Blood in the Machine: The 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.

www.bloodinthemachine.com

Afleveringen

Data centers, AI, and the 2026 elections. Ft. Paris Marx.

30 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 12 min
Afspelen

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. Lees meer

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

Brian’s Bluesky

Producer Ryan’s NewsletterRyan’s Bluesky

Stories Mentioned

Texas sues OpenAI, Sam Altman over product safety - POLITICO

Media — Angela Gonzales-Torres for Congress

James Talarico on X: “There is something deeply wrong with a political system that allows one trillionaire to buy his own personal U.S. Senator.” / X

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 We…
The big tech defectors you’re not hearing about

23 oktober 2026 · 48 min
Afspelen

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. Lees meer

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

Protesters worldwide claim that Apple is complicit in human rights violations in the DRC and Gaza; co. did not respond

Apple Accused of Using “Blood Minerals” in the Congo

Apple employees demand CEO Tim Cook speak up for Palestinian lives

Team Congo

Friends of the Congo

Rotten to the Core: How the Gaza genocide has revealed anti-Palestinian racism at Apple – Mondowei…
California vs. the tech billionaires

16 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 8 min
Afspelen

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. Lees meer

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.

California Labor Federation

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

California Proposition 40, One-Time Wealth Tax for State-Funded Healthcare, Education, and Food Assistance Programs Initiative (2026) - Ballotpedia

Paramount completes $111B Warner merger, creating “Skydance” behemoth - Ars Technica

Newsom signs landmark bill aimed at giving lifeline to struggling California newsrooms - Los Angeles Times

The NO FAKES Act

AI in hiring and firing: California’s No Robo Bosses Act

Get the Facts: NO on PROP 40

An AI School, With No Teachers, To Open in Chicago This Fall

The billionaires fight back: Propositions 41 and 42 could kill California’s billionaire tax even if it passes

Billionaire Google Co-Founder Pumps $102 Million Into Fighting California Wealth Tax | Common Dreams

California Billi…
The two words the AI industry hates more than anything

2 oktober 2026 · 50 min
Afspelen

“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. Lees meer

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 ye…
What’s really behind AI ‘super intelligence’

25 september 2026 · 52 min
Afspelen

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. Lees meer

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

Data Labelers Association

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

The hidden workforce behind every AI tool you use: Announcing the data work landscape 2.0 - TechEquity Collaborative

Altman and Amodei address UN: ‘There are many things that AI cannot and should not automate’

Tech Influence Watch

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 win…
How to kick Flock out of your town

20 september 2026 · 54 min
Afspelen

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. Lees meer

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/

Brian’s Bluesky.

Ryan’s Bluesky.

Articles Mentioned in this Episode

https://atlpresscollective.com/2026/07/28/flock-cameras-atlanta-clearance-rates/

https://ij.org/police-have-reportedly-used-license-plate-readers-to-stalk-romantic-interests-at-least-14-times-in-recent-years/

https://www.commondreams.org/news/police-abusing-flock-cameras

https://immpolicytracking.org/policies/reported-ice-accessing-flock-automated-license-plate-reader-cameras-via-local-law-enforcement/

https://cybernews.com/privacy/de-flock-america-halloween-flock-surveillance-cameras/

https://www.cnet.com/home/security/flocks-ai-cameras-may-have-misread-over-70-of-license-plates-creating-new-headaches-for-cities/

https://www.404media.co/flock-taught-cops-how-to-surveil-no-kings-protesters/

https://www.gadgetreview.com/flock-safety-employees-watched-kids-gymnastics-room-to-pitch-surveillance-tech

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-texas-cop…
The ‘End Times Fascists’ of AI, ft. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor

13 september 2026 · 1 uur 4 min
Afspelen

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: Lees meer

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/

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The real AI jobs apocalypse

4 september 2026 · 58 min
Afspelen

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. Lees meer

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-ne…
The revolt against Meta’s ‘pervert glasses’ is part of a growing storm

28 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 6 min
Afspelen

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. Lees meer

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 o…
Charting the rise of tech fascism

21 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 2 min
Afspelen

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. Lees meer

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 t…