This Machine Kills
Episodes
449. Efficiently Drowning in Work
17 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
TMK thought validated yet again! We talk about two big studies into the effects of AI on workloads, which show with in-depth empirical detail how AI i...
Patreon Preview – 448. Dubai’s Golden Dome Crumbles
11 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
We discuss the breathless article in Jeff Bezo’s Washington Post about how Claude’s integration into the Palantir Maven Smart System has been used...
TMK Live Show in San Francisco - March 19th
11 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Folks, we are doing a TMK live show in San Francisco! Come join Jathan and Ed, along with our friends, Wendy Liu and Jimmy Wu, for a fun night of lef...
447. The Shinji Problem
03 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
We get into the love/hate triangle between Anthropic, OpenAI, and the Pentagon and discuss the details of these contracts for AI weapon and surveillan...
Patreon Preview – 446. Vibe Decoder (ft. Wendy Liu, Jimmy Wu)
24 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
And we’re back with TMK-as-usual! We are joined by Wendy Liu and Jimmy Wu from the Bay Area Current — a new leftist publication writing about the ...
445. What’s Democracy Got to Do With AI? (ft. Bruce Schneier)
19 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
We chat with Bruce Schneier — renowned security technologist and, most recently, co-author of Rewiring Democracy — to discuss the relationship bet...
Patreon Preview – 444. The Stories We Tell
11 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
We chat about our week as Guests of Honor at Capricon, a science fiction convention in Chicago, and all the great panels and chats we had about luddis...
443. Behold the Big Beautiful AI State (ft. Brian Chen)
04 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
We’re joined by Brian Chen — policy director at Data & Society — to discuss his new report on the Trump administration’s industrial policy for...
Patreon Preview – 442. The Empire of Blood and Oil
28 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
We chat about the Karp x Fink interview at Davos, the humiliation ritual of making Adam Tooze sit on a panel about how batteries are a Chinese threat ...
441. The Fight Over AI Use in Mental Healthcare (ft. Ciara Keegan, Ilana Marcucci-Morris)
21 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
We chat with Ciara Keegan and Ilana Marcucci-Morris from the National Union of Healthcare Workers about their ongoing contract dispute with Kaiser Per...
Patreon Preview – 440. TMK x CES: Return to Hell
14 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Ed returns from his annual trip to the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. We learn about the hottest new trends and devices hitting the market. Big t...
439. Do Socialists Dream of Electric Institutions, Part 2 (ft. Aaron Benanav)
07 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
We’re joined yet again by Aaron Benanav to chat about his essays Beyond Capitalism. In this episode we discuss what it means to lay out concrete mod...
Patreon Preview – 438. Bloodsport for Billionaires
30 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We offer projections for the year to come in tech. What might happen with our big beautiful bubble of overinflated assets, overinvested infrastructure...
437. Do Socialists Dream of Electric Institutions, Part 1 (ft. Aaron Benanav)
23 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We’re joined by Aaron Benanav to get into his magisterial essays laying out a vision of society beyond capitalism. In part 1 of our conversation, we...
Patreon Preview – 436. Panic! Attack the User
17 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We go through a number of moral panics about technology — vaping in schools,porn consumption online, social media use by teens — that are boiling ...
435. Schoolwork Will Set You Free
09 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
After discussing the Council of Neo-Nicaea — but like, what if Jesus was an AI? — we then discuss an incredibly harrowing story of abusive practic...
Patreon Preview – 434. Gang Stalking Palantir
02 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We dig into a new interview with Alex Karp as part of his ongoing Crash Out Tour and learn about the paranoid delusions of a man being sacrificed by t...
433. How to Think About Disability (ft. Becca Monteleone)
25 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We chat with Becca Monteleone — author of The Double Bind of Disability: How Medical Technology Shapes Bodily Authority — about the critical inter...
Patreon Preview – 432. Shadowbanned From Candy Crush
19 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Fresh off the New Luddism conference and Luddite Tribunal in New York City, we talk shit about gamerism and the tough solutions required, then get int...
431. How Amazon Workers are Organizing for Climate Justice (ft. Eliza Pan, Dawn)
12 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
[This episode was recorded before Amazon announced its massive layoffs.] We chat with Eliza and Dawn from the Amazon Employees for Climate Justice abo...
Patreon Preview – 430. Bring the Pain
06 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We chat about some of our favorite rubes and dolts in tech media before then getting into the massive layoffs across Amazon and Meta, how the need to ...
429. The Nature of Capital and Freedom (ft. Alyssa Battistoni)
27 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We’re joined by Alyssa Battistoni — author of Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature — to discuss her new book which is really just M...
