Welcome to the first nothing here of the year. How are you? I hope you had a refreshing break over the holidays, because we’re delivering you a large and varied selection of links. The State of the World, Millennial burn-out, bullshit jobs, war, imperialism, and plenty more.
Corey J. White (CJW) - The VoidWitch Saga. Newsletter facilitator. Naarm/Melbourne. Tweets @cjwhite.
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - Writer, reader, weirdo. Author of ‘Welcome To Orphancorp’ and ‘Psynode’. Host of Catastropod. ADHD, spec fic, feminism, cats. Melbourne, Australia. @marleejaneward
Austin Armatys (AA) - Writer/Teacher/Wretched Creature // Oh Nothing Press // MechaDeath physical edition available now
m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / Apocalyptic Futurist / #salvagepunk / @m1k3y
AA: The WELL - State of the World 2019
In an uncertain world, it’s reassuring to know that Bruce Sterling remains as witty and perceptive as ever. I always look forward to this annual wide-ranging group discussion hosted on landmark online community The WELL, and while the discussion can be long and unwieldy to navigate, there’s always ideas on display worth paying attention to. A big part of the appeal is watching Sterling turn on the snark - when he’s in full Chairman Bruce mode, it’s a lot of fun:
I always knew, that when I got older, I’d see my contemporaries whine about how great things were when they were young and had libidos.
Even when things truly are objectively worse in many ways, it’s just so corny! “We had it great when I was young, but the Bad Guys took it and that’s why we can’t have nice things” — when was that ever not so? Has any generation, ever, failed to blather that stale sentiment at people?
You’re eliding your own participation in history! “Only the young die good!” You’re not stuck in a bad traffic jam with your good dune-buggy, your dune-buggy is always a part of the traffic!
CJW: Unsurprisingly, there is so much in this conversation, but one thing that just grabbed me - “hot peace”. What a perfect and perfectly succinct way to describe our view of the forever-War on Terror. We’re not really at war, because that requires an enemy army to be at war with, so therefore we must be at peace. But all the occupations and bombings and death makes it a hot peace.
I was also completely enthralled by Sterling’s discussion of AI chess, and Bridle’s follow-up about Centaur cooperation (a human and AI working together, in an effort to balance out each other’s weaknesses) was very interesting. I’m surprised I haven’t come across the concept before (or if I did, it didn’t stick), but I am all about it. In general I’m very interested in the personhood of non-biological intelligences (see my note about Damien Williams’ writing below), and what better way to foster a relationship between humanity and burgeoning machine intelligences than literal cooperation.
And then this bit from Noah Raford (futurist to the UAE):
Yeah the future is unclear (“dark”, in James’ lovely words), but hasn’t it always been? Maybe we’re just starting to wake up to what most of the rest of the world has been dining on for decades. You don’t lay in bed in these places worrying about the world not making sense. You get up in the morning, throw yourself into the fray, fight like hell, do your best, and pray you make a little progress at the end of the day towards improvement in your circumstances, whatever those may be. And that’s ok. That’s just life in an uncertain world.
It’s frightening, but kind of hopeful. No matter how tough things get, we’re a resilient species. We’ll survive, and maybe thrive. As Raford says, others living in parts of the world ravaged by capital and climate are already surviving difficult conditions, so to paint the future as some looming apocalypse minimises the suffering and survival of all the people who lived through their own apocalypses thanks to colonialism, capital and climate.
AA: Related to the the above, I found the discussion of a need for a new aesthetic to counterbalance the “new dark” very interesting. At one point in the discussion Sterling says:
*So I’m thinking the aesthetics is the key here. Because if “the hidden beauty will rematerialize,” which is a lovely rallying slogan that I like quite a lot, what would that beauty look like? When it came out of hiding, how would we know it was beautiful? We don’t exactly need a “new aesthetic” to know that, because wrinkled old Dorian Gray Facebook isn’t all that new any more, but we do need an aesthetic, because an aesthetic is how you convince other people that the beauty has arrived.
I like the idea of creative people dedicating their valuable brain cycles to generating positive visions of the future, actively trying to “rematerialise hidden beauty”. While dystopia is clearly the dominant mode for much of our thought and speculation about what’s in store for humanity (completely understandably, given the state of the world. I mean, you read this newsletter, you know.), I think it can be a radical creative act to imagine a happier, more free, more beautiful world. In an age when everything is being “cancelled”, maybe the future can still be… renewed.
MKY: here for this
MJW: What CJW and AA said above about apocalyptic and dystopian prospective futures being the dominant narratives lately made me think that maybe we’re already living in the dystopia and what comes next could be the utopia that everyone in those narratives is fighting for. Perhaps we’re the ones who should be waging that war now.
