nothing here but astrocolonialism
issue 154 - 17th October, 2021
CJW: Welcome back to another edition of the nothing here newsletter.
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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: The climate disaster is here – this is what the future looks like - Oliver Milman, Andrew Witherspoon, Rita Liu, and Alvin Chang at The Guardian
The graphics are NA-centric, but there is a lot of information here worth taking in, demonstrating all the ways that climate disaster is already here, and showing pathways for how things might change depending on action taken (or not taken, as the case may be).
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DCH: Feeling Climate Dread? You’re Not Alone by Matt Simon Katie M. Palmer WIRED
WIRED: Climate change is no longer really this kind of nebulous idea that a lot of people didn't think affected their lives personally. As we’re seeing this extreme weather, in particular, it's very much here to impact a lot of lives.
Susan Clayton: There's very good evidence about impacts on mental health of extreme weather events—obviously big storms, wildfires, floods, that kind of thing. Then there are the effects that are more subtle, because they're more gradual. There's not a single causal mechanism that has been identified yet, but there's pretty good evidence from some pretty large data sets that suicide rates tend to go up during unusually hot periods. Psychiatric hospitalizations go up. And people are just more irritable, so there is more antisocial behavior.
What’s the difference between hope and optimism?
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DCH: Children are unsuspecting meat eaters: An opportunity to address climate change by Erin R.Hahn Meghan Gillogly Bailey E.Bradford
Forty-one percent of children claimed that bacon came from a plant.
Kids don’t understand their food sources. At all. BUT they also don’t want animals to be their food sources either.
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Sustainable development won't solve environmental crises, say these experts. It's simpler than that - Antony Funnell at ABC News
Australia could 'green' its degraded landscapes for just 6% of what we spend on defence - Bonnie Mappin, James Watson, Lesley Hughes at The Conversation
Google and YouTube will cut off ad money for climate change deniers - Jay Peters at The Verge
Facebook to act on illegal sale of Amazon rainforest - João Fellet Charlotte Pamment at BBC
Defend the Deep - Helen Scales at Aeon
Geopolitics
CJW: Wardak peace: Rural Afghans live with Taliban, US legacy - Sudarsan Raghavan at Washington Post (via Foreign Exchanges)
In Kabul and other Afghan cities, the United States will be remembered for enabling two decades of progress in women’s rights, an independent media and other freedoms. But in the nation’s hinterlands, the main battlegrounds of America’s longest war, many Afghans view the United States primarily through the prism of conflict, brutality and death.
[...]
Even mundane tasks became matters of life or death. If Haideri shaved, for example, would the Taliban consider him loyal to the foreigners and the government? If he grew out his beard, would the government or U.S. forces consider him a spy?
“Whenever we left our homes we told our families, ‘goodbye,’ ” he said. “We didn’t know whether we would return home alive.”
I’m sure we can expect coverage of Afghanistan to fade quickly now that America is not directly in-country, so I was glad to see this piece on rural life during and after American occupation.
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DCH: America Has Slightly Reduced Its Nuclear Arsenal - Matthew Gault at VICE
The Biden administration revealed how many nukes America has on Tuesday, abandoning a Trump-era policy of nuclear secrecy. Between its active and stored nukes, the U.S. is sitting on 3,750 world-ending weapons as of the last official count in September 2020. In 2018 the number was 3,805, so 55 fewer weapons than last count.
That’s good news...
China’s new silos are part of a troubling trajectory from the past five years. Nuclear weapons are back in vogue. Russia has said it’s working on several new nuclear weapons, the United Kingdom wants to grow its stockpile, and Trump claimed America was working on new nuclear weapons and toyed with the idea of resuming nuclear testing.
Oh. Yeah. Ok. Nevermind.
