nothing here but a practical effects arms-race

issue 143 - 11th July, 2021

CJW: Hey everyone! This issue m1k3y is back, and we have the pleasure of adding Lidia Zuin to the roster permanently! This is a fantastic team, and I’m really excited to see what we can bring you.

With five of us now, it also means we might be able to mix things up going forward, so stay tuned.

If you would still like to support the work we do here, and gain access to the full bonus archive, just go here to become a premium subscriber. (We’ve also got bonuses planned once again.) We appreciate any and all support. And if there’s someone who you think will appreciate the newsletter, please forward this to them.

The Team

• Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
• m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / ecopoet // Dark Extropian Musings / pryvt.rsrch
• Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - also writes as Mia Walsch. Author, memoirist, very tired person. Professional reject. Leatherworker. ¾ through my mental breakdown, I hope.
• Corey J. White (CJW) - Prince Squid.
• Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Journalist, MA in semiotics, and PhD in Arts. Sci-fi writer, futurology researcher and essayist. @lidiazuin

Articles

CJW: Coalition accused of using charity crackdown to silence dissent - Daniel Hurst at The Guardian (via Jane Rawson)

Charity sector insiders who have examined the latest version of the regulations told Guardian Australia the regulations could empower the regulator to deregister charities for encouraging people to attend peaceful protests, including protests on public land.

They keep emphasising that it’s only an issue for charities that encourage people to break the law, but at the same time the Australian government has slowly been criminalising protest and dissent. They oversee an increasingly inequitable society and want us to smile politely in silence while they continue to sell out our future… and people keep voting them in.

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CJW: Revealed: ExxonMobil’s lobbying war on climate change legislation - Alex Thomson at Channel 4

The explosive footage was obtained by Unearthed, Greenpeace UK’s investigative platform, who posed as head-hunters to obtain the information from one of ExxonMobil’s most senior Washington lobbyists.

The recordings appear to reveal the secretive behind-the-scenes activities of a lobbyist for a company that claims in public to support action on climate change, while fighting against legislative attempts to tackle it.

Of course this is how things have long worked in Washington, but it’s good to see it all come publicly to light at the same time as the burning ocean and an entire town burning down during record high temperatures. All these things are connected.

Related: Lethal Force Against Pipeline Protests? Documents Reveal Shocking South Dakota Plans for National Guard - at Democracy Now (via ButchAnarchy)

Again, unsurprising, but at least they’ve admitted what we long felt to be true - the state under capitalism values property more than the lives of its citizens (especially when said citizens are making a ruckus about that same property).

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CJW: The Erosion of Memory - George Monbiot

Like his homicidal predecessor, Mengistu Haile Mariam, Abiy flatly denies the famine. Last week he claimed: “There is no hunger in Tigray.” If justice is ever done, we might one day witness the remarkable spectacle of a Nobel laureate on trial for crimes against humanity.

Not only is the situation in Tigray something more people should be aware of (you may have noticed I’ve been trying be more global and far less Amerocentric in what I share in these pages), but the work the people of Tigray have done on the land since the 1984 famine is inspiring and is an example from recent history of what Cory Doctorow calls Full Employment (that being the vast amount of labor that will be required to transition us away from our fossil fuel driven society/lifestyle/civilisation).

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MKY: What the Dandenong Ranges extended power outage teaches us about backup battery power

TL;DR - SalvagePunk beats bougie eco fash tech.

Newsletters

CJW: 1990: LambdaMOO - by Aaron A. Reed - 50 Years of Text Games (via Austin)

LambdaMOO is still running circa 2021, but is a strange place to visit: both heavy with the dust of ages and as fresh and functional as the day its code first ran. A public bulletin board in the library exhibits surreal temporal collapse: an ad for a long-defunct BBS with a high-speed 14.4k modem sits alongside a note from a lonely Italian in quarantine with COVID-19. The last official news bulletin dates from 2004, yet the @who command still shows a dozen or so active players at any given moment squirreled away in odd corners of the map, still @digging. The hundreds of useful generic objects created over the decades remain just as fertile as they were in 1991, their code ready for reuse in a new generation’s projects.

A great history of MUDs and MOOs in general and LambdaMOO in particular. The section about these worlds functioning as virtual reality spaces despite their text-based nature (or even because of it) appeals to me both as a writer and as someone for whom current VR tech leads to headaches and motion sickness.

