This Machine Kills

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. ••...

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...

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 playin...

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 tr...

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 ge...

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 mainta...

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-american...

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...

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 ex...

[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...

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 o...

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 ch...

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...

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 a...

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 sti...

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, ev...

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...

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...

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...

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 so...

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 e...

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 wor...

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...

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” tha...

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...