nothing here but deathly silence

issue 156 - 31st October, 2021

CJW: Welcome to another issue of the nothing here newsletter, and a big hello to our new subscribers - glad to see you join us.

It is The Spooky Day, which is why we’re sharing so much horrifying stuff with you, and not because there’s so much in the world to be wary of, and so many bastards who need to be held to account.

Our latest bonus came from MKY - Couch to Hero, on Bob Odenkirk, Nobody, and training montages but in real life.

If you like what we do here and would like to support this work (and gain access to the full bonus archive) just go here to become a premium subscriber. Your support means the world to us. And feel free to forward this email along if there’s someone who you think will appreciate it.

The Team

• Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey

• m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / ecopoet // Dark Extropian Musings / pryvt.rsrch / @eattrainrevolt [twit/insta]

• Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Speculative fiction and memoir writer. Just some guy with great hair.

• Corey J. White (CJW) - Author, podcaster, sin-eater.

• Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Journalist, MA in semiotics, and PhD in Arts. Sci-fi writer, futurology researcher and essayist. @lidiazuin

Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: ‘Pristine wilderness’ without human presence is a flawed construct, study says - Latoya Abulu at Mongabay (via Sentiers)

A high-profile case that may be giving renewed salience to this idea is the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework’s draft target 3, which highlights the importance of preserving at least 30% of Earth’s land and ocean by the year 2030. Historically such territorial preservation has been achieved by establishing exclusionary conservation areas, notably national parks. Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and human rights organizations say the creation of such conservation areas will lead to the continued displacement and abuse of Indigenous peoples and local communities if it’s framed in the Eurocentric concept of creating a “pristine wilderness,” a system also dubbed “fortress conservation,” where human inhabitants are seen as a liability.

I feel as though we’ve shared something along these lines previously, but I can’t be certain. Your reminder that the problem isn’t people (especially indigenous people with a long history of stewardship on the land), it’s industry and capital. A Eurocentric approach to conservation that tries to enforce a complete split between human and nature will likely, according to the research mentioned here, do more harm than good.

Displacing humans from their lands to create “pristine” conservation areas not only entails human rights violations and social conflicts over territory, but may erode the biodiversity of ecosystems that co-exist with human intervention while impeding conservation efforts by ignoring Indigenous traditional knowledge of forest management.

MKY: Preach. Just another form of colonialism innit. Hopefully this starts to sink in…

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MKY: Climate change: UN emissions gap report a ‘thundering wake-up call’ - Matt McGrath at BBC

National plans to cut carbon fall far short of what’s needed to avert dangerous climate change, according to the UN Environment Programme.

Their Emissions Gap report says country pledges will fail to keep the global temperature under 1.5C this century.

The Unep analysis suggests the world is on course to warm around 2.7C with hugely destructive impacts.

The fix is in. The thumb is on the scales. The looters are rigging the game. The bills gonna be left for the rest of us to pay. What are you waiting for? We can only save ourselves now.

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MKY: ok kids time for your Anthropocene horror tale…

Jellyfish attack nuclear power plant. Again.

The clash between gelatinous jellyfish and hulking nuclear power plants has a long history. These spineless, brainless, bloodless creatures shut down the Torness nuclear power plant in 2011 at a cost of approximately $1.5 million per day, according to one estimate. Swarms of these invertebrates have also been responsible for nuclear power plant shutdowns in Israel, Japan, the United States, the Philippines, South Korea, and Sweden.

Humans have unwittingly nurtured the adversarial relationship between jellyfish and nuclear power plants. That is, human-induced climate change has raised ocean water temperatures, setting conditions for larger-than-usual jellyfish populations. Further, the relatively warm water near nuclear power plant discharge outlets may attract jellyfish swarms, according to one study. Also, pollution has lowered oxygen levels in sea water, which jellyfish tolerate more than other marine animals, leading to their proliferation.

BECOME JELLYFISH.

