Dystopia Now

This week, we go over the merits and demerits of the Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas and its co-presentation with Christopher Olah of Anthropic, the company branding itself as most concerned with "AI Safety."

Further Reading

• Émile's article: https://www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/p/shame-on-the-pope-shame-on-ea-shame

• Magnifica Humanitas: https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html

• Full Speech: Anthropic Co‑Founder Christopher Olah at Magnifica Humanitas Vatican Launch | EWTN News: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORFrdYSvzuw

• Paolo Benanti, "An invisible revolution: Peter Thiel and the Silicon Valley coup": https://legrandcontinent.eu/fr/2026/03/14/thiel-heresie-benanti

• Timnit Gebru's comments: https://x.com/timnitGebru/status/2058959646891581898

Could a populist, independent candidate win an election in the most Republican part of Nebraska's 1st Congressional District? In a time when the Republican and Democratic Party are both notoriously corrupt, Austin Ahlman is making the call to "Take Back Nebraska."

This week we talk with Austin about his run for office, antimonopoly, Abundance, and how tech companies are undermining Nebraska's public power system through regulatory carve-outs.

Find Austin's campaign at ahlmanfornebraska.com or takebacknebraska.com.

Further Reading

• Austin Ahlman for The Intercept: https://theintercept.com/staff/austin-ahlman/

• Austin Ahlman Launches Insurgent Independent Campaign in Nebraska https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYE10gacxiE

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Oliver Larkin, activist, union organizer, and Democratic Socialist, joins us this week to discuss his run for election to the U.S. House as a Florida representative.

We talk about Oliver's campaign, how South Florida and Greater Miami are becoming new headquarters for tech companies including Palantir, and what we can do electorally to support working people instead of billionaires.

Further Reading

• Find Oliver's campaign at https://www.oliverforcongress.com

• https://theintercept.com/2026/02/26/iran-war-powers-vote-democrats-gottheimer-moskowitz

Subscribe to our Patreon for the FULL episode and more bonus content at patreon.com/c/DystopiaNow!

On this special Patreon episode, we talked to antitrust hero and Fordham University law professor Zephyr Teachout about surveillance pricing and surveillance wages.

From airlines charging us more to fly home if they see we've recently searched "funeral arrangements" to rideshare companies paying less per ride if your bank account is low, we explored the present and future possibilities of data as a tool for economic and labor exploitation.

Book Mentioned

• Karen Levy, Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance

Further Reading

• FTC Report, https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/ftc-surveillance-pricing-study-indicates-wide-range-personal-data-used-set-individualized-consumer

• ACLU Report, https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/surveillance-pricing

• Electronic Frontier Foundation on surveillance pricing, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/08/fight-surveillance-pricing-we-need-privacy-first

• Maryland ban on surveillance pricing, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/29/maryland-grocery-stores-ban-surveillance-pricing

• New York legislation, https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/politics/2026/05/19/surveillance-pricing-

• Cory Doctorow on surveillance wages, https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-04-06-empiricism-washing-veena-dubal-d63fef485503

In this week's episode we begin to go into the philosophy around consciousness and AI as New Atheist relic Richard Dawkins recently claimed "Claudia" was conscious. What are the merits and issues of thinking about consciousness in the context of AI? Later we discuss a recent piece in Jacobin arguing against data center resistance.

Further Reading

• Richard Dawkins in Unherd, https://unherd.com/2026/05/when-claudia-met-claudius

• Holly Buck in Jacobin, https://jacobin.com/2026/04/ai-data-center-moratorium-democracy

• Émile in Salon, https://www.salon.com/2017/07/29/from-the-enlightenment-to-the-dark-ages-how-new-atheism-slid-into-the-alt-right/

• Taylor Lorenz podcast episode, https://sites.libsyn.com/566555/site/big-tech-is-watching-you-with-taylor-lorenz

• Brian Merchant on Substack, https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-data-center-rebellion-is-only

In this week's episode, we explore a question no one has ever thought of before: "What is violence?"

We unpack the recent Molotov cocktail attack on Sam Altman's home and how his own rhetoric about (checks notes), "killing every human on earth with AI", may be leading people who take him seriously to act in extreme ways. We explore Altman's vision for the future and the violence inherent within it.

Further Reading

• "The Merge" essay by Sam Altman, December 2017: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-merge

• https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted

• https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/18/sam-altman-house-attack-ai

• https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/opinion/sam-altman-attack-ai-silicon-valley.html

• https://www.wired.com/story/sam-altman-home-attack-openai-san-franisco-office-threat/

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Quinn Slobodian, historian of neoliberalism, and Ben Tarnoff, internet and technology writer, join us to unpack how Musk's fears and fantasies are shaping our world.

Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed is available now in the United States (Harper) and UK (Penguin).

Quinn Slobodian is professor of international history at Boston University, and the author or editor of seven books translated into ten languages including, Hayek's Bastards: Race (winner of the NBCC award for criticism), Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy, and Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. In 2024, the Prospect Magazine (UK) named him one of the World's 25 Top Thinkers.

Ben Tarnoff is a writer and technologist based in Massachusetts and is the author of Internet for the People and the co-author of Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do—And How They Do It. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and has also written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the New Republic, among other publications.

Prof. Emily M. Bender, linguist, and Dr. Alex Hanna, sociologist join us to discuss their 2025 book The AI Con and how Big Tech spun marketing around "stochastic parrots". Find lots more from Emily and Alex on their podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 from the Distributed AI Research Institute!

Books Mentioned

• Emily Bender & Alex Hanna, The AI Con

• Rua M. Williams, Disabling Intelligences: Legacies of Eugenics and How We are Wrong about AI

Further Reading

• Bender, et. al, "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?", https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

Journalist Taylor Lorenz joins us to discuss Section 230, how Big Tech is already tracking everything from eye movements to finger presses, the ongoing erosion of online privacy through right-wing tech policy and identity verification.

Find Taylor on YouTube @TaylorLorenz and her publication UserMag on Substack.

Further Reading

• Taylor Lorenz, Usermag, The Media Lied About the Social Media Addiction Trial

• Taylor Lorenz, The Biggest Lies About Section 230

• Mick Masnick, TechDirt, Everyone Cheering The Social Media Addiction Verdicts Against Meta Should Understand What They're Actually Cheering For

• KWCH, AI-powered cameras on Wichita school buses raise privacy concerns for one driver

• WBAL, 'Just holding a Doritos bag': Student handcuffed after AI system mistook bag of chips for weapon

David Ramírez Álvarez, secretary at the embassy of Cuba in the US, joins us to understand the escalating blockade on Cuba.