Welcome to another edition of nothing here. We’ve got another varied selection of goodness for you, and a weird slice of the now. Again, we’ve tried to keep it a little slimmer wordcount-wise, but if you’re following the links that tickle your fancy, you’ll still find plenty to keep you occupied.
If you want, and are able to, you can support us by becoming a paid subscriber and receive bonus letters as well as these ones. The most recent bonus was a brain-melting essay on cartoon metaphysics from Austin. I can’t tell you what you’re going to get next, but I can tell you it’s going to be good (and probably weird).
Corey J. White (CJW) - The VoidWitch Saga. Newsletter facilitator.
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - Author of The Oprhancorp Trilogy. Host of Catastropod. Your fabulous goth aunt. On Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, Australia. @marleejaneward
Austin Armatys (AA) - Writer/Teacher/Wretched Creeper // Oh Nothing Press // @0hnothing
m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / salvagepunk / ecopoet // Dark Extropian Musings
CJW: The Uses of Disaster (via Ospare)
In the hells of the present, we find the tools we need to build other worlds, as well as tantalizing glimpses of something often thought impossible. This is not cause for celebration, nor even optimism. But it is cause for hope.
For this hope to be realized, however, we must go beyond Solnit’s empirical focus on what happens in response to specific disaster-events and grasp the character of the capitalist disaster. This is not simply a series of punctuated dates and place names—Katrina and Harvey and Irma, 1755 and 1906 and 1985—but an ongoing condition. For many, the ordinary is a disaster. Any coherent response to such continuous disaster will likewise have to be widespread and durable in order to succeed. Building paradise in hell is not enough: we must work against hell and go beyond it. More than disaster communities, we need disaster communism.
And:
As we write, several Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities across the US are under blockade, as part of a nationwide attempt to disrupt their roundup and deportation operations. In the UK, campaigners have successfully pushed back the government’s attempts to extend immigration enforcement into schools as part of its “hostile environment” policy. In Glasgow in the 1990s, a buddy scheme pairing recent migrants with locals was so successful that working class communities turned out to obstruct dawn raids aiming to deport their new friends and neighbors. To our mind, these, too, are disaster communities, and they are no less important than those in post-’85 Mexico City and post-Katrina New Orleans.
Sadly there’s good reason to believe that we’re going to have more articles to share like this New Report Suggests ‘High Likelihood of Human Civilization Coming to an End’ Starting in 2050, until such a time as something major is overhauled in the way we run our economies and governments. BUT, that’s precisely why I’ve shared this piece on Disaster Communism - because if things get more hostile, community is the only thing that we can trust to help us. And indeed, for people who are currently living much harder lives than us, all we can do is help those communities where we can, whether that’s with donations, volunteering, protest, advocacy, insurrection, or education. So, however you feel about communism, give this Uses of Disaster piece a read and think of it in terms of your own community.
I know this piece got a lot of traction thanks to that headline, but the report was put together by a think tank associated with defense and national security, so take it with a grain of salt - their solutions will not be our solutions. It is interesting though in that they point out that the (horrifying) IPCC report from last year was actually hugely conservative, and we can likely expect far worse. The Ashes Ashes team covered this in a suitably depressing episode.
AA: I just want to reinforce what Corey has said above about doing whatever you can to create and strengthen bonds in your own communities. This link from Save The Children gives the names of 10 organisations that are actively involved in assisting refugees. I won’t personally vouch for any of them, but it’s a good place to start your research, if you want.
Australia is increasingly ramping up surveillance and other mechanisms for state-sponsored oppression (as the federal raids on journalists discussed below should adequately illustrate), and we’re not the only country where this is happening - the Powers That Be know what’s coming, and they’re getting prepared. We need to prepare too.
MJW: In her book The Handbook: Surviving and Living With Climate Change, Jane Rawson (and co-author James Whitmore) stress the importance of community in making it through the slow apocalypse of climate change (I talk to her about it in episode 4 of Catastropod). When it feels like there’s nothing that can be done, even small steps like reaching out to your neighbors and nurturing your friendships can make a huge difference. I think people are aching for this kind of community anyway (see the Yia-yia next door) and it kind of sucks that it’s only disaster that might conjure it.
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CJW: You Can Handle the Post-Truth (via Sentiers)
In 2016, a digital marketing agency called Brud created a computer-generated Instagram influencer named Lil Miquela. She’s a “biracial” “woman” who makes music, sells product, and seems to hang out in real-life places with real-life celebrities. She represents the culmination of a decades-long project to make brands more personal and relatable, the evolution of the corporation from Big Other to girl next door.
[…]
But what’s strange about Lil Miquela in particular is that she’s “woke.” She writes ironically detached posts about how her creators are using her to sell consumer goods. She talks about why she dislikes capitalism and what it’s like to be multi-racial. In other words, the agency behind Lil Miquela co-opts the language of political activists in order to make her “relatable” and sell more products.