CJW: I’d rather see the jellyfish attacking coal plants. Nuclear waste is a difficult problem to solve, but it’s arguably easier than the compounding issues we’re seeing thanks to fossil fuel burning…

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• Australia ranks last out of 54 nations on its strategy to cope with climate change. The Glasgow summit is a chance to protect us all - Johanna Nalau and Hannah Melville-Rea at The Conversation (via Jane Rawson)

• Coal bucks 15-year decline in US with 22% increase as natural gas prices rise by Tim De Chant Ars Technica

• Plastic industry pollution to overtake coal in US by 2030, report says by Tim De Chant Ars Technica

• 45% of Americans Don’t Believe Humans Cause Climate Change, VICE News/Guardian Poll Shows by Natasha Grzincic VICE

• Sci-Fi Icon Neal Stephenson Finally Takes on Global Warming by Adam Rogers WIRED (DCH: Looking forward to this coming out soon.)

Geopolitics

CJW: Deathly Silence: Journalists Who Mocked Assange Have Nothing to Say About CIA Plans to Kill Him (via Dan Hill)

It would seem that covert plans for the state-sanctioned murder on British soil of an award-winning journalist should attract sustained, wall-to-wall media coverage.

The news, however, has been met by Western establishment media with ghoulish indifference—a damning indictment of an industry that feverishly condemns attacks on press freedom in Official Enemy states.

A great overview of the media’s complete lack of concern regarding the CIA’s plans to kill or kidnap Assange. It ends on an important note regarding the media as propaganda tool of US empire and particularly how the narrative surrounding Assange has been sculpted over years for exactly this outcome - that the media would ignore the state planning extrajudicial murders on foreign soil just because they have happily focussed their attention on the man and not the war crimes he helped reveal.

MKY: fuck the media. Fuck them into hell.

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DCH: Want to See a Modern Country Commit Suicide? Take a Hard Look at Britain - Umair Haque at Eudaimonia

Let’s stop and take stock. Brits can’t get food. Raw sewage floats down rivers because the chemicals needed to treat water are in short supply. Doctors can’t run blood tests. I’ve chosen those three examples for a reason. Those are three of the most basic goods and services in society: food, water, healthcare.

Just an update on post-Brexit livin’ here in Plague Island. Now with 100% more Soviet Potemkin bullshit.

MKY: storm the City. leave it in ruins. And remember, remember… the fifth of November.

MJW: Brexit? A bad idea? Well I never…

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DCH: How Did a Billionaire in Seattle Gain So Much Power Over Global Public Health? by Mary Harris at Slate

The World Health Organization is the obvious place where this pandemic response should be happening for the global poor because they have a mandate. It has some semblance of a democratic institution, where you have member states and you have votes. This should be the place where this is happening. But the World Health Organization has really been hollowed out over the decades because it hasn’t been well-funded. And what that’s meant is that Bill Gates, and the Gates Foundation, has become one of the most important funders—the second-largest funder, I think—of the World Health Organization, which gives it a really outsized role in influencing how it works. So at the point that the pandemic came, the Gates Foundation had certainly felt like it had more of a network and more of a background and better capacity to be leading this pandemic. So the response did end up being routed nominally through the World Health Organization. But all the phone calls, all the working groups, all the meetings, it was really the Gates Foundation that was directing.

This isn’t your typical bullshit article that paints Gates as some sort of Covid conspiracy boogeyman. But it does show how his Foundation has an outsized influence on global health policy.

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DCH: The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning by N. S. Lyons at Palladium

A member of the CCP’s seven-man Politburo Standing Committee, he is China’s top ideological theorist, quietly credited as being the “ideas man” behind each of Xi’s signature political concepts, including the “China Dream,” the anti-corruption campaign, the Belt and Road Initiative, a more assertive foreign policy, and even “Xi Jinping Thought.” Scrutinize any photograph of Xi on an important trip or at a key meeting and one is likely to spot Wang there in the background, never far from the leader’s side.

Huning is China’s Surkov or Kissinger. The wyrmtongue “power behind the throne.” He’s shaped Chinese policy more than anyone else since 1989. The article opens with a chilling story about recent disappearances as part of the “Common Prosperity” campaign before diving into his Machivellian rise to power post Tiananmen Square. Well worth a read.

