nothing here but a data-poisoned abyss

issue 236 - 29th October, 2023

CJW: I just wanted to open by saying thanks for the messages of support, and for the new paid sign-ups we've received since the last issue. Your support means a lot.

Normally this is where I'd tell you ways you can support us, but instead I want to share links for charities you can support to assist civilians suffering in Gaza. For UK readers, Medical Aid for Palestinians appears to be doing important and immediate work on the ground. For US readers, charity watch has a list here. It's always hard to know which charities are legitimately doing good work, so if you have resources that I can share in our next issue, please send them in.

Now, let's get to it.

The Team

Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Writer & visual artist. Bleak girl, middle-aged goth aunt.
Corey J. White (CJW) - Author, sin-eater, future sweetie-pie.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Journalist, MA in semiotics, and PhD in Arts. Sci-fi writer, futurology researcher and essayist. @lidiazuin

Climate Change & The Environment

DCH: Why so much is going wrong at the same time - Thomas Homer-Dixon at Vox

But this isn’t a counsel of despair. There’s much we can do to defuse the polycrisis. Most obviously, given that Earth’s worsening energy imbalance seems to be emerging as the single most powerful driver of crises across multiple ecological, economic, and social systems, humanity needs to cut greenhouse gas emissions to near zero as fast as possible. Realistically, though, we won’t cut them deeply enough soon enough to keep the imbalance from having devastating impacts, not least on the world’s food supply. So, within the next couple of decades, humanity will almost certainly intervene to increase the atmosphere’s reflectivity to sunlight — perhaps by pumping sulfur dioxide crystals into the stratosphere — until emission cuts really take effect.

The article starts by interrogating if the polycrisis is a) real b) a useful or distracting framing to drive action and understanding. It argues the answer to both is yep. It then lays out that the main factors driving “the great acceleration” are total human energy consumption, Earth’s energy balance, total human biomass, and connectivity of the human population. Of the four the author suggests the energy imbalance is the most pressing issue to tackle. Hence the advocation of solar geoengineering in the pull quote.

Abandoned Lands: A Hidden Resource for Restoring Biodiversity - Fred Pearce at Yale Environment 360
The System Isn’t Designed to Help You - Tony Dunn at OK Doomer “But as more and more people experience climate change and become victims of climate disasters, we’re going to have to do something. Maybe that something is sacrifice billions of people to homelessness so that a few corporate billionaires can continue to live la dolce vita on their yachts and private jets. Maybe. Or maybe it’s time to realize that you could be next, and that you might want to live in a system designed to support and help you when the bad shit comes and you have no choice but to try to rebuild your life.” (DCH: A brutal first hand account of the many systemic failings across banking, insurance, the legal system, and more while “recovering” from climate disaster.)
10 Reasons Our Civilization Will Soon Collapse - Alan Urban at OK Doomer
What if everything turns out OK? The power of imagining a better future - Gavin Haines at positive.news

Just the headlines:

Earth’s ‘vital signs’ worse than at any time in human history, scientists warn - Damian Carrington at The Guardian
The Great Underappreciated Driver of Climate Change - Alexandra Frost at The Atlantic (DCH: spoiler warning: its food waste)

Geopolitics & Empire

CJW: Hamas Is Dragging Israel Toward the Abyss - Murtaza Hussein at The Intercept

While Israel’s overwhelming capabilities will likely succeed militarily against Hamas, strategically the assault looks likely to inflict grave damage on Israel. With its forces stretched, Israel’s hold on security could become more tenuous, including in sensitive areas of the West Bank and Jerusalem, home to holy sites from three major world religions. A bloody quagmire could quickly dispel the good will extended to Israel and rally international opinion against it.

Offers some thoughts/predictions on how things may progress in Israel-Palestine in the wake of an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza.

US opposes peace as Israel ethnically cleanses Palestinians, waging war on 'entire nation' of Gaza - Ben Norton at Geolitical Economy Report

The BBC acknowledged that the Israeli military attacked a Palestinian convoy, writing, “These vehicles were carrying civilians, who were fleeing northern Gaza after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) issued an evacuation order”.
The BBC verified a video of the attack, describing it as “a scene of total carnage”, which “is too graphic for us to show”.
“Bodies, twisted and mangled, are scattered everywhere”, the BBC described, adding that many of the victims of the Israeli attack were women and children, including infants aged 2 to 5 years old.
[...]
As of 14 October, Israel had killed at least 2,215 Palestinians, including 724 children and 458 women, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
Another 8,714 Palestinians have been wounded in a week of Israeli attacks, among them 2,450 children and 1,536 women.

