This Machine Kills

We chat with Ciara Keegan and Ilana Marcucci-Morris from the National Union of Healthcare Workers about their ongoing contract dispute with Kaiser Permamente over the use and role of AI in healthcare, especially mental and behavioural health. We discuss the impacts of AI on labor conditions and patient care in giant hospital systems like Kaiser — plus the ways Kaiser wants to leave the door open f...

Ed returns from his annual trip to the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. We learn about the hottest new trends and devices hitting the market. Big this year: chatbot wrappers, making everything into phone, unnecessary and dysfunctional “AI-powered” features, plus the mass infantilization of humanity under the guise of frictionless convenience. ••• In 2026, We Are Friction-Maxxing https://www.the...

We’re joined yet again by Aaron Benanav to chat about his essays Beyond Capitalism. In this episode we discuss what it means to lay out concrete models for an alternative world—ones that are not overstructured as blueprints, but also not insubstantial as visions. We then detail the political economic foundations and institutional framework for building a different kind of society. ••• Beyond Capit...

We offer projections for the year to come in tech. What might happen with our big beautiful bubble of overinflated assets, overinvested infrastructure, and overhyped technology? Plus, we speculate about what if we did bloodsport, but for billionaires? Standing Plugs: ••• Order Jathan’s book: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520398078/the-mechanic-and-the-luddite ••• Subscribe to Ed’s substack: htt...

We’re joined by Aaron Benanav to get into his magisterial essays laying out a vision of society beyond capitalism. In part 1 of our conversation, we lay out his incisive analysis of how capitalism is a powerful system built on the obsessive, relentless optimization of one criteria: production for profit maximization. All other criteria are subordinated to this logic to the detriment of all priorit...

We go through a number of moral panics about technology — vaping in schools,porn consumption online, social media use by teens — that are boiling over right now. In each of these cases, real problems have been identified and real policies have been implemented, while their real causes and concerns have been ignored. Instead, the critique of technology is used as a trojan horse for ramping up regre...

After discussing the Council of Neo-Nicaea — but like, what if Jesus was an AI? — we then discuss an incredibly harrowing story of abusive practices at Alpha School, charter schools structured around AI authoritarianism where personalized learning software enact a cruel regimes of punishing metrics, where any humanity is replaced by the cold logic of optimization, where kids are indoctrinated earl...

We dig into a new interview with Alex Karp as part of his ongoing Crash Out Tour and learn about the paranoid delusions of a man being sacrificed by the new pagans of a global woke religion — all while his own family won’t talk with him. If you spend enough time targeting individuals, eventually you too will become a targeted individual. ••• Alex Karp Goes to War https://www.wired.com/story/alex-k...

We chat with Becca Monteleone — author of The Double Bind of Disability: How Medical Technology Shapes Bodily Authority — about the critical intersection of disability and technology. Among many things, we get into the politics of how knowledge about the effects, experiences, and treatments for disability are produced, who has the authority to produce that knowledge, and who must be compliant to t...

Fresh off the New Luddism conference and Luddite Tribunal in New York City, we talk shit about gamerism and the tough solutions required, then get into the deeply sinophobic China envy that motivates the liberal wonks and prevents them from embracing the light of Luddism. Standing Plugs: ••• Order Jathan’s new book: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520398078/the-mechanic-and-the-luddite ••• Subscr...

[This episode was recorded before Amazon announced its massive layoffs.] We chat with Eliza and Dawn from the Amazon Employees for Climate Justice about their organizing campaigns and how they are holding Amazon to account for its promises about sustainability and applying pressure on Amazon’s leadership to make them recognize important issues that they otherwise ignore. We get into the ways that...

We chat about some of our favorite rubes and dolts in tech media before then getting into the massive layoffs across Amazon and Meta, how the need to continue over-investing into AI capex is driving the gutting of opex in the form of labor costs, and why the bubbly cycles of capital investment and accumulation at all costs will continue until Silicon Valley is made to feel the pain of their own mi...

