MJW: Welcome to the latest issue of nothing.here. CJW is at a workshop on another continent, so we’ve given him a fornight off from editing the newsletter and you’re all stuck with me writing the intro. Ha! Fools!
Maybe it’s all the ‘civilisation is gonna collapse’ in the air, but I know I have been utterly unable to consume any media lately aside from comfort/trash: rereads of Stephen King books and reruns of Project Runway. So you don’t just get a rehash of The Dead Zone and a tribute to the father figure I seek in Tim Gunn, I’m lucky enough to be joined in newletter efforts by the usual team who have trawled through various content so you (and I) don’t have to, and they’ve linked it all here. We also have a special guest:
AA: This week we’ve got my friend J. Clement (JC) joining us from his secret lair somewhere in the Scandanavian wilds. Besides being a teacher and “amateur horrorist”, J is one of the most engaged and intelligent people I know. I can’t wait to see what he’s got in store for us… it’s bound to make me very sad and anxious indeed. Hooray!
J. Clement (JC) - Amateur horrorist and teacher living in the haunted forests of Scandinavia.
Corey J. White (CJW) - The VoidWitch Saga. Newsletter facilitator. Naarm/Melbourne.
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - Author of The Orphancorp Trilogy. Host of Catastropod. Your fabulous goth aunt. On Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, Australia. @marleejaneward
Austin Armatys (AA) - Writer/Teacher/Wretched Creeper // Oh Nothing Press // @0hnothing
m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / salvagepunk / ecopoet // Dark Extropian Musings
AA: New Feelings: Roach Complex
I love the column “New Feelings” over at Real Life. It explores “desires, moods, pathologies, and identifications that rarely had names before digital media.” This entry by Chris Randle examines body horror memes on Twitter (particularly the use of the Junji Ito image included here). Randle says:
When I scan my Twitter feed, reliably dramatic if nothing else, the dominant feelings seem to be thirst and menace, with glib hyperbole negotiating extremes of anxiety. Social media amplifies self-loathing; the memorably wretched tweet gets the likes. (Roland Barthes anticipated that impulse: “I want to be both pathetic and admirable, I want to be at the same time a child and an adult,” which is to say, I’m baby.) Twitter’s own denizens call it “the hell site” out of feigned affection, and the underworld has long been described more lavishly than paradise.
CJW: I’m a little surprised that he mentions Cronenberg and people wanting to be run over by celebrities, but didn’t draw a line from there to either version of Crash.
I’ve recently stepped away from twitter (have you missed me) after my TWELFTH anniversary at the hell site. I haven’t enjoyed it for a long time, mostly because I can either have muted keywords or a chronological timeline (shoutout to realtwitter.com), but not both. And let me tell you, I am so fucking sick of hearing about the American election (and it’s still 17 months away. How the fuck do you do it, America? Oh, right, your brains get melted).
AA: #orbgang
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CJW: Is climate change an “existential threat” — or just a catastrophic one?
Follow-up to that “civilisational collapse” piece from last time.
MJW: …and my mum thinks I’m crazy because I’m thinking about retraining in a job that might survive the coming climate apocalypse.
JC: This part of the piece stood out to me:
Think of plans to release aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight and cool the planet back down in the manner that volcanic explosions do. It’d be an enormous endeavor with significant potential downsides (we don’t even yet know all the risks it might pose), but if the alternative is extinction then those risks would be worth taking.
My prediction (in the context of discussing an article about arguing about predictions) is that, in the coming decade, the conversation will shift away from carbon emission mitigation (which is failing miserably, carbon emissions are in fact increasing) towards serious discussions around geoengineering. This and other articles in the mainstream online media are very subtly communicating the idea that climate change will most likely not cause our extinction buuuuuut…… if things look sufficiently fucked, we can always turn to something largely untested and potentially catastrophic like solar radiation management. Shhhhh….if you listen closely, you can hear the Overton Window creaking open!
MKY: Apparently I’m living goals like, live long enough to see talk of putting GIANT MIRRORS IN SPACE (which I’ve been hearing as a simple - aka ill thought - solution to climate change since 199x) turn to China’s proposal to put a GIANT PARASOL IN SPACE:
At first, such a scheme—essentially putting in place a giant parasol to shield our planet to some degree from the sun—seems farfetched, the stuff of futuristic science fiction. And yet it has many merits, the team argues. The team has tested successfully a much-reduced scale model of such a shield, just 2 metres in diameter. The concept of the shield being a controllable spacecraft that shifts in its orbit depending on what region of the planet needs shielding at a given time over the course of the day will be considered in future work.
Now, I’ll go back to my war & geopolitics readings that have replaced climate/ecological readings for no reason that I can quite put my finger on.
