Blood in the Machine

If you’ve heard anything at all about the midterm elections, you’ve heard at least two things: it’s going to be a ‘blue wave’ in which Democrats are poised for major electoral gains, and that everyone involved hates data centers.
We’re all used to hearing about that data center hate now, it’s almost a given; “the single most bipartisan issue in politics,” and so on, but I want to pause to underline how remarkable this is. This time last year, data centers were a niche issue in a handful of local political fights. Now they’re one of America’s most visible, universal and undeniable political battlegrounds.
To investigate how we got here, I sit down with Paris Marx; tech reporter, critic, and author of the new book Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires. Plus, I dig into three things we should be watching during the midterm elections next week.
Hyperscale by Paris MarxParis’s Disconnect NewsletterParis on Bluesky
Brian’s Bluesky
Producer Ryan’s NewsletterRyan’s Bluesky
Stories Mentioned
Texas sues OpenAI, Sam Altman over product safety - POLITICO
Media — Angela Gonzales-Torres for Congress
James Talarico on X: “There is something deeply wrong with a political system that allows one trillionaire to buy his own personal U.S. Senator.” / X
Elon Musk’s America PAC Is Quietly Funding November’s Most Consequential Elections
SpaceX and Tesla have high election stakes as Elon Musk pours $366 million into campaigns
Ohio Senate special election | Tech Influence Watch
Leading the Future | Tech Influence Watch
Exclusive: GOP warns AI companies that data centers are politically radioactive
AI and data centers are incredibly unpopular in every poll | The Verge
The data center backlash reveals NIMBYism’s great contradiction
Texas gubernatorial election, 2026 - Ballotpedia
Data Centers | Gina Hinojosa for Texas Governor
Elon Musk Is Trying To Buy Texas. It Might Earn Him ‘Retribution.’
How Billionaires Are Fighting the Prop 40 California Wealth Tax - The New York Times
https://thewatt.org/en/nota/gas-centros-datos-capacidad-eeuu/
Majority of US’s new AI datacenters to be built on drought-hit land
Exclusive: 75% of Americans Now Oppose Local Data Center Development - Heatmap News
Cheyenne Won’t Take Data Center Wastewater After Meta Contractor Contaminated System | Cowboy State Daily
Why Do Data Centers Use So Much Water? Understanding the Hidden Environmental Cost | Waterless Co Inc.
Canada’s AI minister blames OpenAI for ‘failure’ after mass shooting - POLITICO
ChatGPT Gave Me Chilling Advice—as I Simulated Planning a Mass Shooting – Mother Jones
The Deepfake Nudes Crisis in Schools Is Much Worse Than You Thought | WIRED
Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon call for curbs on AI at ‘pro-human’ summit | US politics | The Guardian
Character.ai’s Bankruptcy Documents Show the Economics of AI Don’t Work
Scoop: Andreessen Horowitz lays off “majority” of portfolio recruiting team
Anthropic posts staggering $80.7 billion net loss in first half of 2026 as IPO approaches - Tech Startups
Investors dump data centre bonds as AI borrowers face ‘Darwin moment’
$64 billion of data center projects have been blocked or delayed amid local opposition


