Every paragraph hit me with more psychic damage

Honestly it's pretty cool that a bigger than expected part of my job is reading the Financial Times every day.

In the new TMK Premium, we discuss the growing genre and tropes of personal literary essays about AI — what N+1 dubs the "AI-and-I" genres — where artists and intellectuals pen long essays laying out their thoughts, worries, and ultimate embrace of AI. www.patreon.com/posts/139592...

This essay is so damn good. I love to see @edwardongwesojr.com digging in the crates to find sharp, prescient critiques of technological political economy from Victorian literature that could / should be written today. thetechbubble.substack.com/p/on-the-ori...

Capricon 46 is delighted to begin announcing our Guests of Honor! Welcome @edwardongwesojr.com and @jathansadowski.com, co-hosts of the podcast This Machine Kills. Their podcast explores the political economy of technology; we are thrilled to have them join us! capricon.org/guests-of-ho...

"Layered both literally and figuratively on top of the future pathway of the Google internet infrastructure, the sugarcane railway tracks evoke the longevity of colonial infrastructures as well as the ideologies underlying them." – @emmaquilty.bsky.social datasociety.net/points/confr...

In the new TMK, we discuss the assassination of Kirk—the latest immense, spectacular, and perhaps ephemeral event in a weird world. Will it be a catalyst for civil war, for years of lead, or for just the latest viral media cycle? Depends on who—and when—you ask. soundcloud.com/thismachinek...

"This is one of those books my mind keeps coming back to. [...] As Mechanics and Luddites, we could prepare students to not simply be cogs, but machine breakers as well as builders." Really lovely review of my book in the context of education technology www.civicsoftechnology.org/mechanic-and...

This outcome was so predictable. It doesn’t matter who shot Kirk or for what reason, it was always going to be a catalyst for cracking down on liberals, leftists, snd “anti-conservative thought.” The point is to never let a good crisis go to waste, especially if that crisis is a massive spectacle.

Feel like I’m going insane with the revisionist history that Charlie Kirk fostered open debate. He chilled speech and his targeting of professors for wrongthink led to threats, harassment, and being forced out of their jobs. His legacy is chilling speech right now, about him

Really good, in-depth interview with me about my book – The Mechanic and The Luddite – in an Italian tech news site. (The way my headshot is zoomed in for the header image did make me go "oh god!" lmao) www.guerredirete.it/siate-meccan...

When democrats do this kinda stuff it feels like they are showing Trump / MAGA that they are loyal opposition who will not pose a real threat to the sovereign's power. Trump responds well to pageantry and displays of fealty. And Trump's posts show he's paying close attention to Kirk's death.

In the new TMK Premium, we dive into the life and mind of Nicole Shanahan, a tech billionaire who is now the self-anointed demon hunter of Silicon Valley and Burning Man. There is soul-corrupting psycho-politics everywhere for those with eyes to see. Full ep: www.patreon.com/posts/138623... Teaser:

Yes, killing people is generally bad. But I have no room in my heart to feel sadness for a man who made a very conscious choice to spend his entire adult life profiting from sowing division, fear and hatred, gleefully putting a target on the back of vulnerable minorities every time he spoke. Sorry!

All I can say is, try to live your life in a way that doesn’t make millions of people do the celebration from the end of Return Of The Jedi when they learn about your death.

Really gonna hate to see what the blowback for this event looks like when Homeland Security actually starts treating any faintly liberal or leftist position as a dangerous terrorist ideology.

NEW: Insurance in the Polycrisis @katemac.bsky.social & I On the twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, those who are devalued, displaced, and disinvested already know what the future on an uninsurable earth looks like for the beautiful and the damned. www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/ins...

A new report from @mediajustice.bsky.social focuses on data center expansion in the US South, looking at environmental racism and practices of resistance. Can’t wait to dig in!

One of my favorite discussions in the issue. How often do you get a climate scientist, legal scholar of corporations and climate risk, and an urban geographer together to talk about the stakes of private finance shaping public knowledge on urban climate risk? More of these conversations, please.

I’ve seen a few posts saying that “critiquing AI is actually a type of racism” and I gotta hand it to them for daring to be so innovatively stupid in public. I would never be so brave.

In the new TMK, we discuss how, with the announcement of a new $100 million Super PAC for pro-AI political influence, lines are being drawn between different styles of AI boosterism in Silicon Valley. www.patreon.com/posts/138072...

Great to see my book among friends at Elliot Bay Books in Seattle! @parismarx.com @bcmerchant.bsky.social

In six states, Medicare will now require prior authorization for certain procedures. The government is hiring companies using AI to make those determinations about healthcare. This is exactly the same tactic that private insurers like UnitedHealth use to delay and deny treatment.

