This Machine Kills

Picking back up on the fight between Big Media and Big Tech, we dig deeper into the type of power of platforms wield, how their political influence operates, the prioritization of consumership over citizenship, and their threats to return us to the state of nature — where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short — if we don’t pledge allegiance to the platform.

Some stuff we reference:

• Are We All Amazon Primed? Consumers and the Politics of Platform Power by Pepper D. Culpepper and Kathleen Thelen | Comparative Political Studies: https://scihub.wikicn.top/10.1177/0010414019852687

• Joel Kaplan's Policy Team Sways Big Facebook Decisions Like Alex Jones Ban by Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman | Buzzfeed: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/mark-zuckerberg-joel-kaplan-facebook-alex-jones

• There’s a Smarter Way to Make Tech Pay for News by Will Oremus | OneZero: https://onezero.medium.com/a-smarter-way-to-make-tech-pay-for-news-9255e3b8dccb

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

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

After months of threats, Facebook finally hit the big red off button on the server labeled Australia and Google is making big backroom deals with media barons like Rupert Murdoch. To help us parse through the policy debates and online discourse about the Australian news media bargaining code, we’re joined by J.R. Hennessy (http://twitter.com/jrhennessy), editor of Business Insider Australia. Henno gives us a bigger picture of how the Internet has long left behind those heady days of a free and open utopia as we discuss the changing relationship between Big Tech and Big Media and the role of government regulation.

Read Henno’s great piece on his substack: http://jrhennessy.substack.com/p/zucked

Some other stuff we reference:

• The trouble with the media bargaining code, by Lizzie O'Shea: http://overland.org.au/2020/12/the-trouble-with-the-media-bargaining-code/

• A pox on Facebook, but also on the media bargaining code, by Samantha Floreani: http://www.smh.com.au/national/a-pox-on-facebook-but-also-on-the-media-bargaining-code-20210218-p573qb.html

• Big Tech versus journalism: publishers watch Australia fight with bated breath, by Richard Waters et al.: http://www.ft.com/content/2fed6b2a-01ba-4c7e-8e95-d50f74c316bf

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

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

We riff on the archetype of the tech guy who can’t bear his California dream being soured by the existence of other people struggling to get by in a city his industry has immiserated. Then dive into the formation of Facebook’s Oversight Board—their very own so-called Supreme Court—and how their cosplaying as Founding Fathers reveals larger lessons for shifts underway in corporate vs. state sovereignty.

Some stuff we reference:

• California Exit Interview: Fleeing $17 Salads and 'General Lawlessness' by Joe Garofoli: https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/California-Exit-Interview-Fleeing-17-salads-and-15947926.php

• Inside the Making of Facebook’s Supreme Court by Kate Klonick: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/inside-the-making-of-facebooks-supreme-court

• Liberalism is Dead by Vicky Osterweil: https://thenewinquiry.com/liberalism-is-dead/

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

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

We discuss the limitations of existing approaches – and democratic alternatives – to data governance in informational capitalism with Salomé Viljoen (https://twitter.com/salome_viljoen_), a legal scholar in the NYU School of Law and Cornell Tech Digital Life Initiative, who is doing some of the most exciting and cutting-edge work in this area. Salomé explains how we need to make data collection work for socially beneficial uses and why surveillance of powerful people / important institutions is good, actually.

Read her excellent work:

• Democratic Data: A Relational Theory For Data Governance: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3727562

• Data as Property? https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/data-as-property

• Find more of Salomé’s work here: https://www.salomeviljoen.com

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

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

It’s part two of us ripping into David Friedman’s anarcho-capitalist fever dream, The Machinery of Freedom. And we get real nutty with it as we detail his libertarian transitional program where school vouchers and surge pricing for streets lead us directly into a new frontier of freedom filled with private protection agencies and free market competition for laws. Are Friedman’s proposals radically dumb and dangerous? Yes. Are they now uncomfortably close to mainstream right-wing ideology? Also yes.

The book we discuss:

The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to Radical Capitalism by David Friedman http://www.daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf

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

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

Cold open: excerpt from Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=6021&v=ZypJn0PgAHA

Have you ever considered that the most important human right is property rights? Are your thoughts preoccupied with kissing the feet of capitalists? Do you dream of abolishing society and clearing the way for the market god to deliver us into salvation? If so, you might just be the one of the all time greatest failsons of our age: David Friedman – whose life is consumed by trying to live up to the legacy of his father, Milton. In a blockbuster reading series, we liquefied our brains with David Friedman’s handbook for anarcho-capitalism. In this episode we lay out the philosophical foundations for why it’s actually good for everybody to act like children who don’t want to share their toys. I’m sorry in advance.

