nothing here but anti-fascist mutual aid

issue 153 - 3rd October, 2021

CJW: Hello, and welcome again to another edition of nothing here.

Our last bonus was And I Feel Fine, about my newfound nihilism and its emancipatory potential.

Our plan is to keep the bonuses coming monthly, so to gain access to those going forward, and to see the full archive, go here to become a premium subscriber. Or hell, if you just appreciate what we do here in these main issues, we appreciate any and all support.

And if there’s someone who will like the NH 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) - is also Mia Walsch. Author and vague binch.

• 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: Nature Fakers - Leo Kim at Real Life Mag

Thinking about the magnitude of what we’ve done — and are doing — to this planet isn’t just hard because it forces us to reckon with the wrongs we’ve committed. It’s hard because our brains are poorly equipped to conceptualize large numbers, a fact that underlies our inability to grasp concepts like federal budget or Covid deaths as well as our role in climate change. But a corpus of films, arising in response to the “transcendent” mode encapsulated by Planet Earth, tackles this representational challenge by visualizing human life in a way that gives us a glimpse of the massive organism we collectively belong to.

On the ways that environmental documentaries encourage viewers to think of humanity and nature as being separate, thus exacerbating the decline of our natural environments because nature is then something "over there," and nkt something we're fundamentally connected with.

References Timothy Morton, Blue Planet, Koyaanisqatsi, and more.

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MKY: Calls for cull as scavenging wild boars trot across Italy and into Rome

https://twitter.com/wantedinrome/status/1440598433966948355

As Bruce Sterling said in DISTRACTION:

"We could integrate the natural world right into the substance of our cities. If we knew how to use our power properly, we could guide herds of American bison right through our own streets. We could live in an Eden at peace with packs of wolves. All it would take is enough sense and vision to know who we are, and what we want."

Which is basically the laziest version of my manifesto.

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DCH: Climate Change Is the New Dot-Com Bubble by Paul Ford WIRED

The comedy of the technology industry is playing again as a kind of Ibsenian tragedy: Scientists and academics told everyone about this thing for decades, and almost everyone ignored them. But then enough people got interested, and now there's a market. And as a result there are a million business models, a million solutions, huge promises of the change to come: We'll pour everything we have into green-energy infrastructure. We'll transact in carbon marketplaces. We'll pull a trillion tons of CO2 out of the air every year. Never mind that today we can do about 0.0005 percent of that, which rounds to nothing.

Paul Ford on his midlife crisis fixation on climate change and the increasing grift in the system.

CJW: Trash Future covered climate grift tech companies on a recent episode. Well worth a listen. Tech grift is nothing new, but when they're soaking up money that could go to actually useful climate change projects, it seems that much worse. That said though, how many investors would invest in reasonable projects? They're investing because they want to be in on the ground floor of the next big thing, not because they give a fuck about maintaining the biosphere.

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• Backyard bush refuge bringing species back from brink of extinction

• The return of crocodile rule

• Sixty years of climate change warnings: the signs that were missed (and ignored) Alice Bell at The Guardian

• Climate change research and action must look beyond 2100

• The Ground Is Literally Exploding Due to Climate Change In Siberia, And It's Going to Get Worse by Becky Ferreira VICE

Geopolitics

CJW: How China tried to discredit London's Uyghur Tribunal and harass its witnesses - Isobel Cockerell at Coda

In Altay, Xinjiang, where Otarbay’s parents and two of his children live, the Chinese authorities were visiting his parents at their house and threatening them about the consequences if their son gave evidence. His sister, who lives in Shanghai, called Otarbay and begged him not to testify.

On the day of the tribunal, Otarbay told the panel of judges how he was starved, beaten, brainwashed and forced to work in Xinjiang’s network of camps and prisons. “Since there were cameras in other places, they would take us to a separate washroom where a camera wasn’t installed, and they would beat us with electric batons,” he said, via an interpreter.

At some point last year I remember seeing claims that the reported abuses and genocide of Uyghur people were actually just anti-Chinese propaganda. I'm sure some sinophobia made it into the reporting from various media outlets, but the sheer amount of reportage, evidence, and interviews makes it difficult to believe it's entirely fabricated. But that's exactly what Chinese authorities would like you to believe, and that's why they are allegedly pressuring people not to testify at the London tribunal.

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CJW: Twenty Years Ago, the Saudi Government Got Away With the Crime of the Century - Branko Marcetic at Jacobin

If 9/11 was a modern Pearl Harbor, then imagine that Franklin Roosevelt had responded to that attack by covering up any evidence of Japan’s involvement, blaming and invading the Soviet Union instead, and then spending the next two decades selling the Japanese Empire billions of dollars in weapons, regularly wining and dining their leadership, and helping them commit war crimes in other parts of the world. This is basically what happened between the United States and Saudi Arabia since that day in 2001.

