This Machine Kills

We get into a great discussion about the Butlerian Jihad — or the war against all computation that catalyzed the events of the Dune series — and the reactionary politics that inform so much science fiction, the trap of treating feudalism as fate, the need for stories informed by the lessons of Luddism, and much more. Cold open: Alex Jones explains Evangelion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X9RUOE...

We pick up with part two of our deep dive into Aadhaar, looking at the social issues, political implications, and street-level implementation. Building on the work of Ranjit Singh and Steven Jackson, we first lay out an analysis of what it means to “see like an infrastructure.” Then we dwell on the problems, errors, and glitches involved in making Aadhaar actually work. And what that means for dif...

We start the show looking back at a Wired cover story from 1997 predicting the next 25 years would be The Long Boom. But oops! Turns out all the bad future spoilers came true instead. We dive deep into Aadhaar, the Indian government’s massive biometric identity database that has enrolled the information of more than a billion people. We talk about the technological architecture of the system and h...

Cold open: MCI “Anthem” commercial (1997): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioVMoeCbrig We dig into Chapter 3, “Scenes of Empowerment, of Wendy H.K. Chun’s book and talk about the pervasive ideology of the internet as an emancipatory world of virtual equality where things like race, gender, age, and ability cease to exist. And discuss how, despite the obvious naivety (at best) of this belief, it st...

We’re very pleased to be joined by Britt Young, a PhD candidate in geography at UC Berkeley, who works on the intersection of technology and disability. We dive into the militarized R&D for prosthetics, Britt’s experiences using an advanced “cyborg” arm, the vast inequality in access to workable prosthetics, and question if our society’s approach to assistive tech is consistent with disability jus...

Why don’t people like crypto? Obviously because they’re old fuddy duddies who don’t want to wrap their mind around new technology! We talk about Ed’s reporting trip to Puerto Rico and why the island has become a haven for crypto enclaves. We then end with a nice palate cleanser as Ed tells us about a recent panel he attended with David Wengrow about his and Graeber’s new book. Subscribe to hear mo...

We’re joined by Nick Chavez, a mechanical engineer working in R&D, to discuss his incisive essay exploring the capitalist origins and purpose of engineering, the class position and labor process of engineers, and the role of engineers before, during, and after communist revolution. Read Nick’s essay: The Present and Future of Engineers | Brooklyn Rail https://brooklynrail.org/2021/10/field-notes/T...

Metastasis is the process of cancer cells spreading to other parts of the body. Facebook is in its full on metastatic phase. We talk about the big news of Facebook rebranding as Meta – its impotent propaganda campaign, the extractive economy underpinning this vision of society, why the metaverse as its pitched is bullshit, and how the actual metaverse is more likely to be an infinite virtual offic...

We discuss Chapter 2, “Screening Pornography” of Wendy H.K. Chun’s book. Diving into the cultural panic around cyberporn in the 90s, we talk about how porn online was used as an early battleground for policy debates about commerce, regulation, and censorship on the internet. You can grab a pdf of Chun’s book here: https://au1lib.org/book/2074091/cc12a3 Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentar...

••• Jathan is doing an intensive residency program so we're unlocking an older patreon episode that many comrades in the TMK Discord said was one of their favorites. Enjoy! ••• Rather than our usual doompilled analysis, we take a big dose of dumbpill as we spend the whole episode on a reading series of the stupidest article we have come across in a long time. Malcolm Gladwell – a man whose career...

It’s a good old TMK where we get mad talking about two stories. First, the increasingly influential “state-as-a-platform” model of governance that France is leaning super hard into, which goes beyond neoliberalism by taking seriously the premise: “What if instead of a government, we had AWS.” Second, schools in the UK are rolling-out facial recognition in secondary school cafeterias. Teaching kids...

Outro: Eva B - Mukhtasir Baatein https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T--NV__iJA We’re joined by two excellent scholars — Noopur Raval, research fellow in the AI Now Institute at NYU, and Rida Qadri, PhD candidate in Urban Information Systems at MIT — to talk about their important research on platform workers and economies in the Global South. We discuss practices of agency and social support amongst...

