CJW: I’ll keep this brief because we’ve got a long one today - I’ve had to trim some things out of the email version, so click on the heading above to see the full version at the blog. This issue we have our first returning guest - please warmly welcome Andrew Dana Hudson once again!
Our last bonus was Out by MJW about coming out with some big news during a pandemic. To get access to it, our future bonuses, and the full archive, just go here to become a supporter.
Andrew Dana Hudson (ADH) - Speculative fiction writer. Solarpunk, cli-fi, and American socialism. Phoenix, AZ. @AndrewDHudson
Corey J. White (CJW) - Current events sin-eater. Sci-fi author. Naarm/Melbourne.
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - Author & podcaster. Apocalypse witch. Your fabulous goth aunt. @marleejaneward
m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / ecopoet // Dark Extropian Musings / pryvt.rsrch
Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
CJW: REPO VIRTUAL OUT NOW
I’ve talked about it plenty before, but REPO VIRTUAL is officially out in the US, is out in the UK in the next couple of days, and in Australia… well, there might not be any stock until the end of June… I don’t even know. Anyway, ask for it at your local indie bookstore, grab the audiobook with some of your audible credits, and if you enjoy it, please give it a review. Pandemic lockdown means that a number of opportunities I might have had to talk about the book are no longer going forward, so I’m hoping that word of mouth online will help the book reach its audience. It’s been reviewing well, including a Starred review at Bookpage, as well as some other choice quotes (and preorder links) at the link above.
And to coincide with the release of Repo Virtual, I’ve also written a piece over at Tor.com on Five Cyberpunk Books About the Now.
Oh, and I also appeared on the Nerd Feuilleton Podcast. Most of the podcast is in German, but the interview with yours truly starts at around the 54 minute mark.
DCH: Y’all really should read Repo Virtual. It’s the bees knees. Really great work, Corey.
CJW: Thanks, Dan, I appreciate it. It was a lot of hard work (and there’s a lot of self-doubt), so I’m really happy with the way it’s been received so far.
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ADH: “Voice of Their Generation” + interview
On their ninth rewrite of the third act of Detective Pikachu vs. Predator, it occurred to Thicket that they might just be the voice of their generation.
This is a story I’ve been waiting a year to share with the public—a tight, mean, absurd exploration of the creative process under cultural fracking capitalism.
CJW: That’s a great story, and reminds me of an idea I’ve been developing for a forthcoming ONP capsule - though there it’s more about labor fracking and cultural fracking.
MKY: freaking loved this! And thanks to having read this prior to publication, as soon as TV shows etc started halting production, I was like - this is the future of content production lol. Just, ya know, minus the ‘hanging out in cafes’ bit.
ADH: Yeah, this is definitely a story that could be tweaked to easily be set in some future plague times. When I wrote it I thought there was something cheeky and subversive about showing off this high tech concept via some schlub in a Starbucks, instead of a corporate boardroom or trade fair. Little did I know all of those things would soon be obsolete.
But you are right, the pandemic largely shuttering film shoots does seem like it would accelerate the shift to this “deep make” production. Feels like there’s been a definite uptick in engaging with algo-generated content, even if it is still mostly silly bullshit, like the AI meme maker. Making real meaning, not the bots’ strong suit yet. But imitation—like these AI-sung Jay-Z raps—that’s coming along nicely.
DCH: +1 for Power Rangers/Overwatch: Ultimate Team Up. Would watch.
And there it is. Palantir is now also doing contact tracing for the Trump administration. I was one of many that helped break the story about Palantir working with the NHSX here in the UK.
It was only a matter of time until it took root in the US too. Especially given Thiel is part of Trump’s re-election campaign. And that he uses his influence at Facebook to help Trump with political ads on the hell-site.
In case you need a reminder of why this is a bad bad thing:
Palantir is known best for its surveillance, predictive, and analytic work with the US government and state and local law enforcement, as well as services provided to the private sector in areas like finance and healthcare. It’s controversial in part because it has provided profiling tools to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and because it generally operates with extreme secrecy and with little oversight regarding the tools and data it provides to military operations, governments, and hedge funds.
As originally reported at The Daily Beast.
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MKY: Making the Fed’s Money Printer Go Brrrr for the Planet by Kim Stanley Robinson
…months into the Covid-19 pandemic, we’re seeing both the scope of the need and that the world can turn on a dime when there’s a perceived need this serious. Government fiscal policy can get very creative when things are overwhelming. That may be the story of this century.
We have to save the biosphere from catastrophic heating. We also have a market that won’t invest enough in this project. So governments need to do it, by way of creating new money specifically targeted to pay for rapid decarbonization.
