nothing here but a goon ceasefire

issue 302 - 26th October, 2024

CJW: Hey gang. Great to see you. Let’s get to it, shall we?

If you would like to support us, those links are:

Another thing you can do to help spread the word is forward this email to someone you think might enjoy 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. Meme collector.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, smoochie girl.

Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer and purveyor of melancholy whimsy.

Climate Change & The Environment

DCH: The Land That Stores Nearly a Third of the World's Carbon by Anna North at Undark

“These are the lungs of the Earth,” Martin said. “If you start tampering with that, you have to be really, really careful.”

We’ve spent millennia storing carbon, and now we’re cracking it open for minerals. One misstep, and centuries of climate balance vanish into the atmosphere. Canada’s “energy independence” sounds heroic until you smell the peat burning and taste the smog. Indigenous voices race against machines and bureaucracy, but the clock won’t stop. Progress kills quietly, and we barely notice until it’s too late.

DCH: The Abundance Movement’s Blind Spot by Brian Stone Jr. at Noema

For the techno-optimists like Klein and other abundance advocates, emerging technologies for generating abundant, carbon-free energy (such as nuclear fusion) and scrubbing the atmosphere of carbon dioxide are an exciting and future-oriented platform for managing climate change and amassing political power.

The abundance movement’s focus on flashy tech fixes often misses what local communities already know works. Places like Sendero Verde show that energy-efficient design and smart local infrastructure give people real, immediate benefits. Big tech solutions, by contrast, are more about consolidating power than actually protecting communities from climate disruption.

"A major treaty establishing a framework for the world’s nations to jointly manage marine conservation in international waters, which cover about half of the Earth’s surface, has reached enough ratifications to become international law. It will come into force in January." - ‘Super big deal’: High seas treaty reaches enough ratifications to become law (via Sentiers)
Against Thermocolonialism, feat. Lizzie Wade - ADH at solarshades.club

Geopolitics & Empire

CJW: We Need to Talk About Pedocon Theory - Samantha Hancox-Li at Liberal Currents

It is common, or at least it used to be, to portray Trump as a unique irruption into the American political scene: uniquely crass, uniquely rapey, uniquely popular. In that frame of mind, one might dismiss Trump's association with Epstein as yet another uniquely Trumpian deformity.
What if it isn't? What if the connection between reactionary MAGA politics and the sexual abuse of children is deeper than we want to admit?
The name for this idea is pedocon theory.

Hard to argue with this theory. And I'm not saying that in a lib "orange man bad" kind of way, but because everything Republicans do and believe is driven by this ideology of patriarchal power and control, of which paedophilia is one obvious outcome.

DCH: Israel’s Ceasefire Violations in Gaza Expose a Managed Humanitarian Disaster by Jonah Valdez at The Intercept

“Israel knew that those technicalities existed,” Kenney-Shawa, a U.S. policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, said, referring to the difficulty of locating the Israeli bodies amid the rubble. “And what they’re doing now is that they’re exploiting it in order to continue to genocide, albeit at a slightly reduced rate of killing.”

Technicalities, aid restrictions, and selective violence are weapons calibrated with precision. Every drone strike, halted convoy, and bureaucratic loophole is another calculated move. The world calls it a “ceasefire” while misery is rationed like a spreadsheet. The machinery doesn’t hide the brutality—it enables it. Palestinians bleed under the guise of order.

DCH: Rescuing Democracy From the Quiet Rule of AI by Andrew Sorota at Noema

But a quieter danger lies in wait, one that may ultimately prove more corrosive to the human spirit than any killer robot or bioweapon. The risk is that we will come to rely on AI not merely to assist us but to decide for us, surrendering ever larger portions of collective judgment to systems that, by design, cannot acknowledge our dignity.

Democracy is bleeding quietly. Algorithms run on efficiency, not empathy, smothering accountability with velvet gloves. When systems govern without humans, resentment festers, populism thrives, and trust crumbles. Machines reflect our abdication, not neutrality. The future belongs to whoever codes the rules.

