This Machine Kills

We give y’all an update on the state of antitrust politics in the US by riffing on two new books about antitrust that offer two different visions from two senators: Amy Klobuchar and Josh Hawley. It’s a knock-down drag-out match for the trustbuster title. In the center corner is Klobbering Klobuchar, offering a pretty good history, plenty of fire and fury, but with little weight behind her punches. In the far, far, far right corner is Howling Hawley, doing his damndest to confuse his foes into submission with revisionism, bullshit, and buffoonery. Our referee for this title fight is Matt “The Brawler” Stoller. You won’t wanna miss this pay-per-listen match!

Some stuff we reference:

• How the Senate’s antitrust chair would take on monopolies | Matt Stoller: washingtonpost.com/outlook/how-the-senates-antitrust-chair-would-take-on-monopolies/2021/04/29/abb7120a-a2a5-11eb-a774-7b47ceb36ee8_story.html

• Amy Klobuchar on Breaking Up Giant Corporations | Liaquat Ahamed: nytimes.com/2021/04/26/books/review/antitrust-amy-klobuchar.html

• Josh Hawley’s Virtual Reality | Gilad Edelman: wired.com/story/josh-hawley-virtual-reality-book-review/

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills

TMK shirts are now available: bonfire.com/mech-luddite/

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 Dan Greene, author of an excellent new book, The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope. Dan’s work provides a deep analysis of how public institutions like libraries and schools are being transformed in the image of startups — pivoting away from the communities and missions they ought to serve — and the decades of punitive neoliberal reforms that brought us here. We deconstruct noxious policy slogans like “learn to code” and “digital divide,” and discuss why leftists must pay attention to the radical politics — both actual and potential — of libraries.

Grab Dan’s book: mitpress.mit.edu/books/promise-access

Follow Dan: twitter.com/Greene_DM

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills

TMK shirts are now available: bonfire.com/mech-luddite/

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)

The TMK Book Club is now in session! We’re discussing the Introduction and Chapter 1 of Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought by Langdon Winner. Follow along with us as we take you on a guided tour of a foundational text in technological politics – one that has greatly influenced our own thinking about these issues and which has, for better and worse, remained extremely relevant today. You can find a free pdf of the whole book here: https://www.ratical.org/ratville/AoS/AutonomousTechnology.pdf

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills

TMK shirts are now available: bonfire.com/mech-luddite/

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)

Cold open: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/13/984994360/he-tried-to-organize-workers-in-chinas-gig-economy-now-he-faces-5-years-in-jail

We dig deeper into our explorations of technological and financial capitalism in China by discussing an invaluable source for rigorous, ruthless analysis: Chuang, a collective and journal “analyzing the ongoing development of capitalism in China, its historical roots, and the revolts of those crushed beneath it.” We then start getting into a long, detailed, investigative report on the working conditions of platform labor in China. While some ghouls in Western countries might look at the horrors we discuss and say, “See, it could be worse.” We must instead assert, “No, it should be better.”

Some stuff we reference:

• Delivery Workers, Trapped in the System | Chuang: https://chuangcn.org/2020/11/delivery-renwu-translation/

• Social Contagion: Microbiological Class War in China | Chuang: https://chuangcn.org/2020/02/social-contagion/

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills

TMK shirts are now available: bonfire.com/mech-luddite/

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)

In part two of our analysis of Amazon, we focus on the labor processes and managerial practices within Amazon warehouses. “Factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost,” Marx wrote in Capital Vol. 1, and through the despotic discipline of dead labour used to dominate living labour, capital “does away with the many-sided play of the muscles and confiscates every atom of freedom [from workers], both in bodily and intellectual activity.”

Some stuff we reference:

• Machinic dispossession and augmented despotism: Digital work in an Amazon warehouse | Alessandro Delfanti | New Media & Society: sci-hub.mksa.top/10.1177/1461444819891613

• Surviving Amazon | Sam Adler Bell | Logic Magazine: logicmag.io/bodies/surviving-amazon/

• Seasonal Associates | Heike Geissler | Semiotext(e): mitpress.mit.edu/books/seasonal-associate

• Chapter 15: Machinery and Modern Industry | Karl Marx | Capital Vol. 1: marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills

TMK shirts are now available: bonfire.com/mech-luddite/

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)

To conduct a post-mortem investigation on the Amazon warehouse union vote in Bessemer, Alabama, we’re joined by Alex N. Press—staff writer for Jacobin and one of our favorite labor reporters. As Alex wrote recently, “In the United States, every step of the unionization process is stacked against workers. It is a miracle that anyone ever unionizes.” We discuss the militancy of capital, the organizing conditions of labor today, and the battle for building worker power. The deck was stacked. We lost this fight. But the class war wages on.

