Blood in the Machine
- Episódios
- 20
- Publicação
- semanal
- Último episódio
- 6 nov 2026
Sobre o podcast
A show about AI, labor, and power. Veteran tech journalist Brian Merchant chronicles the growing backlash and resistance to Silicon Valley and big tech.
Episódios 20
2026 election breakdown: Americans vote down data centers, AI and oligarchy
Greetings all. For the podcast this week, I thought we’d try something a little different, to help digest the impacts of the game-changing midterm elections. First, in case you missed it, here’s my breakdown of …
Notas do episódio
Greetings all. For the podcast this week, I thought we’d try something a little different, to help digest the impacts of the game-changing midterm elections. First, in case you missed it, here’s my breakdown of this very generative election. Naomi Klein called it a must read; thanks Naomi.
To discuss what the election means for AI, the tech lobby, data centers and beyond, for the podcast this week I gathered an all-star panel of journalists, academics, and tech critics, including Molly White of Citation Needed and Tech Influence Watch, Dave Karpf, a professor at the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University (and author of the forthcoming book Vaporware, Inc), and Sophie Song, a Data Center Policy Fellow at the AI Now Institute.
We held a roundtable chat about what did and didn’t go down during this historic, data-centered, AI-and-oligarch-hating election, and what we should be looking out for moving forward. Hope you enjoy the discussion as much as I did.
Guests
MOLLY
Molly White on BlueskyCitation NeededTech Influence Watch
DAVE
Dave Karpf on BlueskyThe Future, Now and ThenPreorder Vaporware
SOPHIE
Get full access to Blood in the Machine at www.bloodinthemachine.com/subscribeData centers, AI, and the 2026 elections. Ft. Paris Marx.
If you’ve heard anything at all about the midterm elections, you’ve heard at least two things: it’s going to be a ‘blue wave’ in which Democrats are poised for major electoral gains, and that everyone involved …
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If you’ve heard anything at all about the midterm elections, you’ve heard at least two things: it’s going to be a ‘blue wave’ in which Democrats are poised for major electoral gains, and that everyone involved hates data centers.
We’re all used to hearing about that data center hate now, it’s almost a given; “the single most bipartisan issue in politics,” and so on, but I want to pause to underline how remarkable this is. This time last year, data centers were a niche issue in a handful of local political fights. Now they’re one of America’s most visible, universal and undeniable political battlegrounds.
To investigate how we got here, I sit down with Paris Marx; tech reporter, critic, and author of the new book Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires. Plus, I dig into three things we should be watching during the midterm elections next week.
Hyperscale by Paris MarxParis’s Disconnect NewsletterParis on Bluesky
Producer Ryan’s NewsletterRyan’s Bluesky
Stories Mentioned
Texas sues OpenAI, Sam Altman over product safety - POLITICO
Media — Angela Gonzales-Torres for Congress
Elon Musk’s America PAC Is Quietly Funding November’s Most Consequential Elections
SpaceX and Tesla have high election stakes as Elon Musk pours $366 million into campaigns
Ohio Senate special election | Tech Influence Watch
Leading the Future | Tech Influence Watch
Exclusive: GOP warns AI companies that data centers are politically radioactive
AI and data centers are incredibly unpopular in every poll | The Verge
The data center backlash reveals NIMBYism’s great contradiction
Texas gubernatorial election, 2026 - Ballotpedia
Data Centers | Gina Hinojosa for Texas Governor
Elon Musk Is Trying To Buy Texas. It Might Earn Him ‘Retribution.’
How Billionaires Are Fighting the Prop 40 California Wealth Tax - The New York Times
https://thewatt.org/en/nota/gas-centros-datos-capacidad-eeuu/
Majority of US’s new AI datacenters to be built on drought-hit land
Exclusive: 75% of Americans Now Oppose Local Data Center Development - Heatmap News
Canada’s AI minister blames OpenAI for ‘failure’ after mass shooting - POLITICO
ChatGPT Gave Me Chilling Advice—as I Simulated Planning a Mass Shooting – Mother Jones
The Deepfake Nudes Crisis in Schools Is Much Worse Than You Thought | WIRED
Character.ai’s Bankruptcy Documents Show the Economics of AI Don’t Work
Scoop: Andreessen Horowitz lays off “majority” of portfolio recruiting team
Investors dump data centre bonds as AI borrowers face ‘Darwin moment’
$64 billion of data center projects have been blocked or delayed amid local opposition
Get full access to Blood in the Machine at www.bloodinthemachine.com/subscribeThe big tech defectors you’re not hearing about
Among the biggest stories in the tech world of late have been the string of high-profile resignations of workers at the major AI companies. Employees like Jacob Coxon at Anthropic have quit their jobs with …
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Among the biggest stories in the tech world of late have been the string of high-profile resignations of workers at the major AI companies. Employees like Jacob Coxon at Anthropic have quit their jobs with splashy warnings that AI companies might build a machine god so powerful it exterminates humanity. Those workers get invited onto primetime news shows and weeks of high-profile media coverage.
And yet, workers who’ve protested, resigned, or been fired for speaking up about the harms these companies are causing right now are given nowhere near the same treatment. This is maddening, because the AI companies are currently, as we speak, helping to automate, abet and facilitate mass death in Iran, Gaza, and Ukraine; we don’t have to speculate about some future tragedy; the tech companies are directly involved in those tragedies, right now, as I speak these words.
This week, on Blood in the Machine, we’ll talk with another employee who was fired from Apple after speaking out against the company’s policies with regards to Palestine, and its treatment of Palestinian employees. Tariq Ra’ouf helped found Apples Against Apartheid, and on October 23, the launch day for iPhone Duo, the group calls on communities everywhere to picket their local Apple Stores.
Tariq Ra’ouf on InstagramApples Against Apartheid
Blood in the Machine: The NewsletterBrian’s Bluesky
Producer Ryan’s NewsletterRyan’s Bluesky
Stories Mentioned
Apple facing new forced labor and child labor charges - FreedomUnited
US group sues Apple over Congo conflict minerals | CNBC Africa
Apple accused by DR Congo of using conflict minerals
Apple Accused of Using “Blood Minerals” in the Congo
Apple employees demand CEO Tim Cook speak up for Palestinian lives
Rotten to the Core: How the Gaza genocide has revealed anti-Palestinian racism at Apple – Mondoweiss
“When the Bubble Bursts”: Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor on Reclaiming Democracy from AI Oligarchs
The Ukraine ‘Kill Zone’ Is AI’s Testing Ground - WSJ
Iran war shows how AI speeds up military ‘kill chains’
Probes Reveal Depth of Big Tech Complicity in Israel’s AI-Driven Gaza Slaughter | Common Dreams
Google DeepMind Engineer Resigns in Protest of Pentagon Contract
Brazil’s President Lula Accuses Meta of Helping His Right-Wing Opponent - The New York Times
Musk Ordered Starlink Slowdown That Blindsided Ukraine - WSJ
Get full access to Blood in the Machine at www.bloodinthemachine.com/subscribeCalifornia vs. the tech billionaires
It’s election season, and while most of the national conversation is focused on the midterms and the increasing likelihood that Democrats will take back the House and perhaps even the Senate, in California, the …
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It’s election season, and while most of the national conversation is focused on the midterms and the increasing likelihood that Democrats will take back the House and perhaps even the Senate, in California, the eyes of the tech elite are focused on another target: The ballot measure Proposition 40, aka the billionaire tax.