Those figures are out of date, and things are only getting worse. We need a ceasefire now.

Related to the discussion of death tolls and more bullshit propaganda from the US and Israel: How does Gaza’s health ministry calculate casualty figures? - Chris McGreal at The Guardian

On Thursday, the ministry said the Israeli bombing of Gaza had killed 7,028 Palestinians, including 2,913 children, in the nearly three weeks since Hamas killed about 1,400 Israelis and abducted more than 200 others in its cross-border attack.
In a move to head off allegations of fabrication, the ministry also issued a 212-page list of the names and identity numbers of every Palestinian it says has been killed in the Israeli bombardment.
[...]
[The Council on American-Islamic Relations’] director, Nihad Awad, said: “Journalists have confirmed the high number of casualties, and countless videos coming out of Gaza every day show mangled bodies of Palestinian women and children and entire city blocks levelled to the ground.
“President Biden should watch some of these videos and ask himself if the crushed children being dragged out of the ruins of their family homes are a fabrication or an acceptable price of war. They are neither.”

No Human Being Can Exist by Saree Makdisi at nplusone

How can a person make up for seven decades of misrepresentation and willful distortion in the time allotted to a sound bite? How can you explain that the Israeli occupation doesn’t have to resort to explosions—or even bullets and machine-guns—to kill? That occupation and apartheid structure and saturate the everyday life of every Palestinian? That the results are literally murderous even when no shots are fired? Cancer patients in Gaza are cut off from life-saving treatments. Babies whose mothers are denied passage by Israeli troops are born in the mud by the side of the road at Israeli military checkpoints. Between 2000 and 2004, at the peak of the Israeli roadblock-and-checkpoint regime in the West Bank (which has been reimposed with a vengeance), sixty-one Palestinian women gave birth this way; thirty-six of those babies died as a result. That never constituted news in the Western world. Those weren’t losses to be mourned. They were, at most, statistics.
What we are witnessing before our eyes is, I think, unprecedented in the history of colonial warfare…. in no instance that I know of has ethnic cleansing been accomplished through the use of massive ordnance and heavy bombardment with ultra-modern weapons systems, including the one-ton bombs (and even heavier bunker-buster munitions) used by Israelis flying the latest American jets. Such matters are normally conducted in person, with rifles or at the point of the bayonet.

A really great piece about Western media in regards to Israel-Palestine, and what Palestinians are "allowed" to say if they are given a chance to speak.

What we are not allowed to say, in other words, is that if you want the violence to stop, you must stop the conditions that produced it. You must stop the hideous system of racial segregation, dispossession, occupation, and apartheid that has disfigured and tormented Palestine since 1948, consequent upon the violent project to transform a land that has always been home to many cultures, faiths, and languages into a state with a monolithic identity that requires the marginalization or outright removal of anyone who doesn’t fit.

“We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other” - Arielle Angel (via Ed Yong)

I know that I have many friends, and that Currents has many readers, who are asking themselves how they can be part of a left that seems to treat Israeli deaths as a necessary, if not desirable, part of Palestinian liberation. But what Exodus reminds us is that the dehumanization that is required to oppress and occupy another people always dehumanizes the oppressor in turn. For people who feel like their pain is being devalued, it’s because it is; and that devaluation is itself a hallmark of the cycle of the diminishing value of human life. As the abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore has said, “Where life is precious, life is precious.”

A really powerful editorial from the editor of Jewish Currents.

Now some further links:

"Gaza is not a state at war with Israel. It is effectively the world’s largest refugee camp — and Israel’s unconscionable bombardment, now set to escalate with US backing, has already killed nearly 2,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including hundreds of children." - Israel’s War on Gaza Is a Murderous Attack on Palestinian Civilians - Seraj Assi at Jacobin - Bit of a concise history of Gaza under occupation.
A Textbook Case of Genocide - Raz Segal at Jewish Currents
Veto Joe - Spencer Ackerman - Some interesting analysis here.
"Al Jazeera reports that Israel is killing a Palestinian in Gaza every five minutes. Israeli forces have massacred entire families and wiped out whole neighborhoods. In its brutal bombardment campaign to “smooth” the way for a ground invasion, Israel has all but flattened Gaza. It has carried out one of its worst indiscriminate targeting of civilians on record, bombing urban neighborhoods, residential towers and buildings, schools, hospitals, and United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) premises. Refugee camps — Deir al-Balah, Khan Yunis, Jabalia — have become the site of massacres. UNRWA says Israel has bombed its school in Gaza, killing eleven UN staff and thirty students. Many hospitals have been bombed and damaged beyond repair." - Israel Has Killed 6 Hamas Leaders in Gaza. It’s Killed More Than 800 Children. - Seraj Assi at Jacobin
"There are two possible scenarios for what happened at Al-Ahli [hospital] last night. The one that holds Israel responsible is fully consistent with its actions and its rhetoric over the past week. The scenario promoted by Israel and the United States requires us to believe that a single Palestinian rocket could inflict the kind of damage that Hamas and Islamic Jihad have never previously been able to inflict upon Israeli targets despite firing thousands of rockets over the past fifteen years." - Israel’s Western Backers Are Still Running Interference for Netanyahu’s War Crimes - Daniel Finn at Jacobin
Israeli Settlers Take Advantage of Gaza Chaos to Attack Palestinians in West Bank - Yuval Abraham at The Intercept - Details about an increase in settler violence in the West Bank now that everyone is focused on Gaza. Related: ‘The most successful land-grab strategy since 1967’ as settlers push Bedouins off West Bank territory - Emma Graham-Harrison and Quique Kierszenbaum at The Guardian
A Half-Century Ago, Another Major Intel Failure Saw Israel’s Leader Resign
Hamas Attack Provides “Rare Opportunity” to Cleanse Gaza, Israeli Think Tank Says - Jon Schwarz at The Intercept

Tech & Design

MJW: This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI by Melissa Heikkilä at the MIT Technology Review

Nightshade exploits a security vulnerability in generative AI models, one arising from the fact that they are trained on vast amounts of data—in this case, images that have been hoovered from the internet. Nightshade messes with those images. Artists who want to upload their work online but don’t want their images to be scraped by AI companies can upload them to Glaze and choose to mask it with an art style different from theirs. They can then also opt to use Nightshade. Once AI developers scrape the internet to get more data to tweak an existing AI model or build a new one, these poisoned samples make their way into the model’s data set and cause it to malfunction. Poisoned data samples can manipulate models into learning, for example, that images of hats are cakes, and images of handbags are toasters. The poisoned data is very difficult to remove, as it requires tech companies to painstakingly find and delete each corrupted sample.

Fuck AI. It can't take the joy of making art away from me, but I don’t want to let it take away the ability I have to support myself with it.

DCH: Amazon Let Its Drivers’ Urine Be Sold as an Energy Drink - Amit Katwala at Wired

The drink had all the hallmarks of a beverage sensation. Striking design, bold font, and the punchy name Release. But inside, each bottle was filled with urine allegedly discarded by Amazon delivery drivers and collected from plastic bottles by the side of the road.
That didn’t stop Amazon from listing it for sale, though. Release even attained number one bestseller status in the “Bitter Lemon” category. It was created by Oobah Butler for a new documentary, The Great Amazon Heist, which airs on Channel 4 in the UK today.

This is probably the most me story I’ve read this year. Big tech criticism + dada art stunt + worker solidarity message. Kudos to Oobah Butler for pulling this off. And of course perpetual shame on Amazon for its many points of failures that made it all possible. More here: The Great Amazon Heist Takes the Piss Out of a Terrible Company

Cooking Up Code - Romello Goodman at Logic Mag - CJW: A short but interesting piece on local design and coding for smaller userbases in order to better understand and serve them.
Exclusive: Tech billionaire Peter Thiel was an FBI informant - Mattathias Schwartz at Insider “Some of Thiel's business interests rely on the FBI and other government agencies as potential revenue sources. He retains a 10% stake in Palantir, a data company that has sold more than a billion dollars of software and related services to the federal government, including the Pentagon, the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the FBI. A $250 million contract with the US Army in September adds to the evidence that Palantir is essentially "a government service provider," a financial analyst said.” (DCH: It should come as no surprise that Thiel is a double-dipping weasel narc but this is a wild story regardless.)
Another three things: The demand for misinformation - Rob Horning “The people who consume misinformation, the authors argue, are not those who tried and failed to find proper information. Instead they intentionally “reject high-quality information and favor misinformation” because of their “low trust in institutions or being strong partisans.” Consuming misinformation validates that lack of institutional trust even if its falseness is exposed.” (DCH: Rob Horning on research about the role of generative AI and the incumbent criti-hype around its foreseen impact on propaganda)
Elon Musk, Innovator - Ed Zitron “To be clear, social media disinformation isn’t a new phenomenon. While it wouldn’t be accurate to say that Musk democratized it, his changes to the platform have certainly played a role in facilitating and amplifying it, as well as changing the incentive structure. There’s now a monetary incentive for ordinary people to lie, sensationalize, and distort, and Twitter will give you the tools to distribute your triangulations and rage-bait to the most amount of people.”
Why can't our tech billionaires learn anything new? - Dave Karpf + "Techno-optimism" is a sign of V.C. crisis - Max Read

