ARC Future Fellow – Monash University // co-host – @machinekillspod // latest book – The Mechanic and The Luddite https://xitter.cf/t.co/Rgzl9unYdU

Naarm / Melbourne
Joined April 2012
Thrilled to announce the official publication of my new book — The Mechanic and the Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism Grab my book to go beyond the vaporous hype and get the real material analysis of technological capitalism that we all need!
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Palmer Luckey is such a try hard comic book villain. Everything about him, every choice he makes, is like if the "muahaha" evil laugh became a real boy.
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🚨479. Trust Doesn’t Care About Your Feelings (ft. @KateKayeReports)🚨 We talk all about the history and future of trying to measure trust by turning it into quantified, objective feature of the world, rather than a dynamic, affective relationship between people.
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When I talk about how the risk modelling that underpins insurance (among other things) is socially constructed and directly influenced by the corporate interests of insurers, this is what I mean. It's not a conspiracy undermining the science of risk; it's just business-as-usual.
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Here we have two anonymous whistleblows — a report from (re)insurance executives and an op-ed from an insurance risk modeller — both sounding the alarm about the ways that corporate interest are applying pressure on how climate risks are modelled and priced.
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We are in the heyday of movies about tech founders which recognize their subjects are terrible people but cannot abandon this belief that they are geniuses who were just too ambitious. These people are petty, stupid, and cynical. Any other representation is hagiography.
All in. Every time. Julia Garner and Anthony Boyle star as Caroline Ellison and Sam Bankman-Fried in this limited series about the love scorned prodigies behind the FTX scandal. The Altruists premieres November 19.
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Jathan Sadowski retweeted
What does the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident reveal about AI discourse? This episode argues that debate treats AI less as a set of explainable machine-learning systems than as a mystified force. W/ @jathansadowski & @bigblackjacobin on @machinekillspod buff.ly/AueQIHb
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Proud to live in a Luddite Nation — now if only our institutions and leaders trusted people’s concerns and accepted their skepticism as legitimate, rather than working overtime for tech companies to make us trust, accept, and use their AI systems. abc.net.au/news/2026-09-25/t…
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Jathan Sadowski retweeted
QUICK now do crypto and your role in promulgating it!
one of the 21st century's great tragedies is that millions of smart people were convinced to bury their heads in the sand by either stochastic parrots discourse or Zitron-style capabilities denialism and haven't updated based on new evidence. nature is healing but it's so late.
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Rather than treating ML as a technology that does things in ways that can be explained and contextualized, even when our understanding is murky or incomplete, AI is proffered as an emergent god with mystified intentions, a great becoming that is horrifying and awe-inspiring.
🚨475. Never Let a Computer Tell Me Shit🚨 We jump off from the OpenAI - Hugging Face hack to discuss the misleading, cynical, and hysterical ways we talk about AI and the stranglehold that existential risk has on our framings and discourses.
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As an academic I feel like that I'm living in that scene in The Big Short where they see all the empty houses and know it's a bubble, but for me it's hearing about all the innovation and growth in higher education, then teaching a class where only 8/250 students show up weekly
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I wish it were just a me problem, but academics now brag about having 30% attendance rates and bumping it up to 50% when there's an in-class quiz. A colleague had to teach to an *empty* room b/c nobody showed up but the seminar was being recorded for future classes.
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Shit is dire. All the universities are investing in AI, while pumping up their growth numbers, but on the ground, in the classrooms, all the McMansions in Florida are empty.
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Jathan Sadowski retweeted
A 'tidal wave' of forever chemicals are being pumped out to satisfy the AI industry, according to The Guardian. Nearly all of the 10 biggest manufacturers of Pfas are planning to increase production for use in semi-conductors and data center cooling systems. These toxic chemicals never break down in nature and are linked to cancer. theguardian.com/environment/…
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Jathan Sadowski retweeted
that’s because you have to strain to read Neo-Luddism as a backwards movement. the truth was there all along for those with eyes to see!
the butlerian jihad used to read as a backwards neo-luddite movement. now it is clear that it is 1 of maybe 3 viable paths forward. in some sense it may be a part of every path forward. incredible how prescient Herbert was. it does seem like there really might be a cap to how far this technology should develop, at least relative to human cognition itself (which may update over time).
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Jathan Sadowski retweeted
the work done by people like @veenadubal and Katie Wells is some of the best not just articulating outrage but trying to point towards a different political and moral economy. we are building a monstrous future and it escapes our notice because it is built experiment by experiment on those of us who are the most vulnerable to this sort of predation—that is, before it's eventually turned on the rest of us! dissentmagazine.org/article/…
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Jathan Sadowski retweeted
Bernie is a Luddite which is why he’s correct. Whether or not you believe in the risk here, we should pursue safeguards and we should push for reforms that shift control over the direction of these technology from private to public hands!
Bernie is the only major politician trying to raise awareness of alignment risk, and he’s just being screamed at by the right for being a Luddite and the left for believing the hyperscaler hype.
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Sometimes you read a manuscript that is written in such a wacky, idiosyncratic way that you know it's not AI generated. You don't even have to wonder. Cranks who use AI are dangerous. Cranks who do not use AI must be protected.
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Jathan Sadowski retweeted
This essay talks about the left's vision for technology, the "alliance" between left and right-wing anti-data center movements, politics of refusal, democratic control over the AI infrastructure buildout, China, industrial policy, and more. thetechbubble.info/p/the-fut…
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