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Among the biggest stories in the tech world of late have been the string of high-profile resignations of workers at the major AI companies. Employees like Jacob Coxon at Anthropic have quit their jobs with splashy warnings that AI companies might build a machine god so powerful it exterminates humanity. Those workers get invited onto primetime news shows and weeks of high-profile media coverage.
And yet, workers who’ve protested, resigned, or been fired for speaking up about the harms these companies are causing right now are given nowhere near the same treatment. This is maddening, because the AI companies are currently, as we speak, helping to automate, abet and facilitate mass death in Iran, Gaza, and Ukraine; we don’t have to speculate about some future tragedy; the tech companies are directly involved in those tragedies, right now, as I speak these words.
This week, on Blood in the Machine, we’ll talk with another employee who was fired from Apple after speaking out against the company’s policies with regards to Palestine, and its treatment of Palestinian employees. Tariq Ra’ouf helped found Apples Against Apartheid, and on October 23, the launch day for iPhone Duo, the group calls on communities everywhere to picket their local Apple Stores.
Tariq Ra’ouf on InstagramApples Against Apartheid
Blood in the Machine: The NewsletterBrian’s Bluesky
Producer Ryan’s NewsletterRyan’s Bluesky
Stories Mentioned
Apple facing new forced labor and child labor charges - FreedomUnited
US group sues Apple over Congo conflict minerals | CNBC Africa
Apple accused by DR Congo of using conflict minerals
Protesters worldwide claim that Apple is complicit in human rights violations in the DRC and Gaza; co. did not respond
Apple Accused of Using “Blood Minerals” in the Congo
Apple employees demand CEO Tim Cook speak up for Palestinian lives
Team Congo
Friends of the Congo
Rotten to the Core: How the Gaza genocide has revealed anti-Palestinian racism at Apple – Mondoweiss
“When the Bubble Bursts”: Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor on Reclaiming Democracy from AI Oligarchs
The Ukraine ‘Kill Zone’ Is AI’s Testing Ground - WSJ
Iran war shows how AI speeds up military ‘kill chains’
Probes Reveal Depth of Big Tech Complicity in Israel’s AI-Driven Gaza Slaughter | Common Dreams
Google DeepMind Engineer Resigns in Protest of Pentagon Contract
Brazil’s President Lula Accuses Meta of Helping His Right-Wing Opponent - The New York Times
Musk Ordered Starlink Slowdown That Blindsided Ukraine - WSJ


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It’s election season, and while most of the national conversation is focused on the midterms and the increasing likelihood that Democrats will take back the House and perhaps even the Senate, in California, the eyes of the tech elite are focused on another target: The ballot measure Proposition 40, aka the billionaire tax.
Prop 40 would enact a one-time 5% wealth tax on the 250 or so billionaires that reside in California, and redirect the funding towards healthcare and education. Predictably, billionaires are furious about the idea; leading opponents include Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who, along with other ultra-wealthy Californians, has spent some $200 million dollars to oppose the measure.
Today, on Blood in the Machine, we’re going to dive into these fights, with the woman who’s at the center of many of them. Lorena Gonzalez is a former state legislator and current president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, and she’s a driving force supporting both Prop 40 and the slate of new laws designed to protect workers from AI.
California Labor Federation
Blood in the Machine NewsletterBrian’s Bluesky
Producer Ryan’s NewsletterRyan’s Bluesky
Articles Mentioned
California just passed the strongest AI labor laws in the US
California Proposition 40, One-Time Wealth Tax for State-Funded Healthcare, Education, and Food Assistance Programs Initiative (2026) - Ballotpedia
Paramount completes $111B Warner merger, creating “Skydance” behemoth - Ars Technica
Newsom signs landmark bill aimed at giving lifeline to struggling California newsrooms - Los Angeles Times
The NO FAKES Act
AI in hiring and firing: California’s No Robo Bosses Act
Get the Facts: NO on PROP 40
An AI School, With No Teachers, To Open in Chicago This Fall
The billionaires fight back: Propositions 41 and 42 could kill California’s billionaire tax even if it passes
Billionaire Google Co-Founder Pumps $102 Million Into Fighting California Wealth Tax | Common Dreams
California Billionaires Are Spending Big in Costly Wealth-Tax Fight
The Blue Wave Could Reshape Politics in the South | The New Republic
$200 million-plus spent fighting and supporting billionaire tax - Los Angeles Times
Gavin Newsom backs measure to kill the billionaire tax and ban future wealth taxes
Gavin Newsom opposes California’s $100 billion billionaire tax. The fight may outlast the vote
Billionaire Tax Explained: What Proposition 40 Would Mean for California
Google co-founder Sergey Brin spends $102M opposing California Prop. 40 | abc10.com
California’s ‘carpet-bombed’ wealth tax measure runs into a wall - POLITICO