Or, what if the world’s govts cared as much about the ecology as the economy? (What if we made them…)
DCH: (with guillotines! And trebuchets!)
CJW: Can’t help but be inspired by some of the utopian ideas on display here:
Many kinds of activities will sequester carbon, and more would be found. Growing forests would count under carbon QE, so would caring for biomes like swamps. Engineers and designers who figure out how to pull carbon dioxide directly out of the atmosphere and then turn it into carbon nanofiber materials, thus replacing cement and steel, would be earning carbon credits in multiple ways.
Thanks Uncle Stan. You’re giving me something to aim for if I can ever shake this pessimistic cloud.
ADH: Personally I welcome our future carbon bureaucratic overlords. I can see them vividly, going from plot to plot testing soiI, measuring trees, guessing the C content of your house and furniture. I imagine people griping about them the way they do about property tax assessors. What a blissfully banal utopia that would be compared to our present climate catastrophe!
I got to study a couple years ago under Klaus Lackner, an expert on this carbon removal and storage question. Or as Lackner calls it, carbon disposal. The key is to recognize that CO2 is really a waste product, a molecule with low energy potential that you have to put a bunch of energy into to do anything useful with. We’ve spent the last century dumping this trash into the air as fast as we could, and now we do indeed need to pay people and industries to clean it up. Which—as Stan points out—gets tricky, because a healthier atmosphere, ocean and biosphere is a public good that neoliberalism is loath to pay for.
Stan actually offers a slightly different imaginary of this carbon accounting scheme than I’ve usually seen, since he proposes both paying to put it back in the ground and paying to leave it in the ground. This basically bails out the fossil political-industrial complex, who in more zero-sum carbon accounting proposals are instead priced out of their business by fees and taxes on extracting carbon that pay for the coins that pay for the sequestration. Maybe Stan’s Keynesian/MMT is more politic, buying off the petrostates. I just chafe at the idea of paying Suad to sit on their oil forever, instead of trying them at The Hague for climate crimes.
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CJW: Welcome to the New Bleak… What Now?
We didn’t know that a simple virus can show everyone the real face of the late capitalism and how all of our states are ready to save corporations first and ready to sacrifice everyone else for them. We didn’t know that people were ready to attack 5G towers to defeat a virus. We also didn’t know that people were so ready to organize, help each other and try to find help for people at the other side of the planet.
[…]
We have to think about the future. What might be or should be ahead of us. Because even though this is the new bleak, to me it feels like what’s next is up for grabs.
ADH: I really liked and agreed with this piece, even though, a couple weeks ago, I let myself write deep into the pit of New Bleak nihilism in a short essay about how “normal” actually is the operative word of this nightmare. But that was a couple weeks ago, and the more I get used to the new habits and rhythms of These Trying Times, the more strange they come to seem. New Bleak is interesting because it gives us a framework for understanding why this moment feels so dispiriting. I think it stems from the sense that—were this crisis one that let us actually take to the streets and barricades today—we’d finally get the revolutionary blow to capitalism so many of us yearn for. But sadly the streets would be too crowded and the barricades need to be sanitized. So instead we feel the moment slipping through our grasp. New Bleak indeed.
MKY: yeah, I sat down to write a plague diary entry for a writing class last week and it came out so bleak i’m not even sure i wanna like, revisit and publish it. Same feel reading this piece in Kotaku, The Doctor, The Disease and The Division - so bleak that I had to skim past tales of the real for their retreat into video games. Same feel again, chatting with friends over Zoom (it had to happen) about The Uninhabitable Earth the other day. Bleak vibes abound.
DCH: I think it’s worth calling back to CJW’s recent bonus post. Seems a grand example of “The New Bleak” to me.
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CJW: These Are Conditions in Which Revolution Becomes Thinkable (at Commune Mag)
A virus isn’t just a biological phenomenon, but a social one. The vulnerabilities it exploits to propagate itself aren’t just the properties of human cells, but how human societies are organized.
On the US economy and labor market in the wake of this pandemic.
Letting workers get sick and die is acceptable; letting workers get sick and threaten the accumulation process is not.
I came to this essay via a talk from Cennyd Bowles (via Sentiers), which is also worth a look.