428. Patreon Preview – Antichrist Superstartup
22 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We start by asking some questions about political control over police forces before jumping into a discussion about Erebor, the new Silicon Valley ban...
427. Many Worlds of Extraction (ft. Laleh Khalili)
13 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We chat with Laleh Khalili — author of Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy — about the different systems,...
Patreon Preview – 426. The Road to Hell is Paved with Advertisements
08 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We play another game of Where in the World is Edward Ongweso — and you’ll never guess. We pull together a few stories. First, further evidence of ...
425. The Oxymorons of Green Capitalism (ft. Thea Riofrancos)
29 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We are joined by Thea Riofrancos — author of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism — to chat about the many frontiers, tensions, and futur...
Patreon Preview – 424. Me and My AI
23 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We chat about the growing genre of personal literary essays about AI where the literati at places like the New Yorker pen long essays laying out their...
423. Violence, Fast and Slow
17 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We discuss the assassination of Charlie Kirk and its potential role as a catalyst of further violence and blowback by right-wing forces who want to av...
Patreon Preview – 422. Demon Valley
10 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Join us as 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 Burni...
421. To AGI, or Not to AGI, That is the Question
03 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Patreon Preview – 420. Long Live the Moron Kings
27 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We got a fun one as we chat about a contemptuous profile of the fringe futurists, biohacker kooks, wealthy technocratics, and wannabe philosopher king...
419. The Launch of a Stillborn God
20 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We chat about the disappointing launch and critical reception of GPT-5 and what this massive claims-reality gap tells us about how an overactive indus...
Patreon Preview – 418. The Trump Pump
15 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
[Apologies for the tardiness, Jereme is moving house, that shit takes a lot of time and work, so it delayed production.] We first chat about how Trump...
417. Whose AI Bubble Is It Anyways? (ft. Paris Marx, Brian Merchant)
06 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Ed chats with Paris Marx and Brian Merchant about artificial intelligence and the political coalitions behind its development in the ...
Patreon Preview – 416. The Neverending Race
31 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We chat for a bit about Trump’s AI Action Plan – more to come on this next week – before getting into broader questions about Silicon Valley imp...
415. It’s Time to Build… Radical Policy for AI (ft. Sarah Myers West, Amba Kak)
22 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We are joined by Amba Kak and Sarah Myers West — co-directors of the AI Now Institute — to discuss their excellent new Landscape Report on Artific...
Patreon Preview – 414. Deus Ex Zuck
16 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
After chatting about Ed’s trip to Greece, we turn our sights on the incredible amount of money that Mark Zuckerberg is spending to poach big names f...
413. ScamGPT – How AI Supercharges Fraud (ft. Alice Marwick)
09 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We chat with Alice Marwick — director of research at Data & Society — about a new report she co-authored on how generative AI is now unleashing a ...
Patreon Preview – 412. Sweat Your Genetic Assets
02 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We dive into Nucleus Genomics, a startup backed by the Founders Fund, that wants to help you evaluate, rank, and name your embryos in a pre-IVF dashbo...
411. Big Easy’s Big Brother
25 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We get into a secret partnership between the New Orleans Police Department and Project NOLA, a private nonprofit organisation that owns and operates a...
Patreon Preview – 410. Palantir’s Psychohistory
18 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ev...
409. The Breakup Meltdown
11 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 be...
408. Synthetic Text Extruder Hype (ft. Emily Bender, Alex Hanna)
04 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 o...
Patreon Preview – 407. Burn Notice
29 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
[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...
Patreon Preview – 406. The Golden Path
20 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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’...
405. AI is the Demon God of Capital (ft. Hagen Blix)
13 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We chat with linguist and cognitive scientist Hagen Blix about his new book Why We Fear AI (co-authored with computer scientist Ingeborg Glimmer) abou...
Patreon Preview – 404. The Parasites that Control Pharmaceutical Prices
07 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We take a deep dive into the lesser-known industry of “pharmacy benefits managers” (PBMs) which are parasitical companies that sit in the middle o...
403. Perpetual Slop Machine
29 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It’s slop world, baby! We get into how the internet has become choked by artificial intelligence systems focused on the endless production, circulat...
Patreon Preview – 402. Crypto Empire of the Sons
24 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 large...
401. Ruled by Bastards (ft. Quinn Slobodian)
14 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
400. Well, Somebody Has to Do Something! (ft. Malcolm Harris)
01 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 fa...
Patreon Preview – 399. The Business of Management (ft. Katie Wells)
25 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We are joined by Katie Wells — Director of Research at Groundwork Collaborative — to discuss her new report with the Fairwork Project which examin...
