Show Notes
Greetings from Read Max HQ! Today’s post is a Read Max audiovisual product featuring cohost Sam Biddle, senior technology reporter at The Intercept. A quick interstitial reminder: Read Max is a subscription business! In order to devote the time I do every week to reading, writing, reporting, thinking, procrastinating, and all other activities essential to the production of this twice-and-sometimes-thrice-weekly newsletter, I need to “convert” readers into “paid subscribers,” a task I attempt to accomplish with these touts. If you find what I do valuable to you--if you think you learn something, or are entertained, or get mad in a productive way--please consider compensating me for that value for the unbelievably low price of $5 a month. Think of it like buying me a beer once a month in exchange for something like 20,000 almost entirely properly spelled and punctuated words of insight, argument, criticism, good sci-fi recommendations, and sometimes even humor. Yesterday Sam and I “went live” to talk about a set of new stories on tech’s ever-increasing ties to the defense industry: * A recent white paper from OpenAI outlining the company’s vision of A.I.’s geopolitical future, about which Sam wrote more here; * Mark Zuckerberg and Palmer Luckey burying the hatchet and partnering on a V.R. headset for the military; and * Palantir's controversial new role counting human beings for the U.S. government. What do these partnerships tell us about the present and future of the tech industry, A.I., and geopolitics? Also up for discussion: What’s going on at Apple? And two distinctly unsettling photographs, the first of Luckey and Zuckerberg breaking bread… …and the second, a sort of wedding-announcement pic of former Apple designer Jony Ive and OpenAI C.E.O. Sam Altman: Please enjoy, here on Substack, or, without video, on any of your preferred podcast platforms!
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit maxread.substack.com
More from Read Max
Greetings from Read Max HQ! For this week’s edition of my intermittment podcast with John Ganz (author of When the Clock Broke and proprietor of the Unpopular Front Substack) we were pleased to host Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, authors of the new book Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, an exploration of Elon Musk’s ideology (such as it is) and power through the system of production and accumulation he seems intent on inaugurating. I highly recommend the book, which you can purchase here; we also discussed, among other things: * this excellent essay on Muskism and Fordism from Quinn and Ben at the Law and Political Economy blog; * Musk’s relationship to apartheid South Africa; * some interesting objections to the Muskism thesis; * how Neon Genesis: Evangelion can help us explain and understand Elon Musk. This one is free for all to listen--enjoy!--but if you find it enlightening or entertaining, please consider paying to subscribe. Only with the support of paying subscribers can I put in all the work it takes to be an independent critic and journalist--to read, research, write, edit, record, etc. etc. If you value that work, consider paying about the price of one beer a month ($5) to help it continue.
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit maxread.substack.com
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit maxread.substack.com
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit maxread.substack.com
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit maxread.substack.com