nothing here but a four-day workweek in the tainted city

issue 212 - 5th March, 2023

CJW: Welcome friends, here we go again. 2023 continues apace. In the words of Jamiroquai the Wise, time keeps slipping into the future. But you're here now, and we've got some interesting things to share. 

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Both give you access to the full bonus archive, as well as new bonuses as they are posted. Another thing you can do to help spread the word is forward this email to someone you think might enjoy it.

The latest bonus is from Lidia: Women artists and spirituality: from subversion to subterfuge?

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, 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: Concrete’s Carbon Footprint Is Huge. It’s Time To Build Differently - Joe Zadeh at Noema

"The problem with that is the process of carbonation,” said Allais. “There is carbon dioxide everywhere in the atmosphere, and any time concrete is exposed to carbon dioxide, it permeates its pores.” When the CO2 permeates it triggers a chemical reaction in the concrete that causes the rebar to rust. “The steel expands because it’s rusting. And the concrete cracks and fails. … And what’s especially interesting is that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere in the last 100 years has greatly expanded, due in no small part to the fact the concrete industry is emitting massive amounts of it into the atmosphere.”

Scientists are trying to figure out how long it takes reinforced concrete to degrade because of carbonation. The average result for a standard structure is 100 years, Allais said. “When you consider that reinforced concrete was invented around 100 years ago,” she went on, “you get this amazing image that the concrete all around the world is beginning to fail.”

[...]

We find ourselves on a treadmill of dependency on a material that is slowly deteriorating from the moment it is first poured. While much of the Global South is embarking on a century of construction, the built environment of the Global North is destined for the monumental challenge of maintenance, demolition and, in the worst-case scenario, ruination.

A great read on the proliferation of concrete, historically and culturally, with special attention paid to the climate consequences and alternatives to current ways of working/thinking that could mitigate its harms.

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CJW: Paying Ourselves to Decarbonize - Kim Stanley Robinson at Noema

Carbon quantitative easing pursued at a substantial level, say $5 trillion a year, would decarbonize our civilization at the speed we must bring to the task. Cutting our carbon burn in half by 2030 would make the following decades immensely easier for subsequent success. Spending $5 trillion per year on decarbonization would leverage much more money in private investment, and what John Maynard Keynes called the multiplier effect would also come into play — creating something like full employment, which would be a powerful tool for eradicating poverty and creating a more just society.

But if a carbon coin is paid for sucking down a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere, then what if you have a ton of CO2 already in the ground, which you own but don’t burn? Wouldn’t that represent a kind of decarbonizing — preemptive in this case, but still worthy of some kind of carbon coin equivalent? It seems like there is some logic to this train of thought. The petro-states will have to be compensated, or they will become desperate and turn into such a force of disruption that efforts to avoid a mass extinction event will fail.

This part of the plan may sound to some people like giving in to an extortionist who is saying, “Pay me or I’ll blow up the world.” But practically everyone on Earth has used fossil fuels in their lives by eating, traveling, using the internet and so on. It has to be admitted: We’re all in the same boat. The Earth is a tiny boat in a vast endless sea, and we have nowhere else to go. We need to employ a kind of eco-realpolitik that refrains from too much righteous judgment, acknowledging that all nation-states are obliged to keep their citizens free from disruption, unemployment and starvation.

KSR is always very well-considered and realistic in his arguments (like here where he mentions that petro-states have citizens that the state needs to support and the way they do that is through selling fossil fuels), and while that lack of radicality might chafe, people in power will respond better to these possible solutions that work within existing economic structures than to the equitable non-capitalist viewpoints espoused elsewhere. That said, as KSR points put, this will still require a shift away from neoliberal market supremacy, which could only be a good thing (I just want to see that as a starting point, not an end point).

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• George Monbiot on another angle from which the British establishment is attacking climate protesters. 

Just the headlines:

• The Market Will Never Solve the Climate Crisis - Grace Blakely at Jacobin

• Does Pollution of the Great Lakes Violate Tribal Treaty Rights? - Bennet Goldstein at Undark

• The next deadly pandemic is just a forest clearing away. But we’re not even trying to prevent it. - Caroline Chen, Irena Hwang at ProPublica

Geopolitics & Empire

DCH: Russia’s Assault on Daily Life in Ukraine - Maxim Edwards at Bellingcat

On February 21, the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said in a statement that the agency had verified 8,006 civilian deaths and 13,827 injuries in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion. “Nearly 18 million people are in dire need of humanitarian assistance and nearly 14 million have been displaced from their homes”.

Two years on now.

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• German lawmaker denounces Ukraine ‘proxy war’ and US ‘terrorist attack’ on Nord Stream pipelines - Ben Norton interviewing 

Just the headlines:

• Only US Warmakers Could Create a Panic as Absurd as the “Spy Balloon” Fiasco - Branko Marcetic at Jacobin 

• West is out of touch with rest of world politically, EU-funded study admits - Ben Norton at Geopolitical Economy Report

• US army resumes theft of Syrian oil weeks after deadly quake - The Cradle

• Eritrean soldiers massacre hundreds in Ethiopia's Tigray region within days of peace deal - Katharine Houreld, Meg Kelly, and Stefanie Le at WaPo (via Foreign Exchanges)

Science & Space

• JWST Discovers Enormous Distant Galaxies That Should Not Exist - Tereza Pultarova at Scientific American

Tech & Design

CJW: A Concerning Trend - Neil Clarke

Anyone caught plagiarizing was banned from future submissions. Some even had the nerve to complain about it. “But I really need the money.”

Towards the end of 2022, there was another spike in plagiarism and then “AI” chatbots started gaining some attention, putting a new tool in their arsenal and encouraging more to give this “side hustle” a try.

Good chance you saw this going around already - Clarkesworld is a mainstay of SFF short fiction, so it was odd seeing this story spread so far beyond our little corner of sosh. For context: the release of ChatGPT has seen a huge influx of machine-written stories hitting short fiction markets, adding additional work and stress onto what are largely un/underpaid positions.

It's odd to me that people think they'll make money doing this when many writers (including myself and Marlee) haven't been able to break into Clarkesworld, even with good stories that have gone on to sell elsewhere (because there is always the matter of an editor's tastes regardless of how good the story is or is not). Venkatesh Rao has recently been talking about mediocre computing and he was lauding ChatGPT for its ability to mimic perfectly mediocre writing, but mediocre doesn't get you into pro-rate short story markets. So this "hustle" seems poorly targeted at the very least.

MJW: Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhh. So many of the measures you can take against this issue are biased to a US based authorship too. It just means that everyone suffers. I haven’t written a single short story that I have not submitted to Clarkesworld first, because they’re always open. This is the first time in years that I have known them to close. With the slow and hideous death of twitter, this is just another way that short sff fiction will suffer. 

I think ultimately Chat GPT will be used for fiction, but in conjunction with a writer, to hasten the process - especially for the kind of authors who make their money by being prolific self-publishers. I mean, they already are and have been for a while. But you just can’t escape the need for individual voice, but so far AI seems to only be able to mimic this, making it hollow and plastic - which is why the writer will be an integral part of successful AI storytelling. Despite that, hustlers are going to hustle and people will continue to attempt to profit from being an unnecessary middleman (dropshipping, etc) because capitalism is gross and everything is terrible.

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DCH: How to navigate the AI apocalypse as a sane person - Erik Hoel 

“There’s a clear plan: slow down research into AGI at Big Tech companies like Google and Microsoft, which means applying social, legal, and governmental pressure on them to proceed as safely as possible and to take the threat seriously. Prevent, as much as possible, a reckless race toward smarter and smarter AGI, which is currently only controllable because it’s occasionally dumb rather than consistently brilliant, it’s schizophrenic, and it’s stuck in a chat window. The slower progress occurs at these companies, and the more criticism these companies face for every misstep, the easier these technologies will be to keep under control. This includes regulatory oversight, but also social pressure to get AI companies to willingly sign onto well-designed AI safety standards.”

Neuroscientist Erik Hoel summarising current AI safety themes in the wake of all the recent ChatGPT chaos. Good related posts from Scott Alexander, Rob Reid, Scott Aronson, and Jon Stokes (who introduces the notion of Lovecraft’s Basilisk which I know can’t get out of my head).  

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MJW: Instagram users are being served gory videos of killing and torture by Taylor Lorenz at The Washington Post

His friends replied that it wasn’t just him. They too were receiving violent videos in their feed. Twitter users also began posting about the phenomenon. “Hey @instagram,” one Twitter user posted in September, “why was the first thing on my feed today a beheading video from an account i don’t even follow? Thx!” Mitchell, an Instagram user in his early 20s who asked to be referred to solely by his first name because of security concerns, said that “It started with a video of a car crash, or an animal getting hit by a train. I just scrolled past it. Then I started to see people get shot.”

Large meme accounts post the graphic content to Reels in an effort to boost engagement, meme administrators and marketers said. They then monetize that engagement by selling sponsored posts, primarily to agencies that promote OnlyFans models. The higher a meme page’s engagement rate, the more it can charge for such posts. These efforts have escalated in recent months as marketers pour more money into meme pages in an effort to reach a young, highly engaged audience of teenagers, marketers said.

Violence is insidious. What does it mean to be repeatedly exposed to it in your everyday doomscrolling? What does it mean when it’s commonplace and used for clicks? And what does it mean to be numb to it? 

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• On YouTube and Meta's complicity in the spread of sectarian violence in India.

• “Indonesia is TikTok’s second-largest market with an estimated 106 million users as of 2022, just behind the U.S. at 140 million users. The mud bath videos are part of a wave of exploitative so-called poverty porn exploding on Indonesian TikTok, which experts say the company has been slow to flag and remove, and which can slip through the cracks of harmful content as defined by the company’s terms of service.”

• "Police statistics show that nine out of 10 kidnappings in São Paulo in the past year have occurred after a date was arranged through Tinder and similar apps. According to Eduardo Bernardo Pereira, a police officer from the São Paulo anti-kidnapping division, men like da Silva — ranging from 30 to 65 years old — are the main targets. The fear over what have become known as “Tinder robberies” has left thousands of Brazilians on dating apps to devise their own safety measures."

• Such hyperoxygenated promises collide pretty hard with the reality of machines that don’t know what year it is (and which get pissy when you correct them). It’s almost kind of hilarious. Society worried we’d get remorseless all-seeing Skynet annihilators of mankind — but what we’ve actually got are glad-handing bullshit artists that can’t be bothered to get trivial facts straight. (DCH: Clive Thompson on the boom/bust cycles of AI summers/winters)

• The Desert of the Virtual - Anna-Verena Nosthoff and Felix Maschewski at Dissent

• MoMA’s Glorified Lava Lamp - Jerry Saltz at Vulture

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Just the headlines:

• Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s the Evidence - Jon Haidt

Society & The Culture

• Rebuilding the Closet - A great piece by Adam Kotsko on the social and cultural tide of acceptance toward normalising non-cishet identities and the current conservative backlash to same.

• I (CJW) enjoyed this read on IMDB supercontributors. Godspeed you obsessive film geeks, especially the ones working in the trivia mines. (They're not mentioned in the piece, but it's my favourite part of the site.)

• I (CJW, again) quite liked parts of this essay on creative repetition, inspiration, and plagiarism, but as I'm mostly sick of AI discourse, I thought that aspect didn't really add much to the piece. By Vivian Lam at Wired.

• We’re All Living Under Gravity’s Rainbow - John Semley WIRED

Health, Cooking, and Related

LZ: Yeasted pumpkin bread

For those who like to cook and bake, here’s a good recipe for yeasted pumpkin bread. Tried this week and got these beauties: 

MJW: OMG that looks amazing. Fuck I miss bread.

Just the headlines:

• No One Really Knows How Much COVID Is Silently Spreading … Again - Katherine J. Wu at The Atlantic

• Science Falls Behind as Syphilis Stages Another Comeback Undark - Bhargavi Duvvuri at Undark

• A Christian Health Nonprofit Saddled Thousands With Debt as It Built a Family Empire Including a Pot Farm, a Bank and an Airline - Ryan Gabrielson at ProPublica

• Did Lina Khan Just Slash Insulin Prices? - Matt Stoller 

Labour & Economics

CJW: Workers Are Dying in the EV Industry’s ‘Tainted’ City - Peter Yeung at Wired 

Further proof that any "green" future we reach thanks to capitalism will be built on the backs of workers in the Global South who experience atrocious and dangerous working conditions. Not to mention the extreme pollution that these companies produce damaging the environment and the health of people living in affected areas, etc…

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• “In a recent trial of the four-day work week, 61 UK companies experimented with giving all their employees a paid day off every week. The experiment—the world’s largest, till date—has been hailed as a resounding success by its organizers. More than 90% of the participating companies want to keep the four-day week, either as a continuation of the pilot program or as a permanent change.” (DCH: see also The bill that would give Americans a four-day workweek.)

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Just the headlines:

• Teacher Charged After Crypto Mining Operation Discovered in School Crawl Space - Nikki Main at Gizmodo

• 'Landlords Are a Scum Class': Everything I've Learnt About London Renting - Joel Golby at Vice

Books

LZ: Irish Ghost Stories, edited by David Stuart Davies

Here’s a compilation of creepy, ghastly short stories written by Irish authors such as Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde and more. Despite saying it’s a compilation of Irish ghost stories, it turns out that most of the narratives take place in other countries – mostly in England, or more precisely London, so the experience can be a bit odd in this sense. Nevertheless, the collection is great with a few exceptions that were kind of painful reads for its slow pace and lack of surprise. Well, to be fair, ghost stories are rarely surprising, so one should count on the good art of writing to really enjoy them. Still, there are several passages that are very visual, to the point that I took a photograph of some pages so I can get back to them and actually draw something based on those descriptions. Also, the book is very pretty: small, with baby blue hard cover and golden page edges. Even if you don’t like it, at least it will make a good decor piece lol.

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LZ: Toshimitsu Fukiharu - Mushroom Botanical Art

Found this one when visiting Tate Modern in London. I think I never bought a book of illustration or botanical art before, so it was a first. I thought it would have more text and contextualization, but not really. It’s more about collecting nice illustrations of mushrooms, found in different books published in different eras and showing print and painting techniques.
I suppose this is a very specific kind of publication, as it might be targeted to a very niched group of people that enjoy/study/make scientific illustration, are interested in mushrooms, and want some inspiration/resources for their research. But… since we have THE INTERNET I'm not sure how useful a book like that is besides for the fact that it is beautiful and… physical?

In the meantime, I will simply share the existence of this little guy Clathrus archeri fungus, which I learned about while checking this book:

Podcasts

DCH: Silicon Valley Is Destroying the World

It’s no coincidence that Stanford University was founded in Palo Alto, California, where many decades later scores of tech companies also got their start. Palo Alto is the birthplace of the “Palo Alto system,” an approach to training racehorses that attempted to speed up the process by applying techno-scientific principles and injecting lots of cash. This ethos of optimization, argues the writer Malcolm Harris, defined Stanford, which in turn helped define Silicon Valley and the ideology it has spread throughout the world.

A short, sharp podcast on the (literally) murderous, eugenic, right-wing roots of Silicon Valley with Malcom Harris author of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World.

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MJW: Hot Money from the Financial Times

When Financial Times reporter Patricia Nilsson started digging into the porn industry, she made a shocking discovery: Nobody knew who controlled the biggest porn company in the world. Now, Nilsson and her editor, Alex Barker, have figured out who the guy was, and much more. Their reporting reveals a shadowy power structure that includes billionaires, tech geniuses and the most powerful finance companies in the world.

Look, porn’s always been shady, but it’s a different kind of shady now. It’s corporate and billionaire shady. Listen to hear some interesting stuff about the deeply enmeshed history of porn and tech.

Music

LZ: Foothill Roots - Through the Night

Through The Night | Foothill Roots

4 track album

Since I spent the end of last year in Ireland for vacation, I’ve been immersed in literature about the country's folklore. I ended up learning about this band by coincidence, without knowing it was Irish, and while listening to it, their music really resonated to me. It’s a combination of black metal and folk, so you’ll find tracks that are simply made of acoustic guitar and others that will feature the typical guttural vocals and fast-pacing drums. 

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LZ: Botanist - VIII Selenotrope

VIII: Selenotrope | Botanist

8 track album

New album by Botanist coming up! I’ve seen they recorded this here in Sweden, and the first track, Angel’s Trumpet, was recently released as a sneak peek. The dulcimer is back in all its glory (for the past albums, it was a little bit more shy than usual) and they have been investing on art merch too. I bought this book they released with their CDs and lyrics. I love when a band takes it further than the music and turns the whole concept into lore!

Art

CJW: Shrouded in Mist, Spectral Icebergs Float Around the Antarctic Peninsula in Photos by Jan Erik Waider - at Colossal

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LZ: Remedios Varo

Found out about her on Twitter and became obsessed. It’s a complimentary reference to the latest bonus newsletter, which was written by yours truly. 

With this unique name which doesn’t give her gender, María de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga was a Surrealist painter born in Spain in 1908 and dead in Mexico in 1963. Just like Dalí, she was also born in Catalonia and she also studied in the same place as he did, the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, in Madrid. While in Europe, she took part of the Surrealist circle and met Andre Breton and, while in Mexico, she was also in contact with Frida Kahlo. There she also worked as a publicist at the pharmaceutical company Bayer, which is pretty much ironic considering her name. 

While her aesthetic was influenced by Renaissance art, like other Surrealists the philosophy behind her images was very much connected to psychoanalysis, in a more Jungian tone. That gets pretty obvious when you see works like this:

Woman leaving the psychoanalyst.

It’s cool to see how she uses warm colors and dreamy scenarios just like Magritte, but with a much more feminine and even contemporary touch. If you search for pop surrealism, you’ll see many more recent works that resemble hers and you may also find her as a reference in Madonna’s Bedtime Stories music video, where she used the painting Nacer de Nuevo as an inspiration (so much love for 90s surrealist CGI):

Unfortunately Remedios doesn’t make it into Higgie’s book The Other Side, which focuses on women artists and their connection to spirituality and the unconscious, something that Remedios definitely achieved with her work.

The Memes