nothing here but a world forced to listen

issue 244 - 21st January, 2024

CJW: Welcome to another issue of nothing here - a broad download of the past fortnight that's bound to contain something illuminating (in one way or another).

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Let's get to it, shall we?

The Team

Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Writer & visual artist. Doominatrix & middle-aged greying goth.
Corey J. White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, bad milk blood robot.

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

Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: How can California solve its water woes? By flooding its best farmland. - Jake Bittle at Grist

The restored floodplain solves both problems at once. During wet years like this one, it absorbs excess water from the San Joaquin River, slowing down the waterway before it can rush downstream toward large cities like Stockton. As the water moves through the site, it seeps into the ground, recharging groundwater aquifers that farmers and dairy owners have drained over the past century. In addition to these two functions, the restored swamp also sequesters an amount of carbon dioxide equivalent to that produced by thousands of gas-powered vehicles. It also provides a haven for migratory birds and other species that have faced the threat of extinction.

Interesting piece on restoring floodplain across California to address the state's water issues, as well as the entrenched interests that can help or hinder the process.

CJW: An Amazing 200 Million Year-Old Race - Meera Subramanian at Orion Magazine

Within ten minutes, the first turtles meet the reach of waves, like a reunion embrace. Two girls beside me squeal with delight. I’m too old to squeal it seems, but I feel something hard inside of me crack open. Waves sweep and tumble the nestlings, leaving them stranded on a spot of sand twenty feet away as the wave retreats without them. So close. But they keep moving toward the surf again until their flippers take a watery hold, and they swim for their lives, toward food, toward the open ocean, toward their other true place of belonging.

About Project Tortuga, which safely hatches and releases baby olive ridley sea turtles in San Pancho.

"The CCCS data also showed that 2023 was the first year on record when every day was at least 1C warmer than the 1850-1900 pre-industrial record. Almost half the days were 1.5C hotter and, for the first time, two days were more than 2C hotter." - 2023 smashes record for world’s hottest year by huge margin - Damian Carrington at The Guardian

Just the headlines:

The EPA Is Backing Down From Environmental Justice Cases Nationwide - Delaney Nolan • The Intercept

Geopolitics & Empire

CJW: 2023 Was the Year the Liberal West, Led by Joe Biden, Betrayed Palestinians in Gaza - Seraj Assi at Jacobin

The mass bloodletting in Gaza is the tragic culmination of the Western colonial legacy in Palestine. The same global forces that failed Palestinians in the past have returned to ensure their final dispossession: the UK, which handed Mandate for Palestine to political Zionists, thanks to the Balfour Declaration, has pledged its full support to Israel. The UN, which created Israel thanks to its Partition Plan, has failed in its mission to protect Palestinians and prevent a repeat of the Nakba. The United States, which was the first country to recognize Israel, has become a partner in its war crimes.

These two pieces are sort of a pair:

South Africa honored the Palestinian plight, and the world was forced to listen - Hebh Jamal at Mondoweiss

I sat there, shocked and emotional, not because I hadn’t been paying attention – quite on the contrary. I was shocked and emotional because, for the first time in history, the crimes committed against the Palestinian people have been laid bare for three hours uninterrupted by political pundits and biased media organizations. For the first time in history, the horrific words and actions of the Israeli state actors were reiterated and taken seriously.
[...]
What South Africa did today is stand up to all and every imperial power that hides behind empty claims of democracy and freedom while funding and supporting death and destruction.

As the author says, there's every chance that nothing will change due to the case South Africa has brought against Israel, but speaking the truth is still important, solidarity with Palestine is still important. Here again we see the global South standing against the murderous imperial and colonial ideology that the global North remains unwilling to reckon with.

CJW: Ukraine’s Trade Unions Face Russian Invasion and Homegrown Attacks on Labor Rights - Volodya Vagner at Jacobin

Russia’s invasion has undoubtedly plunged the Ukrainian economy into a deep crisis. Yet, reformers’ claims that their agenda is necessitated by the stresses of war seem dubious, given that similar proposals had already been launched in 2019, before Putin’s all-out war. At the time, unions put up stiff resistance, and the bill was withdrawn. With martial law in effect, however, protests and strikes are now banned. This time, unions only succeeded in lobbying for some of the latest reforms to be limited to wartime. But with the war dragging on, even these temporary laws risk becoming the new normal.

We've shared pieces before about how the war is being used as a pretence to (further) open Ukraine up to the forces of neoliberalism, and here's another focused on labour.