And this feels related, by Evgeny Morozov: The tech ‘solutions’ for coronavirus take the surveillance state to the next level
[…]the critics of capitalism are right to see Covid-19 as a vindication of their warnings. It has revealed the bankruptcy of neoliberal dogmas of privatisation and deregulation – showing what happens when hospitals are run for profit and austerity slashes public services. But capitalism does not survive by neoliberalism alone […]
On neoliberalism and solutionism, and the vapid destructiveness of each. A lot of interesting things to consider here, with the lens of solutionism providing a new way of looking at Silicon Valley’s (deliberate?) failures of both politics and imagination.
DCH: I’ve known Cennyd for a few years now. Good bloke. We once went to a think tank of sorts on AI in Norway with Warren Ellis, Amber Case, and more. It was a strange few days. We came away with an agenda of urgent themes.
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CJW: Trump and the coronavirus have exposed America as a declining empire: Time to face the facts (via Brendan)
What the coronavirus has shown us, if we’re willing to see it, is America as an imperial power in steep decline, revealed before the world as a weak, divided and ineffectual nation — albeit one with the greatest military force in world history. To put it in the mildest possible terms, that’s a dangerous combination; it might better be described as profoundly terrifying.
This piece veers a little too close to a gormless embrace of Russiagate, but otherwise there are some interesting points being made.
ADH: American here. Can confirm extremely strong failed state declining empire vibes round these parts.
DCH: I’m duel-specced American/British. Can confirm America is a flawed democracy. Here are the receipts.
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The formerly unthinkable drop in oil prices below $0 a barrel on Monday is still reverberating through financial markets, as supply overwhelms demand destroyed by the coronavirus pandemic, forcing some energy companies into possible bankruptcy as storage reaches maximum capacity.
“This is stunning as it basically says that a barrel of oil earlier this week was effectively cheaper than it was in 1870. A period over which US inflation has risen +2870% and the S&P 500 +31746505% in total return terms,” the analysts wrote.
Trump engaged in some sabre-rattling with Iran to help bounce things back but between all of this sure does make it feel like we’re living in the lead-up to a solarpunk novel…
ADH: Yes, for a mere half trillion USD, we could buy up the toxic fossil fuel industry and gently, justly shut it down. Folks!—it’s never been cheaper to save the planet! The solarpunk plotline would be some kind of distributed crypto-fund pulling this off. Or we could fit it into the Action Socialism Green New Deal fantasy I still hold very dear. Either way I feel confident that this is an inflection point we’ll look back on. Either the Powers That Be take this crisis as an opportunity to get out of the fossil business whilst saving face, or we’ll take petrocapitalism to its final, absurdist conclusion: pumping oil back into the ground just so Exxon and Shell can performatively dig it back up again.
I just finished writing a book of stories for my master’s degree based on the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) scenarios, each story describing how the climate negotiations are going in 2055 depending on different choices we make in the intervening years. One thing that’s always bugged me about the SSPs is that they are gradualist narratives. I think that’s often how we look back on history: a slow slosh of one inevitable trend into the next. But history as we live it is actually a series of these inflection moments where all of us palpably feel the potential for significant change. Then things either escalate or de-escalate and we forget that things could have gone the other way. That’s how this moment of dadaist fossil accounting feels, and I for one plan to remember that feeling even if nothing is ever done.
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CJW: I Am a Mad Scientist (via Ospare)
If the air quality is better now, if fewer people die from breathing in pollution, this is not a welcome development so much as an indictment of the way things were before.
I’m angry at the politicians for creating that status quo. I’m angry they ignored the scientists and put their own careers or pocketbooks ahead of the survival of their citizens.
Great points made here. Whatever temporary effects this slowdown might have, it won’t count for anything if we return to business as usual (which is, of course, what our political and corporate leaders want us to do)
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ADH: Google Enters Upside Down World of Renewable Supply and Demand
An early sign of a shift we’ll soon see everywhere as we transition from an energy system that wants steady, even energy use across all parts of the day, to one that incentivises us to get our high-energy work done in the intermittent times when it’s bright and/or windy out. Given that adapting society to that first fossil system lead to the creation of night clubs and amusement parks and 24 hour factories, I think we need to start thinking about how the new renewable system will mean new institutions and cultural norms.
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Cutting Room Floor:
Microplastics found for first time in Antarctic ice where krill source food
The world’s energy order is changing — and China is set to reap the strategic benefits
How Facebook’s Ad Technology Helps Trump Win (via 20minutesintothefuture)
The Proto-Communist Plan to Resurrect Everyone Who Ever Lived - we’ve shared some links on Russian Cosmism before, but this is an interesting round-up written through a modern lens.
Wealth, shown to scale - wealth inequality, visualised.
