This Machine Kills

Cold open: MCI “Anthem” commercial (1997): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioVMoeCbrig We dig into Chapter 3, “Scenes of Empowerment, of Wendy H.K. Chun’s book and talk about the pervasive ideology of the internet as an emancipatory world of virtual equality where things like race, gender, age, and ability cease to exist. And discuss how, despite the obvious naivety (at best) of this belief, it still persists today in various unchanged ways. You can grab a pdf of Chun’s book here: https://au1lib.org/book/2074091/cc12a3 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 very pleased to be joined by Britt Young, a PhD candidate in geography at UC Berkeley, who works on the intersection of technology and disability. We dive into the militarized R&D for prosthetics, Britt’s experiences using an advanced “cyborg” arm, the vast inequality in access to workable prosthetics, and question if our society’s approach to assistive tech is consistent with disability justice or represents a vexing politics of ableism. Follow Britt: twitter.com/bhyrights Read Britt’s work: britthyoung.com Some stuff we reference: ••• The Politics of Ableism | Gregor Wolbring: https://sci-hub.mksa.top/10.1057/dev.2008.17 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)

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 has become a haven for crypto enclaves. We then end with a nice palate cleanser as Ed tells us about a recent panel he attended with David Wengrow about his and Graeber’s new book. 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 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 engineers, and the role of engineers before, during, and after communist revolution. Read Nick’s essay: The Present and Future of Engineers | Brooklyn Rail https://brooklynrail.org/2021/10/field-notes/THINKING-ABOUT-COMMUNISM Music in this episode is from Nick’s glitch group: https://glitchdotcool.bandcamp.com/album/glitch-with-friends-compilation-vol-2 Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills Grab your 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)

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 propaganda campaign, the extractive economy underpinning this vision of society, why the metaverse as its pitched is bullshit, and how the actual metaverse is more likely to be an infinite virtual office we’re all forced to used. Some stuff we reference: ••• Facebook Has No Clue How to Solve Its Image Problem, Leaked Doc Shows | Shoshana Wodinksy https://gizmodo.com/facebook-has-no-clue-how-to-solve-its-image-problem-le-1847945657 ••• The Real Reason Facebook Changed Its Name | Brian Merchant https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/facebook-metaverse-mark-zuckerberg/620538/ ••• Zuckerberg Announces Fantasy World Where Facebook Is Not a Horrible Company | Jason Koebler https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjb485/zuckerberg-facebook-new-name-meta-metaverse-presentation ••• Why Facebook has become Meta | Hannah Murphy, Madhumita Murgia https://www.ft.com/content/29762a96-419f-41b2-9e96-fa7423abb125 ••• Founder’s Letter, 2021 | Mark Zuckerberg https://about.fb.com/news/2021/10/founders-letter/ Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills Grab your 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 discuss Chapter 2, “Screening Pornography” of Wendy H.K. Chun’s book. Diving into the cultural panic around cyberporn in the 90s, we talk about how porn online was used as an early battleground for policy debates about commerce, regulation, and censorship on the internet. You can grab a pdf of Chun’s book here: https://au1lib.org/book/2074091/cc12a3 Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills Grab your 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)

••• Jathan is doing an intensive residency program so we're unlocking an older patreon episode that many comrades in the TMK Discord said was one of their favorites. Enjoy! ••• Rather than our usual doompilled analysis, we take a big dose of dumbpill as we spend the whole episode on a reading series of the stupidest article we have come across in a long time. Malcolm Gladwell – a man whose career is built on being an insanely incurious idiot – got to ride in a Waymo autonomous vehicle. He then wrote about it for Facebook’s newsletter Bulletin. Sorry in advance. Have we misunderstood the future of the automobile? | Malcolm Gladwell | Facebook Bulletin: https://malcolmgladwell.bulletin.com/489595605629557 Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills Grab your 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)

It’s a good old TMK where we get mad talking about two stories. First, the increasingly influential “state-as-a-platform” model of governance that France is leaning super hard into, which goes beyond neoliberalism by taking seriously the premise: “What if instead of a government, we had AWS.” Second, schools in the UK are rolling-out facial recognition in secondary school cafeterias. Teaching kids that access to anything in life, even just lunch, must be mediated by intrusive systems of surveillance and control – oh, I mean, speed and convenience. Some stuff we reference: ••• France finds growth prescription with health app Doctolib https://www.ft.com/content/ca41f61e-2513-41d2-9adf-d94b5af302a1 ••• Facial recognition cameras arrive in UK school canteens https://www.ft.com/content/af08fe55-39f3-4894-9b2f-4115732395b9 ••• Marc Benioff: We Need a New Capitalism https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/14/opinion/benioff-salesforce-capitalism.html Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills Grab your 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)

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 candidate in Urban Information Systems at MIT — to talk about their important research on platform workers and economies in the Global South. We discuss practices of agency and social support amongst workers in places like Jakarta and Bangalore; the North-South divide in how these platforms are understood; contextualizing these systems as an antidote against universalizing them; the trope of “finding” invisible tech workers in exotic lands; the need for a “decolonial cosmopolitan ethic,” and much more. Find Noopur here: noopur.xyz /// twitter.com/tetisheri Find Rida here: ridaqadri.net /// twitter.com/qadrida Their work we discuss: • Mutual Aid Stations | Rida Qadri, Noopur Raval: https://logicmag.io/distribution/mutual-aid-stations/ • Delivery Drivers Are Using Grey Market Apps to Make Their Jobs Suck Less | Rida Qadri: https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kvpng/delivery-drivers-are-using-grey-market-apps-to-make-their-jobs-suck-less • Platform Workers as Infrastructures of Global Technologies | Rida Qadri: https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/july-august-2021/platform-workers-as-infrastructures-of-global-technologies • Interrupting Invisibility in a Global World | Noopur Raval: https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/july-august-2021/interrupting-invisibility-in-a-global-world • An Agenda for Decolonizing Data Science | Noopur Raval: https://mediarep.org/bitstream/handle/doc/14422/spheres_5_0202_Raval_Agenda-for-Decolonizing-Data-Science.pdf?sequence=1 Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills Grab your 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 discuss Chapter 1, “Why Cyberspace?” of Wendy H.K. Chun’s book and dive into the origins, politics, and ideology behind this weird metaphor for the Internet. In the process we trace an evolution of different phases in the Internet's political economy, from the Web 1.0 endless electronic frontier of freedom to the Web 2.0 archipelago of platforms and rentiers, and circling back to many ideological desires born anew in the Web 3.0 vision of a decentralized metaverse. All this and more as we talk through Chun’s richly detailed cultural / material analysis of the Internet. You can grab a pdf of Chun’s book here: https://au1lib.org/book/2074091/cc12a3 Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills Grab your 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)