The book we discuss:

The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to Radical Capitalism by David Friedman http://www.daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf

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

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

After jumping into the abyss of indexation, we’re now smacking directly into BlackRock bottom. The world’s largest asset, which oversees $8.67 trillion, has grown at an unimaginable scale and pace—thanks in no small part to their fintech platform Aladdin on which sits at least $21.6 trillion from major clients. Those are astronomical numbers, but this episode brings their impacts down to earth. We discuss this monstrosity of finance, how BlackRock’s big black box is consuming the world’s wealth, and the plans of its CEO, Larry Fink, to solve climate change while making a hefty profit in the process.

Some stuff we reference:

• Is BlackRock the New Vampire Squid? by Kate Aronoff https://newrepublic.com/article/158263/blackrock-climate-change-fossil-fuel-investments

• BlackRock’s Black Box: The Technology Hub of Modern Finance by Richard Henderson and Owen Walker https://www.ft.com/content/5ba6f40e-4e4d-11ea-95a0-43d18ec715f5

• Larry Fink Letter to CEOs 2021 https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/investor-relations/larry-fink-ceo-letter

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

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

{The first 15 minutes or so of this episode is a little glitchy, but it gets better} We could have done a full episode about the GameStop affair, but there’s already so many good (and bad) explainers and analysis of that, so let’s talk about the real winners in an economy where the line just keeps going up forever: index funds and passive investment. We talk through the operations of indexation, one of the most important – and hugely overlooked – trends in the modern financial system, and discuss what John C. Coates calls the Problem of Twelve: “The likelihood that in the near future roughly twelve individuals will have practical power over the majority of U.S. public companies.” This meeting of the board of global corporate capitalism is called to order.

Some stuff we reference:

• The Future of Corporate Governance: The Problem of Twelve by John C. Coates https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247337

• Investment Firms Are the Big Winners of the GameStop Stock Revolution So Far by Edward Ongweso Jr. https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3gepx/investment-firms-are-the-big-winners-of-the-gamestop-stock-revolution-so-far

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

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

Continuing the story of the Lucas Plan, we lay out how this radical blueprint for socially useful production faced opposition at every turn by entrenched interests who saw it as a threat to their power – and rightfully so! We then explore how the philosophy of social useful production confronts the contradictions of industrial / informational capitalism, revealing this system to be anti-human in every regard, while also providing a concrete alternative that actualizes the real potential of all people to create better technologies for a better society. When the cynical pragmatists meet your demands for radical change with that old boilerplate bullshit: “Okay, so what’s your plan then?” You can now say, “Hey buddy, first of all, fuck you. And second, we’ve got a plan – the Lucas Plan!”

Some stuff we reference:

• The Lucas Plan–An Idea Whose Time has Come? by Dave King: https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/vol22-2/the-new-lucas-plan/

• The Lucas Plan and Socially Useful Production by Adrian Smith: https://steps-centre.org/blog/new-paper-lucas-plan-socially-useful-production/

• A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse by David Graeber: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/a-practical-utopians-guide-to-the-coming-collapse

• We Keep You Alive by Lizzie O’Shea: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/we-keep-you-alive-oshea

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

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

We take a deep dive into another example of a real utopian project from the 1970s, this time from the UK, which provided detailed concrete plans for how to actually do radical techno-politics. The militant labor union at Lucas Aerospace sought to democratize the means of production, giving workers autonomy over the management and purpose of industrial capacity. To achieve that goal, they created an amazing proposal – the Lucas Plan – for how to run factories based on the principles of socially useful production. The story of the Lucas Plan is inspiring and infuriating – and immensely important.

Some stuff we reference:

• Lucas Alternative Corporate Plan (Summary): http://www.workerscontrol.net/authors/lucas-aerospace-combine-shop-steward-committee-corporate-plan-contingency-strategy-positive-

• The Lucas Plan and Socially Useful Production by Adrian Smith: https://steps-centre.org/blog/new-paper-lucas-plan-socially-useful-production/

• The Lucas Plan: What can it tell us about democratising technology today? by Adrian Smith: https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2014/jan/22/remembering-the-lucas-plan-what-can-it-tell-us-about-democratising-technology-today

• Lucas Plan documentary (1978): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pgQqfpub-c&feature=emb_title

• Socially Useful Production by Pam Linn: https://scihub.wikicn.top/10.1080/09505438709526191

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

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