nothing here but corporate serfdom

issue 142 - 27th June, 2021

CJW: Thanks for joining us again for another issue of nothing here. This time out, we have returning guest Maddison Stoff, Melbourne-based writer, critic, musician, and generally rad person.

If you would still like to support the work we do here (and gain access to the full bonus archive), just go here to become a premium subscriber. We appreciate any and all support. And if there’s someone who you think will appreciate the newsletter, please forward this to them.

The Team

• Corey J. White (CJW) - King Sound.
• Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - also writes as Mia Walsch. Author, memoirist, very tired person. Professional reject. Leatherworker. ¾ through my mental breakdown, I hope.
• Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
• Maddison Stoff (MS) - author, critic, and occasional musician from Melbourne, Australia. She writes experimental and pulp-inspired speculative fiction and reviews sci-fi for Aurealis. Subscribe to her Patreon for new stories, personal essays, and creative content every month, or follow her on Twitter @thedescenters.

Articles

CJW: Israel's New Leaders Facilitate, Then Criticize, Racist Rally - Robert Mackey at The Intercept

That, it seemed to many observers, is the extent of change on offer from Israel’s post-Netanyahu government: facilitating a racist rally intended to demoralize and terrify the millions of Palestinians who live under Israeli rule without equal rights, but feeling bad about it.

Nobody who’s been paying attention actually expected change from the “change coalition”...

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CJW: OnlyFans Website May Be Worth $1 Billion After New Startup Funding - Gillian Tan and Lucas Shaw at Bloomberg

We’ve seen this before: Get a profile (and rich) off the labor of sex workers, then pivot away from NSFW content and leave those sex workers high and dry. How do they think their valuation is going to look once all the people bringing in the money are hounded off the site by new anti-SW terms and conditions?

Not to mention that Patreon is already right there. It might not have that sizzle because it’s an old service in internet years, but if neither service is SW-friendly, and Patreon takes a 10% cut versus OF’s 20% cut, where are creators going to go?

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DCH: The Covid vaccine and the people of Nextdoor - Jane Elizabeth at Nieman Journalism Lab

Daniel Acosta-Ramos, an investigative researcher with First Draft, has studied misinformation on Nextdoor throughout the 2020 election and into the pandemic. The platform is just as full of “information disorders” as other social media platforms, he says, but Nextdoor manages to fly under the radar for two reasons: First, it’s hyperlocal and thus smaller in scale than Facebook and many other platforms. Second, it’s difficult for researchers and others to study Nextdoor, because users have access only to their own neighborhood posts.

We’ve talked before about the staggering amount of racism found on Nekkkdoor. What we’re beginning to see now is the significant role the platform is having in ginning up covid misinformation too. Bad actors are using the platform to quickly turn the “vaccine hesitant” into militant anti-vaxxers.

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DCH: NASA: Earth Is Absorbing an 'Unprecedented' Amount of Heat - Brian Khan at Gizmodo

Ominous new research shows that the Earth is taking in a shocking amount of heat. In the past 15 years, the amount of incoming solar radiation trapped on the surface and in the oceans has doubled.

The amount of heat we’re talking about here is equivalent to 4 Hiroshima bombs worth of energy every second. 90% of which is going straight into the oceans. We may very well be past the tipping point here folks.

CJW: Related - Leaked UN draft report warns of accelerating climate devastation - at Al Jazeera (via Foreign Exchanges)

Species extinction, more widespread disease, unliveable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas – these and other devastating climate effects are accelerating and are bound to become painfully obvious before a child born today turns 30, according to the draft report.

[...]

But the document, designed to influence critical policy decisions, is not scheduled for release until February 2022 – too late for crunch UN summits this year on climate, biodiversity and food systems, some scientists say.

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DCH: The Airwaves of Navajo Nation - Karen Fischer at The Verge

A century later, radio across the Nation is just as vital because of the lack of consistent utility access. Stations that broadcast in Diné Bizaad are the bedrock of everyday Navajo life. And for the 7,600 people whose sole language is Diné Bizaad, there is no other option beyond radio to receive news, public health notices, and entertainment — that is the only link to the outside world. That population, whose sole language cannot be heard elsewhere, who are arguably the most vulnerable on the reservation to a lack of information access, were the ones who wanted to hear nothing about a virus that could kill them.

Great read on the collision of the digital divide, cultural ethos, and Covid misinformation in the Navajo Nation and one radio broadcasters fight to save lives.

