Dystopia Now

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On this special Patreon episode, we talked to antitrust hero and Fordham University law professor Zephyr Teachout about surveillance pricing and surveillance wages.
From airlines charging us more to fly home if they see we've recently searched "funeral arrangements" to rideshare companies paying less per ride if your bank account is low, we explored the present and future possibilities of data as a tool for economic and labor exploitation.
Book Mentioned
Karen Levy, Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance

Further Reading
FTC Report, https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/ftc-surveillance-pricing-study-indicates-wide-range-personal-data-used-set-individualized-consumer

ACLU Report, https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/surveillance-pricing

Electronic Frontier Foundation on surveillance pricing, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/08/fight-surveillance-pricing-we-need-privacy-first

Maryland ban on surveillance pricing, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/29/maryland-grocery-stores-ban-surveillance-pricing

New York legislation, https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/politics/2026/05/19/surveillance-pricing-

Cory Doctorow on surveillance wages, https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-04-06-empiricism-washing-veena-dubal-d63fef485503

In this week's episode we begin to go into the philosophy around consciousness and AI as New Atheist relic Richard Dawkins recently claimed "Claudia" was conscious. What are the merits and issues of thinking about consciousness in the context of AI? Later we discuss a recent piece in Jacobin arguing against data center resistance.
Further Reading
Richard Dawkins in Unherd, https://unherd.com/2026/05/when-claudia-met-claudius

Holly Buck in Jacobin, https://jacobin.com/2026/04/ai-data-center-moratorium-democracy 

Émile in Salon, https://www.salon.com/2017/07/29/from-the-enlightenment-to-the-dark-ages-how-new-atheism-slid-into-the-alt-right/

Taylor Lorenz podcast episode, https://sites.libsyn.com/566555/site/big-tech-is-watching-you-with-taylor-lorenz 

Brian Merchant on Substack, https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-data-center-rebellion-is-only

In this week's episode, we explore a question no one has ever thought of before: "What is violence?"
We unpack the recent Molotov cocktail attack on Sam Altman's home and how his own rhetoric about (checks notes), "killing every human on earth with AI", may be leading people who take him seriously to act in extreme ways. We explore Altman's vision for the future and the violence inherent within it.
Further Reading
"The Merge" essay by Sam Altman, December 2017: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-merge

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/18/sam-altman-house-attack-ai

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/opinion/sam-altman-attack-ai-silicon-valley.html

https://www.wired.com/story/sam-altman-home-attack-openai-san-franisco-office-threat/

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Quinn Slobodian, historian of neoliberalism, and Ben Tarnoff, internet and technology writer, join us to unpack how Musk's fears and fantasies are shaping our world. 
Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed is available now in the United States (Harper) and UK (Penguin).
Quinn Slobodian is professor of international history at Boston University, and the author or editor of seven books translated into ten languages including, Hayek's Bastards: Race (winner of the NBCC award for criticism), Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy, and Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. In 2024, the Prospect Magazine (UK) named him one of the World's 25 Top Thinkers.
Ben Tarnoff is a writer and technologist based in Massachusetts and is the author of Internet for the People and the co-author of Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do—And How They Do It. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and has also written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the New Republic, among other publications.

Prof. Emily M. Bender, linguist, and Dr. Alex Hanna, sociologist join us to discuss their 2025 book The AI Con and how Big Tech spun marketing around "stochastic parrots".

Find lots more from Emily and Alex on their podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 from the Distributed AI Research Institute!
Books Mentioned
Emily Bender & Alex Hanna, The AI Con

Rua M. Williams, Disabling Intelligences: Legacies of Eugenics and How We are Wrong about AI

Further Reading
Bender, et. al, "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?", https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922