nothing here but a polluted culture

issue 252 - 14th April, 2024

CJW: Welcome to another edition of nothing here. We've got an eclectic one this time around, so be sure to scroll deep and see what takes your fancy.

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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. Middle-aged greying goth.

• Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, glitch dreamer.

• Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Journalist, MA in semiotics, and PhD in Arts. 

Climate Change & The Environment

• "The world just experienced its warmest March on record, the 10th straight month of historic heat, as sea surface temperatures also hit a new high, according to Europe’s climate monitoring agency." - ‘On borrowed time’: World marks new global heat record in March - Al Jazeera

Just the headlines:

• Europe Rules That Insufficient Climate Change Action Is a Human Rights Violation - Chris Baraniuk at Wired

• AI already uses as much energy as a small country. It’s only the beginning. by Brian Calvert at Vox

Geopolitics & Empire

CJW: Kill Lists In The Age of Artificial Intelligence - Spencer Ackerman

He reports that within the first weeks of the war, not only were junior Hamas operatives permissible targets, but "it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians" in the course of killing one. Another program, this one with the obscene name Where's Daddy, reportedly pings when targets are assessed to be physically proximate to their families, at which point, Abraham reports, the IDF chooses to kill them. "[S]everal sources emphasized that, as opposed to numerous cases of Hamas operatives engaging in military activity from civilian areas, in the case of systematic assassination strikes, the army routinely made the active choice to bomb suspected militants when inside civilian households from which no military activity took place," Abraham notes.

After the reporting on “The Gospel” earlier in the genocide, there’s new reportage on another AI targeting system - this one using metadata to tag people as “militants” (deliberately loosely defined). The above is likely the most horrifying part of the reporting I’ve seen so far. Deliberately attacking an alleged militant when it is known they are with their families. This isn’t self-defense, this isn’t war, this is genocide. There’s no other word for it.

Also worth noting that Israel will not be shamed by this revelation - it’s just advertising for more of their intelligence/warfare tech that they will happily sell to authoritarian and apartheid regimes all over the world.

The story was originally broken by +972 Mag by Yuval Abraham: ‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza. I didn’t see this delineation in Ackerman’s piece, so thought I’d share this: 

A fundamental difference between the two systems is in the definition of the target: whereas The Gospel marks buildings and structures that the army claims militants operate from, Lavender marks people — and puts them on a kill list.

It's quite a long read if you want more details.

DCH: Truly monstrous. A friend summed it up as “F’ing insane…they use 20 seconds of data to mark your whole family for death.”

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CJW: Israel’s Horrific Massacre at Gaza’s Largest Hospital - Seraj Assi at Jacobin

After the raid, the hospital resembled a slaughterhouse. Hundreds of bodies lay scattered in the dirt, mutilated beyond recognition. Bodies with heads and limbs severed were discovered both inside the hospital and in the surrounding area. Surgeons had been tied up and executed. Some bodies were buried under the rubble, with body parts protruding from the ground; others had been crushed and flattened by bulldozers, their hands and legs tied behind their backs.

More egregious IDF atrocities. Plenty more horror in the full article.

Mondoweiss has more on Al-Shifa, including the below which makes it pretty obvious that Israel was actually attacking the remaining Gazan civil infrastructure rather than a(n entirely made up, I'm sure) militant presence in the compound:

Then, in what was universally hailed as a remarkable achievement, a convoy of 13 aid trucks finally arrived in the north without incident on March 17. The difference is that this time, the delivery of aid had been directly coordinated by Gaza’s police force. The key figure who organized the delivery was the Director of police operations, Faiq Mabhouh, and like most of Gaza’s civilian employees, he naturally operated out of al-Shifa. The next day, on March 18, Israel launched its second invasion of the hospital.

Unsurprisingly, Israel recycled the same unsubstantiated claims, asserting that the operation was based on “precise intelligence” that indicated the hospital was housing hundreds of military personnel from which “terrorist attacks” were being conducted. On the first day of the attack, Israeli forces assassinated Mabhouh, while killing dozens more within the medical compound.