398. The Treacherous Eunuch
18 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We try to figure out what the fuck is happening in the US as we chat about the low rent car commercial at the White House, the human shields of cops p...
Patreon Preview – 397. The Silicon Valley Consensus
11 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We dig into a grand theory that Ed is building through a series of essays on the AI industry and the Silicon Valley Consensus, or how “a bunch of in...
396. Need to Justify? Need an Alibi? Blame the AI!
04 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We run through a roundup of recent stories about how different types of AI are already having real, material, immediate impacts on people’s lives —...
Patreon Preview – 395. How Workers are Building Power (ft. Eric Blanc)
24 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We chat with Eric Blanc — author of the new book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big — about h...
394. Who Let the DOGE Out
19 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We dig into DOGE. After some background on what Musk and his harem of broccoli-headed bozos have been up to as they strip the copper out of federal ag...
Patreon Preview – 393. The Age of Disability Comes for Us All (ft. Sunaura Taylor)
10 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Jathan sits down with Sunaura Taylor—author of Disabled Ecologies—in her lab at UC Berkeley to discuss her excellent work which brings together cr...
392. Deep Freak Out
03 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ed and Jathan are together in the San Francisco Bay Area huddled over a single mic like a fire keeping us warm as we record an episode about DeepSeek ...
Patreon Preview – 391. TMK x CES x Vegas
25 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ed is back from his gonzo reporting trip at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. We hear all about the biggest themes, the most stupid products...
390. We All Live in the Firestorm
19 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
[Due to the relevance of this episode — and requests from listeners in LA — we decided to make this week the free episode.] We get into the cros...
389. The Year of Polycrisis
10 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We round up and run down many of the big themes that we think will be important in the coming year and demand our sustained critical attention. Our an...
Patreon Preview – 388. The On-Demand Degradation of Nursing
30 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We get into an excellent new report on the rise of on-demand platforms for nursing, which have spurred further exploitation of labor and degradation o...
387. Getting Fleeced in Nature’s Casino
23 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
[Note: we explain TMK's new structure from 0:00-10:28, so skip that to get straight into the episode] We dive into the market for catastrophe bonds (...
Patreon Preview – 386. The FIRE Sector is Under Water
19 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
First we talk about the unholy trinity of Anduril, Palantir, and OpenAI working together to secure major contracts from the Pentagon for networking da...
385. BlackRock Bought a Zoo
15 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We’ve got a great reading series that redirects our attention to another big bugbear of TMK: the destruction – and salvation – of nature via ass...
Patreon Preview 384. – Executive Paranoia
10 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We tie together a number of things: first, the assassination of UnitedHealth Group’s CEO and the reactions to this event; second, a new startup in t...
383. Rage Against the Administrative Machine
07 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We talk about the legal battles that Musk and Amazon are waging against the National Labor Relations Board, in part by claiming the NLRB is unconditio...
Patreon Preview – 382. Don’t Fetishize the AI Hype
04 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We chat about Ed’s brilliant critical review of the new book AI Snake Oil and talk about the shortcomings of analysis that are so focused on demysti...
381. NYT v. OpenAI: Romancing the Data
28 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We get into the New York Times's lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, which challenges the use of copyrighted material as training data for AI models...
Patreon Preview – 380. Dual Prophet System
24 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In our first recording back from holiday, we get into the Silicon Valley Election and go through the relationship between Trump and Musk. What can we ...
379. The Booming Prison Tech Industry (ft. Susan Li, Alec Karakatsanis)
18 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
[This interview was recorded before the election; we’ll talk about that in the next premium episode] We are joined by Susan Li and Alec Karakatsanis...
TMK on Holiday
03 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Just a quick note – TMK is on holiday for a couple weeks! Jathan is enjoying his honeymoon totally disconnected from all work, while Ed and Jereme a...
Patreon Preview – 378. BYD’s Green Tech Red Scare
30 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We bullshit about ICP, the Joker, and Megalopolis for the first 33 minutes. So jump a bit into the episode if you wanna skip the verbal shit posting a...
377. The Real Cost of Uber/Lyft’s Driver Lockouts
25 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
First we have an update on an old startup as Worldcoin changes its name to World and redesigns its Orb to be more than just an eyeball scanner but als...
Patreon Preview – 376. Silicon Valley’s Political Machine
19 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We chat about a great investigation into the powerful networks of political influence and intimidation that tech companies are bankrolling to ensure t...
375. Of Vampires and Empires (ft. Paris Marx)
15 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We are joined by a dear friend of the show, Paris Marx, to talk about his new series on Tech Won’t Save Us called “Data Vampires” – which prov...
Patreon Preview – 374. Bigger is Not Better in AI
10 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Bringing together a few news items, we analyze the politics of scale in AI. First, OpenAI has one of the largest funding rounds ever at $6.6 billion r...
373. Press X to Start Revolution (ft. Marijam Did)
07 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We chat with Marijam Did, author of the new book Everything to Play For, which bridges radical leftist politics and video games through a real materia...
Patreon Preview – 372. The Sin-Eater of Zero Interest Rates
03 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
With the news of interest rates dropping again, we refocus our attention on Masayoshi Son, the man who perhaps most embodies the pathologies of techno...
371. Optimizing for Planetary Crisis
02 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Jumping off a spate of recent reporting, we revisit the deep relations between the tech sector and fossil fuel industry and discuss how companies like...
Patreon Preview – 370. Paranoid Android
27 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We dive into a weird but revealing article about the phalanx of private security that Elon Musk has amassed around him, spending a small fortune on ex...
369. The Third Most Amazing Race (ft. Gaby Del Valle)
25 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We are joined by Gaby Del Valle who has written a great—and distressingly relevant—essay for The Baffler, which reports on the “eugenic foundati...
Patreon Preview – 368. Building the Most Lethal University
18 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Keeping with our recent theme of exploring the relations between the military and tech sector, we jump off a great essay in The Baffler to discuss a c...
367. A Brief History of Apocalypse
16 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
To mark the occasion of his new best selling airport book, we take a deeper look at Yuval Noah Harari’s impoverished thought and intellectual style ...
Preview – 366. American Dynamism: Or, Libertarian Fascism with Silicon Valley Characteristics
11 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We do a deep dive into Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism Strategy and Little Tech Agenda, which together lay out a clear ideology of how tech ...
365. The Pentagon Primes in Silicon Valley (ft. Michael Richardson)
05 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We chat with friend of the show Michael Richardson—author of the new book Nonhuman Witnessing—about the ongoing, deepening relationships between S...
Patreon Preview - 364. CopGPT
02 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We chat about a heinous crossover as Axon – major police tech firm, maker of tasers and body cameras – creates a new AI product with ChatGPT that ...
363. Go Directly to Jail. Do Not Pass Go.
29 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
{Producer’s note: this episode has an electronic buzz in parts due to a dying microphone. I cleaned it up as much as possible, but it couldn’t be ...
Patreon Preview - 362. Alex Karp’s Freak Flag Flies
24 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We get into a new profile of Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, which is written by Maureen Dowd, one of the NYT’s most credulous opinion writers, and thus...
361. The Artists vs. the Machines (ft. Brian Merchant)
20 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We’re joined by Brian Merchant to chat about his reporting on the frontlines of labor exploitations in video games development and animation studios...
Patreon Preview – 360. Bubbles and Black Markets
16 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We get into the collapse of investor confidence in the AI boom, then turn to the thriving black markets for smuggling vast quantities of AI microchips...
359. We Are All Cyborgs (ft. Danya Glabau, Laura Forlano)
11 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We are joined by Danya Glabau and Laura Forlano, authors of Cyborg, a new book that explores how this archetype of sci-fi stories is also a critical t...
Patreon Preview – 358. *Se7en Voice* What’s in the Benchmark?
07 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We first get an update on regulatory arbitrage in the weed vape industry, then discuss how the benchmarks used to rank AI models—and make claims abo...
357. CrowdStrike ClusterFuck
01 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We first talk about how all news stories, even the most world historic ones, feel ephemeral and disposable, and how this is the perverse effect of a (...
Patreon Preview – 356. Car Dealerships Are an Affront to God
29 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We talk about that paragon of capitalism, car dealerships, and the deceptive, manipulative, extractive tactics they have perfected to make the experie...
355. The Rise of Shadow Finance
23 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We are a bit ahead with recording, but we had to talk about the Trump assassination attempt and JD Vance being tapped for vice president (for like the...
Premium – 354. Capital Questions Gen AI
17 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We take a look at recent reports where venture capitalists like Sequoia and the investment banks like Goldman Sachs are starting to wonder out loud wh...
353. Slaughterbots, Roll Out!
15 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We refocus on the war in Ukraine and the country’s pivot toward being the “Silicon Valley for autonomous drones and other weaponry.” Thanks to a...
Patreon Preview – 352. Big Vape, Small Cigs
08 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We chat about an interesting case study in technology governance: the rise of vapes and the return of cigarettes. How do you create new markets for a ...