nothing here but 40,000-year-old microbes happy to launch nukes
issue 311 - 1st March, 2026
CJW: You wanna go out dancing? Or maybe we can go out and beat some billionaire paedophiles to death with hammers? Just feel like doing something fun when everything seems so awful, y’know?
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The Team
Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Writer & visual artist. Meme collector.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, gnosia.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer and purveyor of melancholy whimsy.
Climate Change & The Environment
CJW: The Quest For Clean Cargo - Julian Sayarer at Noema
In the quiet nights, so calm and dark and brief this far north, I looked out at sea long enough to cycle through all my thoughts and grow bored. I considered what might be lost in a world where permanent distraction drives boredom to extinction, that it is in our moments of boredom that we might be at our most creative and receptive to new thoughts. Perhaps it is only in a world where the cities sleep enough to turn dark at night, where the news channels stop, that we have space to remember, or simply ask, who we are and why we are here.
A great long read about the journey of a cargo sailboat and how it relates to larger climate concerns.
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Just the headlines:
Our Emerging Planetary Nervous System - Rimma Boshernitsan at Noema
Geopolitics & Empire
DCH: The Scent of Iranian Lavender by Spencer Ackermann at Forever Wars
I am not saying anything is a certainty. I am saying that if Trump chooses to resume war on Iran, I would expect it to look a lot more like Gaza than like last June, and that there is pressure-slash-opportunity for the U.S. military to demonstrate the utility of AI on the battlefield. Apartment buildings and hospital wards will fall on the regime-paycheck-drawers and the regime opponents alike.
The article argues U.S. war planning now runs through AI firms, with Pete Hegseth forcing Anthropic to drop safety postures and feed military targeting systems. The focus is scale, not accuracy, mass surveillance, automated association mapping, and target expansion across civilian life in service of destroying Iran’s governing structure. The warning lands hard, a future strike would follow Israel’s Gaza model, where algorithms widen kill lists and accountability disappears into the black box of AI.
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""So grave is the scale, nature, systematic character, and transnational reach of these atrocities against women and girls, that a number of them may reasonably meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity," the experts said in a statement." - Allegations in Epstein files may amount to 'crimes against humanity,' UN experts say - Jasper Ward at Reuters
Science & Space
DCH: The U.S. Military Is Reviving Microbes from 40,000-Year-Old Ice - Becky Ferreira at 404 Media
Digging up ancient lifeforms from permafrost is a busy field, with researchers reviving viruses that have been dormant for nearly 50,000 years in some cases, as well as recently discovering millennia-old bacteria that are resistant to many common antibiotics. But why is the U.S. Army interested?
wHat cOulD pOssiBly gO wRoNg?
Tech & Design
DCH: What technology takes from us – and how to take it back - Rebecca Solnit at The Guardian
The solution to technology is not more technology. The solution to loneliness is each other, a wealth that should be available to most of us most of the time. We need to rebuild or reinvent the ways and places in which we meet; we need to recognise them as the space of democracy, of joy, of connection, of love, of trust. Technology has stolen us from each other and in many ways from ourselves, and then tried to sell us substitutes. Stealing ourselves back, alas, is not as easy as walking out the door. We need somewhere to go and, more importantly, someone to go to who likewise desires to connect.
In “What Technology Takes From Us,” Rebecca Solnit argues Silicon Valley’s obsession with efficiency and convenience trains you to trade embodied life for frictionless substitutes, eroding solitude, craft, and the daily contact that sustains democracy. She frames AI companions, automated kiosks, and outsourced thinking as extensions of what her friend calls the tyranny of the quantifiable, systems that prize product over process and leave you isolated, less resilient, and easier to manage. The point is not nostalgia but power, when you surrender difficulty, presence, and mutual obligation to platforms, you do not gain ease, you lose the practices that make a self and a public.
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DCH: AIs are happy to launch nukes in simulated combat scenarios - Brandon Vigliarolo at The Register
Google's Gemini 3 Flash, Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4, and OpenAI's GPT-5.2 repeatedly escalated to nuclear use in a series of crisis simulations. That may seem like the most shocking conclusion of King's College London Professor Kenneth Payne's recent work, but it's not. Far more striking is why the models talked themselves into destroying the world, which was what Payne set up his study to learn.
In a lab game of brinkmanship, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google’s flagship bots all reasoned their way to Armageddon, which tells you less about the models than about the institutions itching to put them on the command chain.
CJW: Love to see this come out the same week that the US is demanding AI companies provide them with military tools. I’m just a little bit too young to have been impacted by the nuclear armageddon anxiety of the Cold War era, but it’s coming back in fashion, baby!
