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 ...
Jun 25, 2025•1 hr 26 min
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 Population...
Jun 18, 2025•7 min
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 a...
Jun 11, 2025•1 hr 33 min
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 ...
Jun 04, 2025•1 hr 20 min
[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 entrepreneurs...
May 29, 2025•7 min
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. ••• W...
May 20, 2025•9 min
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...
May 13, 2025•1 hr 25 min
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 pr...
May 07, 2025•8 min
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 superhighwa...
Apr 29, 2025•1 hr 23 min
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 volat...
Apr 24, 2025•10 min
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 an...
Apr 14, 2025•1 hr 13 min
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...
Apr 01, 2025•1 hr 49 min
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 gov...
Mar 25, 2025•6 min
We try to figure out what the fuck is happening in the US as we chat about the low rent car commercial at the White House, the human shields of cops protecting Tesla dealerships, how Musk has become (by his own actions) a scapegoat for the public’s hatred, and the ongoing disintegration of social bonds and moral solidarity under a fascist regime. Plus a new data analysis system called ShadowDragon that is supercharging the surveillance capabilities of ICE, DEA, DoS, and more. We endeavor to anal...
Mar 18, 2025•1 hr 11 min
We dig into a grand theory that Ed is building through a series of essays on the AI industry and the Silicon Valley Consensus, or how “a bunch of independent profit-seeking actors have converged on sustaining a certain technology through a frenzy of overbuilding, overvaluing, and overinvesting in order to realize excessive gains that can be translated into political power aimed at restructuring society.” ••• The Silicon Valley Consensus & AI Capex (Part 1) https://thetechbubble.substack.com/...
Mar 11, 2025•4 min
We run through a roundup of recent stories about how different types of AI are already having real, material, immediate impacts on people’s lives — including AI facial recognition used by police to shortcut actually investigating crimes, AI systems used by bosses to monitor, control, and threaten to replace human workers, AI tools for coding that are actively deskilling programmers. Across these examples, AI is treated as a convenient justification and scapegoat by those who use the systems to d...
Mar 04, 2025•1 hr 32 min
We chat with Eric Blanc — author of the new book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big — about how the model of labor organizing through grassroots, horizontal movements is taking off in a huge way. This growing model of worker-to-worker organizing is challenging the conventional model of large, hierarchical unions. By enrolling millions of new workers into the labor movement, worker-to-worker organizing is building a stronger base for greater vi...
Feb 24, 2025•7 min
We dig into DOGE. After some background on what Musk and his harem of broccoli-headed bozos have been up to as they strip the copper out of federal agencies, we zoom out to ask where did DOGE come from? Not just literally, but also politically (as a right-wing project of weaponizing and hollowing out the administrative state), materially (as the next phase in the relationship between tech/finance capital and the state), and ideologically (as the convergence of multiple right-wing movements who f...
Feb 19, 2025•1 hr 41 min
Jathan sits down with Sunaura Taylor—author of Disabled Ecologies—in her lab at UC Berkeley to discuss her excellent work which brings together critical disability studies with enironmental justice. Against the backdrop of her research on toxic waste dumps, military industires, racial capitalism, injured communities, and social movements in Tuscon, AZ, we explore the “expansive webs of injury” that now entrap everybody, giving rise to what Sunaura calls the Age of Disability. ••• Disabled Ecolog...
Feb 10, 2025•7 min
Ed and Jathan are together in the San Francisco Bay Area huddled over a single mic like a fire keeping us warm as we record an episode about DeepSeek before running off to our book launch event at City Lights (thanks all the wonderful TMK fans who made it a packed house!). DeepSeek, the disruptive new LLM from a Chinese startup / hedge fund, is being hailed as Silicon Valley’s “Sputnik moment.” We dig into how DeepSeek challenges the fundamental economics of the AI industry, while casting a skep...
Feb 03, 2025•1 hr 5 min
Ed is back from his gonzo reporting trip at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. We hear all about the biggest themes, the most stupid products, the most dangerous lies, and the mountains of bullshit being created in the place where futures are made—or, at least, where expectations are manufactured and where beliefs are harvested. ••• Jathan’s essay on AI and Tinkerbell: https://futurism.com/ai-tinkerbell Standing Plugs: ••• Order Jathan’s new book: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520398...
