factory.” The reporting is so shocking and unreal — and the critical silence about the system, by many people whose whole beat is “AI ethics,” is noticeable. This is what the lethal risk of AI looks like in its real m...
302. God is the Machine
December 07, 2023 20:47 - 1 hour - 215 MBWe talk about the history of AI by drawing out the often very explicit millenarianism that undergirds so much of this technology and its culture over the last 70 years. This strange brew of Eschatological Evangelism and Technological Theology has sustained a cultish faith in AI’s ability to bring about a New Age. ••• Making God | Emily Gorcenski https://emilygorcenski.com/post/making-god/ ••• The Taming of Tech Criticism | Evgeny Morozov https://thebaffler.com/salvos/taming-tech-criticism ...
Patreon Preview – 301. TMK BC5: Mute Compulsion, Ch. 7
December 03, 2023 01:17 - 7 minutes - 13.4 MBWe discuss Chapter 6 — Capitalism and Difference — and get deeper into the relations between the social logic of capital and social structures of difference like gender, examining how they manifest in the “necessary outside” of social reproduction and the feminization of that labor. Mau gets us to think at different levels of abstraction about the nature, causes, and effects of these relations that are so integral to capitalism as it exists, but do not stem from capital. ••• Mute Compulsion:...
300. Wait, You’re Telling Me the Capitalists Now Control AI?
November 29, 2023 20:07 - 1 hour - 170 MBWith the dust settling, we can take a broader view of the whole OpenAI debacle, what likely caused an internal culture war to boil over into a corporate coup, how OpenAI’s convoluted governance structure made a lot of people ignore the obvious power at play, and what this all means in a bigger sense for the ongoing development of AI. ••• OpenAI and the rift at the heart of Silicon Valley https://www.ft.com/content/a6505db4-c8d4-44c1-a030-502b364ed370 ••• OpenAI’s board had safety concerns. ...
299. Stories About Ordinary People (ft. Joanne McNeil)
November 26, 2023 01:22 - 1 hour - 197 MBWe are joined by Joanne McNeil to discuss her new novel Wrong Way, which skillfully blends a beautiful literary style — focused on characterization, inner life, human relations — with a sci-fi story set in an alternative present / very near future. Joanne’s novel takes the practices of Potemkin AI and pushes them to a logical extreme, revealing their true absurdity by centering the everyday life of an human worker whose job is to secretly imbue the technological future with autonomy. We talk ...
Patreon Preview – 298. Ways of Seeing Infinite Art
November 22, 2023 22:45 - 7 minutes - 13.9 MBWe step into the art world by way of a long profile of Holly Herndon, an experimental artist and musician who works with artificial intelligence to create provocative, strange, and deeply personal works that serve as meta commentaries on the intersection between art + tech + society. Through a start-up she co-founded, Herndon is also engaged in advocacy work to build a “consent layer” for artists in AI infrastructures. We critically discuss the political / cultural economy of these dynamics —...
297. The Unbearable Existence of Insurance
November 17, 2023 02:04 - 1 hour - 225 MBWe kick off with a talk on insurtech that Jathan gave last week on the politics of machine learning and actuarial science, then get deeper into dynamics of speculative asset bubbles, why insurers live and die by the “float,” and some of the cutting-edge insurtech innovations — and fuel for nightmares — that we learned about in Vegas. ••• Slides and script for Jathan’s talk: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1azhFJPuMJXuv9tR6wHp4MAXpDQAlx8Px/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=113285384334686678399&rt...
Patreon Preview – 296. TMK BC5: Mute Compulsion, Ch. 6
November 15, 2023 03:16 - 4 minutes - 9.41 MBWe discuss Chapter 6 — Transcendental Class Domination — and get deeper into an analysis of class relations, the nature of economic power, and how capital wields this form of “impersonal domination” to structure the very “conditions of possibility” for existence and experience in the world. ••• 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 analysis and commentary in our pr...
*Unlocked* – Kill the Ecomodernist in Your Head
November 09, 2023 18:11 - 1 hour - 152 MB[We are traveling and other stuff, so enjoy this exceptional episode from our Patreon archives] We jump off the absurd twitter debate about degrowth and bananas in global communism to discuss much deeper issues about why any alternative to capitalism cannot simply be premised on being better managers of capitalist machines. Despite the arguments of ecomodernists—and the poverty of thought it engenders—there is not a linear development of progress and innovation which either moves forward (to...
Patreon Preview – 295. Accelerate the Eschaton
November 08, 2023 02:50 - 6 minutes - 12.3 MBWe dive into effective accelerationism—its cult of personality, capitalist metaphysics, techno-theology, and lukewarm manifestos. We connect it to previous movements like Singulatariansim, strip away the mercurial branding of these ideologies, and look more closely at the material politics at their core. ••• ‘It’s a Cult’: Inside Effective Accelerationism, the Pro-AI Movement Taking Over Silicon Valley https://www.theinformation.com/articles/its-a-cult-inside-effective-accelerationism-the-pr...
294. The Material Power That Rules Computation (ft. Cory Doctorow)
November 02, 2023 23:42 - 1 hour - 220 MBReturning champion Cory Doctorow joins us to discuss his latest book, The Internet Con, which lays out how the basis of so much material power in the world exists at the intersection of information technology and intellectual property. We get into the mechanics of IT⇔IP, the necessity for interoperability in a world ruled by cartels, and the (intermediate) steps that must be taken now to fight back and create space for even more radical change. ••• Follow Cory: https://twitter.com/doctorow •...
Preview – 293. TMK BC5: Mute Compulsion, Ch. 5
October 31, 2023 21:25 - 6 minutes - 12.6 MBWe discuss Chapter 5 — Metabolic Domination — which brings us to the end of the first section outlining the material conditions (of human nature, society, life) that allow for the existence of something like economic power. Here we see how economic power operates by inserting itself into, mediating and controlling, the processes of human metabolism—that is, the material things and social relations that people depend upon to live. The very thing that makes humans so powerful—the flexibility, p...
292. On Strikes and Solidarity (ft. Alex Press)
October 26, 2023 01:29 - 1 hour - 162 MBWe are joined by Alex Press — labor reporter for Jacobin — for a broad survey of the very large, active landscape of labor union actions happening in the United States. After updates on strikes, we then discuss the deep intersections of solidarity between labor movements and support for Palestine. The struggle for a better world is not just a bunch of isolated events, disconnected in time and place. We must stand together in the many big fights against domination of all kinds. ••• Writers Ag...