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• Oath Keepers in the State House: How a Militia Movement Took Root in the Republican Mainstream - Isaac Arnsdorf at ProPublica

Science & Space

• A vast, thrilling world of nature unfolds outside of human time - Nicholas P. Money at Psyche

• Robot artist Ai-Da released by Egyptian border guards at BBC

• Our universe was made by aliens in a lab, says Harvard scientist at Dazed

• Americans drank so much during the pandemic that liver transplants spiked

Tech & Design

LZ: Would you get a tattoo that fades in a year? Ephemeral is banking on it - Mark Wilson at Fast Company

Totally would. When can we start getting those?

CJW: The funny thing about this being a thing now is that I remember people talking about it 20 years ago when I got my first tattoo. Actual tattoo artists had no idea what I was talking about when I asked them, but my guess is it’s long been possible if anyone bothered to look into alternative inks.

Anyway, I’d totally get 1-year tattoos for my face/head/neck to see how I felt about that before going permanent.

MJW: I mean, I love my hand tattoos, but when I lost work and thought I might have to try crawling back to ‘the man’, something like this might have been helpful.

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DCH: The Anger of Tesla Fans Is Becoming a Problem by David Zipper Slate

But could the Biden administration ultimately force Tesla to pull Autopilot or place constraints on its use? That seems increasingly plausible. Five-year-old guidance from NHTSA articulates the agency’s authority to intervene if autonomous driving systems show evidence of “predictable abuse,” a reasonable charge to levy at Tesla given the array of YouTube videos of drivers asleep or playing games in the driver’s seat, despite warnings in Tesla’s manual. Over the summer NHTSA launched an investigation into a pattern of Teslas striking stationary emergency vehicles, and the agency has challenged the automaker to explain why it didn’t issue a recall for a recent software update. Meanwhile, a growing number of fatalities has been tied to Autopilot, including one in California in which a Tesla Model 3 traveling at 60 mph crashed into a pickup truck and killed one of its occupants (the victim’s family has sued the company). Tesla’s defenders often point to the nearly 40,000 annual traffic fatalities in the United States, suggesting that Autopilot is safer than human drivers, but evidence for that claim is lacking.

As my friend Ben Oderwald says “You literally could not design a more deviously dangerous product than a Tesla.” Or as I like to say, Teslas are unsafe at any level of automation.

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DCH: Exponential Tech Doesn’t Serve Social Good by Douglas Rushkoff at One Zero

Why create solutions “at scale” if operating at scale is itself the main problem? The discussion of how to employ exponential digital technologies in the service of global good is so much more convoluted and self-interested than the simpler and actionable discussion of how to stop fucking up this planet and fucking over its people and how to do so without even staking a claim on the solutions.

Preach Brother Rushkoff.

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DCH: The Metaverse Is Bad by Ian Bogost The Atlantic

It’s absurd but telling that the inspiration for the metaverse was meant as satire. Just as OZY Media misinterprets Shelley, so Zuck and crew misconstrue metaverse fiction. In Snow Crash, as in other cyberpunk stories (including the 1995 Kathryn Bigelow film Strange Days), the metaverse comes across as intrinsically dangerous. The book’s title refers to a digital drug for denizens of the metaverse, with harmful neurological effects that extend outside it.

That danger hasn’t survived the metaverse’s translation into contemporary technological fantasy. Instead, the concept appeals to tech magnates because it connects the rather prosaic reality of technologized consumer attention to a science-fictional dream of escape. You can see why Zuckerberg, plagued by months and years of criticism of his decidedly low-fidelity social networks and apps, might find an escape hatch appealing. The metaverse offers a way to leave behind worldly irritants and relocate to greener pastures. This is the rationale of a strip miner or a private-equity partner: Take what you can, move on, and don’t look back. No wonder fictional worlds with metaverses are always trashed.

Bolded emphasis mine. As Bogost writes this isn’t just the next long con from big tech but yet another “fantasy of power.” I eagerly await the inevitable Adam Curtis docu-series about the Metaverse (assuming we make it that long).