And another piece at Mondoweiss with eyewitness accounts and more context:

The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said that the massacre at al-Shifa was one of the largest in Palestinian history, estimating that at least 1,500 people had been killed, injured, or reported missing, “with women and children making up half of the casualties.”* The organization also confirms that at least 22 patients were shot while in their hospital beds, while the number of displaced persons sheltering at the hospital who were forced to evacuate southward was estimated to include 25,000 people. Moreover, 1,200 housing units in the vicinity of al-Shifa were destroyed.

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CJW: Biden Is Undermining the UN to Protect Israel’s War - Branko Marcetic at Jacobin

Maybe more ominously, US dismissals of the resolution are part of a wider pattern that has seen the Biden administration not just stand by as Israeli officials attack the UN but seemingly join in. Yesterday, after UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese released a report concluding Israel’s actions constituted a genocide, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller suggested she was an antisemite. Last Saturday, President Joe Biden signed into law a bill defunding UNRWA until March 2025 and cutting off US funding for several other UN agencies. These actions have mirrored the behavior of Israeli officials, who have likewise responded to the UN’s criticism throughout the war with charges of antisemitism, and who have explicitly plotted to weaken UNRWA and push it out of Gaza.

Covers the US's continued undermining of the UN and the much vaunted "international rules-based order" for the explicit purpose of supporting Israel's genocide of Palestinians. At this point, why bother abstaining from the vote? It saved face for all of 5 minutes before they started spinning their bullshit about the resolution being "non-binding."

How anyone in the Biden administration can witness what is happening and continue along this path is beyond me. Need more atrocities (you fucking shouldn’t, there have been more than enough): ‘Not a normal war’: doctors say children have been targeted by Israeli snipers in Gaza - Chris McGreal at The Guardian 

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• "Israel is not the shining beacon of democracy in the Middle East that its supporters claim. The banning of one of the few international agencies with reporters in Palestine shows how desperate Israel is to regain control of their narrative." - Israel's Attack on Al Jazeera is Indefensible - Scott Martin at The Catch

• Defunding UNRWA Was Never About Hamas - Yousef Aljamal at InTheseTimes

Just the headlines:

• Al Jazeera Sanad probe: Israeli forces deliberately hit WCK convoy - Al Jazeera

• Israel’s Propaganda Machine is Filling the Internet with Misinformation - Alex Skopic at Current Affairs

Science & Space

CJW: The Best Total Solar Eclipse Photos (2024) - at Wired

I don’t know about “the best” as I saw better photos on social media, but there are still some great ones, including the above which is particularly striking.

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• "Cognition is something that happens not just in the skull but in connection with the environment and with other people." - The Social Benefits of Getting Our Brains in Sync - Marta Zaraska at Quanta

• Why the future of drugs might be in space - Thom Waite at Dazed 

Just the headlines: 

• The Interstellar Fusion Runway Evolves by Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams

Tech & Design

DCH: A.I.-Generated Garbage Is Polluting Our Culture by Erik Hoel at The New York Times

There’s so much synthetic garbage on the internet now that A.I. companies and researchers are themselves worried, not about the health of the culture, but about what’s going to happen with their models. As A.I. capabilities ramped up in 2022, I wrote on the risk of culture’s becoming so inundated with A.I. creations that when future A.I.s are trained, the previous A.I. output will leak into the training set, leading to a future of copies of copies of copies, as content became ever more stereotyped and predictable. In 2023 researchers introduced a technical term for how this risk affected A.I. training: model collapse. In a way, we and these companies are in the same boat, paddling through the same sludge streaming into our cultural ocean.

We’ve shared pieces from Hoel before. In this one he draws a parallel between climate regulation and the need for something similar to the Clean Air Act for the Internet.

