nothing here but autonomous self-illusion
issue 328 - 25th October, 2026
CJW: Welcome back, lovely people. It’s a rainy day here in Naarm after a hot week, but we don’t expect consistency with the weather here, it’s part of the charm. Hope you’re doing well.
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The Team
Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Writer & visual artist. Meme collector.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, a bitch.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer and purveyor of melancholy whimsy.
Climate Change & The Environment
DCH: Sleepless in Slough: the residents who fear for their failing health in Europe’s data centre capital by Brenna Spain at The Nerve
But the cluster is making its way outside the old industrial footprint. At Manor Farm in Poyle, developers proposed a vast data centre on green belt land. When the council failed to reach a decision in time, the developer appealed. The case was then “recovered” by the secretary of state for housing, taking the final decision out of local hands and into Westminster. In June 2026, the government granted permission.
Households within a mile of ten data centres are paying for Big Tech’s compute with their sleep and their lungs. Susan’s asthma woke up, her bed shakes at 3am, and no doctor knows what to ask, while a reporter’s phone logged 62.8 decibels outside her door at midday against a WHO night guideline of 40. The council’s answer is a transfer if triple glazing fails, and Microsoft’s Langley plan swaps a scheme with 60 affordable homes for a 26-metre box and no homes at all. Slough relocates people and keeps the servers.
Geopolitics & Empire
DCH: Nearly 22,000 Palestinian children killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza over three years, with more than 71,000 orphaned at Drop Site Daily
The ministry also reported 612 children killed while seeking food or medicine, 466 deaths from malnutrition, including 157 children, and 2,027 patients who died while awaiting medical evacuation, including 264 children.
One child every 71 minutes for three years: 5,444 under five, 1,125 infants, 71,846 orphaned. Every one of Gaza’s 38 hospitals has been hit, 19 are out of service, 1,723 health workers are dead and 216 ambulances were targeted, so the survivors had nowhere to go.
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DCH: Gaza’s child amputees are growing faster than their prosthetics allow by Mohanad El-Hemrawi at Mondoweiss
According to the same report, no rehabilitation equipment entered Gaza between May 2024 and April 14, 2026. By that date, 18 shipments, including prosthetic limbs and children’s wheelchairs, were still waiting for clearance, for 136 days on average and 526 days in the longest case. In the six months before that, four shipments were rejected. In June, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that Israeli authorities had denied prosthetic hand, knee and ankle joints, silicone liners and medical shoes, despite repeated requests.
Of 2,277 amputees the WHO assessed, 502 have been fitted, and eight prosthetists serve the whole Strip. Eleven-year-old Abdul-Rahman al-Nashash straps on a leg his growing bone has outgrown and hides the limp, while ten-year-old Mahmoud al-Darbali waits by the phone for an evacuation approval, in a queue where 1,092 patients have already died.
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CJW: Becoming Alive, Autonomous, and Explosive - The Invisible Committee at Ill Will
As for the tactic of ramming protesters with vehicles, it has long been tested in the banlieues. What is its purpose, from the standpoint of crowd management? None. The point is to traumatize. The shock and terror are amplified by videos — one way, among others, of turning the protesters’ own tools against them. Their videos become the means through which trauma spreads and, consequently, through which deterrence is achieved. To blame the fascisization of the police serves only to obscure how profoundly democratic this mode of governance actually is.
A new Invisible Committee book has dropped, this is not a drill.
Great interview about the French student protests and the state's response. The above pull quote demonstrates the way police violence is used deliberately as a traumatising technique - here specifically against children. We've seen this in Australia at protests against visits by Israeli state figures, and obviously in America against all sorts of protest movements.
To think we live in a democracy is a joke. It is oligarchy maintained by violence.
Anyway, there's a lot here worth reading, and I'll be grabbing the book (Survival Manual) just as soon as it’s been translated into English.
Tech & Design
MJW: A grassroots plan to reclaim the internet from 'big tech' - ABC News
In the corner of a dining room in an unassuming Melbourne rental sits a palm-sized gadget with "use in case of climate breakdown" written on it.
A lot is riding on the gadget, which is a compact computer called a Raspberry Pi.
Jade Ambrose, a software engineer and community organiser, dreams it could become a lifeline for his local community during power and internet outages which are likely to become more common as extreme weather events, driven by climate change, wreak havoc on Australia's infrastructure.
I'm really aware of how important resources like this are going to be in the years to come, and I'm keen to get involved. I'm also interested in working to make these kinds of resources accessible to everyone in the community, not just the techies. Maintaining these networks is going to take all of us.
CJW: This sounds very cool and is local to Marlee and I, so hopefully something cool comes of it.
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DCH: Revealed: Britain’s contracts with Palantir hit £1bn by Max Colbert at The Nerve
>Before the announcement of the new deal, then-prime minister Keir Starmer visited Palantir’s offices on a trip to Washington organised by the UK’s former ambassador, Peter Mandelson. Palantir was a client of Mandelson’s lobbying company, Global Counsel, and Mandelson held shares in the firm.
Britain has committed £992m to Palantir since 2014, including at least £240.6m awarded directly with no competitive tender. Palantir stays off the Cabinet Office’s strategic suppliers list despite £198.4m of NHS spending in two years, Labour peer Tom Watson has joined as its UK senior vice-president, and Labour’s conference committee blocked the emergency motion to drop it from the NHS.
Society & The Culture
CJW: What’s Wrong With Civility? - Dominique J. Baker at Inside Higher Ed
Audre Lorde once said, “I speak out of direct and particular anger at an academic conference, and a white woman says, ‘Tell me how you feel but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you.’ But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message that her life may change?” Discerning when civility is being used as a convenient mask for attacks against social progress requires our dedicated effort. But we owe it to our students and to ourselves to do whatever we can to pierce those pernicious veils.
On the way higher education in the US has been deliberately co-opted by conservatives in their endless mission to turn America into a soulless right-wing hellscape. Follows on nicely from last issue’s piece on Title IX.
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CJW: Living in community is where self-illusions go to die - Elizabeth Oldfield at Aeon.
When my first child was born, the reality of the climate crisis moved from a theoretical policy problem to one that bubbled acidly in my belly, settled itself in my bones. I had brought this powerless being into a world on fire, and the idea that hard work and individual accumulation could keep her safe stopped making sense. The need to be part of a thick web of humans who would not play a passing role in each other’s lives but commit to costly mutual care felt urgent as the ground bucked and roiled beneath our feet. I wanted ‘a village’, as we say now, not for the golden Instagram images of laughing friends around a photogenic table, but because, in my bleakest moments, I thought it might be essential for survival.
A really interesting read on an experiment in communal living and the ways the idea and reality of it clash with the individualism that's been instilled in us all our lives.
As I've gotten older and no richer, no closer to owning a house, and as things have gotten more precarious and costly, I've thought that this sort of communal living situation might be, not just necessary, but preferable. And I won't be surprised if I find myself living in such a situation at some point in the coming years. But, as the author here lays out, it's not without its problems.
Some parts of this also remind me of the adjustment to polyamory, another process which is not easy but which I think requires and rewards communication and emotional maturity that a lot of people seem to want to avoid in monogamous (particularly cishet) relationships.
Living with others has shown me things in myself that I would prefer to ignore. How much of me is still a child, wanting my way, quick to cry ‘it’s not fair’. I have been learning all this as the world around us unravels. The contrast is disconcerting. If it really is the end of the world, at least as we have known it, then what kind of people will be needed? What would it take to be braver, more resilient and flexible, more joyful, creative and free? A person who could, at bloody least, wait patiently to go in the bathroom, or let someone else use a favourite mug. Someone able to sacrifice sleep to care for another’s child, and have the hard conversation about a failure to mop the kitchen floor, rather than avoiding it. I want to learn these habits. I have a hunch that much more than this might be asked of me. Of all of us.
Anyway, this is specifically a Christian intentional community, but I don’t see why the rest of us heathens can’t learn a little something from it.
Health, Cooking, and Related
DCH: Smoke and Mirrors: The Right’s Latest Attacks Against Trans People by Joanna Wuest at The Nation
The report also cites recent high-profile instances of actual systematic fraud in the Medicare Advantage system that resulted in $90 million settlements with the DOJ. These cases have nothing to do with trans medicine, but they have everything to do with the Trump administration’s support for this privatized form of Medicare, one that creates an incentive for this exact kind of con. By paying “risk-adjusted” higher rates to insurers based on the health of enrollees, Medicare Advantage basically invites its partners in the insurance industry to manipulate patient records. Unlike these insurers, however, trans-healthcare providers are not taking liberties with diagnostic codes to make anyone rich; they’re simply trying to get their patients much-needed care in a system that often withholds everything from hormones to cancer drugs.
May Mailman orchestrated the 2025 executive order, then fronted the report accusing doctors of fraud. Its $4.4 billion “industry” is a rounding error in a trillion-dollar system, and 27 states legislated on it anyway.
Movies + TV
LZ: Carrie (2026)
I am sick this week, so I binge-watched these series after seeing a video of Stephen King himself recommending it. Well… I won't say it's a bad series, but it's not exactly Carrie. I didn't watch the most recent remake, but saw the original movie and read the book. The series doesn't stay too close to the source material, but it updates the story and makes it more of a high school drama, with maybe more violence than other shows. But to me, it became something like the series Gen V or even X-Men, maybe even Mean Girls, as we now see that other people also have the same powers as Carrie. I guess that's the compromise you need to make if you're turning a somewhat contained story into a series, in the end.
Overall, I think the series was very good at updating the topics and making Carrie's mom more realistic, if not even more sympathetic. At least, to me, there were many moments in which I understood her and even thought it was nice of her to be defending her daughter, but there's more to that. There are also some easter eggs throughout the series, like Carrie reading The Handmaid's Tale and a movie theater with “Brian De Palma retrospective” on its façade. And, oh, you'll see Claudia from Interview with the Vampire there too – or rather, Delainey Hayles.
DCH: Just finished watching it last night. Had to take a break during the binge because the show was heavy. Easily the best thing Mike Flanagan has done. Superb performances across the board from all of the actors too. While I share Lidia’s broader concerns as a single series it was quite strong.
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LZ: Apostle (2018)
I saw this movie as a recommendation for folk horror, and it indeed delivers that. The film tells the story of Thomas, a man who travels to an island where a cult has taken residence, and his sister was kidnapped to. We can see how Thomas is weird, but he knows his way around tricking people and blending in, which makes it more convincing that he could infiltrate the cult without being noticed.
And then you will find a populace that looks pretty much like the movie The Village, including a cute red-headed woman who catches the attention of the protagonist. Now that I think of it, Apostle is almost a rip-off of the 2004 film because it is also about making sacrifices (first, leaving blood in jars outside your home at night), which is related to the fertility of the land. But we get to see the deity that commands the island, in mild jumpscares and other more aesthetic takes, full of roots and foliage.
I wouldn't say it's a bad movie, but it's not good either. I suppose the actors help make it a little better, especially Michael Sheen. But other than that, it's very popcorn-like, and it was produced by Netflix, so you get the idea.
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LZ: The Death of Stalin (2017)
I watched this movie with a friend who is really into history and much more knowledgeable about Soviet history than I am, so it was interesting to see a blend of historical accuracy and tongue-in-cheek humor in the way it tells the story of how Stalin died. It's a British-French-Belgian production, so the type of jokes you are going to get are basically British humor, despite the presence of Steve Buscemi and his outstanding American accent compared to all the other British actors. It's very well made and entertaining, but quite different from the type of film I usually watch.
Games
CJW: Why are you playing at your age? What is its use? - Lene Clement
We need the ‘useless’ just as we need essential vital functions to live. There are activities that are ends in themselves and which, being selfless and detached from any practical or commercial ties, can play a fundamental role in the cultivation of the spirit and in the civil and cultural development of humanity.
On utilitarianism as a major contemporary capitalist ideology and the ways it interacts with gaming. I’ve personally been trying to eliminate the utilitarian in my head since it led me to burn out while writing Repo Virtual. It doesn’t always work, but it’s worth trying. For one thing, it’s impossible to predict the utility of rest, relaxation, play, etc. I’ve been struggling with writer’s block since finishing up with Flesh and Blood 2-3 months back, but playing Death Stranding 2 has been one of the things helping tickle that part of my brain where narrative lives. I still haven’t put pen to paper (or fingertips to keyboard), but I feel like maybe soon I will. Maybe.
Music
LZ: Deafheaven - At Work In The Fields Of The Bomb
This new EP, recently released by the American band Deafheaven has surprised many. After exploring more shoegaze on past albums, the group seems to be steering back to their heavier roots, as on the Roads to Judah EP, but perhaps even heavier. A friend even said they sound like a new Emperor. Apparently, they created this album with a message about “the eerie, mundane systems behind mass destruction,” and the EP “examines how catastrophic, world-ending consequences are built out of ordinary, routine daily actions, corporate machinery, and human complacency.” I remember seeing a short interview with the singer George Clarke, who said they wanted to be more political on this EP, tackling topics like war and human pettiness. I think they achieved that quite well.
The Self-Promotion
A short story of mine has been selected as part of an anthology translating Australian SFFH for Chinese readers worldwide. Have a look if that sounds interesting.
The Memes
You just read issue #328 of Nothing Here. You can also browse the full archives of this newsletter.