We have a big chat with Malcolm Harris about his new book — What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis — which takes seriously the fact that “the whole total world is in crisis” and then seriously advances three different ways to understand, confront, and overcome these disastrous conditions. We walk through the pathways that Malcolm stakes out — marketcraft, public power, and communism — and use the bland discourse around Abundance as a foil for the far more incisive analysis he lays out in What’s Left.

••• What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis | Malcolm Harris https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/malcolm-harris/whats-left/9780316577434/
••• Malcolm’s book tour https://linktr.ee/WhatsLeftTour 
••• Malcolm’s review of Abundance https://thebaffler.com/latest/whats-the-matter-with-abundance-harris 

Standing Plugs:
••• Order Jathan’s new book: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520398078/the-mechanic-and-the-luddite 
••• Subscribe to Ed’s substack: https://substack.com/@thetechbubble 
••• Subscribe to TMK on patreon for premium episodes: https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (bsky.app/profile/jathansadowski.com) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.x.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (bsky.app/profile/jebr.bsky.social)


400. Well, Somebody Has to Do Something! (ft. Malcolm Harris)


We are joined by yet another TMK favorite, Quinn Slobodian, who is author of Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. We discuss Quinn’s analysis of “new fusionism” or a mutant strain of neoliberalism that crystallized in the 1990s, which sought to ground and defend neoliberal policies through their own bastardization of biological sciences — cognitive, behavioral, evolutionary, genetic, and so on. They then used scientism to justify and propagate political ideas and economic models based on hardwired human nature and hierarchical differences between races, cultures, and intelligence. The fringes of the 1990s have now become the mainstream of the 2020s.

••• Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right | Quinn Slobodian https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9781890951917/hayeks-bastards 

Standing Plugs:
••• Order Jathan’s new book: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520398078/the-mechanic-and-the-luddite 
••• Subscribe to Ed’s substack: https://substack.com/@thetechbubble 
••• Subscribe to TMK on patreon for premium episodes: https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (bsky.app/profile/jathansadowski.com) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.x.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (bsky.app/profile/jebr.bsky.social)


401. Ruled by Bastards (ft. Quinn Slobodian)

We return to an old enemy of the show by discussing the latest developments in the crypto industry. We trace how crypto has evolved from a grift largely focused on defrauding retail investors into a grift now focused on creating financial infrastructure to facilitate very direct and obvious forms of political influence peddling. Of course, the Greater Idiot Theory still holds as many investors still think that bitcoin is a hedge against the stock market and a reservere of stable value in a volatile economy, but the crypto industry is now driven by the needs of the greatest idiots of them all: Donald J. Trump and Family.

Also, here are links for the pictures we were joking about in the beginning: https://x.com/captgouda24/status/1913254322864894178 and https://x.com/luke_d_ismas/status/1913406583188369497  

••• Crypto Crime is Legal | Molly White https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-81/ 
••• Trump’s Newest Grift: Building a Cryptocurrency Empire While Destroying its Regulators | Molly White https://www.citationneeded.news/trump-crypto-empire/ 

••• TMK in the New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/21/how-to-survive-the-ai-revolution 

Standing Plugs:
••• Order Jathan’s new book: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520398078/the-mechanic-and-the-luddite 
••• Subscribe to Ed’s substack: https://substack.com/@thetechbubble 
••• Subscribe to TMK on patreon for premium episodes: https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (bsky.app/profile/jathansadowski.com) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.x.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (bsky.app/profile/jebr.bsky.social)


Patreon Preview – 402. Crypto Empire of the Sons

It’s slop world, baby! We get into how the internet has become choked by artificial intelligence systems focused on the endless production, circulation, and consumption of slop and shit. This is driven by the continual capture and recapture of deep fried forms of value, instead of actually producing anything new or useful. This leads to an internet that is hostile to human existence—where people are unwelcomed and unnecessary. We trace the degradation of the internet from information superhighway to hostile architecture to abandoned infrastructure.

••• Welcome to slop world: how the hostile internet is driving us crazy https://www.ft.com/content/5d06bbb4-0034-493b-8b0d-5c0ab74bedef
••• AI hype is drowning in slopaganda https://www.ft.com/content/24218775-57b1-4e9f-ba64-266a3239cf27

Standing Plugs:
••• Order Jathan’s new book: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520398078/the-mechanic-and-the-luddite 
••• Subscribe to Ed’s substack: https://substack.com/@thetechbubble 
••• Subscribe to TMK on patreon for premium episodes: https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (bsky.app/profile/jathansadowski.com) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.x.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (bsky.app/profile/jebr.bsky.social)

403. Perpetual Slop Machine

We take a deep dive into the lesser-known industry of “pharmacy benefits managers” (PBMs) which are parasitical companies that sit in the middle of the incredibly consolidated and vertically integrated market of pharmaceuticals <=> hospitals <=> insurers <=> pharmacy benefits managers <=> pharmacies. Through the simple administrative business of making lists of drugs and networks of pharmacies, PBMs have managed to carve out a multi-billion dollar rent-seeking industry premised on controlling (and jacking up) how much drugs cost and where you can get them—and extracting as much money as possible from people who need those drugs. 
 
••• Timeline of FTC lawsuit against PBMs and relevant documents: https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/221-0114-caremark-rx-zinc-health-services-et-al-matter-insulin 
••• Concurring Statement of Commissioner Andrew N. Ferguson https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/Ferguson-Statement-Pharmacy-Benefit-Managers-Report.pdf 
••• Market Power and Inequality: The Antitrust Counterrevolution and Its Discontents | Lina Khan and Sandeep Vaheesan https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/2790/ 
••• Inside the Mafia of Pharma Pricing | Matt Stoller https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/inside-the-mafia-of-pharma-pricing 
••• A brief look at current debates about pharmacy benefit managers https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-brief-look-at-current-debates-about-pharmacy-benefit-managers/ 

Standing Plugs:
••• Order Jathan’s new book: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520398078/the-mechanic-and-the-luddite 
••• Subscribe to Ed’s substack: https://substack.com/@thetechbubble 
••• Subscribe to TMK on patreon for premium episodes: https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (bsky.app/profile/jathansadowski.com) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.x.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (bsky.app/profile/jebr.bsky.social)


Patreon Preview – 404. The Parasites that Control Pharmaceutical Prices

We chat with linguist and cognitive scientist Hagen Blix about his new book Why We Fear AI (co-authored with computer scientist Ingeborg Glimmer) about how the technical qualities of AI – especially LLM chatbots – take the alienation (and seemingly alien power) of capital to the next level. What happens when the social logic of capital — which appears to be a motive force with no motivator — is channeled through generative technologies that appear to be texts with no author? People see an entity that must be feared and worshipped.

••• Why We Fear AI | Hagen Blix & Ingeborg Glimmer https://www.commonnotions.org/why-we-fear-ai 
••• https://www.If A.I. Systems Become Conscious, Should They Have Rights? nytimes.com/2025/04/24/technology/ai-welfare-anthropic-claude.html 
••• Marx’s Comments on James Mill http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/ 

Standing Plugs:
••• Order Jathan’s new book: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520398078/the-mechanic-and-the-luddite 
••• Subscribe to Ed’s substack: https://substack.com/@thetechbubble 
••• Subscribe to TMK on patreon for premium episodes: https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (bsky.app/profile/jathansadowski.com) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.x.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (bsky.app/profile/jebr.bsky.social)


405. AI is the Demon God of Capital (ft. Hagen Blix)

We talk about Pope Le(t)o’s striking critiques of AI and the needs for luddism to be an intersectional movement. Then we get into the Republicans’ advocacy for AI rights over States’ rights, which contributes to a greater hollowing out of government capacity at all levels in an attempt to usher in the great fracturing of society into zones of special economic interest. Finally we sketch a vision of a bold future of post-apartheid integration sparked by Grok’s obsession with white genocide. 

••• Will Pope Leo XIV be an ally against AI? https://www.disconnect.blog/p/will-pope-leo-xiv-be-an-ally-against
••• The Franciscan monk helping the Vatican take on — and tame — AI https://www.ft.com/content/1fa17d8b-5902-4aff-a69d-419b96722c83
••• Republicans propose prohibiting US states from regulating AI for 10 years https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/14/republican-budget-bill-ai-laws
••• Republicans Try to Cram Ban on AI Regulation Into Budget Reconciliation Bill https://www.404media.co/republicans-try-to-cram-ban-on-ai-regulation-into-budget-reconciliation-bill/ 
••• AI agents: from co-pilot to autopilot https://www.ft.com/content/3e862e23-6e2c-4670-a68c-e204379fe01f
••• Insurers launch cover for losses caused by AI chatbot errors https://www.ft.com/content/1d35759f-f2a9-46c4-904b-4a78ccc027df 

Standing Plugs:
••• Order Jathan’s new book: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520398078/the-mechanic-and-the-luddite 
••• Subscribe to Ed’s substack: https://substack.com/@thetechbubble 
••• Subscribe to TMK on patreon for premium episodes: https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (bsky.app/profile/jathansadowski.com) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.x.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (bsky.app/profile/jebr.bsky.social)

Patreon Preview – 406. The Golden Path

[Note: sorry for the lateness, blame sickness. Also, we are doing two premium episodes in a row to change up our schedule because we’re interviewing authors of a new book next week and want it to be a free one. Don’t worry, the next two episodes will be free ones to even things out.]

We’ve eaten our veggies, so now it’s time for dessert as we do a full episode reading series of a new profile about Kara Swisher and learn how to dominate the podcast leaderboards by becoming new media entrepreneurs.