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• This Woman Will Decide Which Babies Are Born - Jason Kehe at Wired - CJW: Every 6 months a SV startup reinvents either eugenics or public transport. Guess which one this is? DCH: I shudder to think how long it’ll take until we see a startup try both at once.

• “They claim that the social media giant exaggerated ad viewership figures by up to 400%, leading them to pay inflated premiums for ad placements on its platforms.” Advertisers sue Meta for allegedly inflating ad viewership in $7 billion lawsuit by Nicola Agius at Search Engine Land - DCH: I’ve worked at startups that wised up to how poor Facebook reach actually is AND how badly matched audiences are to products. It’s a chore having to teach founders this over and over and over again. Especially when this is such an open secret.

• "One of the first questions that may come to mind is why a company like Facebook would allow Netflix to influence such a major business decision. The litigation claims the companies formed a lucrative business relationship that included Facebook allegedly giving Netflix access to Facebook users' private messages." Facebook let Netflix see user DMs, quit streaming to keep Netflix happy: Lawsuit by Scharon Harding at Ars Technica

• How the Gaza War Is Reshaping Social Media at Deconstructed

• Elon Musk Is Beefing With Brazil by Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day

Society & The Culture

CJW: The Gaza Massacre Is Undermining the Culture of Democracy - Enzo Traverso at Jacobin

After October 7, most Western media, including many prestigious and supposedly serious newspapers, published news about pregnant women disemboweled and children beheaded or put in ovens by Hamas fighters. These inventions spread by the Israeli army were immediately accepted as evidence — both Joe Biden and Antony Blinken repeated them in their speeches — whereas their refutation was only whispered at the margins a few weeks later. Myths are performative, as Bloch observed: “The moment an error becomes the cause of bloodshed it is irrevocably established as truth.”

I included this down here because while it's about Gaza, it's also about the broader democratic and cultural fallout of the "war" and the ways Israel and its supporters in the West are conducting themselves in regards to media and propaganda.

A must-read essay, one I'm surprised I haven't seen getting shared online.

If terrorism is always unacceptable, that of the oppressed is usually engendered by that of their oppressor, which is far worse.

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DCH: For Brilliant Color: Packaging the First LSD Blotter - Erik Davis at The MIT Press Reader

In contrast to today, when psychedelics are imagined to be medicines, party favors, or indigenous sacraments, many LSD users in the 1960s imagined their favorite substance as a kind of media. Like the increasingly technological media of the postwar world, LSD filters, transforms, and amplifies non-drug phenomena. Ghost played with this association by disguising his acid as film stock promising “brilliant color.” Each sheet was wrapped inside mylar, which not only protected the acid from damaging UV light, but also discouraged suspicious parties from opening the package on a whim, potentially destroying unexposed film. This “medium is the message” idea permeated acid discourse and marketing. Other examples include “Window pane,” “Clearlist,” and some of the first printed LSD blotters, which featured electric light bulbs.

Brilliant illicit packaging design history lesson.

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Just the headlines:

• Queer Botany Twitter profile + ‘Nature embraces queer people’: inside the Kew show about the LGBTQ+ side of plants

Health, Cooking, and Related

DCH: Response to the Cass Review by Dr Hane Maung at Gender GP

The Cass Review is a profoundly flawed document that could result in significant harms to trans youth and young trans adults if its recommendations are implemented. Not only does it engage in flagrant evidence denial, but it makes several inaccurate claims and recommendations that are not supported by any evidence at all. Moreover, its openly cisheteronormative agenda, whereby cisgender identities are judged to be more desirable or legitimate than transgender identities, enacts the prejudice that is suffered by the trans community in the United Kingdom. It is our position that the Cass Review is an unethical and unscientific document that serves to legitimise a system that commits sustained injustices and harms to the trans community.