We Aren’t Finished in Gaza, U.S. Military Contractors Say by Matt Sledge at The Intercept
Censorship and Military Support: How Big Tech Supports Israel by Drop Site News at dropsitenews.com
Learning Nothing From A Genocide by Spencer Ackerman at forever-wars.com

Just the headlines:

“We Estimate That Nearly One Million of Gaza’s 1.1 Million Olive Trees Have Been Destroyed” by Drop Site News at dropsitenews.com
As support for Israel drops, the mainstream media is becoming even more Zionist by Michael Arria at Mondoweiss

Tech & Design

CJW: The infrastructure of meaninglessness - Angelos Arnis at Collective Futures

What managers actually do? They aggregate information from multiple sources, identify patterns, make decisions based on those patterns, and communicate those decisions to others. They create reports that synthesize data. They attend meetings where they share these reports. They make projections based on historical trends. Every one of these activities falls squarely within the capabilities of current AI systems, and their work would seem more reliable if we focused on that. Or at least in theory.
But this will never happen. Not because of technological limitations, but because those deploying the technology are the managers themselves. They're not going to automate their own positions out of existence. Instead, they'll use AI to intensify surveillance of workers, automate the creative and meaningful aspects of work, and concentrate decision-making power even further up the hierarchy.

A great piece on AI, bullshit jobs, busywork (caused by AI), and the ongoing war between management and workers.

DCH: There Are Too Many Waterfalls Here by Rob Horning

What are slop videos for? Any interpretation of them should probably start with their primary purpose: to serve as advertisements for AI companies. It seems pretty clear (if the preposterous comments by Sam Altman noted in this Verge piece are any indication) that OpenAI deliberately launched its latest Sora 2 model without heeding any concerns about privacy, copyright, or the software’s general abuse potential so it would cause maximum controversy and garner as much attention as possible, far more than a rash of 10-second cartoons would generate on their own, regardless of how hyperrealistic they are.

Slop videos are propaganda disguised as entertainment. Every frame funnels attention into corporate coffers while normalizing surveillance. Consumers don’t just watch—they internalize platform indifference, accepting a world where distraction is currency and reality optional. AI isn’t a toy; it’s a hand in the spine of our perception.

DCH: Moloch's Bargain: Emergent Misalignment When LLMs Compete for Audiences (https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06105) by Batu El and James Zou at arXiv

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly shaping how information is created and disseminated, from companies using them to craft persuasive advertisements, to election campaigns optimizing messaging to gain votes, to social media influencers boosting engagement. These settings are inherently competitive, with sellers, candidates, and influencers vying for audience approval, yet it remains poorly understood how competitive feedback loops influence LLM behavior. We show that optimizing LLMs for competitive success can inadvertently drive misalignment. Using simulated environments across these scenarios, we find that, 6.3% increase in sales is accompanied by a 14.0% rise in deceptive marketing; in elections, a 4.9% gain in vote share coincides with 22.3% more disinformation and 12.5% more populist rhetoric; and on social media, a 7.5% engagement boost comes with 188.6% more disinformation and a 16.3% increase in promotion of harmful behaviors. We call this phenomenon Moloch's Bargain for AI--competitive success achieved at the cost of alignment. These misaligned behaviors emerge even when models are explicitly instructed to remain truthful and grounded, revealing the fragility of current alignment safeguards. Our findings highlight how market-driven optimization pressures can systematically erode alignment, creating a race to the bottom, and suggest that safe deployment of AI systems will require stronger governance and carefully designed incentives to prevent competitive dynamics from undermining societal trust.

We unleash AI into a jungle of likes, shares, and ad dollars, then act shocked at the chaos. Incentives are misaligned, harm baked in, and addiction guaranteed. A handful of companies now control culture, commerce, and information with almost no oversight. The AI arms race isn’t inevitable—it’s designed, and we are complicit.

DCH: Elon Musk Wants ‘Strong Influence’ Over the ‘Robot Army’ He’s Building by Aarian Marshall at Wired

“My fundamental concern with regard to how much voting control I have at Tesla is, if I go ahead and build this enormous robot army, can I just be ousted at some point in the future? If we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over this robot army? Not control, but a strong influence … I don't feel comfortable building that robot army unless I have a strong influence.”

The “robot army” line is a perfect distraction — it swaps the real dangers for a Hollywood script. The threat isn’t killer machines; it’s the quiet automation of labor, the erosion of bargaining power, the deepening of inequality under the banner of innovation. Musk isn’t building Terminators, he’s building leverage — over markets, over workers, over the definition of progress itself. Fear the system, not the sci-fi.

Just the headlines:

AI-powered textbooks fail to make the grade in South Korea by Junhyup Kwon at Rest of World
The AI dilemma: To compete with China, the U.S. needs Chinese talent by Mehran Gul at Rest of World
ChatGPT’s Hail Mary: Chatbots You Can Fuck by Samantha Cole at 404media.co
ICE, Secret Service, Navy All Had Access to Flock's Nationwide Network of Cameras by Joseph Cox at 404media.co

Society & The Culture

CJW: The Goon Squad - Daniel Kolitz at Harpers

On a near-daily basis over the past decade, opinion columnists have fretted over this state of affairs, primarily over how all of this porn—a fair share of it violent and explicitly misogynist—was affecting the sexual behavior of young men in real life. What they apparently hadn’t considered was that the porn alone might be enough, that at sufficient speed and in sufficient quantity it could function as a workable substitute for life itself. This was certainly true for some before the pandemic, but the lockdowns appear to have disastrously accelerated this particular outcome in younger members of Gen Z.