MKY: i never played LamdbaMOO but i can still remember the guys gushing about when i was a young teenage programmer taking a tour of a uni’s computer lab. (date yourself)

Movies + TV

LZ: Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)

For those who enjoyed Blue is the warmest color and fancy historical movies with fierce female leads like Lady Macbeth _or _The Nightingale, the French film Portrait of a Lady on Fire will be your next favorite.

It tells the story of a 19th female painter who is commissioned to paint a portrait of the daughter of a noble woman, but she refuses to pose. With time, Marianne and Heloise begin to know each other better and develop stronger feelings.

The movie is especially interesting not just in terms of addressing queer relationships, but also for portraying feminist efforts of a time when feminism wasn’t exactly possible. While each character helps each other with their own challenges (an unwanted pregnancy, a forbidden relationship, a predetermined marriage etc), we learn how women always had their ways of resistance against the vigent morality and rules, even though this was always done in the shadows.

CJW: That’s one I need to re-watch, along with Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden which is similarly a sapphic period piece, but it’s more of a plot-driven mystery/crime sort of film.

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LZ: Possessor (2020)

Long time no see. Cronenberg’s son Brandon is back in action. After directing the visceral dystopia Antiviral, he comes back with Possessor – guess what, another visceral dystopia. This time, instead of having celebrities selling their virus (imagine buying coronavirus after mutating in the body of a celebrity?), there is an agency that hires “actors” to remotely control people with neural implants (oh hi, Neuralink?!). No Sarah Gadon this time, but Andrea Riseborough is doing a very fine job as the livid protagonist that invades people’s bodies. Kinda psychedelic, a little bloody, and quite distressing, the film blends advanced technology with mental superpowers.

CJW: A little bloody? To me it looked like a practical effects arm-race being played out between father and son (and I am here for it). Possessor is one of the best films I have seen in a long time, but it is not for the faint of heart. Still hoping to write more/properly on it one day…

MKY: so much love for Brandon’s work.

URL

LZ: Solargoth - Paul Graham Raven

Commenting on an article that I wrote about solarpunk and the darker possibilities the science fiction subgenre could get, this essay stresses the importance of moving away from naivety when thinking about a green future supported by emerging technology. Even though most solarpunk writers are rather angry than hopeful about the future and climate change, cyberpunk fans cannot let go of the darkness and violence of the 80s sci-fi. After reading Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future and finding out that contemporary cli-fi is even more political than your regular Love, Death and Robots, Solarpunk thus poses an opportunity for science fiction to be a new frontier of critique on climate change, capitalism, and Silicon Valley utopianism.

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CJW: How Twitter can ruin a life: Isabel Fall’s complicated story - Emily VanDerWerff at VOX

What happened in the wake of “Attack Helicopter” being pulled is that Isabel Fall stopped being someone who acts and became someone who is acted upon. The prevailing narratives about the story erased her agency almost entirely. Fall wanted the story to be titled “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter,” and when she eventually retitled it “Helicopter Story” as a vague gesture of goodwill, many people assumed she had been pressured into doing so. Fall wanted the story taken off the internet, and when it was, many assumed she had been “canceled.” Both narratives framed Fall as an unwitting puppet of forces beyond her control.

In the wake of ‘Helicopter Story’ being shortlisted for the Hugo award, conversations around the story and its reception have appeared again on twitter and elsewhere. I’ve seen some great threads about how the criticisms of the story (coming from the centre and left at least, because who cares what the fuck the right has to say about trans art) were focused on a poisoned sort of individualism. Ie. “This doesn’t represent my experience of transness so therefore it must be objectively bad and extremely problematic.” I’m hoping these discussions might move the needle so we don’t see the same discourse appear every time a trans artist releases interesting/difficult/controversial art.

Isabel Fall was on a path to living as an out trans woman with a career writing science fiction, and now, she says, there will be no more Isabel Fall stories. She is done writing under that name, and she now considers “Isabel Fall” an impossible goal to achieve, a person she will never be.

This is genuinely sad. And I really feel for Fall. I for one welcome more fiction from her, under whatever name she chooses to return.

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CJW: The NFT’s Aura, or, Why Is NFT Art So Ugly? - Sam Keeper

It’s actually very difficult to talk about NFT art as art because most of it is so god damn ugly, vapid, and amateurish. NFT art is like, imagine if you took a bunch of dudes in a high school art fair, then put them in an echo chamber for a decade that constantly told them that everything they did was Epic Bacon, and then finally started handing them million dollar checks for that artwork. Does this sound like an environment where artists would develop self awareness, or intellectual depth, or aesthetic uniqueness, or any of the other stuff that a critic might be interested in?

This is a great piece, looking at the NFT space, and looking at NFT art as art, and the many ways it suffers under that lens.

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CJW: Send in the Clouds - Kevin Rogan at Real Life Mag

The city-as-product is marketing jargon for now. But it illustrates how actual cities have been under pressure to restructure themselves into corporations that offer a service called “urban living,” competing with other service providers for a place in a crowded lifestyle-consumptionist market. They offer culture or a vibrant tech scene or other amenities, all while driving down labor costs, trimming services to the bone, and minimizing the possibility for political dissent.

Plenty of interest concerning tech-libertarian fantasies, but the conclusions towards the end (where the above quote was taken) are what really grabbed me.

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CJW: Neoliberalism’s Bailout Problem - Robert Pollin, Gerald Epstein at Boston Review

Indeed, a new term has entered the economics lexicon—financialization—that is meant to evoke these patterns of explosive growth in shadow banking and financial market trading over the neoliberal era. Financialization has occurred precisely because weak financial regulations allow speculative bubbles to emerge as a regular feature of neoliberal capitalism, while bailout operations prevent these bubbles from collapsing into full-scale 1930s-level economic disasters.

A great history of neoliberal economics in general, and of particular interest might be the particular mechanics behind the stock market surge of 2020 despite economic realities. Both the TrueAnon and Trash Future podcasts have gone over that before, but this is the first time I’ve seen it outlined in text. Ends with some options for how to move past our current and disastrous system of neoliberal capitalism, but is sadly missing “global socialist revolution.”

Video

LZ: Zeal & Ardor - Run music video

The American band has recently released a new music video to announce the single Run. Heavier than ever, the group now tackles themes like mental disorders after serving Jordan Peele’s realness in the metal scene with songs like Vigil (in homage to George Floyd’s murder) and Devil is Fine. Fans are now wondering what comes next, since the band is always changing their style.

The Self-Promotion

LZ: Devs and the Anti-Matrix Effect

Here is my essay about Alex Garland’s series Devs. If you didn’t watch it yet, I recommend reading the text afterwards, since there are some spoilers. In any case, here I bring up some of the semiotic references of the movie and the final message left by the series which is basically about a big tech corporation, a megalomaniac billionaire, and quantum computing. Oh, and there’s Sonoya Mizuno, so I hope now you’re convinced to watch it!

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CJW: Repo Virtual wins Best Science-Fiction Novel at the Aurealis Awards

Repo Virtual won the Aurealis Award for Best Science-Fiction Novel, tied with Laura Jean McKay’s amazing The Animals in That Country. I honestly did not expect the win - I was pretty sure McKay was going to run away with it, so to be able to share it with her is amazing.

It was such a strong slate of books to be shortlisted alongside, and all of the shortlists this year really demonstrate the breadth and quality of Australian SFF. Thanks again to the judges, and to everyone who’s helped get word about RV out there.

Cutting Room Floor

• Homegrown Fascism - Natasha Lennard at The New Inquiry (via Inhabit)
• It is time to end illegal pushbacks and abolish Frontex - Mark Akkerman at Roar Mag
• Forty years in an unmarked grave: family of murdered woman Queenie Hart fight to bring her home - by and via Amy McQuire
• Parliaments of the Earth - R. K. Upadhya at Logic Mag (via Sentiers)
• All the right words on climate have already been said - Sarah Miller at NiemanLab (via Jane Rawson)
• Exclusive: Documents Reveal Erik Prince’s $10 Billion Plan to Make Weapons and Create a Private Army in Ukraine - Simon Shuster at Time (via Foreign Exchanges)
• The Rise and Fall of the Ultimate Doomsday Prepper - Sam Biddle at The Intercept
• Holding Onto Reality in a Virtual World - Dhoya Snijders, Rinie Van Est at Issues
• The Oral History of ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’ - Alan Siegel at The Ringer (via Dan Hill)