I’m shocked and appalled that outlets like The Guardian and charities like Mermaids are bending over backwards to praise the Cass Review. Harms were done to trans people when the interim release of the review happened a few years ago. If the recommendations are followed by the NHS, and it seems like they will be, then puberty blockers will be banned and no one under 25 will receive proper care at all. 

This response from Dr. Maung is a great walkthrough of the many inaccuracies riddled throughout the review. From how unethical and unfeasible RCT demands are on gender-affirmative care, the deliberate exclusion of trans people from the study itself, and more.

This review serves only to give ground cover to bigots and paint anyone who disagrees with it as a fanatic or extremist. 

Labour & Economics

DCH: The unexpected upside of multinational monopoly capitalism by Cory Doctorow at Pluralistic

That's a huge deal, because the German Supply Chain Act goes hard. If Mercedes is convicted of union-busting in Alabama, its German parent-company faces a fine of 2% of its global total revenue, and will no longer be eligible to sell products to the German government. Chomp.

Now, the German Supply Chain Act is new, and this is the first petition filed by a non-German union with BAFA, so it's not a slam dunk. But supermajorities of Mercedes workers at the Alabama factory have signed UAW cards, and the election is going to happen in May or June. And the UAW – under new leadership, thanks to a revolution that overthrew the corrupt old guard – has its sights set on all the auto-makers in the American south.

God bless European regulations. The multi-national nature of corporations opens them up to attacks from unexpected flanks. Fingers crossed Mercedes gets hit. 

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DCH: Bubble Trouble - Ed Zitron

While I hope I'm wrong, the calamity I fear is one where the massive over-investment in data centers is met with a lack of meaningful growth or profit, leading to the markets turning on the major cloud players that staked their future on unproven generative AI. If businesses don't adopt AI at scale — not experimentally, but at the core of their operations — the revenue is simply not there to sustain the hype, and once the market turns, it will turn hard, demanding efficiency and cutbacks that will lead to tens of thousands of job cuts.

Emphasis mine. This is absolutely where we’re going. You’ve already seen it a year or so back in the market contraction against metaverse hooey. We’ll see the same in a year or two when another AI winter sets in.

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DCH: What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain? - Sam Knight at The New Yorker

These observations are surely right, but I worry that they obscure two basic truths about Britain’s experience since 2010. The first is that the country has suffered grievously. These have been years of loss and waste. The U.K. has yet to recover from the financial crisis that began in 2008. According to one estimate, the average worker is now fourteen thousand pounds worse off per year than if earnings had continued to rise at pre-crisis rates—it is the worst period for wage growth since the Napoleonic Wars. “Nobody who’s alive and working in the British economy today has ever seen anything like this,” Torsten Bell, the chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, which published the analysis, told the BBC last year. “This is what failure looks like.”

Thanks. I hate it.

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Just the headlines:

• NYC Chicken Shop Replaces Cashier With Woman in Philippines On Zoom by Jules Roscoe at 404 Media

Newsletters

CJW: Welcome to the Cosmic Mystery Club - CY Ballard

Recently I’ve developed a certain hunger for weird mysteries. Books like China Miéville’s The City and the City, Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt series, Nick Harkaway’s Gnomon. Games like Disco Elysium, shows like Twin Peaks and True Detective, even immersive art installations like Meow Wolf. Mysteries that are all about the possibility of something big moving around under the everyday world, occasionally breaching the surface.

As I tried to answer two questions—Why do I like this? and Where can I find more of it?—I found I wasn’t the only person looking for more of whatever this was. From that sense of possibility and riffing off ‘cosmic horror,’ I started to call this genre ‘cosmic mystery.’

Check the full link above for an introduction to this new project just launched, feeling out the boundaries of Cosmic Mystery. Seeing as Gnomon, Disco Elysium, Twin Peaks and (season 1) of True Detective all really spoke to me, I'm keen to see where this goes. 

