This Machine Kills

355. The Rise of Shadow Finance

We are a bit ahead with recording, but we had to talk about the Trump assassination attempt and JD Vance being tapped for vice president (for like the first 30 minutes). Then we get into a great essay on how private financial markets — or the shadow finance system that is unregulated, unaccount...

Premium – 354. Capital Questions Gen AI

We take a look at recent reports where venture capitalists like Sequoia and the investment banks like Goldman Sachs are starting to wonder out loud whether AI will ever be able to generate enough revenue and consumer demand to make the bubble feel solid. The returns on AI necessary for this massi...

353. Slaughterbots, Roll Out!

We refocus on the war in Ukraine and the country’s pivot toward being the “Silicon Valley for autonomous drones and other weaponry.” Thanks to a combination of foreign investment, entrepreneurial governance, DIY scrappiness, and a ‘by any means necessary’ attitude, the future of cheap, ...

Premium – 352. Big Vape, Small Cigs

We chat about an interesting case study in technology governance: the rise of vapes and the return of cigarettes. How do you create new markets for a product that is highly addictive but also extremely regulated (even banned)? The answer is to flaunt regulation, disrupt competitors, and create an...

351. How AI is Boiling the Oceans

We get into how the massive global expansion of data centres — thanks largely to demand from training and operating AI — is putting major strain on energy systems and requiring the generation of more electricity. How’s all that new energy demand being met? Some renewables, a lot of fossil f...

Premium – 350. Most Data Work is Bullshit

We chat a bit about some upcoming international travel, then do a reading series by a data scientist who wrote a great blog post about how most of the work done by data scientists in large organizations feels totally worthless, pointless, unfulfilling, and unnecessary — in other words, the defi...

349. Death By A Thousand Prices (ft. David Dayen, Lindsay Owens)

We are joined by David Dayen (editor, American Prospect) and Lindsay Owens (director, Groundwork Collaborative) to discuss the special issue of the American Prospect they put together on “how pricing really works.” We drill down into why pricing is the perfect window for seeing how power work...

348. Lost Futures of AI (ft. Evgeny Morozov)

We are joined once again by Evgeny Morozov to discuss his new podcast series, A Sense of Rebellion, which tells the story of a wild bunch of eccentric hippies who had grand ideas for how to design interactive technologies and intelligent environments and cybernetic systems that are radically diff...

Premium – 347. The Insulin Empire, Part 2 (ft. Athena Sofides)

We keep rolling with our discussion about the Insulin Empire with Athena.

• The Insulin Empire https://thebaffler.com/after-the-fact/the-insulin-empire-ongweso-jr-sofides 2024-06-11 22:36:40 +0000 UTC View Post

346. The Insulin Empire, Part 1 (ft. Athena Sofides)

We are joined by Athena Sofides who co-wrote (with Ed) a brilliant essay in The Baffler, which provides an in-depth analysis of insulin, the social health factors of diabetes, and the global oligopoly of pharmaceutical corporations that exert total control over – and extract max profits from �...

Premium – 345. Thuggish Ruggish Live Nation

We do a reading series on a major anti-trust lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice against Live Nation / Ticketmaster and the absolutely wild tactics the company used to intimidate competitors, enforce market domination, and totally lockdown the live entertainment industry. Then we wrap up...

344. How Uber Weaponizes Complexity to Abuse Workers and Bully States

We check in with an old enemy of the show, Uber, to discuss it’s recent battles with states over wage floors and worker rights, and get a masterclass on how Uber weaponizes complexity through it’s platform to abuse workers and avoid regulation, while also wielding the threat of capital flight...

Premium – 343. Broken Windows Redux

Discussing a new surveillance program by NYC Mayor Eric Adams and the public-private partnerships with Fusus by Axon, we dig into how the moral panic around “organized retail theft” has become a smoke screen / cynical moral alibi for an arms race of policing. It’s new software for the old h...

342. Superalignment with Sam Altman’s Values

We talk about how everybody on the superalignment team at OpenAI—focused on safety, risk, adversarial testing, societal impacts, and existential concerns—is resigning, including high-profile people like Illya Sutskever. And nobody can talk about it because of draconian rules (even for Silicon...

Premium – 341. Cyber Freak Beat

After revisiting our discussion of stimulants from last episode, we dive deep into a new hive of freaks on the internet and examine the psychology of forum posters on the Cybertruck Owners Club.