Prop 40 would enact a one-time 5% wealth tax on the 250 or so billionaires that reside in California, and redirect the funding towards healthcare and education. Predictably, billionaires are furious about the idea; leading opponents include Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who, along with other ultra-wealthy Californians, has spent some $200 million dollars to oppose the measure.
Today, on Blood in the Machine, we’re going to dive into these fights, with the woman who’s at the center of many of them. Lorena Gonzalez is a former state legislator and current president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, and she’s a driving force supporting both Prop 40 and the slate of new laws designed to protect workers from AI.
Blood in the Machine NewsletterBrian’s Bluesky
Producer Ryan’s NewsletterRyan’s Bluesky
Articles Mentioned
California just passed the strongest AI labor laws in the US
Paramount completes $111B Warner merger, creating “Skydance” behemoth - Ars Technica
AI in hiring and firing: California’s No Robo Bosses Act
An AI School, With No Teachers, To Open in Chicago This Fall
Billionaire Google Co-Founder Pumps $102 Million Into Fighting California Wealth Tax | Common Dreams
California Billionaires Are Spending Big in Costly Wealth-Tax Fight
The Blue Wave Could Reshape Politics in the South | The New Republic
$200 million-plus spent fighting and supporting billionaire tax - Los Angeles Times
Gavin Newsom backs measure to kill the billionaire tax and ban future wealth taxes
Gavin Newsom opposes California’s $100 billion billionaire tax. The fight may outlast the vote
Billionaire Tax Explained: What Proposition 40 Would Mean for California
Google co-founder Sergey Brin spends $102M opposing California Prop. 40 | abc10.com
California’s ‘carpet-bombed’ wealth tax measure runs into a wall - POLITICO
Get full access to Blood in the Machine at www.bloodinthemachine.com/subscribeThe two words the AI industry hates more than anything
“Stochastic parrots,” a term coined in an influential 2021 paper written by two AI researchers and two computational linguists, essentially holds that large language models are not “intelligent” but are rather …
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“Stochastic parrots,” a term coined in an influential 2021 paper written by two AI researchers and two computational linguists, essentially holds that large language models are not “intelligent” but are rather systems that output material based on what’s in their training data. Now, while LLMs and technologies described as AI today have become more sophisticated and complex over the last 5 years, the term remains a fundamentally accurate way of describing LLMs.
Yet the industry hates it like the plague. AI industry folks absolutely lose their minds over the term, and often bring it up, unprompted, just to try to debunk it again and again.
Why does this particular term have a unique capacity to enrage AI industry folks? I had a theory that, even more so than other critiques about shaky financing or dubious functionality, stochastic parrots undercuts the very foundation that the AI boom is built on: That tech companies are building a machine god of infinite power and potential. These firms have relied on narrative to build up and to sell to the world a very expensive, resource-consumptive technology. If it turns out it’s an unthinking system that’s often fallible in predictable ways, well, that might not be worth quite as many trillions of dollars.
To discuss this theory in greater depth, I thought I’d go right to the source—to one of the paper’s co-authors, professor Emily M. Bender, of the University of Washington.
Quick PSA: I can only do this work thanks to readers, listeners, and viewers who chip in a few bucks each month to help me keep the lights on. If you’re one of them, you have my sincere thanks; you’re the reason I can cover subjects and do the sort of reporting so few others will. If you’re a fan of the “Great 2026 Blood in the Machine Podcast Experiment” or appreciate what we’re doing here, consider upgrading to a paid subscription; it takes no small amount of work to book great guests, research, write, and produce the thing, and we’re early days yet. Okay! That’s enough from me; thanks for tuning in, and hammers up.
Articles and media mentioned in the show:
The “Stochastic Parrots” paperStochastic Parrots 🦜: Frequently Unasked Questions | by Emily M. Bender | MediumEmily M. Bender on BlueSkyThe AI Con, with Alex Hanna.
Producer Ryan’s NewsletterRyan’s Bluesky
Articles mentioned
Weekend Update: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on AI’s Threat to Humanity - SNL
Trump’s new accord on ‘super intelligence’ includes spelling error
“White House Accord on Super Intelligence” / X
Stochastic Parrots 🦜: Frequently Unasked Questions | by Emily M. Bender | Medium
Canada’s AI minister blames OpenAI for ‘failure’ after mass shooting - POLITICO
Parents of teenager who took his own life sue OpenAI
Get full access to Blood in the Machine at www.bloodinthemachine.com/subscribeWhat’s really behind AI ‘super intelligence’
While billionaires and world leaders expound the dangers of all-powerful, “super intelligent” AI, the reality on the ground is that it's a tech product that’s only made possible by countless human beings …
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While billionaires and world leaders expound the dangers of all-powerful, “super intelligent” AI, the reality on the ground is that it's a tech product that’s only made possible by countless human beings, laboring for sometimes dollars a day, doing work like “cleaning” data sets so they’re usable, scanning books and literature into databases, creating usable content, and moderating the output of AI systems to weed out offensive, gruesome, and racist content. These workers are underpaid, overtaxed, and fighting for better conditions—even as AI executives are declaring that the systems they prop up are so powerful they’re about to extinguish life on the planet.
In the meantime, workers like Joan Kinyua and Michael Geoffery Asia of the Data Labelers Association just want fair pay and basic protections. I recently spoke to both of them about what it’s like to perform crucial work day in and day out and yet be completely invisible to the company that relies on your labor—and to the world at large. To help feed Silicon Valley’s illusion that these systems are actually machine gods. And to fight for better conditions, rights and recognition in spite of it all.
Show Notes
Blood in the Machine NewsletterBrian’s Bluesky
Producer Ryan’s NewsletterRyan’s Bluesky
Articles mentioned
My latest newsletter:
Dario Amodei — We Must Pace the Frontier
Altman and Amodei address UN: ‘There are many things that AI cannot and should not automate’
How to use AI doom marketing to dupe the media and rake in billions in 10 easy steps
Frontier AI safety regulations: A reference for lab staff - METR
AI giants tap into the social media playbook: self-regulation
AI leaders call for tougher protections against AI-aided bioweapons | The Verge
AI Labs Want Someone to Stop Them - Bloomberg
The AI extinction narrative is winning out
Misleading Metaphors, Real Risks - by Melanie Mitchell
Get full access to Blood in the Machine at www.bloodinthemachine.com/subscribeHow to kick Flock out of your town
In a year rife with backlash to big tech, data centers, and AI, one company still manages to stand out: Flock Safety. Over the past decade, Flock has been building out a massive network of surveillance cameras …
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In a year rife with backlash to big tech, data centers, and AI, one company still manages to stand out: Flock Safety. Over the past decade, Flock has been building out a massive network of surveillance cameras across the nation. The images those cameras record are uploaded to a central database, and can be accessed by law enforcement and federal authorities.
Abuse of the system has been rampant. Police have used Flock’s Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) to stalk exes and to track women seeking abortions across state lines. ICE has accessed Flock data to assist in crackdown on immigrants. Innocent people have been wrongfully imprisoned after being flagged by the system.
