This Machine Kills

To conduct a post-mortem investigation on the Amazon warehouse union vote in Bessemer, Alabama, we’re joined by Alex N. Press—staff writer for Jacobin and one of our favorite labor reporters. As Alex wrote recently, “In the United States, every step of the unionization process is stacked against workers. It is a miracle that anyone ever unionizes.” We discuss the militancy of capital, the organizi...

Cold open: Ghost in the Shell There is a long list of services that purport to be powered by sophisticated software, but actually rely on humans acting like robots. We discuss a critical concept—whether we call it Potemkin AI, fauxtomation, or ghost work—for understanding how so much so-called artificial intelligence is just a spectacle, a simulation, designed to mystify the labor that really turn...

Cold open: Garden Glossary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBMRWwjGJHQ It’s time for theory chat! To analyse the techno-politics of smart systems, we need good theories at hand. And we’re joined by the great Liv Agar – philosopher, podcaster, streamer – to discuss the hyper-prescient work of Gilles Deleuze on societies of control and the transition away from disciplinary societies. We’re talking...

This episode is from a guest appearance by Jathan on 4ZZZ Radio Reversal, a community radio show in Brisbane, hosted by great friends of TMK and critical scholars: Anna Carlson and Natalie Osbourne. We had a really fun conversation talking about the ramping up of workplace surveillance, labor organising in the tech sector, the political economy of academia, and luddism as liberation. Enjoy! Check...

Okay, so the big boat is no longer blocking the Suez Canal. But that doesn’t mean we can go back to ignoring the global networks of capitalism and colonialism that make our world run. Laleh Khalili – author of the brilliant new book, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula – joins us for a wide-ranging discussion of her rich, historical analysis of global shipping...

Premium – 57. The Arbiters of Asset Allocation We pick back up on our discussion of market indices and index providers, honing in on the close relationship they have with asset managers, how they exercise private authority by setting standards for corporate governance and evaluating the worthiness of “emerging markets,” and the need to reckon with the authority these kingmakers of finance—these ar...

This week’s episodes are part of our ongoing, irregular series where we dive into the deepest, darkest crevices of how financial and technological capital operates today. In a sequel to our episodes on index funds and asset managers — the big three of BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street — we examine the other side of this unholy marriage: market indices and index providers. If the index funds ar...

cw: we discuss school shootings and sexual assault in the second half of this episode. Cold open: We need to talk about AI ethics (H&M): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0x0zsVlp30 Sometimes you just gotta confront the absurdity of it all head-on. We give y’all a news feed roundup as we discuss some of the most inane tech stories that crossed our desks this week. Which all hang together by the rid...

The great Aaron Thorpe — co-host of Trillbillies, host of A Time of Monsters, the poster formerly known as posadist_trapgd — joins us for an extremely fun episode as we riff about why aliens would be communists, the paranoid imagination of imperialism, the wonders of luxury surveillance, the spectacle of convenience, and the ways tech companies really do be manufacturing consent. • Follow Aaron on...

We go in on the dangerous obsession that billionaires like Bill Gates have with framing the most existential risks in society, from public health to climate catastrophe, as problems of market failure that can be solved through clever engineering, technological innovation, and property rights. All of which are best administered by who? You guessed it: “hundreds of Elon Musks.” They come preaching s...

It’s time for a TMK fact check: coronavirus vaccine edition. We give five out of five pinocchios to the claim that Big Pharma won’t profit hand over fist from the production of vaccines. Five pinocchios to the claim that countries in the Global South will receive fair and cheap access to vaccines and treatments. And an unprecedented six out of five pinocchios to the claim that inequities in health...

Cold open: CNBC turns on Chamath and Clover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRWnxUsyVDg We pick back up on the story of Clover Health—which is sure to be a business school case study of investors beware—and talk through Hindenburg Research’s damning report that raises a number of very serious concerns about Clover Health’s business practices, undisclosed Department of Justice investigation, alleg...

