nothing here but dangerous fantasy
issue 305 - 7th December, 2025
CJW: Hey gang. Welcome back to another edition of the thing with the things.
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The Team
- Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
- Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Writer & visual artist. Meme collector.
- Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, terrorpunk.
- Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer and purveyor of melancholy whimsy.
Climate Change & The Environment
DCH: ‘The Precedent Is Flint’: How Oregon’s Data Center Boom Is Supercharging a Water Crisis by Sean Patrick Cooper at Rolling Stone
Mendoza relies on a biweekly water delivery of five five-gallon jugs for cooking all her meals and to drink. Every eight weeks she goes for an infusion of drugs that calms her inflamed immune system. “How can you live with yourself knowing that the water you put in people’s houses is causing miscarriages or cancer, or God only knows how it stunts the growth of a kid? How could they do that? Then these people go out and show their faces in public. And they’re still making money with it, every time those deals get cut for new data centers.” (emphasis mine)
There are plenty of bad actors here from factory farms that poisoned the water to begin with, to data centers that supercharged that pollution far past any safety limit, and regulators who mostly watched it happen. As usual, the poorest people in the community are paying the highest price. But don’t let any of that give Big Tech cover — this crisis exists because AI’s water hunger is as rapacious as the cancers it's now causing.
This is the part Big Tech hates: when the harm stops being abstract and turns into a person trying to stay alive on delivered water. The industry loves to talk about “infrastructure” like it’s magic, but here it’s a machine that converts public health into private equity. Mendoza’s story makes the real externality impossible to ignore — not carbon, but kids growing up poisoned because someone needed a cheaper place to chill a server rack. And the executives keep doing ribbon-cuttings like nothing happened. If this is the future, it’s built on people Big Tech assumes no one will miss.
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DCH: The world lost the climate gamble. Now it faces a dangerous new reality by James Dyke and Johan Rockström at The Conversation
Ultimately that could cause the planet to drift away along the pathway to “hothouse Earth”, a scenario where even if emissions were reduced, self amplifying feedback loops would drive global temperature increases up to or even beyond 5°C. The last time the climate warmed by such an amount was tens of millions of year ago.
When the scientists say “hothouse Earth” you should realise they aren’t being dramatic. They’re describing a future where the planet becomes something our species has never lived on, a place that erases the illusion of control we’ve been clinging to. The tragedy is how calmly we narrate our own slide toward it, as though it’s a plot twist instead of a preventable choice. There’s no bailout coming, no tech miracle waiting backstage. If we don’t treat this warning like a fire alarm, we’re going to find out what “tens of millions of years ago” feels like in real time.
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- passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) - CJW: A heartfelt read on passenger pigeons, extinction, endlings…
Geopolitics & Empire
DCH: AI-powered surveillance firms are gunning for a share of the Gaza spoils by Sophia Goodfriend at 972 Magazine
Israel has already relied on an AI-assisted surveillance tool called Lavender to identify all known and alleged Hamas affiliates as targets for assassination, including public sector workers like police officers, as previously reported by +972 Magazine. Lavender uses predictive analytics to rank Palestinians’ likelihood of being connected to Hamas and other militant groups, based on an opaque set of criteria. The new plans give Israeli intelligence agencies the incentive to continue amassing this information, and U.S. firms and platforms could further bolster these efforts.
This isn't post-war architecture; it’s a blueprint for perpetual occupation, dressed up in the shiny veneer of Silicon Valley "optimization." Palantir, Dataminr—they’re not just vendors, they are the indispensable logistical wing of the new apartheid, shortening the "kill chain" and scraping every scrap of digital life for the data that justifies the next drone strike.
The whole setup, housed in a U.S. military-run center, smells like a classic revolving door: tax dollars fund the slaughter, and then the same tech firms cash in on the surveillance state they helped build, making Gaza the world's most sophisticated, AI-driven open-air prison. It's the ultimate neoliberal feedback loop: genocide as a service contract.
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- “An enshittified military costs more, delivers less, and deploys for ever-more dubious purposes. Military contractors’ performance is unfalsifiable, judged on metrics that have nothing to do with outcomes that matter in the real world. It’s a sick joke that how quickly contractors get paid is a metric of anything but corruption.” The Enshittified Military at Un-Diplomatic
Just the headlines:
- How the GOP’s Groyper Fringe Became Its Future (The Baffler has another piece on Fuentes you should probably read too.)
- Entire Chain of Command Could Be Held Liable for Killing Boat Strike Survivors, Sources Sa by Nick Turse at The Intercept
- The billionaire family poised to rewire U.S. media in Israel's favour by Will Alden at 972 Magazine (DCH: Important read about The Ellisons, their media takeover, and ongoing support for Israel’s genocide.)
Tech & Design
DCH: Peter Thiel’s Apocalyptic Worldview Is a Dangerous Fantasy by Rory Rowan and Tristan Sturm at Jacobin
Thiel’s apocalyptic geopolitics delegitimizes international law, legitimizes violence against racialized others, and sanctifies elite tech wealth as a last bulwark against a coming apocalypse. By remapping material power structures onto a metaphysical struggle, Thiel mystifies US imperialism, class privilege, and his own corporate interests as divine vocation.”
This gets to the cynical, self-serving core of the whole Thielian apparatus: he's not a prophet of doom; he's a marketer of impunity.
By framing questions of taxation, environmental governance, and economic regulation—all things that curb his power—as the work of the Antichrist, he doesn't just argue against them; he makes them a matter of spiritual warfare. It's the ultimate rhetorical dodge: if you disagree with his private monopolies or his lack of corporate taxes, you're not arguing about policy; you're arguing against salvation itself.
The "coming apocalypse" isn't something to be prevented; it's a tool to be wielded. It's the supreme justification for transforming Palantir's surveillance tech and AI-powered military systems into the modern-day Katechon (the restrainer). In this worldview, an AI-powered genocide isn't violence; it's a holy act of restraint. It's a disgusting, yet highly effective, way to mystify the most brutal forms of US imperialism and techno-capitalist profit as a divine calling.
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- “And it’s not just that everyone, regardless of demographic, has watched a discomfiting AI-generated video or heard about a bad AI startup. AI slop is on TV ads, it’s in video games, it’s on the pop charts. There is a tangible, tactile, and unavoidable slop layer that has encrusted pop culture and much of modern life.” Lost in the slop layer by Brian Merchant (DCH: The AI bubble's great innovation is coating our culture in an unavoidable, automated sludge—turns out, the "future of content" is just glorified digital beige.)
- How Big Tech Became Part of the State A conversation with Cédric DurandEvgeny MorozovSusan Watkins at Jacobin
- There Is Only One AI Company. Welcome to the Blob by Steven Levy at Wired
Just the headlines:
- Intimate Advertising, the Next Frontier in AI Manipulation by James Muldoon at Jacobin
- Waymo hits a dog in San Francisco, reigniting safety debate by Caroline Petrow-Cohen at The Los Angeles Times
- Activists Are Using ‘Fortnite’ to Fight Back Against ICE by Megan Farokhmanesh at Wired
Society & The Culture
DCH: Sex Workers Built an ‘Anti-OnlyFans’ to Take Control of Their Profits by Jason Parham at Wired
“There’s a huge lack of transparency. Creators are often left guessing about shadowbans, payout issues, or why their content suddenly stops performing. And because most platforms are built by people outside the industry, the policies and product decisions often feel disconnected from what creators actually need in practice. Most of the corporate alternatives in this space were created by people who have never posted a single piece of content. They don’t understand the risks, the pressure, the customer dynamics, or the creative side.”
This isn't just about a 2% lower cut—it’s about who holds the source code of power when your entire livelihood is a digital file being traded on their servers. OnlyFans’ sudden moralizing with background checks and algorithmically enforced poverty is the oldest Silicon Valley trick: let the workers build the value, then impose bureaucratic control to extract maximum profit while outsourcing the emotional and legal risk.
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CJW: Year in Review 2025: Hari Kunzru on AI slop and censorship - Harm Kunzru at Art Forum
The desire to return to consensus reality is hopelessly nostalgic. Yes, there are still hard limits: The “cloud” is a physical place, scooping out mountains for raw materials and venting heat and carbon dioxide out of gargantuan data centers; political power still grows out of the barrel of a gun. But the layer of the stack in which our subjectivities are formed, the place where our beliefs about the world are shaped, is also a battleground. We must teach ourselves to navigate the torrent that is replacing consensus reality, this turbulent, treacherous mediatized flow. There is no shore to swim back to, but in the new age of magic, when reality is labile and can be recoded by the power of signs, by narrative and memes and vibes and compelling images, art becomes a truly political technology. This is not art as critique. Critique is just sincere-posting, dutifully pointing out yet again that the Medbed isn’t “real.” Art can mess with our masters in ways we don’t yet fully understand. It makes culture. It is a transmitter of values. It is the lava out of which future realities will congeal.
In this piece, Kunzru is largely detailing and lamenting the rise of AI bullshit and the ideology behind it, but the above quote is where he ends it
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- “Philips believes the laws are a direct threat to democratic freedom. “These are censorship laws,” she says. “In the south, where I live, these same proposals mimic a lot of the arguments that you see behind book bans and behind laws that criminalize gender affirming health care or abortion information.”” The Age-Gated Internet Is Sweeping the US. Activists Are Fighting Back by Jason Parham at Wired (DCH: more on the topic in the headlines below)
- “Maybe it’s not that our cognitive software has been downgraded so much as we’ve turned off our firewalls. Everybody in the developed world now has Airdrop access to everyone else’s mind. If we are getting dumber, there’s a good chance we made each other that way.” - A Theory of Dumb: Why Are IQ Scores Suddenly Falling? - Lane Brown at New Yorker (Archive Link)
- None Of This is About Online Safety by Taylor Lorenz
Just the headlines:
- Half of the US Now Requires You to Upload Your ID or Scan Your Face to Watch Porn by Samantha Cole at 404 Media
- Heritage Foundation Says That Of Course GOP Will Use KOSA To Censor LGBTQ Content by Mike Masnick at Techdirt
Health, Cooking, and Related
DCH: When the Market Came for the Dying by Matt Nadel
People tend to fixate on the personal drama of this story, but that reaction obscures what viaticals actually reveal: investors didn’t behave cruelly; the state did. It created conditions in which people with AIDS had to make bets on their own deaths in order to survive, and in which ordinary people could be easily recruited into profiting from that precarity.
We love a villain because it distracts us from the architecture of the crime. It’s comforting to point at the “ghoulish” investor, but the real monster was a bipartisan consensus that decided letting human beings rot without a safety net was acceptable fiscal policy. This is the dark heart of neoliberalism: first you gut the public infrastructure until survival is impossible, then you applaud the “market innovation” that allows the dying to securitize their own desperation. It wasn’t a glitch that finance bros were betting on T-cell counts; it was the system working exactly as designed.
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- “By early 2025, Politico reported that the administration canceled 86 percent of all USAID awards. One analysis found that 71 percent of HIV-related activities globally were terminated, including several HIV treatment awards and most HIV prevention programs. Overall, there has been a huge drop in the number of people starting antiretroviral medication and a decrease in viral load testing, which is crucial for monitoring the virus and preventing transmission. Without the infrastructure of monitoring, documentation, and care, HIV is transmitting unchecked in the dark.” Trump Gutted AIDS Health Care at the Worst Possible Time by Steven W. Thrasher an Afeef Nessouli at The Intercept
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Just the headlines:
- Trump Wants to Make African Countries Share Abortion Data to Get AIDS Funding by Jessica Washington at The Intercept
- Luigi, a Year Later: How to Build a Movement Against Parasitic Health Insurance Giants by Sam Beard at The Intercept
Labour & Economics
DCH: Amazon Workers Issue Warning About Company’s ‘All-Costs-Justified’ Approach to AI Development by Paresh Dave at Wired
“The current generation of AI has become almost like a drug that companies like Amazon obsess over, use as a cover to lay people off, and use the savings to pay for data centers for AI products no one is paying for,” says the employee, who like others in this story, asked to remain anonymous because they feared retaliation from their bosses.
These companies are literally defunding their payrolls to buy data center capacity for the promise of a profit stream that doesn't yet exist, creating a "slop factory" where human jobs are the disposable seed money. The moral bankruptcy here is stunning: Amazon is firing people to pay for the machines that will eventually replace them, all while generating enormous, unnecessary carbon emissions.
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- “So why this aggressive attempt to sell the corporation? A big reason is that Zazlav will be paid $500 million for closing the deal. But behind that payday is that the financiers who run Hollywood simply don’t believe the movie business can offer the kind of returns they see their monopolist peers in tech getting. And they lack any capacity for creativity or leadership.” Netflix Is Trying to Buy Warner Bros Discovery. That Would Be a Disaster for America. by Matt Stoller
- The hidden Kenyan workers training China’s AI models by Damilare Dosunmu and Tessie Waithira at Rest of World
- Journalists win a key battle over AI in the newsroom by Brian Merchant
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Just the headlines:
- Flock Uses Overseas Gig Workers to Build Its Surveillance AI by Joseph Cox at Wired
- AI Price-Fixing Is Protected by . . . the First Amendment? by David Sirota at Jacobin
- David Sacks tried to kill state AI laws — and it blew up in his face by Tina Nguyen at The Verge
Newsletters
CJW: the miracle of the spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta) - Mo Quirk
There are, of course, some notable differences between me and a hyena. I lack an interest in wildebeest carcasses, for instance. I don’t compete with lions on a regular basis. I do make a series of weird noises throughout the day. What I do share with hyenas interests me terribly. Mammals with testosterone levels elevated beyond what is expected for our sex and with associated physiological changes. Hyenas didn’t choose these traits, but then again, neither did I, really. In theory, I could have stayed the same. For a long time, I was convinced to stay the same. But once the idea is there, it’s hard to shake. You realise that there is another option, and once you become aware of that option, every other option starts to feel a lot like death. Hyenas don’t think about it as an option, of course. They just do what’s in their nature. They have no reason to agonise over this growth. When times are hard, you change yourself or you die. This is the most fundamental aspect of evolution.
I shared something from this newsletter above, and this dispatch is just as good. So here's me telling you to subscribe. If you want to.
Movies + TV
CJW: The Strange World Of... David Lynch - John Higgs at The Quietus
This was where/how I learned that John Higgs has written a book about David Lynch and his work, and as I love Lynch’s work and think Higgs writes brilliantly about modern history and culture, I’m going to have to track it down.
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MJW: Bugonia
Neither of the main characters are likable or sympathetic–the grubby conspiracy theorist played by Jessie Plemons, or Emma Stone’s pharma CEO, but I still loved Bugonia. There’s something to be said for thinking, ‘what the fuck did I just watch?’ but in a wonderful way, as the credits roll. The movie is bleak, but what can I say, I like ‘em bleak. I went in knowing absolutely nothing about the film–I didn’t read a synopsis or even hear anything about the storyline–and that was a great idea on my part. It made the absurdity even more whacked-out. Plemons and Stone are both on it in their roles, butting up against each other and each unwilling to waver. Aiden Delbis as Don is a soft place between them, but it’s heartbreaking to watch his manipulation by the main characters. I don’t know if I should call it fun, but it almost is–devestating moments notwithstanding. It’s definitely darkly funny.
CJW: I think Yorgos, Stone, and Plemmons all do fantastic work, so I’m not surprised I loved Bugonia. The core of the film is Stone and Plemmons facing off against one another, and it’s their strength as actors that absolutely sells that central conversation and the film itself. I honestly had no idea where it was going to go, but was utterly content to be taken for that ride. If you need a little more on the film before you watch it, check out the trailer as it doesn’t give too much away.
Podcasts
DCH: Uncovering the inner workings of an AI genocide
+972's Yuval Abraham takes us inside his groundbreaking investigations into the Gaza war and the legal and moral challenges he faces when reporting.
Yuval Abraham has done more than anyone else to expose the big tech empowering the genocide in Gaza. This podcast is well worth your time.
Videos
LZ - Ivy the occultist and occultism for beginners
I'm trying to finally lock in with occultism. I have a billion books and a few ideas, but the only way I have engaged with this universe was purely academic – as in, reading about history and the precepts of every branch, etc. I have joined a shamanic retreat once, but I'm soooo skeptical and cynical that I can't get around thanking the element gods… but! I love symbolic stuff and ways to change my perception or perspective in life. So I found this playlist curated for beginners. Ivy is a very down-to-earth woman, and she's very thorough in her explanations. She talks of occultism and its practices from a very practical, rational viewpoint, which can be annoying because I've been procrastinating with learning how to meditate for years. Maybe that's how I'll finally get into it, not through all the wellness positivity shit that has been around. We'll see…
The Memes
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