nothing here but a billionaire corpse pyramid

issue 165 - 23rd January, 2022

CJW: Welcome to our new subscribers, and welcome back to our old friends. We’ve got another bumper issue for you.

If you enjoy what we do and have the means (and desire) to support us, you’ve got a couple of options:

• $5 monthly subscription.
• $50 annual subscription.

Both give you access to the full bonus archive, as well as new bonuses as they are posted.We appreciate any and all support.

Our latest bonus comes from Dan: A Timeline of QAnon Crimes. It’s as odd as you’d expect, but also a little heartbreaking.

Okay. On with the show.

The Team

• Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
• m1k3y (MKY) - @eattrainrevolt
• Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Writer and ADHD apocalypse witch.
• Corey J. White (CJW) - Author, podcaster, sin-eater.
• Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Journalist, MA in semiotics, and PhD in Arts. Sci-fi writer, futurology researcher and essayist. @lidiazuin

Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: Ten Million a Year: Dying to Breathe - David Wallace-Wells at LRB (via Dan Hill)

[…] air pollution kills more than ten times as many as the flu every single year, and we hear even less about it. In 2017, a Lancet study put the figure at almost seven million a year, about two-thirds from outside air pollution and one-third from indoor, household pollution. More recent estimates run higher, with as many as 8.7 million deaths every year attributable just to the outdoor particulate matter produced from burning fossil fuels. Add on indoor pollution, and you get an annual toll of more than ten million. That’s more than four times the official worldwide death toll from Covid [in 2020].

[…]

The World Bank estimates that as much as 6 per cent of global GDP is lost to pollution and puts the annual loss at $8.1 trillion. Last year, Drew Shindell of Duke University, an expert on pollution impact, appeared before the US House Committee on Oversight and Reform. By further cleaning up America’s air over the next fifty years, Shindell’s research shows, the country could prevent 4.5 million premature deaths, 1.4 million hospitalisations, 1.7 million cases of dementia and 300 million lost work days. The result, he calculated, would be $700 billion a year in net benefits, ‘far more than the cost of the energy transition’. In other words, a total decarbonisation of the US economy would pay for itself through public health gains alone.

Obviously at this newsletter we don’t particularly care for the economic arguments that continue to stall our transition to a future where more than just the elite are able to live in our changed climate, but I always find it telling that the economic rationale is always there (for example, it’s been demonstrated that letting refugees into the community would be far cheaper than detaining them indefinitely in Australia’s torture prisons, but the torture prisons apparently send a message, and that’s more important even to a government that claims to be fiscally minded).

They (they - you know what I mean) don’t want things to change because they’re currently reaping all the rewards of the status quo and under an altered system they might not remain at the top.

Anyway, there’s a lot more to this piece on air pollution from David Wallace-Wells, including the ways the pyrocene more greatly affects the developing world than the developed. It’s not strictly “climate change” focussed, but of course fossil fuel burning contributes to both air pollution and climate change. Stick around right to the end.

//

CJW: EU climate monitor reports last seven years were world’s hottest on record (via Foreign Exchanges)

In its latest annual assessment, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) confirmed that 2021 had joined the unbroken warm streak since 2015. It found that last year was the fifth warmest on record globally, marginally warmer than 2015 and 2018. […]

That was despite the cooling effect of the natural La Nina weather phenomenon.

Overall, the monitoring service found the last seven years “have been the warmest years on record by a clear margin”.

Emphasis mine. I don’t know where you’re reading this but, thanks to La Nina, here in Melbourne we had a very late summer, with weeks of legitimately cool weather right when summer should have been rearing its ugly head. The fact that 2021 was still one of the warmest years on record despite that chill wave says a lot (and none of it is good).

DCH: 8 years of record-breaking temperatures. And a whole lot of death wrapped up in that.

