nothing here but ecosystem revival

issue 141 - 13th June, 2021

Welcome to another edition of the nothing here newsletter. MKY is taking a break but I hope we’ll have him back next month. In the meantime we have special guest Lidia Zuin! Lidia is a Brazilian semiotician, journalist, researcher, futurologist and professor.

nothing here but this electric face

issue 140 - 30th May, 2021

Welcome to another edition of the nothing here newsletter. We’ve got more of all the good (read: bad) stuff for you.

Early this week, I (CJW) was given access to OpenAI’s GPT-3 beta. I half-expected my application to fall through the cracks, thinking they’d be more interested in technical applications rather than the sort of stupid experiments I was likely to conduct, but either they’re letting any old chump get in, or I managed to wow them with my brief application spiel.

My pitch was that I wanted to explore GPT-3’s potential use as the next evolution of the Cut-Up Technique, invented by Brion Gysin and popularised by William S. Burroughs. I’ve experimented with the Cut-Up Technique (CUT) plenty before – both cutting within a piece of work to see what new insights might reveal themselves through the arbitrary juxtaposition of words and phrases, and also as a tool for combining two vastly different texts. CUT can be fun, and it can also be revealing and confronting, like one time where it found the intention behind a very personal piece of writing even when said intention was not on the page.

nothing here but a birth of violence

issue 138 - 16th May, 2021

CJW: Hello again and welcome.

CJW: On Becoming...

Every now and then there’ll be a new meme that spreads through author twitter about an author’s brand, or what themes they find they keep writing. I’ve seen variations go by a dozen times, easily, and I always scrolled right past each time because I had no idea what my response would be.

Being able to work out the answer to that question would mean being able to step back and look at a project subjectively, and I’m usually so deep in a project I can’t tell if it’s any good, let alone what bigger themes it might be touching on. But working through another edit on my current manuscript I finally figured it out… And it’s about damn time.

issue 136 - 2nd May, 2021

CJW: Welcome to the latest instalment of nothing here. It’s a big one. Sorry? This issue we’ve got returning guest, Andrew Dana Hudson. Thanks for joining us Andrew!

Cancelling Deleuze

[bonus] issue 135 - 23rd April, 2021

CJW: Apologies for the delay with this issue. Turns out I fucked up something when I first set up the Buttondown account, so I’ve been getting that sorted out, and it’s taken a bit longer than I hoped (which is entirely down to me having too much on this month). I put off sending this on Sunday, just so Mr Buttondown (Justin to his friends) could finish fixing my fuck up. (We’re still not done, but I came up with a temporary workaround at least.)

nothing here but toothless protest

issue 134 - 18th April, 2021

Welcome to another instalment of nothing here. I hope you’re all doing well. These are trying times, but we’re getting through, and we’ll continue to get through it.

A Eulogy for Micajahala

[bonus] issue 133 - 11th April, 2021

I imagine more than a few of our readers have lost loved ones within the last year. Thought it might help to share the eulogy I wrote for my mother on February 1st, after she died in January.

nothing here but global suicide

issue 132 - 4th April, 2021

CJW: Welcome to nothing here, coming to you via Buttondown. Hopefully everything goes smoothly and you get this email in your inbox without hassle. It’s a long one today, so let’s get straight to it.

• Our latest bonus was Maddy, about my very first dog.
• Latest unlocked bonus: Bingewatching the end of Civilisation
• Full list of unlocked bonuses.

CJW: As promised, here we are, coming to you live from Buttondown HQ.

This mail *might* end up going out to the full list because Buttondown allowed me to give new subscribers a 14-day preview of our bonus posts, but I can't remember if I hit that button before or after importing everybody.

Anyway, first a little housekeeping for our current paid subscribers - the Buttondown import carried over your Premium status, but I'm still trying to work out whether or not Buttondown knows when your subscriptions are due to expire, or if I will have to manually sort that out when the time comes. Justin at Buttondown has been a great help so far, so I've got no doubt he'll help me figure this out shortly. Worst case scenario, I've got subscription end dates saved from a Substack export, so no one will be cut off prematurely! In the meantime, I think everything is working well...