Cold open: Chamath, Clover, CNBC https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/video/chamath-palihapitiya-addresses-some-concerns-surrounding-clover-health-spac/vp-BB19KRae SPACs are blowing up. Everywhere you turn, it’s SPAC this, SPAC that. What the frack is a SPAC? After an explainer on this cool new financial innovation, we dive into a juicy story of a SPAC in action – SPACtion, if you will – Clover Health....

Cory Doctorow joins us again for an excellent, wide-ranging discussion about his critique of surveillance capitalism, the mind control fallacy that captures critics, how monopoly jurisprudence is trapped in the 80s, sectarian schisms in science fiction, the difficulty of imagining revolutionary moments, and much more. Links to Cory’s work: • Twitter: https://twitter.com/doctorow • Books: https://c...

Cold open: excerpt from UBIK by Philip K. Dick Outro: amazing new track by Jereme, "End of Time" We’re joined by Cory Doctorow — prolific author, longtime activist, friend of the show — to learn about a critical issue that much of his advocacy work centers on: adversarial interoperability, a.k.a competitive compatibility. Cory explains why this approach to designing and governing technological sys...

Picking back up on the fight between Big Media and Big Tech, we dig deeper into the type of power of platforms wield, how their political influence operates, the prioritization of consumership over citizenship, and their threats to return us to the state of nature — where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short — if we don’t pledge allegiance to the platform. Some stuff we reference: • A...

After months of threats, Facebook finally hit the big red off button on the server labeled Australia and Google is making big backroom deals with media barons like Rupert Murdoch. To help us parse through the policy debates and online discourse about the Australian news media bargaining code, we’re joined by J.R. Hennessy (http://twitter.com/jrhennessy), editor of Business Insider Australia. Henno...

We riff on the archetype of the tech guy who can’t bear his California dream being soured by the existence of other people struggling to get by in a city his industry has immiserated. Then dive into the formation of Facebook’s Oversight Board—their very own so-called Supreme Court—and how their cosplaying as Founding Fathers reveals larger lessons for shifts underway in corporate vs. state soverei...

We discuss the limitations of existing approaches – and democratic alternatives – to data governance in informational capitalism with Salomé Viljoen (https://twitter.com/salome_viljoen_), a legal scholar in the NYU School of Law and Cornell Tech Digital Life Initiative, who is doing some of the most exciting and cutting-edge work in this area. Salomé explains how we need to make data collection wo...

It’s part two of us ripping into David Friedman’s anarcho-capitalist fever dream, The Machinery of Freedom. And we get real nutty with it as we detail his libertarian transitional program where school vouchers and surge pricing for streets lead us directly into a new frontier of freedom filled with private protection agencies and free market competition for laws. Are Friedman’s proposals radically...

Cold open: excerpt from Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=6021&v=ZypJn0PgAHA Have you ever considered that the most important human right is property rights? Are your thoughts preoccupied with kissing the feet of capitalists? Do you dream of abolishing society and clearing the way for the market god to deliver us into salvation? If so, you might just be the one of the...

After jumping into the abyss of indexation, we’re now smacking directly into BlackRock bottom. The world’s largest asset, which oversees $8.67 trillion, has grown at an unimaginable scale and pace—thanks in no small part to their fintech platform Aladdin on which sits at least $21.6 trillion from major clients. Those are astronomical numbers, but this episode brings their impacts down to earth. We...

{The first 15 minutes or so of this episode is a little glitchy, but it gets better} We could have done a full episode about the GameStop affair, but there’s already so many good (and bad) explainers and analysis of that, so let’s talk about the real winners in an economy where the line just keeps going up forever: index funds and passive investment. We talk through the operations of indexation, o...

Continuing the story of the Lucas Plan, we lay out how this radical blueprint for socially useful production faced opposition at every turn by entrenched interests who saw it as a threat to their power – and rightfully so! We then explore how the philosophy of social useful production confronts the contradictions of industrial / informational capitalism, revealing this system to be anti-human in e...

We take a deep dive into another example of a real utopian project from the 1970s, this time from the UK, which provided detailed concrete plans for how to actually do radical techno-politics. The militant labor union at Lucas Aerospace sought to democratize the means of production, giving workers autonomy over the management and purpose of industrial capacity. To achieve that goal, they created a...