//

CJW: How Bad Are Plastics for the Environment, Really? - Rebecca Altman at The Atlantic (via Sentiers)

Yet to date, climate policy has not focused on manufacturing or plastics. And too often plastics’ proliferation can seem of secondary importance as climate disasters accelerate. But plastics and climate aren’t separate issues. They are structurally linked problems, and also mutually compounding, with plastics’ facilities spewing climate-relevant emissions and extreme weather further dispersing plastic into the environment. Research is under way to study their interaction—the way, say, thermal stress affects how species respond to toxic exposures. But they have the same root. “Plastic is carbon,” fossil fuels in another form, CIEL’s president, Carroll Muffett, told me. Or, as the geographer Deirdre McKay phrases it, plastic is climate change, just in its solid state.

Plenty of great stuff in this piece. If you’ve ever wondered what I meant when I said plastics recycling is a lie, some parts of this will help explain what I mean.

MJW: I had a lucid dream or active daydream the other day after brushing my teeth where I suddenly realised every toothbrush I had ever had in my life still exists and will exist for thousands of years, and what it would look like if they all piled up in front of me. Then I wondered what all the plastics I’d ever used and wasted might look like if it swamped me, and then I drowned in plastic. So that was a nice treat from my brain.

//

MKY: The radical intervention that might save the “doomsday” glacier - James Temple at MIT Technology Review

is it kidnapping oil & gas execs and holding them for ransom at an undisclosed location, but actually just using ransomware’d funds to create an elaborate human pyramid, stacking their bodies into twisted, ritual symbols from the depths of the antarctic oceans, attempting to summon the Ancient Ones whilst also at least slowing the invasion of warm water that’s accelerating the polar ice melt… is it?

CJW: Unfortunately, no.

Even if the world immediately halted the greenhouse-gas emissions driving climate change and warming the waters beneath the ice shelf, that wouldn’t do anything to thicken and restabilize the Thwaites’s critical buttress, says John Moore, a glaciologist and professor at the Arctic Centre at the University of Lapland in Finland.

“So the only way of preventing the collapse … is to physically stabilize the ice sheets,” he says.

That will require what is variously described as active conservation, radical adaptation, or glacier geoengineering.

I’m not against the idea of glacier geoengineering (as they say, combined engineering efforts at the source of the problem should be simpler [and hopefully prevent further knock-on effects] than building sea walls everywhere the sea might rise after the glacier melts. But, they’ve also given a timeline of 5 years before the glacier collapses. I’m not sure that 5 years is enough time for the relevant nation states to come to an agreement (Antarctica isn’t exactly free of territorial disputes), locate the funding (remember, right wingers are barely willing to admit climate change is real, so I expect they’d do their best to block funding efforts), and then complete the large-scale engineering works in an extremely hostile environment.

Anyway. Sin-eating doomsayer over here. Just ignore me.

DCH: I liked M1k3y’s billionaire corpse pyramid idea better. /kicks dirt

//

• It’s Not Just Manchin - Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic

• Scientists Warn that Sixth Mass Extinction Has ‘Probably Started’ - Becky Ferreira at Vice

• How a Powerful Company Convinced Georgia to Let It Bury Toxic Waste in Groundwater - Max Blau at Propublica

• A Project to Count Climate Crisis Deaths Has Surprising Results - Matt Reynolds at Wired

• Doomsday Scientists Announce Apocalypse Is Nigh, Not Here Yet - Matthew Gault at Vice

Geopolitics & Empire

DCH: Millions of Pro-Trump Americans Support Political Violence But Not Who You Might Think - CJ Werleman at bylinetimes.com

But, contrary to cartoonish illustrations of pro-Trump supporters or the comically named ‘Make America Great Again’ movement, the economic profile of the 716 people arrested or charged over the 6 January attack is representative of mainstream America – with more than half of them employed in white collar occupations, including CEOs, architects, lawyers, doctors, accountants and business owners.

“Our national survey shows that the no. 1 belief among insurrectionists – shared by fully 75% of respondents – is the ‘Great Replacement’ of the electorate by the Democratic Party, and that this idea is also the most important separator of people in the 21 million from the general population, where the theory doesn’t hold much sway,” says Dr Pape.