Jan 25, 2025•11 min
[Due to the relevance of this episode — and requests from listeners in LA — we decided to make this week the free episode.] We get into the crossover between the LA wildfires and the FIRE industry – finance, insurance, real estate. Where most people see a hellscape of risk and loss, the FIRE industry also sees a landscape of opportunity and profit. First are reports of landlords and investors never letting a good crisis go to waste as the latter jack up rents for people who need places to stay a...
Jan 19, 2025•1 hr 19 min
We round up and run down many of the big themes that we think will be important in the coming year and demand our sustained critical attention. Our analysis spans from the new golden age of crypto to further consolidation in the (corporate) venture capital industry, from the ramping up of investment and partnerships in the market for military technology to the ways in which AI will keep growing as a story about the collisions between multiple massive interconnected infrastructures. Standing Plug...
Jan 10, 2025•1 hr 30 min
We get into an excellent new report on the rise of on-demand platforms for nursing, which have spurred further exploitation of labor and degradation of care in an industry that has already been hollowed out by suppression of worker rights and financialization by private equity firms. The destruction of healthcare wouldn’t be complete if tech innovators didn’t use re-skinned versions of algorithmic management software to make things even worse by further stripping the sector to its bare bones. ••...
Dec 30, 2024•10 min
[Note: we explain TMK's new structure from 0:00-10:28, so skip that to get straight into the episode] We dive into the market for catastrophe bonds (or, “cat bonds”) and talk about how this complex financial instrument is sold as the silver bullet for climate finance — especially for under-developed countries that are at risk of devastation from disasters like hurricanes, floods, earthquakes — which is meant to be an alternative to insurance for places that cannot access or afford policies. In r...
Dec 23, 2024•1 hr 27 min
First we talk about the unholy trinity of Anduril, Palantir, and OpenAI working together to secure major contracts from the Pentagon for networking data systems and training AI models. Then we get into how Blackstone now owns the AI boom with $50 billion invested in data centre infrastructure and another $50 billion in the pipeline. Lastly, we chat about how the mortgage markets in the US, Australia, and elsewhere—the very cornerstone of entire economies and generational wealth—are once again fa...
Dec 19, 2024•6 min
We’ve got a great reading series that redirects our attention to another big bugbear of TMK: the destruction – and salvation – of nature via asset markets and risk management. We talk about how the business world is coming around to the idea that is nature is *not* a “a free, infinitely extractable resource” and might actually be a valuable asset worth safeguarding—but only if it has clear and direct links to immediate profit! This has led to a number of great new innovations like “biodiversity ...
Dec 15, 2024•1 hr 5 min
We tie together a number of things: first, the assassination of UnitedHealth Group’s CEO and the reactions to this event; second, a new startup in the Thiel family that rehabilitates Sauron as a shining beacon of security for the terrified tech elite; and third, the vision put forward by Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, for an army of ethical techno-slaves that are powered by a new vaporware platform called Agentforce. Pre-order Jathan’s new book! https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520398078/the-m...
Dec 10, 2024•8 min
We talk about the legal battles that Musk and Amazon are waging against the National Labor Relations Board, in part by claiming the NLRB is unconditional because it violates employers’ rights to a trial by jury. We then get into a broader discussion of how the right-wing has organised a highly effective — while also ideologically inconsistent — political movement which is based on a single-minded obsession with — and demonic hatred of — the bureaucratic minutiae of oft-overlooked government agen...
Dec 07, 2024•1 hr 23 min
We chat about Ed’s brilliant critical review of the new book AI Snake Oil and talk about the shortcomings of analysis that are so focused on demystifying the hype about what AI can do that the hype becomes the only thing that matters. We sharpen our own critique by sparring with this interesting and thoughtful — but also limited and naive — critique of AI. Rather than treating hype as the root of all evil in tech — and thus framing our solutions to AI harms as a technical exercise of discerning ...
Dec 04, 2024•10 min