Books

MS: Something I read recently for Aurealis magazine that doesn’t seem to be getting the attention it deserves is Unity, a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk novel by Seattle sci-fi writer Elly Bangs.

I loved this book not only for it’s interesting subtext about polyamory and (transgender) identity, but also for the way that created an illusion of a history behind its world: a future setting built over the rubble of a number of potentially eminent appocalypses, which at once functioned as a warning that if weren’t for some kind of human intervention, could have been the last, but also offered reassurance that the endings were survivable, even desirable in a broader sense, as every ending, every separation, offers us the chance to build something better. Something new.

Quietly, I don’t have too much hope about the world we live in changing for the better without some kind of a big collapse. So it always feels affirming when I get to read contemporary science fiction novels that still feel aspirational after periods of conflict and collapse. It isn’t just escapism for me. I think it counts as self-care? It’s hard work watching people burn the Earth when individually there’s almost nothing I can do to stop it happening. It’s inspiring to know that other people, especially other sci-fi writers, think about this situation too.

Movies + TV

MS: Gentleman Jack

On a lighter note, my girlfriend Natalie is also a writer. She’s working on a young adult fiction novel at the moment about a teenaged trans-lesbian who undergoes a BPD-related crisis. As part of her research for this book, she’s been looking into positive, or at least relatable portrayals of the condition in popular media. She believes the television series Gentleman Jack (based on the diaries of historical landowner Anne Lister,) is among the best.

Honestly, it’s hard to find authentic and empowering neurodiverse characters in queer-inclusive media outside of the stories that I write myself, but the fact that Anne Lister’s character is not just this, but also a dominant/toppy cis lesbian with a lot of the same (gender) problems that a trans lesbian might also face, makes this show a comforting experience for me! I’m even willing to overlook the fact that she’s (at least at the beginning,) somewhat of a tyrannical landlord, although it bothered me so much I almost turned it off to start with. In context though, it seems more like a complicated but unfortunate necessity, rather than the stain on her character which it seemed to me to be when she was introduced. More period dramas about historical lesbians, please!

URL

CJW: How are our cities going to look in a rapidly heating world? It won’t be long before 50C will be normal - James Bradley at The Guardian

Despite the impacts of Covid-19, Australian cities are going to get bigger and more crowded in coming decades. Meanwhile, the need to reduce greenhouse emissions is going to force us to make difficult decisions about their layout and organisation, increasing density in many areas and building transport corridors to move people about more efficiently.

But this is also good news. Because it means we have an opportunity to reshape our cities and make them work better for all of us. And one of the most important ways we do this is by regenerating natural systems and incorporating living ecosystems into the urban environment.

James Bradley writes brilliantly about climate change, grounding it in a context that many of the scientific reports and responses might miss. He’s also on the slate with me (and others) for the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, with the winner to be announced on the 7th of July.

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CJW: Ecological crises and equitable futures - Sy Taffel at ESRA (via Sentiers)

If the discourse of the Anthropocene problematically homogenises humans in order to distribute blame equally for ecological crises which are overwhelmingly the result of activities by certain groups of economically privileged humans, discourses surrounding overpopulation predominantly criticise those who contribute the least to these crises. [...] If we focus on population growth instead of per capita emissions we end up blaming the global poor for crises that are overwhelmingly caused by the global rich.

This is a thorough, straightforward, and well-annotated overview of current ecological discourse, taking issue with inequalities and misinformation contained within Extinction, Apocalypse, and Technological Solutionism discourse, and offering Degrowth as a path forward.

Degrowth is designed to ensure that everyone has enough to lead a dignified and materially comfortable life while curtailing the drastic overconsumption that has led us towards an ecological precipice. This recognises that the dramatic growth of inequality over the past 40 years had led to a situation where a dramatic redistribution of wealth is required for a socially and ecologically just society.

[...]

[...] forming plans for a materially credible, ecologically sustainable, post-capitalist future is absolutely necessary if we are to avoid the likelihood of a future where the rich fortify themselves in relatively safe, highly militarized zones within temperate regions while most people are left in ruined ecologies located in sacrifice zones, existing well below the social foundation. While extinction falls prey to the fatalism of capitalist realism and technological salvation is a fantasy, degrowth is a strategy that should be pursued in order to avoid a future where ecological crises and social breakdown form an apocalyptic event that elicits nationalist, racist and xenophobic human responses.

I don't know if there's anything new here if you've been paying attention, but these sorts of overviews are always useful for encapsulating a lot of information in one readily-linkable place.

