nothing here but an exodus

issue 254 - 28th April, 2024

CJW: Welcome gang, to another issue. It’s great to have you.

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Now, let’s begin.

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

CJW: Is $38 trillion a lot? - Bill McKibben (via Sentiers)

One, some of you may remember the famous Limits to Growth report from the early 1970s. It predicted that without serious efforts to change our demands on the planet, economic growth would begin to suffer right about now. We thought about it as a society and then, with the election of Ronald Reagan, rejected it; we are now harvesting that bitter fruit. If we don’t act now then our children may wish they still had bitter fruit to harvest.
Two, capitalism—which regularly acts homicidally—is acting truly suicidally. Having been warned for years now, it resists every effort to rein in its excesses. As Exxon’s CEO helpfully explained earlier this year, it’s not that you couldn’t make good money from renewable energy—you just couldn’t make ‘above average returns’ because sunshine is free. So instead we’ll tank the world, and with it the world economy (which is a subset of the first, not the other way round).

A great piece from McKibben about climate economics and the suicidal hunger for near-term profits at the cost of, not just the biosphere, but soon the economy too. All that matters is the next quarter, shareholder dividends, and executive bonuses. But you all already know all this. Sigh.

‘Water is more valuable than oil’: the corporation cashing in on America’s drought - Maanvi Singh at The Guardian
“The ice sheets represent the most glaring example of a fundamental issue behind human stagnation when it comes to climate change: time. The failure to address the world’s most existential risk is at root a temporal problem. Virtually none of the timelines—of emissions, of impacts, of solutions—line up in ways that society can effectively manage. Things take too long or deliver delayed impacts. The cause-and-effect of it all is stretched thin, too thin for a species so locked into our daily existence.” The Time Paradox of Climate Change - Dave Levitan, Joshua Sneade at Atmos
“As French demonstrators declared during last summer’s pension reform protests, “Fin du monde, fin du mois, même combat.” The end of the world and the end of the month are the same fight.” Workers, Not Technocrats, Will Secure a Sustainable Planet - Alec Fiorini at Jacobin

Just the headlines:

New York is suing the world’s biggest meat company. It might be a tipping point for greenwashing - Whitney Bauck at The Guardian (via Sentiers)

Geopolitics & Empire

CJW: The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth - Andreas Malm at Verso

There is an odd spiral of reality and fantasy at work in the moment of 1840: the British really did turn one Palestinian town into ruins. Then they started imagining that all of Palestine was one landscape of ruins – desolate, deserted, depopulated; fanciful constructions at best, but rather adequate representations of what Akka seems to have looked like after 3 November. In the next coils of the spiral, the ideational emptying of the land became a precursor to the real thing. ‘Earth without people’ read the prescription for a Nakba. Ever the pioneers, the British undertook a prefigurative elimination of the Palestinian people. At this moment in time, curiously, Jews still had a position rather symmetrical to the Palestinians: they existed as characters in the plot, but purely in the realm of the imagination. Actual Jews did not count. Jews did not clamour to abandon their homes for Palestine – rather, to the contrary, as even one Zionist scholar has noticed, ‘British Jewry was opposed to “anything that might seem to impugn its status as ‘wholly’ English.” English Jews could only be embarrassed by the suggestion that they were waiting to go back to Palestine’. Before Zionism was Jewish, it was imperial.

This is a very long piece that combines the long threads of history pertaining to the current genocide in Gaza, the rise of fossil imperialism as represented by British steam ships (and of course, the related anthropogenic climate change), and Zionism as a product of said imperialism.

It could best be summarised this way:

The steps along the way to the destruction of Palestine were simultaneously steps along the way to [the destruction] of the Earth.

It continues to make important points right up until the end, so I highly recommend making time to read this piece if you want a deeper understanding of the full extent of the imperial project that is taking place in occupied Palestine. It’s over 18k words, so I feel like I’m setting you homework, but for a certain kind of NH subscriber, this is a must-read.

Related: Leaked Cables Show White House Opposes Palestinian Statehood - Ken Klippenstein at The Intercept

CJW: Palestine speaks for everyone - Jodi Dean at Verso

The images of Palestinians that see we in our imperialist settings are usually pictures of depictions of devastation, bereavement and death. The humanity of the Palestinians is made conditional on their suffering, on what they’ve have lost, and what they endure. Palestinians get sympathy but not emancipation; emancipation would eat away at sympathy. This image of the victim produces the “good” Palestinian as a civilian, even better as a child, woman, or elder. Those who fight back, especially as part of organized groups are bad: the monstrous enemy that must be eliminated. But everyone’s a target. The fault for the targeting of the “good” Palestinians is thus placed on the “bad “ones, further justification for their eradication: every inch of Gaza provides a hiding place for terrorists. The policing of affect squeezes out the possibility of a free Palestinian.

