meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
Bad Faith

Episode 558 Promo - The Techno Dystopia Has Arrived (w/ Dr. Anita Say Chan)

Bad Faith

Bad Faith

Comedy, News, Politics

4.52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 16 March 2026

⏱️ 8 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Scholar of science and technology studies and Associate Professor of Information Sciences and Media Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Anita Say Chan, is back to break down the fight between the Pentagon and Claude A.I., & explain big tech's increasingly obvious and ominous gestures to a techno feudalist future where intelligence is paywalled, human bodies exist to be rented by AI agents, and big tech runs the American military machine.

Subscribe to Bad Faith on YouTube for video of this episode. Find Bad Faith on Twitter (@badfaithpod) and Instagram (@badfaithpod).

Produced by Armand Aviram.

Theme by Nick Thorburn (@nickfromislands).

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

The Pentagon has been, of course, interested in the state overall. Trump's sort of administration has been heavily invested, of course, in AI and the AI industries. He's pulled back and essentially encouraged a pull back on regulations. And we've seen how essentially bringing the tech industry, but explicitly the AI industry into alignment with the Trump administration, with his administration,

0:23.2

has been part of the goals from day one.

0:27.2

And we saw that, especially with the kinds of overtures to bringing them in,

0:31.1

not just for those sort of visuals where you could literally see the heads of everyone from Open AI to meta, to Google, et cetera, all sort of again, like in alignment,

0:36.2

literally right behind him for the kind

0:38.2

of inauguration, but also in the kinds of early heads of industry kinds of meetings where he's

0:44.3

really brought in a number of them to Mar-a-Lago, into these sorts of other sorts of spaces where

0:49.2

there would be international negotiations being parlayed. So you can see, again, that he's

0:53.7

trying to align the U.S.

0:55.8

interests, the national interest alongside that of the AI industry and kind of keeping them all at

1:01.1

play and trying to essentially also keep the AI industry and check with him to underscore over

1:06.7

and over again how much is at stake. The billions and billions of dollars on contracting

1:11.1

that's at stake, essentially for the end, beyond that, also land grabs with the kind of fight

1:17.3

for various infrastructures and the data center build out that's getting, and the need for the

1:21.8

enormous amount of new energy resourcing that will require. All of that is at play. And you can see them all essentially

1:29.5

happily keeping themselves in alignment with each other for this kind of land and money and

1:34.0

power grab. So this articulates though and very kind of concrete though layers when you start

1:39.7

to see this kind of now application of AI into the Pentagon and to the department, the State Department

1:46.6

and to the national security interests where they are explicitly contracting AI companies

1:51.4

for some version of security and defense needs.

1:54.7

You saw that we all got to see some version of the Pentagon getting some pushback, some

1:58.6

pushback from Anthropics, saying that the Pentagon's

...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Bad Faith, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Bad Faith and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.