nothing here but a wealth of repression

issue 219 - 14th May, 2023

CJW: Dan's not with us this issue, but I think we've still found plenty of interesting stuff to share with you all.

We're all feeling the pinch with interest rates spiking and rising food costs (lucky we don't need that stuff...), but if you're still able to support us, you’ve got a couple of options:

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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, apocalypse witch, goth aunt.

• Corey J. White (CJW) - Author, sin-eater, future sweetie-pie.

• Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Journalist, MA in semiotics, and PhD in Arts. Sci-fi writer, futurology researcher and essayist. @lidiazuin

Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: Wealth of Nature - George Monbiot

Until the Arias government took power, Costa Rica suffered one of the world’s worst deforestation rates: on one scientific assessment, its forest cover fell to just 24.4% of the country.

Today, forests occupy 57%, which, Umaña tells me, is close to the maximum: some parts were never forested, while others are now occupied by productive farms and cities. While a small amount of illegal timber felling continues, Costa Rica is the only tropical country to have more or less stopped and then reversed deforestation. It now has one of the world’s highest percentages of protected areas. How did it happen?

Monbiot on the new documentary Paved Paradise, and the Costa Rican government's efforts to address deforestation. Really interesting stuff, and another example showing that environmental degradation can be addressed by a government with the will to do so (and the will to stand against Capital's interests).

Just ignore Monbiot's recent piece on How to Blow Up a Pipeline, where he is sadly wrongo. 

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• The “Electrify Everything” Movement’s Consumption Problem - Amy Westervelt. CJW: A follow-up to the piece on mining we shared last time, which goes into detail about the consumption part of the equation that I mentioned, even dropping some facts and figures I wasn’t aware of.

• Geothermal Everywhere: Finding the Energy to Save the World - Maria Streshinsky at WIRED. CJW: A long-read in the classic personal/emotional vein, about one woman's quest to make geothermal power widespread in the US, by teaming up with the people who have the expertise to make it happen: the oil and gas industry. I haven’t read much on geothermal, so I don’t know how this piece is eliding when it comes to environmental risks (or outright harms), but it’s another area to watch.

Geopolitics & Empire

CJW: In Israel and Palestine, a New Wave of Repression Meets an Upsurge in Resistance - James Hutt interviewing Khalida Jarrar at Jacobin

[T]he West Bank is full of checkpoints and we’re witnessing the Israeli army assassinating more and more people at the checkpoints. They have invaded Jericho many times recently, especially after their raid on the nearby Aqabat Jaber refugee camp, where soldiers demolished many houses and assassinated five people. If Israel thinks these people did anything wrong it could have arrested them, like normal. Instead, it is aiming to kill. Shooting people has become very easy now for the Israeli army.

[...]

There is an escalation of the violence with this new fascist government. All Israeli governments violate the rights of Palestinians by arresting and killing people, but we look at this new government and see people like [Israeli minister of finance] Bezalel Smotrich or Ben-Gvir, who was convicted of terrorism against Palestinians by Israeli police. Now he’s not just part of the Israeli government — he’s the minister for national security.

This interview with Khalida Jarrar ("one of the most celebrated — and targeted — leaders of the Palestinian liberation movement") offers a great summary of the situation on the ground for Palestinians in Israel-Palestine, including internal political and class divisions that stand in the way of liberation.

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• Digital Security Tips to Prevent the Cops From Ruining Your Trip Abroad - CJW: This seemed worth sharing considering the undermining of privacy by police, immigration, and intelligence officials. Another security tip The Intercept didn't share is that if you're going to be a whistleblower, don't go to The Intercept…

Just the headlines:

• US Sanctions Are Brutal and Inhumane. And They Don’t Work. - Branko Marcetic at Jacobin 

Science & Space

• Mind reading breakthrough immediately raises questions of ethics - Richard A Lovett at Cosmos

Tech & Design

CJW: Radical Design For A World In Crisis - Anab Jain at Noema

Mycelium travels the dark recesses of the Earth; it moves through unseen spaces and emergent conditions, and as it moves it finds and forges new connections and alliances. To the human eye, soil is a space of unknowns. To mycelium, the dark is rich with possibility; through intuitive exploration, mycelium metabolizes such possibilities, making use of what is available while simultaneously nurturing all around it. Such a cooperative interface is essential for ancillary design. 

Ancillary design does not fear the unknown, the undefined and ambiguous; it thrives in between and beneath. Open to ambiguity, it is a practice of moving through a vast ecology of nonlinear causality and emergence.