Follow Alex: https://twitter.com/alexnpress

Read Alex: https://www.jacobinmag.com/author/alex-press

• Amazon Waged a Brutal Anti-Union Campaign. Unsurprisingly, They Won. | Jacobin | Alex N. Press: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/04/amazon-bessemer-union-drive-vote-nlrb

• Sabotage: The Conscious Withdrawal of the Workers' Industrial Efficiency | Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: https://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/flynn/1917/sabotage.htm

• How tech workers feel about China, AI and Big Tech’s tremendous power | Protocol | Emily Birnbaum, Issie Lapowsky: https://www.protocol.com/policy/tech-employee-survey/tech-employee-survey-2021

• Amazon's New Algorithm Will Set Workers' Schedules According to Muscle Use | Motherboard | Ed Ongweso: https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xeba/amazons-new-algorithm-will-set-workers-schedules-according-to-muscle-use

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills

TMK shirts are now available: bonfire.com/mech-luddite/

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)

Cold open: Ghost in the Shell

There is a long list of services that purport to be powered by sophisticated software, but actually rely on humans acting like robots. We discuss a critical concept—whether we call it Potemkin AI, fauxtomation, or ghost work—for understanding how so much so-called artificial intelligence is just a spectacle, a simulation, designed to mystify the labor that really turns the crank of smart systems sold as advanced innovations. They are the humans hidden inside mechanical minds.

Some stuff we reference:

• Potemkin AI | Jathan Sadowski: https://reallifemag.com/potemkin-ai/

• The Automation Charade | Astra Taylor: https://logicmag.io/failure/the-automation-charade/

• Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass | Mary L. Gray Siddharth Suri: https://ghostwork.info/

• Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media | Sarah T. Roberts: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300235883/behind-screen

• Difference and Dependence among Digital Workers: The Case of Amazon Mechanical Turk | Lilly Irani: https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-abstract/114/1/225/3763/Difference-and-Dependence-among-Digital-Workers

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills

TMK shirts are now available here: bonfire.com/mech-luddite/

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)

Cold open: Garden Glossary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBMRWwjGJHQ

It’s time for theory chat! To analyse the techno-politics of smart systems, we need good theories at hand. And we’re joined by the great Liv Agar – philosopher, podcaster, streamer – to discuss the hyper-prescient work of Gilles Deleuze on societies of control and the transition away from disciplinary societies. We’re talking rhizomes, dividuals, passwords, capitalism, power, and smart technology as we break down a critical theory for understanding a society driven mad by control.

Follow, listen, read, watch Liv: https://linktr.ee/livagar

Some stuff we reference:

• Postscript on the Societies of Control | Gilles Deleuze: cidadeinseguranca.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/deleuze_control.pdf

• Control and Becoming | Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri: uib.no/sites/w3.uib.no/files/attachments/6._deleuze-control_and_becoming_0.pdf

• Too Smart | Jathan Sadowski: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/too-smart

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills

TMK shirts are now available here: bonfire.com/mech-luddite/

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)

This episode is from a guest appearance by Jathan on 4ZZZ Radio Reversal, a community radio show in Brisbane, hosted by great friends of TMK and critical scholars: Anna Carlson and Natalie Osbourne. We had a really fun conversation talking about the ramping up of workplace surveillance, labor organising in the tech sector, the political economy of academia, and luddism as liberation. Enjoy!

Check out 4ZZZ (4zzzfm.org.au) and follow Radio Reversal (twitter.com/RadioRevers), Natalie Osborne (twitter.com/DrNatOsborne), and Anna Carlson (twitter.com/annajcarlson)

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills

TMK shirts are now available here: bonfire.com/mech-luddite/

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)

Okay, so the big boat is no longer blocking the Suez Canal. But that doesn’t mean we can go back to ignoring the global networks of capitalism and colonialism that make our world run. Laleh Khalili – author of the brilliant new book, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula – joins us for a wide-ranging discussion of her rich, historical analysis of global shipping, imperialist infrastructure, and technological fantasy.

Grab Laleh’s book: versobooks.com/books/3172-sinews-of-war-and-trade

Follow Laleh: twitter.com/LalehKhalili

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills

TMK shirts are now available here: bonfire.com/mech-luddite/

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)