nothing here but a general theory of cyberdelics
issue 306 - 21st December, 2025
CJW: Welcome to another edition of nothing here. Last weekend there was a horrific mass shooting at Bondi Beach (which is in Sydney, for all our international readers) targeting Jewish people at a Hanukkah celebration. 15 people were killed - may their memory be a blessing to their families and loved ones. About 40 more were injured.
It’s fucking atrocious, and might lead to (needed) tighter gun control, but of course our Zionist government (what else can you call it when they fail to condemn Israel’s genocide of Palestinians) is taking this opportunity to crack down on protest and free speech. They likely would have done it without the consent manufacturing of our rabidly right-wing media, but the number of fascist creeps using this tragedy to score political points (again, against notions of protest and free speech, particularly protest against genocide) has been utterly disgusting.
I haven’t included any articles about the above because it’s all been awful and predictable. Though I will say that it should come as no surprise that there were immigrants who put their bodies on the line to stop the gunmen, notably Ahmed al-Ahmed, a Muslim man from Syria who was shot disarming one of the gunmen. But the fact of this man’s bravery won’t stop the worst in our society from fanning the flames of Islamophobia (and that includes the Zionists as well as the white supremacists).
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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 & visual artist. Meme collector.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, kerosene.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer and purveyor of melancholy whimsy.
Climate Change & The Environment
Just the headlines:
Coffee biochar makes for lower-carbon, stronger concrete (via Sentiers) - CJW: This research comes out of Australia. Very exciting, especially as someone living in Melbourne, Australia’s coffee capital.
Geopolitics & Empire
DCH: Israel preparing largest ever ‘archeological cleansing’ in West Bank by Alon Arad at 972 Magazine
Against this backdrop, archaeology in East Jerusalem and the West Bank has long since forfeited its objective scientific value. The discipline’s commitment to studying the past to deepen human understanding has been subordinated to a political project of Jewish supremacy, in which archaeology is wielded as a tool of territorial control. Rather than defending the integrity of their field, many Israeli archaeologists have effectively become an extension of the state’s political apparatus.
This is colonialism so confident it’s now excavating itself alibis. When bulldozers arrive carrying clipboards and carbon dating tools, violence doesn’t disappear — it just learns the language of “heritage” and “restoration.” What’s being erased in Sebastia isn’t only olive trees and land access, but the basic idea that science can claim neutrality while actively enabling dispossession. Archaeology here isn’t studying history; it’s manufacturing it, retrofitting empire with footnotes. When scholars refuse to resist this, they don’t just lose credibility — they become complicit in erasure.
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“To make sense of these seemingly conflicting signals — surging markets alongside deepening social and economic turmoil — it is necessary to look beyond traditional indicators. Israeli economic researcher and BDS activist Shir Hever argues that Israel is now operating in what he calls a “zombie economy,” one kept moving through massive military expenditure, foreign credit, and political denial.” Is Israel’s genocide economy on the brink? by Amos Brison at 972 Magazine
Just the headlines:
Department of Defense goes to war by AI chatbot by David Gerard at Pivot to AI
Science & Space
DCH: ‘Greetings, earthlings’: Nvidia-backed Starcloud trains first AI model in space as orbital data center race heats up by Pia Singh at CNBC
“Anything you can do in a terrestrial data center, I’m expecting to be able to be done in space. And the reason we would do it is purely because of the constraints we’re facing on energy terrestrially,” Johnston said in an interview.
Rather than question an AI boom that’s melting grids and draining water tables, the answer is apparently to strap an H100 to a rocket and call it environmental responsibility. The Shakespeare-in-orbit demo is pure spectacle — a billionaire tech sector performing cleverness while refusing restraint. Orbital data centers aren’t about saving the planet; they’re about preserving an unsustainable business model by exporting its costs off-world.
Tech & Design
DCH: Gramsci’s Nightmare: AI, Platform Power and the Automation of Cultural Hegemony by Ethan Zuckerman
One implication of this is that owners of AI systems have immense power to shape our worldviews as systems like these become a default way in which we get information about the world. But another point is just how hard it is to change the core values that get distilled into that blob of linear algebra when you squeeze a civilization’s worth of texts into a large language model. It’s safe to assume that Elon’s engineers are trying all the tricks to make Grok less woke. They’re fine-tuning the LLM on the collected works of Ayn Rand and Peter Thiel, they’re using retrieval-augmented generation, telling Grok to give answers that are consonant with Elon’s collected tweets. But it doesn’t work, which forces programmers to use brute force.