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JC: Between the Devil and the Green New Deal
The Green New Deal (GND) has been all over the media in recent months as it seems like climate change is finally penetrating the consciousness of the amorphous blob known as the mainstream media. While forces on the reactionary right have been predictably against the drastic changes in fossil fuel consumption demanded by advocates of the GND, citing impacts to economic growth and the exorbitant costs of the plan (yes Fox News, human extinction is a cheaper option, I guess….), there has been a lack of critique of the proposal coming from the far left.
In his piece, Jasper Bernes manages to articulate, very clearly, the case that both the scale and intensity of resource extraction required to full-fill the transformative vision held in the GND would entail both massive costs in terms of further environmental degradation, while concurrently, perpetuating the high levels of human immiseration seen in the world under the present regime of rapacious free-market capitalism. I’ve done some further digging and some of the statistics are just staggering. For example, to replace the 2 billion fossil fuel burning cars currently clogging roads with cleaner electric cars, copper extraction rates would need to double while cobalt mining would need to almost quadruple in just the next 30 years!
This doesn’t even scratch the surface of the massive amounts of pollution and ecosystem annihilation brought about as a result of the mining processes required. When one considers the impacts on humans lives that the mining of these materials currently enacts (increased rates of cancer, exploitation of local populations through use of slave & child labour, as well as, the transformation of ancestral lands into ecological ‘sacrifical zones’), it becomes gut-wrenchingly difficult, from a leftist perspective, to support such a proposal.
Bernes rightly argues that within the Green New Deal’s framework lies no demands for a move away from neo-liberal capitalism, the very system that is ultimately driving the climate crisis . Essentially, we are being asked to trust that ‘green’ capitalism will ameliorate the destruction to the ecosystem brought on by its brutish predecessor. Us lefties truly face a dilemma in regards to placing our support in the options presented for combating climate change. The status quo is obviously untenable and risks catastrophic destruction of the natural world but the alternative, in the form of the Green New Deal, will leave in place the same issues of exploitation and selective environmental degradation that currently exist in the world. What the hell are we to do?
AA: Classic J. Clement content right here! This article was sobering, beautifully written, compelling, logical and unlikely to alter the mindset of those rare few who have the practical agency to change the grim prognostication for our planet’s future....
We cannot keep things the same and change everything. We need a revolution, a break with capital and its killing compulsions, though what that looks like in the twenty-first century is very much an open question. A revolution that had as its aim the flourishing of all human life would certainly mean immediate decarbonization, a rapid decrease in energy use for those in the industrialized global north, no more cement, very little steel, almost no air travel, walkable human settlements, passive heating and cooling, a total transformation of agriculture, and a diminishment of animal pasture by an order of magnitude at least. All of this is possible, but not if we continue to shovel one half of all the wealth produced on the planet into the maw of capital, not if we continue to sacrifice some fraction of each generation by sending them into the pits, not if we continue to allow those whose only aim is profit to decide how we live.
I can’t help but feel convinced the pits will grow. The revolution isn’t coming, and it’s mostly because we’re so completely in the thrall of Capital.
CJW:
There is no solution to the climate crisis which leaves capitalism’s compulsions to growth intact. And this is what the Green New Deal, a term coined by that oily neoliberal, Thomas Friedman, doesn’t address. It thinks you can keep capitalism, keep growth, but remove the deleterious consequences. The death villages are here to tell you that you can’t. No roses will bloom on that bush.
What a great piece. It touches on a few issues that I’ve only been made aware of thanks to the Ashes Ashes podcast, so if you’re not a podcast sort, definitely read this piece and see some of the climate change/IPCC/Green New Deal realities that you won’t hear about in mainstream media. But to put it simply: we can’t continue to grow our economy and increase our quality of life and reduce our carbon footprint. Anyone who tells you otherwise is just hoping to maintain the status quo for a little longer so they can make more money before we realise their grift. We either keep consuming until the predicted climate change catastrophes become reality, or we fundamentally alter the way the global economy works.
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MJW: Bodies in Seats - Facebook moderators in Tampa
CJW:
Marcus was made to moderate Facebook content — an additional responsibility he says he was not prepared for. A military veteran, he had become desensitized to seeing violence against people, he told me. But on his second day of moderation duty, he had to watch a video of a man slaughtering puppies with a baseball bat. Marcus went home on his lunch break, held his dog in his arms, and cried. I should quit, he thought to himself, but I know there’s people at the site that need me. He ultimately stayed for a little over a year.
There are frankly too many fucked up things in this one paragraph.
Hey, so, I know Facebook makes it really easy to keep in touch with friends and family, but also, maybe no platform should be allowed to get that big, and maybe we should stop rewarding them with our time, attention, and money considering all of the damage they inflict on people.
But don’t listen to me, listen to someone in the trenches:
I asked him what he thought needed to change.
“I think Facebook needs to shut down,” he said.
MJW: Who knew that humans would take something with such potential as the internet, and make it awful? WHO KNEW?!
JC: A dispatch from a digital hellscape. This is one of the bleakest things I’ve read in recent memory. Truly horrifying. The Zuck needs to be publicly flogged for his crimes against humanity.