You can read more about the study from Dr. Pape himself in this piece he wrote for Foreign Policy. The most terrifying data point he found was this: For every 1% decline in the white population the number of expected insurrectionists increased by 26%. OAN, Fox News and other similar outlets are mainstreaming the bullshit Great Replacement conspiracy theory.

//

MKY: Why tree planting in the Negev sparked protests, riots and a coalition crisis - The Times of Israel

Do you like heavily-entangled events of political and environmental consequence? Do ya wanna see settler colonialism in action? Did you want a glimpse of militarised police enforcing eco-fascist agendas as the State chooses just how environmental policies are implemented and… everyone’s favourite: who benefits?

Aka - there’s a lot going on what might otherwise be mistaken for ‘business as usual’ in Occupied Palestine.

To bring it all home…. for no reason in particular, i’ll just leave this here by way of a conclusion: The Djab Wurrung Birthing Tree at The Monthly.

//

DCH: Smedley Butler Helped Build American Empire. Then He Turned Against It. - Jonah Walters at Jacobin

After matriculating in elite schools, Butler enlisted in the Marines as a second lieutenant at the age of seventeen. The trajectory of his life as a soldier traced the arc of US imperial expansion in the early twentieth century, from Cuba to the Philippines to Nicaragua to Haiti to Shanghai, with many stops in between. Along the way, he attained a kind of public glory few soldiers even dream of. Butler was the youngest major general in Marine Corps history, and at the time of his death, he was the most decorated Marine who had ever lived.

But accolades were not enough to ease his troubled conscience. As the fearsome roar of the early century faded into the unease of the Great Depression, Butler exchanged his military garb for a civilian suit and jacket, leaving the Marine Corps behind to pursue a new vocation as the most prominent antiwar orator in America.

A great review of Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire by Jonathan M. Katz. Butler’s been chewing up a lot of background processing in my brain lately.

As you can see from it there are tons of interesting parallels to the Wall Street Pusch/Gold standard and The Capitol Insurrection/Cryptocurrency. Sadly we have no one like Butler in the frame. Yet.

Anyway, if you’re new to Butler this is a great read. Enjoy.

//

• Capitol riot: Leader of far-right Oath Keepers charged with sedition at BBC

• Boris Johnson Has Outlived His Usefulness for Britain’s Ruling Class by Phil Burton-Cartledge at Jacobin

• Strawberry Fields Forever by Sam Thielman at foreverwars.substack.com - DCH: See also: 20 Years and 4 Presidents Later and Gitmo Still Not Closed by Brett Wilkins at Common Dreams

• Afghanistan: Taliban plans for suicide brigade reveal changing nature of warfare in 21st century MKY: i heard y’all like irregular warfare…

• Villarejo claims that Spain’s intel was involved in the Barcelona terrorist attack of 2017 - VilaWeb - MKY: are you even trying to work cool phrases like ‘a strategy of tension’ into everyday conservation? Here’s your chance!

• Fury and grief for Spaniards in fight to remove Franco’s murdered victims from the Valley of the Fallen - Isobel Cockerell at Coda

• Kazakhstan after the Uprising : Eyewitness Accounts from Almaty; Analysis from Russian Anarchists - Crimethinc

• Newly Declassified Video Shows U.S. Killing of 10 Civilians in Drone Strike - Christoph Koettl, Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt, Azmat Khan, Evan Hill at The New York Times

• Myanmar’s Rebels Get Resourceful With Improvised Drones - Nick Waters at Bellingcat

• The CIA May Be Breeding Nazi Terror in Ukraine - Branko Marcetic at Jacobin

Science & Space

DCH: Open-Source Vaccines Got More Funding From Tito’s Vodka Than the Government - Ella Fassler at Vice

Dr. Peter Hotez and Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi are professors at the Baylor College of Medicine and co-directors of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development, where they are renewing their pleas for the US federal government and other G7 countries to financially support the mass production of Corbevax, the world’s first open-source, patent-free COVID-19 vaccine being distributed on a mass scale.

