Guest of Honor – This Machine Kills

This Machine Kills

Photo of Edward Ongweso Jr against a background of unevenly placed blue tiles. He appears to be a black man with a moustache and beard, his hair contained by a staggered rainbow headband, wearing glasses, a yellow jacket, and a partially obscured white t-shirt with an image of a pair of people and some type of machinery.

Edward Ongweso Jr is a writer, editor, and born-again Luddite. His fiction and non-fiction can be found in a few places, his two cats are trapped inside his home. With Jathan, Edward co-hosts the This Machine Kills podcast which explores the political economy of technology. He also writes The Tech Bubble newsletter.

Jathan Sadowski's headshot. He appears to be a close-shaven white man wearing glasses with a moustache and beard and a plain gray t-shirt. THe background is neutral.

Jathan Sadowski is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Human-Centred Computing at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He studies the political economy of technology, or how dynamics of social power and financial profit influence the design, use, and impacts of emerging technologies in our lives. For his research on the techno-politics of crisis, insurance, and climate risk governance, he is the recipient of a prestigious Future Fellowship from the Australian Research Council. Jathan is also co-host of the weekly podcast This Machine Kills and author of two books: The Mechanic and the Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism (University of California Press, 2025) and Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World (MIT Press, 2020).