We are joined by one of our favorite friends — Meredith Whittaker — for a giant discussion that bridges her two latest articles. First a historical analysis of Charles Babbage and the smoking gun that

To conduct a post-mortem investigation on the Amazon warehouse union vote in Bessemer, Alabama, we’re joined by Alex N. Press—staff writer for Jacobin and one of our favorite labor reporters. As Alex

We are joined by Justin Roczniak—of the excellent engineering disasters podcast, Well There’s Your Problem—to talk about the potential freight rail strike that has been brewing for a long time and nea

Well it’s finally happened. We are joined by Evgeny Morozov—preeminent critic of digital capitalism and founder of The Syllabus—for a very long conversation. Among a great many things, we discuss: the

We're unlocking the latest episode from the premium feed on the political economy of Buy Now, Pay Later companies. What are they, where did they come from, how do they work, why are they booming, and

We dig into the details of FTX’s collapse. FTX is not an isolated event. FTX is not a bad apple. FTX is not uniquely mismanaged. FTX is not a cautionary tale. FTX is not a stunning surprise. FTX is a

Cold open: TMK x SoftBank Main show: Sure you might know all about Amazon’s extensive network of hellish warehouses, its horrendously exploitative labor conditions, its cynical partnerships with the

Intro: Contra – This Machine Kills (remixed) https://contra805.bandcamp.com/track/this-machine-kills We’re joined by two of the sharpest minds on the politics of AI and data governance—Meredith Whitt

We go back in time—with the help of groundbreaking work by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow—to examine what the history of social inequality can teach us about the politica

We discuss how the failed promises of smart city megaprojects around the world – really honing in on Africa and a case study of Konza City in Kenya – perfectly encapsulate the brand of colonialism pro

We’re delighted to be joined by Chris Gilliard (twitter.com/hypervisible) – one of the best experts on privacy and surveillance around – for a fantastic discussion laying out his incisive analysis of

We are joined by Dan McQuillan to discuss his great new book Resisting AI. As Jathan wrote in a blurb for the book: “With analytical and moral clarity, McQuillan makes the case for recognising the rad

We’re joined by the great Veena Dubal (twitter.com/veenadubal), law professor at UC Hastings, for a fantastic discussion about how gig work platforms like Uber have weaponized ideas of flexibility and

We’re joined by Phil Neel, a communist economic geographer, to dig deep into different theories of crisis in capitalism. While theorizing crisis is a core part of the Marxist analysis of capitalism, w

We are joined by Abeba Birhane — Senior Fellow in Trustworthy AI at the Mozilla Foundation — for a critical discussion about the release of GPT-4 and OpenAI. We also get into the excellent work that A

Kicking off the new year, we are joined by returning champion Wendy Liu – author of Abolish Silicon Valley – to look back on all the very dumb things the tech sector has forced us take seriously in 20

If we want to understand the cloud, then we need to study real estate. We are joined by Dan Greene—from the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies—who has written the premier analysis

Outro: Eva B - Mukhtasir Baatein https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T--NV__iJA We’re joined by two excellent scholars — Noopur Raval, research fellow in the AI Now Institute at NYU, and Rida Qadri, PhD

[Due to illness, we are unlocking this classic episode — which has only become more relevant as the news coverage and regulatory response to PFAS forever chemicals has only increased since our recordi

Based on Amazon’s recent acquisitions of One Medical and iRobot—just the latest in a shopping spree of vertical integration—we analyze how these seemingly disparate things all plug into Amazon’s broad

We are joined by Antony Loewenstein — author of The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World — to discuss his extensive reporting on the Israeli occupatio

Okay, so the big boat is no longer blocking the Suez Canal. But that doesn’t mean we can go back to ignoring the global networks of capitalism and colonialism that make our world run. Laleh Khalili –

We are very pleased to be joined by returning guest Danielle Carr, anthropologist and historian of science who is finishing her PhD at Columbia, to chat about her excellent new essay on the (anti-)pol

We go in-depth on an article that has not received the attention it is due: an investigation into an automated welfare fraud system in the Netherlands, which is based on unprecedented access to the ma

We discuss a new startup doing the rounds called Sanas that uses AI “accent translation” to make "non-white" call center workers speak English with a white American accent. This is some real retro thr

We’re joined by Nick Chavez, a mechanical engineer working in R&D, to discuss his incisive essay exploring the capitalist origins and purpose of engineering, the class position and labor process of en

We’re joined by Dan Greene, author of an excellent new book, The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope. Dan’s work provides a deep analysis of how public institu

We’re joined by Olivier Jutel to talk about a fantastic paper he wrote on blockchain imperialism in the Pacific. We discuss how blockchain projects and crypto entrepreneurs are partnering with the US

It’s the tech news roundup, yeehaw! We look at a few recent stories in techno-politics worth discussing. First, businesses are blaming Amazon for draining the labor pool, not being exploitative enough

We take a deeper look at Nvidia, a company that has — compared to software firms like OpenAI — flown under the radar for both investigative and critical analysis of AI. We discuss their meteoric rise