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Authoritarian regimes are using Interpol to target minorities and pro-democracy activists - Mariam Kiparoidze at Coda
Science & Space
CJW: SpaceX's Satellite Megaconstellations Are Astrocolonialism, Indigenous Advocates Say - Becky Ferreira at Vice
Indigenous communities are disproportionately affected by this interference with the night sky, which falls under a broader pattern of astrocolonialism. Light pollution is considered by some experts to be a form of cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples, whose traditions have already experienced erasure across countless other spheres.
“The concern I feel regarding megaconstellations is the same concern I feel when I see my country on fire or hear of my neighbors in the Torres Straits and their struggles with rising sea levels due to climate change,” Karlie Alinta Noon, a Gomeroi woman as well as an Indigenous research associate and PhD student in astronomy at the Australian National University, said in an email.
Interesting and important point on SpaceX’s orbital trash*.
*I don’t actually know if SpaceX’s satellites are good for what they’re meant to be, I just think Musk is one of the biggest grifters of our current moment and don’t trust his companies to do anything worthwhile.
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DCH: ‘Galactic Britain’: how Cornwall is winning the European space race By Rowan McIntosh The Guardian
Spaceport Cornwall is one of the cornerstones of the government’s National Space Strategy, unveiled last month, in which the prime minister, Boris Johnson, called for “global Britain [to become] galactic Britain”. Six spaceports are slated around the UK as the government looks to create one of the most “innovative and attractive space economies in the world”.
This country is drunk on some Dan Dare bullshit.
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CJW: Baby Poop Is Loaded With Microplastics - Matt Simon at Wired (via Sentiers)
All told, PET concentrations were 10 times higher in infants than in adults, while polycarbonate levels were more even between the two groups. The researchers found smaller amounts of both polymers in the meconium, suggesting that babies are born with plastics already in their systems. This echoes previous studies that have found microplastics in human placentas and meconium.
Emphasis mine.
Tech & Design
LZ: Experimental brain implant zaps away depression in real-time - Rich Haridy at New Atlas
According to the article, “the implant monitors brain activity for patterns of depression and responds with short bursts of electrical stimulation designed to disrupt cycles of depressive brain activity.” Wow. As someone who is on meds, I think this would be great but at the same time it’s frightening when you consider that brainjacking is considered a “future expression” for cyberattacks against neural implants.
CJW: Where do I sign up?
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CJW: Privatising the sky: drone delivery promises comfort and speed, but at a cost to workers and communities - Michael Richardson, Jake Goldenfein, and Thao Phan at The Conversation
But a bigger question for the public is about the skies above our heads. Do we want to live under a cloud of drones?
At present, most of the time people are free to enjoy the skies above their homes and communities. Kids can fly kites and enthusiasts can fly their own drones. Drone delivery risks privatising a new layer of that common space, and handing it over to Alphabet and others.
For a little more convenience we’re going to subject more workers to shitty, overworked gig-economy conditions and blot out the sky...
MKY: Here’s one solution…
https://twitter.com/pitdesi/status/1445118812659933187
And another:
LZ: Drones falling from the sky in China - via @disclosetv
There’s still no confirmed reason for the crash, but the scene has this ma/tragic beauty of dystopia.
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DCH: The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising - Jesse Frederik and Maurits Martijn at thecorrespondent.com
The point is, advertising is like cystic fibrosis, not the flu. And even that’s extremely unfair to cystic fibrosis, since people buying things because they saw an ad is even rarer than cystic fibrosis.
An oldie but a goodie. One of the best longreads on the long con that is online advertising. Despite all that data and all those engineering resources, it’s still just a random longshot.
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DCH: Facebook Is Weaker Than We Knew By Kevin Roose The New York Times
But Facebook’s research tells a clear story, and it’s not a happy one. Its younger users are flocking to Snapchat and TikTok, and its older users are posting anti-vaccine memes and arguing about politics. Some Facebook products are actively shrinking, while others are merely making their users angry or self-conscious.
