CJW: Welcome to issue 52 of the nothing here newsletter. 52 means we are officially 2 years old. Thanks to everyone who has followed us along this full journey and to those who have joined us more recently.
It’s another bumper issue this fortnight - there has been so much going on I feel like we’ve barely touched on some issues that would normally get featured quite prominently (the first that comes to mind is the tech companies pulling back from developing facial recognition tools and/or providing them to law enforcement).
I wrote our last bonus letter, all about Nick Bostrom’s Simulation paper, reality, free-will, and related topics. I almost feel like I could write a book on the subject, but for now I have too many novel ideas fighting for my time and brain power, so it’ll have to wait. Anyway, to get access to this bonus, future bonuses, and the full archive, just go here to become a supporter.
Corey J. White (CJW) - Current events sin-eater. Sci-fi author. Naarm/Melbourne.
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - Author. Apocalypse witch. Your fabulous goth aunt. I’m also this guy.
m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / ecopoet // Dark Extropian Musings / pryvt.rsrch
Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
Many signs at rallies referred to the 432 deaths that are known to have happened since the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody delivered its final report in 1991. That figure is based on Guardian Australia’s findings from a two-year long project to monitor Aboriginal deaths in custody, Deaths Inside. We updated the database and published new results on Saturday. We found the number had risen to 434. But by Saturday morning even that number was already out of date.
If you need any further evidence to convince you of just how violently racist Australian police are (particularly toward Indigenous people) then consider this: in the middle of global protests about police violence against black people, they still couldn’t help themselves, and murdered another 5 Aboriginal people in police custody in a matter of days.
Related: Australia still turns a blind eye to Aboriginal people dying in police custody
Wave after wave of immigrants can come here and experience Australia’s unique brand of racism yet still manage to be more accepted and higher up the social rungs than Aboriginal people will ever be. It’s too hard to deal with local issues, and therefore pointing at America and saying “but they’re worse” is an easy method of avoidance.
This is a great summary of the Australian context concerning Aboriginal deaths in police custody.
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MJW: Australia’s Media Has To Share The Blame For Our Racist Culture
I fear for a day when 90% of the media that Australians consume comes from a handful of very large organisations whose main concern is their bottom line. We know that the best way to drive traffic or keep people’s attention is to make them feel a negative emotion. This model is fundamentally broken. It rewards the wrong people — the people who know how to get under your skin and cause a reaction.
I am frequently fucking embarrassed at the state of Australian media. The people who live here deserve better than this.
CJW: There’s so much in this piece - well-worth reading for our Aussie subscribers.
Of course Australians think racism is a thing of the past — we only ever show them a white utopia on our screens.
This piece also serves to highlight the importance of supporting local media organisations, because the big corporates only care about cash flow, not the people who need the news. I’ve seen a few people recommend NITV, but if like me you don’t watch TV, you could pay attention to, and support, organisations like IndigenousX.
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MJW: Robodebt was an algorithmic weapon of calculated political cruelty
The government sparked backlash against robodebt when it attacked freelance journalist Andie Fox, who published her personal account of robodebt. The government responded by leaking her case details to the media…
“Robodebt was bureaucratic violence enabled by lack of government accountability. Its prime purpose was the dogmatic pursuit of a campaign of cruelty against the unemployed, disabled people, single parents, care-givers, casual and gig economy workers.”
The Australian government runs on fucking cruelty (just take a look at our pandemic and economic response - sensible and saved thousands of lives yes, GOOD JOB!, but their subsequent economic plans included a petty two-tiered welfare system and massive subsidies to industries with the most power to lobby. Their plan seems to be ‘let’s support the people who least need the support and fuck poor people!’ and their justification for that is… poor people are used to being poor?)
Robodebt was a massive exercise in cruelty and punitive punishment, they knew it right from the start, and they did it anyway. PEOPLE FUCKING DIED FROM THIS. I am sick of our leaders pandering to a white mid-to-upper-middle-class ‘Aussie-battler’ voter base that, if the fallout from Coronavirus goes the way it will probably go, is going to disappear. Maybe when large swathes of the population are forced to take government support as jobs disappear forever, the formerly-oblivious middle-class will look at our system of welfare and realise how fucking wrong it is - now that they are being fucked by it.
CJW: In a just society, someone would be in prison for this, or an entire group of someones, but because this is the world we live in, no one even lost their job.
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Make no mistake, the police are the ones rioting. And they’re doing so with impunity.
A detailed breakdown of the first days of the protests in the US that sprung up after the murder of George Floyd. Just in case you, uhh, somehow missed it.
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CJW: The George Floyd Killing Exposes Failures of Police Reform
“Now is the time to invest in a safe, liberated future for our city. We can’t afford to keep funding MPD’s attacks on Black lives,” the Minneapolis group Reclaim the Block wrote in a statement calling on the city council to defund the police department.