A really fascinating look at some ideas, observations, and research that came out of the recent Theorizing the Web and RadicalxChange conferences. It covers digital culture, online manipulations, memes, fake news, digital death, and a lot more.
One thing I found slightly frightening is how many projects in the works are straight out of Black Mirror. I picked up on 2 - see if you can find more.
AA: Thanks to Corey sharing this with me, I have now seen what “sexy hipster CGI Colonel Sanders” looks like. I will now inflict that on you too, dear reader, as I am loathe to suffer alone. BEHOLD THE HORROR!
Also, examples of Woke-Speak as a marketing tool are surely never more prevalent than during Pride Month, right? This article by Arwa Mahdawi is a takedown of that increasingly bemusing practice, with a focus on Budweiser’s recent Pride campaign, but Mahdawl also made the point that:
(Budweiser) also worked closely with Pride London and a number of LGBT charities for its Fly the Flag campaign – which is something a lot of companies don’t bother doing. TransPals UK, one of the groups Budweiser partnered with, countered one criticism of the campaign by tweeting that the partnership “will provide much-needed funding & support to the South LDN Trans community”.
Anyway, there’s TONS of great stuff at this link. It’s well worth a read. Here’s a bit I found particularly interesting, about engaging with conspiracy theorists and other “bad meme hosts” (the ContraPoints Incel video linked below is worth a watch, too):
Except in extreme cases, it’s important not to distance these people or publicly shame them. Distancing leads to further social isolation, which can lead to further radicalization. We have to soberly investigate how they spiraled into their current belief system, acknowledge the kernel(s) of truth inside their theory, separate the ideas from the people who hold them, and understand that good people can be hosts to bad memes. The harder you push back, the more they dig in. It’s one of those counter-intuitive things like turning the steering wheel into the turn when you feel your car spinning out. (ContraPoints’ YouTube video on the incel community is one example of how to do this tactfully and creatively).
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CJW: Helsinki’s Radical Solution to Homelessness (via Omar Sakr)
“We decided to make the housing unconditional,” says Kaakinen. “To say, look, you don’t need to solve your problems before you get a home. Instead, a home should be the secure foundation that makes it easier to solve your problems.”
In Finland they solved their homelessness problem by… giving people housing, unconditionally. It’s simple, it works, and in the West we often have a “surplus” of housing because of real estate industry bullshit, so it’s completely feasible for the rest of us to copy this approach. But it doesn’t punish people who are already down on their luck, so we probably won’t try it. If we do give it a shot, it’ll only be because it could save money, never mind the dignity of the people involved:
Housing First costs money, of course: Finland has spent €250m creating new homes and hiring 300 extra support workers. But a recent study showed the savings in emergency healthcare, social services and the justice system totalled as much as €15,000 a year for every homeless person in properly supported housing.
MJW: The move away from ‘staircase’ modes of treatment to this issue is the key: not waiting for the person to get their life together and then giving them housing, but making housing the cornerstone of how people get their lives together. It’s the same principle as making drugs legal and providing them to addicts - once the need to break the law in multiple ways to feed the addiction is gone, the improvement in people’s lives makes other important things fall into place. When you give people dignity and a safe place to rest their heads, then you give them the utter base of a functional existence with which to build a happy life. Of course, our government would never go for it - it makes too much sense.
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AA: Australia is at War with Journalists
[…] journalism has been criminalized to the extent that if a journalist even handles “secret” or “top secret information,” they can be charged and jailed.
This has created the Orwellian power of the authorities to be able to charge a journalist should they be caught in a cafe merely holding such a document, or opening an email containing classified documents. And that, in turn, feeds a temptation for officials to stamp documents as “secret” or “top secret.”
Australia’s law needs to change to give genuine protection to journalists and whistleblowers as long as their exposures are in the public interest.
The author of this article is John Lyons, the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Head of Investigations, and the man who live-tweeted the Australian Federal Police’s raid on his office. Twitter is often characterised as a misery-and-irony-drenched “hellsite” (not entirely untrue), but it certainly still has its uses.
I can only hope the outrage over this story doesn’t die down, but it’s hard to imagine Australia’s deeply conservative voting public being stirred to action by this flagrant display of state suppression of the press. Grim, sad times. And unless people do something drastic, it’s only going to get worse.
Oh, and you can find that “Afghan Files” story by the ABC here. I hope everyone reading this reads it and passes the story on, it’s about as important as they come. The leaked document that the ABC utilised in this investigation embarrassed the government, and here’s why:
A large proportion of the documents are reports on at least 10 incidents between 2009-2013 in which special forces troops shot dead insurgents, but also unarmed men and children.
If the Australian public don’t have the right to know about incidents such as these (done in our name, and with our money), what DO we have a right to know about?