We’re joined by Alyssa Battistoni — author of Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature — to discuss her new book which is really just Marxist political theory at its finest. We get into capitalism’s relationship to nature, the ways in which capital absorbs and subsumes so much of our world into its systems, restructuring and controlling so many social/natural processes through its logics....

We start by asking some questions about political control over police forces before jumping into a discussion about Erebor, the new Silicon Valley bank founded by Palmer Luckey and Joe Lonsdale with backing from Peter Thiel, which leads us nicely into an exegesis of Thiel’s deeply scholastic interpretation of the biblical revelations contained within One Piece—plus some choice bits from Antichrist...

We chat with Laleh Khalili — author of Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy — about the different systems, footsoldiers, and circuits of extraction that are essential to capitalism. We take a tour of the great many worlds of extraction: from sand mines and oil fields, to management consultants and chemical engineers, to surveillance systems and genocidal col...

We play another game of Where in the World is Edward Ongweso — and you’ll never guess. We pull together a few stories. First, further evidence of the AI productivity paradox and the fact that nearly every company is excited about AI, but none of them can figure out how exactly it is beneficial or profitable. Second, this includes the companies making AI, which is why they have fallen back on the o...

We are joined by Thea Riofrancos — author of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism — to chat about the many frontiers, tensions, and futures of green capitalism. How do we understand a system that is oxymoronic in its contradictory nature? How do we trace the political economies, material infrastructures, and extractive industries that are in the process of defining a planetary path depend...

We chat about the growing genre of personal literary essays about AI where the literati at places like the New Yorker pen long essays laying out their thoughts, worries, and ultimate embrace of AI. But as with most personal essays, we end up learning more about the foibles and anxieties of the authors than anything material about the thing they are writing about. Big shout out to the excellent pie...

We discuss the assassination of Charlie Kirk and its potential role as a catalyst of further violence and blowback by right-wing forces who want to avenge a martyr, by left-wing groups who want to kick off years of lead, or perhaps as simply another immense yet ephemeral moment in a strange world where “our whole life is surrounded by an immense accumulation of spectacles.” Then we segue expertly...

Join us as we dive into the life and mind of Nicole Shanahan, a tech billionaire who is now the self-anointed demon hunter of Silicon Valley and Burning Man. There is soul-corrupting psycho-politics everywhere for those with eyes to see. ••• ‘Demonic’: Silicon Valley Billionaire Blasts Burning Man https://www.thenerdreich.com/demonic-silicon-valley-billionaire-blasts-burning-man/ ••• The Baby Died...

With the announcement of a new $100 million Super PAC for pro-AI political influence, lines are being drawn between different styles of AI boosterism in Silicon Valley. There are those who worship at the altar of AGI and believe any other position is an intolerable impediment to innovation. There are those who want the tech sector to focus on using existing AI systems for everyday economic applica...

We got a fun one as we chat about a contemptuous profile of the fringe futurists, biohacker kooks, wealthy technocratics, and wannabe philosopher kings who have combined their vast resources and grand dreams to pursue a single mission: immortality. ••• How to Live Forever and Get Rich Doing It https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/08/11/how-to-live-forever-and-get-rich-doing-it Standing Plugs: •...

We chat about the disappointing launch and critical reception of GPT-5 and what this massive claims-reality gap tells us about how an overactive industry, propelled by grand social forces of capital accumulation, are ultimately producing “normal” or “mid” technologies. Plus, we get into the productivity paradox that plagues AI. ••• Does AI really boost productivity at work? Research shows gains do...

[Apologies for the tardiness, Jereme is moving house, that shit takes a lot of time and work, so it delayed production.] We first chat about how Trump’s Transportation Department will be “unleashing American drone dominance,” then we get into the thick morass of the Trump family’s ongoing entanglements with the crypto industry—and how both sides of this partnership are deeply, financially dependen...

In this episode, Ed chats with Paris Marx and Brian Merchant about artificial intelligence and the political coalitions behind its development in the United States and abroad. Are we all living in the same AI bubble? Europe, China, and America all have different visions for what their ideal global value chain looks like when it comes to AI—its raw material inputs, chips, data centers, invisible la...