With the anti-Flock movement growing, and more people looking into how to get Flock out of their communities, I sat down with Ed, an organizer with DeFlock, to explain, step by step, how you can start a movement to get the surveillance tech out of your town, too.
Check out DeFlock here.
Blood in the Machine Newsletter: https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/
Articles Mentioned in this Episode
https://atlpresscollective.com/2026/07/28/flock-cameras-atlanta-clearance-rates/
https://www.commondreams.org/news/police-abusing-flock-cameras
https://cybernews.com/privacy/de-flock-america-halloween-flock-surveillance-cameras/
https://www.404media.co/flock-taught-cops-how-to-surveil-no-kings-protesters/
https://deflocktheusa.com/cancellations/
Get full access to Blood in the Machine at www.bloodinthemachine.com/subscribeThe ‘End Times Fascists of AI, ft. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor
End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor. Naomi Klein’s Newsletter, Patterns.Astra Taylor on BlueskyBlood in the Machine Newsletter: Brian’s Bluesky.Producer Ryan’s Newsletter: Ryan’s Bluesky.Articles …
Notas do episódio
End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor. Naomi Klein’s Newsletter, Patterns.Astra Taylor on BlueskyBlood in the Machine Newsletter: Brian’s Bluesky.Producer Ryan’s Newsletter: Ryan’s Bluesky.Articles mentioned in this episode:
The Automation Charade by Astra Taylor.
The politics and possibilities of ‘AI could kill us all’ by Brian.
More:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-and-nationalism-are-a-deadly-combinationhttps://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-ai-jobs-apocalypse-is-for-thehttps://www.arabnews.com/saudi-arabia/saudi-arabia-and-us-sign-strategic-artificial-intelligence-partnership-2623228https://theconversation.com/iran-war-shows-how-ai-speeds-up-military-kill-chains-278492https://influence.citationneeded.news/https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Americas-AI-Action-Plan.pdfhttps://www.axios.com/2025/09/17/anthropic-dario-amodei-p-doom-25-percenthttps://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5926181-xai-naacp-memphis-grok/
Get full access to Blood in the Machine at www.bloodinthemachine.com/subscribeThe real AI jobs apocalypse
AI executives like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have been forecasting an incipient AI jobs apocalypse for three years now. So where is it? Well it’s here, kind of. But instead of replacing …
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AI executives like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have been forecasting an incipient AI jobs apocalypse for three years now. So where is it? Well it’s here, kind of. But instead of replacing tens of millions of workers, it’s mostly making them miserable.
Across the US, workers are souring on AI, and they’re increasingly outspoken about it. A new report from Glassdoor documents how workers are becoming more and more negative towards —at the moment that AI CEOs have promised that the products would be making everyone’s working life easier and more streamlined. Yet the data paints a pretty clear picture: Just as people are getting fed up with data centers, Meta AI glasses, and AI in general, they’re getting angrier about bosses pushing AI on them in the workplace, too. To discuss all this and more, I’m joined by Alex Hanna. Hanna is a sociologist, a director at the Distributed AI Research Institute, and the co-author of the AI Con; she’s also behind the Luddite Lab, a project that provides resources to workers who are navigating AI in the workplace. Blood in the Machine Newsletter: https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/ Brian’s Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/bcmerchant.bsky.social Producer Ryan’s Newsletter: https://www.thestorieswetell.co/ Ryan’s Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/thestorieswetell.coAlex Hanna’s Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/alexhanna.bsky.social The Luddite Lab: https://labor.dair-institute.org/primers Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 Podcast: https://dair-institute.org/maiht3k/ Articles mentioned in this episode:https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/why-office-workers-are-turning-againsthttps://www.glassdoor.com/blog/how-workers-feel-about-ai-2026/https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/sep/02/we-have-had-enough-thousands-of-staff-at-the-university-of-sydney-walk-off-the-job-over-ai-job-securityhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/01/nyregion/ai-ban-schools-nyc.htmlhttps://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-02-04/unions-urge-newsom-california-lawmakers-to-rein-in-aihttps://www.pen-guild.org/news/pen-guild-wins-landmark-arbitration-on-ai-protectionshttps://www.bcg.com/publications/2026/why-ai-pilots-rarely-deliver-valuehttps://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/amazon-cuts-jobs-its-artificial-general-intelligence-group-2026-07-22/https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-coo-andrew-macdonald-ai-token-spending-harder-justify-2026-5?op=1https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/after-firing-700-employees-for-ai-swedish-company-admits-their-mistake-and-plans-to-rehire-humans-what-happened/articleshow/121252776.cms
Get full access to Blood in the Machine at www.bloodinthemachine.com/subscribeThe revolt against Meta’s ‘pervert glasses’ is part of a growing storm
New fronts are opening up in the opposition to big tech. The anti-data center movement is rolling, AI is unpopular as ever, and now, a widespread backlash to Meta’s new AI glasses—termed Pervert Glasses by the …
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New fronts are opening up in the opposition to big tech. The anti-data center movement is rolling, AI is unpopular as ever, and now, a widespread backlash to Meta’s new AI glasses—termed Pervert Glasses by the masses—is unfolding at breakneck pace. Silicon Valley, of course, is in denial about all of it.
This week on the podcast, to help make sense of this latest revolt against a Silicon Valley project, I spoke with Chris Gilliard, an author, thinker, and surveillance scholar who’s spent many years investigating big tech’s efforts to seduce us with sleek, aspirational products, track us, and harvest our data. Gilliard is the author of Luxury Surveillance, a forthcoming book about this very subject from MIT Press; you may better know him as Hypervisible, the handle he uses online and on Bluesky.
It was a great chat, and Gilliard’s work is absolutely vital. Hope you enjoy.
In case you missed it, I wrote about some of the topics we discuss above in this week’s column:
Other stories mentioned in the segment and the interview:
“Luxury Surveillance,” Real Life Mag, by Chris Gilliard and David Golumbia.
Heatmap’s latest data center sentiment poll.
“Data Centers’ 'Oh sh-t moment’, Politico.
“Flock CEO Begs for ‘Compromise’ as Backlash Spills Over,” Futurism.
‘Darth Vader’ Wants Flock in San Diego, 404 Media, by Sam Cole.
“Man Charged With 3 Felonies For Breaking 3D-Printed ‘Decoy’ Flock Camera, 404 Media,” by Jason Koebler.
“Grand Jury Declines to Indict Man Caught on Camera Destroying Flock Pole”, Futurism.
“Songs created by AI banned from Australia’s music charts,” BBC.
“Apple Music to Add Labels for AI-Generated Music Later This Year,” Billboard.
A brief note about how BITM is working these days: Subscribers get (at least) one written newsletter edition sent to their inboxes each week, typically, ideally, Tuesday or Wednesday, as well as one episode of Blood in the Machine: The Show, which runs every Friday. But I can only do all of this with the support of readers like you, so if you find value in independent, critical tech journalism, and you’re able, please consider a paid subscription. I want to keep as much of this un-paywalled as absolutely possible, and I can only do that when folks chip in. Many thanks to all who do so, it’s very much appreciated. Cheers, onward, and hammers up.