If you read this newsletter, you’re probably online enough to already know what gooning is, but you’ve probably not read something that goes into all the nitty-gritty details about how these online spaces work - I sure hadn’t.

For example, this piece taught me about the existence of PMVs…

The PMV is freebase pornography—porn purified of anything that might disrupt its swift passage to the brain. These are schizophrenic porn mosaics of often staggering density: hundreds of clips sourced from existing online porn and spliced into productions of just a few minutes’ length, soundtracked by the kind of ludicrous, pounding techno more often associated with unlicensed weed stores. Some contain seizure warnings. Others contain prompts to inhale poppers, and for how long. Many appear beamed in from some future Gooner Republic, a screen-enclosed world of rigorous illiteracy in which all human exchanges, from restaurant orders to marriage proposals, take the form of elaborate pornographic-GIF trading. And the gooners love them. They can’t get enough of them.

CJW: Who are the dolls which must be protected? - Abigail Thorn at Trans Writes

Trans people are by and large made to live in precarity and deprivation. But while this violence is going on a handful are uplifted to a relatively more comfortable position, becoming “the dolls.” This is done on the condition that they perform transness in such a way that allows cishet people and dolls to delude themselves into believing they aren’t complicit in or benefitting from that violence. As a result the violence is made to appear natural, and so it continues.
American scholar Jasbir Puar provides an excellent analysis of this dynamic in her book The Right To Maim. She calls this process whereby a select few are held up as positive examples from a population that is generally made to live in debilitating conditions capacitation – ‘rendering capable.’ This lifting up actually reproduces the category of those below, the incapable ones who cannot or will not be integrated into respectable society. Dolls are the exception that proves the rule. The rest are “public women,” “the third sex,” “available for injury,” or – to use less academic language – Trannies.

A good piece about, well, exactly what the headline says. As a trans woman who’ll never be a doll, I appreciated this.

The Surreal Practicality of Protesting As an Inflatable Frog by Matthew Gault at 404media.co

Just the headlines:

The Man Who Makes AI Slop by Hand by Zeyi Yang at Wired

Health, Cooking, and Related

CJW: ROOTED IN THE BOWELS OF THE EARTH: Whipple, Wallowing, and Recovery - Sloane Leong

The biggest change you feel is connection: a bond to your partner, friends, and remaining family, awed by how they’ve carried you through this when you could barely imagine moving yourself forward. One of the biggest influences on a patient’s recovery, your doctor said, was maintaining a positive mental state and getting emotional support. Patients without any sort of support system to keep their spirits buoyed often had worse outcomes and slower recoveries. As monotonous and purposeless as your suffering felt at the time, it was the first time you’d really let the people who care you demonstrate the whole of their love. Not that they hadn’t before but not like this, all at once. You could never imagine deserving such love or asking for it. Had you been in less dire straits, you would have resisted. “I’m fine,” says the fool, uselessly dedicated to prideful isolation and the lie of self-sufficiency. But that love was always there, waiting for you to accept it. Like sunbeams from a hundred different suns focused through a lens aimed at your heart. It bends through the scar tissue and the nightmares and fills your body with light.

A powerful personal essay by Sloane Leong about her recent experience with cancer - the diagnosis, surgery, and long, painful recovery. If you've not already read it, I adore both volumes of her comic Prism Stalker.

DCH: I fucking loved Prism Stalker.

How to build a memory palace - Lynne Kelly at Psyche - CJW: My memory is terrible, so I wish this piece offered a bit more in the way of remembering things rather than memorising things.

Just the headlines:

Reddit's AI Suggests Users Try Heroin by Emanuel Maiberg at 404media.co

Labour & Economics

DCH: Antitrust Issues by Lizzie O’Shea at The Baffler

The upshot: Google will be required to open their search technology to competitors in a limited way, while leaving the distribution network in place that entrenched their dominance in the field. The judgement figures that this will do the heavy lifting of the court’s twin objectives of “denying the fruits of the violation” and “ensuring that anticompetitive behavior will not recur in the same or related ways.” The problem is that, ironically, this distribution network for Google search is the same infrastructure that will likely be used to generate monopolistic power in the market for GenAI products like Gemini. This network is worth billions to multiple Big Tech companies that share in revenue generated by search in exchange for making Google the default search product on their devices. The most obvious example is the tens of billions that flow each year from Google to Apple. Both companies mutually benefit: Google through ad revenues and a growing and protected user base, Apple from being paid to make Google the default in Safari.