Facebook’s declining relevance with young people shouldn’t necessarily make its critics optimistic. History teaches us that social networks rarely age gracefully, and that tech companies can do a lot of damage on the way down. (I’m thinking of MySpace, which grew increasingly seedy and spam-filled as it became a ghost town, and ended up selling off user data to advertising firms. But you could find similarly ignoble stories from the annals of most failed apps.) Facebook’s next few years could be uglier than its last few, especially if it decides to scale back its internal research and integrity efforts in the wake of the leaks.
That threat is very real. It’s why we need good regulations and protections NOW before this behemoth topples.
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We are Google and Amazon workers. We condemn Project Nimbus - Anonymous Google and Amazon workers at The Guardian
Activists are Designing Mesh Networks to Deploy During Civil Unrest - Ella Fassler at Vice
Facebook’s role in Myanmar and Ethiopia under new scrutiny - Emmanuel Akinwotu at The Guardian
It’s 20 years since the first drone strike. It’s time to admit they’ve failed. - Emran Feroz at MIT Technology Review
When Facebook went down this week, traffic to news sites went up - Laura Hazard and Owen Nieman at Journalism Lab
Facebook runs the coward’s playbook to smear the whistleblower - Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge
The Facebook whistleblower says its algorithms are dangerous. Here’s why. - Karen Hao at MIT Technology Review
Revealed: Facebook’s Secret Blacklist of “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” - Sam Biddle ay The Intercept (DCH: shocker but white supermatist groups in the US are still treated lightly while marginalized groups get a boot on the neck.)
How DeepMind Is Reinventing the Robot - Tom Chivers at IEEE Spectrum (via Sentiers) - CJW: Some interesting detail on current work in machine learning and robotics.
Society & The Culture
LZ: Man dressed as ninja attacks army special ops soldiers with katana sword - Victor Tangermann at Futurism
Neal Stephenson made a joke about that in Snow Crash. Turns out that life imitates art for real.
CJW: Pretty soon the Taliban are going to be running around with Katanas because they know US soldiers can’t deal with them.
More than 20 minutes after the initial contact, the blotter says, a 911 call came in from someone at the airport saying 26 special operations military members were "hunkered down in a hanger [sic] wondering where help is."
I think if 26 special ops members can’t deal with one guy with a sword, they should be washed out immediately…
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DCH: How AT&T helped build far-right One America News by John Shiffman Reuters
“They told us they wanted a conservative network,” Herring said during a 2019 deposition seen by Reuters. “They only had one, which was Fox News, and they had seven others on the other [leftwing] side. When they said that, I jumped to it and built one.
Since then, AT&T has been a crucial source of funds flowing into OAN, providing tens of millions of dollars in revenue, court records show. Ninety percent of OAN’s revenue came from a contract with AT&T-owned television platforms, including satellite broadcaster DirecTV, according to 2020 sworn testimony by an OAN accountant.
Never forget that Big Telco was the original flavor of corrupt big tech.
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Conspiracist Thinking Is the Result of 40 Years of Social Atomization - Luke Savage at Jacobin
Founders of Koch-Backed COVID Disinformation Organisation Bankroll New Cross-Party Parliamentary Group By Nafeez Ahmed bylinetimes.com
Conservative Donors, Turning Point USA and the US Capitol Attack By Sian Norris bylinetimes.com
The Missing Teen Who Fueled ‘Cult Panic’ Over Dungeons & Dragons By Jon Peterson. WIRED
Labor & Economics
CJW: CIA Op or Not, the Pandora Papers Are a Big Deal - Branko Marcetic at Jacobin
There’s good reason to speculate that the Pandora Papers, the massive leak exposing the tax-dodging practices of the global superrich — which includes plenty of Russians and Chinese, but almost no Americans — is a CIA plant. Nevertheless, it’s a newsworthy story that deserves the attention it’s gotten.
[...]
