CJW: You’ll notice things look a little different this issue. We’ve moved the newsletter away from tinyletter and onto substack for a couple of different reasons. Substack allows you to edit letters in the archive, its editor is a little simpler (which makes copying them over from gdocs easier), and hopefully our letters won’t get irregularly held up by an aggressive content-review algorithm, or get broken by Outlook.com and gmail. Substack also allows creators to charge a fee for their newsletters, sending issues for their paid subscribers, unpaid subscribers, or both.
What does this mean for you?
The core nothing here experience - these fortnightly dispatches chock full of articles and commentary - will always be free. So, beyond the changes to the design of the newsletter, the change to substack doesn’t have to change anything for you. If, however, you enjoy what we do and would like to support us monetarily, you’ll be able to sign up to become a paid subscriber.
Paid subscribers will get irregular random bonus letters containing early access to Oh Nothing Press releases and other self-published odds and ends from the team. Once we reach 20 paid subscribers, we will start sending out bonus paid issues. These will be fortnightly missives from one member of the team - short fiction, essays, manifestos, reviews, rants, whatever. With the core nothing here dispatches and the bonuses, paid subscribers will be hearing from us once a week, instead of once a fortnight.
Will these bonuses be worth it?
I’m certain that the four of us are capable of generating some interesting bits of bonus content for you, but if another $5 a month is too much for you (because, let’s face it, we’re all already supporting podcasts and other creators on Patreon), that’s fine, don’t even worry about it. We’re not going to hold anything back from these fortnightly dispatches. I’ll say it again: the core nothing here experience will always be free. Collectively we pour a lot of time and energy into this newsletter, so this is just a chance for people to support us if they’re able. And believe me, I understand how big an ‘if’ that can be.
So if you want to become a paid subscriber, hit the button below.
Anyway, on with the show…
Corey J. White (CJW) - The VoidWitch Saga. Newsletter facilitator. Naarm/Melbourne.
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - ‘Welcome To Orphancorp’ and ‘Psynode’. Host of Catastropod. ADHD, spec fic, feminism, cats. On Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, Australia. @marleejaneward
Austin Armatys (AA) - Writer/Teacher/Wretched Creature // Oh Nothing Press // MechaDeath physical edition available now // @0hnothing
m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / Apocalyptic Futurist / #salvagepunk / @m1k3y
AA: Free Shipping: Delivery robots will redefine the meaning of every object they transport by Chenoe Hart for Real Life
This article looks at the possibility of decentralised object-sharing, a concept that seems increasingly possible given the advances in drone and small-scale delivery robot technology.
The ability to request the express arrival of any object missing from your life with a minimum of effort could make it increasingly possible to live as though you already own everything. That is to say, ownership might become an irrelevant consideration in comparison to the availability of abundant options for short-term consumption like those already offered by media streaming services.
But of course for a system like this to truly take off, people actually have to push back against the idea of private ownership. Sounds unlikely? Maybe not as far-fetched as you might think:
Consumption may now be taking on a different role within our broader culture. The same young people who no longer hang out at malls may lose their desire to shop for objects altogether. Younger consumers are now presumed to be more interested in spending on experiences rather than things (at least according to the findings of one widely quoted Eventbrite-funded survey) and to be more interested in “access” to objects over owning them (a trend particularly associated with reduced homeownership rates). While a 2017 analysis by Deloitte found that decreased consumer spending was more likely to be correlated with rising health-care costs rather than consumers’ “rushing to experience,” the enduring popularity of the hypothesis may be related to its apparent explanatory power — how well it seems to address anxieties about how our society and economy are evolving. An editorial last year by libertarian economist Tyler Cowen, for instance, expressed concerns that subscription-based alternatives to ownership could undermine “traditional American concepts of capitalism and private property.”
AA: Oh no, not our concepts of capitalism and private property!
CJW: The idea here of basically creating a peer-to-peer network for trading physical goods and eroding the very concept of ownership is fucking fascinating. Is this one example of what technosocialism could look like?
And then this:
Some of the environmental footprint involved in moving those objects around could be partly offset if their movement kept them from being discarded or prevented replacements from needing to be produced in the first place. Every new product released into the market would compete on more comparable footing against the long tail of the remaining supply of every object that had been produced before.