MKY: so long as i don’t have to watch it in VR. lol. Let them have virtual cake. IN THE KINGDOM OF THE PERPETUALLY LOGGED IN THE OFFLINE HUMAN IS something something…

MJW: I’ve read that having Zuck as the face of this rebrand is an epic, epic mistake, and I think they are right. I mean, is this the face you want repping your metaverse?

And ‘Meta’? Fuck off. It sounds like some fucking asshole insisting we call him by his handle: ‘My name is The Plague,’ etc.

MKY: yeah those people are the worst.

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DCH: The Magnificent Bribe by Zachary Loeb at Real Life

Nearly 50 years ago, long before smartphones and social media, the social critic Lewis Mumford put a name to the way that complex technological systems offer a share in their benefits in exchange for compliance. He called it a “bribe.” With this label, Mumford sought to acknowledge the genuine plentitude that technological systems make available to many people, while emphasizing that this is not an offer of a gift but of a deal. Surrender to the power of complex technological systems — allow them to oversee, track, quantify, guide, manipulate, grade, nudge, and surveil you — and the system will offer you back an appealing share in its spoils. What is good for the growth of the technological system is presented as also being good for the individual, and as proof of this, here is something new and shiny. Sure, that shiny new thing is keeping tabs on you (and feeding all of that information back to the larger technological system), but it also lets you do things you genuinely could not do before. For a bribe to be accepted it needs to promise something truly enticing, and Mumford, in his essay “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” (DCH: I’ve linked it for your benefit) acknowledged that “the bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe.” The danger, however, was that “once one opts for the system no further choice remains.”

Mumford’s nowhere near as well-known as, say, McLuhan but he should be. He was every bit as prescient and accurate when it came to the perils of big tech in its nascency. Shame more people didn’t listen to him.

CJW: This…

He began talking about a split between “authoritarian” and “democratic” types of technologies. The term “authoritarian” was affixed to complex, centralized systems, over which individual humans could exert little control, while the term “democratic” was reserved for smaller scale systems that could be controlled by individuals. A key factor in the power of “authoritarian” technologies was that they steadily worked to eliminate alternatives to themselves.

…sounds an awful lot like the sorts of tech monopolies encouraged by our current mode of capitalism.

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• Beethoven X: The Intelligence of Bodies - Jan Swafford at Van Magazine

• In India, Facebook Grapples With an Amplified Version of Its Problems by Sheera Frenkel Davey Alba The New York Times (DCH: Facebook is fanning the flames of genoicide. Again.)

• Five points for anger, one for a ‘like’: How Facebook’s formula fostered rage and misinformation by By Jeremy B. Merrill and Will Oremus at The Washington Post (DCH: Outrage is the business model)

• For Uber and Lyft, the Rideshare Bubble Bursts by Greg Bensinger The New York Times (DCH: Uber’s $3 billion dollar magic trick

• Dominance And Collusion: Inside The Unredacted Antitrust Lawsuit Against Google’s Ad Tech Business - at AdExchanger

Society & The Culture

CJW: Why longtermism is the world’s most dangerous secular credo - Phil Torres at Aeon

This way of seeing the world, of assessing the badness of AIDS and the Holocaust, implies that future disasters of the same (non-existential) scope and intensity should also be categorised as ‘mere ripples’. If they don’t pose a direct existential risk, then we ought not to worry much about them, however tragic they might be to individuals. As Bostrom wrote in 2003, ‘priority number one, two, three and four should … be to reduce existential risk.’ He reiterated this several years later in arguing that we mustn’t ‘fritter … away’ our finite resources on ‘feel-good projects of suboptimal efficacy’ such as alleviating global poverty and reducing animal suffering, since neither threatens our longterm potential, and our longterm potential is what really matters.

We shared another piece on longtermism from Phil Torres back in August, but in case you missed that one, this is another piece worth the read.

[…] there’s a good case to make that the underlying commitments of longtermism are a major reason why humanity faces so many unprecedented risks to its survival in the first place. Longtermism might, in other words, be incompatible with the attainment of ‘existential security’, meaning that the only way to genuinely reduce the probability of extinction or collapse in the future might be to abandon the longtermist ideology entirely.