CJW: That’s another thought that’s frightening but hopeful: that we’re already living in the dystopia, so from here we could/should build the utopia we want to see. I think it’s happening, slowly, and on the fringes - green politics, properly left politics, worker organising, permaculture movements, etc - but I think (hope) it will continually accelerate. We need it to, because this dystopia can get darker if we let it.
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To ensure that our physical infrastructure and critical systems were defended, we empowered a myriad of government agencies to develop best-in-class offensive capabilities and prohibitive deterrence frameworks. No similar plan or whole-of-government strategy exists for influence operations. Our most technically-competent agencies are prevented from finding and countering influence operations because of the concern that they might inadvertently engage with real U.S. citizens as they target Russia’s digital illegals and ISIS’ recruiters. This capability gap is eminently exploitable; why execute a lengthy, costly, complex attack on the power grid when there is relatively no cost, in terms of dollars as well as consequences, to attack a society’s ability to operate with a shared epistemology? This leaves us in a terrible position, because there are so many more points of failure.
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As early as 1970, McLuhan wrote, in Culture is our Business, “World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.”
MKY: re: the McLuhan quote - THIS
CJW: Plenty of interesting McLuhan/related stuff in The Bright Labyrinth by Ken Hollings - the book itself is about “Sex, Death and Design in the Digital Regime”, and helped influence my thinking on Repo Virtual before I started writing it. The Bright Labyrinth and this prophetic quote make me think I should do a deeper dive into some McLuhan reading.
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CJW: The antidote to civilisational collapse, an interview with Adam Curtis (via Mutter at Restricted.Academy)
Why is it so odd? Why do you feel so strange? There’s a jangly-ness at the back of people’s minds at the moment. You can feel it yourself. Is this really going to go on? Where’s it going? When does this change? No one is explaining those feelings, which is what “HyperNormalisation” was sort of trying to do in its own little way. Sorry, I do tend to rant.
As ever, Adam Curtis is making me look at the modern day from a new angle. His argument that politics has become managerial, and about endlessly maintaining a status quo, is not something that would have occurred to me before, but I can’t find fault in it.
Journalism doesn’t have to remain the same. It will take other forms. It tells stories about the world that in a way are imaginative. This is the battle I have with a lot of my colleagues in the BBC. They accuse me of being too imaginative in the way I put footage together. But they make up stories out of facts too, but when they do it, it’s boring. People like imagination if they feel that it’s genuinely rooted in fact. That’s why you have to tell stories.
They also talk about the “bullshit jobs” idea put forward by David Graeber, which I actually heard about via Sam Yang’s Must Triumph podcast. I recommend giving the episode a listen.
And here we have Pamela Anderson making some similar points: Revolt! Don’t React (via Dan Hill)
We must stop believing that the current system is set in the stone with an inability to change. We must stop believing that what we have is the best possible system out there. We must stop claiming that the other side is bad or confused or brainwashed by fake news. Instead we must do more than just wave the flag of tolerance and civility. We must work towards offering a stronger political story.
AA: They’re constantly playing back to you the ghosts of your own behaviour. We live in a modern ghost story. We are haunted by our past behaviour played back to us through the machines in its comparison to millions of other people’s behaviour. We are guided and nudged and shaped by that. It’s benign in a way and it’s an alternative to the old kind of politics. But it locks us into a static world because it’s always looking to the past. It can never imagine something new. It can’t imagine a future that hasn’t already existed. And it’s led to a sense of atrophy and repetition. It’s “Groundhog Day”. And because it doesn’t allow mass politics to challenge power, it has allowed corruption to carry on without it really being challenged properly.
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CJW: I Was A Cable Guy. I Saw The Worst Of America.
Really interesting read. Listeners to Street Fight Radio will likely see some parallels between this article and what Bryan has said about his time as a Cable Guy - opiate abuse because of the way the work breaks your body down, piss tests, shitty customers, and shitty management. And the use of “points” and daily quotas to drive workers shows that Amazon’s shitty practices (RE: warehouse employees) aren’t new, just the logical conclusion of working under capitalism - pushing people to work harder/faster/longer/without pee breaks because those numbers always have to be trending upward.
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CJW: The ‘innocent internet’ died and the 21st century was born
This is an interesting opinion piece, though I completely disagree with the way it’s framed - that the 21st Century is and will be defined by our current technosociopolitical reality and not by, say, catastrophic climate change, resource depletion, mass extinctions, or any other number of issues that are simply so much bigger than the American media, American culture, and the blurring of the line between online and off, real and fake.
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MJW: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
I think a lot of us can relate to the sensation and assorted bizarre symptoms of burnout, broken down in this article.
