Stay ConnectedA 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.
Copyright: © All rights reserved
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 the “necessary outside” of social reproduction and the feminization of that labor. Mau gets us to think at different levels of abstraction about the nature, causes, and effects of these relations that are so integral to capitalism as it exists, but do not stem from capital. ••• Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital – Søren Mau https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2759-mute-compulsion 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)
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 structure made a lot of people ignore the obvious power at play, and what this all means in a bigger sense for the ongoing development of AI. ••• OpenAI and the rift at the heart of Silicon Valley https://www.ft.com/content/a6505db4-c8d4-44c1-a030-502b364ed370 ••• OpenAI’s board had safety concerns. Big Tech obliterated them in 48 hours https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-11-20/column-openais-board-had-safety-concerns-big-tech-obliterated-them-in-48-hours 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)
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 set in an alternative present / very near future. Joanne’s novel takes the practices of Potemkin AI and pushes them to a logical extreme, revealing their true absurdity by centering the everyday life of an human worker whose job is to secretly imbue the technological future with autonomy. We talk about the need to tell stories about ordinary people and their social relations with the technical systems and corporations that structure their reality, rather than always focus on the hero’s journey of gifted kids with oversized egos and privileged agency. ••• Follow Joanne: https://twitter.com/jomc ••• Read Wrong Way: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374610661/wrongway 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)
We step into the art world by way of a long profile of Holly Herndon, an experimental artist and musician who works with artificial intelligence to create provocative, strange, and deeply personal works that serve as meta commentaries on the intersection between art + tech + society. Through a start-up she co-founded, Herndon is also engaged in advocacy work to build a “consent layer” for artists in AI infrastructures. We critically discuss the political / cultural economy of these dynamics — these ways of seeing and means of producing artworks — both old and new. ••• Holly Herndon’s Infinite Art https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/holly-herndons-infinite-art 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)
We kick off with a talk on insurtech that Jathan gave last week on the politics of machine learning and actuarial science, then get deeper into dynamics of speculative asset bubbles, why insurers live and die by the “float,” and some of the cutting-edge insurtech innovations — and fuel for nightmares — that we learned about in Vegas. ••• Slides and script for Jathan’s talk: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1azhFJPuMJXuv9tR6wHp4MAXpDQAlx8Px/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=113285384334686678399&rtpof=true&sd=true 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)
We discuss Chapter 6 — Transcendental Class Domination — and get deeper into an analysis of class relations, the nature of economic power, and how capital wields this form of “impersonal domination” to structure the very “conditions of possibility” for existence and experience in the world. ••• Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital – Søren Mau https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2759-mute-compulsion 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)
[We are traveling and other stuff, so enjoy this exceptional episode from our Patreon archives] We jump off the absurd twitter debate about degrowth and bananas in global communism to discuss much deeper issues about why any alternative to capitalism cannot simply be premised on being better managers of capitalist machines. Despite the arguments of ecomodernists—and the poverty of thought it engenders—there is not a linear development of progress and innovation which either moves forward (to the right) or backward (to the left). Break free of bourgeois ideology! Throw off the shackles of capitalist systems! Abolish the commodity form! 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)
We dive into effective accelerationism—its cult of personality, capitalist metaphysics, techno-theology, and lukewarm manifestos. We connect it to previous movements like Singulatariansim, strip away the mercurial branding of these ideologies, and look more closely at the material politics at their core. ••• ‘It’s a Cult’: Inside Effective Accelerationism, the Pro-AI Movement Taking Over Silicon Valley https://www.theinformation.com/articles/its-a-cult-inside-effective-accelerationism-the-pro-ai-movement-taking-over-silicon-valley ••• The Techno-Optimist Manifesto https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/ 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)
Returning champion Cory Doctorow joins us to discuss his latest book, The Internet Con, which lays out how the basis of so much material power in the world exists at the intersection of information technology and intellectual property. We get into the mechanics of IT⇔IP, the necessity for interoperability in a world ruled by cartels, and the (intermediate) steps that must be taken now to fight back and create space for even more radical change. ••• Follow Cory: https://twitter.com/doctorow ••• Cory’s new book: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3035-the-internet-con ••• Cory’s other new book: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/thelostcause 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)
We discuss Chapter 5 — Metabolic Domination — which brings us to the end of the first section outlining the material conditions (of human nature, society, life) that allow for the existence of something like economic power. Here we see how economic power operates by inserting itself into, mediating and controlling, the processes of human metabolism—that is, the material things and social relations that people depend upon to live. The very thing that makes humans so powerful—the flexibility, porosity, and promiscuity of our social relations with other things, people, and environments—is also what makes us susceptible to domination of various forms. ••• Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital – Søren Mau https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2759-mute-compulsion 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)
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
