nothing here but blueberry milk subscription models

issue 232 - 17th September, 2023

MJW: Hahaha, who left me driving the bus? But also, hello! Welcome to the newsletter. This week we've got all manner dispatches from our dystopian present. From rapid cycling trends to sponge cities, we are chasing after interesting things for you to engage with (use caution pls, the world's vibes are off rn.

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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, emerging hag, middle-aged goth.
Corey J. White (CJW) - Author, sin-eater, future sweetie-pie.

Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Journalist, MA in semiotics, and PhD in Arts. Sci-fi writer, futurology researcher and essayist. @lidiazui

Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: The people of Ecuador just made climate justice history. The world can follow - Steve Donzinger at The Guardian

Days ago, voters in Ecuador approved a total ban on oil drilling in protected land in the Amazon, a 2.5m-acre tract in the Yasuní national park that might be the world’s most important biodiversity hotspot. The area is a Unesco-designated biosphere reserve and home to two non-contacted Indigenous groups. This could be a major step forward for the entire global climate justice movement in ways that are not yet apparent.

We’ve shared some stories related to Donzinger and Ecuador previously - Donzinger is the American lawyer who was placed under an unprecedented house arrest in America for, basically, daring to stand up against Chevron alongside the people of Ecuador.

This is an important moment not just for Ecuador, but for the rest of us looking to stand against a fossil future. The state won’t do anything without being forced to, as we see protest being criminalised in various parts of the world to protect the current fossil-fueled status quo:

In the United States, it is not broadly known that the fossil fuel industry quietly funds a national lobbying campaign that has introduced draconian anti-protest bills in at least 18 states. These laws threaten anyone protesting at an oil or gas facility with huge fines and serious prison sentences; some states even impose criminal liabilities on non-profit advocacy groups that support the protesters. These are really laws of intimidation designed to stop protest before it happens. And they are also manifesting in other countries including Australia, the United Kingdom and Germany.

DCH: The genius of China's sponge cities

Decades of urbanisation efforts in China and climate change has led to water shortages and flooding. Sponge cities are a novel and much more natural form for urban planning that promises to retain water at it’s source, slow down the flow of water, all the while cleaning it and funnelling for potential redistribution elsewhere.

“A climate psychologist explains how we’ve moved beyond hope, anger, and complacency toward something more promising. The driving psychological theory to explain how the public thinks about climate change is under revision. Climate change concern has moved from the periphery to the core.” Rebecca Leber at Vox
“According to research published in 2014 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, excess heat generated by a city’s worth of air conditioners can increase the outside temperature by 1 to 1.5 degrees Celsius at night.” - Sophia Khatsenkova at euronews

Just the headlines:

Geopolitics & Empire

CJW: In U.S.-China AI contest, the race is on to deploy killer robots - David Lague at Reuters

An interesting long-read on the development and use of automated weapon systems. The problem is, that as interesting as it is in the abstract (I've already got a story idea out of this article) it's tied up in the current push for a new Cold War with China which just seems to be incredibly stupid and shortsighted considering the need for cooperation in the face of climate change.

Republican hopefuls ramp up war talk over Mexican border - CJW: Speaking of US plans to wage incredibly stupid wars…
"At a moment when the imperatives of survival demand unprecedented global cooperation for decarbonization, the question preoccupying US foreign-policy elites is over how many cold wars to wage." - Spencer Ackerman at The Nation (via Foreign Exchanges)
Homesick: A return to Chornobyl’s radiant landscape - Zarina Zabrisky at Orion Magazine - CJW: One for my fellow Chernobyl obsessives.

Just the headlines:

Science & Space

CJW: Why do we trust novelists with the future? - Andrew Dana Hudson

I’d argue that fiction writing and futures thinking share core competencies. (This applies even to non-speculative fiction.) Both involve assembling big piles of hypotheticals and putting them in a convincing, compelling order. Both are a kind of imaginative play, throwing aside familiar norms and trying on new ones, like children in games of pretend. And both involve contending with the endlessly complicated system dynamics of human society.

Some interesting thoughts from friend of the newsletter, ADH, on futures and sci-fi writing.

Tech & Design

CJW: ‘Privacy Nightmare on Wheels’: Every Car Brand Reviewed By Mozilla — Including Ford, Volkswagen and Toyota — Flunks Privacy Test

According to Mozilla research, popular global brands — including BMW, Ford, Toyota, Tesla, Kia, and Subaru — can collect deeply personal data such as sexual activity, immigration status, race, facial expressions, weight, health and genetic information, and where you drive. Researchers found data is being gathered by sensors, microphones, cameras, and the phones and devices drivers connect to their cars, as well as by car apps, company websites, dealerships, and vehicle telematics. Brands can then share or sell this data to third parties. Car brands can also take much of this data and use it to develop inferences about a driver’s intelligence, abilities, characteristics, preferences, and more.

I remember my grandpa, an engineer and generally handy type, complaining when cars were becoming more electronic/computerised because there was less and less mechanical work he could do himself.

Now, not only are cars computerised, now they're spying on you too. Because of course they are.

DCH: Column: Elon Musk comes around to blaming the Jews - Michael Hiltzik at The Los Angeles Times

There are few precedents in American history for someone with the public renown of Elon Musk voicing or hosting opinions of such unalloyed virulence. The closest analogue is probably Henry Ford, who in 1920 began publishing screeds in the Dearborn Independent, a local weekly he had acquired, alleging the existence of a vast Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination.

“Musk is sometimes compared to the innovator Henry Ford,” Josh Marshall observed Tuesday on his website, Talking Points Memo. “The comparison seems increasingly apt, if not in the way many have intended.”

Musk has gone all-in on Protocols of Zion bullshit. He’s been signal-boosting brazenly anti-semitic accounts (above and beyond his usual gang of alt-right weirdos like Ian Miles Cheong) like Richard Hainina. This bastard is going to get people hurt.

MJW: The Death of Unity by Brandon Sheffield at Insert Credit

Ultimately, it screws over indies and smaller devs the most. If you can afford to pay for higher tiers, you don't pay as much of this nickle and dime fee, but indies can't afford to on the front end, or often it doesn't make sense in terms of the volume of games you'll sell, but then you wind up paying more in the long term. It'll squash innovation and art-oriented games that aren't designed around profit, especially. It's a rotten deal that only makes sense if you're looking at numbers, and assume everyone will keep using your product. Well, I don't think people will keep using their product unless they're stuck. I know one such developer who is stuck, who's estimating this new scheme will cost them $100,000/month on a free to play game, where their revenue isn't guaranteed. Unity is desperately digging its own grave in a search for gold. This is all incredibly short-sighted and adds onto a string of rash decisions and poorly thought through schemes from Unity across the last few years.

I'm fucking sick of this subscription-model, price-gougey bullshit that is coming from literally every direction. Unity is taking the piss with the rules of the game. Instituting this dick move on new customers is one thing, but to say that all existing customers now have to pay a fee on past releases that have used the engine is a whole new step. If they can change the terms and conditions of their fees after you've agreed to them, with no recourse, what's to stop them from changing any term or condition after the fact? You can't give consent in perpetuity. You can't agree to something you never agreed to. There is no such thing as ethics or integrity in capitalism, and there never can be. The greed is colossal and coming from every single direction. It is ruining everything and I fucking hate it.

On top of this there is no minimum cooldown period after they change their fee, so they can raise it as they like, whenever they like. Effectively we're all locked into an upward-only, per-install pricing model that can change whenever Unity decides they need extra revenue to make their stock look healthy.

“Merely weeks after emerging as the apparent heir to address social media’s woes and generating over 100 million users in less than five days, Threads appears to be, well, fraying at the edges already with a recently reported 80% drop in daily active users since launch.” - Rimma Boshernitsan at TechCrunch
This raises the question of whether all prompting tends inexorably toward redundancy. Are we prompting LLMs for things we can conceptualize but can’t imagine? What can that even mean? Groys argues that people prompt LLMs in hopes that they will generate “an answer that reflects an already accumulated mass of writing better than any individual writer could.” He thus claims that “prompting takes the form of dialogue between an individual author and the zeitgeist,” as it’s been reified through the model’s processing of its mass of training data, which he characterizes as “a huge garbage pit into which every new text is thrown as merely an additional piece of garbage.” This perhaps makes us see our prompts as a kind of meta-garbage rather than a form of garbage writing itself. The prompt is a trash bag, if not a suit of armor.” - Rob Horning

Just the headlines:

Society & The Culture

CJW: "They don't care about community safety. They care about cops and cages": Outrage at Qld's racist laws that will only lock up more black kids - Amy McQuire

On Wednesday, the Queensland government stealthily passed new laws that will allow children - predominately black children - to be detained in watchhouses for extended periods.

They passed it from a building that sits a 20-minute walk away from the Brisbane City Watchhouse, a place where Amnesty International in 2019 recorded over 2655 breaches of domestic and international law, including the failure to “provide children with adequate clean clothes, underwear, and personal hygiene products, the institutional use of violence; the use of isolation as punishment, and failure to provide adequate health and medical care”. It is the same place where the brave whistleblower Steve Marshall revealed shocking racist and sexist remarks by watchhouse staff, where children were being exposed to sexual acts by incarcerated adults, where a girl was held in a holding cell with two males, where illegal strip searches were being carried out on children, and where children were treated like incarcerated adults.

Australia (and Queensland specifically) continues in its abhorrent treatment of first nations people.

CJW: Blueberry milk nails and the illusion of choice under capitalism - Caitlyn Clark at Dazed

TikTok trend cycles are attempting to remain on the cutting edge of uniqueness, while flattening all forms of individuality into a carefully selected collection of Amazon Storefront-shoppable products that formulate a “-core” or “girl” (sure to end up flooding Goodwill donation bins and landfills within a year). As life under capitalism feels increasingly alienated and social institutions are in continuous decline, these trends feel like a confused attempt to reconcile individualism with a desperate need for community.

Some interesting thoughts here on TikTok microtrends, community vs individualism, and what "freedom" really means under capitalism.

Related: I'm beginning to see the light - Drew Austin

The metaverse concept was dead on arrival; there’s nowhere left to go but outside. And that’s what we’re doing: TikTok is the social network for the internet’s decadent era, embodying the worldview that becoming viral content is the highest calling, the end state to which everything aspires and strives. You visit Italy not to enjoy yourself but to help Italy fulfill its destiny as a meme.

Some interesting thoughts on the internet, content, "real life," etc.

CJW: What It Looks Like When Trans Kids Are Simply Allowed to Play Sports - Frankie de la Cretaz at Self.com (via Ed Yong)

While it’s absolutely crucial that we continue to talk about the ways laws and rhetoric target children, we want to also highlight the kids who don’t make the news, whose stories might go otherwise unheard: the ones who are already out there playing on teams with their friends, winning and losing without incident. That’s why we felt it was important for you to hear some of their stories, to see what it actually looks like when trans kids are allowed to play sports alongside their peers. When these young people get the opportunity to share their experiences, they can no longer be the faceless, nameless threat that legislators and other adults (who have, for some reason, made it their mission to target children) have made them out to be. When you read their stories, it becomes clear that we are talking about kids—kids who pose no threat to their peers (or anyone else) but are, in fact, at risk as a result of the hateful rhetoric and exclusionary policies that target them.

If you're reading this newsletter you probably don't need it, but here's a reminder that all the anti-trans laws and rhetoric are targeting actual children (adults too, of course), who are just trying to live their lives, figure out who they are, and find ways to be happy. All of that can be hard enough for kids, and especially teens, without being the focus of these hateful campaigns.

Racially motivated - Adam Kotsko - CJW: Some thoughts on media weasel-words around racist mass shootings and how it relates to broader American political and cultural life.
“To cope with the isolation they face daily, the men on death row spend a lot of their time in search of escape — something to ease the racing thoughts or the crushing regrets. Some read books or find religion. Some play games like Scrabble or jailhouse chess. Others turn to D&D, where they can feel a small sense of the freedom they have left behind.” - Keri Blakinger at themarshallproject.org
“Semenya’s case, and now the situation presented for trans athletes, represents an attempt to police which bodies are permitted participation in track and field. Track and field is unusual in that it showcases a larger variety of bodies than might be present in other sports: Black and white, short and tall, fat and skinny, muscled and lithe. But when concerns about women with intersex conditions cropped up—and indeed, ever since— targets have been strictly African women. Banned athletes hail from South Africa, Burundi, Kenya, and Namibia. On online track and field outlets and forums, writers and fans speculate constantly about whether particular women look too masculine, more frequently targeting Black women. Physical appearances are closely scrutinized as to whether they step too far beyond acceptable feminine embodiment and therefore constitute a threat to the integrity of competition. Trans and intersex bans have been floated as maintaining a sort of race-neutral fairness within women’s competition—and yet their implementation has been almost exclusively to exclude Black women, often from poorer economic backgrounds, from competition.” Mike Gallagher at The New Inquiry

Health, Cooking, and Related

CJW: The Battle Against the Fungal Apocalypse Is Just Beginning - Maryn McKenna at Wired

In the 14 years since it was first spotted, C. auris has invaded health care in dozens of countries. But in that time, other fungal infections have also surged. At the height of the Covid pandemic, India experienced tens of thousands of cases of mucormycosis, commonly called “black fungus,” which ate away at the faces and airways of people made vulnerable by having diabetes or taking steroids. In California, diagnosis of coccidioidomycosis (also called Valley fever) rose 800 percent between 2000 and 2018. And new species are affecting humans for the first time.

An interesting piece on spreading fungal infections. I was already across Candida auris and the danger it poses in medical settings, so here are some new fungi to fear. Current hypothesis is that various fungi are adapting to an increasingly warm climate, to the point where they may be able to survive in our warm bodies, where previously they couldn't.

The Jackpot continues to expand in scope.

Just the headlines:

Opinion: The Simplest Way to Prevent the Next Pandemic? Leave Bats Alone.

Labour & Economics

DCH: Biden’s NLRB Brings Workers’ Rights Back From the Dead - Harold Meyerson at prospect.org

Last Friday, the National Labor Relations Board released its most important ruling in many decades. In a party-line decision in Cemex Construction Materials Pacific, LLC, the Board ruled that when a majority of a company’s employees file union affiliation cards, the employer can either voluntarily recognize their union or, if not, ask the Board to run a union recognition election. If, in the run-up to or during that election, the employer commits an unfair labor practice, such as illegally firing pro-union workers (which has become routine in nearly every such election over the past 40 years, as the penalties have been negligible), the Board will order the employer to recognize the union and enter forthwith into bargaining.”

Biden sucks. He’s backpedalled on too many issues and lost (or just not shown up) too many important political fights. But one thing I will credit to him is putting absolute pitbulls into important roles in places like the NLRB, FCC, and FTC. Hopefully they can all succeed where he’s failed. Time will tell.

“Audits of high-income taxpayers are more costly, but the additional revenue raised more than offsets the costs. Audits of the 99-99.9th percentile have a 3.2:1 return; audits of the top 0.1% return 6.3:1.” - William C. Boning, Nathaniel Hendren, Ben Sprung-Keyser & Ellen Stuart at The National Bureau of Economic Research
“Despite all of McKinsey’s supposed efforts, the use of force by guards at Rikers has only increased since 2016, reaching what a federal monitor called an “all-time high” in 2020. In 2021, slashings and stabbings were up more than 1,000 percent from 2011. In 2019, ProPublica found that McKinsey had “rigged” its violence-reduction numbers. (McKinsey denied this.) And in May 2022, New York City stopped using McKinsey’s system for classifying detainees. In the end, the city spent $27.5 million on McKinsey’s services, with precious little to show for it. McKinsey, on the other hand, collected its money and moved right along.” - Garrison Lovely at The Nation

Just the headlines:

Movies + TV

LZ: Riget, season 3

Isn't it funny how life goes! This is a series that Lars Von Trier directed in the 90s and it was pretty much like a Danish Twin Peaks or a haunted hospital with weird and nonsensical stuff happening. It had a little bit more of a dark humor, especially dedicated to the differences between Danes and Swedes – and that's how you get the main line "danskjävlar" (Danish scum).

I watched the first two seasons almost 10 years ago with my husband, then boyfriend, and we couldn't quite grasp those jokes. It turns out that now we live in Sweden, more precisely Malmö, which is the city you can see from Copenhagen and vice-versa. In 1999, they built a bridge connecting both cities but it wasn't ready yet when the series were on, but as distances have shortened since then, the rivalry also intensified.

This time we catch up with some of the old characters (those who didn't die or maybe accepted joining the series again) in a very meta approach – the protagonist is an old lady who watched the series and started to have dreams about the hospital, so she goes there to figure out what's real and what was fiction. At the same time, we have the son of one of the main characters (Helmer) working in the hospital and facing all the incongruity between Swedes and Danes.

It was absolutely funny for us now that we know better about both cultures. I don't know if that is too specific for other audiences to enjoy the show, but I liked the new season and how it gives closure to the whole lore.

Games

DCH: Eat The Reich

Eat The Reich is a new RPG making the rounds on Kickstarter. Think Inglorious Basterds but with Vampires. Looks fun. Gizmodo has an interview with the creators.

Music

LZ: Lepra - Devil’s Blood in Her Tongue

This band appeared on my latest releases selection on Spotify, and I’m glad that happened. They are an antifascist, feminist black metal band from the US. They have a very interesting take on black metal (what they actually call black velvet metal) and they don’t even have guitars on their compositions – only bass, keyboards and drums. This gives their music a bit of a post-punk vibes, maybe some dungeon synth, but the combined vocals of growling and clean voice also contribute a bit to a more punk mood. Recommended for those who like Feminazgul but also Kittie.

The Self-Promotion

CJW: The Big Book of Cyberpunk, edited by Jared Shurin

The full table of contents for The Big Book of Cyberpunk has been released, including a story from yours truly. This was my first reprint sale, which is exciting enough on its own, but when I saw the full TOC for the book I was blown away by the scale and breadth of the list, and a little stunned to be sharing a book with PKD (I literally have his face tattooed on my arm), Samuel Delaney, canonical cyberpunks like Wiliam Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Pat Cadigan, and peers/contemporaries including Ganzeer, Cassandra Khaw, Isabel Fall, T.R. Napper, etc etc. It's an amazing list.

US preorders are up here.

MJW: I've managed to stumble and fall into a regular illustration gig, a development I never saw coming but that I LOVE. You can find illustrations by Mia Walsch on the Tryst Blog, on cool articles like Clients, Stigma, Intimacy and The Performance of Pleasure and Whorephobia is a Problem for Everyone.