A follow-up to last issue's links on 9/11, this time focusing on Saudi complicity.

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MKY: Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA's secret war plans against WikiLeaks

If you haven’t read this yet and/or want a recap with follow up, check out the Risky Business ep where they jump straight into it: https://www.risky.biz/RB640/.

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• Defending the legacy of Chile's 2019 uprising - Bree Busk at Roar Mag

• There's Trouble in El Salvador's Bitcoin Paradise - Hilary Goodfriend at Jacobin

• Organizing against militarism from Israel to Europe - Jonathan Hempel at Roar Mag

• The Scientist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine by Ronen Bergman Farnaz Fassihi The New York Times

• An autonomous robot may have already killed people – here’s how the weapons could be more destabilizing than nukes by James Dawes at The Conversation

• Dune Foresaw—and Influenced—Half a Century of Global Conflict by Andy Greenberg at Wired

Science & Space

DCH: Age of Invention: The New Space Empires by Anton Howes antonhowes.substack.com

The initial Dutch forays into the Indian Ocean in the 1590s had originally been financed by lots of different companies, often associated with particular cities — similar to the proliferation of billionaire-led space exploration companies today. But the Dutch soon recognised that such a high-risk trade would only be able to survive if it came with correspondingly high rewards — rewards that could only be guaranteed by eliminating domestic competitors (and if possible, foreign ones too). They therefore amalgamated all of the smaller concerns into a single company with a state-granted monopoly on all of the nation’s trade with the region.

Good short read on the emerging parallels between colonialism under sails or rockets.

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• They may have founded Rome, then vanished. New work sheds light on the mysterious Etruscans - “a welcome reminder that genes and culture aren’t synonymous”

• ‘No one could have predicted.’ DNA offers surprises on how Polynesia was settled - not all colonisations are the same…

• Resistance to front-line malaria drugs confirmed in Africa :/

• How far will global population rise? Researchers can't agree - “Demographers are racing to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example. In some of the worst-hit countries, the large number of deaths in a relatively short period [2020] has already had an effect in lowering life expectancy.”

• Grimes Wants to Rebound from Elon Musk With 'Lesbian Space Commune' by Samantha Cole VICE

Tech & Design

CJW: Socialist Cyborgs - Victor Petrov at Logic Mag

In reality, however, the 1980s generation of Bulgarian children found themselves becoming cogs in an economy that continued to suffer shortages, bottlenecks, and scarcity—all of which contributed to the collapse of the communist regime in 1989. When that happened, the technological skills and entrepreneurial desires the state had cultivated in its children were rechanneled into viruses and the first software enterprises of democratic Bulgaria.

A really interesting history of “the first electronic generation” in Bulgaria.

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DCH: [Report] Bad News - Joseph Bernstein at Harper's Magazine (via Cory Doctorow)

Today, an even greater aura of omnipotence surrounds the digital ad maker than did his print and broadcast forebears. According to Tim Hwang, a lawyer who formerly led public policy at Google, this image is maintained by two “pillars of faith”: that digital ads are both more measurable and more effective than other forms of commercial persuasion. The asset that structures digital advertising is attention. But, Hwang argues in his 2020 book Subprime Attention Crisis, attention is harder to standardize, and thus worth much less as a commodity, than the people buying it seem to think. An “illusion of greater transparency” offered to ad buyers hides a “deeply opaque” marketplace, automated and packaged in unseen ways and dominated by two grimly secretive companies, Facebook and Google, with every interest in making attention seem as uniform as possible. This is perhaps the deepest criticism one can make of these Silicon Valley giants: not that their gleaming industrial information process creates nasty runoff, but that nothing all that valuable is coming out of the factory in the first place.

The problem with most criti-hype arguments is that they often create a false dichotomy: that techbros can’t possibly be evil geniuses because they aren’t geniuses at all. Which is true. But the problem is incompetence and evil aren’t mutually exclusive at all. As I’m fond of saying “any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”

Techbros are a threat because they’re idiots reaping financial rewards by bringing together dangerous lunatics. That happens not because of their vapid ad tech but because they push your nutso cousin to groups that are even nuttier than he is. Swaths of America isn’t guzzling horse dewormer because they saw ads for it. They’re doing so because their nutty friend in a FB group swears by it. They’re doing it because Joe fucking Rogan said it saved his life on IG.

