You’ve heard us reference the work of Jay Springett (aka @thejaymo) on nearly every pod this year — so with his new book Slop Machines of Loving Grace near completion, we invited Jay on the show to chat through some of its themes. The book takes 2008 as a breaking point, a moment where the late-20th century financial system imploded and, in its place, society was given a new operating system: one optimized for exocapitalism and shaped by “smartness,” a forceful symbiosis of finance and software.
On the ep, we discuss the rise of American “code-spaces” (e.g., apps, platforms, etc) and hyper-fragmented “data subjects” taking the place of the modern “individual.” "What happens,” Lil Internet asks, “when AI agents become not just tools but inhabitants of the world of human culture?
Chat with an Oct 2025 draft Jay’s book’s here: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-68d150abe8008191b27383697808eed9-slop-machines
Follow/subscribe/listen to more of Jay’s work at https://thejaymo.net
See also: NM85 | Jay Springett on “Worlds” as Medium (2024)
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You’ve heard us reference the work of Jay Springett (aka @thejaymo) on nearly every pod this year — so with his new book Slop Machines of Loving Grace near completion, we invited Jay on the show to chat through some of its themes. The book takes 2008 as a breaking point, a moment where the late-20th century financial system imploded and, in its place, society was given a new operating system: one optimized for exocapitalism and shaped by “smartness,” a forceful symbiosis of finance and software.
On the ep, we discuss the rise of American “code-spaces” (e.g., apps, platforms, etc) and hyper-fragmented “data subjects” taking the place of the modern “individual.” "What happens,” Lil Internet asks, “when AI agents become not just tools but inhabitants of the world of human culture?
Chat with an Oct 2025 draft Jay’s book’s here: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-68d150abe8008191b27383697808eed9-slop-machines
Follow/subscribe/listen to more of Jay’s work at https://thejaymo.net
See also: NM85 | Jay Springett on “Worlds” as Medium (2024)
Preview | Orit Halpern on Agentic Imaginaries (NM88) 2025
New Models
32 minutes 47 seconds
6 months ago
Preview | Orit Halpern on Agentic Imaginaries (NM88) 2025
This is a preview — for the full episode, subscribe: https://newmodels.io https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com
Our guest is Orit Halpern: co-author of The Smartness Mandate (MIT Press, 2023); author of Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke, 2014); and Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische Universität Dresden.
Often in discussions about machine learning and smartness, AI is presented as the natural path of human progress, an evolutionary – almost biological – development that emerged out of human communication systems and that has the potential to far exceed them. But as Orit argues, these technologies are neither inevitable nor inhuman. Rather they are the result of a particular intersection of neoliberal theory, psychology, and computer science that generated the economic incentives, political will, and public desire for AI to exist in the specific form we have now.
On this episode, Orit animates the technological imaginary that gave rise to our culture of AI, asking, among other things, how a highly adaptive, machine-learning enabled world changes the terms of political possibility and human revolution.
For more: https://orithalpern.net
“Financializing Intelligence: On the Integration of Markets & Machines“
https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/on-models/519993/financializing-intelligence-on-the-integration-of-machines-and-markets/
“Futures of Cybernetic Urbanism” in "Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective" catalogue of the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale (2025)
Counter-Practices and The Image of Thought https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/29768640251335679
Planetary Infrastructure
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-658-38128-8_1-1
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Episode image adapted from: Marco Zorzanello photo of the installation TERMS AND CONDITIONS by Transsolar, Bilge Kobas, Daniel A. Barber, and Sonia Seneviratne at La Biennale di Venezia, 2025
New Models
You’ve heard us reference the work of Jay Springett (aka @thejaymo) on nearly every pod this year — so with his new book Slop Machines of Loving Grace near completion, we invited Jay on the show to chat through some of its themes. The book takes 2008 as a breaking point, a moment where the late-20th century financial system imploded and, in its place, society was given a new operating system: one optimized for exocapitalism and shaped by “smartness,” a forceful symbiosis of finance and software.
On the ep, we discuss the rise of American “code-spaces” (e.g., apps, platforms, etc) and hyper-fragmented “data subjects” taking the place of the modern “individual.” "What happens,” Lil Internet asks, “when AI agents become not just tools but inhabitants of the world of human culture?
Chat with an Oct 2025 draft Jay’s book’s here: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-68d150abe8008191b27383697808eed9-slop-machines
Follow/subscribe/listen to more of Jay’s work at https://thejaymo.net
See also: NM85 | Jay Springett on “Worlds” as Medium (2024)
