nothing here but abolitionist allies

issue 160 - 12th December, 2021

CJW: Welcome to another edition of the nothing here newsletter. As usual, we’ve got more links than you can poke a stick at.

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The Team

• Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey

• m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / ecopoet // @eattrainrevolt [twit/insta]

• Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Notorious bisexual & fatigued babe.

• Corey J. White (CJW) - Author, podcaster, sin-eater.

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

Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: Curb Your Food Tech Enthusiasm - Jan Dutkiewicz at Wired

This is a great summary of the state of food production (meat, in particular) and climate change, the dubious promises of “clean cow” technology, and other related topics.

[…] widely publicized claims that feeding cows algae feed additives could cut their emissions by 80 percent actually work out to be closer to 10 percent when you take into account when and under what conditions you can change a cow’s diet. Biodigesters, meanwhile, are very expensive and only address the 10 or so percent of agricultural methane emissions that come from manure. And whether either of these can be massively scaled is an open question. With these realities in mind, the modest 18 percent decrease in emissions from currently available technology outlined by the Breakthrough Institute’s report looks dubious. But even if its more ambitious goal of developing new technology that reduces beef’s methane by 48 percent were to work, the resulting emissions would still be higher than the currently worst-emitting pork and chicken, and well over twice as much as plant-based meats and four times as much as tofu. The clean cow, in other words, is a lame duck.

MKY: -pull string for my rant on how we should ritually sacrifice all the cattle in Aus and only eat Kangaroo and whatever other native animals are tasty - should that be your jam (bonus points for going out and getting it yourself (0pts to me… so far))

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MKY: Earth is getting a black box to record our climate change actions, and it’s already started listening - Nick Kilvert at ABC News

Earth’s Black Box: a 10-metre-by-4-metre-by-3-metre steel monolith that’s about to be built on a remote outcrop on Tasmania’s west coast.

Chosen for its geopolitical and geological stability, ahead of other candidates like Malta, Norway and Qatar, the idea is that the Tasmanian site can cradle the black box for the benefit of a future civilisation, should catastrophic climate change cause the downfall of ours. If that sounds unhinged, it’s worth remembering that we’re currently on track for as much as 2.7C of warming this century. Ask any climate scientist what happens when warming breaches 2C, and they’ll almost invariably tell you it’s not worth thinking about. Plenty of past civilisations and empires have collapsed in the face of less.

WAKE UP BAE THE NEW LONGNOW CLOCK JUST DROPPED

Those who have discovered the black box — now the colour of rust, its solar panels long since dead — have got no frame of reference for what they find inside or how to decipher it. So now what?

“That is a [question] that we are still working on ourselves,” the developers say.

Ummmm… maybe start here?

And give this a watch

CJW: Wondering if this newsletter will get noticed by the black box with how much we talk about climate change…

DCH: This trailer for s2 of Foundation sucks.

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CJW: Humans Are Doomed to Go Extinct - Henry Gee at Scientific American

The signs are already there for those willing to see them. When the habitat becomes degraded such that there are fewer resources to go around; when fertility starts to decline; when the birth rate sinks below the death rate; and when genetic resources are limited—the only way is down.

I’m always wondering how much of my pessimistic outlook on our future is depression, and how much is simply the logical conclusion of all the reading I do on climate change and environmental degradation. Porque no los dos?

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• The Earth After Humans - NOEMA - Rob Dunn at Noema (via Sentiers) [sounds like some kinda… posthuman world to me, MKY]

• Regenerative by Design - Annette Lin at Space10 (via Sentiers) - CJW: Lots of interesting ideas here.

Geopolitics

DCH: The Weapons Industry Couldn’t Be Happier About Biden’s Nominee for Pentagon Arms Buyer by Sarah Lazare, Jacobin

LaPlante is currently the president and chief executive officer of Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, a contractor for the US military, where he has served since 2020. As recently as November 2, the company announced that it ​“has been selected by the U.S. Air Force as one of 55 contractors on a digital engineering contract that aims to increase the service’s ability to work on digital designs of its future platforms.” The price tag is massive, potentially amounting to $46 billion over eleven years, according to the company.

This is just one of numerous contracts with the U.S. military held by Charles Stark Draper Laboratory. The most recent one was announced just thirteen days before Biden announced the nomination of LaPlante.