None of that has anything to do with the efficacy of its ad tech. Cory gets that even if it takes him a while to circle back to the dangers of tech that brings like-minded crazies together. The long read from Bernstein is a good one if you want to better understand the long con of ad tech though.

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DCH: The Largest Autocracy on Earth by Adrienne LaFrance at The Atlantic

Pretending to outsource his most consequential decisions to empty imitations of democratic bodies has become a useful mechanism for Zuckerberg to avoid accountability. He controls about 58 percent of voting shares at the company, but in 2018 Facebook announced the creation of a sort of judiciary branch known, in Orwellian fashion, as the Oversight Board. The board makes difficult calls on thorny issues having to do with content moderation. In May it handed down the decision to uphold Facebook’s suspension of Donald Trump. Facebook says that the board’s members are independent, but it hires and pays them.

Now, according to The New York Times, Facebook is considering forming a kind of legislative body, a commission that could make decisions on elections-related matters—political bias, political advertising, foreign interference. This would further divert scrutiny from Facebook leadership.

A good longish read on how Zuckerberg and Facebook continually create homegrown Orwellian distortions of Democratic institutions to obscure scrutiny of the failings of executive leadership. Facebook is a hostile nation-state disguised as a platform and a corporation. It’s time we all treated it like one.

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• https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/09/facebook-zuckerberg-metaverse-stephenson-big-tech - Ryan Zickgraf at Jacobin

• Good Luck Finding a Stranger, More Interesting Game in 2021 Than 'Cruelty Squad' - Patrick Klepek at Vice (via Dan Hill)

• Sun shines on Indonesia in massive solar cable deal

• Ideas | Refugees help power machine learning advances at Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon - Alexa, use slave labour to show me hell on earth.

• Apple and Google Go Further Than Ever to Appease Russia by Lilly May Newman at Wired

• Bad Apple By Feline Lim at popular.info

• No More Apologies: Inside Facebook’s Push to Defend Its Image by Sheera Frenkel and Ryan Mac at The New York Times (DCH: The best read you’ll find on Facebook’s “Project Amplify” and how it retooled it’s algorithms to bring feel good new stories about the company to the feeds of its billions of users)

• https://www.horizons-mag.ch/2021/09/02/sci-fi-agriculture-in-the-here-and-now/ - Atlant Bieri at Horizons (via Sentiers)

Society & The Culture

CJW: Patients and psychiatrists fought against fascism together at Saint-Alban - Ben Platts-Mills at Aeon

When I reflect on what unsettles me about this vision of the ‘asylum’, housing both patients and dissidents, I am aware that the fear is rooted in my understanding of what those words mean. ‘Patient’ means vulnerable, sick, incapable. ‘Dissident’ means violent, strong, dangerous. But what Tosquelles and Bonnafé were able to see was that neither of these roles was fixed – patients could be strong, dissidents could be vulnerable. Moreover, both groups were engaged in the common project of resisting fascism. However militant this work might become, it was justified by reference to the much greater violence it opposed.

A fascinating look at the Saint Alban's psychiatric asylum in France during WW2. Apparently starvation and other awful conditions were common in asylums in France at the time, but Saint Alban's bucked the trend with what could be described as anti-fascist mutual aid. Great read, and great lessons for the rest of us.

MJW: Look, I have a tendency to turn shit around and relate it to myself, we all know it, let’s move on. I have a real space in my heart and mind for old-timey psychiatric institutions because had I been born in another time I’d likely have been sent to one. I mean, I have probably needed to be sent to one in this time, but knowledge of conditions has made me realise I’m better off trying to get well amongst my community. This article drew up thoughts of Geel, in Belgium, where for 700 years, the ‘mad’ have been taken into the community - not treated to rid themselves of their mental illness, but accepted for who they are.

The parallels between the fascist state and the daily fascism of the lives of psychiatric patients was not lost on me. When the author speaks of psychiatrists ‘disoccupying’ their attitudes it resonates to our current need to decolonise our attitudes. When the disabled and dissidents combine, two ‘dangerous’ subtypes, into an almost utopian, anarchic society, what does that say about the ‘dangerous’? Mutual aid is dangerous to oppressive systems. Community is dangerous to facism.

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CJW: Treated like savage beasts: disabled people and the vaccine - Maddison Stoff at Overland

It’s impossible for any reasonable individual to trust a ‘commonwealth’ whose mouth-pieces continually affirm through rhetoric and action that your needs are less important than the needs of other people. That your speech can be ignored, that your care is de-prioritised, that your poverty or ‘underlying health conditions’ mean that when you die, you won’t be counted, and your death was the result of your bad choices, not because of your society abandoning you. But yet, this is the reality disabled people have to live in every day, and most of us are not just marginalised because we’re disabled: race, gender, class, and sexuality are vectors for increased oppression too. The way to solve vaccine scepticism therefore, isn’t via force or using shame, and it won’t be helped by appeals to personal responsibility or civic duty either.

