nothing here but bastards
issue 280 - 2nd February, 2025
CJW: Welcome to another issue of nothing here. I actually haven’t added much this fortnight, and not for lack of trying - it’s just difficult to focus on poring over the usual array of articles and errata while witnessing the genocide being enacted against trans people by the new US administration. (If you balk at me describing it as a genocide then you haven’t been paying attention.) Thanks to the rest of the team for covering for me inadvertently.
Anyway…
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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. Hates the internet.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, uppity trans woman.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer, fulltime goth and metalhead.
Climate Change & The Environment
“Amazon has chosen not to break out data on environmental stats such as greenhouse gas emissions for AWS from the rest of the company in its sustainability reports, making it almost impossible to determine whether these emissions are growing as they have been for its cloud rivals.” Real datacenter emissions are a dirty secret - Dan Robinson at The Register
“According to a June 2024 analysis from Barclays Research — which uses a bottom-up approach based on utilities’ forward-looking supply contracts — annual demand to power data centres in the US could grow by a range of 14%-21% every year through 2030. That would imply US data-centre demand roughly tripling by 2030, from 150-175 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2023 to as much as 560 TWh — equivalent to 13% of current US electricity demand.” AI’s “relentless thirst for power” - Alexandra Scaggs at The Financial Times
Searching For Climate Salvation In Deep Hellfire - Henry Wismayer at Noema
Just the headlines:
A third of the Arctic’s vast carbon sink now a source of emissions, study reveals - Patrick Greenfield at The Guardian
Geopolitics & Empire
DCH: Big Tech Stands to Profit From a US Takeover of Greenland - Lois Parshley at Jacobin
Though the island is not for sale, the president emphasized Greenland’s importance to US national security. Left unspoken: a US takeover could weaken the country’s mining laws and ban on private property, aiding Trump donors’ plans to profit from the island’s mineral deposits and build a libertarian techno-city.
Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel (who’s partner is Trump’s Ambassador for Denmark) want to turn Greenland into a crypto-utopia. Paraphrasing a smart friend here but if this were to happen then Trump gets to be a guy who added a big territory to the US and the broligarchs get their own IRL Minecraft.
//
Nearly 40,000 Palestinian Children Orphaned by War in Gaza - Rasha Abou jalal at Drop Site News
“Suddenly, Assous heard his daughters screaming. “I rushed to the bedroom with my wife; Shaimaa was holding Laila tightly, while Teema was screaming next to them,” he recounted. “I took hold of Laila, and my hands quickly became covered in blood. It was coming from her head — she had been hit with a bullet.” After Gaza ceasefire, Israel turns its firepower on the West Bank - Basel Adra at 972mag
“In the West Bank, Israeli settlers were regularly attacking Palestinian civilians, forcing them off their land, doing things like burning farms, olive groves, oftentimes injuring or killing Palestinians,” says Intercept reporter Jonah Valdez. “With Trump lifting those sanctions, Israel is getting pretty much another pass to continue its violent land grabs from Palestinians.” - Trump’s Nightmare Plan for Gaza at The Intercept
“The trove of documents reveals that Microsoft’s ties to the Israeli military are deeper and more lucrative than previously known, exposing the tech giant’s role in supplying advanced cloud and AI services during the war that multiple international bodies, including the International Court of Justice, ruled may plausibly constitute a genocide. Drop Site shared the documents with Israeli investigative magazine +972, which previously exposed Israel’s use of AI in its bombing campaign, and The Guardian, both of which also published stories Thursday.” The Israeli Military Is One of Microsoft's Top AI Customers, Leaked Documents Reveal - Ryan Grim at Drop Site
Tech & Design
DCH: What DeepSeek means for energy (and climate) - Susan Su at Climate Money
Last week, a small Chinese startup called DeepSeek accomplished the seemingly impossible: they unveiled an AI model that rivals ChatGPT while using dramatically less computing power, trained and developed with a fraction of the time and capital. Wall Street responded by dumping AI and energy stocks, betting on a future of lower AI energy demand.
But they’re wrong.
Instead, we’ll look back on this moment as one of the biggest catalysts for increasing energy demand in the digital era. DeepSeek's breakthrough is about to unleash an unprecedented surge in power consumption that will dwarf anything we've seen from the first wave of AI.
You’ve probably read a lot of great posts about Deepseek already: about how protectionism has blown up in the US’s face, about how China was able to pull this off precisely because of US sanctions, about how the AI bubble was a con all along (not once but twice, actually make that three times) but this post by Susan Su is probably the most important one you’ll read.
I was gleeful in my schadenfreude but as Su smartly points out even if some parts of the overall compute are cheaper we still don’t know the full costs involved and where it might be more expensive in other areas but even more importantly if this becomes a huge tipping point in AI getting even more embedded into society then this is astronomically bad news for the environment.
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DCH: Full stack Trumpism by Ryan Broderick
Bannon’s two most important political theories are that politics “exist downstream of culture” and that the only arbiters of culture that matter are the media, who can easily be distracted or manipulated by “flooding the zone with shit.” During Trump’s first presidency, this felt true enough. Trump, a creature of pop culture and reality TV and tabloids, conquered the White House and then spent the next four years ruling via a media loop built from livetweeting Fox & Friends. But American mass media is effectively over now, replaced by tech platforms whose algorithms determine culture and, thus, politics, and run on a business model that requires an ever-constant flood of shit.
This is the new evolution of the outrage economy.
//
“For the tech bros — or as some say, the broligarchs — this is about much more than just maintaining and growing their riches. It’s about ideology. An ideology inspired by science fiction and fantasy. An ideology that says they are supermen, and supermen should not be subject to rules, because they’re doing something incredibly important: remaking the world in their image.” The broligarchs have a vision for the new Trump term. It’s darker than you think. - Sigal Samuel at Vox
Just the headlines:
The global struggle over how to regulate AI - Katie McQue at rest of world
Developer Creates Infinite Maze That Traps AI Training Bots - Jason Koebler 404 media
AI Is Too Unpredictable to Behave According to Human Goals - Ben Guarino Scientific American
Elon Musk email to X staff: ‘we’re barely breaking even - Richard Lawler at The Verge
Society & The Culture
DCH: Elon Musk did a Nazi salute on live TV to show us there's nothing we can do about it - Brian Merchant
“If he loses, I’m fucked,” Musk famously told Tucker Carlson, perhaps alluding to the many lawsuits and legal troubles he was facing. But Trump did not lose, and now Musk has never been more unfucked in his life. He has triumphed, and so who knows, and who cares? He can go on national television and give a Nazi salute and the national press will collapse in on itself, second-guessing, trying to play fair, even cowering preemptively from reporting on the truth of the moment at all.
As Paris Marx says, Elon Musk is a fascist. See how easy it is to be succinct and truthful? The mainstream media could stand to learn a thing or two from journalists like Brian and Paris.
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MJW: ‘Rape is effectively decriminalised’: how did sexual assault become so easy to get away with? by Benita Kolovos at The Guardian
While one in five women over the age of 15 has been sexually assaulted in their lifetime, almost 90% will not report to police. Of the women who do make a report, only a quarter will see their perpetrator charged. And even fewer will see their perpetrator plead guilty or be convicted. From decade to decade, the numbers don’t shift.
According to Victoria’s Sentencing Advisory Council, there were 23,000 reports of rape to police between 2010 and 2019 but only 1,000 sentencings for rape offences. More recent data from New South Wales shows there were 9,138 sexual assaults reported to police in 2022 but only 1,016 convictions.
What a chilling headline. What more is there to say about this? The numbers speak for themselves.
CJW: We've all known the figures for a long time, but the phrasing in that headline is a perfectly distilled encapsulation of our society's depth of hatred towards women.
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“Populism, left-wing populism, and right-wing politics are not linked to the spread of misinformation. We find that radical-right populism is the strongest determinant for the propensity to spread misinformation,” the researchers note. New study shows radical-right populists are fueling a misinformation epidemic - Mihai Andrei at ZME Science
“As written by Sen. Bradford Blackmon, the bill would make it “unlawful for a person to discharge genetic material without the intent to fertilize an embryo.There are also fines involved, the third strike resulting in the loss of $10,000 from the perpetrator.” Mississippi politician files ‘Contraception Begins at Erection Act’ - WLBT Staff (DCH: Good thing pornhub pulled out of the South)
Deevers seeks the total abolition of porn by imposing criminal penalties of up to 10 years in prison for production, distribution, or possession of porn and 10-to-30-year criminal penalties for “organized pornography trafficking.” Oklahoma Senator Introduces Bill to Make Porn Completely Illegal - Samantha Cole at 404 media
Health, Cooking, and Related
DCH: Spanish Flu Killed 50 Million. Terrorists Can Now Create Synthetic Version of the Virus. - Henry Miller, AMerican Council on Science and Health
Most people probably associate terrorist attacks with the 9/11 airplane hijackings or the Boston Marathon bombings, but bioterrorism is also a real and growing threat. That was brought home vividly by a fascinating, and terrifying, real-world experiment by an MIT professor and two of his students who re-created a virus identical to the one that caused the devastating 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. During that outbreak, an estimated 500 million people worldwide — one-third of the world’s population at the time — were infected and nearly 50 million died.
This sounds like the plot to a very bad Hollywood thriller.
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“The women were told they would be moved to a men’s prison, Ollam said, under President Donald Trump’s anti-trans executive order, which directs the Bureau of Prisons to ensure “that males are not detained in women’s prisons” and that inmates don’t receive gender-affirming health care using federal funds.” Trans Women in Federal Custody Face the Terror of Being Transferred to Men’s Prisons - Shawn Musgrave at The Intercept - CJW: Read up on V-Coding, which is a practice of punishing trans women by “giving” them to especially violent prisoners. You can guess where it goes from there. I’m not being glib, I just don’t have the stomach to describe it.
Just the headlines:
What an Undervaccinated America Would Look Like - Katherine Wu at The Atlantic
Instagram and Facebook Blocked and Hid Abortion Pill Providers’ Posts - Claire Cain Miller at The New York Times
Labour & Economics
DCH: Uber's Bastards by Edward Ongswego Jr.
I have long believed that one of the greatest threats we face is the proliferation of the on-demand labor platform. The so-called “gig economy” is one of the larger altars to greed and misery in our civilization where millions of people are sacrificed in order to grow Smaugian hoards that are then transmuted into this or that form of power.
A good long essay on the new gig economy pitch rolling around Silicon Valley–Uber for nursing. Speaking as someone that’s worked in healthcare I can confidently say that continuity of care is a very important thing to people actually getting quality care. Doing away with that is a very bad idea.
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“Fast fashion does not only have a huge environmental impact. In fact, the industry also poses societal problems, especially in developing economies. According to non-profit Remake, 80% of apparel is made by young women between the ages of 18 and 24. A 2018 US Department of Labor report found evidence of forced and child labour in the fashion industry in Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Philippines, Turkey, Vietnam and others. Rapid production means that sales and profits supersede human welfare.” - The Social Impacts of Fast Fashion By Rashmila Maiti at earth.org
“Oxfam said trillionaires are expected to emerge within the next decade, as the richest 1% now own 45% of global wealth, while 44% of humanity lives on less than $6.85 per day.” Billionaires growing richer faster than ever, says Oxfam - DW
Books
MJW: Neon Girls by Jennifer Worley
I love a memoir, and this is a great one about working at San Fransico’s Lusty Lady Peepshow in the 1990’s. But it’s also a powerful account of labour organizing, as Worley and other dancers come together to unionise the Lusty, and later turn it into a worker-run cooperative. This book has it all: all the gossip from working in the peeps, and all the power of collective bargaining.
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MJW: The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson
Nelson’s aunt was murdered in 1969, and her case was reopened in 2004 when DNA evidence found a new suspect. Nelson attended the trial and wrote about it in The Red Parts, which blurs the lines between personal memoir and true crime account. It examines the effects of a murder on a family at a personal level, and tries to pick apart the usual salaciousness of true crime as a genre and a cultural obsession, all in lyrical and spare prose.
Music
LZ: Perchta, pagan black metal with female vocals coming from Austria
Oh my god. I am so impressed by this band. The vocals are so good and all the pagan references to this goddess called Perchta and then I learn that the vocalist is also a midwife!!! Fucking badass!!!!! According to Wikipedia, the deity is described like this:
In some descriptions, Perchta has two forms; she may appear either as beautiful and white as snow like her name, or as elderly and haggard.
In many old descriptions, Perchta had one large foot, sometimes called a goose foot or swan foot. Grimm thought the strange foot symbolized her being a higher being who could shapeshift to animal form. (...)
In the Tyrol, she appears as a little old woman with a very wrinkled face, bright lively eyes, and a long hooked nose; her hair is dishevelled, her garments tattered and torn.[9]
And then look at her:
Badass!!! They are going to play with Lunar Aurora, Gràb, Rauhnacht and Gjoad in June in Germany. I so wish I could go. Let's see how this year goes. I hate that many times I travel, spend a lot of money, and then they come to Copenhagen haha. Well, it is what it is. But do check her music, they released a new album last year, so fresh content to enjoy!
The Self-Promotion
CJW: Crisis Actors By Maddison Stoff and Corey Jae White
Maddison and I had the basic idea for this story (a traveling troupe of trans actors using tech and theatrical tools to fuck with cogs of the surveillance state) a couple of months before Stop Copaganda was even announced, and as soon as we saw the callout we knew we could focus the story towards it and maybe do something powerful with it. We had a loose plan, and we just needed to get started on the story now that we had a deadline approaching.
On Election Day, we all know what happened. I knew I could let myself wallow in the depression, or I could let the anger through instead and sit down and start on this story. I got the first scene down in one go, making this near-future vision of a fascist US. And then our story was released on Inauguration Day, with Elon Musk doing a fucking Nazi salute on stage.
I'm still depressed, still angry, and I have so much fear (and love) in my heart for my trans brothers, sisters, and others in the US. But fuck the fascists. When we say "death before detransition," we are not talking about suicide.
Please read this story.
The Memes