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DCH: We’re Not In A Real Estate Bubble - It’s far worse than that - Jared A. Brock

So long as your monthly housing-as-service payment remains relatively “affordable” (AKA half your income), the ownership class doesn’t care if it’s rent instead of a mortgage. Thus, house prices continue to rise against all reason as private equity and rent-seeking investors outbid families for control of shelter. Sure, there might be more real estate price crashes, but they’ll just be bigger versions of 2008 — buying opportunities for the hyper-elite. Your home is now a future hedge fund investment.

[...]

We’re in the middle of a paradigm shift to corporate serfdom.

We need more cities to take aggressive stances against AIrBnB. Berlin has been one of the best case studies in the fight against this bullshit. They’ve had (to varying success) laws on the books for years that have had noticeable short-term impact to aid renters and home buyers against this parasitic platform and the commercial interests that have flocked to it. Because of these and similar policies more housing stock has been released for practical use because it’s simply not in greedy landlords interests to use AirBnB.

CJW: I’ve basically come to the conclusion that until such a time as Hollywood adapts one of my books, it’s very unlikely I’d be able to afford to buy a house.

Notably (and as we’ve mentioned before, I’m sure), this sort of rentiership was one of Peter Frase’s Four Futures. It was also the one I thought most likely to occur, as the writing has been on the wall for a while now. But that doesn’t mean we can’t shift to a better future.

MJW: This housing bullshit is why the largest growing population of people experiencing homelessness in Australia is women over 55. (Insert link) If governments will let the nanna's of the country experience homelessness, then fuck the rest of us.

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CJW: Airbnb Is Spending Millions of Dollars to Make Nightmares Go Away - Olivia Carville at Bloomberg

[Internal safety t]eam members have the autonomy to spend whatever it takes to make a victim feel supported, including paying for flights, accommodation, food, counseling, health costs, and sexually transmitted disease testing for rape survivors. A former agent who was at Airbnb for five years describes the approach as shooting “the money cannon.”

[...]

Former agents recall cases where they had to counsel guests hiding in wardrobes or running from secluded cabins after being assaulted by hosts. Sometimes the guests were the perpetrators, as with an incident when one was found in bed, naked, with his host’s 7-year-old daughter. Agents have had to hire body-fluid crews to clean blood off carpets, arrange for contractors to cover bullet holes in walls, and deal with hosts who discover dismembered human remains.

Parts of this are pretty horrifying. And I can't help but wonder how much uber and others pay each year to cover up the assaults that are certainly happening on their platforms. I'm not saying that to fearmonger, but rather to point out that the key to profitability for these platforms is to do as little as possible when it comes to regulations, safety, and oversight, and only address issues if and when they become a PR problem.

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CJW: Planetary Sapience - Benjamin Bratton at NOEMA (via Sentiers)

The technologies of a planetary society are ongoing processes over which we have agency. In its current commercial form, the primary purpose of planetary-scale computation is to measure and model individual people in order to predict their next impulse. But a more aspirational goal would be to contribute to the comprehension, composition and enforcement of a shared future that is more rich, diverse and viable.

There's a thread of techno-optimism throughout this piece that I can't really get behind, but I still thought it worth sharing because the idea of using our existing planetary technologies to rethink our relationship to the planet and all that entails is an interesting one. And of course some sort of deliberate terraforming is necessary (rather than the deterraforming we've performed as a byproduct of our Western lifestyles), and when we're talking about, for instance, rewilding at the scale we need to consider, that's a project that could be greatly assisted by the global networks of satellites to track our progress, not to mention global communications to facilitate cooperation, etc.

Anyway, that's just one place my mind went. There's plenty more - the section on synthetic intelligence in particular spoke to me.

Is the very long-term evolution of “intelligence” — human, animal, machine, hybrids — a fundamental purpose of the organization and complexification of life itself? If so, now that intelligence begins to migrate to the inorganic substrate of silicon, what planetarities does this portend?

MS: I’ve written stories featuring synthetic-biological hybrid intelligences for years, but it’s only recently that people have begun discussing them as if they’re imminently happening. As with most real-world post-human or transhuman stuff, I find it deeply troubling to imagine these intelligences being programmed in the capitalist-masculinist world we currently live in, enshrining it’s hypocrisies and biases as the rhetoric framework to create a “better human” or “improve” the world. Most people with the power and desire to make these changes happen do not share my values or my definition of intelligence. But in a better world, I’d love to merge my conscious mind with a machine. It’s an interesting subject to explore in fiction nonetheless!