MKY: I legit wanna fight Bostrom. Somebody stick him in a training camp. I’ll be over there soon enough…

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DCH: Sinclair Workers Say TV Channels Are in ‘Pandemonium’ After Ransomware Attack by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai VICE

The company is now in the headlines for being the latest in a seemingly endless list of ransomware victims. Sinclair has released very few details about the attack since it was hacked Sunday. On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that the group behind the attack is the infamous Evil Corp., a ransomware gang that is believed to be based in Russia and which was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury department in 2019. The ransomware attack interfered with several channels’ broadcast programming, preventing them from airing ads or NFL games, as reported by The Record, a news site owned by cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. It has also left employees confused and wondering what’s going on, according to current Sinclair workers.

Sinclair is a blight that drives so much poison into the American media ecosystem and information diet. Yes, ransomware is dangerous. Yes, Evil Corp are baddies. BUT it’s always nice when bad things happen to bad people and bad corporations. Fuck Sinclair.

MKY: ransomware them all.

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• Don’t Give in to the Culture Industry’s Appeals to Nostalgia - Paris Marx at Jacobin

• Squid Game Aesthetics by Maureen N yesstyle.com

• People Have Spent More than $1 Million on NFT ‘Girlfriends‘ by Gita Jackson VICE

Labor & Economics

LZ: A Florida restaurant chain says staff got bigger tips after it hired a $1,000-a-month robot to carry plates - Kate Duffy at Insider

This is interesting. Many times we feel worried about automation and robots getting our jobs etc, but this went differently. I suppose the system works best in countries where there is a habit of tipping staff. Here in Brazil, we don’t usually give tips except on delivery apps and I’m not so sure if that’s something popular either… but hopefully this could be a global trend?

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DCH: What’s Behind the Biggest U.S. Strikewave in a Generation by Matthew Gault VICE

From the John Deere factory floor to the cereal-crunching halls of Kellogg’s, workers are telling management they’ve had enough. It’s labor unrest the U.S. hasn’t seen in a generation.

Great (and shortish) podcast on the many reasons the US working class have fucking had enough. Couple this with the Great Resignation happening in the professional / managerial classes and corporations are getting it at both ends.

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DCH: The billionaires are angry by Judd Legum popular.info

But recently, Senator Krysten Sinema (D-AZ), who voted against Trump’s tax bill, abruptly said she opposed any increase to the corporate or individual tax rate. This sent Democrats scurrying for alternative sources of revenue. Soon, that attention focused on a proposal being developed by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) to increase taxes on billionaires. The Wyden proposal would tax the unrealized capital gains of people whose wealth exceeds $1 billion. Currently, that threshold applies to 745 people, or .0005% of the population.

If the tax makes it past Congress then it could raise $200 to $250 million over 10 years. Good interview between Anand Giridharadas and Wyden with more details. Fingers crossed the gravy train comes to an end.

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• Real life debt and despair behind Netflix’s “Squid Game” - Victoria Kim at LA Times

• (Funko) Pop Modernism? - Xenogothic

• Multilevel Marketing Scams Expose Capitalism’s Foundational Lie - Luke Savage at Jacobin

• Inside Amazon’s Worst Human Resources Problem by Karen Weise Grace Ashford Jodi Kantor, The New York Times

Newsletters

CJW: The Environmental Impacts of SpaceX’s Oil and Gas Gambit - ESGHound

The rockets and the beach closures were all anyone talked about before, during, and after the Draft PEA process. Meanwhile, SpaceX and FAA had snuck a rather large industrial operation into this document. I noticed this nearly immediately and realized something very, very bad was going on. As I stated from day 1, construction of this kind of industrial operation constitutes a prima facie significant environmental impact.

A utility sized 250 megawatt power plant, a natural gas treatment facility, and a methane liquefier (eg a LNG process) is no small thing.

I got onto this piece via the Trash Future podcast. We’ve talked about Grifton Musk before, so I shouldn’t be surprised, but SpaceX is greenwashing a literal natural gas plant and only getting away with it due to some dodgy paperwork that the NEPA is letting pass (for mysterious reasons - though possibly because Musk has gotten to a sort of “too big to fail” status, or because people really [wrongly] believe he represents the future).

