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’ prof...
Mar 07, 2024•9 min
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, Inv...
Mar 02, 2024•1 hr 17 min
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 h...
Feb 27, 2024•10 min
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 onl...
Feb 24, 2024•1 hr 25 min
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! https://www.p...
Feb 21, 2024•7 min
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 https://vay.io/press-release/vay-launc...
Feb 16, 2024•1 hr 14 min
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 ...
Feb 10, 2024•1 hr 17 min
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 ...
Feb 07, 2024•6 min
We 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 se...
Feb 02, 2024•1 hr 17 min
We 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 Facial...
Jan 31, 2024•11 min
We’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://yale...
Jan 27, 2024•1 hr 31 min
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 https://vay.io/press-release/vay-launc...
Jan 24, 2024•9 min
We 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 + iro...
Jan 19, 2024•1 hr 31 min
We 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 more an...
Jan 17, 2024•7 min
We 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 cha...
Jan 13, 2024•1 hr 12 min
We 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 analy...
Jan 08, 2024•8 min
We 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) and...
Jan 05, 2024•1 hr 34 min
We 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 our pr...
Dec 26, 2023•7 min
Returning 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 social d...
Dec 21, 2023•1 hr 39 min
With 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 War o...
Dec 16, 2023•14 min
We 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 mate...
Dec 11, 2023•1 hr 27 min
We 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 mate...
Dec 10, 2023•9 min
We 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 Subscr...
Dec 07, 2023•1 hr 34 min
We 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: A M...
Dec 03, 2023•7 min
With 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. Big T...
Nov 29, 2023•1 hr 14 min
We 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 abo...
Nov 26, 2023•1 hr 26 min
We 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 — th...
Nov 22, 2023•7 min
We 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&am...
Nov 17, 2023•1 hr 38 min
We 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 premium ...
Nov 15, 2023•5 min
[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 the...
Nov 09, 2023•1 hr 7 min