• Cybertruck Owners Club 2024-05-21 05:54:47 +0000 UTC View Post

340. With AI Friends Like These, Who Needs Society?

First we dive into some exciting news of actual innovation: ultrasonic extraction for cold brew coffee. Then offer a live react to OpenAI’s new product GPT-4o, which is its new flagship model in the form of a voice assistant, and jump from there to talk more deeply about the problems with AI co...

Premium – 339. Reality is Downstream from the Unreal Engine

In what feels like a curse of eternal return, we discuss the news that Softbank is leading a $1 billion funding round into what is now the premier UK AI startup, Wavye, which has a generative simulation model for driving data. We then transition to talking about a long piece of reporting on video...

338. Certified Rap Beef // Campus Actions, Deranged Reactions

Because we are all rap heads at TMK, we have been feeling juiced up by the beef between Kendrick and Drake, so we spend the first half breaking that down. Then we catch up on the campus protests and collective actions, the vibes on the ground in the encampments, and the range of deranged reactio...

Jathan got married (new shows next week)!

Hello comrades – just a quick note to say there won't be any new shows this week because Jathan got married a couple days ago! So we are gonna revel in the post-wedding happiness (and exhaustion) by taking a short break from recording. We will be back with new stuff next week. For those interes...

Premium – 337. A History of Fossil Empire in Palestine, Part 2

We continue our discussion of Andreas Malm’s new, giant, magisterial essay, which lays out a longue durée analysis of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, situating it in a history of fossil empire, colonial annihilation, and ecological catastrophe that stretches directly back to 1840. The project of...

336. A History of Fossil Empire in Palestine, Part 1

We start with the announcement of Jathan’s new book, plus direct attention to a new special issue on ideologies and power in AI. Then we send our solidarity and support to Jodi Dean and others who are being punished for speaking out for Palestinian emancipation, before digging into the main sub...

Premium – 335. Seto Kaiba is My Role Model

First we eulogize the dream deferred of Neom, then we add more lore to Palmer Luckey who, as we find out, has modeled his whole life on a literal-minded interpretation of a character from Yu-Gi-Oh!, then we talk more about the conspiratorial and immaterial thinking of the China-TikTok Hawks, fina...

334. Israel’s AI Kill List: “That’s the Holy Grail. Once you go automatic, target generation goes crazy.”

In the first part of the show, we talk about a ridiculous new paper funded by OpenAI that aims to reconcile all human values by combining them into a “moral graph” to train Socratic LLM through reinforcement learning by people “voting on wisdom upgrades.” Then we dig into the latest repor...

Premium – 333. JSOC for the Environment

We dig into reporting on a special forces unit in the Brazilian ministry of environment which is composed of tier one operators who are also all scientists that are driven by a singular righteous mission of protecting the Amazon rainforest, wildlife and Indigenous communities from illegal miners ...

332. Opening the Vicious Circle of Risk Rating (ft. Ariel Bogle)

We are joined by Ariel Bogle — an investigative reporter with The Guardian Australia — to discuss her new, big piece uncovering the Security Risk Rating Tool created by the private contractor Serco and used to control the lives of people in Australia’s immigration detention centres. We get ...

Premium – 331. TMK BC5: Mute Compulsion, Ch. 13

We discuss Chapter 13 – Surplus Populations and Crisis – and get deeper into the role of surplus populations in capitalism, how your relative position to the circuits of capital plays a big part in dictating what kind of life you have, and why capital needs a steady pool of people to sacrific...

330. The Silicon Empire in Eastern Europe (ft. Erin McElroy)

We are joined by Erin McElroy — author of Silicon Valley Imperialism — to first discuss their work as a co-founder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and the important work they are doing on landlord tech, both as an academic and activist. Then we get deeper into their new book that offers ...

Premium – 329. Surging Forward

In the first part we chat about fast food and the spread of surge pricing to everything, then use some recent announcements in the tech sector to get into the magical thinking and fictitious capital that totally sustains the AI industry all for the grand dream and supreme purpose of squeezing out...

328. The Universal Science of Advertisement (ft. Lee McGuigan)

We are joined by Lee McGuigan — author of Selling the American People — to discuss the origins of advertising / adtech and how the ad industry has been deeply entangled with operations research and information technology since the 1940s, way longer than the usual stories of when adve...

Premium – 327. TMK BC5: Mute Compulsion, Ch. 12

We discuss Chapter 12 – The Power of Logistics – and get deeper into how, as Mau writes, “mobility is power, and means of transportation and communication are weapons,” which capital wields against labor, against government, against nature, against itself. We also illustrate the techno-po...