The only way to solve this issue ethically is to see disabled people as full people, and repair the social contract with them that the government and our society have undermined for years. If you a treat a person like a beast, they will become one. The crimes of beasts you have abused are all your fault.

A great piece from friend of the pod Maddison, about Australia's abhorrent treatment of disabled people, as it has been emphasised by government responses to the pandemic.

MKY: cruelty is the point. Vote these puta madres out. All of them.

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CJW: Spirited Away - George Monbiot

But I suspect it also has something to do with the issues we now face. A justified suspicion about the self-interest of big pharma clashes with the need for mass vaccination. The lockdowns and other measures required to prevent Covid-19 spreading are policies which, in other circumstances, would rightly be seen as coercive political control. Curtailing the pandemic, climate breakdown and the collapse of biodiversity means powerful agreements struck between governments – which can be hard to swallow for movements that have long fought multilateral power while emphasising the local and the homespun.

This is something anyone who’s very online will have noticed - conspiracy culture continues to grow, and the current (and most viral strains) are coming out of far-right and white supremacist places, even if many of the people helping to spread them don’t realise that.

This continuing reality bifurcation is going to have a massive impact on our culture and politics going forward, and I’m not sure what can be done to curtail it. We might all find ourselves needing to become specialists in deradicalisation if we don’t want to lose friends and family to these far-right rabbit holes.

Speaking of which - if you have any resources on deradicalisation you think worth sharing, please hit reply. I’ll talk more about it in the future, but I’ve got reason to need some resources myself, and I hope that I’ll be able to put together some good resources to share here sometime in the future.

Related: From Micro to Macro: How Counter-COVID Influencers Evade Moderation - Jordan Wildon at Logically

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MKY: At Melbourne's anti-lockdown protests, everyone has a different version of the truth

Related to the above reality bifurcation.

Or what if teh real simulation is the mediasphere you are imprisoned in?

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CJW: The Futility of White Justice - Amy McQuire

The idea that justice for three Aboriginal children could come down to one word is outrageous when told through the lens of the Black Witness, but through the logic of the colonial courts, it is substantiated and seen to be legitimate. Through the voice of the Black Witness, we see the lunacy of this normalised logic that downgrades the worth of black children to a question of legal terminology even as their community rallies for 30 years to show that they were valued, and loved. One word for three lives. How is this justice?

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DCH: We’re Already Barreling Toward the Next Pandemic by Ed Yong at The Atlantic

“To be ready for the next pandemic, we need to make sure that there’s an even footing in our societal structures,” Seema Mohapatra, a health-law expert at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, told me. That vision of preparedness is closer to what 19th-century thinkers lobbied for, and what the 20th century swept aside. It means shifting the spotlight away from pathogens themselves and onto the living and working conditions that allow pathogens to flourish. It means measuring preparedness not just in terms of syringes, sequencers, and supply chains but also in terms of paid sick leave, safe public housing, eviction moratoriums, decarceration, food assistance, and universal health care. It means accompanying mandates for social distancing and the like with financial assistance for those who might lose work, or free accommodation where exposed people can quarantine from their family.

Yong continues to be the best journalist covering Covid-19.

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• Indigenous traditional owners win back Daintree rainforest in historic deal - Ben Smee at The Guardian

• Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism (Ep. 132) by conversationswithtyler.com

• 'Vigilante treatments': Anti-vaccine groups push people to leave ICUs by Ben Collins NBC News

• The Unbelievable Grimness of HermanCainAward, the Subreddit That Catalogs Anti-Vaxxer COVID Deaths by Lili Loofbourow Slate

Labor & Economics

DCH: El Salvador’s Bitcoin Law Is a Farce by David Gerard Foreign Policy

Bukele announced the name “Chivo” in late June, but the corporation operating the network, Chivo SA de CV, was not put together until Aug. 24, two weeks before launch. Chivo SA de CV is a private company, so it is not subject to freedom of information laws as a government department would be, despite being funded with $60 million of public money. The plan for Chivo was promoted by the president and his brothers Karim, Ibrajim, and Yusef Bukele Ortez, who are thought to be the main bitcoin advocates in the president’s circle. The president’s chief of staff, Carolina Recinos, is on the U.S. State Department’s Engel List of corrupt officials, and is a director of Chivo SA de CV.

Maybe the Silicon Valley motto of “move fast and break things” shouldn’t be the ambition of a nation’s economy?