MJW: Gaza war offers the ultimate marketing tool for Israeli arms companies - Sophia Goodfriend at 972 Magazine

In late November, the Israeli defense tech start-up Smartshooter posted a grainy photo on Facebook showing three Israeli soldiers aiming assault rifles at a blasted-out concrete building somewhere in the Gaza Strip. The caption reads: “The SMASH 3000 is now in action with the IDF Special Forces of Sayeret Maglan, transforming Close Quarter Combat (CQC) scenarios!” In an interview published by Globes a month later, the company’s CEO, Michal Mor, framed Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed almost 30,000 Palestinians, as a sales boost. “This is the finest hour of the defense industries,” Mor said.

This is where we are at now. Genocide as marketing opportunity.

Inside Israel’s torture camp for Gaza detainees - Yuval Abraham at +972 Magazine
The Legal Case Against Joe Biden for Enabling Israel’s Genocide Against Gaza - The Intercept
"Top US officials quietly reviewed more than a dozen incidents of alleged gross violations of human rights by Israeli security forces since 2020, but have gone to great lengths to preserve continued access to US weapons for the units responsible for the alleged violations, contributing – former US officials say – to the sense of impunity with which Israel has approached its war in Gaza." - ‘Different rules’: special policies keep US supplying weapons to Israel despite alleged abuses - Stephanie Kirchgaessner at The Guardian
"If we want a prosperous Ukraine with a viable path toward liberal governance and European Union membership, we will have to concede that it cannot be a NATO or U.S. ally, and that this neutral Ukraine must have verifiable limits on the types and quantities of weapons it may hold. If we refuse to agree to those terms, Russia will quite probably turn Ukraine into a dysfunctional wreck incapable of rebuilding itself, allying with the West, or constituting a military threat to Russia." - Russia's upper hand puts US-Ukraine at a crossroads - George Beebe and Anatol Lieven at Responsible Statecraft

Just the headlines:

John Pilger’s Reporting Demolished Western Propaganda’s Myths
‘It is a time of witch hunts in Israel’: teacher held in solitary confinement for posting concern about Gaza deaths - Emma Graham-Harrison and Quique Kierszenbaum at The Guardian
Coverage of Gaza War in the New York Times and Other Major Newspapers Heavily Favored Israel, Analysis Shows - Adam Johnson at The Intercept

Science & Space

“The Anthropocene signifies that humans have become a geological force, with the ability to modify the planet. But not everyone is equally responsible for this situation. It’s primarily the people of the Global North; particularly, the super-rich who think they can do it all with their money, even flee the Earth. That idea of conquest originates with European colonialism, linking imperialism, capitalism and progress. We should also restrict space shuttles, like SpaceX. Spending so much money, effort and time on going to Mars seems stupid to me; we should invest that energy in saving our planet. As a philosopher, I’m an optimist. Our perception, our values, can change in two or five years. Opportunities for change are everywhere. I want to explore what they are.” - Kohei Saito, philosopher: ‘Spending so much money, effort and time on going to Mars is stupid’ - Pablo Leon • el pais
Orion Magazine - Time Stands Still in San Diego's Frozen Zoo - Natalie Middleton at Orion Magazine - CJW: A fascinating piece on a facility that stores genetic material of endangered and extinct animals.

Tech & Design

DCH: Get Ready for the Great AI Disappointment - Daron Acemoglu • WIRED

Some people will start recognizing that it was always a pipe dream to reach anything resembling complex human cognition on the basis of predicting words. Others will say that intelligence is just around the corner. Many more, I fear, will continue to talk of the “existential risks” of AI, missing what is going wrong, as well as the much more mundane (and consequential) risks that its uncontrolled rollout is posing for jobs, inequality, and democracy.

A hopeful prediction that the AI hype will die down this year. And maybe there’s some truth to it. You’re seeing more and more detractors come out regarding the obvious shortcomings of the predictive models fuelling LLMs and GPTs.

If the hype does subside it's not super clear to me what will take its place. The VC-Big Tech axis has already burned through crypto and metaversal bubbles pretty quickly.

“This marriage of convenience between American psychologists and American ad-men was a cozy connection warmed across the early decades of the twentieth century. It was out of this marriage that the concatenation of attention and value first emerged As early as 1895, one of the mainstays of the Leipzig-trained progenitors of academic psychology in the United States, Edward Wheeler Scripture, who held a post at Yale, had written a book chapter on attention that suggested ad-men were ahead of laboratory psychologists in the practical understanding (and manipulation) of eyeballs. Scripture felt the psychologists needed to do more lab work in order to be able to give something back to those who had deep lay expertise in attention capture.” Fracking Eyeballs - D. Graham Burnett • Asterisk (DCH: Excuse the link to an EA mag but I thought this was a good piece on the first 50 or so years of the gestation of surveillance capitalism. Good Adam Curtis vibes throughout.)
“Although hundreds of papers have been written on NLP since its first iteration in the 1960s, and thousands of systems deploy the technique, only in the last decade has the problem of bias – particularly gender stereotyping – been explicitly addressed (Bolukbasi et al., 2016; Hovy & Prabhumoye, 2021; Schmidt, 2015). Linguists were aware of this – it is a well-researched phenomenon – but as the results of algorithmic discrimination became more apparent, greater scrutiny was directed toward computational processes often taken for granted; indeed, often taken for granted because of a desire to see the computer as an arbiter of neutrality, distanced from human flaws.” Power in AI: Inequality Within and Without the Algorithm - Kate Devlin at King’s College London (DCH: Kate is always smart. This is a good read on the long history of discrimination in the field of AI)
Column: The AI industry has a battle-tested plan to keep using our content without paying for it - Brian Merchant at The Los Angeles Times

