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Blood in the Machine
Writing and reporting on AI, tech, labor and power. For everyone Silicon Valley is happening to. Click to read Blood in the Machine, by Brian Merchant, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
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- 188 from 20 Jun 2023 to 30 Oct 2026
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- weekly (70 in the last year)
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2026 57
- Data centers, AI, and the 2026 elections. Ft. Paris Marx.
- We cannot under any circumstances let AI firms govern the future
- The big tech defectors you’re not hearing about
- California vs. the tech billionaires
- The 15 best Luddite horror films
- The two words the AI industry hates more than anything
- California just passed the strongest AI labor laws in the US
- What’s really behind AI ‘super intelligence’
- The AI extinction narrative is winning out
- How to kick Flock out of your town
- The ‘End Times Fascists’ of AI, ft. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor
- The politics and possibilities of ‘AI could kill us all’
- The real AI jobs apocalypse
- Why office workers are turning against AI
- The revolt against Meta’s ‘pervert glasses’ is part of a growing storm
- With the backlash to data centers, Flock and AI glasses, a mass opposition to big tech is underway. Silicon Valley is in denial.
- Charting the rise of tech fascism
- The State of the AI Bubble with Ed Zitron
- The Odyssey as tech criticism
- What is an 'Elon Musk'?
- "Everyone hates AI" in Paris
- Xbox workers speak out about layoffs, AI, and how big tech brought a crisis to gaming
- What VAR tells us about AI
- The Luddites take New York
- How and why to de-Google your life
- The AI industry is pouring hundreds of millions into US elections
- Understanding the Luddites in the age of AI
- How to use AI doom marketing to dupe the media and rake in billions in 10 easy steps
- Working class neighborhoods are resisting data centers at 5 times the rate of wealthy ones
- How Anthropic used AI ethics slop to play the pope and eclipse OpenAI
- They just formed the biggest tech worker union in the US. They plan to rein in AI and curb layoffs
- AI as the new avatar of American capitalism
- The AI-inflected crisis artists are facing, in 4 charts
- The data center rebellion is only the beginning
- Palantir is overplaying its hand. Plus: Tim Cooks's real legacy
- Monterey Park becomes the first city in California to ban "all data centers within city limits"
- A brief history of techno-negativity
- BLOOD IN THE MACHINE is looking for a podcast producer
- Why the AI backlash has turned violent
- AI firms and their US military ties, "a whole civilization will die tonight" edition
- It's open season for refusing AI
- AI's aesthetics of failure
- The first basic income for workers impacted by AI has begun sending out $1,000 monthly payments
- Conan O'Brien, tech critic
- "If AI is writing the work and AI is reading the work, do we even need to be there at all?" Educators reveal a growing crisis on campus and off
- Warning Signs
- The most aggressively anti-AI film of the ChatGPT era
- Actually, the left is winning the AI debate
- Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras
- Five takeaways from an unhinged AI discourse
- Google is stifling anti-ICE speech in the workplace as 1,200 employees call on the company to cut ties
- How Jeff Bezos and Amazon became instruments of authoritarianism
- On the smokescreen of AGI, and fighting for workers in the age of Trump and the tech oligarchy
- The lines have been drawn
- What Trump really wants with AI
- Abolish the senses
- Busy
2025 87
- The best books, films and TV about AI + tech in 2025
- There has to be a way
- "I was forced to use AI until the day I was laid off." Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry
- A code red for AI
- Journalists win a key battle over AI in the newsroom
- A bloody Cyber Monday discount
- How to quit Spotify
- Lost in the slop layer
- Trump and big tech take two more stabs at ending AI democracy
- Guillermo del Toro's 'Frankenstein' gets the monster right for the age of AI
- How to dis-enshittify the world, with Cory Doctorow
- What’s really going on with AI and jobs?
- Understanding the tech oligarchy and its gilded rage with Jacob Silverman
- How artists behind Marvel, Alien, and the Matrix are fighting AI
- How to win followers and influence people (to subscribe to your newsletter)
- Silicon Valley's capture of our political institutions is all but complete
- AI profiteering is now indistinguishable from trolling
- The incredible arrogance of OpenAI
- "AI is an attack from above on wages": An interview with cognitive scientist Hagen Blix
- We're about to find out if Silicon Valley owns Gavin Newsom
- The Luddite Renaissance is in full swing
- Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI
- The killing of Charlie Kirk and the end of the "global town square"
- Cognitive scientists and AI researchers make a forceful call to reject “uncritical adoption" of AI in academia
- One of the last, best hopes for saving the open web and a free press is dead
- A $500 billion tech company's core software product is encouraging child suicide
- Ground the choppers
- AI Killed My Job: Translators
- How California feels about AI
- The real winner of the AI boom so far? Big Cloud
- GPT-5 is a joke. Will it matter?
