This Machine Kills

Jathan is back from Sweden where he was giving a keynote at a smart cities conference. For this episode, Jathan delivers his keynote here — “State-as-a-Platform” – Sovereignty and Capital in Smart Governance – which is followed by a rousing discussion about the relations between agency and structure, doom and hope, positioning and maneuvering. Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills Grab fresh new TMK gear: bonfire.com/store/this-machine-kills-podcast/ Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)

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, and support David here: ••• Twitter: https://twitter.com/davidgerard ••• Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/book/ ••• Libra Shrugged: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/libra/ ••• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/davidgerard Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills Grab fresh new TMK gear: bonfire.com/store/this-machine-kills-podcast/ Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)

We dive back into chapter 10 – Why the State Has No Origin – of The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow. And finish up our discussion of how different forms of social power based on violence/sovereignty, information/administration, charisma/heroic politcs all come together in different combinations at different places and points, with some features exaggerated over others, to produce radically different forms of states throughout human history. Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills Grab fresh new TMK gear: bonfire.com/store/this-machine-kills-podcast/ Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)

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 State Department and contributing to the geopolitical agenda of American hegemony. This is all part of the Pacific Ideology – a long history of treating the Pacific islands as a colonial frontier for financial extraction and testbed for experimental innovation. It’s techno-solutionism in the service of imperial soft power. ••• Read Olivier’s paper – Blockchain imperialism in the Pacific https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053951720985249 ••• And his other paper – Blockchain humanitarianism and crypto-colonialism https://www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899(21)00305-6 ••• Follow Oliver: https://twitter.com/OJutel Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills Grab fresh new TMK gear: bonfire.com/store/this-machine-kills-podcast/ Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)

We dive into chapter 10 – Why the State Has No Origin – of The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow. This is a massive chapter that gets deep into analyzing the features of social power and development of state institutions. We see how control of violence, control of information, and control of charisma all come together in different combinations at different places and points, with some features exaggerated over others, to produce radically different forms of states throughout human history. To really do this chapter justice, we had to break it into two parts. The second part will drop next week. Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills Grab fresh new TMK gear: bonfire.com/store/this-machine-kills-podcast/ Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)

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 political economic development of the internet, from its origins as a military network to its privatization via wholesale handover to a telecom oligopoly to its existence today as an archipelago of shopping malls run by slumlords. We then discuss why there’s an urgent need for democratizing and demarketizing the internet, what that could look like, and how the seeds of that radical change can already be found in existing projects. ••• Order Ben’s book: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3927-internet-for-the-people ••• Follow Ben: https://twitter.com/bentarnoff ••• Read Logic Magazine: https://logicmag.io/ Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills Grab fresh new TMK gear: bonfire.com/store/this-machine-kills-podcast/ Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)

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 but in ways that can be unexpected and unknowable. Together these conditions are producing a world that is far more weird, bizarre and unsettling than anybody intended. Less George Orwell, more Phillip K. Dick. Some stuff we reference: ••• I don't really trust papers out of "Top Labs" anymore | https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/uyratt/d_i_dont_really_trust_papers_out_of_top_labs/ ••• The Steep Cost of Capture | Meredith Whittaker https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/november-december-2021/the-steep-cost-of-capture ••• AI Inventing Its Own Culture, Passing It On to Humans, Sociologists Find | Edward Ongweso Jr | https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkp7y7/human-culture-to-increasingly-come-from-unexplainable-ai-sociologists-find Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills Grab fresh new TMK gear: bonfire.com/store/this-machine-kills-podcast/ Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)

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 explain how stablecoins, and specifically Tether, have become systemically important to the workings of the system and the wealth of big players, creating too big to fail institutions that continue growing despite their practices, performance, and people being anything but stable. Listen to Crypto Critics’ Corner: https://twitter.com/CryptoCriticPod Follow Bennett Tomlin: https://twitter.com/BennettTomlin Follow Cas Piancey: https://twitter.com/CasPiancey Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills Grab fresh new TMK gear: bonfire.com/store/this-machine-kills-podcast/ Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)

We dive into chapter 9 – Hiding in Plain Sight – of The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow. We discuss the utopian experiment of Teotihuacan in Mesoamerica 2000 years ago: a city that revolted against authoritarian rule and instituted a socialist system, complete with universal housing and democratic governance, which lasted for hundreds of years. Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills Grab fresh new TMK gear: bonfire.com/store/this-machine-kills-podcast/ Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)

(While Jereme works to overcome a technical problem from our last record, we are unlocking an episode.) We continue our discussion of Hilary Allen’s paper on DeFi and shadow banking and dive into her comparative analysis between Wall Street and Silicon Valley. We see how there are direct analogues between the kind of financial innovations and systemic fragilities that led to the 2008 crash and the crisis dynamics of DeFi: overleveraging and crypto tokens; rigidity and smart contracts; bank runs and stablecoins. Allen then argues that the best approach is not to legitimize DeFi through regulation, but to erect a firewall that prevents it from integrating with the mainstream economy and financial sector. Some stuff we reference: ••• DeFI: Shadow Banking 2.0 | Hilary J. Allen https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4038788 ••• Is Crypto Re-Creating the 2008 Financial Crisis? | Charlie Warzel, Hilary Allen https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/galaxy-brain/624cb2ebdc551a00208c1524/crypto-bubble-web3-decentralized-finance/ ••• Defi and Shadow Banking 2.0: Leverage, rigidity and bank runs | Cory Doctorow https://doctorow.medium.com/defi-and-shadow-banking-2-0-7bae9d1d308e Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills Grab fresh new TMK gear: bonfire.com/store/this-machine-kills-podcast/ Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)