Books

LZ - Tentacles Longer Than Night, by Eugene Thacker

This is the last book of the Horror of Philosophy trilogy. I wonder whether Thacker needed three books to cover everything as many times the read felt repetitive and tiring. As promised, he covered more horror titles and brought their philosophical value to the table, so I do have a longer list of movies and books to check out now. It was interesting to see how the author brought the philosophical value even of slasher movies and those who only seem to want to make you disgusted and scared. It's another take than the psychological one about horror movies being a way to address trauma, for example. Overall, a fun read, but it could definitely be just one or two books tops.

… and speaking of which I'm also (trying to be) reading Cryptonomicon and, gosh, that's a book that totally didn't need as many pages as it has. It's been a struggle and I only didn't give up entirely because it's for my work's book club…

Movies + TV

LZ - The Omen (1976) + The First Omen (2023)

The prolog to the 1970s classic movie The Omen was recently released here in Sweden, so I took the opportunity to see it on the theater while having dinner – first time I had this fancy experience and we also had a private session with just the two of us! Anyhoo, this new movie is supposed to explain the origins of Damien aka the Antichrist kiddo, so most of the movie happens in this convent and orphanage where the American nun Margaret is sent to get her vows. There she meets this other strange girl who has visions and is constantly being punished, the same way she used to do when she, herself, was an orphan girl too. So that's why she gets attached to this girl, Carlita, who, yes, it's the supposedly actual mother of Damien as we see in the original movie… but things get a bit more complicated and stretched. 

I'm not saying it is a bad movie, I actually liked it, but too many times the director made absolutely obvious homages to other horror movie classics like Possession (including the fact that the protagonist looks a lot like Abujani), The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, Mother Joan of Angels, Angel Heart, and so on… but I was happy to see the Brazilian actress Sonia Braga taking a central role in the film, and also that they had Dave Jones actor Bill Nighy and Ralph Ineson (the father in The VVitch, this dude has the most amazing deep voice ever!)... It's a movie made for fans of 70s horror movies and many times you will have that Captain America moment "I know this reference", which is cool at some points, and cringey when you see a copy of Abujani's iconic freaking our scene at the metro in Possession.

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LZ: The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

So much love for Hammer movies! Tbh I just started catching up with them, but I did a course a few years ago on Gothic Horror and the studio was always mentioned with a lot of affection by the teachers. I can get why, the more I watch to their films. I watched this one in particular because it was mentioned by Thacker in Tentacles Longer than Night, because it's an adaptation of a Poe story, aaaaand there's Vincent Price and Barbara Steele. So good, so much affection in Price's acting and, I don't know, for some reason he reminds me of my grandpa… my mom would probably disagree, but I still have this feeling! And while I was watching this movie about the son of an Inquisitor who loses his wife after, supposedly, a great shock, I couldn't avoid once again seeing Anya Taylor-Joy's face in Barbara Steele. I guess increasingly she is becoming our new scream queen together with Florence Pugh and I'm loving it.

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LZ: The Bride! (to be released in 2025)

I learned about this movie recently. It's a new version of Frankenstein's Bride with Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley. I have no idea what it is going to be, but I love both actors. The sneak peek photos are promising, even though there is a high risk of having a Monster that looks like Jared Leto's Joker and thus follow the curse of the new Crow that looks like a trap singer instead of your classic goth bae. Ah the movie will be directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, which prompted several jokes on Twitter on whether the first part of the movie would be directed by Katie Holmes instead lol

Games

CJW: Why Max Hass Matters - Joshua M. Henson at Unwinnable

What the game doesn’t wear on its sleeve are the radical modes of resistince in its relentless empathy for those who either will not or cannot work for the Nazis. The Kreisau Circle does not discriminate on any basis: Europeans, Americans, Black Liberation Army-esque New Yorkers, communists, the mentally ill, and the physically disabled are all welcomed and accepted, and allowed to contribute based on their ability. There is no means test to be welcomed as an anti-fascist.

[...]