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DCH: The Politics of Biodesign by Ollie Cotsaftis

All this knowledge should be seen as an opportunity for design. Biophilic design, biomimicry, and biodesign are contemporary yet underutilized approaches to design and fabrication with significant potential to regenerate our wounded planet. But whereas the former, biophilic design and biomimicry, refer to the production of materials, objects, and systems either better connected with nature or inspired from biological models, biodesign provides a more elegant and relevant answer through the use of biomaterials and living organisms as core components of the finished work.

Dovetails nicely with the need to design for sustainable development and regenerative action caller for in the society-centered design manifesto Sarah Gold and I wrote last year. Making more things biodegradable is just the first step. We can and should and need to do so much more.

Data Viz

DCH: The shocking numbers behind the Lake Mead drought crisis - Rachel Ramirez, Pedram Javaheri and Drew Kann at CNN

The United States' largest reservoir is draining rapidly. Plagued by extreme, climate change-fueled drought and increasing demand for water, Lake Mead on Wednesday registered its lowest level on record since the reservoir was filled in the 1930s.

25,000,000 Americans are about to get well and truly fucked thanks to the climate crisis. The hardest hit are going to be agricultural communities in Arizona as well as indigenous peoples living within the Colorado River basin.

Music

MS: I’ve been rediscovering the 2020 Grimes album Miss Anthropocene recently after bouncing off it fairly hard when it came out effectively for not being Art Angels, but also just because the songs felt like inauthentic subjects for the singer/producer to write about considering her relationship with Elon Musk. Now that time has passed, however, especially in the wake of my own break-up with a person who took advantage of my comparatively vulnerable economic circumstances to exploit me, it’s difficult to avoid noticing a previously unrecognised emotional subtext to the album.

It’s an often un-remarked upon fact that Elon Musk has a history of (alleged) psychological abuse, and if you look at things like the July 4th 2020 streaming conversation between Ashnikko (another artist who is terribly inspiring to me) and Grimes which Musk drops in on at the 13 minute mark, you can see a lot of anecdotal evidence that their relationship is not completely healthy, most notably depicted in the way that Musk just doesn’t show much interest in having two of the most exciting independent pop artists in the world having a conversation in his lounge room, and the way that Grimes herself seems scared of him, scared of herself, anxious, even before he shows up.

This perspective is explored in even greater detail in the film clip for her (explicitly suicidal) song You’ll Miss Me When I’m Not Around, a green-screen film produced from offcuts made during the production of another song from the same album that seems to be about the use of drugs to get away from reliving your trauma, which together point towards an artist who is living under serious psychological strain… perhaps because she’s living or has lived with an (allegedly) emotionally abusive billionaire who ruined her career for a lot of long-term and potential fans while presumably providing access to material support or even short-term confidence that Grimes must have felt unable to secure on her own, possibly because he planted that emotional dependence in her, or took advantage of it once she couldn’t get away?

I also quite enjoy how close the song looks visually to a (freely released) story I wrote back in 2017 which is inspired by and references a different track from her previous album Art Angels, but the vibe of her new song compared to her older one is muted, draped in images of power but not using any of them, while also being visibility pregnant with the child of a man from an economic class that causes untold damage merely by existing, from an artist who’s continuously flirted with at least the imagery of anti-capitalist revolution since she was a teenager.

None of this is something I can prove, of course, but it all has the same trauma-pop aesthetic as the work of artists such as Allie X, Hannah Diamond, or Pale Waves, all of which have built careers pushing at the boundaries of commercial music, using pop song tropes to write about and evoke complex emotions, like the ones that you experience while living in a toxic relationship, or recovering from an emotionally invalidating home. It’s interesting to see Grimes doing this, and it puts a really different spin on songs like We Appreciate Power, which previously simply seemed to celebrate the slow-burning apocalypses their lyrics describe. I’m finding them relatable now.

Art

MS: Fuzz Dungeon & The Invisible Hand There’s a couple of cool anti-capitalist games on Steam I’ve played through recently. As I’ve argued previously, despite how much I’m personally inspired by them, video-games as a medium are haunted by pro-capitalist politics, so it’s always nice to see new projects that criticize the economic system in an honest and uncompromising way.

