As Enterprise AI goes full state capture and as Elon Musk’s freshmen engineers get their hands on all the data of the US federal government, Helen and Audrey team up again to ask: was this always going to be the end game? We look at AI’s 75-year-old relationship with white nationalism, eugenics and military violence, and we ask whether AI as a ‘general’ technology could ever escape these associations. Audrey anticipates a new era of edtech investment that will drive venture capital and data architectures even deeper into public education. While Helen muses on the AI Action Plan of the UK government that - despite its very different vibe - is putting UK data and public services into the hands of many of the same US corporations that are bringing us Project25.
It seems the tech news has become the news, and whatever madness that brings into the world in the coming days and weeks, you’ll want to get your sanity check here.
Limited show notes this week, but you might like to check out:
Some recent commentary on the Elon Musk moment (sure to be out of date by now) from the UK Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/08/elon-musk-doge-team-staff
And from the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/05/elon-musk-federal-technology-takeover/
Up-to-date takes on tech history-in-the-making are often posted here: https://futurism.com/.
Daniel Greene’s book, mentioned by Audrey: The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope (MIT Press): https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262542333/the-promise-of-access/
Feminist critiques of AI from the 1980s and 1990s, mentioned by Helen (most of these require a log-in):
Alison Adam: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/135050689500200305
Lynette Hunter: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rh.1991.9.4.317
Donna Haraway: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3178066
Lucy Suchman (still writing brilliantly on this topic today): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20539517231206794
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