This Machine Kills

In the first part we chat about fast food and the spread of surge pricing to everything, then use some recent announcements in the tech sector to get into the magical thinking and fictitious capital t...

27 Mars 20248min

We are joined by Lee McGuigan — author of Selling the American People — to discuss the origins of advertising / adtech and how the ad industry has been deeply entangled with operations research and in...

23 Mars 20241h 23min

We discuss Chapter 12 – The Power of Logistics – and get deeper into how, as Mau writes, “mobility is power, and means of transportation and communication are weapons,” which capital wields against la...

19 Mars 20246min

We dig into the latest proposed legislation to ban TikTok — which is quickly moving in the US House with broad bipartisan support — and the jingoistic motivations, the complete lack of concern about a...

16 Mars 20241h 7min

We talk for a while about the data monetization deals happening now between platforms like Reddit and AI companies like OpenAI, then get into cultural concerns about how technology mediates our realit...

13 Mars 20245min

We start with a long chat about Dune 2 – to avoid spoilers, or if you just don’t want to hear about Dune, skip to this timestamp: 34:43. We then get into the FTC / DOJ’s case against the rent maximizi...

11 Mars 20241h 13min

We look at the intensifying systems of surveillance and control that are being integrated into supermarkets to further exploit labor, monitor customers, and capture profits, while also pushing the inc...

7 Mars 20249min

First we chat about the very dumb debacle with Google’s Gemini AI being “absurdly woke,” when in reality the story here is that they were extremely naive and lazy about how to solve the structural bia...

2 Mars 20241h 17min