“The US government could, tomorrow, agree to make 4 billion doses of our vaccine,” Hotez told Motherboard. “There is still no roadmap to vaccinating the world. We’re doing what we can, but we could do much more if we had help from G7.”

Bottazzi told Motherboard that her team “constantly” sought government funding “at all levels” in 2020. They made pleas during congressional hearings, webinars, conferences, to journalists, and through op-eds. The philanthropic arm of the Texas-based Tito’s Vodka, which donated $1 million dollars to the effort, has contributed more funds than the U.S. government.

//

• Donkeylike creatures may be first known hybrid animal made by humans (How It Started)

• In a conservation first, a cloned ferret could help save her species (How It’s Going) ((just don’t overthink it, k - MKY))

• Conservationists seek new ways to keep critically endangered possums alive

• Bring in the clones: Instagrammers are genetically replicating their pets - Jessica Lucas at Input (doing immortality for the ‘gram - DCH)

Tech & Design

DCH: Mark Zuckerberg Is TNR’s 2021 Scoundrel of the Year - David Roth at The New Republic

There are many things to abhor about Mark Zuckerberg and his works, but the fundamental mediocrity of it all—the lack of vision, the absence of any moral sense or shame, the inability and unwillingness not just to fix but even reckon with the dangerous and ungovernable thing he’s made—is what feels both most egregious and most of this moment. It is embarrassing and not a little enraging to realize that you are subject to the whims of an amoral and incurious capitalist posing as a visionary optimist. It is especially humiliating when the all-bestriding and inevitable figure in question is such a dim, dull nullity.

Hammer. Nail. Head. As Kara Swisher said long ago, perhaps Zuck didn’t “take enough humanities courses” before dropping out of Harvard. This would all be ever so slightly more tolerable if he was just even slightly interesting.

//

DCH: Economists Pin More Blame on Tech for Rising Inequality by Steve Lohr at The New York Times

Half or more of the increasing gap in wages among American workers over the last 40 years is attributable to the automation of tasks formerly done by human workers, especially men without college degrees, according to some of his recent research.

Globalization and the weakening of unions have played roles. “But the most important factor is automation,” Mr. Acemoglu said. And automation-fueled inequality is “not an act of God or nature,” he added. “It’s the result of choices corporations and we as a society have made about how to use technology.”

Automation happened, of course, because of globalization and the weakening of unions. But it’s still nice to see more and more economists take a more worldly turn. Long overdue.

//

• Chicago’s “Race-Neutral” Traffic Cameras Ticket Black and Latino Drivers the Most - Emily Hopkins at ProPublica

• YouTube is major conduit of fake news, factcheckers say - Dan Milmo at The Guardian

• Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai were involved in ad collusion plot, claims court filing by Russell Brandom at The Verge

• Web3 Can’t Fix the Internet - James Muldoon at Jacobin

• How Silicon Valley Is Helping the Pentagon Automate Finding Targets

• Lawmakers Plan Legislation to ‘Ban Surveillance Advertising’ - Joseph Cox at Vice (good news everyone - DCH)

• Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them - Ashley Bardhan at Futurism & Cryptocurrency Titans Newly Obsessed With Artificial Wombs - Maxwell Strachan at Vice (Siri show me two stories that are made even worse when you think about their implications together. - DCH)

• The Dungeon Master - Anne Diebel at The New York Review of Books (good read about Peter Thiel)

Society & The Culture

LZ: Soggy aka Swampcore

The world is too big for us to enjoy only cottagecore and dark academia. Meet S W A M P C O R E.

//

DCH: Why We’ve Succumbed to Pandemic Apathy - Marion Renault at The New Republic

When I bring this all up with my therapist, she tells me I am not her only patient struggling with pandemic apathy. Right now, she says, it seems to be especially afflicting those who, until recently, had considered themselves highly engaged, cooperating as much as possible with public health guidelines to protect society’s most vulnerable and enact their core values of justice and compassion. In our apathy, we finally yield to a dread that all our careful compliance has been in vain, given omicron’s brutal strain on the health care system. “We’re always looking to make sense out of something we can’t make sense of,” she advises. “Dissociation is a survival mode.”