Get full access to Blood in the Machine at www.bloodinthemachine.com/subscribeCharting the rise of tech fascism
Going back decades, there’s been a faction in Silicon Valley whose chief interest was not coding, consumer technology or even business, but power. In some ways, the story of the last ten years of the tech …
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Going back decades, there’s been a faction in Silicon Valley whose chief interest was not coding, consumer technology or even business, but power. In some ways, the story of the last ten years of the tech industry has been the story of that faction, perhaps best embodied by Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, but also represented by figures like Marc Andreessen and figures like Alex Karp, Palmer Luckey, and David Sacks, winning the power they sought. The consequences of that victory have been disastrous.
Gil Duran, a veteran journalist and California political operative, is the author of the Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, a book about how, exactly, this disaster has unfolded, and where it’s left us. That is, with a tech industry that’s overwhelmingly eager to abet, enable, and profit from authoritarian governments, by wielding power within them, and by building its tools of surveillance, automation, and extraction.
Duran calls the key bloc driving this push ‘tech fascists’, and many have openly called for an end to democracy, or for rule by monarch—or CEO. And it is hard to overstate the import of the ascendency of the tech right.
These figures now have a direct line to the White House, have one of their own in the White House in former VC JD Vance, and are often in the White House themselves. They hold massive government contracts and their unprecedented hoards of lobbying cash influence shapes public policy, in addition to controlling much of the digital architecture that guides our daily lives.
The results of all this are everywhere you look. This is, yes, how you get DOGE running wild in the federal government, laying off hundreds of thousands of civil servants and pulling USAID funding for the most vulnerable, leaving people dead as a result. It’s how you get the widespread cronyism and corruption in Washington, with government figures embracing crypto and the AI industry and enriching themselves in the process. It’s also how you get tech CEOs rising into a class that more resembles an oligarchy than the mere ultra-wealthy.
One reason Facebook and Meta have operated with such impunity over the years is that Peter Thiel helped Mark Zuckerberg structure his company in such a way that he would retain ‘supervoting shares’ and would be unaccountable to a board of directors or anyone else. Just this week, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei announced he would be doing the same; he will essentially be impervious to boardroom dissent or activist shareholders. This means, for instance, that as Claude users revolt over fears that the company’s new watermarking process—which was an important win for everyone who opposes the internet being coated in slop, and the mass deskilling of creative workers—will out them as AI spammers, it will ultimately be up to Amodei himself to decide what to do, and no one else.
Members of what Duran calls the Nerd Reich then use their power to further concentrate wealth, and of course, more power. A report by the AFL-CIO’s executive pay watch found this week that Elon Musk’s Tesla pay in 2025—he took home $158 billion—was an astonishing 2.5 million times his average workers’ salary. As the lead researcher on the report told Fortune, it’s ‘unlike anything we have seen before.’
Tech CEOs operating at such a distance from ordinary people may also explain why they’re so willing to undertake practices and push products that large swaths of the public absolutely hates. We already well know that data center opposition is the single political issue most Americans are united against, and that Gen Z is vehemently anti-AI. But consider also Meta’s marquee new product—”AI glasses” that allow users to film people without their consent, and that have already been dubbed “pervert glasses” by the masses. Just this week, Futurism published a report about how the glasses are being used by bullies in schools to harass their peers, especially girls. The bullies are apparently aping tactics seen on viral videos, in which pickup artists film women they’re hitting on without consent; hence the pervert glasses name.
This is perhaps, providing fuel for another future lawsuit—this week Meta goes to court against twenty-nine US state attorneys general who accuse the company of knowingly designing addictive products that harm the mental health of children. They’re seeking $200 billion in damages.
It might also explain why tech CEOs are willing to scan and destroy books en masse to feed them into their AI systems, despite the horror most people experience when they hear about such a practice. In, a story that’s almost too on the nose for a segment discussing the Nerd Reich, 404 Media had a rare bookseller put an AirTag in a rare book bought by a mystery buyer, and it wound up in an Amazon Facility expressly designed to scan and mulch books to train the company’s large language models. At the very same time, meanwhile, AI-generated books are flooding Amazon’s online marketplace, and crowding out real authors, who are earning less and less for their own, human-authored books.
As a result of all of the above, there is a powerful, enraged backlash growing against the nascent tech oligarchs, multibillionaire AI CEOS, and the Nerd Reich; whatever you’d like to call them. I’ve been covering the tech sector for nearly two decades now, and I’ve never seen anything like this. People are shouting down big tech reps and data center proponents at public meetings. Flock, the private provider of police surveillance equipment, has been under siege for months; a national week of action against their product, ALPRs, is underway right now, as I record this. A survey conducted by CNBC found that young people aged 18-34 found tech CEOs overwhelmingly untrustworthy. “Young People Hate AI CEOs So Passionately That It’s Almost Hard to Believe,” as Futurism put it.
Even Elon Musk’s own AI bot, Grok, has appeared to turn against him, accusing him of watching child porn and calling for his assassination on X.
The tech elite may have the wealth, the influence, and the ear of the president, but not even that can insulate them from a growing mass movement, increasingly intent on taking them on. And we have every reason to think that what we’re seeing now is only the beginning.
So that’s episode number 7? 8? depending on how you count? of the podcast in the bag there. I tried something a little different this time, trading the headline roundup/AI resistance digest in the beginning for more of a short essay/composed intro. Not sure which I prefer, tbh, though I did enjoy the chat with Duran, who has laid out the key strands of modern Silicon Valley’s dominating ideology in blunt and easily comprehensible terms, regardless.
In fact, let me know what you think in general here. I’m happy with, and proud of, the work that I’ve put together here with my excellent producer Ryan Hodes. We’ve covered a lot of ground over the last couple of months, from checking in on the New Luddite movement and discussing their wildly successful Summer of Ludd in NYC,
tried to answer the question of ‘What is an Elon Musk’ with author and historian Quinn Slobodian
sat down with laid-off Xbox workers who are still organizing to fight back against their employer, Microsoft (this was, at least to me, such a powerful and impactful conversation)
discussed the state of the AI bubble with the world’s leading (and loudest) industry bear, Ed Zitron
dug into how AI and crypto companies are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the current election cycle to buy favor and influence with the great Molly White,
and talked about how to de-Google our lives with tech critic extraordinaire Paris Marx.
Anyway, every one of the guests have been great, in my humble and unbiased opinion, and I’ve enjoyed all these conversations. HOWEVER, getting the thing up and running has been a lot more legwork than anticipated. I feel like I’ve already written some variation of that sentence or another one just like it a time or two already, but it’s …
Get full access to Blood in the Machine at www.bloodinthemachine.com/subscribeThe State of the AI Bubble with Ed Zitron
There are fresh signs that the AI bubble is wobbling. Again.In recent weeks, a much-vaunted AI-focused hedge fund, Situational Awareness, run by Valley wunderkind Leopold Aschenbrenner lost $35 billion; nearly …
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There are fresh signs that the AI bubble is wobbling. Again.
In recent weeks, a much-vaunted AI-focused hedge fund, Situational Awareness, run by Valley wunderkind Leopold Aschenbrenner lost $35 billion; nearly its entire fund. South Korea saw its largest-ever stock market collapse as investors pulled bets on AI chips and tech stocks. The circularity of the AI economy, with hyperscalers investing in AI labs and AI labs purchasing cloud compute from the hyperscalers and hyperscalers reporting big profits, is reaching new heights of precarity. Due to a fresh series of moratoria and political opposition, the future of the massive data center buildout has never looked more uncertain. The US markets have dipped then boomed, dipped then boomed.
