April 16, 2023, 12:09 p.m.
nothing here but a disappearing doomsday - issue 216 - 16th April, 2023
Nothing Here
nothing here but a disappearing doomsday
issue 216 - 16th April, 2023
CJW: Welcome to another edition of nothing here. I hope 2023 is treating you well. Let’s get to it.
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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, apocalypse witch, 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: The Incredible Disappearing Doomsday by Kyle Paoletta at Harper’s Magazine
It is, I promise, not quite as bad as you once imagined, but it is worse than you’ve lately been led to believe. The seas will rise, the summers will get hotter. There will be more red-sky days, more storms, more jungles turned into savannas and savannas turned into deserts. Global emissions may peak in a few years, but the subsequent decline will probably be too gradual to limit warming to even 2.5 degrees Celsius—the level that the United Nations projects the world’s net-zero pledges currently put it on track to reach. None of that constitutes an apocalypse, but it does suggest a world destabilized by hundreds of millions of people going hungry and being forced to flee their homes. The media’s job, in this moment, is not to raise alarms or offer assurances. It is to document the ongoing mutilation of our planet, and to push citizens, politicians, and corporations to stanch the carnage. Everything else is style that detracts from the substantive peril of the present.
This is a great long-read media criticism piece on the changing story of climate change coverage. Bold emphasis mine.
CJW: A really interesting piece. This near the end kinda covers where my thinking is at:
The world has yet to demonstrate the political will to save itself; stories that give readers the misleading impression that things will be just fine are overcorrecting for our prior fatalism, and risk replacing it with complacency. Writers like Wallace-Wells want us to believe that their own doom-peddling has chastened the world into a response that hasn’t actually occurred. The best course for many journalists may be to take a break from narratives and reconnect with the science.
Elsewhere we're reading about a potentially catastrophic change in ocean temperatures, but the general message certainly seems to have changed recently with little progress being made in terms of political will, corporate accountability, or fossil fuel use.
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Reintroducing just nine species or groups of species (including African forest elephants, American bison, fish, gray wolves, musk oxen, sea otters, sharks, whales and wildebeest) would help limit global warming to less than the 1.5°C (2.7°F) threshold set by the Paris Agreement, according to the report.
Why Is Sea Level Rise Worse In Some Places? Spoiler: the land is sinking too.
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Just the headlines:
‘A living pantry’: how an urban food forest in Arizona became a model for climate action by Samuel Gilbert, The Guardian
Climate change: Fossil fuel emissions from electricity set to fall - report - BBC News
Geopolitics & Empire
CJW: As Israelis Protest Mounting Authoritarianism, Apartheid Regime Over Palestinians Goes Unchallenged - Alice Speri at The Intercept
The Israeli government has deployed an array of legal and policy pretexts to extend its domination of the West Bank, most notably by supporting the more than half million Israeli settlers who illegally moved there. Since a new, far-right coalition took power, Israel has been roiled by mass protests that reached an apex this week, as hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to oppose plans by Netanyahu — who is currently fighting corruption charges — to severely curtail the independence of the country’s judiciary. But the political crisis means little to Palestinians, including the 1.6 million with Israeli citizenship, who have long viewed Israel’s courts as complicit in their oppression, and the legal system many Israelis are now rushing to defend as an enabler to the regime of racial domination forced upon them.
“Palestinians know that Israel has only ever been a democracy for its Jewish citizens, and never for us,” George Bisharat and Jamil Dakwar wrote in an op-ed for Haaretz this week. “What we are witnessing today is an internal Israeli Jewish struggle over who will administer an apartheid regime over the Palestinians, not a genuine fight for democracy for all.”
A great long read that connects the recent protests against Netanyahu's planned judicial overhaul with the plight of Palestinians and Israeli apartheid.
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CJW: The US blockade of Cuba is a violation of democracy - Calla Walsh at Geopolitical Economy Report
The blockade is not about restoring democracy in Cuba, despite Washington’s attempts to portray it as such. No, these sanctions are designed to force Cuba into a return to capitalist dictatorship.
[...]
The blockade is not about forcing Cuba to give its people a greater say in their democracy. Cubans already have one of the most robust democracies in the world.
Rather, the blockade is about exerting maximum economic pressure on Cuba, to enable the US to impose its so-called model of “democracy” on Cuba – which means “democracy” for the US ruling class to seize Cuba’s resources and exploit its people.
A great read on Cuba’s democracy and the US attacks against it. I’m sure Cuba’s not perfect, but in my mind it’s a little socialist tropical paradise. I’ll keep learning Spanish, and one day maybe they’ll let me live out my senescent years there.
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“The conflict may seem like just another turn in an endless cycle of violence, but its proximate cause reflects a novel crisis, if only for its depth: the increasing radicalization of the Israeli settler movement, and its political patronage by the Netanyahu government.” - Israeli Settlers Move on the Holiest Site in Jerusalem — Setting Off a New Crisis - Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept
Just the headlines:
Mexico's AMLO calls out US 'oligarchy' at Biden's 'democracy' summit - Ben Norton at Geopolitical Economy Report
How Christian Is Christian Nationalism? by Kelefa Sanneh, newyorker
To Help End the Yemen War, All China Had to Do Was Be Reasonable - Ryan Grim at The Intercept
https://theintercept.com/2023/04/12/ben-ferencz-obituary-iraq-war/ - Jon Schwarz at The Intercept
From Discord to 4chan: The Improbable Journey of a US Intelligence Leak by Aric Toler, bellingcat + Intelligence leak exposes U.S. spying on adversaries and allies by Shane Harris, The Washington Post
Science & Space
DCH: Manifest Destiny in Space - Current Affairs
Yes. I’ll just put my cards on the table here and say it’s a terrible position to believe that it is more important to secure the survival of a trillion hypothetical beings in the future than a few billion actual beings now. Therefore, rather than putting your money into development in developing countries, or into access to clean water, healthcare, or universal basic income for people who are here, you should really give the money to the entrepreneurs who are looking toward the future of, again, some major abstracted version of humanity.
Religious scholar and Astrotopia author Mary-Jane Rubenstein on the messianic bullshit and effective altruism lurking in the corporate-colonialism of the shitty 21st century space race.
Tech & Design
CJW: Elon Musk doesn't know what's really happening on Twitter - Paris Marx
In Germany, Twitter could face fines of up to €30 billion because it hasn’t been taking down posts containing illegal hate speech, as identified under the NetzDG law. Remember that Musk says he’ll follow countries’ laws around hate speech, but clearly isn’t in this case. Even worse is what’s going on in Brazil right now.
After a string of recent school shootings in Brazil, including a recent attack at a daycare center where four children were killed, the government is trying to crack down on social media posts that promote school shootings, including vile content such as the photos and names of attackers, images of mutilated children, and songs encouraging further attacks. The Justice Minister recently met with representatives of the various platforms, and Twitter explicitly refused to take down these types of posts. A list of violent accounts were provided to Twitter, but the company acted on very few of them. That not only angered the Justice Minister, who said it was like the rules of the platform trumped Brazil’s Constitution and the lives of young people — again, going against Musk’s claims about following countries’ rules [...]
A great response to the recent Musk BBC interview, pointing out his lies (and general failings) in regard to the platform.
Related: Elon Musk Is Waging War on Freedom of Speech on Twitter by Luke Savage at Jacobin
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Heaven Banning - where a troll is relegated to private quarantine in an online space where they’re praised by bots - was once a provocation, now a possibility with GPT. Read Rob Horning for more. I (CJW) wonder if the author, Asara Near, took the name from Blindsight, where there’s a sort of living VR afterlife free of friction or conflict for the user called Heaven.
World-class bedshitting here from Substack
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Just the headlines:
Whoops, Samsung workers accidentally leaked trade secrets via ChatGPT by Cecily Mauran, Mashable
The TikTok Ban Isn’t About National Security. It’s About the Global Dominance of US Tech. - Paris Marx at Jacobin
A Computer Generated Swatting Service Is Causing Havoc Across America - Joseph Cox at Motherboard (via Ahmet A. Sabancı)
Doctors using AI catch breast cancer more often than either does alone (via Sentiers)
ChatGPT Isn’t ‘Hallucinating.’ It’s Bullshitting. by Carl T. Bergstrom, undark + ChatGPT - The Revolutionary Bullshit Parrot by Adam Kaczmarek at Reasonfield Lab
Society & The Culture
MJW: Where the Sidewalk Ends by Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein at Lux
Cars are essential infrastructure in Alabama. There is virtually no public transportation, and the cities are not walkable. This is deliberate. When the state passed its first gas tax in 1950, politicians stipulated that the proceeds could fund only roads and bridges, not public transit. The racism and classism of that decision, in the state that would see the Montgomery bus boycott just a few years later, is no coincidence. Public transit is a powerful tool to redistribute wealth and power. One 60-year-old Selma resident I spoke with remembers when there was still a bus system in Montgomery, which she called the “bloodline” of the city. Budget cuts in the 1980s — blowback from the boycott — starved the system completely. “They gave us the bus seat,” she said, “but they took the damn bus!”
On one man's plan for mutual aid via vehicle repair. And also communism.
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Just the headlines:
Forensic Re-creations of Police Abuse Lead to Landmark Legal Settlements - Akela Lacy at The Intercept
TikTok creators are being arrested for violating religious laws in Nigeria by Olatunji Olaigbe, Rest of World
The Shared Anti-Trans and Anti-Abortion Playbook by Irin Carmon, nymag
The UK government is considering its worst attack on trans rights yet by Jeff J, Dazed
Health, Cooking, and Related
Just the headlines:
There’s No Such Thing as a Casual Interaction With Your Doctor Anymore by Zoya Qureshi, The Atlantic
Drug overdose deaths have quadrupled among older US adults by Grace Wade, New Scientist
Labour & Economics
DCH: Bitcoin is Commoditized Waste by Rusty Foster Today in Tabs
Far be it from me to say that these facilities should all be blown up. That’s absolutely not a thing I would write or advocate. So, certainly, don’t do that. They do appear to be quite easy to find though, and the Times lists the location of thirty four of them.
You know what to do…
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Contacting another person will become a luxury product, available only to the wealthy who can afford to pay the ‘conscious human being premium’. From Katherine Dee’s piece on The Post-Human Economy in which she posits that a lot of the disruption being attributed to near-term AI has already happened thanks to dark SEO tactics, content farms, and more.
Just the headlines:
AI Can’t Take Over Everyone’s Jobs Soon (If Ever) > Models are still expensive to run, hard to use, and frequently wrong by Matthew S. Smith, IEEE Spectrum
California Governor Gavin Newsom Is Giving the Crypto Industry Free Rein by Freddy Brewster, Jacobin
Ireland Asks: What if Artists Could Ditch Their Day Jobs? by Alex Marshall, NY Times
UK doctors are striking over being paid $17.40 an hour by Aurora Almendral, Quartz
Newsletters
LZ: Drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
This friend from childhood is publishing a very interesting newsletter. It has started with a series of fictional pieces that combine fantasy and science fiction in a way that would engage the fans of writers such as Ursula K Le Guin, Frank Herbert, Diana Wynne Jones and Octavia Butler – but there’s more to it! The most recent newsletter is more of a philosophical, religious essay, so I would say that’s the kind of newsletter you would like to subscribe to in case you like weird, magical, philosophical stuff - fictional or not!
Books
LZ - Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte
Yes, that time of life has arrived and so I decided to read this book that is mostly connected to sentimental mothers who love period drama. To be honest, the only reason why I decided to read this book was because I learned it was a gothic story that involved ghosts, but it’s definitely not creepy. Ugh! It’s super dramatic and very much dated since a contemporary version would just be “fuck good manners”.
However, I would say after watching the miniseries with Tom Hardy that this is a story that is more enjoyable in movies than in the book, as the characters written by Bronte are absolutely hateful. In the movie, at least, there’s more drama, more romance. In the book, there’s only disgrace, hate, revenge and madness. Which is perhaps good for some readers, but I was looking for romance after finishing Dracula and finding none of Coppola’s take in the original source. Anyways, would I say this book is worth reading? Probably not. Do I regret reading it? Not really.
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MJW: Rememberings by Sinead O'Connor
This memoir is heavy and beautiful. It's an insight into a woman and performer who stands for something, who forsakes pop for her ethics and has lived her life exactly as she pleases. It's about trauma and rage and music and mental illness. It's prose is so lyrical, which I guess is to be expected for a songwriter. Bonus if you listen to the audiobook which is read by O'Connor herself.
Games
LZ: Diablo IV (open beta)
Last month, Blizzard offered open beta weekends so we could take a peek of what’s coming up in Diablo IV. I must confess that I never played Diablo before, but being a slave to Overwatch and a fan of dark shit, I decided to give it a try. Also, the current villain, Lilith, is a b s o l u t e l y gorgeous. I remember when the first trailer was released, I even dreamed of her!!! But I was also caught by the new character creator, which allows you to do some really cute chars and there was even some discussion on body diversity when you consider classes like Barbarian.
I tried only Sorceress and Necromancer and I shall stick to the last one, after all…
The Self-Promotion
LZ: Mind-reading technologies could break with anthropocentrism
A follow up to the previous text about virtual reality and lucid dreams based on this recent research that used generative AI to read brain scans and reconstruct the images seen during the process. But even if we can reconstruct what people are seeing with the help of AI, do we really apprehend one’s worldview? And how’s that when it comes to trying to pick another species’ brains?
How we treat animals might show us how we will treat robots
An interesting take on animal welfare and how it could give us a glimpse of the ways we might treat sentient robots, in case they ever come to exist.
New research field, necrobotics uses spider corpses to create robots
Yes, that's exactly what it means: turning corpses into robots. As horrible as it sounds, how open are we to acknowledge that many of our comforts come at the cost of other beings' suffering?