Buttondown also uses Stripe to process payments, but you will still need to re-up through Stripe when the time comes, because I can't simply transfer those payment details over for obvious security reasons. You should get notification emails from Buttondown with the correct subscription link, but I'll also be keeping an eye on things. If anything goes wrong, or you've got any questions, you can always hit me up at nothing [@] coreyjwhite.com.

CJW: This will be our last newsletter on the Substack platform. I wanted to move to Buttowndown immediately, but with an archive of over 120 letters (including bonus posts which are another thing I need to figure out on Buttondown), as well as paid and unpaid subscribers, it’s going to take me a minute to migrate everything. The real heads will know that Buttondown will be our third provider, but the newsletter has grown in size and complexity since the Tinyletter days. Depending on how it goes (I do, after all, have a day job, a novel I’m editing, a podcast, and various other projects on the go), the next bonus might be delayed so I can figure everything out. 

Current paid subscribers - all payments have been paused while I figure this out. I’ll be in touch with more information about your subscriptions later, once I’ve got everything sorted on the Buttondown back-end.

Hello and welcome to another issue of (De)Extinction Club. I mean nothinghere_. You’re at the combination DXC / NH super bleak look at just how fucked things are looking for the continent 3/4ths of us here call home.

Forget the nightmare fuel of the rather Day After Tomorrow-smelling likely scenario of ‘a major ocean current hitting a tipping point’ and all the ‘fun’ that might follow that. No, we’re locked 'n loaded and seeing things are just as fucked as they already are. (But if that’s enough for you to go out and start seeding the global ecosocialist revolution, don’t let me stop you.)

CJW: Let’s get right to it, shall we?

Our latest bonus was Can't Get You Out of My Head, and our latest unlocked bonus is on Ursula Le Guin’s , capitalism, culpability, etc. 

CJW: We've gathered together here to discuss Kylie Minogue's iconic 2001 pop hit, Can't Get You Out of My Head:

The song was released on the 8th of September, 2001 - the very end of the End of History, before two planes crashing into the World Trade Center proved that history was far from done with us.

In the opening shot of the video clip we see Kylie driving a classic muscle car along a future-coded highway, expressly demonstrating that the tools of the past were sufficient for carrying us into the future. This was neoliberal capitalism distilled into pop perfection, but little did Kylie know, the highway she was driving us all down would lead to an entrenchment of what Mark Fisher termed Capitalist Reali--

CJW: Welcome to another edition of nothing here.

Our latest bonus was the first two chapters of The Forgetting Navigations, a novella Marlee is serialising over on . Our latest unlocked bonus is , a piece of original short fiction from Marlee.

CJW: Here are the opening chapters from The Forgetting Navigations - a novella Marlee is serialising over at her Patreon.

CJW: Welcome to another edition of the nothing here newsletter.

Our latest bonus was A primer on propaganda in the 21st century courtesy of DCH, and our latest unlocked bonus is , the continuation of MKY’s explorations. 

Today I want to talk to you about propaganda in the modern world. This will be a whistle-stop tour of the strategies, tactics, tools, and channels used by bad actors, trolls, and other assholes to spread hate, disinformation, and terror. Before we do though I’d like to give a shout out to the amazing Tash Wilcocks for illustrating all of this in one brilliant go. Ok… buckle up. This is going to be a bumpy ride.

From Kissinger to Trump

As with many horrible things in the world today, a lot of this shit starts with elder statesmen and war criminal, Henry Fucking Kissinger. He was a pioneer of “constructive ambiguity” as a policy construct. It’s weasel words that “fudges” sensitive issues to let countries save face while actually accomplishing little. Or worse, exacerbating issues over time. A perfect example of this is UN Security Council Resolution 242 which had two mutually exclusive principles in it. That resolution and other policies like it in the mid 70s intentionally lit the fuse for the conflict we see in Syria today.

CJW: Welcome to another instalment of the nothing here newsletter.

Our latest bonus was The Secret of the Ancestor Simulation, in which I combine my interests in Simulation Theory and chaos magick (and some politics sneak in there too, because these are the times we live in).