Where does all of this leave us? Just about everybody—Sam Altman, the Financial Times, AI critics, your local barista—seems to agree that we’re still, somehow, improbably, in some kind of a bubble. But how big? How volatile? When will it burst? How? This week, I dive into all these questions with the infamous AI skeptic, analyst, and industry scapegoat Ed Zitron, author of the Where’s Your Ed At newsletter and CEO of EZPR.
Blood in the Machine Newsletter
Ed Zitron’s articles discussed:
The Subprime Data Center Crisis
Articles mentioned in this episode:
Governor Abbott Directs Comprehensive Data Center Audit
The AI Slop Backlash Is Actually Having an Impact | WIRED
Snapchat joins other popular platforms in fight against 'AI slop'
Get full access to Blood in the Machine at www.bloodinthemachine.com/subscribeWhat is an 'Elon Musk'?
Elon Musk is not the richest man in the world merely because he’s good at selling cars or rockets at a profitable margin. That might have sufficed for richest men in the world of decades past. But Musk became …
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Elon Musk is not the richest man in the world merely because he’s good at selling cars or rockets at a profitable margin. That might have sufficed for richest men in the world of decades past. But Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, however briefly, for a lot of reasons, and being good at moving a particular product is not chief among them. Musk sells a vision. Musk harnesses the state to implement his corporate goals, to secure his companies’ foundations beyond the vicissitudes of common capitalism. Musk mediates his message on social platforms, which he owns and controls, and uses to bend politics to his will. The list goes on.
This formula has been emulated by the most recent crop of tech titans; your Sam Altmans and Dario Amodeis, whose path to power lies in selling a vision over simple goods, who work the state to buffet their businesses, and who paint a bleak picture of the future through which their products will help you survive. To understand what’s going on here, not just with Tesla or SpaceX or OpenAI or Anthropic, but the modern American economy itself, I sat down with the historian and author Quinn Slobodian, who has put a name to this tendency: Muskism.
Slobodian is the co-author, with Ben Tarnoff, of the book by the same name, which I fully and heartily recommend. We dig into all of the above, and a lot more; including the under-examined role that growing up in apartheid South Africa played in influencing Musk’s present-day ideology and tastes.
I very much enjoyed this discussion, and think you will too. Understanding Muskism, after all, could not be a more urgent project.
Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.
Subscribe to Blood in the Machine.
In case you missed last week’s show, you can check that out here.
GenAI performing arts survey is here.
Post about AI in Paris.
Get full access to Blood in the Machine at www.bloodinthemachine.com/subscribeXbox workers speak out about layoffs, AI, and how big tech brought a crisis to gaming
On July 6th, Microsoft announced that it was laying off 4,800 workers, largely from its Xbox gaming division. It’s now sadly routine in the tech industry; thousands of jobs gone in an instant, with little more …
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On July 6th, Microsoft announced that it was laying off 4,800 workers, largely from its Xbox gaming division. It’s now sadly routine in the tech industry; thousands of jobs gone in an instant, with little more than a corporate memo and some platitudes about AI.
To better understand what actually happens behind the scenes in a big tech layoff event, and to understand the particular crisis faced by the gaming industry, this week I sat down with three Microsoft workers for a special edition of Blood in the Machine. Two of these workers have been impacted by the layoffs, one saw longtime friends lose their jobs. All three are fighting back. This is how.
Brian’s info
Blood in the Machine: The Newsletter
Articles discussed
Microsoft to cut 4,800 jobs, overhaul Xbox unit
- Reuters
Union Video Game Workers Fight for Rights Amidst Xbox Layoffs
- CWA
Hundreds rally at Bethesda HQ to protest Xbox layoffs, and Ars was there - Ars Technica
End studio closures and stop the cycle of layoffs. - XBOX Player Voice (Archived)
Get full access to Blood in the Machine at www.bloodinthemachine.com/subscribeThe Luddites take New York
The year has been marked by the rise of open, widespread, and increasingly spirited backlash to AI, data centers, and big tech. As such, the stage was well set for the Summer of Ludd, a series of protests …
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The year has been marked by the rise of open, widespread, and increasingly spirited backlash to AI, data centers, and big tech. As such, the stage was well set for the Summer of Ludd, a series of protests, performances, talks, and meetups in New York City organized around the idea that we need to get people into the streets and break Silicon Valley’s grip over our lives.
There were mock trials of big tech, plays staged detailing the Luddites’ true origin story, marches, and teach-ins. By just about any count, it was a smashing success; the event drew favorable coverage everywhere from the Washington Post to WIRED to the Economist. It was even, amusingly, transmuted into a clickbait MSN listicle produced to maximize on-screen engagement.
I sadly couldn’t be there on the ground for the proceedings, so I did the next best thing: I invited the Luddite documentarian, organizer, and activist Amanda Hanna-McLeer, who was there for the festivities, and who directed the Luddite Recreations play that ran throughout the week in Tompkins Square Park, to give us the rundown.
Hanna-McLeer has been documenting the youth-led Luddite movement for years now; as she explains, it started with the Luddite Clubs students formed to reject social media and organize offline activities in high schools and colleges across the nation. In many ways, the Summer of Ludd is a culmination of that movement thus far.
It also, however, Hanna-McLeer notes, feels like the beginning of something else, something even bigger.
We get into all of that: the size of the crowds, the enthusiasm among so many people have for logging off and plugging in, and how the people who encounter the new Luddites are increasingly open to movements that challenge big tech.
One simple reflection of all this is the positive news coverage I mentioned above. I can comfortably say from my experience as a tech journalist, that even five to ten years ago, these kids and activists would have been mocked and scorned. Instead, most people immediately get where they’re coming from. Their message about fighting big tech, anyway, if not the gnome hats. Progress is progress.
Events like the Summer of Ludd—which not only protest big tech but proactively envision an alternative, participatory future; one grounded in community, commonality, and sociality—are dovetailing with data center protests, AI-critical labor movements, and students (and everyone else!) roundly booing AI. It does feel like the ground is shifting in some real and interesting ways, and that new spaces are opening up. Here’s to hoping.
Some related reading:
Now for some other stories about our rapidly unfolding dystopia that caught my eye this week, and about those fighting to keep it at bay. BUT FIRST, before we move on: Today’s edition of BITM is sponsored by DeleteMe, whose mission is hunting down and, yes, deleting the data that brokers have hoovered up about you over the years and made available to their clients. DeleteMe is Wirecutter’s top-rated data removal service, and I’ve used it myself, to locate and eradicate scores of sites that were listing and selling personal info like my home address and phone number. If you’re interested in taking DeleteMe for a spin, sign up here and use the code LUDDITES for 20% off an annual subscription. OK! Onwards.
A treasury report drafted by Trump officials outlines fears of the AI bubble bursting
This is a bit of news that seemed to glance the surface without breaking through. I didn’t see this too widely reported, but thought it was pretty telling nonetheless. The report isn’t public, but was obtained by journalists; including those at NOTUS, who report that
This draft report inside the Treasury Department is set to warn of the risks posed by the artificial intelligence market, likening key aspects of it to the dotcom bubble that upended the U.S. economy when it burst in the early 2000s.