We are joined by Tamara Nopper and Eve Zelickson —— from the Data & Society Research Institute —— to discuss their excellent primer on Wellness Capitalism. This is the pure ideal of TMK crossovers as

In the first part of the show, we talk about a ridiculous new paper funded by OpenAI that aims to reconcile all human values by combining them into a “moral graph” to train Socratic LLM through reinfo

We are excited to be joined again by Evgeny Morozov, host of The Santiago Boys, a new narrative podcast series about the history of Cybersyn, the geopolitics of its creation in Cold War Latin America,

We are unlocking a recent episode about a topic that remains very relevant. We dig deep into Effective Altruism and Longtermism, laying out the origins, beliefs, and actions of this ideological moral

Cold open: Garden Glossary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBMRWwjGJHQ It’s time for theory chat! To analyse the techno-politics of smart systems, we need good theories at hand. And we’re joined by

We’re joined by Taylor Lorenz – business reporter at the New York Times, twitter.com/TaylorLorenz – for an excellent discussion about the evolution and rapid growth of the creator economy, the working

We are joined by David Gerard – longtime critic of blockchain, even before it was cool – to discuss the experience of staring into the crypto abyss and having it stare back into you. Follow, read, an

We get into a great discussion about the Butlerian Jihad — or the war against all computation that catalyzed the events of the Dune series — and the reactionary politics that inform so much science fi

Cold open: What is Democracy? Outro: Jeff Mangum and Guy Picciotto at the Rolling Jubilee telethon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztyj7kE9tNc Extremely excited to be joined by Astra Taylor – acclaim

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 “

In this week’s episodes, we dig into an excellent (and very long) new law article, which is crucial for understanding the history, mechanics, constraints, and consequences of venture capitalism. How d

We do a deep dive into the ideas of Lina Khan, the newly confirmed chair of the Federal Trade Commission. We discuss her large body of scholarship—digging up some of her lesser known, but arguably mor

We do a close reading of a new article in Foreign Policy by futurist Parag Khanna and venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan, which stands as a monument to how “web3” is like a brain worm that destroys

Outro: St. Lorelei - https://stlorelei.bandcamp.com/track/outside-the-green We kick things off with an announcement about TMK sweeps month. Then we get into a discussion of data politics based on th

We discuss the limitations of existing approaches – and democratic alternatives – to data governance in informational capitalism with Salomé Viljoen (https://twitter.com/salome_viljoen_), a legal scho

In our mission to analyse capitalism and technology from the experiences of workers, we would be remiss if we ignored a crucial form of labor that people – across the political and social spectrum – t

We kept ignoring DAOs and web3 hoping it would go away, but sadly it hasn’t. So we pick apart each part of the acronym—decentralized, autonomous, organization—and discuss the techno-politics of their

At last, the Luddism episode has dropped! We dig into the actual, and massively misunderstood, history of Luddites — not as an insult for people who are deemed “anti-progress,” but as a labor movement

We are joined by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant — co-hosts of Death Panel — to discuss their truly excellent new book, Health Communism, which offers a searing analysis of how our conception

We are joined by Alex Sammon – politics reporter at Slate – to discuss one of the best pieces of gonzo reporting in recent memory. Alex journeyed into the heart of darkness at the center of American c

As an antidote to the constant glowing profiles of tech executives and venture capitalists, TMK is starting an ongoing, occasional series where we highlight the stories and experiences of radical tech

We take a deep dive into another example of a real utopian project from the 1970s, this time from the UK, which provided detailed concrete plans for how to actually do radical techno-politics. The mil

Cold open: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/13/984994360/he-tried-to-organize-workers-in-chinas-gig-economy-now-he-faces-5-years-in-jail We dig deeper into our explorations of technological and financial

We’re joined by co-host of TrashFuture – and friend of TMK from the start – Riley Quinn as we examine the brain of the Thought Leader. Forged in the fires of the financial crash, driven mad by Interne

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

We are joined by Brian Merchant—LA Times tech columnist, author of Blood in the Machine, dear friend of TMK, general in the Ludd Army—to talk about his extraordinary new book. Brian has produced a mas

We take a look at the critical ecologies of the cloud with Mél Hogan – Director of the Environmental Media Lab at the University of Calgary – who researches the environmental politics of server farms

We give y’all a primer on the debates about the “right to repair.” Corporations and conservative think tankers love spouting bad faith arguments that frame the right to repair as an issue of innovatio

We’re joined by one of the best critical observers of Web3 around – Molly White, creator of Web3 is Going Just Great – to discuss what made her, as a software engineer who is immersed in the tech sect

We are joined by Erin McElroy — author of Silicon Valley Imperialism — to first discuss their work as a co-founder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and the important work they are doing on landlor

We start the show looking back at a Wired cover story from 1997 predicting the next 25 years would be The Long Boom. But oops! Turns out all the bad future spoilers came true instead. We dive deep int

We've unlocked this episode for the free feed. It's been a long time since we’ve seen a good old fashioned bank run lead to the collapse of a venerable financial institution, but leave it to Silicon V