••• How Kara Swisher Scaled Even Higher https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/business/media/kara-swisher-podcasts.html
••• Is Scott Galloway the Howard Stern of the Business World? https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/02/style/scott-galloway.html
••• Winners of an ‘Exclusive Invitation’ to Dine With Trump Will Gather Tonight https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/us/politics/trump-memecoin-dinner.html 

Standing Plugs:
••• Order Jathan’s new book: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520398078/the-mechanic-and-the-luddite 
••• Subscribe to Ed’s substack: https://substack.com/@thetechbubble 
••• Subscribe to TMK on patreon for premium episodes: https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (bsky.app/profile/jathansadowski.com) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.x.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (bsky.app/profile/jebr.bsky.social)


Patreon Preview – 407. Burn Notice

We chat with Emily Bender and Alex Hanna — authors of AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want — and pierce the veil of hype by getting into how these systems actually work and, importantly, the work they cannot do despite claims by boosters and doomers alike. Think of datasets like ImageNet or LAION-5B as big vats of pink slime and LLMs like ChatGPT as “synthetic text extruding machines” that turn pink slime into nuggets of text. It’s easy to forget that these magical mystery machines are direct descendants of very unexciting things like “T9 word.” We end the episode by chatting about why we shouldn’t trust the hype about how AI is going to destroy (or revolutionize) the education sector. 

••• The AI Con | Emily Bender and Alex Hanna https://thecon.ai/ 
••• On the genealogy of machine learning datasets: A critical history of ImageNet https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20539517211035955
••• Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 https://www.dair-institute.org/maiht3k/  

Standing Plugs:
••• Order Jathan’s new book: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520398078/the-mechanic-and-the-luddite 
••• Subscribe to Ed’s substack: https://substack.com/@thetechbubble 
••• Subscribe to TMK on patreon for premium episodes: https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (bsky.app/profile/jathansadowski.com) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.x.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (bsky.app/profile/jebr.bsky.social)


408. Synthetic Text Extruder Hype (ft. Emily Bender, Alex Hanna)

It’s a real friends and enemies episode of TMK. We get into the messy breakup between Trump and Musk, then talk about the rekindling relationship between Palmer Luckey and Mark Zuckerberg, before ending with OpenAI trying to forge a new tier lists of countries who support “democratic AI” (aka friends of America), countries who aren’t yet doing enough to support “democratic AI” but could upgrade to friend status, and countries who are “CCP-led China” (aka enemies of America), plus we learn more about a man who Sam Altman describes as a “dear personal friend.”

•••  Live Updates: Trump Threatens to Cut Musk’s Government Contracts as Online Feud Escalates https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/06/05/us/trump-elon-musk 
••• Builder.ai Faked Business With Indian Firm VerSe to Inflate Sales, Sources Say https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-30/builder-ai-faked-business-with-indian-firm-verse-to-inflate-sales-sources-say 
••• Builder.ai collapses after revelation that its "AI" was hundreds of engineers techspot.com/news/108173-builderai-collapses-after-revelation-ai-hundreds-engineers.html 
••• Meta Fired Palmer Luckey. Now, They’re Teaming Up on a Defense Contract. https://www.wsj.com/tech/meta-army-vr-headsets-anduril-palmer-luckey-142ab72a 
••• Whose National Security? OpenAI’s Vision for American Techno-Dominance https://theintercept.com/2025/06/03/openai-sam-altman-trump-china/ 

Standing Plugs:
••• Order Jathan’s new book: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520398078/the-mechanic-and-the-luddite 
••• Subscribe to Ed’s substack: https://substack.com/@thetechbubble 
••• Subscribe to TMK on patreon for premium episodes: https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (bsky.app/profile/jathansadowski.com) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.x.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (bsky.app/profile/jebr.bsky.social)


409. The Breakup Meltdown

We chat about Palantir and their role in enacting Trump’s executive order for a unified database across federal agencies and a master profile for every individual — and their larger role in bringing about the glorious new age of theocratic techno-nationalism for the West.

••• Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/trump-palantir-data-americans.html
••• ICE Just Paid Palantir Tens of Millions for ‘Complete Target Analysis of Known Populations’ https://www.404media.co/ice-just-paid-palantir-tens-of-millions-for-complete-target-analysis-of-known-populations/ 

Standing Plugs:
••• Order Jathan’s new book: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520398078/the-mechanic-and-the-luddite 
••• Subscribe to Ed’s substack: https://substack.com/@thetechbubble 
••• Subscribe to TMK on patreon for premium episodes: https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (bsky.app/profile/jathansadowski.com) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.x.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (bsky.app/profile/jebr.bsky.social)


Patreon Preview – 410. Palantir’s Psychohistory

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.

Patreon Preview – 410. Palantir’s Psychohistory

This Machine Kills

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