CJW: Twice in a row, a recommendation for Drew Shell’s Gentle Decline, as his recent thoughts on a post-oil future are really interesting. The focus on local production/agriculture is something I’d already cordoned onto as part of a low/no carbon now, so Drew’s thoughts here dovetail with mine - as in, we need to embrace the local now, using existing oil reserves to transition away from using (and needing) them later.
MKY: Guns Akimbo
Gave this one a proper blog review for once. It is totally not a crypto Samara Weaving appreciation post.
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MJW: Circus of Books, Netflix
A standard, every day Jewish couple tries to make a bit of $ to tide them over by distributing Hustler Magazine in the 70’s, and somehow the whole shebang turns into a long-running career in the hardcore gay porn industry. Circus of Books, the store, was an LA institution for gay men in the 80’s, and it bore witness to that turbulent history. This feature-length doco on Netflix is a look at an otherwise totally normal family in America who just so happened to have a bit of a weird job, Circus of Books really appealed to me as a regular kinda person who just so happens to have an odd career in the ‘adult’ industry. It’s also a tale about family, coming out, secrets, and the death knells of an industry.
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MKY: Run
Not sure that Phoebe Waller-Bridge has done anything more than lend her name to this (correct me if i’m wrong) but this is a def a show that if you liked Fleabag…
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MKY: Gangs of London
Six words:
Take a plot they prolly found in Guy Ritchie’s waste paper bin, then give the camera to the man behind The Raid when it clicks over to the action beats and voila - one hell of a show, that’s all about Ṣọpẹ Dìrísù cutting his way thru a generic modern uk gangster plot and leaving the kinda trail of carnage that Samara Weaving would be proud of.
DCH: Good shout, MKY – I’m eagerly waiting to binge Gangs of London. Right now we’re enjoying the drip feed of the third season of Killing Eve. Obviously Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer are terrific but Fiona Shaw is impeccable as a Rule 63 Bond that went into management as they got older.
DCH: Signal from deep space perfectly harmonizes with elvis song (via Science)
Physicists have detected more gravitational waves. The notes detected form a perfect fifth which is highly unusual. Coincidentally that means they also harmonize perfectly with the opening notes of Elvis’ Can’t Help Falling in Love.
CJW: Elvis was an alien = confirmed.
DCH: Judge Dredd: Day of Chaos (Goodreads)
2000AD recently ran some sales on their comics. I scooped up some Dredd during that time. There’s a good read in Fast Company about how prescient the serial can be:
Curiously, as disorienting and purposefully horrific as it is, “Day of Chaos” also captures parts of the experience of today that might not have seemed immediately obvious in advance: as the virus spreads, the story points out inefficiencies in testing—“Grand Hall can only spare two test teams. Probably pointless, anyway”—and the exhaustion felt by everyone as they deal with what’s happening. (It also identifies the surreal feeling that sheltering in place has created: “Inside the blocks it may be Hell on Earth. But out here—out here the Judges have largely regained control … There are the refugees. The bug victims. And people simply driven out by hunger and desperation. But for all that, the streets are strangely peaceful.”)
MJW:You’re Wrong About, hosted by Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes.
This podcast is what happens when two really fucking smart journalists get to talk about the incidents in the (primarily American) past and dish on what really ocurred behind the standout characters and features we remember. Precisely researched and fueled by passion and genuine interest in the subject, I could listen to this podcast all day, and some days in isolation, I have. Before I found You’re Wrong About, I didn’t really give two shits about the OJ Simpson trial, now I find myself eagerly listening to a 2-part episode on Kato Kaelin, utterly fascinated. Two highly intelligent and reasonably funny people explore the things we only part-remember, and it makes for highly entertaining listening.
DCH: The Lucky Devil is a strip club in Oregon. Previously they were in the news for their “Boober Eats” delivery service. Uber of course filed a cease and desist. The Lucky Devil is now offering a drive-thru takeaway service complete with go-go dancers. What’s more it all seems legit safe.
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DCH: Civil War II pre-enactment. More evidence America is broken. You can rest assured they’d all be dead if they were PoC.
DCH: My pal Dean Sabatino and his band, The Dead Milkmen were prescient. 25 years ago they saw our disinfectant injecting now. Wonder what other predictions loom in their catalog?
DCH: This is a map by Berkley artists & activist, Alfred Twu. It’s illustrates the different inter-state pacts emerging in CoronavirUSA. We live in a shitty cyberpunk backstory now.
ADH: I’ll see your post-Union map and raise you this incredibly piece of pro-Iran #Calexit propaganda. Both true art.
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CJW: And that’s it for now. Hope you’re coping alright with lockdown, pandemic stress, illness, loss, and all the rest. Stay safe.