- AI disagreements
- Automating the mass shooting victim
- The AI bubble is so big it's propping up the US economy (for now)
- On AGI, mass automation, and what the Luddites really fought against
- Trump's AI Action Plan is a blueprint for dystopia
- How big tech is force-feeding us AI
- The struggle over AI in journalism is escalating
- The budget bill opens the floodgates for state surveillance tech and bad AI
- Don't forget what Silicon Valley tried to do
- Hundreds of workers mobilize to 'Stop Gen AI' and help each other survive AI automation
- AI Killed My Job: Tech workers
- A moral crusade against AI takes shape
- This is the gentle singularity?
- The weaponization of Waymo
- Elon Musk's job has already been automated
- The "AI jobs apocalypse" is for the bosses
- An 'always on' OpenAI device is a massive backlash waiting to happen
- OpenAI's desperate quest to become an AI monopoly
- Dismantling the Empire of AI with Karen Hao
- Behind Silicon Valley and the GOP’s campaign to ban state AI laws
- Four bad AI futures take root
- Did AI kill your job?
- The AI jobs crisis is here, now
- DOGE's AI-powered Take Your Child to Work Day
- How federal workers can organize to stop DOGE
- The fury at 'America's Most Powerful'
- The original slop: How capitalism degraded art 400 years before AI
- The five best Luddite episodes of Black Mirror
- Therapists went on a hunger strike to protest 'assembly line' conditions and the automation of mental healthcare
- Turning the little screws
- Flyover Country
- The currents of anti-oligarchy protest and a great tick-tock nonfiction thriller about revolution
- This is what AI-generated trade policy looks like
- The powerful tech criticism of one of the best Studio Ghibli films
- Get your Signal group chats together and get out there
- OpenAI's Studio Ghibli meme factory is an insult to art itself
- Deconstructing the new American oligarchy
- DOGE's 'AI-first' strategist is now the head of technology at the Department of Labor
- OpenAI and Google's dark new campaign to dismantle artists' protections
- So the LA Times replaced me with an AI that defends the KKK
- Workers know exactly who AI will serve
- The mass firing of federal tech workers at 18F is one of DOGE's most overtly political acts yet
- The great horror film that predicted our cultish post-truth predicament
- AI companies are spamming federal workers' key online hub
- What's really behind Elon Musk and DOGE's AI schemes
- 'AI is in its empire era'
- The tech oligarchs and their AI are taking over. Let's fight back.
- The federal tech workers facing down DOGE
- Why Meta's bleak 'AI vision' is winning out
- Government by Grok
- The Critical AI Report, January 2025
- The great undermining of the American AI industry
- Elon Musk did the Nazi salute on live TV to prove he could
- Martin Luther King Jr's prescient criticism of technology and power
- The tech oligarchy has been here for years
- The fires are everywhere
2024 38
- The year ends with our hammers up
- The Critical AI Report, December 2024 Edition
- The rage transcends
- ChatGPT's weird and very quiet second birthday
- No thanks to an AI book generation
- Tech under Trump
- Bluesky's success is a rejection of big tech's operating system
- Silicon Valley got what it wanted
- How bad will it get?
- One year of Blood in the Machine (the book)
- A complete guide to luddite horror films
- Elon Musk's tech projects are inseparable from his authoritarian one
- AI will never solve this
- Yes, the striking dockworkers were Luddites. And they won.
- In California, no AI bill is safe
- Silicon Valley and investors are betting that OpenAI's project is too big to fail
- AI is revitalizing the fossil fuels industry, and big tech has nothing to say for itself
- Kamala Harris vs. Donald Trump on tech, AI, and antitrust
- Surprise, the most influential people in AI are also the richest
- This Labor Day, let's consider how we want technology to work for *us*
- How a bill meant to save journalism from big tech ended up boosting AI and bailing out Google instead
- The artists fighting to save their jobs and their work from AI are gaining ground
- This is the beginning of the end of the generative AI boom
- The great and justified rage over using AI to automate the arts
- Every startup in JD Vance's VC fund, ranked from least to most hillbilly elegiac
- AI is not "democratizing creativity." It's doing the opposite
- On the Supreme Court rulings, the great debate disaster, and how big tech stands to profit from it all
- The most powerful takedowns of generative AI, from those who know its impacts best
- AI can't fix what automation already broke
- Understanding the real threat generative AI poses to our jobs
- Why is Sam Altman so obsessed with 'Her'? An investigation
- For tech CEOs, the dystopia is the point
- "Crush!"
- AI really is smoke and mirrors
- The tide is turning against OpenAI
- Let's not do this again, please
- Torching the Google car: Why the growing revolt against big tech just escalated
- The AI companies' battle-tested plan to keep using our content without paying for it