You can find an excellent analysis of this whole pitiful shambles on ABC’s Media Watch here.
CJW: The government says they’re not behind this, but for some strange reason, the raids happened 13-14 months after the story was published, but only 2.5 weeks after the Federal Election.... Not suspicious at all…
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AA: Training a single AI model can emit as much carbon as five cars in their lifetimes
In a new paper, researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, performed a life cycle assessment for training several common large AI models. They found that the process can emit more than 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent—nearly five times the lifetime emissions of the average American car (and that includes manufacture of the car itself).
I can’t help but think that this is actually a helpful side-effect for those with vested interests in seeing their AI flourish.
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MKY: John Wick is a Modern Fairy Tale
“Naming John Wick for Baba Yaga instead of Koschei places him inside a lineage of feminine power, feminine wrath, and feminine antagonism to the governance of men. John Wick is not wronged like a man. John Wick is wronged like a witch. John Wick is wronged like the only woman the king fears, and the only person who can truly hold the king to his word.”
Fascinating reading of the JW films. [thx @debcha!]
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MKY: ADIFO: The hyper-agile, omnidirectional, supersonic flying saucer (via Emily Dare)
There’s a whole ufological conspiracy wormhole you can fly through on reading this about the Breakaway Civ’s ‘onboarding of toys’. But I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
“There’s certainly nothing else out there that can hover and dart about like a drone, while also offering extreme high-speed performance as well as the ability to spin wildly or suddenly produce thrust in five different directions at speed – not to mention potentially employing the main ducted fans to tilt or even flip the aircraft in horizontal flight. The mind boggles just thinking about what this could do in the hands of a well-trained pilot – as well as how treacherous it could be for the ham-fisted.”
The thing is: when your antifa cell is being chased through the streets and buildings by these incredibly maneuverable craft you won’t be asking where they came from, just how to evade them. And I doubt there’ll be anything to prepare you for this in the two big playable resistance sims that had their launch announcements this week (Cyberpunk 2077, Watch Dogs: Legion). But just because there’ll be no sonic boom to warn you they’re incoming doesn’t mean we can’t skip past Uber talking about using my home city to test its flying cars, and using centaur systems of food delivery drones landing on cars to have a friendly flesh face to its last mile to get a glimpse at what’s truly just over the techno-horizon.
Just more evidence that the future as I continue to see is:
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MKY: Russian biologist plans more CRISPR-edited babies
The experiment will target the same gene, called CCR5, that He did, but Rebrikov claims his technique will offer greater benefits, pose fewer risks and be more ethically justifiable and acceptable to the public. Rebrikov plans to disable the gene, which encodes a protein that allows HIV to enter cells, in embryos that will be implanted into HIV-positive mothers, reducing the risk of them passing on the virus to the baby in utero. By contrast, He modified the gene in embryos created from fathers with HIV, which many geneticists said provided little clinical benefit because the risk of a father passing on HIV to his children is minimal.
Russia and China totally aren’t in a race to create posthumans (did someone say super soldiers?) for a hothouse earth future. C’mon now, that sounds like something out of a Predator movie. Plus, they’ve already got a few bugs to work out, cause it seems that Gene edits to ‘CRISPR babies’ might have shortened their life expectancy:
People with two disabled copies of the CCR5 gene — the version that protects against HIV infection — are 21% more likely to die before the age of 76 than are people with at least one working copy of the gene, according to a study1 published on 3 June in Nature Medicine. The reason for the discrepancy is unknown.
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Cutting Room Floor:
This desalination device delivers cheap, clean water with just solar power
When Kids Realize Their Whole Life Is Already Online thanks to their proud parents…
Scientists Genetically Modify Fungus To Kill Mosquitoes That Spread Malaria (via Ospare)
AA: I’m currently in a book club that is reading through Future Days: Krautrock and The Building of Modern Germany by David Stubbs. Although we’re not finished with it yet, I can safely say that it’s an absolute ripper of a book.
I’m a huge fan of CAN, so there are some really excellent anecdotes about this band and their approach. By way of example I thought I’d share with you this quote from Irmin Schmidt (who is still with us at 82 years old, by the way) that caught my attention:
‘From the beginning we would often spend hours, sometimes days, transforming the studio, the space, into a sound installation. A microphone, a speaker and maybe a bit of delay would be enough to make the room resonate. Every little noise, every sound became meaningful: steps, a chair, a few words, an accidental sound created by touching an instrument. Playfully, unintentionally but at the same time highly concentrated and alert, we would explore the space, the sound of objects and movements – more attentive listeners than players. When we were lucky a magical sound-atmosphere would appear, the room, everything around us, the ambience became music – the Can version of ambient – a school for magicians.’
“A school for magicians.” Yes. Something to inspire us, perhaps, no matter our discipline or passion?