While still limited due to his needs, Max Hass is accepted and integrated into the broader resistance. He still spends time playing with toys, doodling, and drawing on people’s clothing without their permission, but Max is also permitted to contribute to plans, go on missions, and communicate with B.J. while on the field. The game never permits the characters to infantilize him. While Max Hass may come across as a “’simpleton,” he is incredibly astute. All of the characters address him as an equal, and while they may soften their tone to be mindful of his needs, it is never done in a way that comes across as dismissive or distant. 

This is a fantastic piece on Wolfenstein II and the way the anti-fascist gang of protagonists accepts Max Hass on his terms, per his needs and abilities. It’s been a few years since I played the game, but the devs really weren’t fucking around with representation - not because they ticked some arbitrary boxes, but because they treat this varied gang with empathy and do a fantastic job of demonstrating their humanity (period, and also in contrast to the hateful fascist idelogy of the Nazis).

Music

LZ - They Came From Visions - Twilight Robes

Casually stumbled upon this band with dudes dressed in cloaks, something in between The Wicker Man and The Name of the Rose, but definitely with medieval vibes. It actually makes me quite curious on how much metal or rather black metal finds in medieval times so much inspiration. You can tell these guys are really into this kind of stuff when you see the cover art and how they even include some Gregorian chant-like techniques in their singing techniques. They have only this album, but I've been listening on repeat for about a week now. Highly recommend it to fans of Batushka, but in case they want something that sounds less like a mass.

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LZ: Viglos - The Apiarist

What the hell? Is dressing up as a medieval beekeeper a trend in black metal now? Both They Came from Visions and this new band from Switzerland have the same dress code. Not complaining, just finding it funny. Good music too. And I just had access to the full release and will be soon writing an article with an interview with them. Keep an eye!

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LZ: Einstürzende Neubauten - RAMPEN (APM: Alien Pop Music)

I previously wrote about a single that the band released, the song Ist Ist, but now the full album is finally out and this interview with Blixa published in The Quietus is brilliant. One of his children has came out as a trans man and this put him reading about gender and he found in Paul B Preciado the right amount of radicality he was searching for. I love that, as much as I love Preciado's work and it's such a lovely match to see this bridge being built. In fact, Neubauten has already addressed this topic in the previous album: the song Seven Screws in Alles im Allem is based on the myth that Hercules was killed after wearing address, and by the end of the song you can hear Blixa singing "nonbinary" repeatedly. It's also great that he brought that in RAMPEN with the song Trilobiten, inspired by a trilobite fossil that he got as a gift, and how much this species were alive when gender didn't even exist yet. Gotta love Neubauten and celebrate their fifty years of career!

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LZ: Morild - Så kom m​ø​rket og tog mig på ordet …

Danish black metal with a huge ass album title (which is actually a combination of all the song titles haha). The word Morild is apparently the Danish term for plankton luminescence, so that's one thing that already made me interested in them… but good thing is that their music is amazing too. Very melodic and atmospheric, especially the first track.

Art

CJW: Nick Brandt Visualizes the Effects of Rising Seas in His Unsettling Underwater Photos - Colossal

Although warming global temperatures are causing sea levels to rise around the globe, the Pacific islands are experiencing the change at a more rapid rate than anywhere else. Higher tides and extreme weather can wage unrelating flooding, rendering low-lying regions uninhabitable and displacing the communities that call them home.

In Sink / Rise, Nick Brandt peers into the not-so-distant future to imagine the effects of rising waters. His photographs depict people performing unremarkable tasks like sitting at a table or tottering on a seesaw, although their surroundings are incredibly unsettling. Shot entirely in-camera off the coast of Fiji, each seemingly mundane scene occurs on the ocean floor. The subjects hold their breath as they pose and wear a rigid, stifled expression reflective of the imagined catastrophe. It’s easy to envision their suffocation quickly becoming literal.

Beautiful photos and as relevant as ever if you scroll back up to the first piece under “Climate Change + The Environment”.

The Memes