13 days. Which means that deal likely closed while LaPlante was in talks with Biden for the new role. He’s virtually writing his own checks!

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• Rights group: Taliban kill, abduct dozens of ex-officers - Lee Keath at AP News (via Foreign Exchanges)

• A Tyrant’s Power - George Monbiot - CJW: Part of the continued rise of authoritarianism.

• How Australian police will use DNA sequencing to predict what suspects look like - Donna Lu at The Guardian - CJW: Jathan Sadowski and Jenny Davis have written an open letter calling for a moratorium on use of this tech.

• Conditions Deteriorate in Breakaway US Republic of Oroville as War Looms by Tim Marchman, vice.com

• The Peril and the Promise of Biden’s Drone Review by Spencer Ackerman, foreverwars.substack.com

• A blanket of surveillance covers Calais, but more migrants are dying at sea than ever before - Isobel Cockerell at Coda

Science & Space

CJW: Dreams are a precious resource. Don’t let advertisers hack them - Adam Haar Horowitz, Robert Stickgold, and Antonio Zadra at Aeon

Multiple marketing studies are openly testing new ways to alter and drive purchasing behaviour through sleep and dream hacking. The American Marketing Association New York’s 2021 Future of Marketing study found that, of more than 400 marketers from firms across the United States, 77 per cent of them aim to deploy dream-tech for advertising in the next three years. The commercial, for-profit use of dream incubation – the presentation of stimuli before or during sleep to affect dream content – is rapidly becoming a reality.

I’ve talked before about how we live in a SFnal future, but one that’s rendered mundane by its intersection with our reality. Here we see it again - some Inception style shit for the purpose of… selling more beer.

Anyway, this is a fascinating read on sleep, induced dreams and their effect, advertising, and more.

What have we lost when we become so collectively inured to invasions of our privacy and to exploitative economic practice that we would happily accept a 12-pack for the placement of beer advertising into our dreams? Among other things, we certainly seem to have a diminished awareness of just how important sleep and dreams are – how they play a crucial, constructive role in our wellbeing and daytime behaviour.

Admittedly, this is a nascent field of study, but there is already reason to think that such interventions, even if briefly administered during a single night of sleep, could impact people’s waking behaviour. As an example, a recent study of adult smokers showed that delivering targeted smells – a combination of rotten eggs or fish and cigarette smoke – during participants’ sleep resulted in a 30 per cent reduction in their smoking over the following week.

MKY: GOOD NEWS EVERYBODY!

*i went looking for the much better skit on The Moth Effect about enabling data sharing on pillows but that’s not online so here’s an old timey toon instead.

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LZ: Assisted-Suicide Chamber Approved by Authorities in Switzerland by Tony Tran at Futurism

As much as I like this because it represents an advance in regulations and procedures for euthanasia, it kind of scares me and makes me think too much of Philip K. Dick’s book Ubik. I mean, it’s literally the plot, it’s even in Switzerland!

MKY:

CJW: I am all for legal/assisted suicide, but the idea of demedicalising it so that a person completes an online survey to get a suicide code puts a bad taste in my mouth. At the very least that seems like it would leave a lot of room for abuse.

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• Living ‘Xenobots’ Are World’s First Self-Replicating Robots - Matthew Hart at Nerdist

• In Leaked Email, Elon Musk Says SpaceX Is Facing Bankruptcy - DCH: Good. Fuck ‘em

• It’s Time to Fear the Fungi - Rose Eveleth at Wired - CJW: Oh, good.

• DARPA Funded Researchers Accidentally Discover The World’s First Warp Bubble - Christopher Plain at The Debrief.

• China moon rover will investigate cube-shaped ‘mystery’ object on lunar far side - Amanda Kooser at C|Net

Tech & Design

DCH: Rohingya sue Facebook for £150bn over Myanmar genocide by Dan Milmo, The Guardian

The US complaint cites Facebook posts that appeared in a Reuters report, with one in 2013 stating: “We must fight them the way Hitler did the Jews, damn Kalars [a derogatory term for Rohingya people].” Another post in 2018, showing a photograph of a boatload of Rohingya refugees, says: “Pour fuel and set fire so that they can meet Allah faster.”