CJW: If you’re on twitter, you need to be following hackermaderas for a varied look at the cyberpunk now and near future. Recently they’ve posted some absolutely horrifying examples of future war shit. This sort of military technology would be so cool… if it was in a GI Joe movie (but it would almost certainly be Cobra using it), but in the real world, with the current state of “warfare”, you know this is just new, technologically advanced ways for the US military to blow up weddings in the Middle East and murder civilians without needing to worry about giving their own soldiers PTSD.
That would be such a simple test actually: “Would this tech be used by GI Joe or Cobra?” If it’s the latter, maybe don’t design/build/sell it.
AA: Another link via hackermaderas: I just spent way too long playing with this procedural landscape generator. I found it very relaxing to create and slowly tweak these little fantasy worlds, adding and subtracting different elements.
HINT: Start with some big brushes, generate your image, and then add in detail with some smaller brush sizes.
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CJW: DisImages
Rhizome is a group curating and archiving examples of net art. I would tell you to sign up to their newsletter, but I can’t find the form to link to (seriously, don’t use mailchimp for your newsletter. It’s a pain in the arse, and only good for commercial use). This recent drop really caught my eye - an archive of stock photos from DisImages. Today’s current obsession with weird stock images for/as memes suggests DisImages we’re ahead of the game.
DIS Images responded to the tendency for commercial stock photo agencies to offer very generic imagery which often reproduced stereotypes and gender norms in the process.
[…]
DIS Images, in contrast, kept many of stock photography’s reproducible gestures intact, but introduced less palatable aspects of life under late capitalism, and modeled radical or satirical responses.
Stock images as art and as sociopolitical commentary on late capitalism? Perfect.
CJW: Abstraction, by Shintaro Kago (NSFW)
This fascinatingly fucked-up short comic came via briantm at the Restricted.Academy forum. I’ve definitely seen some of Kago’s work before, but the way they break and then remould the fourth wall in this comic is something else entirely.
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CJW: Finder Library Volume 2
Years ago, probably about the time the Finder Library collections were published, Warren Ellis mentioned Finder in his newsletter. Years later, friend of the newsletter Brendan reminded me that this series exists, and I tracked down the first two fat volumes. Let me tell you, I am ashamed of myself for sleeping on this for so long. It is a brilliant and varied series of sci-fi, in a fascinating and unique world, with smart, subtle worldbuilding, fantastic characters, and beautiful art. Carla Speed McNeil is phenomenal.
You’ll want to start with Finder Volume 1 (of course), but the stories here are even better than the ones contained in Vol 1 - particularly the opening tale about a man who maintains a virtual world in his own head that other people visit. It’s all about art, creation, inspiration, imposter syndrome and so much more.
Don’t make the same mistake as me - if you like sci-fi, comics, and gorgeous black and white art, you won’t find anything else quite like Finder.
MKY:
That weird hyperreal object I mentioned last issue is now unlocked and available for your arcane edification.
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AA: The Creeper Magazine Kickstarter ends in just a few hours. This is the only place you’ll be able to get the design below (by Jon Weber) on a t-shirt. We’re also giving out a set of 3 stickers (good ones - big and vinyl and all that) to all physical backers as a way to say ‘thank you’. We’re so grateful to all those who backed this project in any capacity, we really appreciate it, and we hope you enjoy the magazine!
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MJW: Continuum was last weekend, and the theme was ‘Other Worlds’. Continuum is Melbourne’s Science Fiction/Fantasy convention and is one of the rare events where the Aussie SFF community can get together and sink piss at the bar… oh, and all the rest too.
I love the community aspects of the convention most of all - there are some wonderful people in Aussie SFF (Cat Sparks, I’m looking at you…). This year there were two international Guests of Honour, Kate Elliot and Ken Liu. I shared a panel with Ken (‘Standalone or Series?’) and he was engaging and had lots to say about that particular subject. Corey and I both attended and sat on various panels (we teamed up on ‘Writing and Depression’, something we know all too much about…).
At the closing ceremony the theme and Guests of Honour were announced for next years con: ‘All Possible Futures’, Zen Cho, Glenda Larke and… me! I’m so excited and honoured.
(Artwork by Briar Rolfe)
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CJW: And that’s us for another issue. Hope you found something in here to rattle the bars on the ol’ brain cage (and honestly - with everything we packed in - if you don’t feel buzzed by something, that’s on you).
I’m not sure how present I’m going to be in the next couple of issues, as I’ll be travelling to the US for a novel writing workshop, and then stopping in to NYC to visit some friends and see my editor. But that’s why this is a team effort - you can be sure that between the four of us (and guests…) we’ll still deliver something worthwhile into your inbox.
Look after yourself, build/find your community, and if you’re in a position of privilege, give others a chance to speak. You might not like what they have to say, but maybe you need to hear it.