Mass distribution as opposed to mass consumerism could mean an end to planned obsolescence and the mountains of waste we create with cheap, disposable products of all sorts (for instance, a while back I read an article about cheap pedestal fans that made me completely rethink the way I approached buying products, but I couldn’t for the life of me know what terms to punch into google to bring that up again instead of countless pages trying to sell me cheap pedestal fans. But the gist of it was that the amount of materials being used and the amount of waste being created to manufacture and distribute pedestal fans was in no way reflected in the price we pay for them, but because we value money and not the environment we get countless fans on the side of the road every hard rubbish day).
AA: Making supply and manufacturing chains more transparent, and asking people to pay attention to the way products “magically” appear in their stores and homes, is definitely an important step in trying to reckon with consumerism and its environmental effects. This 2008 project by artist Thomas Thwaites, which details his attempts to create a janky modern plastic toaster “from scratch”, was a classic that illuminated some of these issues. His accompanying TED Talk from 2010 has been viewed over 1 million times. I also look for any excuse to bring up Alexis Madrigal’s “Containers” podcast, which was a totally fascinating deep-dive into global shipping.
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CJW: Time to Panic
I know the science is true, I know the threat is all-encompassing, and I know its effects, should emissions continue unabated, will be terrifying. And yet, when I imagine my life three decades from now, or the life of my daughter five decades now, I have to admit that I am not imagining a world on fire but one similar to the one we have now. That is how hard it is to shake complacency. We are all living in delusion, unable to really process the news from science that climate change amounts to an all-encompassing threat. Indeed, a threat the size of life itself.
This opinion piece touches on a lot of favoured NH topics - the climate change apocalypse, our lack of concerted response, the ineffectiveness of personal consumer “solutions” to the problem, Morton’s Hyperobjects, and plenty more.
MJW: Now panic and freak out! Finally, something I’m good at.
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AA: Cashing in on refugees, duo make $20 million a month at Manus Island
Some excellent reporting by the team of Angus Grigg, Jonathan Shapiro and Lisa Murray at the Financial Review revealed the shady dealings behind the security arrangements at Australia’s offshore refugee processing centre in Papua New Guinea. Their article is behind a paywall, but here’s the gist:
Calculations by the Financial Review indicate Paladin is being paid on average $20.8 million a month by the government to provide security at all three sites and manage the East Lorengau Transit Centre. That amount has risen 48 per cent from an average of $14 million a month last year. A Home Affairs spokesperson said there were now 422 people housed at the three camps – 213 at East Lorengau, 111 at West Lorengau and 98 asylum seekers at Hillside Haus.
That means on a daily basis it now costs the Australian government over $1600 to house each refugee on Manus, not including food and welfare services, more than double the price of a suite at the Shangri-La hotel in Sydney.
Our (terrible) Australian government is currently under scrutiny for the process under which Paladin acquired these contracts, but this is likely to be as consequence-free as ever. Military-Industrial grifters making massive profits while facilitating the unjust imprisonment and torture of innocent people? Just another day in the “lucky country”.
I need a drink.
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CJW: Landmark Australian ruling rejects coal mine over global warming (via Sentiers)
This is particularly inspiring considering the fact that our federal government recently threatened to renationalise a coal power station that would otherwise be shutdown. Our neoliberal hellscape is predicated on the primacy of The Market, but when even The Market says that coal is on the way out, our morally bankrupt and utterly visionless politicians cry foul.
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CJW: Why CAPTCHAs have gotten so difficult
I’ve been known to complain about CAPTCHAs on twitter - primarily that we’re training the neural networks behind self-driving cars and not being paid anything for our labour (reminder: there will be many different ways we’ll be made to train neural networks - think of tumblr’s adult content algorithm, likely being trained with every click of the userbase that is desperate to get their posts unflagged), but the difficulty of CAPTCHAs is also a very real concern (he says when we’re also talking about the extinction of all bugs). Twice in the past 2 weeks I’ve been locked out of services because my Very Human responses didn’t correspond to whatever the database expected from me. So, as well as doing more training for our robot overlords because it requires more clicks to be convinced, I’m also getting frustrated with the website I’m trying to access, and also not reaching the services I went there for in the first place. So hey, that newsletter Ganzeer recommended sounded great, but because CAPTCHA is shit, I’m frustrated with tinyletter, not signed up to the newsletter, and writing this rant right here.
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CJW: All the sad young literary fakes (via Jane Rawson)
I didn’t really want to include that Dan Mallory/AJ Finn profile from the New Yorker last time because whilst it was a detailed look at the many lies that formed the foundation of Dan Mallory’s publishing career, it seemed to be lacking some broader, external context. As pointed out by the brilliant Australian poet Omar Sakr, Mallory’s path to success is utterly steeped in white privilege - that a white man could stumble into a job on a pack of lies, be constantly absent and literally pissing in cups at his boss’s desk, and still rise through the ranks, while POC struggle to get into the publishing industry in any sort of role. And that’s something that’s touched on here in this article by Ruoxi Chen, and also in the above article from Jessa Crispin, though Crispin’s is framed as being about white hoax authors, rather than the whiteness of publishing industry professionals.
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CJW: Something Is Broken in Our Science Fiction
I’m in the interesting position of both having written an anti-cyberpunk manifesto, and then following it up by writing a cyberpunk novel. And I’ll write more about this one day (maybe in an interview closer to the release of Repo Virtual?) but in general I agree with this article, and indeed made the same argument RE: dropping the -punk suffix in aforementioned manifesto. But STILL, I think cyberpunk is a perfectly valid subgenre today, precisely because it is the one that best represents the Now in all its horrifying, neoliberal “glory”. But there’s also a reason why I wrote RV as a sort of “end of cyberpunk” book - because we need to find in these fictions and in our Now, the seeds for what comes next…
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CJW: https://blog.openai.com/better-language-models/#sample5
An AI that generates realistic pieces of text, that the researchers didn’t release because of the fake news and disinformation potential inherent in the system.
AA: Our fellow Republic of Newsletter-er Max Anton Brewer took a limited version of this tech for a spin in his latest excellent missive.
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AA: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/26/against-creativity-oli-mould-review
Creativity, Mould shows splendidly, is also a rhetorical cover for the punitive fiscal “austerity” imposed by neoliberal governments. When Jeremy Hunt said the NHS needed to be more “creative”, he meant it had to find out how to do more with less money. Ironically, as Mould observes, the financial crisis, gratefully seized on as the excuse for austerity, “was itself a product of a process that the creativity narrative has championed relentlessly, namely financial innovation”.
CJW: I feel like this review, and the book it is a review of, would share some parallels with the Millennial burnout article that did the rounds - specifically the idea that every worker needs to be an entrepreneur, and that work therefore seeps into all other facets of our lives.
Sidenote: Sortition is also one of my favourite, must-resurrect ideas from antiquity.
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MJW: You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information. Then They Tell Facebook.
The only comment needed for this is an infographic from the article:
AA: News From The Future (link to web-based version of latest issue)
The Institute For The Future’s newsletter should have something of value for most Nothing.here readers. It’s curated by Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing / Cool Tools. The latest issue provides bite-sized summaries of topics like beanless coffee, infrastructure-free toilets and air-taxis. A subscribe link can be found here.
MKY: Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe [2018 paperback edition]
Or, Seeing through the ruins of colonisation.
I’m only halfway thru this, and will be dropping a formal review elsewhere in the near future.
I’ve talked about Bruce Pascoe in a previous issue, on the incredible power of his piece in the Extinction branded issue of Meanjin - which has since been unlocked.
“Almost no Australians know anything about the Aboriginal civilisation because our educators, emboldened by historians, politicians and the clergy, have refused to mention it for 230 years. Think for a moment about the extent of that fraud. Imagine the excellence of the advocacy required to get our most intelligent people today to believe it. Imagine the organisation required in the publishing industry to fail to mention Aboriginal agriculture, science and diplomacy. Don’t blame Pauline Hanson, don’t blame Geoff Blainey and Keith Windschuttle, blame Manning Clark, Gough Whitlam and every editor of Meanjin and Overland, for they too were guilty of that omission.”
That completely understandable, totally justifiable sense of righteous indignation is peppered throughout Dark Emu. Each chapter he details fact after mind-blowing fact about the occluded history of the first peoples of this continent I call home, pausing only to express his frustration - and in places, address critics of the first edition with even more facts - that its fallen to him to write this very necessary, mandatory reading material for every single Australian. (In fact, in a better version of Australia, this would be required reading for our stupid citizenship test that ‘assesses your English language skills and what you know about Australia and Australia citizenship’. Fuck Donald Bradman, name me three local crops instead.)
This, for example, is how he feels compelled to conclude the chapter on Aquaculture (sorry about the dog hairs in the scan, dogs rule everything around me):
Which brings us to this diagram, from Seeing Through The Debris by @thejaymo:
“We can begin to remodel the present and think about the past in a way that allows for multiple histories just as the Futures Cone allows us to think of possible futures.”
I’ve been thinking about his piece a lot lately, as I stare at this image from Policy Design for the Anthropocene which I put on my wall and think about its Known Unknowns:
[Policy Design for the Anthropocene]
Reading Dark Emu has made it even more relevant. Sure, Jay’s writing about how we might glimpse the secret tech of a Breakaway Civilisation… but even more urgent is resisting the gravity of civilisational mythology - colonialism in particular. In making the necessary efforts in seeking out a more authentic and true Actual Historical Narrative. And to do that, we must see through the ruins of colonisation.
R e a d t h i s b o o k.
CJW: SEX EDUCATION // RUSSIAN DOLL
Maybe it’s just my particular tastes, but in general I’ve struggled to find many Netflix Originals that are worth watching (I put on Sick Note because I wanted to watch some new comedy and I turned it off after the first 20 awful, unfunny minutes of a 40 minute episode). The End of the Fucking World, Love, and OITNB are the only ones that come immediately to mind. Which is why it’s so surprising to find that two recent additions - SEX EDUCATION and RUSSIAN DOLL - are both excellent shows. SEX EDUCATION is a teen comedy that manages to be intelligent, heartfelt, touching, and funny, while dealing with various topics that teenagers can (probably) relate to. And, as ever, Gillian Anderson is a delight.
And RUSSIAN DOLL. I don’t feel that I need to explain my deaths to you, Warren.
I loved it, from start to end. The entire cast is great, but Natasha Lyonne is phenomenal as a witty, lovable arsehole, and easily carries 80% of the show on her own (or, she makes it look easy, which itself is a skill). I’ve seen complaints that it’s “just Groundhog Day”, and a) so what? GD still stands up; b) I daresay it’s smarter and darker than GD, maybe funnier, and with an ending that is more nuanced than the saccharine-sweet Hollywood love story bullshit of GD; and c) everything is “just” something else if you want to be reductive.
MKY: fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck John Updike.
I loved this show when it was merely doing its Happy Death Day thing, then they took it up a notch with that lift scene and there went the rest of my nights finishing this.
AA: I watched this show with my wife and we both really enjoyed it - we have fairly different tastes when it comes to TV drama, but this had something for both of us. Russian Doll manages to do quite a lot in its 8 episode run, establishing an intriguing story while touching on a range of tones and genres with unfussy style. The switch to a kind of Surreal Lynchian Horror in Episode 7 was particularly effective. While the ending was SPOILER ALERT OR WHATEVER I GUESS DO PEOPLE STILL SAY THAT somewhat ambiguous, I hope they don’t make any more - it was a satisfying conclusion, even if it didn’t reveal the mechanics of the main characters’ situation (which, like most sci-fi conceits, is more a vehicle for the human story, rather than the main point).
I remember reading around the time of Maniac’s release that director Cary Fukunaga was encouraged by Netflix to pay attention to engagement metrics and the streaming services algorithms to make structural and content decisions “100 percent based on audience participation’ - aka making sure people were as unlikely as possible to stop their binge consumption.
I wonder if the tonal shifts and pacing of Russian Doll were decided upon in similar fashion, and would I feel this diminished its achievements if they were?
MJW: God, I love good time loop media. I mean, there are the obvious examples, but too - have you folks watched ‘Monday’, the X Files episode? Fucking primo time looping. I’ve got a real soft spot for Natasha Lyonne (and anyone who’s made a magnificent comeback from being a fuckup - I relate), and she was perfect in Russian Doll. I also really loved the episode length, one would have expected the series to be the usual 40-ish minute episode, but I liked the shorter format. It’s nothing when you’re doing a binge, but because I have issues with sitting still, I really appreciated the shorter eps. I also loved that it was helmed by women! I agree with AA: I don’t want any more of Russian Doll. As it stands it was near perfect.
CJW: Yes - exactly. I assumed the first episode was going to be 40 minutes and was stunned when it ended. THANK YOU. It’s one of the seemingly rare shows that respects the audience’s time as well as intelligence.
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MKY: Berlin Station (s3)
Despite my initial misgivings, and disappointment at them dropping the white nationalist international arc from s2 [see earlier issue], this season (which just concluded) was as good, if not better, than previous seasons. This season functions as a changing of the guard, introducing a much better action lead (Torres played by Ismael Cruz Córdova) as it phases out Richard Armitage, the nominal lead of s1/2, who never looked up to it and is constantly overshadowed by my new personal idol, Rhys Ifans. It is an excellent depiction of Hybrid War, and if that’s not enough, mixes in some updated le Carre vibes in its b-plot (old spook telling tales… just that his memoir is a podcast because 2019).
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MKY: Umbrella Academy (S1)
The Watchmen Jnr vibes are so strong in this show..
Less strong is what you have to endure to finally see [spoiler] go full Dark Phoenix.
And they don’t even do the work of setting up a yellow crayon scenario.
But it’s nice to see my favourite Misfit in full flight again.
Also functions as a timeywimey prequel to Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves (I guess, never read it, never will.)
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MKY: Deadly Class (S1 E1-3)
Fuck yes this show. Rollins, you are redeemed at last. Benedict Wong, so good to see you in a lead role. Also the entire thrust of the show: genuine revolution vs maintaining the status quo by any means necessary. Where is my free copy of the Anarchist’s Cookbook? When can I start my residency there on thought crime and samizdat production? Maybe Number 5 from the Umbrella Academy can jump me there… he’d fit right in.
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MKY: Doom Patrol (S1 E1)
The latest in the new crop of comix coming to the small screen. Based on the first ep, this seems to be positioning itself in a space somewhere between Penny Dreadful, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen [comics] and American Gods. Feels very cinematic - like, my housemate thought we were watching a movie. Keen to see where this goes. (The comix were my heatwave reading, but… weirdly, summer seems to have been cancelled here now. <insert joke about a season renewal>)
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AA:
I just finished watching this deeply psychedelic animated sci-fi short called Scavengers (written and directed by Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettnerand, commissioned by Adult Swim) and it fucking ruled. If you enjoy the squelchy bio-tech of classic Metal Hurlant (there’s definitely some Moebius influence here), find seven-ish minutes of your valuable time to explore this unique world. You can find some more information about the short and its creators at shortoftheweek.com here.
CJW: That short is phenomenal - definitely puts me in mind of the Graham/Roy run on Prophet, with the organic-tech and legitimately-alien alien critters.
MKY: That was great!!! Bumping Prophet on the to-read list now.
MJW: The whole entire writing game is an exercise in patience. I’ve got a few things on submission and a few things in the works and all of them require a lot of waiting and hoping. I’ve never had much patience (thanks ADHD!) and it’s been a really valuable lesson I’ve learned from this whole writing caper. So now, when I’m asked that essential question ‘what advice do you have for emerging writers?’ the answer will be: learn fucking patience.
MKY: https://www.meetup.com/Prototypes-and-Popcorn/events/258925055/
I’m giving a short talk at this design meetup here in Melbs on March 5. I’ll be talking about embracing the Alien Earth, and reading from my forthcoming survival horror short story for… what’s that? Oh yeah… Creeper mag.
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MJW: I’ve got a story in the Queer YA anthology Kindred, out in June. My short is called ‘Rats’, and it’s a queer dystopian meet-cute set in a future Melbourne CBD. If you’ve got a young queer in your life, this might just be the book they need. It features amazing Aussie authors like our past guest Alison Evans, Claire G Coleman, Omar Sakr, and more. You can pre-order here.
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CJW: And that’s it for another issue! As ever, thank you for joining us. I’ve spoken about the community-building aspect of the newsletter here before, and that’s such an important aspect of what we’re doing here. We want people to connect with and through us, so if you ever have anything you want to share, just hit reply.