It made me think of this tweet from Malka Older:
…and the follow-on article: This Is What Black Burnout Feels Like
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CJW: Learning China’s Forbidden History, So They Can Censor It
For Chinese companies, staying on the safe side of government censors is a matter of life and death. Adding to the burden, the authorities demand that companies censor themselves, spurring them to hire thousands of people to police content.
That in turn has created a growing and lucrative new industry: censorship factories.
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Like many young people in China, the 24-year-old recent college graduate knew little about the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. He had never heard of China’s most famous dissident, Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died in custody two years ago.
Now, after training, he knows what to look for — and what to block. He spends his hours scanning online content on behalf of Chinese media companies looking for anything that will provoke the government’s wrath. He knows how to spot code words that obliquely refer to Chinese leaders and scandals, or the memes that touch on subjects the Chinese government doesn’t want people to read about.
And maybe this article also helps to explain why news about China’s historical first landing on the far side of the Moon were couched in terms like “China says”, “China claims”, etc. At first it seemed vaguely racist (and maybe that was part of it), but we can’t pretend that China doesn’t have a complicated relationship with the truth.
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MKY: China’s Atlantean ambition for the South China Sea
FEEL THE POST-CYBERPUNK’NESS - come for China prototyping fully automated interplanetary colonisation at the bottom of the ocean, stay for the vietnamese hunting them in old russian subs.
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MKY: What Happens If China Makes First Contact? (via Ganzeer)
They set up a trading outpost and the belts and bridges go into the stars? Kinda fine w/ that tbh.
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MKY: Houseplant with hint of rabbit purifies indoor air
“What do you get when you cross a houseplant with a rabbit?” Corey, CrispSF is already here dude
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This article by Eric Thurm (with illustrations by Matt Lubchansky) is hilarious. It’s now clear to me that the only way to counteract Wario’s unpleasant anti-semitic subtext is for Nintendo to officially make him a rabbi. Thrum explains:
Wario will be a fun rabbi, but he will also be a good one. As an incorrigible egotist, Wario is more than prepared for carrying on the long tradition of Jews yelling at each other about the finer points of Talmudic interpretation. As a partially reformed villain who has succumbed to greed in the past, he knows the sin that lies in men’s hearts intimately, and how to lead the members of his congregation away from temptation. And as a man who has been locked in an eternal struggle with his ostensibly purer, more perfect self, Wario grasps the importance of understanding the often-fraught lines between good and evil.
CJW: Technoccult News
One of Damien Williams’ recent letters reads like a call to arms for altering society and/by altering the way we think about a variety of issues that we either take for granted or simply don’t consider at all. Read it here, and subscribe at the bottom. Williams is constantly one of my favourite contemporary thinkers to read, and REPO VIRTUAL became the book that it is because I was inspired by the way Williams talks about non-biological intelligences, personhood and the body-mind connection. I’m sure I owe him more than the tiny amount I give via patreon…
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CJW: I really liked this exercise from Autumn Christian’s newsletter - designed to help you to become a better writer by taking time to truly experience the sensory world surrounding you:
The Infinity in a coffee exercise is like this - set a timer for 20 minutes, get a cup of coffee, and sit on the floor. Then do nothing but see, feel, and drink it, exploring the sensory fragments that float up until the time is up.
At first, this will probably be excruciatingly boring. There isn’t really enough sensory input here for you to be entertained with constant dopamine hits. So just like with meditating, your mind will begin to drift. Force your mind back to the task at hand - explore the cup of coffee, both the taste and the warmth (or ice) and sensation. If you do this enough, your brain will do something that I can only describe as - it will become bored with boredom. The time it takes varies, and it can take several sessions, but you will eventually hit a nirvana-type state in which you become totally engaged with the task of feeling. You will hit a sort of peak where the coffee cup, and drinking it, feels endlessly fascinating.
You will understand at that point that infinity is not just the breadth of the universe, but also the depth. That inside of each sensation exists an infinity of sensations. And every which way you experience, there is more infinity. At one point I experienced a sort of out of body experience, and realized that I was actually the coffee, that the molecules in-between the spaces. And yes, I was sober. It was like the poor man’s sensory deprivation tank, except with coffee.
MJW: I’m all for the exploration of sensory expansion with the aid of coffee. Who needs drugs? Except for the drug of caffeine, but you know what I’m playing at.
AA: Chapo Traphouse discusses Starship Troopers
Great discussion of Paul Verhoven’s classic Starship Troopers by some of the Chapo Traphouse crew here.