Career Treasury analysts found that AI firms are more deeply entrenched in the U.S. economy than their dotcom predecessors and pose significant risk to the entire system if financial conditions change, productivity goals are missed or various choke points stymie growth.
A downturn in the AI market would send shockwaves throughout the entire economic ecosystem, the analysts wrote.
What’s so notable isn’t really the message, which should be pretty familiar to critics of the AI bubble by now, but the way that it breaks from the narrative put forward by the Trump administration, which is, to the public, endlessly optimistic about AI’s transformational power.
Waymo called the police on teen riders who were playing with a toy gun and allegedly drinking
The Waymo stopped, detained the kids until the cops could arrive on the scene, which they did, and then approached the vehicle with guns drawn.
On Monday, the San Mateo Police Department posted on Facebook: “Parents do you know where your teens are? @waymo does!”
The police department continued in the post: “Two 15 year olds up to trouble in a Waymo this afternoon were detained after Waymo reported they were drinking and shooting from the vehicle. After calling us and stopping the car, we were able to safely remove both subjects and determined they were shooting Orbeez from the car as they sipped on afternoon libations while being chauffeured around town in the driverless vehicle.”
Pretty grim stuff! And your regular reminder that Waymos are continuously surveilling both the inside and the outside of their vehicles, collecting data that is recorded and made available to authorities, and now, apparently, proactively intervening when an automated system or someone at Google decides a criminal act has occurred—and putting teens at legitimate risk of being shot for being dumb teens. It seems only a matter of when, not if, we see an interaction like this that ends more tragically.
Big data center resistance news:
The largest-ever proposed data center, a 2,100 acre, 22 million square-foot facility slated for Prince William County in Virginia, has officially been cancelled.
The project failed after receiving sustained pushback from a local historical society—it would have been built on top of a famous Civil War battlefield and the graves of all the soldiers killed there—and a local homeowner’s association.
Meanwhile, all of Scotland is considering a “sweeping” data center moratorium.
The Guardian reports:
Last Sunday the Scottish National party (SNP)’s national council passed a motion to freeze all new datacentres in Scotland. That motion has been sent to the Scottish government to consider.
It could apply to all datacentre projects that have not yet received planning permission…
The move emerged as the Guardian on Monday revealed how the developer and the UK government misrepresented the technical feasibility of a massive datacentre hub in Scotland in the face of community fears that their land would be subsumed by the development, and promised jobs and investments would never materialise.
This site, in Lanarkshire, was to be an “AI growth zone”, a key element of the government’s strategy to build national AI infrastructure in rural areas of Britain.
The SNP’s resolution came amid signs of a wider upheaval in the UK’s AI strategy as Andy Burnham prepares to replace Keir Starmer in Downing Street. He is reportedly considering a review of several critical planks of Starmer’s technology policy.
The Guardian previously reported that an “AI growth zone” in North Tyneside was more of a publicity stunt than a viable project, despite being supposedly backed by the maker of ChatGPT, OpenAI. Several other big UK AI projects have been found to be “phantom investments” after the government failed to audit investment numbers or jobs claims.
And I was surprised I didn’t see this making more of the rounds:
Apparently, Meta’s data centers contaminated Cheyenne, Wyoming’s wastewater system with a “rare bacterial contaminant”
According to the Cowboy State Daily news:
Cheyenne’s Board of Public Utilities isn…
Get full access to Blood in the Machine at www.bloodinthemachine.com/subscribeHow and why to de-Google your life
While Google seems dead set on making their users hate their product, the courts in Europe are taking issue with their anti-competitive business practices. Meanwhile, the Summer of Ludd kicks off in New York …
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While Google seems dead set on making their users hate their product, the courts in Europe are taking issue with their anti-competitive business practices. Meanwhile, the Summer of Ludd kicks off in New York and a new dating survey finds: It’s sexy to be a luddite. Plus, my good friend and fellow tech journalist Paris Marx joins us to discuss the final boss of Google's enshittification: Search going full AI mode. Paris has long advocated for getting off US tech, and he’ll share some of his best tips for de-googling your life.
Paris's forthcoming book is Hyperscale, his podcast is Tech Won't Save Us, and his guide for getting off US tech is here.
Articles mentioned in this episode: Swedish court orders Google to pay $1.5 billion to Klarna in antitrust damages - Reuters. Vancouver protesters call on federal government to halt plans for AI data centres - Global NewsCanada unveils AI strategy - Global News. The latest green flag? Not using AI - Mashable. Probe into 'subversive' anti-AI Singham network is 'enormous,' former Treasury advisor says - Fox News. Law enforcement tracking anti tech extremism - WIRED & The Intercept.
Blood in the Machine is produced by Ryan Hodes, chief consultant is Kate Osborn, art is by Koren Shadmi, and the music is by Brian Merchant and Ryan Hall, engineered by Josh Q. Hammers up.
Get full access to Blood in the Machine at www.bloodinthemachine.com/subscribeThe AI industry is pouring hundreds of millions into US elections
The tech lobby spent $27 million on a single Congressional election in New York. OpenAI-backed Leading the Future spent $8 million on ads attacking Alex Bores, who vowed to rein in AI, in an effort to fire a …
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The tech lobby spent $27 million on a single Congressional election in New York. OpenAI-backed Leading the Future spent $8 million on ads attacking Alex Bores, who vowed to rein in AI, in an effort to fire a warning shot—did it work? What does this mean for democracy? Meanwhile, a Michigan town takes on a nuclear AI data center, and a bipartisan effort to legislate against AI theft of artist’s work hits the Senate.
Plus, I speak with technologist and journalist Molly White about her new project: Tech Influence Watch, which keeps tabs on the enormous sums the AI and crypto industries are spending to influence elections.
Articles mentioned in this episode:
Tech Influence Watch, Citation Needed
“We Will Fight to Our Very Last Breath” 404 Media
Google is investing $75 million in A24 as part of an AI filmmaking partnership Quartz
Children’s book illustrators start “We Are Better Than This” campaign to “stop the theft by big tech”
Bipartisan members introduce new bill to protect creators from AI style theft Axios
Big Tech won the race. But the AI fight is just beginning Politico
Producer: Ryan Hodes.
Executive producer: Kate Osborne
Art by Koren Shadmi.
Music by Brian Merchant and Ryan Hall, engineered by Josh Q.
Get full access to Blood in the Machine at www.bloodinthemachine.com/subscribeHow to dis-enshittify the world, with Cory Doctorow
Does Cory Doctorow even need an introduction at this point? If you spend any amount of time at all online, then you’ve encountered his work, his ideas, his words. But the ultra-prolific science fiction writer …
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Does Cory Doctorow even need an introduction at this point? If you spend any amount of time at all online, then you’ve encountered his work, his ideas, his words. But the ultra-prolific science fiction writer, digital rights activist, and coiner of the “Enshittification” verbiage that’s become universal shorthand for the degradation of the internet (and, to an extent, everything else), has been especially ubiquitous lately. His book-length treatment of the Enshittification thesis was just published by FSG last month, and he’s been on the press tour war path.
