This Machine Kills This Machine Kills
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- Technology
A podcast about technology and political economy /// Agitprop against innovation and capital /// Hosted by Jathan Sadowski and Edward Ongweso Jr., Produced by Jereme Brown /// Hello friends and enemies
Listen anywhere that fine podcasts are distributed. Subscribe at patreon.com/thismachinekills to get premium episodes every week.
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Patreon Preview – 329. Surging Forward
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 that totally sustains the AI industry all for the grand dream and supreme purpose of squeezing out another 3% annual growth in the economy.
••• Uber-style pricing is coming for everything https://www.vox.com/money/24105250/fast-food-restaurants-dynamic-pricing-algorithm-wendys
••• Scientific Journals Are Publishing Papers With AI-Generated Text https://www.404media.co/scientific-journals-are-publishing-papers-with-ai-generated-text/
••• Microsoft Hires DeepMind Co-Founder Suleyman to Run Consumer AI https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-19/microsoft-hires-deepmind-co-founder-suleyman-to-run-consumer-ai
••• Saudi Arabia Plans $40 Billion Push Into Artificial Intelligence https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/19/business/saudi-arabia-investment-artificial-intelligence.html
••• Have We Reached Peak AI? https://www.wheresyoured.at/peakai/
Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills
Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl) -
328. The Universal Science of Advertisement (ft. Lee McGuigan)
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 information technology since the 1940s, way longer than the usual stories of when advertising and technology joined together. As Lee’s work shows, the ad industry is a perfect case study for better understanding how the science / ideology of (algorithmic) optimization broke free from its confines in military strategy or economic planning and became a set of universal methods and solutions that should be applied everywhere.
••• Lee’s book – Selling the American People: Advertising, Optimization, and the Origins of Adtech https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545440/selling-the-american-people/ ‘
••• Follow Lee – https://twitter.com/ljamesmcguigan
Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills
Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl) -
Patreon Preview – 327. TMK BC5: Mute Compulsion, Ch. 12
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 labor, against government, against nature, against itself. We also illustrate the techno-politics of logistics with yet another reveal that a rapidly rising startup in the space of automating labor – Presto Automation – is actually Potemkin AI. Now that’s the power of logistics as a substitute for the power of technology!
••• Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital – Søren Mau https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2759-mute-compulsion
••• AI-Powered Drive-Thru Is Actually Run Almost Fully by Humans https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-07/ai-fast-food-drive-thrus-need-human-workers-70-of-time
Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills
Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl) -
326. The Problem With America’s Ban on TikTok
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 any of the actual cultural influence, social impact, economic power, or just empirical reality of this technology, and instead the hyper-fixation on this being a Chinese app rather than an American app. Indeed, the ban bill would force TikTok into becoming American owned — thus becoming a way more pernicious and shitty piece of tech.
••• TikTok Crackdown Shifts Into Overdrive, With Sale or Shutdown on Table | Wall Street Journal https://archive.is/fGfnc
••• TikTok Is For Millennials, It Turns Out https://www.garbageday.email/p/tiktok-millennials-turns
••• The Influencers Getting Paid to Promote Designer Knockoffs From China https://www.wired.com/story/influencers-paid-promote-designer-knockoffs-from-china/
Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills
Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl) -
Patreon Preview – 325. Medium Anxiety
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 reality, before ending with a social analysis of anxiety as the dominant affect in society right now.
••• Google cut a deal with Reddit for AI training data https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/22/24080165/google-reddit-ai-training-data
••• Tumblr and WordPress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools https://www.404media.co/tumblr-and-wordpress-to-sell-users-data-to-train-ai-tools/
••• Shutterstock Expands Partnership with OpenAI, Signs New Six-Year Agreement to Provide High-Quality Training Data https://investor.shutterstock.com/news-releases/news-release-details/shutterstock-expands-partnership-openai-signs-new-six-year
Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills
Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl) -
324. Dune Dudes 2 // Evicting RENTMaximizer
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 maximizing algorithms being used by landlords to collude on price and drive up rents. It’s a real delight seeing antitrust enforcers knock back these obviously problematic technologies and deny the corporations’ totally idiotic legal defense of them.
••• Price fixing by algorithm is still price fixing https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/03/price-fixing-algorithm-still-price-fixing
Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills
Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl)