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Paris Marx, host of the Tech Won't Save Us podcast, lays out a vision for an alternative model of technology that serves the people, rather than the shareholders of a handful of US tech companies. We talk about how the Trump regime's overreach (unpredictable foreign trade policies, kidnapping the leader of a sovereign state, escalating support for the Zionist entity's genocide in Gaza, an unprovoked and illegal attack on Iran, including the assassination of Iran's supreme leader, his family, and other high-ranking officials of the Iranian government) has presented us with a unique opportunity for an internationalist response that rejects US tech and builds a new technical stack in service of the public good. Mentioned in this episode:Road to Nowhere - book by Paris Marx [permalink]Hyperscale - book by Paris Marx [permalink]Tech Won't Save Us - podcast by Paris MarxDisconnect - newsletter by Paris MarxLudicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors - book by Ed Niedermeyer  [permalink]See the transcript footnotes for more! We'd love to hear from you if you disagree with something we've said. Please read our rules of engagement for good faith discussions, and then send an email to [email protected] or hit us up on socials. To view full show notes, including transcripts, please visit the episode page. Be sure to follow us on BlueSky and Mastodon! Cover art by Anya K. Jordan @anyakjordan.bsky.social Theme music by Xylia Politechs is provided under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoAI licence

At the beginning of the season, we felt we had a pretty good handle on HELLISH AI: a Hyper-scaled Expansive Large Language model which is Imperial, Sucks up all the electricity and water, and causes Human suffering. We wondered whether a different way was possible, a HEAVENLY AI that is High quality, with Ethical curation of data, Accesible to individuals and smaller organisations, Viable, Environmentally sustainable, with Narrowly focused applications, using a Language model, that fit with the true spirit of YOLO: since you only live once, you might as well live well. In this conversation, we apply what we've learned from our guests this season to try and answer that question. Mentioned in this episode:I Am An AI Hater - essay by Anthony Moser [permalink]A Butlerian Hauntology - paper by Dr. Syed Mustafa AliEmpire of AI - book by Karen HaoBritish Post Office scandal - article about wrongful prosecution of British Post Office workersLibrary Freedom Project - a network of values-driven librarians working together to build information democracy [permalink]See the transcript footnotes for more! We'd love to hear from you if you disagree with something we've said. Please read our rules of engagement for good faith discussions, and then send an email to [email protected] or hit us up on socials. To view full show notes, including transcripts, please visit the episode page. Be sure to follow us on BlueSky and Mastodon! Cover art by Anya K. Jordan @anyakjordan.bsky.social Theme music by Xylia Politechs is provided under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoAI licence

Friend of the show Dr. Chris Gilliard returns to catch us up on what's been happening in the world of surveillance since last time we talked. From Ring-powered "pet finder" systems to Meta/Rayban-wearing Glassholes to Anthropic's performative handwringing over their Department of War contract, it's not very encouraging out there. You might be able to guess what Chris thinks about the question of whether any of this technology can be redeemed. Mentioned in this episode:On the Impossibility of Ethical Surveillance - essay by Torin MonahanFacial Recognition is the Plutonium of AI - paper by Luke Stark [PDF] Cute videos, but little evidence: Police say Amazon Ring isn't much of a crime fighter - article by Cyrus Farivar [permalink]Careless People - book by Sarah Wynne-WilliamsThe TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence - paper by Timnit Gebru and Emile P. Torres [permalink]See the transcript footnotes for more! We'd love to hear from you if you disagree with something we've said. Please read our rules of engagement for good faith discussions, and then send an email to [email protected] or hit us up on socials. To view full show notes, including transcripts, please visit the episode page. Be sure to follow us on BlueSky and Mastodon! Cover art by Anya K. Jordan @anyakjordan.bsky.social Theme music by Xylia Politechs is provided under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoAI licence

Dr. Dan McQuillan, Senior Lecturer in Critical AI at Goldsmiths, University of London, defines Decomputing as "a 50:50 hybrid of decolonial and degrowth approaches." He joins us to unpack that further and pick up on some of the themes from his prescient book from June of 2022, "Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence", which came out a mere four and a half months before OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT on the world. Mentioned in this episode:Resisting AI: An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence - book by Dan McQuillan [permalink]Tools for Conviviality - book by Ivan Illichdanmcquillan.org - Dan McQuillan's blog [permalink] We'd love to hear from you if you disagree with something we've said. Please read our rules of engagement for good faith discussions, and then send an email to [email protected] or hit us up on socials. To view full show notes, including transcripts, please visit the episode page. Be sure to follow us on BlueSky and Mastodon! Cover art by Anya K. Jordan @anyakjordan.bsky.social Theme music by Xylia Politechs is provided under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoAI licence

Josh and Ray are joined by computational linguist Dr. Emily M. Bender to discuss what "AI" really is, and why the slippery nature of the term is very much intentional. We look at the eugenicist history of the quest to define and measure human intelligence and try to understand what the project of "artificial intelligence" is, then explore LLMs as synthetic text extruding machines and automation technology, as opposed to a machine god on the cusp of being born. Mentioned in this episode:Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 - podcast by Drs. Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna [permalink]THE AI CON - How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want - book by Drs. Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna  [permalink]On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜 - paper by Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, et al. [permalink]Ghost in the Machine - film by Valerie Veatch [permalink]The TESCREAL Bundle - paper by Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres [permalink]See the transcript footnotes for more! We'd love to hear from you if you disagree with something we've said. Please read our rules of engagement for good faith discussions, and then send an email to [email protected] or hit us up on socials. To view full show notes, including transcripts, please visit the episode page. Be sure to follow us on BlueSky and Mastodon! Cover art by Anya K. Jordan @anyakjordan.bsky.social Theme music by Xylia Politechs is provided under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoAI licence

In order to answer the question of whether we still need libraries when we have chatbots, we're joined by Alison Macrina, founder and Executive Director of Library Freedom Project, and Kay Slater, member of LFP and library worker in Chicago. Alison and Kay dispel some myths, talk about how libraries have changed with technology, how libraries are funded, how library workers have a central role to play in resisting AI, and how members of the public like us and our listeners can support libraries. Mentioned in this episode:Library Freedom Project Resources - Posters, bookmarks, presentations, and more resources to help with teaching and promoting information democracy, privacy, and intellectual freedom. [permalink]Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves - paper by Fobazi Ettarh [permalink]Libraries for the People - a leftist library project [permalink] We'd love to hear from you if you disagree with something we've said. Please read our rules of engagement for good faith discussions, and then send an email to [email protected] or hit us up on socials. To view full show notes, including transcripts, please visit the episode page. Be sure to follow us on BlueSky and Mastodon! Cover art by Anya K. Jordan @anyakjordan.bsky.social Theme music by Xylia Politechs is provided under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoAI licence

Nate Madson Dion, a fifth grade math teacher from Aurora, Colorado, schools Josh and Ray on how technology has crept into primary schools, how the inevitability narrative manifests with teachers and administrators, and how he has found effective ways to resist, both through one on one conversations with fellow educators, but also around the bargaining table for his union's contract. Nate puts out a call for parents to contact their local school boards, find out how AI is being deployed in their children's schools, and more importantly, how to opt out of it. Mentioned in this episode:B******t Jobs - book by David GraeberParents Fell in Love With Alpha School’s Promise. Then They Wanted Out. - article in Wired [permalink]How to engage in pseudoscience with real data: A criticism of John Hattie’s arguments in Visible Learning from the perspective of a statistician - article in the McGill Journal of Education [permalink]Writing vs AI - article by Cory Doctorow [permalink]Politechs Season 1 Episode 6 - Programmers - Josh and Ray talk about how to talk to programmers about AI.See the transcript footnotes for more! We'd love to hear from you if you disagree with something we've said. Please read our rules of engagement for good faith discussions, and then send an email to [email protected] or hit us up on socials. To view full show notes, including transcripts, please visit the episode page. Be sure to follow us on BlueSky and Mastodon! Cover art by Anya K. Jordan @anyakjordan.bsky.social Theme music by Xylia Politechs is provided under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoAI licence

Software engineer and reluctant activist Radhika talks about epistemic violence, identity, immutability, the Enlightenment, common law, and many other things besides to illustrate just one of the ways in which trans people's lives are under attack. We discuss how AI affects trans people, and what it would take to be able to deploy machine learning technologies to improve their lives rather than oppress them, then end on a call to action for technologists. Mentioned in this episode:The Racial Contract - book by Charles MillsThe Sexual Contract - book by Carol PatemanAbsurd Trolley Problems - a set of increasingly ridiculous trolley problems We'd love to hear from you if you disagree with something we've said. Please read our rules of engagement for good faith discussions, and then send an email to [email protected] or hit us up on socials. To view full show notes, including transcripts, please visit the episode page. Be sure to follow us on BlueSky and Mastodon! Cover art by Anya K. Jordan @anyakjordan.bsky.social Theme music by Xylia Politechs is provided under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoAI licence

Tech journalist Karen Hao joins us to discuss her book, "Empire of AI". Karen explains why she believes that the Silicon Valley hyper-scaled LLM flavour of AI is an imperial technology, and has become even more explicitly imperial in the 12 months since the book first came out as it is being more and more incorporated in the US military's wars. The paperback edition of the book has just been released in the US and UK, so if you live in either of those places and haven't read the book yet, be sure to pick it up! Mentioned in this episode:Empire of AI - book by Karen HaoEmpire of AI - UK paperbackEmpire of AI - US paperbackMystery AI Hype Theater 3000 - podcast by Emily M. Bender and Alex HannaMicrosoft's Hypocrisy on AI - article by Karen Hao [permalink]See the transcript footnotes for more! We'd love to hear from you if you disagree with something we've said. Please read our rules of engagement for good faith discussions, and then send an email to [email protected] or hit us up on socials. To view full show notes, including transcripts, please visit the episode page. Be sure to follow us on BlueSky and Mastodon! Cover art by Anya K. Jordan @anyakjordan.bsky.social Theme music by Xylia Politechs is provided under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoAI licence

We welcome our favourite political scientist, Dr. Anna Colom, back on the show to dive into democracy: what is it really, how does AI threaten it, and how can it be built for real? Anna is a researcher with The Data Tank, a "think and do tank"; they work with people, organisations and institutions around the world to unlock data's potential: gathering, accessing, and reusing it responsibly, so we’re all better equipped to tackle the pressing issues of our time. Mentioned in this episode:The Sciences of the Democracies - book by Jean-Paul Gagnon and Benjamin Abrams [permalink]The Tech Coup - book by Marietje Schaake [permalink]Polis - an open-source platform that helps entire cities, states, or even countries find common ground on complex issues [permalink] We'd love to hear from you if you disagree with something we've said. Please read our rules of engagement for good faith discussions, and then send an email to [email protected] or hit us up on socials. To view full show notes, including transcripts, please visit the episode page. Be sure to follow us on BlueSky and Mastodon! Cover art by Anya K. Jordan @anyakjordan.bsky.social Theme music by Xylia Politechs is provided under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoAI licence

Josh and Ray sit down with Dr. Syed Mustafa Ali, author of a recent paper entitled "A Butlerian Hauntology" to unpack the dense payload of insight contained within the paper. Dr. Ali grabs threads from Dune, critical race theory and world-systems theory, political economy, political ecology, and political theology, actually existing fascism, computer science, classic Luddism, literature, film and television, labour power, and anticolonial jihad and masterfully weaves them together in a critical computing tapestry of extraordinary beauty. Gaze upon it, ye tech bros, and despair! Mentioned in this episode:Imaginary Futures from Thinking Machines to the Global Village - book by Richard Barbrook [permalink]Empire of AI - book by Karen HaoAliens R Us: The Other in Science Fiction Cinema - book edited by Ziauddin Sardar and Sean Cubitt [permalink]A Cyborg Manifesto - essay by Donna Haraway [permalink]Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity - paper by Drew McDermottSee the transcript footnotes for more! We'd love to hear from you if you disagree with something we've said. Please read our rules of engagement for good faith discussions, and then send an email to [email protected] or hit us up on socials. To view full show notes, including transcripts, please visit the episode page. Be sure to follow us on BlueSky and Mastodon! Cover art by Anya K. Jordan @anyakjordan.bsky.social Theme music by Xylia Politechs is provided under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoAI licence

Foz Meadows joins us to discuss his "Against AI" polemic, written in response to Erin Underwood's open letter to SFWA and the SFF community in the wake of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association's announcement that works written by LLM tools and works for which LLM tools were used at any point in the writing process would not be eligible for consideration. The conversation touches on not only Foz's piece, but also the sheer stupidity of thinking we can outsource the act of thinking to machines that do not think, what the introduction of LLMs is doing to education, and the role that writers—especially science fiction and fantasy writers—have to play in resisting the inevitability narrative. Mentioned in this episode:Against AI - Foz's response to Erin Underwood's open letter to SFWA and the SFF community [permalink]Nebula Awards Rules - section 9.11 deals with LLM tools [permalink]Open Letter to the Science Fiction Writers Association and Community - by Erin Underwood [permalink]xkcd: Duty Calls - someone is wrong on the internetDodge v. Ford Motor Co. - case in which the Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford had to operate the Ford Motor Company in the interests of its shareholders, rather than for the benefit of his employees or customersNo Take, Only Throw - a webcomic strip in which a dog wants to play fetch with its owner [permalink] We'd love to hear from you if you disagree with something we've said. Please read our rules of engagement for good faith discussions, and then send an email to [email protected] or hit us up on socials. To view full show notes, including transcripts, please visit the episode page. Be sure to follow us on BlueSky and Mastodon! Cover art by Anya K. Jordan @anyakjordan.bsky.social Theme music by Xylia Politechs is provided under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoAI licence

Datacentres might seem boring, but Aurora Gómez Delgado of Tu Nube Seca Mi Río, a Spanish organisation working to combat the ecosocial impact of datacentres, would like you to sit up and take notice of the resources they are stealing from the people who live in the surrounding region. Aurora educates us on the increase in number and size of datacentres, accelerated even further by the AI project, and the corresponding impact on water and power usage, and what that means for farmers trying to grow their crops, people trying to pay their electricity bills, and the availability of clean drinking water. Mentioned in this episode:Tu Nube Seca Mi Río - Spanish organisation focused on the ecosocial impact of datacentresSYSTEM OVERLOAD: How new data centres could throw Europe’s energy transition off course - by Jill McArdle and Pierre TerrasEl Escarabajo Verde - Spanish TV show about the environmentChatGPT Turned Into a Studio Ghibli Machine. How Is That Legal? - by Alex Reisner in The Atlantic [permalink]Hayao Miyazaki's thoughts on an artificial intelligenceThe supply chain capitalism of AI: a call to (re)think algorithmic harms and resistance through environmental lens - , by Ana ValdiviaData Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back - , by Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry2024 CrowdStrike-related IT outages We'd love to hear from you if you disagree with something we've said. Please read our rules of engagement for good faith discussions, and then send an email to [email protected] or hit us up on socials. To view full show notes, including transcripts, please visit the episode page. Be sure to follow us on BlueSky and Mastodon! Cover art by Anya K. Jordan @anyakjordan.bsky.social Theme music by Xylia Politechs is provided under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoAI licence

Josh and Ray sit down with Anthony Moser and discuss the impetus for him to write "I Am An AI Hater". We talk about the role of politeness in maintaining the status quo, Anthony's views on copyright as a musician, the importance of collective action, how the law is not a source of power but rather an expression of power, and lots more. Mentioned in this episode:I Am An AI Hater - Anthony's essayPolitechs season 1 episode 4 - Surveillance - our interview with Chris GilliardAs of 27 Jan, 2026, NVIDIA, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta are worth a combined $20.077 trillion. The total market cap of the US stock market is $140.182 trillion, meaning six US tech companies account for 14% of the value of the market (data from companiesmarketcap.com). Josh's statement that the top 7 tech companies were worth half of the US stock market was incorrect.Blood in the Machine - a book my Brian Merchant on the origins of the rebellion against big tech in the Luddite movement in early 19th century EnglandEmpire of AI, by Karen Hao [PERMALINK]The Coloniality of the Algorithm, a talk by Flavia DzodanAnthony's template for emailing teachersLauren Woolsey's recording of "I Am An AI Hater"Adolfo Neto's recording of the Portuguese translation of "I Am An AI Hater""Eu Odeio IA", Portuguese translation of "I Am An AI Hater" We'd love to hear from you if you disagree with something we've said. Please read our rules of engagement for good faith discussions, and then send an email to [email protected] or hit us up on socials. To view full show notes, including transcripts, please visit the episode page. Be sure to follow us on BlueSky and Mastodon! Cover art by Anya K. Jordan @anyakjordan.bsky.social Theme music by Xylia Politechs is provided under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoAI licence

Much to their chagrin, Josh and Ray discover that Season 1 of Politechs wasn't sufficient to destroy AI. They conclude that the only thing to do is assemble a Luddite army and launch a new assault on HELLISH AI. Welcome to Season 2 of Politechs! Mentioned in this episode:Tu Nube Seca Mi Río - Spanish organisation opposing datacentresAI Killed My Job, by Brian MerchantEmpire of AI, by Karen Hao [PERMALINK]I Am An AI Hater, by Anothony MoserThe Kirby Frame, by Anthony MoserAgainst AI, by Foz MeadowsA Butlerian Hauntology, by Dr. Syed Mustafa AliTech Won't Save Us - a critical tech podcast We'd love to hear from you if you disagree with something we've said. Please read our rules of engagement for good faith discussions, and then send an email to [email protected] or hit us up on socials. To view full show notes, including transcripts, please visit the episode page. Be sure to follow us on BlueSky and Mastodon! Cover art by Anya K. Jordan @anyakjordan.bsky.social Theme music by Xylia Politechs is provided under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoAI licence