Emphasis mine. I spent 2020 working on various digital Covid response initiatives. That made Covid inescapable for me. Then in 2021 I decoupled from that work (and tried to make Brexit less shitty for small businesses). Now in 2022 I’m living a hermetically sealed life.

It’s all exhausting. Corey wrote about embracing a nihilism-of-a-sort awhile back and I think that’s what we’ve all done. The cognitive overload of trying to make sense out of (waves hands) all of this tragic bullshit is just too much. Because there is precious little sense to it. Just more deaths and chaos to lay at the feet of all the oligarchs and kleptocrats.

MJW:

It’s not that I don’t care anymore, it’s that I’ve had to shut down feeling it or I’d never get out of this.

//

MJW: Non-monogamy and intimacy: A slut for friendship - Liz Duck Chong at Archer

Maybe the real non-monogamy was the friends we made along the way.

A nice little take on NM as radical friendship. Archer has some great stuff coming out lately.

//

• How Parasocial Relationships Affected Me And My Favourite Instagram Dominatrix

• Model Claims She Was Turned Into a Sex Doll Without Her Permission by Samantha Cole at VICE

• By Accusing Emma Watson of Antisemitism, Israel’s Apologists Are Showing They’re Desperate - Em Hilton at Jacobin

• The Planet-Killing Asteroid Is Always Political - Ingrid Burrington at Vice

• Austerity Is Prolonging the Pandemic - Liam Flenady at Jacobin & Families Are Going Rogue With Rapid Tests - Rachel Gutman at The Atlantic.com (two to read together. - DCH)

• The World We Want to Live in After COVID - Dhruv Khullar at The New Yorker

• Freedom as a Preset: Joanne McNeil on Metaverses Past and Present

Labor & Economics

DCH: The Central Banks Made the Superrich Even Richer During the Pandemic - Grace Blakeley at Jacobin

The wealthy, meanwhile, will have more money than they know what to do with. So they’ll continue to plough their excess cash into financial markets so that it can be recycled into debt for powerful corporations and the less well-off. The end result is an economy that resembles a system of debt peonage — only on a planetary scale. A study from the United States has shown that the rich have now “accumulated substantial financial assets that are direct claims on US government and household debt.” Most of what we owe, we owe to the top 1 percent.

That bolded bit is part of the reason why you’re seeing Congress and local state politicians start to bite the hands of the big tech bros that feed them. It’s also why you’re seeing unprecedented labor action in the US. More and more it’s looking like the pandemic was the last straw for American workers.

//

• Facebook contractors threaten to stop work over missing paychecks - Russell Brandom at The Verge - DCH: Content moderation is the most important job in tech and the poorly paid freelancers doing the work can’t even get paid on time. Unbelievable.

• The next Amazon union vote in Bessemer, Alabama, is set for early February - Anna Kramer at Protocol

• Google unveils Project Vivian, its secret plan to… disparage unions - Andrew Paul at inputmag.com

• Fear and Loathing in the Silicon Valley C-Suite by Matt Stoller

• People Building ‘Blockchain City’ in Wyoming Scammed by Hackers - Edward Ongweso Jr at VICE

• Kenyan Police Have Committed Murder on Behalf of Property Developers - Jaclynn Ashly at Jacobin

• Now You Can Rent a Robot Worker—for Less Than Paying a Human - Will Knight, Wired

• Gig Workers Were Promised a Better Deal. Then They Were Outsourced - Morgan Meaker at Wired (New gig economy, same as the first. - DCH)

• A Tesla employee died on its production line - Nat Rubio-Licht at Protocol

Movies + TV

CJW: Too Old to Die Young

Even though I’m a big fan of Nicolas Winding Refn, it took me a couple of years to get to this series after bouncing off the first episode when it was still new. As you’d expect from NWR, it’s a beautifully shot and bisexually lit neo-noir crime drama set in the criminal underworld of LA county and Mexico, with ultraviolence, gangland wars, extrajudicial killings, dead pornographers, and a killer soundtrack.

I’ve seen people complaining about the treatment of women in this show, and NWR’s work more broadly, and I can’t disagree with the complaint, but I do think that it’s part of the point of the work. Anyone who thinks NWR is presenting these horrific masculine caricatures as heroes is failing at basic critical reading. They’re not even anti-heroes, they’re broken men who know little beyond the language of violence. Obviously that’s not for everyone, but I love it (though, I do think Neon Demon is NWR’s best work precisely because it changes focus).

The highlight for me was probably the performances on offer. Not from Miles Teller, though he’s fine as a Ryan Gosling stand-in for the silent and violent cipher, but from the other leads. The interplay between the two Mexican leads, Augusto Aguilera and Cristina Rodlo is fantastic - they’re as kinky as they are vicious. The rising king and queen of a Mexican cartel, willing to stop at nothing to secure their respective birth rights. Jenna Malone is brilliant, and John Hawkes as her one-eyed and well-intentioned personal assassin is doing some career-best work (and he’s had a hell of a career, so that’s really saying something).

It’s a slow burn of a series (sometimes too slow, to be honest), but it’s entirely worth it, even just to see what NWR will do with 12 or so hours and a good chunk of Bezos bucks. Co-written with Ed Brubaker, it’s also made me want to finally get around to checking out some of his comics.

Sadly it only got one season, and while most of the story as it’s set up is told by the end, they were setting up a truly interesting and potentially weird conflict for the second series that we’ll never see. Maybe Brubaker can convince NWR that they should produce it as a comic series…

//

LZ: Arcane

Even if you don’t play League of Legends (I don’t, never did), you should definitely check this animation on Netflix. Besides the beautiful aesthetic and soundtrack, it is so well directed and so stylish. One thing that I noticed is that it is very crude, in a sense that even though it’s an animation and the characters are initially children… they don’t tone cruelty or violence down.

Music

LZ - Author & Punisher - Maiden Star

New single is just l i t. If you don’t know the band, but you like industrial music, maybe NIN and even Deftones, give it a try. Or if not, just take a look at how this guy does his music and how awesome it is.

//

LZ: M‡яc▲ll▲ - Pain of Water

M‡яc▲ll▲Pain of Water

Fancy witch house? For these guys, WH was never over. Here’s their new single with an amazing collab with GHST.

The Self-Promotion

CJW: Cringe

Sometimes I make t-shirt designs.

//

CJW: Buddies Without Organs - Now with Faces!

I’ve been pretty terrible at talking about BwO here in these pages, but for those who are unaware, I joined the Buddies Without Organs podcast last year, with Sean (of Wyrd Signal) and Matt (Xenogothic) to talk about the writings of Gilles Deleuze.

This year we’re joining the Zer0 Books YouTube channel to talk about the lesser known works of Mark Fisher in The K-files.

The K-Files: Mark Fisher’s “Astrolithic Megapunk” - YouTube

Last year, Buddies Without Organs explored the works of Gilles Deleuze. Now, in association with Zer0 Books, we are turning towards the lesser-known works of…

Fisher is a writer we all already love, and we felt he’d be great to read together. We’re starting as we intend to go on with a oft-neglected post from the Hyperstition blog about the 1970s children’s serial, Children of the Stones — a series that Fisher suggests is an example of an underrepresented British sci-fi genre: “megalithic astropunk”.

In a slight change to our hosting arrangements, the podcast will first be made available to Zer0 patreons, going live on their YouTube channel shortly afterwards, and finally appearing on our website a week after that.

From that point on, you can listen in all of the usual places, including Spotify, iTunes and Podbean. You’ll find the episode on YouTube here.

The Memes