We need to defund police everywhere, but it seems most pressing in the US where they are literally using military hand-me-downs. If we must have police (and that’s a big if) they should be unarmed, with a focus on community outreach.
This article covers a lot of ground on the topic of reforming and/or defunding the police in the wake of George Floyd’s murder (and the many, many others of recent years).
Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson ushered in an era of police reform that saw federal and local governments invest heavily in police training, including on racial bias, and in technology like body cameras that officials promised would bring about accountability. Floyd’s death was yet another reminder that those reforms have failed.
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CJW: Minneapolis residents commandeered a hotel for homeless
While hotels across the metro area sit mostly empty because of the coronavirus, all the rooms in the four-story former Sheraton are filled. Other areas of the hotel are being converted to sleeping spaces to accommodate still more people, while the waiting list stretches beyond 100.
Actions like this give me real hope for change following this possible-revolution. Just as long as the racists in and out of uniform can keep their fingers off their triggers long enough to recognise the humanity of their fellow citizens.
MKY: This was my favourite thing. And then they took over Capitol Hill in Seattle and took this to the next level… fuckyeah mutual aid. Fuckyeah radical teen vogue readers. Viva la CHAZ man.
DCH: Speaking of the Seattle autonomous zone, this is an amazing read with Nikkita Oliver, the former mayoral candidate leading the efforts.
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CJW: The Top U.S. Coronavirus Hot Spots Are All Indian Lands (via Jim McDermott)
If Native American tribes were counted as states, the five most infected states in the country would all be native tribes, with New York dropping to No. 6, according to a compilation by the American Indian Studies Center at U.C.L.A.
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My sense is that the Navajo have handled the crisis reasonably well. The tribe canceled events, imposed curfews and tested a far higher rate of the population than the country has as a whole. But the Indian Health Service says that 28 percent of tests have come back positive, an alarmingly high rate.
And while we’re talking about racist police violence in the US, here’s an article from 2017: Native Americans: The forgotten minority in police shootings. I share this not to take away from BLM at all, but rather to say that police need to be defunded all across the country, not just in Minneapolis, or other cities with similarly high profile killings.
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DCH: How to Protest Safely in the Age of Surveillance (Wired)
As I write this (01 Jun 2020) there is a literal arsenal of tech being used in Minneapolis to surveil protestors. And the US Military is monitoring protests in at least 7 other states. The Wired article above gives you some basic tips to protect yourself and your allies.
CJW: Worth noting that Signal is (apparently) funded by the CIA. I still think it’s mostly secure - it just comes down to whether or not they want to break encryption on your communications. I assume for 99% of Americans, that’s not the case, but it really depends on how extreme the coming police, military, and intelligence actions/crackdowns are in the wake of the protests. If they decide that left-wing = antifa = terrorist, then a lot of people might find themselves under increased scrutiny (to say the least).
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DCH: Anonymous Hackers Threaten To ‘Expose The Many Crimes’ Of Minneapolis Police (Forbes)
We’ll see if they come through on this but fingers crossed they do. I’ve read elsewhere that they’ve already doxxed the entire MN PD.
MKY: From what I saw after that, isn’t wasn’t a fresh drop. Nonetheless, it’s great to see Anon maybe back. HACK THE PLANET!
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DCH: Inside the NSA’s Secret Tool for Mapping Your Social Network (Wired)
This is where contact chaining came in. The phrase is used to describe a sophisticated form of analysis that looks for hidden, indirect relationships in very large data sets. Contact chaining began with a target telephone number, such as Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s, and progressively widened the lens to ask whom Tsarnaev’s contacts were talking to, and whom those people were talking to, and so on.
A good read about the evolution of NSA surveillance from Mainway and Stellar Wind to the “contact chaining” social graph they use today.
CJW: We all heard Snowden’s revelations, but the true scope of US surveillance has only really become apparent to me recently. They spy on the whole fucking world - they know who you talk to, for how long, and they probably know what you talk about and why (I doubt the claims they’re “only” collecting metadata). They know what you spend your money on, and they know what gets you off. But don’t worry about it - they’re the good guys, so it’s fine…
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DCH: Trump Is Doing All of This for Zuckerberg
It’s important to pay attention to what the president is doing, but not because the legal details of this order matter at all. Trump is unlikely to repeal Section 230 or take any real action to curb the power of the major social-media companies. Instead, he wants to keep things just the way they are and make sure that the red-carpet treatment he has received so far, especially at Facebook.
Good read as always from Zeynep Tufecki. Twitter is Trump’s noisey misdirection from his real game which plays out on Facebook. With Zuckerberg’s full and willing backing.