Anab Jain outlining the philosophy of a new design movement - ancillary design - which takes a more-than-human approach to design for our increasingly turbulent world and times.

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CJW: There Is No A.I. (proxy link) - Jaron Lanier at New Yorker (via Sentiers)

We assume that decontextualization is intrinsic to the very idea of a digital network. That was never so, however; the initial proposals for digital-network architecture, put forward by the monumental scientist Vannevar Bush in 1945 and the computer scientist Ted Nelson in 1960, preserved provenance. Now A.I. is revealing the true costs of ignoring this approach. Without provenance, we have no way of controlling our A.I.s, or of making them economically fair. [...]

If a chatbot appears to be manipulative, mean, weird, or deceptive, what kind of answer do we want when we ask why? Revealing the indispensable antecedent examples from which the bot learned its behavior would provide an explanation: we’d learn that it drew on a particular work of fan fiction, say, or a soap opera. We could react to that output differently, and adjust the inputs of the model to improve it. Why shouldn’t that type of explanation always be available? There may be cases in which provenance shouldn’t be revealed, so as to give priority to privacy—but provenance will usually be more beneficial to individuals and society than an exclusive commitment to privacy would be.

A thought-provoking piece from Jaron Lanier on "AI" and the notion of data dignity as a (perhaps necessary) tool to minimise the possible harms of the current approach to generative systems. Lanier is always worth the read. 

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• Can Ocean Waves Power the Grid? New Technology is Bringing Us Closer Than Ever (via Sentiers) - This sounds like the titular road from Monica Byrne's (brilliant) novel The Girl in the Road.

• Google wants to take over the web - Paris Marx on Google's AI search plans being another way they plan to stifle the open web.

• Deskilling on the Job - danah boyd on the likely effect AI could have on deskilling workers (and a broader discussion of skilled labour). (via Sentiers)

Society & The Culture

CJW: The other side of egoism - Mandy Brown

In criticizing altruism, [The Dispossessed] isn’t suggesting we jettison care for each other. Rather, it’s positing that altruism is a meagre sort of caring. And, I think, it’s going further to argue that caring for each other is also caring for ourselves. “Altruism, hell, I want to respect myself,” says Shevek. In place of altruism, Shevek calls for mutual aid, for solidarity—for seeing the plight of others as his own. That, for me, is the big difference between altruism—or its close cousin, charity—and mutual aid. The former preserves the hierarchy between giver and receiver. The latter recognizes that everyone has things to give, and everyone has things they need. The Anarresti argue that real care isn’t selfless but reciprocal, not altruistic but mutual. Nobody goes hungry while another eats.

Some really interesting thoughts on altruism (and so-called effective altruism) versus mutual aid, using Le Guin's The Dispossessed as a lens.

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CJW: How We Ended Up in the Era of ‘Quantitative Aesthetics,’ Where Data Points Dictate Taste Ben Davis at Artnet (via Sentiers)

On one level, this is seen in a rise of a kind of wonky obsession with business stats in fandoms, invoked as a way to convey the rightness of artistic opinions—what I want to call Quantitative Aesthetics. [...]

It manifests in music. As the New York Times wrote in 2020 of the new age of pop fandom, “devotees compare No. 1s and streaming statistics like sports fans do batting averages, championship, wins and shooting percentages.” [...]

[...]

[...] indie director James Gray, of Ad Astra fame, recently complained about ordinary cinema-goers using business stats as a proxy for artistic merit: “It tells you something of how indoctrinated we are with capitalism that somebody will say, like, ‘His movies haven’t made a dime!’ It’s like, well, do you own stock in Comcast? Or are you just such a lemming that you think that actually has value to anybody?”

I'm sure we've all come across these sorts of Quantitative Aesthetics before, as it's been the MCU fan's default position ever since the movies began an obvious decline in quality (and, before that, in a desperate attempt to "prove" their cultural importance) , but this piece is interesting in the way it ties together a number of cultural, economic, and tech trends that led us to this place. And of course, as James Gray alludes to above, it's an obvious side effect of capitalist realism.

It also seems to me to relate to the rise of generative AI, in that both disregard the quality/ies - and inherent humanity - of art and culture in order to supplant these with their own (capitalist) priorities. The skill and artistry involved doesn't matter, all that matters is how much money it can make/save and how much labour it can alienate. These thoughts likely spurred on by this recent Rob Horning piece: Sprachkunstwerk. 