We are joined by Katie Wells and Kafui Attoh to discuss their new book – Disrupting DC: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of the City – which offers a rich analysis of Uber and its operations in Washingto

We are joined by Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin – authors of the excellent new book Chokepoint Capitalism – to discuss how creative labor markets are tightly squeezed on all sides by massive monopol

We talk about the booming market for – and community organizing against – landlord technologies that use invasive surveillance to terrorize tenants and automate evictions. In addition to discussing th

We are joined by Auni Ahsan and Stephen McMurtry – organizers with the Alphabet Workers Union – to talk about the nuts and bolts of organizing at a major tech company, the development of AWU and its r

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

Rather than try to hit you with hot takes and quick analysis on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we take a step back and round up of the most craven people in crypto who saw this crisis as a problem i

It’s time for a TMK fact check: coronavirus vaccine edition. We give five out of five pinocchios to the claim that Big Pharma won’t profit hand over fist from the production of vaccines. Five pinocchi

We're taking a week off recording so we're unlocking one of our favorite episodes from the Patreon feed for you to enjoy. Cold open: Ghost in the Shell. There is a long list of services that purport

Returning champion David A. Banks joins us for a supersized discussion about his new book, The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America. How do cities have to act like social med

Metastasis is the process of cancer cells spreading to other parts of the body. Facebook is in its full on metastatic phase. We talk about the big news of Facebook rebranding as Meta – its impotent pr

Why don’t people like crypto? Obviously because they’re old fuddy duddies who don’t want to wrap their mind around new technology! We talk about Ed’s reporting trip to Puerto Rico and why the island h

Cold open: excerpt from UBIK by Philip K. Dick Outro: amazing new track by Jereme, "End of Time" We’re joined by Cory Doctorow — prolific author, longtime activist, friend of the show — to learn abou

We take a deeper dive into the intellectual chicanery, moral corruption, and sociopathic tendencies at the heart of behavioral economics and its most famous “experts.” This is truly one of those cases

Been a long time since we’ve seen a good old fashioned bank run lead to the collapse of a venerable financial institution, but leave it to Silicon Valley to rediscover something old and call it new ag

We are very pleased to be joined by Sarah Myers West— managing director of AI Now Institute and former Senior Advisor on AI to the FTC—to discuss their excellent new report, 2023 Landscape: Confrontin

We spend more time talking about the political economy of AI – the production and application of AI within a capitalist system and how it might (and should) differ within a socialist or communist syst

We’re joined by Ben Tarnoff—author of Internet for the People; co-founder of Logic Magazine—to do some historical materialism on the internet. Ben has a great new book coming out that traces the polit

We investigate the political economy of Buy Now, Pay Later companies. What are they, where did they come from, how do they work, why are they booming, and who is winning and losing? We focus our analy

After way too long, we finally got our friend and comrade Paris Marx—host of the excellent podcast Tech Won’t Save Us—on TMK for a great conversation ranging from the politics of Bitcoin and Tesla to

We are joined by Alex Press — labor reporter for Jacobin — for a broad survey of the very large, active landscape of labor union actions happening in the United States. After updates on strikes, we th

Episode now remastered so it sounds 1000x better! Cold open: Agent Zuboff receives her mission. Main show: We politically cancel Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, for ad

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

We check in on our old friends/enemies at the New York Time, then get to some listener mail about effective altruism, all before offering a smart, nuanced, and critical defense of the CIA. You see, it

We are joined once again by Nick Chavez, a Marxist mechanical engineer, to discuss the political economy of automation – providing the groundwork for a better understanding of how automation actually

We are joined by Quinn Slobodian — author of Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy — to discuss the libertarian extremism that forms the intellectual foundati

We go from talking about how AI/ML research is dominated by the resources, interests, and tradeoffs of “top labs.” Then discuss how our algorithmic agents become active participants in human culture b

We spike our blood pressure with a discussion about recent reporting on the systems used by health insurers to automate rejecting claims. It’s one of those classic situations we all know and love: hum

We are joined once again by Evgeny Morozov to discuss his new podcast series, A Sense of Rebellion, which tells the story of a wild bunch of eccentric hippies who had grand ideas for how to design int

We are joined by Bennett Tomlin and Cas Piancey, hosts of the great podcast Crypto Critics’ Corner, for a deeper dive into stablecoins—a cornerstone // time bomb of the crypto financial system. They e

We get into Evgeny Morozov’s latest essay on the geopolitical interests and military neoliberalism that’s really driving the AI arms race. Morozov traces today’s developments back to the Cold War – no

We take a hard look at the White House’s new AI Bill of Rights and discover that the Eye of Sauron is actually ethical according to its principles. We then go in on academia and journalism for, in the

Opening song: Venceremos – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11MlvWKfL7s We’re very excited to be joined by the hosts of Left Reckoning, Matt Lech and David Griscom, for an action packed double header

As the Federal Trade Commission files suit to block the merger between Nvidia and Arm, we take the opportunity to revisit the excellent and necessary work of the FTC’s Chair, Lina Khan. We discuss a r