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We are born, we live, we die, and in the interim we are compelled by various social forces to watch dozens of superhero movies.
[…]
It’s possible we’re now trapped in an endless loop of Marvel reboots until the climate apocalypse takes us.
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MKY: Robo-fish powered by battery ‘blood’
Researchers have created a robotic fish powered by a battery fluid that its developers dub ‘robot blood’.
As Emily Dare said after I showed it to her, “Something has to live in the seas”.
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MKY: As the Earth System continues to collapse in fun and exciting new ways, I take comfort that my vision of salvagepunks fighting to steer the world to a restablised state, side-by-side with their transhuman familiars, grows closer to realisation:
This assistive robot is controlled via brain-computer interface
First-ever successful mind-controlled robotic arm without brain implants
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CJW: What Really Happened to Malaysia’s Missing Airplane
Interesting and thorough look at the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370.
MJW: I have an intense fear of flying (even though I fly all the time) and I generally avoid reading anything like this to not add to my terror. But for some reason, I couldn’t help but read this, and now I have to worry about pilot murder-suicide on top of explosive decompression and mid-air breakapart.
AA: This article has lingered on my mind for days. I found this meditation on the final hours of the murderous pilot’s life particularly haunting:
It is easy to imagine Zaharie toward the end, strapped into an ultra-comfortable seat in the cockpit, inhabiting his cocoon in the glow of familiar instruments, knowing that there could be no return from what he had done, and feeling no need to hurry. He would long since have repressurized the airplane and warmed it to the right degree. There was the hum of the living machine, the beautiful abstractions on the flatscreen displays, the carefully considered backlighting of all the switches and circuit breakers. There was the gentle whoosh of the air rushing by. The cockpit is the deepest, most protective, most private sort of home.
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MKY: Extinction Deniers
Of course extinction deniers is now a thing. Cool mind war we’re having…
JC: It’ll be fleek when archaeologists pinpoint the exact moment when the internet fried our collective brains!
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Cutting Room Floor:
AA: A recent issue of Marc Weidenbaum’s long standing Disquiet newsletter had some thoughts about blogging on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the word “blog”. I found Marc’s call-to-blog quite inspiring, and like him I wish more interesting people would start blogs to explore and share their passions:
And don’t concern yourself with whether or not you “write.” Don’t leave writing to writers. Don’t delegate your area of interest and knowledge to people with stronger rhetorical resources. You’ll find your voice as you make your way. There is, however, one thing to learun from writers that non-writers don’t always understand. Most writers don’t write to express what they think. They write to figure out what they think. Writing is a process of discovery. Blogging is an essential tool toward meditating over an extended period of time on a subject you consider to be important.
CJW: The end of that quote is exactly it, and I’m sure it’s a big part of why we keep returning to some topics again and again in this newsletter - they’re topics we consider important, so when we have an opportunity to talk about them, we do.
Honestly I wish I had more time to blog. But with writing, newslettering, dayjob, reading, etc, I can only really make the time when I have something I definitely want/need to talk about.
MJW: ‘Most writers don’t write to express what they think. They write to figure out what they think.’ YES! I feel like I don’t know how I feel about something until I write it out (see my Overland article ‘Invisible Until’, where I figured out I was really, really pissed off.) I loved blogging. I had a super active blog around 2012, and it’s where I got my writing chops back to merge into fiction. I don’t even have it linked on my website any more, but it’s still out there, floating in the internet.
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MKY: Metafoundry 72 - Terraform Incognita (emphasis mine):
While I was in Hebden Bridge, I looked out of the window of a coffee shop one Friday at lunchtime, and saw a small crowd of schoolchildren on a climate protest. Sensitized by being in England, it dawned on me that what I was seeing was a rebellion of the natives against the colonizers – the inhabitants of the future marshaling resistance to the colonizing present and to the extraction of the resources that they will need to thrive.
JC: Really beautiful and inspiring writing. While living in a world where governments are literally arguing that future generations have no fundamental right to a stable climate, we must remain cognizant of our own moral responsibility to work towards providing some semblance of a liveable planet for our childrens’ children.
JC: The Dropout
A really fascinating journey into the rise and fall of Steve Jobs acolyte, Elizabeth Holmes, and her medical testing company, Theranos. This podcast does a remarkable job of leading the listener through the strange world of smoke and mirrors known as Silicon Valley. Theranos’ story shines a light on the unwavering faith in technological progress that has become uber prevalent in modern society and how that faith led some very wealthy and powerful people into sinking their fortunes into what was, essentially, a high-tech ponzi scheme.
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MJW: That’s it from us for this biweekly allotment. I hope you all stay on the upbeat even though things are bleakish at the moment (or is that just me?) Just remember - community is gonna save us, and we’re lucky to have all you in ours. When times get tough, remember that d̶a̶d Tim Gunn loves you.