In 2018, Donald Trump handed the CIA a gift when he secretly loosened the rules around covert cyber operations. Besides cyberattacks on infrastructure, the order also made it easier for the CIA to “to engage in the kind of hack-and-dump operations that Russian hackers and WikiLeaks popularized, in which tranches of stolen documents or data are leaked to journalists or posted on the internet,” Yahoo News reported last year.
On the Pandora Papers as a possible CIA op, and on US media reportage of leaks after the 2016 election.
Related:
Overview from The Guardian: Pandora papers: biggest ever leak of offshore data exposes financial secrets of rich and powerful
This piece is interesting because of its focus on individual stories, all connected to an Australian accountant: Pandora Papers: The little-known Australian accountant exposed in one of the world's biggest leaks
DCH: And a good rundown on how Scotland is at the heart of much of this via Cory Doctorow: Scottish Limited Partnerships are still laundering criminal millions
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CJW: Berliners vote to expropriate corporate landlords - Thomas McGrath at Roar
I can't remember if we shared anything about Berlin's expropriation of rental properties from corporate landlords in the last issue, but here's a piece from one of the activists involved in the campaign.
First Berlin, next the world.
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CJW: When wage becomes wager: the dark side of microwork sites - Phil Jones excerpted at Roar
As if even the mention of “work” or “workers” might upset this gentle air of bonhomie, the sites refer only to “users,” “taskers” and “players.” Play now equals pay. “Brightly gamified compliance regimes” extend to the work process itself. On-screen rankings, nonmonetary rewards and access to new levels of accreditation — such as Mechanical Turk’s enigmatic “Masters qualification” — are used to gamify tasks in ways that blur the boundaries between work and play.
A great piece on the exploitative systems that underpin microwork sites.
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How Economic Inequality Inflicts Real Biological Harm By Robert M. Sapolsky at Scientific American (paywall)
‘It’s Not Sustainable’: What America’s Port Crisis Looks Like Up Close By Erin Schaff, Peter S. Goodman The New York Times
Newsletters
DCH: James Madison and the Debilitating American Tendency to Make Everything about the Constitution By William Hogeland williamhogeland.substack.com
This system relied on federal taxation—no longer just duties on imports, but also taxes imposed domestically to create an “internal revenue,” drawn uniformly from the broad interstate mass of ordinary people, and earmarked for making annual interest payments to the small interstate class of rich speculators who had invested in bonds that helped pay for the war. The idea was to concentrate the country’s wealth in a few, supposedly especially capable hands, and grow it; to put the brakes on the democratic innovations in public finance that had recently gained traction; and to flood the separate states with federally unified police power.
Another great bad history lesson from my friend Bill.
Movies + TV
LZ: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed to Become TV Series - Emmet Asher-Perrin at Tor
This could be good… or a tragedy as many adaptations of science fiction books into TV series. The company behind is Anonymous Content, which produced True Detective, Mr. Robot, Maniac, and The OA, so… I guess it’s very promising.
MKY: can’t be worse than the Foundation adaptation (unless that’s actually perfect depiction of the kinda shithouse future a bunch of Long Now LARPers dream of? I’m still not sure. I keep getting distracted by Lee Pace. JFC.)
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CJW: Squid Game
You’ve heard about Squid Game. If Netflix is to be believed, you’ve probably watched Squid Game. You’ve also probably heard that the creator tried to sell the show for 12 years before it finally got picked up. I wanted to talk about this last issue before it was seemingly everywhere, but I was only half-way through the season and also wanted to give the others a chance to catch up…
I’m a big fan of death sports and death races, and I want to write one some day, which is why I’m a little annoyed that I didn’t think of some of the narrative devices Squid Game uses to keep itself fresh. Very minor spoilers for the first couple of episodes, but where the ‘contestants’ of a death sport tournament are usually held against their will for the duration, in Squid Game they’re given the chance to return home, only to confronted by the debt and desperation that made them agree to sign up in the first place - similarly to Parasite, Squid Game is about wealth inequality and the degradations of capitalism.