Just the headlines:

Instagram ‘Sincerely Apologizes’ For Inserting ‘Terrorist’ Into Palestinian Bio Translations - Samantha Cole at 404 media
Dozens of US states sue Meta Platforms for allegedly harming mental health of young people - Reuters
The Failures of Neoliberal Governance Paved the Way for Uber’s Conquest of the City - Sara Wexler at jacobin
Why Big Tech, Cops, and Spies Were Made for One Another - Cory Doctorow at The Intercept + Cory Doctorow’s Vision for a Just Tech Revolution by David Moscrop at Jacobin

Society & The Culture

LZ: Why People Ghost — and How to Get Over It

I was never good with social interactions, but moving to Sweden felt like I am a complete illiterate in human relationships and a literal alien. Most likely I was unlucky and met someone who doesn’t deal well with their own emotions to the point of being honest with me, and that’s what ghosting can be about. This article is very interesting and it made me realize some things that weren’t very clear to me about these situations. Also, the author mentions studies that say that taking Tylenol helps with emotional pain caused by social interactions – what can’t it do, really?

CJW: The 'no' vote was a racist vote. - Amy McQuire

By claiming the ‘no’ vote was NOT racist, but instead was about campaign messaging or lack of bipartisanship, the reality of racial violence, which is ingrained in every single structure and institution in this settler colony, is also denied. The conversations that blackfellas want and NEED to have are again silenced. The country is not ready to deal with its own racism, because it is a racism that sustains it. It is a racism that every single non-Indigenous voter who cast a ‘no’ vote benefits from. Australia is not ready, but we will make them ready.

A great piece on the recent Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum here in Australia.

Related: Indigenous groups say referendum loss proves Australia is a ‘country that does not know itself’ - Sarah Basford Canales at The Guardian (via Ed Yong)

CJW: Three things - Rob Horning

The problem with “AI editing” would not be that it “falsifies reality” but that it is likely to default to stereotypes and import biases into images in its effort to automatically “correct” them to some statistical norm. It could serve as an avenue for having one’s images written over with what is supposed to be more desirable, so that the AI-edited images appear as an ideologically corrected account of your own experiences instead of a means for individuals to make more persuasive images that say what they want them to say. AI capabilities (like algorithmic feeds) tempt us with passivity; they offer to pre-edit material into something we are expected to find entertaining or meaningful — we get to be passively entertained while we have it confirmed for ourselves that we are going along with someone’s idea of the proper flow. We aren’t settling for the “original exposure,” but we’re not taking an active stance toward interpreting the world either. With all sorts of AI tools, it will be increasingly important to figure out where “editing” stops and where autocorrection begins.

A couple of times recently, Rob Horning has written to push back against the idea that AI editing of photos (using consumer tools now being loaded onto phones) is dangerous or worrying because it changes how we remember events and undermines reality. I’m not sure where I sit on that particular argument, but above he offers a more compelling one - that it's dangerous because of the implicit biases of these tools and the homogenisation likely to occur as photos are edited along the same statistically derived lines.

Whole Earth Index (via Austin) - The entire run of Whole Earth Catalogs online for your perusal.

Just the headlines:

Whistleblower: The World Bank Helped Cover Up Child Sex Abuse at a Chain of For-Profit Schools It Funded - Ryan Grim, Neha Wadekar at The Intercept

Health, Cooking, and Related

Why the US is the only country that ties your health insurance to your job - Dylan Scott at Vox

Labour & Economics

Inside a $30 Million Cash-for-Bitcoin Laundering Ring in the Heart of New York - Joseph Cox at 404media

Just the headlines:

The Five-Day Office Week Is Dead - Nicholas Bloom at The New York Times
Hollywood Actors Are Still on Strike After Four Months - Alex N. Press at Jacobin
Bandcamp’s Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off - Emanuel Maiberg at 404media

Books

MJW: Doppelganger by Naomi Klein

This is actually the first Naomi Kein book I’ve read, even though I know all the talking points of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine well, almost like I didn’t need to read them because the zeitgeist summed it up for me. Doppelganger is different, in that this time, it’s personal.

It must be rough getting mixed up constantly with someone who has views so way out and contrary to your own. Klein’s work is so critical of branding, yet even she had to start ‘protecting’ her brand from the endless mixing up of herself with Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth, who is now a covid conspiracist and darling of Steve Bannon despite her feminist history.

She makes some good points about the polarity of the covid battle that had me really examining my hardline stances on the ‘rightness’ of my views. I mean, I still believe that my opinions on covid are correct - I trust the ONSLAUGHT OF PEER-REVIEWED STUDIES that back up covid’s existence, the longterm harm it causes, and the need for some public health measures. She speaks about how the ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality of anti-vaxxers and covid hoaxers led to many questions that probably should have been asked not being asked, and how many solutions that should have been discussed got lost in that black and white battle.

MJW: The Woman in Me by Britney Spears

I read far more of the poppy, zeitgeisty books than I care to admit (like, I actually sat through Spare and everything.) I’ve never been a fan of Britney, I’m a rock and roll kinda gal, and though I find some of her songs fun, I've never sat down and listened to them. But I am interested in her as both a cultural phenomenon that I grew up with, and further, as a mentally ill woman in the modern world.

Anyway, when my preorder of Britney's memoir audiobook came through, I was like, 'bitch I am READY…' ...to be harrowed, because Spears' memoir is a devastating personal account of the collision of fame, the media, sexual objectification, abuse, and mental illness. I fucking shuddered when, after placing her under the infamous conservatorship, her father told her, 'I am Britney Spears now.' I prefer memoirs that end in the middle, or the start, of the subject's process. I fucking hate when memoirists tie their life up in a nice bow. Spears is trying to heal from the abuses inflicted on her, and might never really get there, but I am glad she has the chance to live her life the way she fucking wants too. Knife dances, nude insta selfies and all.

On a lighter note, Michelle Williams reads the audiobook!

Movies + TV

LZ: The Black Phone (2021)

It took me a long while to watch this one. I remember it became quite popular when it was released, so my expectations were really high… only to be disappointed. Not that the movie is terrible, it couldn't be with that child actress Madeleine McGraw – what an insanely talented little girl!!, but it's like I read on Letterbox: if she was the one to be kidnapped, the movie would end in 15 minutes. Why? Because the protagonist, her brother, is a coward weakling who is nevertheless helped by the ghost of previous kidnapped boys. Since the story happens in the 1970s and in the US, the movie has a lot of It vibes, but it gets trashier with the ghost CGIs and the way Ethan Hawke aka The Grabber has absolutely no backstory. In Brazil we would say this is a movie for Sessão da Tarde or Tela Quente, which were two TV shows that aired films either in the afternoon or in the evening after the soap opera and the titles were often soulless blockbusters.

Podcasts

DCH: Elon Musk Unmasked: Origins of an Oligarch (Part 1) - Paris Marx at Tech Won’t Save Us

Elon Musk wasn't always the influential billionaire he is today. To begin our dive into the myth of Musk, we need to go back to his origins — to find out where he came from, what inspired him, and how he became the man he is today. Those details set the foundation for the three episodes to come. This is episode 1 of Elon Musk Unmasked, a special four-part series from Tech Won’t Save Us.

Part 2 is available too. Marx is one of the best critics of Musk. These are good pods with a lot of detail even if you’re familiar with the many ways and whys for Musk’s bullshit.

MJW: A Bit Fruity with Matt Bernstein

A pal recced the ‘Libs of Tiktok’ ep of this new podcast. You might know Matt Bernstein from his insta @mattxiv, whose viral LGBTQI+ infographics deliver important info in a very accessible, easy to digest aesthetic format. The ‘Libs’ ep features journalist Taylor Lorenz, who’s article outed the utterly un-enigmatic mod of the violence-inciting social media account, Chaya Raichik. It also features some of the victims of the Libs account telling their stories of doxxing, bomb threats, and swatting at the hands of Libs followers, all in the name of ‘protecting children.’