In the new TMK Premium, we chat about a contemptuous profile of the fringe futurists, biohacker kooks, wealthy technocratics, and wannabe philosopher kings who have combined their vast resources and grand dreams to pursue a single mission: immortality. Teaser: soundcloud.com/thismachinek... Episode:

"Everywhere, the bureaucratic logic of organisations merges with the calculative logic of machines, feeding on data emitted by ever-smaller and more powerful devices that ended up first in the homes, then on the laps, and then in the hands of billions of individuals." —Marion Fourcade, @kjhealy.co

"Having some visionary single decision-maker allows you to be Queen Isabella funding Columbus. I fantasize about well-meaning wealthy leaders guiding humanity with pure intent, giving top scientists the capital to take tenfold actions," Diamandis said. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

New research shows "home insurers consider the credit score of the homeowner more important than the location of the home in setting prices... On average across the nation, it is more expensive to have a poor credit score than to live in a zip code with a high disaster risk."

In the new TMK, we chat about the disappointing launch and reception of GPT-5 and what this massive claims-reality gap tells us about an overactive industry propelled by grand social forces of capital accumulation to produce technologies that are good for ??? soundcloud.com/thismachinek...

In the new TMK, we chat about the disappointing launch and reception of GPT-5 and what this massive claims-reality gap tells us about an overactive industry propelled by grand social forces of capital accumulation to produce technologies that are good for ??? soundcloud.com/thismachinek...

The fact that the thing we're calling artificial intelligence *can't do math* and yet we're jamming it into programs that successfully *have done math* for decades, then warning people against using the AI to do math, seems like an excellent summary of where we are.

In TMK Premium, we get into the thick morass of the Trump family’s ongoing entanglements with the crypto industry—and how both sides of this partnership are deeply, financially dependent on each other. Trump has embraced his true calling: fictitious meme capital. www.patreon.com/posts/premiu...

Incredible book launch for 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑀𝑒𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑖𝑐 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐿𝑢𝑑𝑑𝑖𝑡𝑒 at Victorian Trades Hall last night! We sold out the venue, saw so many wonderful people, and got to talk so much shit about technological capitalism. It doesn't get any better!

“Pushing your business to exploit social crises of which it was a significant driver by deploying dangerously tractable and addictive products with few consistent guardrails is wildly cynical, misguided, pernicious, and depressing. It’s also, unfortunately, extremely normal.”

These kinda weird, pedantic, too familiar messages from listeners is part of podcasting. But in a real shocker the sender is an award-winning female country music artist from earlier decades — I verified the identity but won’t dox — who listens to TMK while also correcting my accent lmao

My essay “Because the twin is not a copy: the politics of digital twins” - written for a 2023 workshop organised by Christoph Borbach & out now in a special issue on digital twinning in #NewMedia&Society #DigitalTwins #algorithms journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

My Melbourne book launch is next Thursday! Come see me chat with really smart friends about the Mechanic and the Luddite. There will be some free drinks and books for sale! Register below.

Always a fun time going on TMK, especially when it’s about AI and geopolitics!

This is such a fundamental misunderstanding of how AI works that it could serve as a teaching tool for how not to think about the technology. AI does not "recognize" or "disclose" its "own built-in weaknesses."

This was a good convo that @edwardongwesojr.com hosted entirely while lying on his bed, TMK is the best give us a listen

In the new TMK, Ed chats with @parismarx.com and @bcmerchant.bsky.social to chat about the vast proliferation of AI bubbles across the US, Europe, and China—and their competing visions of the ideal global value chain for AI. soundcloud.com/thismachinek...

So far this year, "capital expenditures on AI added more to US economic growth than all consumer spending combined... spending on IT for AI is so big it might be making up for economic losses from the tariffs, serving as a private sector stimulus program." www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-ai-bub...

AI doesn't just mean investing trillions into building data centres, it means building different types of data centres that are incredibly energy dense and intensive to power and cool the AI chips. Great news in a burning world! ig.ft.com/ai-data-cent...

Incredibly instructive reporting on what appears well on its way to becoming the biggest, most concentrated, most energy- and resource-intensive, and most speculative wave of capital investment ever. ig.ft.com/ai-data-cent...

In the new TMK Premium, we get into Silicon Valley imperialism, American force projection and soft power through AI, the endlessly convenient competition against China, plus a new addition of tech freak watch. Teaser: soundcloud.com/thismachinek... Full episode: www.patreon.com/posts/135353...

wtf is a “privately owned fighter jet”??? I don’t like learning this exist at all — let alone in the context of one nearly colliding with a passenger jet.

This (real!) line from Trump's speech about the AI Action Plan has me feeling delirious. “We’re going to make this industry absolutely the top because right now it’s a beautiful baby that’s born,” Trump said about A.I. “We have to grow that baby and let that baby thrive. We can’t stop it.”

In our new policy brief for @datasociety.bsky.social, @mwoluchem.bsky.social and I break down the myths and industry talking points attached to data centers. Who benefits from unbridled data center growth and who is most at risk when such speculative ventures fail?

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