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Blood in the Machine

von Brian Merchant

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A show about AI, labor, and power. Veteran tech journalist Brian Merchant chronicles the growing backlash and resistance to Silicon Valley and big tech.

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  1. Data 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 hates data centers. We’re all

  2. The 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 splashy warnings that AI companies

  3. California 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 eyes of the tech elite are fo

  4. The 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 systems that output material b

  5. What’s really behind AI ‘super intelligence’

    While billionaires and world leaders expound the dangers of all-powerful, “super intelligent” AI (https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-the-stories-about-all-powerful), the reality on the ground is that it's a tech product that’s only mad

  6. How 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 across the nation. The images

  7. The ‘End Times Fascists’ of AI, ft. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor

    End Times Fascism (https://bookshop.org/p/books/end-times-fascism-and-the-fight-for-the-living-world-astra-taylor/66802b8005ce0f8f?ean=9780374621384&bkshp-astro=t) by Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor. Naomi Klein’s Newsletter, Patterns (https://n

  8. The real AI jobs apocalypse

    AI executives like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have been forecasting an incipient AI jobs apocalypse (https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-ai-jobs-apocalypse-is-for-the) for three years now. So where is it? Well it’s

  9. The 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 masses—is unfolding at breakne

  10. Charting 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 industry has been the story of that

  11. The 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 its entire fund. South Korea

  12. What 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 the world’s first trillionaire,

  13. Xbox 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 than a corporate memo and some

  14. The Luddites take New York

    The year has been marked by the rise of open, widespread (https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/its-open-season-for-refusing-ai), and increasingly spirited backlash (https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/why-the-ai-backlash-has-turned-violent)

  15. How 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 and a new dating survey finds: I

  16. The 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 warning shot—did it work? What d

  17. How 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, digital rights activist, and c

  18. Understanding 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 Silverman, author of GILDED RA

  19. Dismantling 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, executives were elusive, the cul

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