This Machine Kills

We pick up with part two of our deep dive into Aadhaar, looking at the social issues, political implications, and street-level implementation. Building on the work of Ranjit Singh and Steven Jackson, ...

28 Nov 202110min

We start the show looking back at a Wired cover story from 1997 predicting the next 25 years would be The Long Boom. But oops! Turns out all the bad future spoilers came true instead. We dive deep int...

24 Nov 20211h 29min

Cold open: MCI “Anthem” commercial (1997): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioVMoeCbrig We dig into Chapter 3, “Scenes of Empowerment, of Wendy H.K. Chun’s book and talk about the pervasive ideology o...

21 Nov 20218min

We’re very pleased to be joined by Britt Young, a PhD candidate in geography at UC Berkeley, who works on the intersection of technology and disability. We dive into the militarized R&D for prosthetic...

16 Nov 20211h 9min

Why don’t people like crypto? Obviously because they’re old fuddy duddies who don’t want to wrap their mind around new technology! We talk about Ed’s reporting trip to Puerto Rico and why the island h...

14 Nov 20216min

We’re joined by Nick Chavez, a mechanical engineer working in R&D, to discuss his incisive essay exploring the capitalist origins and purpose of engineering, the class position and labor process of en...

10 Nov 20211h 38min

Metastasis is the process of cancer cells spreading to other parts of the body. Facebook is in its full on metastatic phase. We talk about the big news of Facebook rebranding as Meta – its impotent pr...

3 Nov 20211h 7min

We discuss Chapter 2, “Screening Pornography” of Wendy H.K. Chun’s book. Diving into the cultural panic around cyberporn in the 90s, we talk about how porn online was used as an early battleground for...

30 Okt 20217min