We discuss Chapter 1, “Why Cyberspace?” of Wendy H.K. Chun’s book and dive into the origins, politics, and ideology behind this weird metaphor for the Internet. In the process we trace an evolution of different phases in the Internet's political economy, from the Web 1.0 endless electronic frontier of freedom to the Web 2.0 archipelago of platforms and rentiers, and circling back to many ideologic...

We are very pleased to be joined by returning guest Danielle Carr, anthropologist and historian of science who is finishing her PhD at Columbia, to chat about her excellent new essay on the (anti-)political epistemology of the pop sci style as represented by the work of the genre’s golden boy, Carl Zimmer. We discuss science as both an institution and ideology that, like other such things with aut...

Outro: And We Thought That Nation-States Were a Bad Idea by Propagandhi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNWZ6THAUPo We give you our raw reactions to a mind-numbing Bloomberg Opinion piece that “argues” for granting mega-corporations like Facebook and Amazon statehood and giving them a seat at the United Nations. Never have we seen somebody survey an issue as wildly important as “corporate soverei...

For this week's free episode, we are unlocking the first episode of our new TMK Book Club Patreon series, which will be running biweekly for the next few months. If you want to hear more – and check out our large back catalogue of premium episodes – please subscribe on Patreon! We dive into our next instalment of the TMK Book Club – “Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Opti...

We dive into our next instalment of the TMK Book Club – “Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics” by Wendy H.K. Chun. This is a foundational piece of critical theory and new media studies, and a necessary addition in the TMK pantheon. Published in the heady days of 2005, we provide some context about the state of the Internet, culture and politics at the time. Then we di...

We take a hard look at Netradyne, the latest piece of shitty surveillance tech already forced on Amazon delivery drivers—and perhaps coming soon to your car. First we look at Lauren Kaori Gurley’s reporting on how these AI cameras are extremely error prone—but weirdly never in ways that benefit, rather than punish, workers—and then take a deeper dive into how Netradyne is pitching its product to i...

To quote the headline for Ed’s article, “Ok, what the fuck is Evergrande and is it going to blow up the global economy?” First question: Evergrande is the second largest real estate developer in China. Its business model is premised on infinite growth, it’s massively indebted to everybody, and it is finally collapsing. Second question: Maybe! We lay out the dynamics leading up to, and unfolding no...

outro: https://youtu.be/JanZSDIWpmg We start with a quick moratorium on self-deprecating apologia for doompill. Confronting, with sober senses and ruthless analysis, the material conditions of the world is not always a joyful thing. But, importantly, it is not one that calls for nihilism, fatalism, or doom. We then discuss a long excerpt from an upcoming biography of Peter Thiel and finally give t...

Intro: https://youtu.be/7YynqVvgZYI We spend the first half finishing our discussion of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s essay. Then, in the second half, we switch gears and talk about the video of a Tesla trying to mow down pedestrians, the cultural logics of speed, worlds built for objects over people, and the relations between automation, authority and anarchy. Some stuff we discuss: • How to...

We go back in time—with the help of groundbreaking work by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow—to examine what the history of social inequality can teach us about the political developments of today and the course we can plot for tomorrow. Along the way, with the help of the two Davids, we deploy the sharpest tools of historical materialism to debunk, dismiss, and dunk on...

It’s part two of the Never Forget Extravaganza! We’re joined again by military tech journalist Kelsey D. Atherton to explore the deep and decades long entanglement between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon—from the early days of the semiconductors industry being born in the cradle of military contracts to the contemporary period of, as one Pentagon startup calls it, “the new Manhattan Project” of ar...

It’s the Never Forget Extravaganza! We’re joined by military tech journalist Kelsey D. Atherton to breach the memory hole of forever war and consider the invasions and occupations, technologies and tactics, abroad and at home, that have defined the post-9/11 era. This is part one of our conversation with Kelsey. Part two – and TMK’s 100th episode – will drop on the Patreon feed on 9/11. We set the...

outro: Funeral Candies – You're Dead https://youtu.be/TjvQPijYEZ8 We start with discussing an investigation into the harrowing—and fatal—working conditions of delivery drivers in South Korea and the human tragedy at the heart of ecommerce. Moving on to lighter fare—by comparison—we talk through a report on the massive tax breaks and anonymous shell companies supporting the spread of data centres a...