Jathan Sadowski

@jathansadowski.com

7934 Followers 275 Following

ARC Future Fellow – Monash University /// co-host – This Machine Kills /// critical insurance tech + climate risk governance /// political economy of technology and capitalism: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520398078/the-mechanic-and-the-luddite

But it was the sheer scale of the proposals, the suddenness with which they’ve appeared and the secrecy surrounding them that is punching emotion into the issue, turning out thousands of Democrats and Republicans for tense town hall meetings around the state. Residents said they often discovered a data center project in their town through a quiet rezoning request by a company no one recognized. They said their small town boards were outmatched compared with wealthy companies in a hurry to break ground.
A new algorithm for determining how much aged care support people can receive to remain living at home is being blamed for reducing care for older Australians. Peter Willcocks, who was on a Department of Health aged care panel, likens the new Integrated Assessment Tool (IAT) system to the Robodebt fiasco because clinical assessors cannot override its algorithm — even if they think the person deserves a higher level of care. Early communications from the department advised assessors they would have the power to "override" the algorithm, but that option was later removed.
side by side pictures of Glenn Beck, Richard Branson, and Steven Bannon below a headline that says Pro-human AI declaration brings together unlikely group calling for trustworthy tech An eclectic group including Steve Bannon, Glenn Beck, Richard Branson, Ralph Nader, Susan Rice and Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu signed the letter.
How AI Impacts Skill Formation Judy Hanwen Shen, Alex Tamkin AI assistance produces significant productivity gains across professional domains, particularly for novice workers. Yet how this assistance affects the development of skills required to effectively supervise AI remains unclear. Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition in the process. We conduct randomized experiments to study how developers gained mastery of a new asynchronous programming library with and without the assistance of AI. We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average. Participants who fully delegated coding tasks showed some productivity improvements, but at the cost of learning the library. We identify six distinct AI interaction patterns, three of which involve cognitive engagement and preserve learning outcomes even when participants receive AI assistance. Our findings suggest that AI-enhanced productivity is not a shortcut to competence and AI assistance should be carefully adopted into workflows to preserve skill formation -- particularly in safety-critical domains.
screenshot of the title and abstract of my paper in Turkish
Picture of a care on fire with graffiti that says "fuck ICE" and the title of the essay: Capitalism Without Humans As new technologies (not immigrants) replace human labor, “machine breaking” as a tactic of rebellion is taking on a renewed vitality. Sarah Jaffe January 21, 2026
left: picture of a woman wearing a sweater and skirt right: same woman pulling down her skirt to reveal a hidden handgun in a holster caption: "imagine getting blicked by a cutie patootie. Bet not run up on Emily at Barnes & Nobles she got sum for ya"
Sam Udotong in - 1st Co-founder & CTO at Fireflies.ai 10h • ••• We charged $100/month for an Al that was really just two guys surviving on pizza. We scaled Fireflies to a $1B valuation after 6 failures from our original crypto food delivery idea. Nothing motivates you more than the pressure of living month to month with no safety net. Before I explain how 2 broke guys validated a $1B idea, you need to understand we were couch surfing while desperately chasing our entrepreneurial dreams. An Al notetaker was our last hope after 6 ideas our friends claimed were "genius". The best way to validate your business idea is by becoming the product yourself. We told our customers there's an "Al that'll join a meeting." In reality it was just me and my co-founder calling in to the meeting sitting there silently and taking notes by hand. When customers scheduled a meeting, we'd manually dial in as "Fred from Fireflies.ai" We'd sit there silently, take detailed notes, and send them 10 minutes later. After taking notes for 100+ meetings (and falling asleep in many), we were finally able to make enough money to pay the $750/month rent for a tiny SF living room. That was the point when we said let's stop and automate everything. The best prototype was 2 guys surviving on pizza. Validation before automation saved us from our 7th failure.
Sam Udotong in - 1st Co-founder & CTO at Fireflies.ai 10h • ••• We charged $100/month for an Al that was really just two guys surviving on pizza. We scaled Fireflies to a $1B valuation after 6 failures from our original crypto food delivery idea. Nothing motivates you more than the pressure of living month to month with no safety net. Before I explain how 2 broke guys validated a $1B idea, you need to understand we were couch surfing while desperately chasing our entrepreneurial dreams. An Al notetaker was our last hope after 6 ideas our friends claimed were "genius". The best way to validate your business idea is by becoming the product yourself. We told our customers there's an "Al that'll join a meeting." In reality it was just me and my co-founder calling in to the meeting sitting there silently and taking notes by hand. When customers scheduled a meeting, we'd manually dial in as "Fred from Fireflies.ai" We'd sit there silently, take detailed notes, and send them 10 minutes later. After taking notes for 100+ meetings (and falling asleep in many), we were finally able to make enough money to pay the $750/month rent for a tiny SF living room. That was the point when we said let's stop and automate everything. The best prototype was 2 guys surviving on pizza. Validation before automation saved us from our 7th failure.
