Jathan Sadowski

The AI bubble is so big it's propping up the US economy (for now) Plus how American professors are fighting back against the AI onslaught, a backlash over AI models in Vogue, and more.

So far this year, "capital expenditures on AI added more to US economic growth than all consumer spending combined... spending on IT for AI is so big it might be making up for economic losses from the tariffs, serving as a private sector stimulus program." www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-ai-bub...

AI doesn't just mean investing trillions into building data centres, it means building different types of data centres that are incredibly energy dense and intensive to power and cool the AI chips. Great news in a burning world! ig.ft.com/ai-data-cent...

Incredibly instructive reporting on what appears well on its way to becoming the biggest, most concentrated, most energy- and resource-intensive, and most speculative wave of capital investment ever.
ig.ft.com/ai-data-cent...

Patreon Preview – 416. The Neverending Race We chat for a bit about Trump’s AI Action Plan – more to come on this next week – before getting into broader questions about Silicon Valley imperialism, American force projection and soft power throu

In the new TMK Premium, we get into Silicon Valley imperialism, American force projection and soft power through AI, the endlessly convenient competition against China, plus a new addition of tech freak watch.
Teaser: soundcloud.com/thismachinek...
Full episode: www.patreon.com/posts/135353...

wtf is a “privately owned fighter jet”??? I don’t like learning this exist at all — let alone in the context of one nearly colliding with a passenger jet.

Bruh, babies are like the easiest thing in the world to stop! A very important part of being a parent is stopping your baby from doing stupid and destructive things!

This (real!) line from Trump's speech about the AI Action Plan has me feeling delirious.

“We’re going to make this industry absolutely the top because right now it’s a beautiful baby that’s born,” Trump said about A.I. “We have to grow that baby and let that baby thrive. We can’t stop it.”

Data Centers Aren’t the Future of American Prosperity Tamara Kneese and Maia Woluchem cut through lobbying points and speculative myths to focus on what the evidence reveals about the tech industry’s claims.

In our new policy brief for @datasociety.bsky.social, @mwoluchem.bsky.social and I break down the myths and industry talking points attached to data centers. Who benefits from unbridled data center growth and who is most at risk when such speculative ventures fail?

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A U.S. surgeon trying to have a “peer to peer” consultation with a doctor at a health insurance company who is hiding his identity as her patient gets denied coverage. And it gets worse from there. You have to see it to believe it.

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Book Launch, 'The mechanic and the luddite' Jathan Sadowski in conversation with Lizzie O'Shea and Chris O'Neill for the launch of 'The Mechanic and the Luddite'.

Melbourne Folks! I will be hosting a book launch to celebrate The Mechanic and the Luddite! Come hear me chat about the book with Lizzie O'Shea and Chris O'Neill — and have a free drink!
• August 14th, 6pm, Victorian Trades Hall
• Register for free: events.humanitix.com/sadowkski-th...

415. It’s Time to Build… Radical Policy for AI (ft. Sarah Myers West, Amba Kak) We are joined by Amba Kak and Sarah Myers West — co-directors of the AI Now Institute — to discuss their excellent new Landscape Report on Artificial Power. We discuss Trump’s AI Action Day and his ad

In the new TMK, we chat with @smw.bsky.social and @ambakak.bsky.social from @ainowinstitute.bsky.social about their important work laying out a progressive—and practical—policy agenda for AI, which centers real social needs not corporate profits. soundcloud.com/thismachinek...

The metamorphosis of Sequoia's Shaun Maguire: 'Never back down.' Shaun Maguire's posts about Zohran Mamdani shocked many. Not the people who know him.

I wrote about venture capitalist Shaun Maguire, his accusations that Zohran Mamdani is a "secret Islamist," and his emergence as a leading right wing voice in the tech industry.
www.businessinsider.com/shaun-maguir...

Nothing planned yet but hopefully in the nearish future.

Absolutely! I love this paper and your analysis totally explains how and why such a baldly absurd policy move can even happen in the first place.

Book Launch, 'The mechanic and the luddite' Jathan Sadowski in conversation with Lizzie O'Shea and Chris O'Neill for the launch of 'The Mechanic and the Luddite'.

Melbourne Folks! I will be hosting a book launch to celebrate The Mechanic and the Luddite! Come hear me chat about the book with Lizzie O'Shea and Chris O'Neill — and have a free drink!
• August 14th, 6pm, Victorian Trades Hall
• Register for free: events.humanitix.com/sadowkski-th...

Oh come on! How do you take a satirical headline about blind devotion to the tech industry and turn it into real government policy? I’ve heard of making markets and creating demand but this is next level.

OpenAI signs deal with UK to find government uses for its models Wide-ranging agreement with artificial intelligence firm behind ChatGPT comes after similar UK deal with Google

Me, a rube: governments procure a technology when a specific need is identified.

UK: “lol, no”

NYC has gotta vote for Zohran and then push him to cancel all these techno-fascist partnerships. Don’t forget that Eric Adams is a literal cop.

