The Machinist

Over the last decade, employees in the tech industry defied stereotypes — opposing contracts with ICE and the US military, even organizing to bargain collectively. Their employers, led by Elon Musk, responded by laying them off en masse and moving further to the right. Tech organizers J.S. Tan and Clarissa Redwine reflect on lessons from the flowering and then stifling of tech worker militancy.

Clarissa Redwine and J.S. Tan, Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World’s Most Powerful Industry Haymarket Books, 2026

The post Tech Worker Militancy appeared first on KPFA.

Dominic and Cymene can't wait to tell you all about the new Nathan Fielder documentary, You Can See Everything. But don't worry, no spoilers. It's our last podcast before Halloween so we bring the scares by welcoming (17:02) Mél Hogan to the podcast to talk about data centers and why AI is such a bad, bad idea. We start hot by talking about why AI ought to be considered an irredeemable fascist project. We turn to how AI underwrites the eugenicist class politics of billionaire oligarchs, the AGI hype machine, the idea of a new Silicon Valley master race, and the general condition of tech enshittification. We wonder whether AI was always secretly the neoliberal endgame and then celebrate the rising resistance to data centers. Mél closes with why she thinks data center resistance is going to be a long struggle but why we should all be there for it. Check out Mél's excellent podcast, The Data Fix here. Hang in there, everyone, peace and love.

This week on Sinica, I’m joined again by Afra Wang, the Bay Area-based writer behind the AI newsletter Concurrent, who was last on the show in January to talk about her Wired piece on The Morning Star of Lingao and China’s “Industrial Party.” She’s back with two new pieces of on-the-ground reportage that get beneath the surface of China’s apparent AI techno-optimism: her New Yorker Lede piece on Liangzhu, the town outside Hangzhou where laid-off and burnt-out tech workers have gone to vibe code in each other’s living rooms (and where AI and BaZi fortune-telling have become strangely intimate), and a forthcoming New York Magazine piece on China’s sprawling, lucrative, and largely unregulated “learn AI, get rich” education industry. We talk about why 93% of Chinese respondents tell Gallup that AI will mostly help their country, what that number conceals, and whether what looks like optimism is sometimes closer to acceptance.

Afra’s pieces discussed in this episode:

• What China’s Vibe-Coding Capital Can Tell Us About the A.I. Boom — The New Yorker, September 23, 2026
• [Her forthcoming New York Magazine piece on China’s AI education industry — [LINK TK, expected after October 12]]
• You’ve Never Heard of China’s Greatest Sci-Fi Novel — Wired, January 2026, and our January 2026 Sinica conversation about it
• Subscribe to Afra’s newsletter, Concurrent

Also mentioned:

• Optimism About AI Globally Widespread Despite Uneven Adoption — the Microsoft-Gallup survey
• China’s OpenClaw gold rush — MIT Technology Review
• Damien Ma and William Adams, In Line Behind a Billion People: How Scarcity Will Define China’s Ascent in the Next Decade
• Evan Osnos, Crazy English — The New Yorker, April 2008
• Lian Si 廉思, Journey Without a Map 无图之旅：一代青年的自我寻路
• Ken Liu on Chinese science fiction — Sinica, 2016

06:51 – Walking into Liangzhu’s living rooms: the San Francisco déjà vu, and the grimness beneath the techno-optimist story the West wants to hear

10:14 – Setting the scene: a real-estate developer’s utopian village, Neolithic ruins, Xi Jinping’s intervention, and a “road-to-food ratio” low enough to build real community

17:30 – Child of the layoffs or child of DeepSeek? The post-COVID “ego death” of Chinese tech — and a quibble about the word “crackdown”

21:42 – Master Qi and the living room as a social form: what Liangzhu offers that a Beijing office or a WeChat group can’t

24:11 – What the 93% really tells us: optimism, acceptance, or FOMO when you can’t protest a data center

29:26 – “Westerners get restless when they can’t protest; Chinese people get restless when they haven’t found a teacher”: qiúzhī 求知, meritocracy as religion, and the company called Shēngcái Yǒudào 生财有道

32:48 – Inside Shengcai Youdao: the “prosperity evangelist” conference room, the ladder from ordinary member to CEO class, Mr. Tree’s Hilton seminars, and who’s actually paying 3,000 yuan a year

37:44 – Scam or ladder? The state’s war on the “paid knowledge” mess, Dragon Ball referral credits, and the security guard running Claude Code on his phone during his shift

41:03 – How it compares to the Valley’s course-sellers; selling hope and upward mobility, echoes of Crazy English, and “the prosperity gospel with Chinese characteristics”

45:30 – “Take us to Silicon Valley!”: what the West means to a room of one-person companies building apps for the U.S. App Store

47:18 – Xiao Kai, the 25-year-old AI filmmaker from Heilongjiang: murder mysteries as model-friendly plots, government commissions, WaytoAGI, and the local-government AIGC fever

55:28 – Lian Si’s Journey Without a Map: a Party insider tells young people to “make peace with the ordinary” while everyone else says learn AI or be left behind

59:59 – FateTell and the gray zone of AI fortune-telling: tarot slot machines in Shenzhen, crystal shops, and Liangzhu as “China’s Sedona”

1:04:13 – Levy, the BaZi cosmology, Sam Altman’s chart, and Kaiser plays the skeptic: the Yijing as “humanity’s first statistical decision model,” the Whole Earth Catalog, and New Age re-imported from the West

1:12:27 – Do they actually believe it? Speech fasting, BaZi compatibility in hiring, and Chinese syncretism at work

1:14:45 – When the local government falls in love with the scene: Crazy Thursday, incubators, “new quality productive forces,” and why Liangzhu’s peak may already be over

1:19:42 – Are Chinese people really cavalier about AI safety? Pragmatism, scarce compute, trust in state capacity, the blind spots of EA — and a preview of Afra’s third piece on China’s “industrial AI slop”

Paying It Forward:

Zilan Qian, a GovAI fellow researching AI governance in China who writes the Substack Until Zilan Finds a Better Name and is a must-read on how AI-safety concepts like “loss of control” translate (or don’t) into the Chinese context. Her most widely shared piece: Why America Builds AI Girlfriends and China Makes AI Boyfriends.