Fuzz Dungeon is probably the coolest game I’ve played recently that tries this. To say too much about it would spoil the surprise, but it basically feels like dropping acid at an office and then going to a forest rave, allowing you to explore a drug-fucked, 90’s nostalgia-tainted dream-landscape that explores the endless ennui of our collapsing economic system, while also feeling unpretentious, even actually fun!

The Invisible Hand is simpler and slightly more ‘serious’, offering a tongue-in-cheek but thought-provoking pseudo-simulation of the life of a mid-level stockbroker. It’s another one that traffics in subverting player’s expectations, but it’s more direct about it’s anti-capitalist commentary. Special mention should also go to Umurangi Generation, a 2020 indie game by a Maori developer about the way it feels to live in a collapsing anthropocene, which uses an expanded Pokemon Snap-style photo mechanic to allow players the chance to document an alien invasion of a cyberpunk world.

DCH: These sound amazing. And yeah, Maddison is absolutely right. The protestant work ethic has subverted play for far too long.

The Self-Promotion

MS: I’m working on two major projects at the moment, a sci-fi novella about a disabled lesbian and her neurodiverse queer polycule set aboard a communist generation ship that I have finished drafting and am currently editing, (you can read about that on my Patreon if you would like,) and an rpg set loosely in my sci-fi universe, currently named perfect_run. I’ll be talking more about that in a post on Patreon on the 8th of July, so keep an eye out for it on Twitter if you’re interested, but basically the concept is that you’re a retired cyberpunk who’s tasked with rescuing your non-binary partner from a CEO who’s taken them hostage. Your first run will always go sub-optimally, (as the game has more depth than the player’s led to think,) leading your protagonist to speculate about what she did wrong: hence the title, perfect_run, and the central mechanic of exploring a living slice of cyberpunk Melbourne, which is slightly different every time you choose to leave your house.

The game starts out looking like a standard (albeit highly anti-capitalist,) j-rpg with an interesting costume change mechanic and hopefully should look more like Disco Elysium once you finish off a run or two. The central plot is short to make it easier to finish several times. It’s early days but I’m quite excited, and I’m already working in some mild references to it into something else I’m writing at the moment, to tie the world in more directly with my pre-established universe. I played a lot of Star Wars games when I was younger and always wished the characters of those (especially Kyle Katarn from Dark Forces, as bounty-hunter turned force sensitive jedi is a really satisfying arc for me, even though I wish he’d been a she instead,) were more visible in canon media, so I guess it’s partially a reaction to that! But the chance it offers for some cross-promotion should be helpful for me too.

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MJW: My first piece in a year came out on the Tryst.link blog this week. Written as Mia Walsch, it's about the (sex work) game, the mask, and the dollars. 'Provider Image', validity, and the performance of success. I don't know if this means my 'break' is over (is my mental breakdown over? Who can say?!) but it's definitely an article written by me.

Cutting Room Floor

• The Political Establishment Doesn't Want You to Know the Economy Is Rigged - Branko Marcetic at Jacobin
• A beautiful idea: how COVAX has fallen short - Ann Danaiya Usher at The Lancet (via Gareth)
• Anti-corruption activist Nizar Banat dies in Palestinian custody - Steve Hendrix and Sufian Taha at Washington Post (via Foreign Exchanges)
• Meet NATO, the Dangerous “Defensive” Alliance Trying to Run the World - Jon Schwarz at The Intercept
• How China Spreads Its Propaganda Version of Life for Uyghurs
• Climate change: Morrison government taken to UN by Torres Strait Islanders over rising sea levels - Anthony Galloway at Sydney Morning Herald
• Absolute Zero - George Monbiot
• Microbes and solar power ‘could produce 10 times more food than plants’ - Damian Carrington at The Guardian
• The Lithium Mine Versus the Wildflower - Gregory Barber at Wired - CJW: This is a really great read.
• The Tom Cruise deepfake that set off 'terror' in the heart of Washington DC - Mark Corcoran and Matt Henry at ABC News
• Trash streaming: Russia targets violent internet channels - Felix Light at Coda (via Ospare)
• How YouTube’s rules are used to silence human rights activists - Eileen Guo at MIT Technology Review
• Solargoth - Paul Graham Raven - CJW: On the Lidia Zuin solarpunk piece we shared when she guested last issue.
• Everything Zen: David Prior on "The Empty Man" - Adam Nayman at mubi.com (via Dan Hill) - CJW: Lots of spoilers, so save it for after you've seen the movie (and see the movie).Petition To Not Allow Jeff Bezos Re-Entry To Earth