This Machine Kills
A podcast about technology and political economy /// Agitprop against innovation and capital /// Hosted by Jathan Sadowski and Edward Ongweso Jr., Produced by Jereme Brown /// Hello friends and enemies Listen anywhere that fine podcasts are distributed. Subscribe at patreon.com/thismachinekills to get premium episodes every week.
Episodes
May 7, 2026 • 7 mins
We go in for a second helping on analysing the opposition to data centers. After further deconstructing the arguments against opposition, we do what none of them actually do: pay attention to the actual material conditions on the ground. We discuss reporting on why real communities are opposed to these infrastructure projects and how these projects are being pushed through in black-boxed, stonewalled, fast tracked ways that are des...
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April 28, 2026 • 89 mins
We deconstruct the confused arguments – from the left – against moratoriums for data centres. These positions set up a false dichotomy between either pausing or governing technology, they start from the assumption that a politics of refusal or opposition is an illegitimate position to hold, and they depend on rhetorical leaps and pretzel logic to make arguments that end up ceding more ground to corporate power than they gain for le...
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April 23, 2026 • 8 mins
We dig into two shocks in international political economy that are each on their way to being complex, interrelated crises. First, the unsustainable system of export-led “bottomless competition" in China that is dominating — and disrupting — global markets for advanced manufacturing and high-tech goods thanks to hyper-competitive pressure, diminishing returns, vertical integration, hefty subsidies, and other industrial / policy dyn...
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April 14, 2026 • 100 mins
We do a deep dive into OpenAI’s new report “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First” and pick apart their extensive set of proposals for building an “Open Economy” and "Resilient Society” all against the backdrop of surviving the “transition toward superintelligence”. There are some moments of insidiously clever thinking, which stand out against a laundry list of boring ideas that repackage existing t...
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April 8, 2026 • 7 mins
We talk about a new innovation in focus groups and public polling called “silicon sampling” — or a new way that models which claim to represent the world are actually engines that shape reality. The art, science, and illusion of modelling human beliefs and behaviors has always been riddled with problems, but now it's being done on a much grander scale using intrinsically impenetrable techniques. From there we further crystallize ou...
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April 1, 2026 • 78 mins
We chat with Tim Sahay and Kate Mackenzie — authors of the indispensable newsletter The Polycrisis and hosts of the new podcast Electric World Order — to get into the energy transition, financial markets, fossil fuel disruptions, and the war in Iran. Much of the coverage about the current oil crisis and chokepoint in the Strait of Hormuz is focused on the impacts of supply shocks, but equally important are the long-term effects of ...
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March 25, 2026 • 6 mins
We chat about new strides in Australian innovation. What if you had a computer quiz that decided if your grandma deserved the care needed to have a good life? What if you had a computer quiz designed to eliminate empathy in the name of streamlining budgets? What if you had an unbending, unchallengeable, system of rules that turned human experts into vestigial organs? And what if that system cost more than a $1 billion in privatisat...
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March 17, 2026 • 77 mins
TMK thought validated yet again! We talk about two big studies into the effects of AI on workloads, which show with in-depth empirical detail how AI intensifies and expands labor, rather than lightens and shrinks workloads. Weird! Did anybody know this would happen???
••• TMK live show in San Francisco, 7pm on Thursday, March 19th, with our friends at Bay Area Current and DSA SF. Join us! https://www.eventbrite.com/e/decoding-the-...
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March 10, 2026 • 5 mins
We discuss the breathless article in Jeff Bezo’s Washington Post about how Claude’s integration into the Palantir Maven Smart System has been used for rapid target generation and prioritization for missile strikes in Iran. Then we go deeper into the fraying relationship between the Gulf states and the tech industry and the highly concentrated forms of financial investment and physical infrastructure in the UAE and Saudi Arabia that...
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March 10, 2026 • 1 min
Folks, we are doing a TMK live show in San Francisco! Come join Jathan and Ed, along with our friends, Wendy Liu and Jimmy Wu, for a fun night of left-wing tech criticism as we decode the tech vibe shift. Thanks to Bay Area Current and DSA SF for sponsoring the event.
Entry is free, and they'll be drinks available with suggested cash donation.
••• Thursday, March 19th at 7:00pm
••• First Unitarian Universalist, Starr King Room
...
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March 2, 2026 • 90 mins
We get into the love/hate triangle between Anthropic, OpenAI, and the Pentagon and discuss the details of these contracts for AI weapon and surveillance systems, what’s actually at stake here with debates over the terms of “guardrails”, “red lines” and “lawful uses,” and how the competing (a)moral visions for AI and war that are represented in this debate really come down to a difference of opinion about technical capabilities at t...
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February 24, 2026 • 7 mins
And we’re back with TMK-as-usual! We are joined by Wendy Liu and Jimmy Wu from the Bay Area Current — a new leftist publication writing about the working class in San Francisco and beyond — as we chat about mapping out the rising milieu of right-wing culture in San Francisco, from the growing scene of tech intelligentsia publications that each have their different flavor of right-wingism to the psychic damage and hostile architectu...
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February 18, 2026 • 66 mins
We chat with Bruce Schneier — renowned security technologist and, most recently, co-author of Rewiring Democracy — to discuss the relationship between technology and democracy. We get into how people with money/power use systems like AI to create a flywheel of more money/power. But importantly, as an advocate of public-interest technology, Bruce also lays out how AI is being used to empower citizens and strengthen democracy, and th...
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February 10, 2026 • 7 mins
We chat about our week as Guests of Honor at Capricon, a science fiction convention in Chicago, and all the great panels and chats we had about luddism, science fiction, politics of futures, and the importance of the stories we tell—and are able to tell and believe—about technology-in-society. Then we wrap up with a recent case study of storytelling: the performative puppetry of moltbook.
••• Moltbook was peak AI theater https://w...
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February 3, 2026 • 72 mins
We’re joined by Brian Chen — policy director at Data & Society — to discuss his new report on the Trump administration’s industrial policy for building The Big AI State. We lay out how Trump’s is bringing together various forms of intervention to ensure America achieves “global technological dominance.” This includes de-risking the construction of data centers and energy infrastructure, ensuring the American AI tech stack takes ove...
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January 28, 2026 • 7 mins
We chat about the Karp x Fink interview at Davos, the humiliation ritual of making Adam Tooze sit on a panel about how batteries are a Chinese threat to America, how an administrative rule change at the EPA about the (non-)value of life in regulatory cost-benefit analysis will be a major accelerant for the American Empire of Blood and Oil — plus a forbidden riff.
••• Trump’s E.P.A. Has Put a Value on Human Life: Zero Dollars https...
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January 20, 2026 • 69 mins
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 for deeper integration of AI and rep...
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January 13, 2026 • 9 mins
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.thecut.com/article/brooding-friction-...
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January 6, 2026 • 103 mins
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 Capitalism Part 1 & 2 | Aaron Benanav h...
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December 30, 2025 • 7 mins
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: https://substack.com/@thetechbubble ...
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