Above link is a summary of ESGHound’s findings.

Books

LZ: Hervé Le Tellier - L’anomalie

Not sure if this book was translated to English, but I got a translation to Portuguese for a special project and I’m obsessed. Tellier tells the story of an airplane that landed twice, meaning that there is a duplicate flight with duplicate passengers. Now scientists, religious leaders, and psychologists are trying to make things work out as 243 people face their double and the real consequences of it. The novel plays with some sci-fi tropes (or a philosophical theory, considering Bostrom’s work) about the possibility we are living in a simulation and it’s pretty interesting to see how the author deals with the possibility in a practical, rational, even comic way. Some quotes are simply brilliant. I don’t remember highlighting so much of a fiction book as I did here.

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CJW: Review: ‘The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity’ - William Deresiewicz at The Atlantic

The Dawn of Everything is framed by an account of what the authors call the “indigenous critique.” In a remarkable chapter, they describe the encounter between early French arrivals in North America, primarily Jesuit missionaries, and a series of Native intellectuals—individuals who had inherited a long tradition of political conflict and debate and who had thought deeply and spoke incisively on such matters as “generosity, sociability, material wealth, crime, punishment and liberty.”

The Indigenous critique, as articulated by these figures in conversation with their French interlocutors, amounted to a wholesale condemnation of French—and, by extension, European—society: its incessant competition, its paucity of kindness and mutual care, its religious dogmatism and irrationalism, and most of all, its horrific inequality and lack of freedom. The authors persuasively argue that Indigenous ideas, carried back and publicized in Europe, went on to inspire the Enlightenment (the ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy, they note, had theretofore been all but absent from the Western philosophical tradition). They go further, making the case that the conventional account of human history as a saga of material progress was developed in reaction to the Indigenous critique in order to salvage the honor of the West. We’re richer, went the logic, so we’re better. The authors ask us to rethink what better might actually mean.

This review of the new book from David Graeber and David Wengrow - the final book from Graeber, and a rethinking of what we think we know about human history. This is a great review, and makes me very interested in checking this book out.

Related: David Graeber Knew Ordinary People Could Remake the World

MKY: i am ordering this stat! The gods of the supply chain only know when it will arrive. Which is what passes for a nice surprise these days. Oh look, the thing… bless the net.

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CJW: ‘The Old Axolotl’: Man Without Body, Book without Paper - Mikolaj Glinski at Culture.pl (via Gareth Jelley)

On Jacek Dukaj’s The Old Axolotl and the way it approaches being a digital-only work of science fiction, and the author’s thoughts on the future of digital content (sorry) more generally. A few years old now, but still really interesting.

Especially interesting to consider a genuinely unique future for ebooks when we’re seeing a global paper shortage affecting the publishing industry.

Movies + TV

LZ: Dune by Denis Villeneuve

Alright, everybody is talking about it. I was charged with writing an article about the impact of Dune as a climate fiction and this was something interesting to me, because I never read the book from this angle and it seems this is actually growing. There are a few essays about the topic and I found it interesting how Villeneuve pays tribute to the complex worldbuilding of Herbert’s series. Some critics are complaining that the movie is soulless though beautiful, and I believe those who already read the first book may find it a bit redundant because it’s basically a literal adaptation of the novel… but the current actors are much better than in Lynch’s version, though his Dune has its own charm nevertheless. I thought Chalamet has channeled Paul very beautifully and he does look younger on screen as suggested by Villeneuve. Looking forward to seeing what’s coming next, when Chani will have more screen time.

MKY: Part2 just got greenlit. So I’m excited to revisit this again in a few years. Honestly would rather have watched a 4hr full adaptation though - seeing “Part1” come up on screen seconds in srsly took the wind outta my err… sand sails? Idk. Def need way more Chani time. Waaaaaaaaaaaaay more. Way. Kinda into the Fremen for some reason.

The Memes

LZ: With a phallic picture of a rocket as avatar and with an incel-ish meme posted, Musk seems to be having a hard time after his breakup with Grimes – or aren’t they really separated? I mean, if they are not, Claire… c’mon now…

This could be the cover of a book about Millennials, right?

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MJW: