This Machine Kills

Returning champ Salomé Viljoen joins us once again to discuss her latest work analyzing the relationship between social data and value creation. We get into the conversion problem of turning data into...

21 Dec 20231h 38min

With Cop City as a case study, we draw together two recent articles — one on the historical connection between right-wing racism, environmental groups, and ecoterrorist actions, and one on how the mas...

16 Dec 202313min

We dive into a new report that details Israel’s military strategy of wiping out “power targets” and “family homes,” which is bolstered and justified by an artificial intelligence system (Habsora, or “...

11 Dec 20231h 27min

We dive into a new report that details Israel’s military strategy of wiping out “power targets” and “family homes,” which is bolstered and justified by an artificial intelligence system (Habsora, or “...

10 Dec 20238min

We talk about the history of AI by drawing out the often very explicit millenarianism that undergirds so much of this technology and its culture over the last 70 years. This strange brew of Eschatolog...

7 Dec 20231h 33min

We discuss Chapter 6 — Capitalism and Difference — and get deeper into the relations between the social logic of capital and social structures of difference like gender, examining how they manifest in...

3 Dec 20237min

With the dust settling, we can take a broader view of the whole OpenAI debacle, what likely caused an internal culture war to boil over into a corporate coup, how OpenAI’s convoluted governance struct...

29 Nov 20231h 14min

We are joined by Joanne McNeil to discuss her new novel Wrong Way, which skillfully blends a beautiful literary style — focused on characterization, inner life, human relations — with a sci-fi story s...

26 Nov 20231h 26min