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“Stochastic parrots,” a term coined in an influential 2021 paper written by two AI researchers and two computational linguists, essentially holds that large language models are not “intelligent” but are rather systems that output material based on what’s in their training data. Now, while LLMs and technologies described as AI today have become more sophisticated and complex over the last 5 years, the term remains a fundamentally accurate way of describing LLMs.
Yet the industry hates it like the plague. AI industry folks absolutely lose their minds over the term, and often bring it up, unprompted, just to try to debunk it again and again.
Why does this particular term have a unique capacity to enrage AI industry folks? I had a theory that, even more so than other critiques about shaky financing or dubious functionality, stochastic parrots undercuts the very foundation that the AI boom is built on: That tech companies are building a machine god of infinite power and potential. These firms have relied on narrative to build up and to sell to the world a very expensive, resource-consumptive technology. If it turns out it’s an unthinking system that’s often fallible in predictable ways, well, that might not be worth quite as many trillions of dollars.
To discuss this theory in greater depth, I thought I’d go right to the source—to one of the paper’s co-authors, professor Emily M. Bender, of the University of Washington.
Quick PSA: I can only do this work thanks to readers, listeners, and viewers who chip in a few bucks each month to help me keep the lights on. If you’re one of them, you have my sincere thanks; you’re the reason I can cover subjects and do the sort of reporting so few others will. If you’re a fan of the “Great 2026 Blood in the Machine Podcast Experiment” or appreciate what we’re doing here, consider upgrading to a paid subscription; it takes no small amount of work to book great guests, research, write, and produce the thing, and we’re early days yet. Okay! That’s enough from me; thanks for tuning in, and hammers up.
Articles and media mentioned in the show:
The “Stochastic Parrots” paperStochastic Parrots 🦜: Frequently Unasked Questions | by Emily M. Bender | MediumEmily M. Bender on BlueSkyThe AI Con, with Alex Hanna.
Producer Ryan’s NewsletterRyan’s Bluesky
Articles mentioned
AI Bros Are Having a Meltdown Because the Associated Press Stylebook Clarifies That AIs Don’t Have Feelings
Weekend Update: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on AI’s Threat to Humanity - SNL
Alec Stapp on X
Trump AI deal rebrands ‘artificial intelligence’ as ‘superintelligence’ | Donald Trump | The Guardian
Trump’s new accord on ‘super intelligence’ includes spelling error
“White House Accord on Super Intelligence” / X
Stochastic Parrots paper
Stochastic Parrots 🦜: Frequently Unasked Questions | by Emily M. Bender | Medium
Nate Silver on X:
View of The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence
“Be willing to destroy a rogue data center by airstrike” - leading AI alignment researcher pens Time piece calling for ban on large GPU clusters
Canada’s AI minister blames OpenAI for ‘failure’ after mass shooting - POLITICO
Parents of teenager who took his own life sue OpenAI


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While billionaires and world leaders expound the dangers of all-powerful, “super intelligent” AI, the reality on the ground is that it's a tech product that’s only made possible by countless human beings, laboring for sometimes dollars a day, doing work like “cleaning” data sets so they’re usable, scanning books and literature into databases, creating usable content, and moderating the output of AI systems to weed out offensive, gruesome, and racist content. These workers are underpaid, overtaxed, and fighting for better conditions—even as AI executives are declaring that the systems they prop up are so powerful they’re about to extinguish life on the planet.
In the meantime, workers like Joan Kinyua and Michael Geoffery Asia of the Data Labelers Association just want fair pay and basic protections. I recently spoke to both of them about what it’s like to perform crucial work day in and day out and yet be completely invisible to the company that relies on your labor—and to the world at large. To help feed Silicon Valley’s illusion that these systems are actually machine gods. And to fight for better conditions, rights and recognition in spite of it all.
Show Notes
Data Labelers Association
Blood in the Machine NewsletterBrian’s Bluesky
Producer Ryan’s NewsletterRyan’s Bluesky
Articles mentioned
My latest newsletter:
Dario Amodei — We Must Pace the Frontier
The hidden workforce behind every AI tool you use: Announcing the data work landscape 2.0 - TechEquity Collaborative
Altman and Amodei address UN: ‘There are many things that AI cannot and should not automate’
Tech Influence Watch
How to use AI doom marketing to dupe the media and rake in billions in 10 easy steps
Frontier AI safety regulations: A reference for lab staff - METR
AI giants tap into the social media playbook: self-regulation
AI leaders call for tougher protections against AI-aided bioweapons | The Verge
AI Labs Want Someone to Stop Them - Bloomberg
The AI extinction narrative is winning out
Models Don’t Go Rogue
Misleading Metaphors, Real Risks - by Melanie Mitchell
Rapid Response 47 on X: “.@POTUS: The United States totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme of control for Artificial Intelligence


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