CJW: That discussion dovetails nicely into this comic at the Nib: The Good War. (via Ganzeer)
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CJW: 2018 Awards Season Screenplays
A follow-up to the Black List in the last issue - this time it’s the full screenplays for a number of 2018 films.
MKY: https://www.drycleanercast.co.uk/podcast/#/need-to-know-incel-movement-the-altright/
I finally found the deep dive into the connections between/through line that runs through Trump and the alt-right, incels and the MAGA bomber I was asking ppl to point me to on twitter as 2018 closed out. Of course it had to be on a lil british spy podcast.
The author interviewed here makes a rather compelling comparison between Trump and the ‘scripted violence’ (his term) of the Rwandan genocide, after detailing all the ways Trump, FoxNews, InfoWars [and so on into the abyss..] are creating and propagating the sick memeplexs that are driving people to violence (from the incel shooters to the MAGA bomber and on and on).
Another term for what’s going on rn is “stochastic terrorism” (thanks Emily Dare!) and it’s worth pulling out a sizeable quote from this explainer from back in 2011: Stochastic Terrorism: Triggering the shooters.:
The stochastic terrorist is the person who uses mass media to broadcast memes that incite unstable people to commit violent acts.
One or more unstable people responds to the incitement by becoming a lone wolf and committing a violent act. While their action may have been statistically predictable (e.g. “given the provocation, someone will probably do such-and-such”), the specific person and the specific act are not predictable (yet).
The stochastic terrorist then has plausible deniability: “Oh, it was just a lone nut, nobody could have predicted he would do that, and I’m not responsible for what people in my audience do.”
The lone wolf who was the “missile” gets captured and sentenced to life in prison, while the stochastic terrorist keeps his prime time slot and goes on to incite more lone wolves.
Further, the stochastic terrorist may be acting either negligently or deliberately, or may be in complete denial of their impact, just like a drunk driver who runs over a pedestrian without even realizing it.
Finally, there is no conspiracy here: merely the twisted acts of individuals who are promoting extremism, who get access to national media in which to do it, and the rest follows naturally just as an increase in violent storms follows from an increase in average global temperature.
It’s not just far right conspiracy shows doing this today.
The call is coming from inside the White House.
InfoWars and co - I’m looking at you, Dark Journalist - like to call themselves ‘the alternative media’, but they’re more a part of the mainstream than little podcasts like this doing real journalism. A mainstream of hate.
The most disturbing thing of all in the podcast was the author saying none of the US media wanted to discuss these issues.
Which is all to say, if you didn’t already get the memo, the asymmetric warfare Brian Wood was writing about in DMZ is already here, but it’s far more complex than Red vs Blue states. All those mass shootings and vehicular massacres are just the beginning. Welcome to 2019.
CJW: I thought I was meant to be the depressing one in this newsletter… ;)
MKY: I just had to one-up AOC calling Trump a racist to Anderson Cooper’s face I guess :P
AA: Clark Mixtape
“I’ve basically just gone and given you ALL a load of unreleased tracks of mine in the form of a mixtape.”
MJW: Strap in: here’s how my brain works.
I was cleaning the other day and listening to some old CD’s when a story idea popped into my head. Not fully formed, but getting there. I’d been worried about having no WIP since I finished my novella, and feeling the distinct kind of dread that accompanies that, when: boom. I guess I just wanted to say: isn’t it interesting how brains work? I feel like my subconscious was maybe wrangling this idea for a while, without my knowledge. And the other thing I wanted to say is: how it’s super important to trust your process. My way might not be your way, but it works for me, and that’s the most important part. Find your way and then trust it to come through for you. It will. You got this. I got this too.
MJW: The latest episode of Catastropod is out! In this one, I talk with writer Jane Rawson (of A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists and From The Wreck) about her non-fiction book The Handbook: Surviving and Living With Climate Change and ask the question: is climate change apocalyptic? Listen here or on your podcast app.
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MJW: Once and Future: Australian Speculative Fiction See me in 2D, reading awkwardly!
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CJW: And with that, I’ll just close by saying, welcome to 2019. Things will be tough, things will be weird, but you’ve got people you can rely on, and you’ve got the strength to be someone they can rely on. Ryan K. Lindsay likes to start his year with a word to act as a theme, and I’m going to put forward a word for nothing here: Community. That’s the four of us, that’s our guests, and that’s our readers, that’s you. That’s you and your friends and your families and your loved ones. It’s everything that matters, and it’s probably not on social media. (Or it’s on social media like diamonds in a sea of shit.) Community. It’s what we need to face off against the dystopias of the now and the future.
And, as ever, I’m saying this for myself as much as anyone else. I work from home, I write at home, I socialise rarely. I need to better connect to the communities around me for any number of reasons. So hold me accountable.