Just the headlines:

Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find - Jason Koebler • 404media.co
AI girlfriend bots are already flooding OpenAI’s GPT store - Michelle Cheng at Quartz

Society & The Culture

CJW: An animal myself - Erica Berry at Aeon

Today, there is perhaps no animal we are more unmoored from than ourselves. ‘The world is now dominated by an animal that doesn’t think it’s an animal,’ writes the natural philosopher Melanie Challenger in How to Be Animal (2021). ‘And the future is being imagined by an animal that doesn’t want to be an animal.’ It is shame that drives us to evade our animality, contends philosopher Martha Nussbaum in the book Hiding from Humanity (2004), so uncomfortable are we with our own ‘propensity to decay and to become waste products ourselves’. The more we confront the degradation of our oceans and lands, however, the more we must face that it’s not just animal habitat under threat – it’s our habitat, too. Faced with this mounting unliveability, we look to the nonhuman for ideas of survival. To be a rat in a rotting city is to make out OK. [...] Labelling individuals as ‘animals’ – refuting their humanity – has long been a project of the racist, colonial, sexist imagination. Only by rejecting these legacies of white-settler anthropocentrism can we imagine better, less hierarchical ways of existing among, between, and within species.

I'm always gonna share essays about human/animal phenomenology because it's an area I find fascinating, and as someone with a lot of empathy for/with animals it's something I think about a lot. Plenty of interesting thoughts here, but I particularly liked this:

In a gamified research study he calls ‘Project Shell’, participants take on the body of a loggerhead sea turtle, trading their arms for flippers as they dodge passing ships and fishing flotsam on their journey from hatchling to adult. Pimentel found that participants left the game with new environmental attitudes, increased compassion, and a willingness to donate to marine conservation efforts. ‘Your brain stores [virtual reality] experiences in autobiographical memory,’ he told me. ‘It’s happening to you, versus something you’re seeing.’ Players adopted what he calls a ‘body transfer’ response, perceiving themselves as turtles.

It's not surprising when I've read other pieces about people rapidly adapting to additional prosthetic sensory devices, but it's still fascinating and further encourages me to consider a future of deep human-animal connection and collaboration.

CJW: The Twisty Tale of the BBC Show Supposedly So Terrifying That It Was Destroyed - Pat Cassels at Atlas Obscura

And so we see how England in the 1960s wanted future generations to remember its cultural output: the Royal Shakespeare Company and the London Symphony Orchestra, not low-budget, spine-tingling thrills. There’s an argument to be made—and not an especially difficult one—that it’s precisely those idiosyncrasies that make genre entertainment more deserving of preservation. “The policy of targeting light entertainment to junk I always thought was a mistaken one,” said Python’s Jones. “I mean, a concert made in 1960 is pretty much like a concert made today.” On the other hand, adds Jones, “It’s the light entertainment that records the history.”
Or, in this case, the dark entertainment.

This piece is ostensibly about a horror show that was too horrifying to stay on the air and has since disappeared, but really it's about the preservation of media and culture, and what we want to say and remember about our culture based on what we choose to protect and archive. It's still an important discussion today with studios and streaming platforms removing "content" at will, The Internet Archive being attacked, and many people being unaware of the fickle nature of digital storage.

45 Years Ago, One Kids Book Series Taught A Generation How To Make Bad Decisions - Matthew Kaplowitz • Fatherly (DCH: a delightful love letter to Choose Your Own Adventures)

Health, Cooking, and Related

A discovery in the muscles of long COVID patients may explain exercise troubles - Will Stone at NPR
“Private equity firms are increasingly buying hospitals across the US, and when they do, patients suffer, according to two separate reports. Specifically, the equity firms cut corners, slash services, lay off staff, lower quality of care, take on substantial debt, and reduce charity care, leading to lower ratings and more medical errors, the reports collectively find.” Hospitals owned by private equity are harming patients, reports find - Beth Mole • Ars Technica

Labour & Economics

DCH: The AI Octopus - Eric Posner • Project Syndicate

The OpenAI-Microsoft relationship is only a small part of a rapidly growing AI oligopoly. As a recent paper by the law professors Tejas Narechania of the University of California, Berkeley, and Ganesh Sitaraman of Vanderbilt University documents, market power is rife all along the AI supply chain. The monopolist Nvidia manufactures most of the chips needed for AI development. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft dominate cloud computing, which is essential for storing the data on which AI models are trained.