Another essay published at Verso. A great essay on the politics of solidarity with a free Palestine, and the ideological and media manipulations that seek to undermine the very idea of a free Palestine.

CJW: We need an exodus from Zionism - Naomi Klein at The Guardian

[Zionism] is a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery – the story of Passover itself – and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide.
It is a false idol that has taken the transcendent idea of the promised land – a metaphor for human liberation that has traveled across multiple faiths to every corner of this globe – and dared to turn it into a deed of sale for a militaristic ethnostate.

A powerful piece from Naomi Klein.

"In fact, while most Security Council members condemned or at least expressed horror at this violation of long-standing international norms at the time, the United States, France, and the United Kingdom alone refused to do so, using the opportunity to suggest that it was Iran that was responsible for the attack on its own consulate." - Netanyahu Has Brought Us to the Brink of War With Iran - Branko Marcetic at Jacobin - CJW: The West is a fucking joke.
"A special State Department panel told Secretary of State Antony Blinken that the U.S. should restrict arms sales to Israeli military units that have been credibly accused of human rights abuses. He has not taken any action." - Blinken Is Sitting on Staff Recommendations to Sanction Israeli Military Units Linked to Killings or Rapes - Brett Murphy at ProPublica
Documenting Six Months of Israeli War Crimes in Gaza - Lee Mordechai at Jacobin - CJW: A good summary if you need one to share with any blinkered friends/family.
'The soldiers opened the way for the settlers': Pogroms surge across West Bank - Oren Ziv at +972 Magazine

Just the headlines:

Iran had legal right to counter-attack Israel in self-defense - Ben Norton at Geopolitical Economy Report
U.S., Not Israel, Shot Down Most Iran Drones and Missiles - Ken Klippenstein at The Intercept (DCH: more info on the secret US alliance including Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia)
U.K. Passes Controversial Rwanda Deportation Bill - Alexandra Sharp at Foreign Policy

Science & Space

DCH: Carl Sagan, nuking the moon, and not nuking the moon - Georgia Ray at Eukaryote Writes Blog

What Lederberg and Haldane definitely did not know was that that same next year, 1958, the US would also study the idea of nuking the moon. They called it “Project A119” and the Air Force commissioned research on it from Leonard Reiffel, a regular military collaborator and physicist at the University of Illinois. He worked with several other scientists, including a then-graduate-student named Carl Sagan.

The idea of Carl Sagan being involved in American counter-plans to nuke the moon during The Cold War is doing my head in. This whole thing reads like some fan-fic mashup of Dr. Strangelove and For All Mankind. The mix of absurdity and nihilism that drove the brinkmanship between the US and USSR never ceases to surprise and terrify.

“I hope it sparks discussion, informs policy and practice in animal welfare, and galvanizes an understanding and appreciation that we have much more in common with other animals than we do with things like ChatGPT.” - Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness, Experts Declare - Dan Falk at Quanta
Cybernetics is the science of the polycrisis - Henry Farrell at Programmable Mutter

Tech & Design

CJW: The Man Who Killed Google Search - Ed Zitron

These emails tell a dramatic story about how Google’s finance and advertising teams, led by Raghavan with the blessing of CEO Sundar Pichai, actively worked to make Google [Search] worse to make the company more money. This is what I mean when I talk about the Rot Economy — the illogical, product-destroying mindset that turns the products you love into torturous, frustrating quasi-tools that require you to fight the company’s intentions to get the service you want.

A great summary of how Google deliberately sabotaged Search in order to be able to serve more ads.

DCH: also contains this blisteringly good quote: “McKinsey is to the middle class what flesh-eating bacteria is to healthy tissue.”

DCH: The AI hype bubble is deflating. Now comes the hard part. - Gerrit De Vynck at The Washington Post

A year and a half into the AI boom, there is growing evidence that the hype machine is slowing down. Drastic warnings about AI posing an existential threat to humanity or taking everyone’s jobs have mostly disappeared, replaced by technical conversations about how to cajole chatbots into helping summarize insurance policies or handle customer service calls. Some once-promising start-ups have cratered, and the suite of flashy products launched by the biggest players in the AI race — OpenAI, Microsoft and Google — have yet to upend the way people work and communicate with one another. While money keeps pouring into AI, very few companies are turning a profit on the tech, which remains hugely expensive to build and run.

Expect (more) mass layoffs at tech companies in 12-18 months.

Meta and Lavender - Paul Biggar - CJW: On Meta's likely complicity in the genocide in Gaza.
"According to Digital Empires, the laissez-faire market-based U.S. model of tech governance is losing its appeal both at home and abroad. Domestically, both major political parties have soured on Big Tech, albeit for different reasons. Democrats distrust the corporate concentration of Big Tech, while Republicans are convinced that content moderation has an anti-conservative bias. Globally, concerns about data privacy have made life more difficult for the Big Five tech firms—Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft." - The New Empires of the Internet Age - Daniel W. Drezner at Foreign Policy
“Tesla has been forced to recall its two main driver-assist systems, Autopilot and Full Self-Driving, in the face of increased government scrutiny over the company’s autonomy claims. The families of Tesla drivers who have been killed in crashes involving Autopilot have sued the company for wrongful death. And Musk’s tenure as head of X, formerly Twitter, has alienated many of Tesla’s progressive-leaning customers, who have watched in horror as he promotes right-wing conspiracy theories on the platform.” Tesla’s in its flop era - Grzegorz Wajda at The Verge
Meta’s new AI paves the way for social networks where nothing is what it seems - Casey Newton at Platformer
We Need To Rewild The Internet - Maria Farrell at Noema

Just the headlines:

Grindr Sued in London for Sharing Users HIV Status With Ad Firms - Katharine Gemmell at Bloomberg
Instagram Advertises Nonconsensual AI Nude Apps - Emanuel Maiberg at 404
Ads for Explicit ‘AI Girlfriends’ Are Swarming Facebook and Instagram by Lydia Morrish at Wired
Google fires 28 employees who protested Israel cloud contract - Wendy Lee at The Los Angeles Times

Society & The Culture

MJW: Sentenced to Death by COVID — How US Prisons Became an Epicenter of the Pandemic by Katie Tastrom at Truthout

According to the COVID Prison Project, “The majority of the largest single-site outbreaks since the beginning of the pandemic have been in jails and prisons.” One of the many arguments for abolition is the way those in state “care” are sickened and killed. Infections are allowed to run rampant in these facilities because incarcerated people are seen as disposable — a phenomenon I call “carceral epidemiology.”

Why the world cannot afford the rich - Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate E. Pickett at Nature (via Sentiers)
"We found that the domains of sex work were organized hierarchically, as theorized by the so-called “whorearchy,” whereby the more “unfavorable” domains (e.g., prostitution) fall at the bottom, and the more “favorable” ones (e.g., webcamming) sit at the top." Attitudes Toward Cisgender Women’s Participation in Sex Work: Opportunity for Agency or Harmful Exchange? - Hanna Puffer, Gordon Hodson & Elvira Prusaczyk at Springer
"We are no longer creating. We are, in many ways, simply lending our voice to an algorithm. The world, as a result, becomes ever more shaped and optimised according to the goals of our corporate machine overlords. Their primary objective? To leverage the data you provide to generate profits." Greetings from the future it's really f*cking boring - Patrick Ryan at The Odin Times

Health, Cooking, and Related

DCH: Infected blood scandal: Children were used as 'guinea pigs' in clinical trials - Chloe Hayward and Hugh Pym at BBC

The trials involved children with blood clotting disorders, when families had often not consented to them taking part. The majority of the children who enrolled are now dead.
A shortage of blood products in the UK in the 1970s and 80s meant they were imported from the US. High-risk donors such as prisoners and drug addicts provided the plasma for the treatments that were infected with potentially fatal viruses including hepatitis C - which attacks the liver resulting in cirrhosis and cancer - and HIV.

These kids were used as “clean petri dishes” to product test Factor VIII. Parents and their kids were enrolled in clinical trials without their knowledge or consent. And then rarely if ever told they had acquired fatal blood diseases as a result.

This is truly monstrous.

“Thousands of people are still living with debilitating long Covid. Estimates vary but around 1.5 million people are believed to have long Covid – about 350,000 of whom report that it significantly limits their ability to undertake their day-to-day activities.” Is Covid still a threat four years on from the first wave? - Tom Bawden at inews.co.uk
“I think that for AI to depict stereotypical images of what it means to ‘look trans/nonbinary’ has the potential to cause real harms upon real people,” Ghosh continued. “Especially for young people, who might be seeing such images more and more in their daily media diets, this can create an unhealthy impression that there is a ‘correct’ way to present oneself as trans/nonbinary.” Review Used By UK to Limit Gender Affirming Care Uses Images of AI-Generated Kids - Jules Roscoe at 404 (DCH: more bullshit connected to the Cass Review discussed last newsletter)
Women in Menopause Are Getting Short Shrift - Rachel E. Gross at The Atlantic
The Lasting Impact of Exposure to Gun Violence - Rod McCullom at Undark

Just the headlines:

Idaho Goes to the Supreme Court to Argue That Pregnant People Are Second-Class Citizens - Jordan Smith at The Intercept

Labour & Economics

DCH: New World Order? - Kate Mackenzie at Phenomenal World

We live in a dysfunctional system in which money flows out of the countries that need it most and into the coffers of the wealthiest. In 2023, the private sector collected $68 billion more in interest and principal repayments than it lent to the developing world. International financial institutions and assistance agencies extracted another $40 billion, while net concessional assistance from international financial institutions was only $2 billion—even as famine spread. The result is that as developing economies make exorbitant interest payments to their creditors, they are forced to cut spending on health, education, and infrastructure at home. Half of the world’s poorest countries are now poorer than they were before the pandemic.

Good long read on the “money-military matrix” that is the current extractive global money bricolage threatening the world. The faster we can find alternatives to the hegemony of the New York / London system into something polycentrist the safer we’ll all be. People talk about globalisation a lot but what it really did was concentrate power in a few central nodes–predominantly the US which has allowed it to weaponise the world economy.

"On Friday night, workers at Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, unionized. The victory was decisive: 2,628 to 985, meaning 73 percent of ballots were in favor of unionizing with the UAW. Of 4,300 eligible voters, 83.5 percent cast ballots, a remarkably high turnout. These workers really wanted a union." Chattanooga VW Worker: “This Will Change What People Think Is Possible” - Alex N. Press at Jacobin (DCH: As we touched on last newsletter this should also open up potential international legal action thanks to EU legislation)
"Today, the Federal Trade Commission, led by Chair Lina Khan, voted 3-2 to eliminate contracts that stop people from switching jobs, contracts known as ‘non-compete agreements.’ The rule goes into effect in 120 days, and prohibits nearly all non-competes. There are a few exceptions; the FTC rule can’t touch non-competes with certain nonprofits and within few regulated industries. But by and large, this rule, unless conservative judges step in aggressively, means that American employers will no longer be able to use non-compete provisions." FTC Enrages Corporate America by Eliminating Non-Compete Agreements - Matt Stoller
How cheap, outsourced labour in Africa is shaping AI English - Alex Hern at The Guardian
The Philosophical Case for a Four-Day Workweek - Will Lewallen at Jacobin

Just the headlines:

Amazon Flex Drivers Are Constantly at Risk - Alex N. Press at Jacobin
African Lending Needs a Better World Bank - Hannah Ryder at Foreign Policy

Movies + TV

CJW: Zankyou no Terror / Terror in Resonance

A screenshot from Zankyou no Terror, showing two teenagers on a motorbike at night, the headlights glowing bright, with lit-up skyscrapers in the background.

I finally got around to watching this anime mini-series from 2014 recently, after having it on my watchlist for years. It follows two teenage boys, survivors of a secret experimental program that sought to weaponise their savant-like intelligence.

It’s hard to know what more to say about the show. I could give you a basic rundown of the plot, but it seems largely beside the point - I’m recommending you watch it, so you’ll see for yourself soon enough. It’s very much a vibes-based show - gorgeous art, interesting characters, but with nothing particularly unique going on with the plot. Still, by the end it’s a gripping narrative, and, as you can probably guess from the title, it raises some worthwhile questions about the nature of terror and terrorism that seem only more relevant now than they would have been a decade ago when the show was released.

If you’ve read or watched How to Blow Up a Pipeline (and I recommend both), then you’re already familiar with Andreas Malm’s arguments for sabotage in the face of entrenched fossil fuel infrastructure and interests (double-Malm issue today, apparently). And then we look at the university protests in the US - where thousands of citizens are peacefully protesting their nation’s complicity in genocide, and being met with violence from the forces of the state who are supported by the captured media and media class - then you might start to wonder what options are left when peaceful protest is spoken of as though it is violence, when resistance is treated like terrorism.

When the state (and/or capital) is so resistant to the will of the people, then some of those people will see terror as their only way to be seen and heard. And depending on the targets and tactics they use, they could potentially come across as more reasonable than the increasingly violent and authoritarian state (just look at all the anti-protest laws being introduced across the US, UK, Australia, and elsewhere) they’re fighting back against.

That’s what I was thinking about when I finished the show. I expect we could see more art grappling with the idea of terrorism as a valid response to the state of the world, and I’m fascinated by that (I will almost certainly be looking to explore it in a fiction project in the future), but I’m also terrified about what we might see happen in the real-world.