Blood in the Machine: The Podcast

The year has been marked by the rise of open, widespread , and increasingly spirited backlash to AI, data centers, and big tech. As such, the stage was well set for the Summer of Ludd, a series of protests, performances, talks, and meetups in New York City organized around the idea that we need to get people into the streets and break Silicon Valley’s grip over our lives. There were mock trials of...

While Google seems dead set on making their users hate their product, the courts in Europe are taking issue with their anti-competitive business practices. Meanwhile, the Summer of Ludd kicks off in New York and a new dating survey finds: It’s sexy to be a luddite. Plus, my good friend and fellow tech journalist Paris Marx joins us to discuss the final boss of Google's enshittification: Search goi...

The tech lobby spent $27 million on a single Congressional election in New York. OpenAI-backed Leading the Future spent $8 million on ads attacking Alex Bores, who vowed to rein in AI, in an effort to fire a warning shot—did it work? What does this mean for democracy? Meanwhile, a Michigan town takes on a nuclear AI data center, and a bipartisan effort to legislate against AI theft of artist’s wor...

Does Cory Doctorow even need an introduction at this point? If you spend any amount of time at all online, then you’ve encountered his work, his ideas, his words. But the ultra-prolific science fiction writer, digital rights activist, and coiner of the “Enshittification” verbiage that’s become universal shorthand for the degradation of the internet (and, to an extent, everything else), has been es...

Happy Halloween all. I got into the spirit by catching up with the horror flicks I’d been sleeping on (28 Years Later was surprisingly good) and, more importantly, chatting with the great tech journalist Jacob Silverman, author of GILDED RAGE: ELON MUSK AND THE RADICALIZATION OF SILICON VALLEY , a book about some very scary people who hold immense sway over our politics and our lives. Before we ge...

Years before OpenAI became a household name, Karen Hao was one of the very first journalists to gain access to the company. What she saw when she did unsettled her. Despite a name that signaled transparency, executives were elusive, the culture secretive. Despite publicly heralding a mission to build AGI, or artificial general intelligence, company leadership couldn’t really say what that meant, o...