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CJW: ‘Collapse of civilisation is the most likely outcome’: top climate scientists
Australia’s top climate scientist says “we are already deep into the trajectory towards collapse” of civilisation, which may now be inevitable because 9 of the 15 known global climate tipping points that regulate the state of the planet have been activated.
Now we return to our regularly-scheduled apocalypse.
MKY: right? Crises are nesting within each other like Russian dolls rn.
MJW: Cool cool cool cool cool cool cool cool.
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CJW: Pentagon War Game Included Scenario of Gen Z Protests
According to the scenario, many members of Gen Z — psychologically scarred in their youth by 9/11 and the Great Recession, crushed by college debt, and disenchanted with their employment options — have given up on their hopes for a good life and believe the system is rigged against them.
The military is already planning ways to put down a Zoomer rebellion, so don’t let them down, fellow kids.
MKY: GenXer’s for the ZRebellions!
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MJW: Luxury Bag Factory Worker Jailed For A Facebook Post
Unless they are unionized, workers like Soy, who are at one end of the supply chain, rarely know which brands they are making products for. This absence of transparency in the brands’ supply chains, according to labor rights activist Andrew Tillett-Saks, is one of the ways brands escape accountability for how factories treat their workers. “Brands hide behind these corporate structure nuances… It’s important for the public to be reminded who is at either end of the supply chain and the vast gulf of inequality between them.”
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CJW: The Politics of Pop: The Rise and Repression of Uyghur Music in China
When he sang of the “homeland” (weten) that night, everyone in the largely Uyghur audience understood exactly what he meant: not China or even Xinjiang but the Uyghur homeland, separate, special, and apart. Undoubtedly, these lyrics only pushed past the censors because of plausible deniability. Surely the singer was prepared to tell anyone who asked that the homeland he sang of was the People’s Republic. But we all understood; we knew the meaning of the hidden transcript.
We shared links last year about the “re-education” camps in China where Uyghur people are being detained, but this is an interesting and broader look at Uyghur music, culture, and history, through the lens of a local The Voice singing competition.
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CJW: The Great Film Production Renaissance: Are You Ready? (via Sentiers)
Some interesting speculations here, but I’d take it all with a grain of salt. The author talks with the breathless enthusiasm that is common to tech types, without failing to take into consideration the larger artistic and cultural impacts of this sort of filming, or the ways this digital fidelity encourages vapid spectacle. For instance, you’ll never look at an Avengers film again after someone points out how much time they spend arguing with each other in boring corporate office style environments. They do that because it’s cheap, but it’s also creatively lifeless. If this is the future for blockbusters, that’s fine, who cares, they’re already mostly CGI anyway, but I don’t (or refuse to) see a future where digital backdrops come to replace real, physical locations. Imagine Atlanta without it being filmed in and around Atlanta.
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CJW: Mass Extermination of Iowa Pigs Amid Pandemic Revealed
Rather than caring for these animals until pre-pandemic demand returns, or converting them into discounted or donated food for millions of people who have suddenly become unemployed and food insecure by caring for the animals until slaughterhouse capacity can accommodate them, many companies, including Iowa Select, have evidently made decisions driven exclusively by a goal to maximize profits. In sum, they are slaughtering these now “worthless” animals in vast numbers as fast as possible, using extermination methods that cause sustained suffering and agony, to avoid the costs of keeping them alive.
Factory farming is inhumane at every stage. You can’t even justify its use by saying it provides cheaper meat than smaller, more humane farming, because as you can see here, they don’t give a fuck about food production or feeding people - those are just steps along the way to the real goal of making money.
Related: Animal Rights Activists Uncover Locations of Factory Farms
MJW: I just… I can’t… I do not understand.
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DCH: Pandemics have fueled the rise of mega-corporations—and they’ll do it again
Big businesses have leveraged plagues to augment their power for centuries. And Covid-19 won’t be any different.
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ACAB Spring:
Louisville Police Left David McAtee’s Body on Street for 12 Hours
Racist History Behind Trump’s Threat to Shoot Minneapolis Protesters Spurs Twitter to Act
James Mattis Denounces President Trump, Describes Him as a Threat to the Constitution
A boot is crushing the neck of American democracy | Cornel West
American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation & The 1619 Project - Historical context (via Jay Edidin).
Cutting Room Floor:
Why Can’t More Families Use SNAP Benefits for Online Orders? (DCH: I grew up on SNAP assistance in the form of food stamps. This benefit system needs to be radically updated.)
#PublishingPaidMe and a Day of Action Reveal an Industry Reckoning
Donald Trump’s executive order is “plainly illegal,” says co-author of Section 230 (via 20minutesintothefuture)
Neo-Feudalism and Pandemic Shock Doctrine - more on neofeudalism in this review of Mackezie Wark’s Capital Is Dead, which I’m really going to have to read.
Universal Basic Everything (via Sentiers) - “What we have been building in Barking and Dagenham are universal basic infrastructures for peer-to-peer participation.”
On the rise of dark stores and ‘multifunctional retail’ - Dark stores and the possible future of retail (via Sentiers)
Let’s end JK Rowling’s toxic ‘debate’ on womanhood (via Alison Evans)
Mining company destroys sacred Aboriginal cave in Western Australia. They’re “sorry.”
CJW: We must bear witness to black deaths in our own country
They are not ‘outraged’ because they are not ‘shocked’. There is nothing shocking about racist violence perpetrated by police because it is normalised. It is seen as legitimate violence. It is this legitimate violence that was not only used to steal the country and assert white dominance but also maintain it through the oppression of Aboriginal people.
A powerful piece from Amy McQuire. In so many ways, Australia has been culturally colonised by the US, which is why it’s sad but not surprising that it took the huge BLM protests in America to make people in Australia stand up and take notice of the issues we have here and even then, plenty of people have been trying to deny our own history of slavery. It may not have been on the same industrial scale as the Transatlantic Slave Trade, but it was no less real, and it was still slavery.
MKY: Damnation (2017) [Netflix]
Wanna watch a Marxist preach the Revolution to the people during the Depression? Wanna watch a small scale insurrection play out against Bankers and their Pinkerton agents? Only problem is it’s a one-season wonder, that was only greenlight to begin with on the success of Mr Robot, at the time. This is definitely a show to watch rn.
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MKY: Penny Dreadful: City of Angels
Also rather timely. And basically a Natalie Dormer showcase. So far she’s punched a cop and started a race riot, and is helping the Nazis create the infrastructure for a future land invasion - and making LA pay for it! I just pray its ending isn’t as Dreadful as the orig series.
MJW: I would watch Natalie Dormer do anything. Sweep the floor, read a book in silence, lay in a hammock eating an apple… Oh wait.
CJW: We’re about five minutes away from launching a Natalie Dormer gif newsletter, aren’t we?
CJW: Or: How to name a disaster - Elvia Wilk (via Andrew Dana Hudson)
[…] while the future may resemble the past, there will be no reversal of the pandemic, nor a reversion to the worldview that came before. Loss changes those who live through it. “It,” says Lessing, “was, above all, a consciousness of something ending.” Something is ending, but many things are continuing and others are beginning, and this offers the opportunity for new choices. What will end are certainly not the structures of power that got us here: Those will likely hold, and try to hold tighter. We should and will try to dismantle power.
Interesting piece about experiencing and naming a slow apocalypse (or just massive, catastrophic shift), using Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor as a lens. I’ve not read it, and indeed I’m torn on the two Lessing books I have read (The Golden Notebook and Shikasta, which were brilliant and heart-breaking in parts, but meandering and dull in others), but now I want to check it out.
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CJW: I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream: The Duty of the Black Writer During Times of American Unrest
This is a brilliant personal essay by Tochi Onyebuchi. I’ve not yet read his book Riot Baby, but I’ve heard nothing but great things about it, and after reading this I’m even more excited to check it out.
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MJW: Indigital - Australia’s First Indigenous Tech Education Company
Indigital is Australia’s first Indigenous Edu-tech company, specialising in technology development and digital skills training in augmented and mixed realities, artificial intelligence, machine learning, internet of things and geospatial technologies. Our mission is to close the digital divide between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, by providing a meaningful pathway for Indigenous people into the digital economy and the creation of future technologies. Together, we can use digital technologies to express 80,000 years of human knowledge for generations to come.
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DCH: The Tragedy of the Common Black Square
A brilliant read from my friend Rina Atienza about blackout tuesday and the intersection of art history, media theory, protest, and even faith. Holy hand grenades, indeed.
DCH: The Machine Never Blinks: A Graphic History of Spying and Surveillance (Fantagraphics)
We used to call it the Information Age, an era of technological innovation that made our lives more convenient. But since the idealistic early days of the Internet, we’ve learned that seemingly benign technology, from debit cards to social media, is being used to spy on us — so now let’s call it what it is: the Surveillance Society.
Good read by Joseph Canlas, Ivan Greenberg, Everett Patterson. Worth your time.
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No one working in comics today is better suited to tell Bowie’s story than the Allreds. This sets a new bar for their work too. Scoop it up while you can.
DCH: Will covid-19 reverse globalisation?
From that pinko rag, The Economist
DCH:
Emory Douglas was one of the greatest designers of the 20th century.
MJW: I posted a piece on Medium back in April (what is time, even?) about how I work and how I hope that our new world order changes the way we work forever: Please let us revolutionise work.
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MJW: If you’ve made it to the end of our newsletter of horrors we salute you. Remember: as you destroy this fucking cruel system, dismantle racist institutions, and egg every bigot you see, be kind to yourself. Have you eaten lunch? Did you bring a sweater?