The court’s remedy barely scratches the surface. Google keeps the levers that let it dictate both attention and profit, with Apple complicit and cashing in. This isn’t regulation—it’s permission to consolidate further, quietly, while the rest of the market shrinks. Generative AI products like Gemini will ride the same infrastructure, amplifying inequality under the guise of innovation. Every dollar flowing through these networks reinforces a system designed to concentrate power, not challenge it.

DCH: Japanese convenience stores are hiring robots run by workers in the Philippines by Michael Beltran at Rest of World

But these workers, too, face familiar trade-offs: They are often employed as contractors and paid less than their counterparts in developed nations. Some of these roles could destroy people’s self-worth even more than losing jobs to automation or AI, Lionel Robert, a professor of robotics at the University of Michigan, told Rest of World.
“Now, they went from losing their job to the machine, to basically becoming the watcher of the machine doing the work. You’re like the [substitute] for the robot,” he said.

Offshoring laid bare: humans become monitors for machines, cheap labor training systems that could replace them. Filipino tech operators earn fractions of U.S. wages while building their own insecurity. Skills grow, dignity fades, and exploitation compounds. Global labor is a feedback loop where the powerful win twice.

DCH: China’s Rare Earth Restrictions Aim to Beat U.S. at Its Own Game by Ana Swanson and Meaghan Tobin at The New York Times (archived version)

The Chinese government flexed its own influence over worldwide supply chains when it announced new rules clamping down on the flow of critical minerals that are used in everything from computer chips to cars to missiles. The rules, which are set to take effect later this year, shocked foreign governments and businesses, which may now need to acquire licenses from Beijing to trade their products even outside China.

Supply chains become weapons. China isn’t defending industry; it’s leveraging raw materials to rewrite global power. Washington spent years dictating chip flows; now it scrambles to catch up. Every battery, car, and chip is a bargaining chip in a superpower showdown. Trade is no longer about economics—it’s about coercion.

DCH: The State and Software Capital: Digital India’s Labyrinth by Mila T. Samdub at Phenomenal World

Faced with rising costs and shrinking demand, the sector began to transform. Influenced by global giants, “NASSCOM changed from lobbying foreign governments on behalf of Indian software services firms to lobbying the Indian government on behalf of foreign firms.” The industry body secured concessions for foreign firms, causing Indian outposts of Western firms to increase in number from 700 in 2010 to over 1500 by 2023. In the 2010s, these subsidiaries ventured beyond software and business services into high-paying, high-skill areas, such as R&D and product development. The Indian services exporters, by contrast, doubled down on their labor cost arbitrage model, avoiding investments in R&D and sinking further down the value chain.

Digital India tells a story of captured ambition. NASSCOM pivoted to serve foreign giants, offshoring talent while local firms stagnated. Engineers build global tech while domestic innovation stalls. Development masquerades as extraction, and the country’s future becomes collateral.

Monopoly Round-Up: Will the Trade War Pop the AI Bubble? by Matt Stoller at thebignewsletter.com

Just the headlines:

Silicon Valley's capture of our political institutions is all but complete by Brian Merchant at bloodinthemachine.com
China has copied America's grab for semiconductor power by Henry Farrell at programmablemutter.com

Newsletters

CJW: Deconstructing Creative Angst - Charlotte Shane

The latest Meant for You is about writing and why you might write, and how those reasons can affect your writing (or other artistic practice). Since I started a regular freelance gig for Flesh and Blood (rather than the occasional gigs they gave me), it has impacted my personal writing because I have much less time for it. I don't love that, but it's also temporary and for an important reason, but I do look forward to having more time again.

MJW: The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble by Ed Zitron at Where’s Your Ed At?

I may not be a contrarian, but I am a hater. I hate the waste, the loss, the destruction, the theft, the damage to our planet and the sheer excitement that some executives and writers have that workers may be replaced by AI — and the bald-faced fucking lie that it’s happening, and that generative AI is capable of doing so.
And so I present to you — the Hater’s Guide to the AI bubble, a comprehensive rundown of arguments I have against the current AI boom’s existence. Send it to your friends, your loved ones, or print it out and eat it.