Recommendations:

Afra: Ken Liu’s new collection, The Passing of the Dragon and Other Stories, whose title borrows a metaphor from Ursula K. Le Guin.

Kaiser: Marilynne Robinson’s Home, the second of the four Gilead novels — set in the same few weeks of 1956 as Gilead but seen from inside the Boughton household, as Glory and her prodigal brother Jack circle a secret the book doesn’t name until nearly the end.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Brazil’s renewable energy is being exploited to justify unnecessary data center construction. Laís Martins joins Paris Marx to discuss why the renewable energy sector is behind a rise in Brazilian data center development, how this is impacting communities, and the ways this greenwashing is redirecting funding away from more socially progressive projects.

Laís Martins is a technology reporter at The Intercept Brasil.

The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Support the show on Patreon.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Preorder Hyperscale to support Paris at Bookshop or find more links at hyperscalebook.com.
• Laís has written about the connection between wind energy and data center construction.
• Laís has written about the social impacts of the renewable energy driven data center build out in Brazil.

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One of the more utopian promises of technology has always been that it will free us from the necessity of work - but not having to work poses its own problems. What will we do instead? how will we make money? and what might a leisure-oriented society look like? Technophiles - from the early cybernetics enthusiasts to today's AI promoters - have looked to ancient Athens as an example of a society where citizens were free to engage in culture, reflection and political participation. But was ancient Athens really such a place? and how likely is it that today's tech lords will deliver 'the good life' to us all?

Guest: Michele Kennerly, Associate Professor Communication Arts and Sciences, and Classics and Mediterranean Studies, Pennsylvania State University

Producer: David Rutledge

Automated Athens: Ancient Greek Ideals in the Early Age of Automation by Michele Kennerly (University of Chicago Press 2026)

Tech companies are working with the fossil fuel industry to push unnecessary data center projects while misrepresenting the climate impact — and governments are letting it all happen. Ketan Joshi joins Paris Marx to discuss how the data center buildout is driving a surge in fossil fuel investment, and how it’s all playing out in Australia.

Ketan Joshi is a climate writer and data analyst based in Oslo working with climate and environmental groups.

The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Support the show on Patreon.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Click here to get your first month of Proton Mail for just $1.
• Preorder Hyperscale to support Paris at hyperscalebook.com.
• Ketan wrote a report on how Big Tech is greenwashing their destructive climate impacts.
• Ketan worked with Greenpeace to put out a report on how NVIDIA is greenwashing to hide their climate impacts.
• Ketan worked with Greenpeace on a report that explores how Australia’s data center buildout is completely derailing their renewable energy transition.

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In this episode of EU Watchdog Radio, Alma Kirchhoff, Research Assistant at Counter Balance, speaks with Zuzanna Warso, Director of Research at Open Future, about the lack of transparency surrounding European investment in AI and data centres.

They unpack critical questions about where public money is going, and what the rapid expansion of data centres means for energy systems and the environment. Can a climate bank invest in infrastructure that risks running counter to its own climate mandate?

Read the blog: Can the EIB be a Data Centres Bank and call itself a Climate Bank? 

There's only one story in town at the moment. With Dario Amodei running around telling us all how dangerous he and his acolytes are, while Trump tells us we need to deregulate more than we already have, everyone's asking: Is AI about to end the world?

Cory Doctorow joins Ava to discuss this, breaking down the good and bad of the industry, and why the problem is far deeper than just the latest software Silicon Valley is imposing on the world.

Cory Doctorow's new book The Reverse Centaur's guide to Life after AI is out now: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3584-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-a

Subscribe to How to Rebuild Britain now: https://linktr.ee/howtorebuildbritain

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In this episode of Responsible Bytes, Dr. Zena Assaad speaks with Heidy Khlaaf, Chief AI Scientist at the AI Now Institute, about why military AI systems are far less reliable than their marketing suggests, especially in safety-critical and combat settings. They unpack the gap between “accuracy” as a narrow model metric and real-world performance, explaining how opaque, brittle systems, automation bias, outdated data, and poor interoperability can lead to serious mistakes while obscuring accountability. The conversation also explores the power dynamics behind the push for AI in warfare, including what Heidy characterises as a “safety theatre,” version-control concerns, and how companies and governments normalise speed over caution. Overall, the episode is a sharp critique of the idea that AI can safely replace human judgment in high-stakes environments, and a call for more skepticism, technical rigor, and accountability in how these systems are deployed. 

More about our guest:
📸Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hak90/
📘LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heidy-khlaaf/
🔵BlueSky: https://www.heidyk.com/
🌐Website: https://www.heidyk.com/

More about our host:
📸Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zena_assaad/
📘LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-zena-assaad/
🔵BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/zenaassaad.bsky.social
🌐Website: https://www.zenaassaad.com/

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