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. This fellowship advances our understanding of climate risk governance across three Workstreams. Workstream 1 will conduct ethnography at insurance industry conferences and with companies building climate risk models. Workstream 2 will engage in research with governments and communities who are managing the risks and realities of uninsurability from natural disasters. Workstream 3 will collaborate with a climate policy think tank to develop innovative policies grounded in original empirical research and conceptual analysis-that advance climate justice.
Luddite Tribunal! Featuring Lizzie O'Shea and Jathan Sadowski Technology is on trial, and you’re the jury. It’s hammer time! Welcome to the Luddite Tribunal where we channel the revolutionary spirit of the Luddites and critically examine the role of digital technologies in our day to day lives with panellists, Jathan Sadowski (host of This Machine Kills podcast) and Lizzie O’Shea (lawyer and digital rights activist). Bring along a piece of technology to be judged or participate as a jury member and help us decide whether an item is an “obnoxious machine” or socially beneficial. Thursday 27 November, 6.30pm Brunswick Library
Rentier capitalism, technofascism and the destruction of the common by Kohei Saito and Ryuji Sasaki This paper critically examines the emerging discourse on technofeudalism. While mainstream narratives celebrate technological advancement driven by American tech giants, proponents of the technofeudalism thesis argue that a new ruling class – ‘cloudalists’ – has supplanted traditional capitalists, extracting data and rent in ways reminiscent of feudal relations. However, this discourse fails to account for the ongoing dynamism of capitalist investment and competition. In contrast, this paper advances the concept of rentier capitalism by revisiting Marx’s analysis in Capital, with particular attention to his often-overlooked theory of ground rent in Volume III. Drawing on Marx’s notebooks published for the first time in the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), the paper argues that rentier capitalism constitutes the most advanced and contradictory form of contemporary capitalism, which accelerates the destruction of the common and undermines the conditions necessary for working-class solidarity. As the dual crisis of capital accumulation and anti-systemic movements intensifies socio-economic and political instability, the threat of an authoritarian turn towards technofascism becomes increasingly imminent.
Bluesky post from Justin Wolfers There are basically only two positions in the debate about Al. 1. I've barely invested any time in learning how to use it effectively. Al sucks. 2. I've invested in learning how to use this tool. Holy cow, it's transformational. Position #1 has lower barriers to entry.
Picture of the book Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley by Jacob Silverman
Witch Power: A Journey Into Contemporary Witchcraft with Emma Quilty Emma Quilty - Friday November 7th at 7pm - Hive Mind Books, 219 Irving Ave, Bushwick
Before LegalZoom reached unicorn status, co-founder Eddie Hartman was actually disinvited to his family's Thanksgiving, because he wouldn't stop asking for money to help fund his dream venture. "Me and my two co-founders invested our own money and then started asking friends and family for help," says Eddie. "We quickly wore out our welcome but it was worth it because we knew how to take what we started and grow it while maintaining profit." Eddie, who is co-author of the new book Scaling Innovation: How Smart Companies Architect Profitable Growth (Wiley), a sequel to the international bestseller Monetizing Innovation, is immediately available for interviews and expert commentary to share the following:
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Court Rules in AAUP v Rubio: Trump Admin Violated First Amendment Home In a landmark ruling, a federal court today ruled that the Trump administration’s policy of arresting, detaining, and deporting noncitizen students and faculty members for their pro-Palestinian advocacy violates the First Amendment. The AAUP, the Middle Eastern Studies Association and several AAUP chapters brought the suit with the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, seeking to block the Trump administration from carrying out large-scale arrests, detentions, and deportations of noncitizen students and faculty members for ideological reasons (typically because of pro-Palestinian speech).
Reframing Our Relationship to Technology Confronting Data Centers, Deep-Sea Cables, and Colonial Legacies in the South Pacific The Cloud is Dead: A Series on Living with Legacies of Resource Extraction
Map of the United States showing data at the county level for insurance premium price difference caused by credit score. The map is titled: What's The Credit Score Penalty in Your County? How Much More a Typical Homeowner Pays in Annual Home Insurance Premiums for Having a Low or Medium Credit Score
Hi Jathan TMK listener here. If you want to keep pronouncing it "resignate," by all means ... But if you want to pronounce it resonate (REZ-on-ate), your malaprop catches my ear, almost every episode. Thanks for all your good work. Kindly, in solidarity,
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.
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.
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.
Even experts who disagree and think there is a deepening climate-driven insurance problem don’t say this will automatically lead to the abrupt meltdowns of the 2008 crisis. Here’s how former California insurance commissioner Dave Jones, a Democrat, put it to me. “Over time you’ll see even more insurance company insolvencies, more insurance price increases and less insurance availability, more mortgage defaults, and falls in asset values and credit freezes; as opposed to a single catastrophic event or events where a bunch of financial institutions nationally go down at once.” Although, he added, “There is some risk of that as well.”