And good! “Enshittification” is vintage Doctorow—it’s sharp, frisky, freewheeling, and erudite; call it elevated, book-length blogging, perhaps. It’s also going to be the book I recommend to folks interested in getting into Cory’s nonfiction work; it so ably ties together the many strands of his thought and his various crusades into a manifesto of sorts. And, naturally, it persuasively makes the case for how big tech and its monopolistic platforms have conquered the internet, systematically siphoned it of vitality and utility to placate shareholders, and left an enshittified husk of what the web, and the world, ought to be, in its wake.
So naturally, I wanted to have Cory on Blood in the Machine: The Podcast to discuss it all. Cory has given approximately 4,000 interviews for this book and topic at this point (I recommend the New York Times mag profile for a look at his life and career, as well as his backyard, where he throws some great parties). So I thought I’d pick his brain specifically on how he thinks workers—tech workers and otherwise—can help turn the tides of enshittification. My instinct was to call this “deshittifying” the web, but Cory prefers “dis-enshittification”, which, fair enough. Regardless, we cover a lot of fertile ground, and field some good questions and comments from the chat (thanks to everyone who popped in when we were live).
Cory and I don’t agree on everything—copyright law in particular is a point of contention—but there is a lot of food for thought here, if I do say so myself. We cover why tech workers are both woefully under-organized and potentially powerful vectors for change, AI, sectoral bargaining, and more. I always have a good time chatting with Cory; I hope you enjoy our conversation, too.
Which reminds me: If you do enjoy chats and recordings like this, consider chipping in a few bucks a month so I can continue doing them. It takes time and energy to research and write these posts, to schedule interviews, and to find the adequate angle at which to prop up my phone on a stack of books on my desk so I can record the thing. Thanks to all those who already to pitch in; you make the whole BLOOD project possible.
Man, this was a busy week. On top of my chat with Cory, I also joined host Alexis Madrigal and fellow tech writer Charlie Warzel on KQED’s Forum; you can listen to that here. I also joined Lauren Goode and Michael Calore on WIRED’s Uncanny Valley podcast, to discuss the AI bubble piece I wrote for the magazine last month. I also spoke with CBC’s Nora Young about the invisible labor that makes AI systems possible; that article is out here.
Okay! That should bring us about up to speed. Hope everyone had a solid weekend and maybe even found a little respite. I, for one, I might add, had a fantastic weekend. The conference on New Luddism at Columbnia was a smashing success. I’ll have more to share soon, but the event brought together academics, journalists, labor organizers, policy heads, and student activists. I met so many folks doing great work in the space, the conversations were stimulating, and it was quite possible, for a few hours, to glimpse a future where our systems are no longer fueled by relentless worker exploitation and surveillance, or beholden to big tech and the oligarchs that operate it. I’ll write a longer debrief on all of the above soon, but for now: great stuff. A shout to the organizers for knocking it out of the park.
On Saturday, Paris Marx, Edward Ongweso Jr, Jathan Sadowski and I held a Luddite Tribunal before an absolutely packed house at the Starr Bar in Brooklyn. More on that before long, too, but it was just such good fun. It was kind of like the conference, in fact, just with more hammers. Thanks so much to everyone who came out, joined the chaos, and brought tech to submit for judgement.
I’ve got a lot of things cooking for this week, so I’ll end here for now. More soon, thanks for reading—and hammers up.
Get full access to Blood in the Machine at www.bloodinthemachine.com/subscribeUnderstanding the tech oligarchy and its gilded rage with Jacob Silverman
Happy Halloween all. I got into the spirit by catching up with the horror flicks I’d been sleeping on (28 Years Later was surprisingly good) and, more importantly, chatting with the great tech journalist Jacob …
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Happy Halloween all. I got into the spirit by catching up with the horror flicks I’d been sleeping on (28 Years Later was surprisingly good) and, more importantly, chatting with the great tech journalist Jacob Silverman, author of GILDED RAGE: ELON MUSK AND THE RADICALIZATION OF SILICON VALLEY, a book about some very scary people who hold immense sway over our politics and our lives.
Before we get into that, for anyone interested, I wanted to bump my list of best-ever ‘luddite horror’ films I wrote up last year. It was a fun one, I think:
OK! Onwards.
2025 has in many ways been the year of the tech oligarch. It marks the moment that many of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest and most powerful figures openly embraced an antidemocratic regime and publicly pledged support to authoritarianism. It feels like a lifetime ago, but I for one will not forget the image of tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos standing in the front row and applauding at Donald Trump’s inauguration, or their multiple trips and photo ops at Mar-a-Lago, or Elon Musk’s central role in the early months of the administration.
They’re still there, too, even if they aren’t making as many headlines. David Sacks, Elon Musk’s compatriot, is the White House’s AI and crypto czar. Executives from the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, are in advisory roles. JD Vance, whose mentor was Peter Thiel, owes his career to Valley operators. And not only are they in power, but they’re angry. They practice a politics of pitched persecution and extreme resentment that can be baffling to those of us who’d kill to simply not have to worry about paying the rent for a year. As Silverman puts it in his book, these tech titans “had the world at their fingertips and they couldn’t stand the touch.”
So *why* are they so mad? What are these world-beating centibillionaires so furious about? Why is it that they “swung right” so hard in the 2020s, if that’s in fact what happened? How did we get here, in other words? And what can we do about it?
Silverman’s book tackles all of the above and more. It argues that we shouldn’t view the tech billionaires as a collection of eccentric elites, but as a class; a group that, whether they publicly present as liberals or conservatives, share a distinct set of ambitions and goals: Slashing regulations and oversight, lowering taxes, extracting value from the state, and concentrating power.
We get into all of the above in our conversation, which you can check out here or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is officially the second installment of BLOOD IN THE MACHINE: The Podcast, after the inaugural episode with Karen Hao a bit back. There are still warts aplenty; for instance, I thought I would be able to edit the audio and video after I uploaded it, but no! Not allowed in Substack’s player. There’s only a weird “AI enhancement” option that is supposed to trim the dead air but instead cuts right to me talking about some technical difficulties. Alas! Future episodes will be seamlessly intro’d I’m sure—like the one next week with Cory Doctorow, which will be recorded on Tuesday, November 4th at 7 PM EST / 4 PM PST for those who’d like to join the live chat.
Speaking of live chatting, thanks to everyone who joined the fray with Silverman, and to all those who left questions and thoughts in the comments, we had time to answer some at the end.
Let me know what you think of this newish Blood in the Machine audio enterprise in the comments, and whether you’d like me to keep doing them. I’ll add the obligatory note here that it takes time and resources to plan and prep for such things, and I’d appreciate your support so I can continue doing them. Thanks as always to everyone who already chips in.
Finally, I’ve been doing a bunch of Spanish and Italian language interviews since BLOOD: The Book just published in those languages, and I got one particularly fun request about Frankenstein—which figures into the book as BITM readers who’ve stuck with it till the end will know—in light of the release of the new Guillermo del Toro film. (Which I cannot wait to see, by the by.) A reporter from El Pais asked me the following, and I thought I’d share my answer here for anyone interested.
EL PAIS: What is your interpretation of the novel Frankenstein in these times of AI, of the quest to prolong life, and in which powerful technologists such as Thiel, Musk, Sam Altman, Zuckerberg, and Bezos permeate every aspect of our working, social, and personal lives, as well as the future to come?