This is, of course, the real threat of AI. Collusion is baked into the market. Only a handful of players have access to the silicon, cloud storage, and reams of data required to make AI a thing. Which in turn means a potential concentration of capital and by extension political power the likes of which we’ve yet to see.

Elon Musk just escalated his war on workers - Paris Marx • disconnect.blog
Inequality Inc. How corporate power divides our world and the need for a new era of public action - Oxfam
An AI Future Is Much Shakier Than You Think - Dave Karpf at Foreign Policy

Books

LZ: White Noise, by Don DeLillo

So my first contact with DeLillo was through the movie Cosmopolis and then the book. Very similar stories, different experiences. Though I liked both, I felt the movie was more impactful to me – more visual and the soundtrack really put me in the mood. But DeLillo has style, especially if you like to see the world through the lens of an American, and White Noise is very much like that.

When I read the book's synopsis, I was like… what? Because it's basically the story of this guy who is a university professor who leads a department focused on Hitler studies. But he's no nazi or anything like that, he's actually a father and stepfather of several kids who live together under the same roof with his fourth or fifth wife, Babette, a housewife that runs on stairs and eats plain yogurt in the hopes of losing weight. Until there's an airborn chemical accident that takes the town, causing chaos that, in any case, is sorted out after a while.

Because the chemical accident isn't really the turning point you would think it is: it doesn't necessarily destroy anyone's home or kill anyone in specific, but it's a trigger for other things that were running quietly underneath the fabric of this traditional American family. Then, the book gets to the actual DeLillo stuff: weird but interesting takes on life, culture, feelings, intellectual and chaotic pessimistic rants, one-of-a-kind characters (especially the kids, who totally don't sound like kids but it's fun nevertheless), and, you know, the usual impending doom.

Movies + TV

CJW: I Found David Lynch’s Lost 'Dune II' Script - Max Evry at Wired

While infused with the plot of Dune Messiah, Lynch's script for Dune II is more than a fascinating curiosity; it is a glimpse into an alternate post–Return of the Jedi movie landscape where a visionary oddball conjured Herbert's sci-fi works onscreen as a dark, sophisticated, and eye-poppingly weird cinematic odyssey that—as George Lucas' Star Wars remains—could still be a viable franchise today the way Lynch envisioned it: weirding modules, heartplugs, face dancers—the works.

I'm not really a fan of Lynch's Dune - though I've not gotten around to the apparently-better cut that Lynch disowned - but I still thought this was a great insight into what the director might have done with the sequel.

Podcasts

CJW: Just One More Front ft. Seamus Malekafzali - Trash Future

Sharing this because I thought the conversation about the possible expansion of the war in Gaza across the region was interesting and worrying. TF is worth the subscribe if you haven’t already, though this episode is a bit more serious and staid than the usual.

MJW: Nobody Dies Here by Alongside Radio

This is a 12-part series about North Richmond Community Health’s Medically Supervised Injecting Room in Melbourne, Australia. I’m not finished yet, but this is a great podcast about the service and harm minimisation and a super controversial subject that really just seems so simple to me.

Music

LZ: Cosmic Black Metal Is as Weird and Dark as It Sounds

This is an old article (2017) about cosmic black metal and a few bands that compose this sub-subgenre of another subgenre in metal. I went back to it because I'm currently reading Eugene Thacker's first book of the trilogy on the Horror of Philosophy. I was positively surprised to see that right in the first pages he invites us to a debate over demonology and has black metal as its first example.

As much as Thacker brings something different to philosophy (though it is kind of close to what Schopenhauer did before), cosmic black metal is also doing the same work by pushing the boundaries of the subgenre, going further than paganism and satanism, to find in deep space the cosmic horrific realization that we, humans, are nothing, nada – we could simply disappear and the world would carry on, possibly better. It's easy to say that, make dark jokes about it, but considering it for real and trying to imagine it… it's quite scary, much scarier than demons or hell, or even death. Because this is about the uselessness and meaninglessness of human existence.

Anyhoo, every band has their approach and I'm only starting Thacker's book, so there's more to come in future issues. Stay tuned!

DCH: Whispers in the Echo Chamber - Chelsea Wolfe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0o2GraeMlo

An absolute banger. Title track from the new album releasing in February. Can’t wait for more.