Show Notes
[We had technical difficulties and had to use a backup recording, sorry!] We chat with JS Tan and Clarissa Redwin — both veteran tech workers and labor organizers — about their new book which chronicles the tech worker movement over the last ten years. JS and Clarissa have been deeply involved in this movement, which gives them the perfect vantage point to trace the catalyzing events and organizing efforts, as well as discuss what went right, what went wrong, and how the tactics for class consciousness and worker resistance must be adapted for the tech sector.
••• Against Tech Oligarch | Book and Tour Dates https://againsttecholigarchy.com/
Standing Plugs: ••• Order Jathan’s book: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520398078/the-mechanic-and-the-luddite ••• Subscribe to Ed’s substack: https://substack.com/@thetechbubble ••• Subscribe to TMK on patreon for premium episodes: https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills
Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (bsky.app/profile/jathansadowski.com) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.x.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (bsky.app/profile/jebr.bsky.social)
More from This Machine Kills
We discuss and riff on the People’s AI Assembly, organized by AI Now Institute and More Perfect Union, which just happened in New York City.
Jathan chats with journalist Kate Kaye about her new podcast series, Trust Control, all about the history and future of trying to measure trust. We get into different ways of defining trust, proxies for turning trust into quantified scores and “objective” models, motivations for making trust into a metric that can be optimised, and ultimately, the anti-social shift from trust as a dynamic social relationship that is a core part of human interactions to trust as an objective feature of systems with or without humans.
We discuss a deep dive into the ascendency of microdramas – the short-form video series that are already bigger than the conventional film industry in China and are quickly taking over studios in Hollywood. We chat about the financial and cultural antecedents of microdramas, and the strange impacts of these videos on media production and consumption today, and the unevenly distributed futures of AI generated entertainment.
We get into the new decree from Trump that “artificial intelligence” is now called “super intelligence” – it sounds less fake and more powerful — and the broader currents of tech advice and policy in the Trump administration. Then we discuss how OpenAI and Anthropic are behaving like rogue agents, who are also irresponsible and incompetent to a degree that should be unbelievable.
We learn all about how leftists are against any new regulations for AI. It’s the unbelievable return of horseshoe theory as we discuss the curious new discourse cycle being promoted by prominent pundits.