This Machine Kills

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 Mar 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 Mar 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 Mar 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 Mar 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 Mar 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 Mar 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 Mar 20241h 17min

We discuss Chapter 10 – The Capitalist Reconfiguration of Nature – and get deeper into why capital seeks to subsume nature, generally, and how capital has been wildly successful at subsuming agricultu...

27 Feb 20249min