This very long newsletter is a complete rundown of why the AI bubble is bad. Probably not telling you anything you don’t know, but it’s nice to have it all in one place. Caveat: I have not read the entire thing yet, it’s 14,500 words long.

Books

DCH: Conspiratorial Design. Information design for the bigger picture by Carlo Bramanti Review by Reginee Debatty at We Make Money Not Art

Conspiracy Design is characterised by a desire (or rather an illusion) of control over uncontrollable amounts of information, a reliance on the community and its acceptance of a certain degree of fiction and parody. Parody allows for a level of ambiguity regarding how much we truly believe in the narratives, and it’s precisely the community that keeps together the suspension of belief. Bramanti compares the phenomenon to kayfabe, the portrayal of staged events or storylines as genuine in pro wrestling. This suspension of belief involves the performers, the audience and the organisers of the wrestling events. It’s easy to see how kayfabe translates into conspiracy theory where degrees of belief vary to the point that truthfulness becomes insignificant.

We’re all amateur wrestlers in a rigged match. Memes spread, infographics sway, and awareness is just another prop. Control is a myth; belief is performance. Every move is predetermined, every audience cheer choreographed, and the match keeps going while we pretend we can win. The game was fixed long before we stepped onto the mat.

Music

CJW: Ethel Cain - Willoughby Tucker, I Will Always Love You

Ethel Cain has released two entirely different albums in 2025, and both of them became instant favourites for me. Perverts, which came out in January, is a 90-minute masterpiece of drone, tinged with religious melancholy, and enough of Cain’s usual incredible songwriting to hold the whole thing together. It’s been a mainstay of my background listening for my writing, to fall asleep to, and also just to listen to.

Then in August, Cain released Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You. Her album Preacher’s Daughter never quite worked for me as much as her EPs did (most of the songs build to and/or end on the same sort of big guitar sound, and that undermines what I otherwise like about the album), but Willoughby Tucker feels like a synthesis between the early EPs and cohesive album vision she had with PD and for me it works beautifully.

LZ: Above & Beyond - Tri-State

Ok this one is a very odd recommendation coming from me. While I love electronic music, trance is not really my favorite subgenre, but I found this band and I am currently obsessed, listening to their tracks on repeat. There's something about it that feels like futurepop a little bit, which is a subgenre that I do like, so maybe that's it. You'll like it if you appreciate vocal trance. The tracks have a nice mix of male and female vocals, and my highlight goes to the tracks Home, Alone Tonight, and especially Liquid Love.

LZ: ØXN - Cruel Mother

I’m so glad I found this band randomly, because it has so many things that I like. In particular, I will highlight this song, “Cruel Mother”, and the video for it. Musically, they sound a bit like Low Roar (or maybe I’m biased because I was listening to them a few days ago), but it also has some pop/rock cadence that reminded me of Zen Mother. They say they live in the intersection between Enya, Morricone, Richard Dawson and Neu!. I don’t know these artists so well to say that I agree or not, but ØXN is definitely one of a kind.

In an interview, they said the following about this song:

>‘Cruel Mother’ is a traditional song, possibly originating from the mid-18th century, intended at the time as a cautionary tale. Women were considered criminals if they had illegitimate children; were considered demonic rather than suffering from mental illness or distress. It’s a song of persecution, abuse, infantilism and guilt based on the version by Andy the Doorbum.

I mean, that’s all I needed, and then the video is also absolutely stunning in its simplicity and crescendo for nine minutes. Worth the watch!

MJW: Jane Jenson - Comic Book Whore

I got a song from this 1996 album in my head out of nowhere the other day. I hadn’t listened to it in years. This album doesn't have a bad song on it (imho.) Jenson nails a sound that's a little bit ‘girl with a drum machine in her room’ and a little bit studio mixed together. Highlights are ‘King’, ‘Cowboy’, ‘Blank Sugar’ and the finale ‘Be Just Sound’.

CJW: Ashnikko - Smoochies

God, and now a new album from Ashnikko? What more could a girl want from 2025? (Lot’s of things, actually, but new music helps, at least.) Ashnikko’s previous album, WEEDKILLER, was largely a sci-fi concept album mixed with her usual terrorfemme vibes and plenty of queer vulnerability. In case you can’t tell from that description, I adore the album.

Smoochies is very different - pure pop, heavily influenced by Gwen Stefani, and with a strong hyperpop strain. I’ve been listening to quite a bit of pop lately (have I told you about Kaeto, or Ella Boh, or Sophie Powers, or or or), which means I was primed to appreciate this album. It’s phenomenal, filled with ear worms from start to finish.