This Machine Kills

Mar 24 2025 421 ep. 47 mins 4.3k

This Machine Kills Podcast artwork

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.

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Patreon Preview – 399. The Business of Management (ft. Katie Wells)

Mar 24 2025 5 mins

We are joined by Katie Wells — Director of Research at Groundwork Collaborative — to discuss her new report with the Fairwork Project which examines the current labor conditions in the gig platform market in the US. We chat about how core features of the broader economy are becoming extremely abnormal — prices are no longer fixed and standard, income is piecemeal and unstable

398. The Treacherous Eunuch

Mar 17 2025 71 mins

We try to figure out what the fuck is happening in the US as we chat about the low rent car commercial at the White House, the human shields of cops protecting Tesla dealerships, how Musk has become (by his own actions) a scapegoat for the public’s hatred, and the ongoing disintegration of social bonds and moral solidarity under a fascist regime. Plus a new data analysis system c

Patreon Preview – 397. The Silicon Valley Consensus

Mar 10 2025 4 mins

We dig into a grand theory that Ed is building through a series of essays on the AI industry and the Silicon Valley Consensus, or how “a bunch of independent profit-seeking actors have converged on sustaining a certain technology through a frenzy of overbuilding, overvaluing, and overinvesting in order to realize excessive gains that can be translated into political power aimed a

396. Need to Justify? Need an Alibi? Blame the AI!

Mar 03 2025 91 mins

We run through a roundup of recent stories about how different types of AI are already having real, material, immediate impacts on people’s lives — including AI facial recognition used by police to shortcut actually investigating crimes, AI systems used by bosses to monitor, control, and threaten to replace human workers, AI tools for coding that are actively deskilling program

Patreon Preview – 395. How Workers are Building Power (ft. Eric Blanc)

Feb 23 2025 7 mins

We chat with Eric Blanc — author of the new book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big — about how the model of labor organizing through grassroots, horizontal movements is taking off in a huge way. This growing model of worker-to-worker organizing is challenging the conventional model of large, hierarchical unions. By enrolling

394. Who Let the DOGE Out

Feb 18 2025 101 mins

We dig into DOGE. After some background on what Musk and his harem of broccoli-headed bozos have been up to as they strip the copper out of federal agencies, we zoom out to ask where did DOGE come from? Not just literally, but also politically (as a right-wing project of weaponizing and hollowing out the administrative state), materially (as the next phase in the relationship betwe

Patreon Preview – 393. The Age of Disability Comes for Us All (ft. Sunaura Taylor)

Feb 09 2025 6 mins

Jathan sits down with Sunaura Taylor—author of Disabled Ecologies—in her lab at UC Berkeley to discuss her excellent work which brings together critical disability studies with enironmental justice. Against the backdrop of her research on toxic waste dumps, military industires, racial capitalism, injured communities, and social movements in Tuscon, AZ, we explore the “expansi

392. Deep Freak Out

Feb 02 2025 65 mins

Ed and Jathan are together in the San Francisco Bay Area huddled over a single mic like a fire keeping us warm as we record an episode about DeepSeek before running off to our book launch event at City Lights (thanks all the wonderful TMK fans who made it a packed house!). DeepSeek, the disruptive new LLM from a Chinese startup / hedge fund, is being hailed as Silicon Valley’s �

Patreon Preview – 391. TMK x CES x Vegas

Jan 24 2025 10 mins

Ed is back from his gonzo reporting trip at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. We hear all about the biggest themes, the most stupid products, the most dangerous lies, and the mountains of bullshit being created in the place where futures are made—or, at least, where expectations are manufactured and where beliefs are harvested. ••• Jathan’s essay on AI and Tink

390. We All Live in the Firestorm

Jan 18 2025 78 mins

[Due to the relevance of this episode — and requests from listeners in LA — we decided to make this week the free episode.] We get into the crossover between the LA wildfires and the FIRE industry – finance, insurance, real estate. Where most people see a hellscape of risk and loss, the FIRE industry also sees a landscape of opportunity and profit. First are reports of landl