This Machine Kills

We dive back into chapter 10 – Why the State Has No Origin – of The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow. And finish up our discussion of how different forms of social power based on violence/sov...

20 Jun 20225min

We’re joined by Olivier Jutel to talk about a fantastic paper he wrote on blockchain imperialism in the Pacific. We discuss how blockchain projects and crypto entrepreneurs are partnering with the US ...

16 Jun 20221h 14min

We dive into chapter 10 – Why the State Has No Origin – of The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow. This is a massive chapter that gets deep into analyzing the features of social power and devel...

12 Jun 20229min

We’re joined by Ben Tarnoff—author of Internet for the People; co-founder of Logic Magazine—to do some historical materialism on the internet. Ben has a great new book coming out that traces the polit...

9 Jun 20221h 18min

We go from talking about how AI/ML research is dominated by the resources, interests, and tradeoffs of “top labs.” Then discuss how our algorithmic agents become active participants in human culture b...

4 Jun 20227min

We are joined by Bennett Tomlin and Cas Piancey, hosts of the great podcast Crypto Critics’ Corner, for a deeper dive into stablecoins—a cornerstone // time bomb of the crypto financial system. They e...

3 Jun 20221h 18min

We dive into chapter 9 – Hiding in Plain Sight – of The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow. We discuss the utopian experiment of Teotihuacan in Mesoamerica 2000 years ago: a city that revolted ...

30 Mai 20229min

(While Jereme works to overcome a technical problem from our last record, we are unlocking an episode.) We continue our discussion of Hilary Allen’s paper on DeFi and shadow banking and dive into h...

25 Mai 20221h 30min