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CJW: AI Delusions Are Leading to Domestic Abuse, Harassment, and Stalking - Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism
We’ve identified at least ten cases in which chatbots, primarily ChatGPT, fed a user’s fixation on another real person — fueling the false idea that the two shared a special or even “divine” bond, roping the user into conspiratorial delusions, or insisting to a would-be stalker that they’d been gravely wronged by their target. In some cases, our reporting found, ChatGPT continued to stoke users’ obsessions as they descended into unwanted harassment, abusive stalking behavior, or domestic abuse, traumatizing victims and profoundly altering lives.
It's really not surprising that the current "miracle" out of the tech industry provides rape culture and violent misogyny as a service. More than that, though, it’s reinforcing this NPCification side effect we’ve seen from the hyper-individualist nature of Western society (as in, believing other people aren’t real people, and are only NPCs*). It’s an echo chamber of one, reinforced by a sycophantic chatbot, but the people who succumb to it see more humanity in the bot than they do in the people they're obsessing over and harming. In every case it seems like they are so caught up in the feedback loop of obsessive illusion that they ruin their own lives over it.
*As someone who grew up as a nerd and gamer, it’s so fucking weird the extent to which gamer terminology has entered not just general parlance, but specifically socio/political parlance too.
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“ICE more than tripled the amount of data it holds on Microsoft servers between July 2025 and January 2026, at the same time as the agency’s crackdown on migrants broke new records and sparked mass protests across the United States. Whereas last July the agency was storing around 400 terabytes of data in Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure, by the end of January that had risen to almost 1,400 terabytes — equivalent to approximately 490 million images.” ICE tripled its reliance on Microsoft in last six months, leaked files reveal - Yuval Abraham (DCH: Hey CoPilot: Tell Satya Nadella to get fucked.)
Society & The Culture
DCH: Kansas revokes driver’s licenses from trans residents in latest assault on rights - Sara Braun at The Guardian
Transgender Kansas residents have begun receiving letters from the state’s department of motor vehicles notifying them that their driver’s licenses will be invalid beginning Thursday, as a new law goes into effect that demands that forms of identification must now reflect the credential holder’s “sex at birth”.
More anti-trans bullshit in Kansas.
CJW: I’ve seen some promising bits and pieces coming out of Kansas in the wake of this at least. Like, the notoriously left-wing Kansas police (that was a joke) have said they won’t police this new law because of the resources it would require. And of course, ACLU and other groups are suing, protesting, etc.
But if it isn’t opposed and stopped, it’s a big step towards genocide. Criminalise all trans people who dare to drive, detransition them into the wrong prisons, and let that system deal with them - look up V-coding if you think I’m exaggerating.
Health, Cooking, and Related
CJW: immortal jellyfish (Turritopsis dohrnii)
"He hurts his jellyfish, too. It’s necessary for them to rejuvenate. It’s not necessary to hurt a human to make them rejuvenate, so there must have been some other reason for it."
Another fantastic edition of Mo’s newsletter. This one is touching, heartfelt, and as interesting as ever.
Labour & Economics
DCH: Burger King rolls out AI headsets that track employee 'friendliness' - Danielle Kaye at BBC
> The tool is "designed to streamline restaurant operations" to let managers and staff "focus more on guest service and team leadership", Restaurant Brands International, the chain's parent company, said in a statement on Thursday.
Burger King plugs OpenAI into a headset to police please and thank you, because nothing says modern dystopian management like turning minimum wage workers into data points for saying the magic words on cue.
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DCH: Who Wants to Rent a Human? - David Moscrop at Jacobin
A company called Rent A Human boasts on its website that “robots need your body” and calls itself the “meatspace layer for AI.” Customers can find humans to do their embodied work while would-be contractors can rent themselves out to agents. It’s a kind of demented Taskrabbit or Fiverr. Potential tasks include signing things, picking things up, and making purchases. As the company puts it, these are things “AI literally can’t do.”
Rent A Human reduces workers to remote controlled bodies for AI agents, paid to sign, queue, and click on command. The nightmare is not sentient machines, it is people trained to act like them.
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“Agents offer bosses a powerful excuse to depress wages, conduct layoffs, and exert additional control over workers. Where AI is used to augment or gigify labor, managers are able to demand workers accomplish more with fewer colleagues, in less time, and for less stable wages and benefits.” Bullshit Bots - Sohini Desai at The Baffler (DCH: For the record, Twiki was not a bullshit bot. He was Buck Rogers’ best bud.)
Just the headlines:
The Class War on White-Collar Workers Is Just More Capitalism - Ryan Zickgraf at Jacobin
Paramount Has a Secret Plan to Buy Hollywood Before the Cops Arrive - Matt Stoller (DCH: Highly unusual actions by Paramount’s legal team suggest they already know the fix is in)
The Memes
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