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• We Need Empathy, Not Just Etiquette, On The Subway - Lily Sánchez at Current Affairs. CJW: About the murder of Jordan Neely on a NYC subway and also society's loathing for unhoused people, and the broader societal effects of atomisation. Like the author, I also loathe how the media jumped on the narrative that excused this murder for all of the obvious reasons. Even if Daniel Penny's version of events is true, this is a dangerous precedent to set in a country slow-roasting in hatred.

Labour & Economics

MJW: Labor’s immigration and housing policies are an explosive combination

In the election campaign, Anthony Albanese promised to set up a $10 billion fund that will build 10,000 homes a year. Meanwhile, it has approved two million visas when there are 51,437 homes currently available to rent. So obviously, the Labor housing policy is hopelessly inadequate and when combined with its immigration policy, it’s downright dangerous.

This is the first article I've read that lays out some numbers on the Australian housing crisis (thanks to Ruby Hamad for linking it on her insta.) Not only is this crisis leaving people homeless and international students horribly exploited, but it's fueling a lot of fascist anti-immigration bullshit too (as seen in this article from the ABC yesterday about Nazis protesting at Melbourne parliament house… again.)

Newsletters

CJW: Big Brother is Coming - Nofil Khan

Well worth signing up to see dispatches on the cutting edge of all things generative AI. At the above link is AI mind-reading, AI jet fighters, and using AI tools to generate anime. And that's from a couple of months ago. The rapid rate of development happening in generative AI spaces is kinda scary.

Books

MJW: The Beach by Alex Garland

I’d not read this book in over a decade, but it’s an old favourite of mine. I stumbled across the audiobook while casting around for something to listen to during the cleaning, ordering and rearranging of my house, which is a forever war but it keeps me busy (cos you know what they say about idle hands.) Alfie Allen narrates the audiobook and does a pretty decent job of it considering there are an array of accents (but he does break character and jump off script at one point to say that he is NOT going to attempt an Italian accent, which gave me a giggle.)

Corey surprised me when they said that they’d never read The Beach. You know how some books are bestsellers for mysterious reasons? Like they’re badly written and otherwise generally awful? Some books are bestsellers because they are fucking good, and The Beach is one of them. Forget the movie, please. It’s fucking terrible. The book is quite, quite good. There’s so much in it aside from the dreamy Thai island and the community a group of travellers create there. Slam in some video games, the Vietnam war, fucktons of weed, shark attacks, power, seething hatred for arrogant jerks, and the horror. If you’ve not read it, or not read it since the nineties, I advise you take a look.

Movies + TV

LZ: Dead Ringers (Amazon Prime mini-series)

JUST WATCH IT. NOW. I know, everyone is dead tired of adaptations and remakes and continuations and reboots and sequels and prequels of existing titles, but this one is worth it. First of all it is directed by Alice Birch, the same person behind The Wonder and Lady Macbeth (both starring Florence Pugh). Second, it's Rachel Weisz making up for Jeremy Iron's interpretation of the Mantle twins. It is brilliant, fun, with extremely well written dialogues and it is giving American Psycho. More under the Self-Promotion section!

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LZ: The Lure

This is a Polish musical film featuring sirens. Yes. That's right. I thought it was closer to a horror flick, but even though there is blood and kind of scary sights, it's not really. Whoever is into Polish cinema will find notable faces here, like Michalina Olszańska (I, Olga Hepnarová) and Jakub Gierszał (Spoor). It's fun. It's kind of a fairytale for adults, but it's silly and dramatic enough to make it an enjoyable time. The outfits are great and the songs are also entertaining.

Podcasts

CJW: Hollyweird Rise Up ft. Nick Adams - Trashfuture Podcast

Possibly the best discussion I’ve come across on the WGA strike, particularly when they’re talking about AI, and the way that AI tools could serve to encourage a solipsistic drive within the individual consumer (as opposed to traditional film which can encourage empathy and expose a viewer to stories they didn’t even know they were missing out on.

Now do the publishing industry next (not specifically the AI angle, as I don’t see that being a problem in the same way, but in the way that the people who write the books that support the entire industry are underpaid and disrespected).

Art

LZ: BAPTISM OR DEATH  BLACK METAL IN CONTEMPORARY ART,  BIRTH OF A NEW AESTHETIC CATEGORY

Very interesting paper about black metal as an aesthetic category from the perspective of history of art.

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MJW: Alphachanneling

Loving this piece from Alphachanneling. Check out their other work if you like drawings of people fuckin. Ha!

The Self-Promotion

LZ: Cronenberg's Dead Ringers gets a feminine and feminist revamp

No spoilers here, just a compilation of what you should expect when watching this new miniseries starring the magnificent Rachel Weisz as the Mantle twins.

The Memes