This Machine Kills

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 su...

11 Mar 20254min

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 sh...

4 Mar 20251h 31min

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, h...

24 Feb 20257min

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 fro...

19 Feb 20251h 41min

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. A...

10 Feb 20256min

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 Cit...

3 Feb 20251h 5min

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 bu...

25 Jan 202510min

[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 –...

19 Jan 20251h 18min