ME: I could write a whole essay on this question!
Frankenstein is just as relevant today as it ever was. A story about a careless founder recklessly unleashing a dangerous new technology without considering who might suffer as a result? I could just as easily be describing Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg as Victor Frankenstein.
It’s a testament to Mary Shelley’s power of observation about how men attempt to harness technology for their own power and profit that her work is just as cutting in the age of AI as it was in the age of the automated loom.
Scholars have read Shelley’s treatment of the monster—who is neglected, misunderstood, and intelligent—as a comment on the way that industrialists like Richard Arkright treated the working people of the day. That is, they were willing to make them suffer in their experiments with using technology, and vulnerable human workers, to maximize production and profit. Yet again, it’s scarcely different today: With AI, Altman, Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk are running large-scale experiments on society while aiming to deskill and immiserate workers. All with regard for little but how it grows their own power and lines their pockets. Some things never change.
Pretty relevant to my chat with Mr. Silverman, if I do say so myself.
OK! That’s it for today, thanks everyone. Once again: Happy Halloween, and hammers up.
Get full access to Blood in the Machine at www.bloodinthemachine.com/subscribeDismantling the Empire of AI with Karen Hao
Years before OpenAI became a household name, Karen Hao was one of the very first journalists to gain access to the company. What she saw when she did unsettled her. Despite a name that signaled transparency …
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Years before OpenAI became a household name, Karen Hao was one of the very first journalists to gain access to the company. What she saw when she did unsettled her. Despite a name that signaled transparency, executives were elusive, the culture secretive. Despite publicly heralding a mission to build AGI, or artificial general intelligence, company leadership couldn’t really say what that meant, or how they defined AGI at all. The seeds of a startup soon to be riven by infighting, rushing to be first to market with a commercial technology and a powerful narrative, and led by an apparently unscrupulous leader, were all right there.
OpenAI deemed Hao’s resulting story so negative it refused to speak with her for three years. More people should have read it, probably. Since then, OpenAI has launched Dall-E and ChatGPT, amassed a world-historic war chest of venture capital, and set the standard for generative AI, the definitive technological product of the 2020s. And Hao has been in the trenches, following along, investigating the company every step of the way. The product of all that reportage, her new book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI, is now officially out. It’s excellent.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you were looking to understand modern Silicon Valley, the AI boom, and the impact of both on the wider world by reading just one book, that book should be Empire of AI.
So, given that it could not be more in the Blood in the Machine wheelhouse, I invited Hao to join me for the first-ever BITM livestream, which we held yesterday afternoon, to discuss its themes and revelations. It went great, imo. I wasn’t sure how many folks would even drop by, as I’d never tried a livestream here before, but by the end there were hundreds of you in the room, leaving thoughtful comments and questions, stoking a great discussion.
This is also the first BITM podcast, too—though perhaps I got a little overzealous; the audio quality isn’t always great, and if I want to get official about it, I think I’d have to edit a new intro, as I was kind of all over the place. We’ll figure this stuff out, eventually, so thanks for bearing with.
But the conversation wound up being so good that in addition to reposting the video above, I transcribed it below, too, so you can read it as a Q+A. Forgive any typos. (I didn’t transcribe the audience Q+A portion.) As always, all of this work is made possible *100%* by paid supporters of this newsletter. If you value work like this—in-depth interviews with folks like Hao, who are fighting the good fight—please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Many human-generated thanks to all those who already do.
BLOOD IN THE MACHINE: Okay, greetings and welcome to the very first Blood in the Machine Multimedia Spectacular, with Karen Hao. Karen is a tech journalist extraordinaire. She's been a reporter for the MIT Technology Review and the Wall Street Journal. And you currently write for the Atlantic, as well as other places. You lead the Pulitzer Center's AI Spotlight Series, where you train journalists around the world how to cover AI. And after reading this book, I'm so glad it is you doing the training and not certain other journalists in this ecosystem—we won't name names. So congratulations on all of that. Did I get it all? Did I get all the accolades?
Karen Hao: Yes [laughs].
Okay, perfect. But most importantly, for our purposes today, Karen has written this book, Empire of AI, Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's Open AI. And it's out this week. And let me just say this bluntly. This is not the interview you want to come to for hardballs and gotchas on Karen, because I just absolutely love this book.
I personally hoped somebody would write this book. I think it's just really just a real feat of reportage and cultural analysis and economic and social critique. It's a panoramic look, not just at the leading generative AI company, but at the last five to 10 years of some of the most important technological, economic, and cultural headwinds in all of tech, as well as how they're impacting, reshaping, and injuring communities around the world.
But if you have time to read one book about AI and its global and political implications, then this is it. Honestly, this is it. And we'll dig into why in just a second.I can't recommend it enough Okay. End of effusive praise. Karen, thank you so much for joining.
Thank you so much for having me, Brian. And it's an honor to be part of this first live stream. I religiously read all of your issues. And it is also so effective and inspirational for me to do the work that you're doing. So thank you.
Well thank you. And I look forward to diving on in. So let us do so right now. And let's just start with with the title. Okay, we've got this is this book is called Empire of AI, not say, “OpenAI, the company that changed everything.” It is very explicitly, I think, this formation, which I think really does sort of put in context the entire story to come in quite a useful lens. So why is that? Why is it called Empire of AI? Why is this book about OpenAI beginning with this empire framing?
Yeah, so the thing that I have come to realize over reporting on opening AI and AI for the last seven years is that we need to start using new language to really cap the full scope and magnitude of the economic and political power that these companies like OpenAI now have. And what I eventually concluded was the only real word that captures all of that is empire.
These are new forms of empire, AI companies. And the reason is in the long history of European colonialism, empires of old several features to them. First was they laid claim to resources that were not their own and they would create rules that suggested that they were in fact their own.
They exploited a lot of labor as in they didn't pay many workers or they paid them very, very well for the labor that would fortify the empire. They competed with one another in this kind of moralistic way where the British Empire say they were better than the French Empire, or the Dutch Empire would say they were better than the British Empire, and all of this competition was ultimately accelerated the extraction, the exploitation, because their empire alone had to be the one at the head of the race leading the world towards modernity and progress.
So the last future of empire is that they all have civilizing missions and they, whether it was rhetoric or whether they truly believed, they would fly this banner of we are plundering the world because this is the price of bringing everyone to the future. And empires of AI have all of these features. They are also laying claim to resources that are not their own, like the data and the work of artists, writers, creators. And they also design rules to suggest that actually it is their own.
Oh, it's all just on the internet. And copyright law is fair use. And they also exploit a lot of labor around the world, in that they do not pay very well the contractors that are literally working for the companies to clean up their models and to do all the labeling and the preparation of the data that goes into their model.
And they are ultimately creating labor automating technology. So they're exploiting labor on the other end of the AI development process as well in the deployment of these models, where OpenAI literally defines AGI as highly autonomous technology. As systems that outperform humans' most economically valuable work. So their technologies are suppressing the ability of workers to mobilize and demand more rights. And they do it in this aggressive race where they're saying, there's a bad guy, we're the good guy, so let us continue to race ahead and be number one.
And one of the things that I mentioned in the book is empires of old were extremely violent and we do not have that kind of overt violence with empires of AI today but we need to understand that modern day empires will look different than empires of old…
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