I think Gramsci would warn us that this is hegemony with the war of position already won: when common sense is automated, struggle no longer happens primarily in schools, unions, or media, but inside models whose “neutrality” masks frozen power relations. The real danger of LLMs is that they normalize the absence of struggle. They present sedimented common sense as neutral knowledge, freezing yesterday’s compromises into today’s baseline reality.
Musk-with-Grok is just the loud version of a quieter, more structural dynamic. Even without an explicit ideological thumb on the scale, LLMs default to smoothing, resolving, affirming modes—turning conflict into sentiment, struggle into vibe. This is what I mean when I say it normalises the absence of struggle: not that grievance disappears, but that it gets metabolized as a personal feeling rather than a collective problem with antagonists, history, and stakes.
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DCH: The time has come to declare war on AI by Drew Magary at SFGATE
The problem is only metastasizing. In a very short timeframe, AI has become the high-fructose corn syrup of the digital realm: It’s now in everything, even if you don’t want it there. It’s at the top of every Google search, unless you do a bit of manual tinkering. It’s in your news feed. It’s on your Spotify playlist. It’s in terrible holiday ads for Coca-Cola. And, thanks to our beloved President Narcolepsy, it’s about to be in your government.
Magary is right to be furious, even if the fury is doing some of the work for him. AI isn’t neutral infrastructure that went wrong; it’s a bundle of incentives deliberately engineered to deskill, extract, surveil, and replace, then launder that damage through the language of “convenience” and “progress.” What’s new isn’t the harm — it’s the speed and scale, and the way political power has already lined up to protect the grift. This isn’t a Terminator future; it’s a duller one, where cognition atrophies, labor gets cheaper, and nobody in charge pays the cost. When a technology requires this much coercion, propaganda, and regulatory capture to survive, that’s not innovation — that’s a hostile takeover of everyday life.
Society & The Culture
CJW: Understanding Transmisogyny, Part Five: Natalism, Nativism, Nationalism - Talia Bhatt
Replacement theories, then, illustrate a crucial facet of fascist politics: the necessity to frame the persecution of the marginalized as a defense of the Nation, especially in times of peace, when there is no war to propagandise, to mobilise and unite the volk. Justifying reactionary violence is a psychological necessity, for even those who delight in cruelty and exploitation still often feel the need to see themselves as in the right, to frame their own actions as righteous, as an unsavory necessity that might not be “pretty”, but “must be done” for the sake of the “greater good”. Powerless groups are recast as deceptive elites, or dehumanized instruments of a greater, secret will, whose inferiority and rapaciousness is not their fault, as such, but an innate part of their nature that demands their culling. Replacement myths are how asylum-seekers and refugees fleeing war-torn lands become an invading force on Western shores, how displaced and destroyed communities become cartels and criminals and terrorists.
It’s how the powerful silence their own conscience while killing the helpless.
Emphasis mine. Another fantastic piece of writing, covering fascist narratives related to immigration, birth rates, nationalism, with a focus on how those narratives affect women, queers, and trans people. There’s a lot more to it than that too, obviously. This whole “Understanding Transmisogyny” series is must-read, but this part in particular is a thorough examination of the fascist ideology of the moment and if you are a person living through this current moment who wants to understand what’s happening and push back against it, you need to read this.
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DCH: Why Disney just put $1 billion into OpenAI by David Gerard at Pivot to AI
Disney thinks it’s the Mafia. But OpenAI is not a regular business you can send the boys round to shake down. It’s a weird money-burning scam that’s shaped a bit like a business.
So OpenAI just talked Disney, the biggest thugs in Hollywood, into giving them money for a bag of magic beans. One thing I’ll give Sam Altman, he’s got a silver tongue. Best monorail salesman in the business.
Disney handing OpenAI a billion dollars isn’t confidence, it’s fear wearing a tuxedo. This is what happens when an empire built on human craft realizes the future might not need it, and responds by buying a seat at the table of a company that doesn’t actually have a table yet. The AI slop angle is a sideshow — Disney knows audiences hate it, which is why it’ll be buried in the margins and filtered by humans who still know what taste is. The real move is legal and symbolic: a big, shiny number Disney can wave at Midjourney, Google, and the courts while pretending this is innovation instead of a hedge against irrelevance. If OpenAI collapses, Disney shrugs and moves on; the real tragedy is how openly a cultural giant is admitting it no longer believes in its own ability to make the future itself.
Labour & Economics
DCH: Secret Documents Show Pepsi and Walmart Colluded to Raise Food Prices Across the Economy by Matt Stoller at Big
And that was where it was supposed to stay, secret, with mean-spirited name-calling and invective camouflaging the real secret Ferguson was trying to conceal. That secret is something we all know, but this complaint helped prove - the center of the affordability crisis in food is market power. If that got out, then Ferguson would have to litigate this case or risk deep embarrassment. So the strategy was to handwave about that mean Lina Khan to lobbyists, while keeping the evidence secret.
This is what “inflation” looks like when you peel off the euphemisms and stare directly at the mechanism. Two corporate behemoths quietly coordinating to squeeze everyone else — consumers, small grocers, competitors — while politicians perform outrage theater and bury the paperwork. Walmart doesn’t win because it’s cheaper; it’s cheaper because Pepsi makes sure everyone else is more expensive. That’s not the market failing, that’s the market working exactly as designed under monopoly capitalism. Prices are political again because people can feel, in their grocery carts, that they’re being deliberately cheated.
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DCH: Netflix can’t be allowed to buy Warner Discovery by Paris Marx
The prospect of Netflix acquiring one of the most recognizable US film studios feels not just like the culmination of the past nearly twenty years of Silicon Valley’s entry into and disruption of the film industry, but also a much longer process of the attempt to capture and commercialize culture — transforming it in the process to serve the ends of corporate tyrants rather than its essential function as a means of social enrichment. In that sense, Netflix is a problem because it’s both the product of a deeper rot in society and culture, while helping to extend its effects even further.
This is the nightmare scenario finally saying its name: culture fully absorbed into the logic of the feed. Netflix buying Warner wouldn’t be “synergy,” it would be enclosure — the last major commons handed over to an engagement-optimized growth machine that treats art as retention sludge. We already know how this movie ends because we’ve watched it for fifteen years: consolidation, layoffs, thinner work, shorter windows, algorithmic taste replacing human judgment. The streaming revolution didn’t democratize culture, it strip-mined it, and this merger would finish the job. Regulators stopping it wouldn’t be nostalgia — it would be one of the last chances to say culture is not just another vertical to be optimized until nothing is left.
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“Not only are fresh graduates expected to understand and use the latest tools efficiently, they are asked to up their output by 70% because ‘they are using AI.’” “Everyone is so panicked”: Entry-level tech workers describe the AI-fueled jobpocalypse by Yashraj Sharma at Rest of World (DCH: AI automation doesn’t replace work, it raises the quota until the worker breaks.)
Just the headlines:
Monopoly Round-Up: Netflix Prices Have Gone Up 125% Since 2014 by Matt Stoller at Big
Newsletters
CJW: The Kids Are Not Okay (With Tech) - Andrew Dana Hudson
> So, how did it go? For the most part, well. In the final week of each semester, I always ask students for feedback on my course design. This time nearly all of them said they appreciated the break from their heavily tech-mediated lives and course loads. Even the student who had been most ornery and resistant to the device policy early in the semester had come around, said it helped him focus. Many reported that they found handwriting a better way to gather their thoughts and take memorable notes and voted to keep the handwritten assignments.
ADH decided to go analog only in his classroom, and it went well! That’s not surprising to me - I do a lot of thinking on paper, often starting a story by writing the first paragraph or page on paper and then shifting over to the screen when I’ve got some momentum going. But still, I hope this piece gets shared around and more people try it in their classrooms/lives.
Lots more interesting thoughts at the link, especially for people engaged in education, so have a look if that sounds like your bag.
Books
LZ - A General Theory of Magic, by Marcel Mauss
This is a short book, but I think it's because of its concision rather than being incomplete or insufficient. It's more for an academic perspective, so you won't find approaches to magic from a practical or “believing” viewpoint, but what is interesting is that it doesn't discard the possibility that magic exists and works. I've been studying this topic more closely, from both an academic and a practical perspective, and I recently learned that there are different approaches to magic (see the Videos section for reference). One of them is the social approach, which is largely the hypothesis of this book: magic is social, and it works because there's a feedback loop between the magician and the people.
What the magician does can be seen as a form of performance (no wonder Anton LaVey, a former performer, created the Church of Satan), but it only works or is considered successful if people engage with and believe in it. This has inspired me to write a new essay about online tarot readings and their increasing popularity. I've seen people growing their channels and possibly using this as their sole or main source of income in less than one year, people who suggest both mindfulness practices like meditation and breath work, but who also “channel” messages.
Like astrology predictions, many things can sound very generic, but they also know exactly what the pain point of people who search for this sort of content is: breakups, complicated romantic relationships, anxiety about the unpredictable, a wish for companionship or some sort of routine. Back in the day, we would always have a TV show or cartoon to watch every day during lunch or dinner, so it was a part of our routine. Because these channels can feed content daily, it creates a form of engagement, ritual, and routine. There's a comment section, social media profiles for cross-posting, membership options, and more. It's about a social ritual or engagement, but would it work as well as it does if we weren't so lonely as we are, as a society, these days?
Possibly, because these figures always existed, only in smaller and more local ways: the local witch or psychic, the friend who knows how to read tarot, or the mystic booth in a town fair. When I visited the Watkins bookshop in London, which is the oldest esoteric bookshop in the city, I saw both tarot readers waiting for drop-in consultations and also a more secluded booth for those who want a reading or a birth chart. The proportions are just different, but it's still a social phenomenon, only online this time. Which is why there's also another branch of magic that is technomagick, which understands that everything happens on a cybernetic, algorithmic level. Things change, but they are always alive in us and our society.
Anyways, I'm brewing these ideas, and I'll soon write something on my Medium blog.
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MJW: Murderland by Caroline Fraser
The reviews say this book transcends True-Crime voyeurism, but I don’t know if I’d go that far - it’s still incredibly graphic in the way that true crime often is. This non-fiction book about the Pacific Northwest, serial killers and lead smelters is interesting in the connection it makes between serial murder and heavy metal poisoning, while it also weaves a small storyline about the writer’s own occasional violent fantasies. I ate it up in audiobook format.
Videos
LZ - The Six Models Every Magician Should Know, by Angela's Symposium
This is the video I mentioned in the Books section. I found this YouTube channel among dozens of other similar ones. From my brief exposure to this realm, I've seen that most people tend to lean towards one of the two extremes of the spectrum: either they are huge believers and practitioners, or they are very academic, matter-of-fact, and consequently boring.
Angela seems to be an academic who is passionate about the topic, or at least I fw with her more than other creators when it comes to talking about magic from a research perspective, but also not too far away from the topic to treat it like a sterilized experiment. She is quite concise and still very knowledgeable about this subject, offering even different perspectives and criticisms for every model. I don't think the video necessarily helps you choose which model works best for you, but it gives you a rough idea about which model you currently operate, if that's a topic that interests you.
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CJW: Rotoscoped Memories Animate a Dynamic Music Video of Growth and Loss - at Colossal
>The result is a tender portrait of universal human emotion, one that races through the birth and development of a child. Energetic and dynamic, the animation gives the feeling of being a bit too quick to allow viewers to savor any singular moment, instead resigning us to a chaotic swirl of time passing.
A gorgeous piece of animation about being.
Art
MJW: I’m loving these dreamy land/cloud scapes by seongryul on insta.
The Self-Promotion
LZ - The Consumed Consumer, by Vilém Flusser (a translation)
Many eons ago, while I was still an undergraduate student, a dear teacher introduced us to an essay written by an author I was then addicted to. I was heavily influenced by this teacher, who served as my mentor for my final project, and later by my supervisor during my master's program. Flusser was a somewhat controversial philosopher because he never put references, and sometimes he could go very poetic and symbolic, meaning that you don’t really understand what he’s talking about – it could be one thing and everything.
This text was discussed from a feminist and consumerism perspective, but it also encompasses broader archetypal discussions that draw on Jung's concepts of animus and anima, adapting them to the context of consumer society. It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly this is about, but it’s an overview of how our society, ecology, culture, and gender roles are all affected by the way it was built from a male perspective. However, even if we try to imagine what a feminine culture or society could look like, we’re possibly even unable to do it, because we are so conditioned by the masculine viewpoint. Flusser mentions that not even paleolithic matriarchal societies would give us a glimpse because they already had a masculine influence, just not the same dichotomy that we have now.
It’s a fairly long read (21 minutes), and there might be many grammar mistakes and things that don’t make much sense, since I’m not a professional translator. Feel free to leave me comments pointing them out!
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LZ - 90/00s Cyberdelics
I was thinking these days… do you remember those movies from the 90s and early 2000s? Like Code 46, BenX, Thomas est Amoureux, Strange Days, Lola rennt, Hackers… what the hell is this mood called? Well, apparently, there's the term cyberdelics or cyberdelia that encompasses the techy/futuristic mood of that period, and these movies kinda set the aesthetics and the soundtrack for it. So I created a Spotify playlist with several songs that carry this vibe. The genres range from IDM to trip hop, techno, rock, industrial, rock… it's the sort of thing that “if you know, you know” – the soundtrack you would want to listen to when you used to “enter”/”access” or “surf” not the internet, but cyberspace.
The Memes
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