Blood in the Machine

A newsletter focusing on technology, empowerment, and the relevance of the Luddites today.

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The original slop: How capitalism degraded art 400 years before AI

1 week ago | bloodinthemachine.com | Mike Pearl

Greetings all — I’ve got something a little different today: The first original BITM guest post, from the great writer and editor Mike Pearl. Mike is a former VICE columnist, the author of The Day It Finally Happens, a frequent contributor to the New Republic, and a good friend. After the Studio Ghibli AI slopfest hit critical mass a couple weeks ago—it is, unfortunately, still ongoing—Mike sent me the following essay.
Black Mirror's 5 best broadsides against big tech

1 week ago | bloodinthemachine.com | Brian Merchant

I’m old enough to remember when Black Mirror first dropped, and the anthology sci-fi show was widely received as transgressive, even shocking. Here was a smart, often legitimately unsettling suite of dark modern Twilight Zone fables, all built around the ways new technologies might be used (typically by faceless corporations just off screen) to corrode our humanity. It was, in other words, a luddite show, at a time when “luddite” was still very much a pejorative.
Therapists went on a hunger strike to protest 'assembly line' conditions and the automation of mental healthcare

1 week ago | bloodinthemachine.com | Brian Merchant

Mental health professionals at the giant consortium Kaiser Permanente started a five-day hunger a strike in Los Angeles on Monday this week, an escalation of a broader strike that has ground on since October 2024. The workers are fighting for more time spent with patients and better pay, and against algorithmic triage and an assembly line-style of providing mental healthcare.
Turning the little screws

2 weeks ago | bloodinthemachine.com | Brian Merchant

In the summer of 2016, just months before Donald Trump was elected president for the first time, I snuck into what was then the world’s largest iPhone factory. Officially called the Longhua Science and Technology Park, it was better known as Foxconn City, named after the massive subcontractor that handles the bulk of Apple’s product manufacturing.
Flyover Country

2 weeks ago | bloodinthemachine.com | Brian Merchant

When the clip of Howard Lutnick announcing his vision for post-tariff America—millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones—went viral, I immediately thought of “Flyover Country.” Back in 2016, right after Trump was elected the first time, his cabinet *also* talked endlessly about bringing electronics manufacturing back to the US, alongside the anti-immigrant and mass deportation rhetoric.
The currents of anti-oligarchy protest, and a great tick-tock nonfiction thriller about revolution

2 weeks ago | bloodinthemachine.com | Brian Merchant

On Saturday, I brought my boys down to Culver City in LA, where hundreds of people lined the streets outside city hall. Folks were packed on both sides of Culver Boulevard, even commandeering the median, with signs and verve and plenty willingness to chant and yell and cheer. The boys delighted in the more vulgar chants (“Fuck this shit!”) and climbed trees to wave signs of their own.
Welcome to the age of AI-generated economic collapse

2 weeks ago | bloodinthemachine.com | Brian Merchant

Greetings fellow bloodied machinists — The fun never ends. Last week was marked by national security-threatening Signal chats and the socially mediated march of fascism; the broad daylight disappearing of students and state-produced content humiliating immigrants. This week, we’re dealing with all that *and* a haphazardly instigated global trade war that threatens to tank the US into recession—and which sure seems to have been hashed out by ChatGPT.
The powerful, kid-friendly tech criticism of one of the best Studio Ghibli films

3 weeks ago | bloodinthemachine.com | Brian Merchant

One of the reasons that the AI-generated Ghibli meme phenomenon—and especially the OpenAI-perpetrated Miyazaki disrespect—irked me so much is because we’re a Studio Ghibli family over here. Sorry Pixar, but no animation studio has a better hit rate for films the entire family can legitimately enjoy. My Neighbor Totoro and Ponyo are favorites, but we also field a lot of requests for deeper cuts like TheSecret World of Arrietty and The Cat Returns.
Get your Signal group chats together and get out there

3 weeks ago | bloodinthemachine.com | Brian Merchant

This was a bad week. I’m not sure I’d try to justify a claim that it was particularly bad in the scheme of an already interminable parade of bad weeks, but it was certainly bad. Maybe it was the combo of malicious executive incompetence in SignalGate with demonstrations of state power that openly aspire to fascism; the daytime abductions of students and socially mediated migrant Salvadoran prison tours with Trump officials.
OpenAI's Studio Ghibli meme factory is an insult to art itself

4 weeks ago | bloodinthemachine.com | Brian Merchant

“I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself” -Hayao Miyazaki, on AI tools. Miyazaki’s AI criticism is largely limited to a handful of comments from a single video clip, but it’s enough to make the Studio Ghibli co-founder one of the most famous AI skeptics in the canon. In the 8 year-old clip, Miyazaki is presented with a crude AI demo displaying a zombie-like figure that has ‘learned’ to walk.