The number of Rohingya killed in 2017, during the Myanmar military’s “clearance operations”, is likely to be more than 10,000, according to the medical charity Médicins sans Frontières.

The Rohingya genocide in Myanmar is the worst-case example of the perils of Facebook’s outrage-based business model.

Does Facebook have culpability in all of these deaths? No, of course not.

Does it profit from revenue generated from the views related to all of these deaths? Definitely.

Is it complicit in many of these deaths. Absolutely.

Facebook will continue to have blood on its hands as long as Zuckerberg and other executives resist pressures to change their fundamental business model. And it will only continue to get worse as they insist on purely technological solutions to deep ethical issues.

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DCH: An ‘Alt-Jihad’ Is Rising On Social Media by Moustafa Ayed, Wired

The fusion of alt-right and jihadist aesthetics was perhaps clearest on the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, when a coalition of alt-jihadist meme producers ran a competition to see who could create the best meme of the attacks. The challenge was shared through a central page on Facebook, coordinated on Telegram, and A/B tested on Discord. Soon, key accounts across all of the platforms began toiling away on GigaChad attack footage; Angry Birds, Salt Bae, and Doge spin-offs, and of course Pepe the Frog piloting one of the planes as it slammed into a tower.

Nihilists of a feather…

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• Forza Horizon 5 Is Gaming’s Gateway Drug to Dystopia - Ryan Zickgraf at Jacobin

Society & The Culture

CJW: Got your Spotify Wrapped? Treat it like a shopping list. - Caitlin Welsh at Mashable

Spotify infamously pays artists fractions of a cent per stream. The actual amount of money that makes it back to the artists varies, depending on how much of a cut labels and distributors take. But most sources agree that Spotify pays between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream, and that’s before the money is divvied up according to whatever terms are set out in distribution contracts.

I’ve previously shared the Trash Future episode on Spotify’s awful, anti-artist (and anti-art) practices, so of course I have to share this. Do what it says in the headline.

Personally I’m a bandcamp sort, and have heard that artists get an 85% cut of all purchases, which is basically the best deal out there. So if your Spotify faves have a bandcamp page, consider buying some albums on that platform.

“For digital [Bandcamp is] really the best, but any digital purchases are good,” [Peter] Hollo explained. “It takes a ridiculously low number of digital sales to eclipse all streaming royalties.”

MJW: I am part of the problem and I know it.

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DCH: Telegram’s latest influencer is too out there even for QAnon by Andrew Paul, inputmag.com

Apparently, even QAnon followers have their limits. Multiple outlets have begun reporting on an alarmingly extreme subsect led by Michael Brian Protzman, an antisemitic Nazi sympathizer with a history of domestic abuse who recently convinced an unsettling number of adherents to head to Dallas, Texas, last month to witness the second coming of JFK and his son. It didn’t exactly go as prophesied, but many are reportedly still lingering in the area, and regularly convene at a local Hyatt Hotel conference room referred to as “The Ark” to plot their next moves.

Protzman is part of a new breed of QAnon conspiracists that weaves in strange bastardizations of things like the Qabbalah and eschatology. Various Telegram channels dedicated to “Negative48” have over 100,000 subs. That rise in prominence is raising the ire of the traditional figureheads in the cult:

“That Dallas meet up organized by Negative 48 just made our entire movement look unbelievably dumb, and naive,” prominent QAnon conspiracy influencer John “QAnon John” Sabal wrote on Telegram last month shortly after publications began roasting Negative48’s Dallas debacle. “[He is] making ridiculous, and grandiose claims that would NEVER come to pass. Do you see why this kind of thing is SUPER DANGEROUS to the movement???”

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CJW: Trees and Other Abolitionist Allies - Amelie Daigle at Protean Mag

On the relationship between trees and violence, the slow violence of structural racism, climate change, and more. An Amero-centroc piece, but with broader relevance too.

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• The Failure of Occupy is Almost Complete - Freddie deBoer (via Inhabit) - CJW: Really interesting read on the current state of leftist politics (and seemed to describe Twitter pretty well too).

Labor & Economics

CJW: Well, I Quit - Jess Lipka at Inhabit

Do not stop developing yourself as human capital. This is the ultimate demand placed upon the neoliberal subject. “Find your passion!”, “Love what you do!”, Apply yourself!’‘ A properly subjectivized neoliberal subject derives meaning from their constant self-production. This search for meaning is the metaphysics of human capital.

On the neoliberal worker as a concept, r/antiwork, the Great Resignation, and related topics.

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DCH: The Indian Farmers’ Movement Has Shown Us How to Fight Narendra Modi by Achin Vanaik, jacobinmag.com

The BJP’s dominance in the “Hindi heartland” states across the northern, central, and western parts of India gave rise to this electoral anomaly. Three of the seven states that will have assembly elections in 2022 belong to this heartland region. This includes Uttar Pradesh (UP), India’s biggest state, which would have the world’s fifth-largest population if it was a country in its own right.

UP is the jewel in Hindutva’s national electoral crown. The BJP’s performance there will indicate its prospects in the 2024 national election. The participation of farmers in the western part of UP has clearly damaged the party. By retreating over the farm laws, the BJP hopes to recover this lost ground.

A very good read on the current political/economic situation in India. The farmer’s movement could form a blueprint for defeating India’s fascist regime. Time will tell.

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DCH: Ghost Kitchens Are Proving to Be a Messy Business, as Reef Global Shows by Eliot Brown, wsj.com via New Shelton Wet Dry

Reef Global Inc. operates “ghost kitchens” from trailers in parking lots. So it’s a food-service company basically. It has raised over $1.5 billion, some of it from SoftBank. That would buy a lot of trailers, but naturally Reef used the money to buy parking lots […] Reef quickly used much of the $1.2 billion it raised to buy two giant companies that manage and operate parking lots, becoming what it says is the largest parking-lot network in North America. […] except they also somehow bought the wrong parking lots […] Reef found it wasn’t able to put trailers on many of its lots, as some had enclosed garages, where propane tanks and utility hookups aren’t allowed. Others were owned by landlords who didn’t want food trucks, former employees said. As a result, Reef rents lots from other parking owners for more than 70% of its kitchens.

More venture capitalist induced nonsense from SoftBank. Ghost kitchens are a con fomented by the likes of ex-Uber CEO and piece of human shit, Travis Kalanick. And like other on-demand services they’re inherently dangerous:

A few seconds after a cook turned on a stove in a tiny mobile kitchen in a Houston parking lot in April, a fireball erupted from the propane burners, flaring out into the center of the trailer owned by Reef Global Inc. While the cook escaped harm—she happened to open a refrigerator at the same time that shielded her from the flames—it was the second such incident at the same Houston trailer in four months. The first one injured a different cook, as flames scorched her face and gave her third-degree burns on her hands.”

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• Hackers Are Spamming Businesses’ Receipt Printers With ‘Antiwork’ Manifestos - Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai at Vice

• Infiltrating Amazon: What I learned going undercover at the corporate giant - Mostafa Henaway at The Breach

• Same Old - Sun-Ha Hong at Real Life

• Financialization Was a Response to Capitalism’s Failings by Jack Copley, jacobinmag.com

• The Escapist Fantasy of NFT Games Is Capitalism by Cecilia D’Anastasio, wired.com

• Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama will get another chance to vote to unionize by Annie Palmer, cnbc.com

• Judge Orders Google to Disclose Secret Anti-Union Documents by Lauren Kaori Gurley, vice.com

• The Internet’s Casino Boats and The Token Disconnect both by by Stephen Diehl (DCH: Diehl is one of the smartest people writing about cryptocurrency. These are two of his best too.)

• The Supply Chain Disruption Arrives ‘Just in Time’ - Kim Moody at Labornotes

Books

MJW: Four Lost Cities by Annalee Newtiz

It’s like Annalee looked into my heart and said, ‘how can I write a book completely relevant to Marlee’s interests’, and then wrote this book. They have been to Çatalhöyük, ffs! Jealous. Four Lost Cities talks about the abandonment of Çatalhöyük, Pompeii, Angkor and Cahokia in real terms, without the collapse narrative. Nothing is so simple (okay, Pompeii’s ash cloud was pretty straightforward) like everything, there was so much more to it than that.

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LZ: This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free by Martin Hägglund

At the same time that I am happy to be reading this book, I’m angry I didn’t know about it when I was writing my thesis. Perhaps it was for good, since this book opens up many other debates that I probably wouldn’t be able to address.

Here, Hagglund claims that the fact that we are mortal is actually a blessing since it’s finitude itself that makes things important, desirable and unique.

As someone who is interested in radical life extension, I’m finding it very curious because he has the opinion that living forever would be pointless. He doesn’t take the same easy road to say that endless life would be boring, but he actually invites the reader to think that better than living forever or expecting to be in heaven with God for the eternity, we should be paying more attention to our daily life, the small things – that’s why he mentions the book My Struggle, which has over 3k pages describing the ordinary things that happen in the life of the author.

With that being said, Hagglund also stresses that in order to enjoy life, we must not only be free but also be provided with all support to be alive and well – meaning, capitalism is making this impossible. So I’m really looking forward to reading the final chapters of the book when he proposes some kind of economic system.

Movies + TV

MKY: Rubble Kings [http://rubblekings.com/] - ~1hr

“The story behind cult classic The Warriors” aka a look at how NYC fell into ruin into the 1970s, in particular the South Bronx… and the results of that: in the void of the State and its services grew community defense orgs (aka The Gangs) that spread throughout New York. And in particular, the tale of The Ghetto Brothers - both a gang and pop group - that succeeded where the State failed. (A reading.)

Suggestions for more docs examining periods and places where strangefruit grew in the decay of the State are very much welcome. (It’s already hot enough here and I can’t afford to rent a place with aircon - but I can sit by the fan and watch shit like this for days. TIA frenz!)

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MKY: Nailbomber: Manhunt (Netflix) ~1hr

As a review in the link above notes, this largely focuses on the victims of the attack. Which is good, like fuck netflix true crime stuff that venerates the perpertrator … unfortunately this means down-playing the far more fascinating angle (spoiler): how an undercover anti-fascist spent ten years hanging around the British National Party’s nazi members and was thus able to tip-off the cops (who were fucking useless, and basically like, lads will be lads) as to just who was waging a one-man War on the Other, as they saw it.

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LZ: Matrix Resurrections new trailer

Oh God, please help us and make this sequel good. Some may think only a miracle could spare us from some franchise-spoiling sequel, but… while I got angry af with that end when John Wick Neo says he still knows kung fu. UGH! The pain. But on the other hand, this new trailer makes us think that maybe this time Neo isn’t the chosen one, but actually Trinity. That would be a lovely improvement, imo. And the fact that they are back to the Matrix makes me wonder how the franchise is distancing itself from the platonic myth of the cavern to get more acquainted with Bostrom’s simulation argument. Well, I have just written an article about that (in Portuguese). Next time I will come with a translation!

MKY: yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Video

LZ: MC Carol - Levanta Mina

My psychologist recommended this video to me. MC Carol is such an amazing woman, but this time she surpassed all expectations. In this video, she invites a diversity of women to discuss the issue of representation, inclusion, beauty standards, and media. Hopefully the automatically translated subtitles will give you an idea of how powerful this is!

Art

LZ: Dream by Wombo

After making photos sing random songs, Wombo is back with a much more interesting app called Dream. Well, it’s basically something that I always dreamt of – an AI that generates art by sharing written prompts. I saw that MJW already did some experiments with it, so I’m leaving this here as an opportunity for her to share her artwork too! Here are my favorite so far:

MJW: I loooove this game. I put in the titles of my novella The Forgetting Navigations (the novella that will never find a home) and the new memoir Id Girl and now I have covers. Boom.

The Self-Promotion

LZ: Human-Machine Literature: an interview with K Allado-McDowell

You might remember that some newsletter ago I recommended the book “Pharmako AI” written by a human in partnership with an AI. So here’s my interview with the author and some reflections that I had about this robotic Wittgenstein-ish work.

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CJW: Come And See: Fascism as Cosmic Horror

I watched Come And See as part of August Movie August, and it seemed to me that it had some parallels with cosmic horror, in the way the incursion of the Nazis represented an almost incomprehensible evil and anti-human ideology. So, I decided to write about that for Interstellar Flight Press.

The Memes