When a friend casually asked me whether I had read Jathan Sadowski's new book yet, I shrugged it off with a "I still plan to, yes". I spontaneously decided to check out the first pages and well: I did not put the book away until I finished it within a week. What a treasure! You may already know Sadowski from the podcast "This Machine Kills" that he co-hosts and which is a staple of progressive tech-critique in its own right. In his book you will find a lot of what makes the podcast so excellent as well: Witty writing, outspoken analysis and a deep understanding of the material conditions that shape technology under capitalism. Over the course of 211 pages Sadowski describes in a very understandable way how the dynamics of capitalism have shaped the way we think about "innovation", "progress" and technology in general. It also makes a great case for the perspective of the luddite worker movement of the early 19th century, calling for not just questioning how technology works but who build it for what purpose and to whose benefit. To illustrate this, he includes a fantastic analysis of the political economy of so-called "AI" as well as the fundamental role of venture capitalists, futurist and the risk-economy of insurance companies. The book is such a valuable antidote to the limited vision of futures under capitalism because it radically questions the inevitability of the neoliberal status quo. Quotes like "Not all innovations deserve to exist, and many should never have been created in the first place." (p. 45), "Unicorns are not magical creatures found in nature by lucky investors, they are artificial creations engineered by VCs." (p. 72) or "This is not just a defamatory remark about Silicon Valley being a bunch of vampiric freeloaders. This is an analytical statement" (p. 132) may give you a taste.

The true strength of the book lies in its final chapter. It ruthlessly dismantles the capitalists futures that foreclosed any ideas of meaningful social ransformation and limits us to think of progress only within "release schedules" (p. 199) of new consumer gadgets. The book finishes with a final reference to the luddites: "What turned these mechanics into Luddites was knowing when it was time to stop tinkering at home and take to the streets, factories, and wherever else capital was imposing its future upon them. This is the same wisdom that must galvanize us today." I wholeheartedly agree and recommend reading the book for yourself.

I was pleasantly surprised to be tagged in this is really thoughtful and generous review of my new book on LinkedIn. If it weren't my book, I'd be rushing out to grab a copy after reading this recommendation!

If ChatGPT is the statistical average of Reddit, then this is the biological avatar of Reddit.

Monash researcher awarded $1.1M ARC Future Fellowship to tackle climate insurance crisis

Here's a really nice article published by my faculty about my new ARC Future Fellowship: www.monash.edu/it/news/2025...

Definitely looks that way!

Premium – 414. Deus Ex Zuck | This Machine Kills Get more from This Machine Kills on Patreon

In the new TMK Premium, we turn our sights on the incredible amount of cash that Zuckberg is spending to hire big names in AI and ask the question: What could possibly make this level of investment into creating the Meta Superintelligence Lab a worthwhile endeavor? www.patreon.com/posts/premiu...

Monash researcher awarded $1.1M ARC Future Fellowship to tackle climate insurance crisis

Here's a really nice article published by my faculty about my new ARC Future Fellowship: www.monash.edu/it/news/2025...

Chatbots have really brought us into the age of the “smart dumb guy” — idiots who do not realize the limits of their own understanding and thus think they are breaching the limits of human knowledge because they spend too much time texting with the Dunning-Kruger Effect Machine.

Theses posts were back to back in my feed—and there are many more like them. If you are competing against *hundreds or thousands* of other applicants for a job, then that hiring process is now also a lottery. Terrible sign of an economy rushing into severe recession.

Insurance is the bedrock of modern society, but this institution is now failing the public at a time when we need it most. Addressing the conditions of this breakdown—and mitigating further disasters and disruptions—requires confronting a “polycrisis,” or a process in which “disparate shocks interact so that the whole is worse than the sum of the parts, ” writes political economist Adam Tooze (2022). A necessary analysis of polycrisis and its consequences must account for the industries, technologies, and policies that govern risks—and, crucially, how they engage in socio-technical processes of defining, predicting, and valuing risks. By synthesising the following objectives into a cohesive research program, this Future Fellowship aims to create essential empirical knowledge about urgent problems of insurability, which will inform new policy solutions and critical theories, all for the purpose of understanding and tackling the complex polycrisis at the nexus of insurance markets, risk technologies, and climate governance regimes. • Objective 1: Examine the design and construction of climate risk models by insurance industry and risk analytics firms to identify the assumptions, trade-offs, values, and goals built into these systems. • Objective 2: Engage directly with governments and communities at the frontlines of risk vulnerability to understand how abstract computational models and simulations connect to lived experiences and ground truth. • Objective 3: Develop new policies and frameworks for climate risk justice, which are informed by original empirical work and contribute to greater equity and security in risk governance. • Objective 4: Generate critical theoretical contributions that guide analytical and applied work about the techno-politics of risk governance in an age of global polycrisis.

@katemac.bsky.social @70sbachchan.bsky.social I'm a fan of your newsletter and I thought you'd like to know that my new Australian Research Council Future Fellowship project uses polycrisis as a framing. Here's an excerpt from the grant application outlining the framing and project objectives.

It was the latest salvo in an aggressive and wide-ranging campaign to quiet critics. In recent months, UnitedHealth has targeted traditional journalists and news outlets, a prominent investor, a Texas doctor and activists like Ms. Strause and her father, who complained about a UnitedHealth subsidiary. In legal letters and court filings, UnitedHealth has invoked last year’s murder of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of the company’s health insurance division, to argue that intense criticism of the company risks inciting further violence.

UnitedHealth's CEO being assassinated has been a huge boon for the company's legal team as they use the murder to justify "an aggressive and wide-ranging campaign to quiet critics" through threats and lawsuits aimed at journalists, platforms, activists, and investors. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/12/b...

AI facial analysis cannot infer latent psychological, personality, or behavioral features, and technology that pretends to have these capabilities is grossly unethical.