And the return home also gives a police detective the opportunity to infiltrate the game in his search for his missing brother - a very interesting wrench thrown into the gears.
I don’t know that I would have watched a show that was simply about the violence and psychological tension of the game and taking place between the players, but by encompassing the outside world into the story, Squid Game is that much more compelling.
Related: Squid Game Is an Allegory of Capitalist Hell
DCH: Thoroughly enjoyed it. A dash of Hostel here, a pinch of The Prisoner there. All the more gripping if you understand some of the nuance around Korean culture and language being explored (Sang-Woo’s suicide attempt springs to mind).
MKY: if you liked this then you'll love ALICE IN BORDERLAND.
Video
DCH: Planet City -- a sci-fi vision of an astonishing regenerative future
A radical new proposal envisions a climate solution in the form of a city designed to accommodate the Earth’s entire population. This so-called Planet City would have 10 billion people living in 1.4 million neighborhoods climbing 165 stories high in an area covering just 0.02% of the Earth’s surface. The rest of the planet would be set aside as a vast, people-free wilderness. (Via Fast Company)
A protopian address to the climate catastrophe. We need more like this.
MKY: i believe this was done in part at least with one of the galleries here. I def saw something come and go in my insta, a live thing with Liam that i was 2hrs too late to watch. That is a thing that happened. A world beyond my 10km bubble rn, that’s harder to imagine. The entire world in a series of bubbles tho… that I can see.
My search fu is failing me, but there were some similarly cool speculative architectural works in the past, like having a single city that spanned the breadth of North America. And hey, I love fiction as much as the next guy. In the meantime, once more ya gotta wonder just why Gates has bought up so much of the land there. And what the very cool rebranded US Gov is doing here? [Which is mostly a prompt to myself to look into this further, when my time is vaguely my own again. lol]
Music
LZ: Concrète Dschungel: Einstürzende Neubauten’s Kollaps At 40 - Jeremy Allen at The Quietus
Last year I was supposed to travel to Portugal to see Neubauten live, but Covid-19 cancelled everything and also postponed the new 2021 date to 2022. I guess they were more than 20 years without playing live concerts, at least with the whole band, because some members have their own side projects. Now their debut album is completing its 40th birthday. This review by Jeremy Allen offers a context of the period when the album was released, in the midst of a bombed-out West Berlin. The quote that opens the review is already good enough to convince you to read the text and enjoy the music: “[West Berlin is] a surrealist cage in which those inside are free.” György Ligeti.
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DCH: I Feel As If I Might Be Vanishing: The Caretaker’s “An empty bliss beyond this World” By Matt Mitchell
So I’m a huge fan of Leyland James Kirby’s outings as The Caretaker. Each album is a meditation on memory and loss. These albums helped me process my father’s struggles with Alzheimers as he died. It seems like I’m not the only one. This essay by Matt Mitchell (with linked tracks) is deeply poignant.
The Self-Promotion
LZ: The Futuristic Vision of Fully Automated Luxury Communism
Another translation that I finished for an essay that I wrote back in 2020. Here I comment on the book with the same name written by the British author Aaron Bastani. For those familiar with other Singularity University terms like “abundance” and the “faith” in space mining for an utopian future, here’s a more left-wing, politicized analysis of the possibilities of automation.
MKY: i heard you didn’t read the Long Doom i mean BOOM! bullshit back on WIRED in teh late 90s so i repackaged it for Centrist Liberals that LARP as Leftists and think we can magically produce/consume our way to ‘sustainability’ and UGH! Ouch, my nerves. Fuck Bastani. AMA! (It’s not me talking its the future dsytopia invading my christmas presents that are stuck in some 7th level of container shipping hell.) Srsly tho i couldn’t get thru this podcast preview without flashing back to being in teh room as Kevin Kelly or whoever it was pitched everyone on The New Rules for the New Economy and wondering why i didn’t just storm the stage. (I was very young, for one thing.)
The Memes
MJW: And for this week... 