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DCH: A Labor Movement for the Platform Economy by Li Jin, Scott Duke Kominers, and Lila Shroff at Harvard Business Review

But with platforms, collective action is more challenging. Not only do today’s platform-based workers exist in a nascent labor category, but their participation is decentralized, making it harder for them to connect with each other. As the industry has matured, and consolidation has led to monopsony power, platform labor has reached a turning point. Platforms are increasingly governing participants’ opportunities and livelihoods, and with that comes the need for mutual accountability and evolving protections and responsibilities. It’s time to revisit the social compact between platforms and their workers — and discover a new form of collective action to do so.

The authors are much kinder to the corporations than I am but this is still a good read on how decentralized collective action that brings gig workers and content creators together could be a model for bringing some economic justice to the algorithms behind the likes of YouTube and Uber.

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• China declares all crypto-currency transactions illegal by BBC

Movies + TV

MKY: FREE GUY

Like, sometimes you just wanna watch Hollywoo do what it does best… let Ryan Reynolds be the front man from some pop gnostic entertainment, hidden under the veil of explosions and FX and well-worn tropes. Because apparently I only watched The Nines.

(spoiler) the icing on the cake being, after our enlightened hero - basically Action Jesus - escapes his suburban hellscape prison and leads his followers into the promised land, they’re all basically wandering around animated solarpunk concept art. Which is nice.

Somehow I don’t think the new Matrix will be half as good - and def not pure nicecore - but I’m always up for being proven wrong.

CJW: I wonder how cheap the CGI was in this movie compared to the likes of an MCU, because the setting - a GTA-esque MMO from the POV of an NPC inside it - gave it the perfect excuse to go a little cheap, unlike other films where slightly dodgy CGI will stick out like a sore thumb (I’m thinking of the driving sections in both The Peninsula and Kate [the latter of which was otherwise good, the former… not so much]).

But, as someone who’s been thinking about Simulation Theory lately (not to mention my ongoing interest in the personhood of non-biological intelligences), it certainly scratched an itch, and was good fun to boot. Come for Ryan Reynolds and Jodie Comer, stay for Channing Tatum…

MKY: OR IF MAGIC MIKE ROCKS YOUR WORLD, GO WITH THAT TOO (fuck i love that guy). FX-wise, i was flashing more on Nolan’s stunts than anything else. At what point do tell all teh Simulation folx, congrats - you reinvented gnosticism?

MJW: I'm continually surprised at how much I like Ryan Reynolds. This movie was such a fun romp while also shoving in some nice ideas about non-human intelligence, utopia and intellectual property. Also, all heterosexual men are a little attracted to Channing Tatum. He can dance, ffs.

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LZ: The Green Knight

Well, I really appreciate A24, so it was no surprise to me that I would enjoy this latest release. First I found it super interesting to see Dev Patel (who portrayed an Indian character in Slumdog Billionaire) being characterized as a medieval knight/villager. I didn’t know the chivalric tale behind the movie, so it was all new to me. Loved to see Alicia Vikander as well and how the actors are “reutilized” throughout the narrative by interpreting other characters. The way the movie plays with the passage of time is also impressive. I wonder if the tale has this same reference or if it was more authorial. A nod to the CG for the giants as well, such a dreamy scene.

Video

LZ: Duda Beat - Nem um pouquinho

Even though I’m not a fan and specialist in this kind of music, I really appreciated the music video released by the Brazilian artist Duda Beat with the studio Alaska. They have produced Pabllo Vittar/Anitta/Luisa Sonza’s video “Modo Turbo” a while ago, but I believe they have improved a lot with this latest release. Not only because the video has a narrative, but also because it succeeds in blending general cyberpunk elements with Brazilian references and also a nod to the LGBTQI+ community. I find it exciting that some musicians are once again releasing music videos with a story and CG, not just the person singing randomly -- I loved this trend in the 90s and 2000s, missed them so much.

Radiohead - If you say the word

Same here. I really would like to write something about this video. I love that Thom is giving this more “experimental dance/theater” tone to his most recent videos. It’s also great to see that the band is recovering some songs they didn’t release in the past, so it gives us a very nostalgic feeling like it is this very case. I love that they use the trope of suited people as wild animals being hunted to be put (back? Or first inserted?) in the cities.

The Self-Promotion

LZ: His House brings horror movies closer to the reality of refugees in Europe

This is an essay I wrote first in Portuguese and now it’s available in English on my Medium profile. :) If you had the chance to check it on Netflix, His House is a contemporary horror movie which blends fantasy/horror elements with political and social issues such as the refugee crisis, warfare, and African culture. I definitely recommend you to check this movie out.

The Memes

MJW: