nothing here but deepfake pitches

issue 148 - 22nd August, 2021

CJW: Everything happens all the time, as these past 2 weeks have attested.

Spare a thought for Marlee, who’s in hospital at the moment (nothing major, but it’s never a great time). Melbourne’s in lockdown, so I can’t go visit her either - but at least we have COVID under control enough where they have a bed for her. Things could be much worse.

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The Team

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

• m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / ecopoet // Dark Extropian Musings / pryvt.rsrch

• Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - also Mia Walsch. Professional reject. Hectically ADHD. I’m not really here this time cos I just had my appendix out.

• Corey J. White (CJW) - Everything happens all the time.

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

Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: Climate change report from IPCC a 'code red for humanity', United Nations chief warns - Michael Slezak and Penny Timms at ABC News

Here's a summary of the latest IPCC report. You've probably already read at least one similar summary, but I wanted to point out this bit of irony:

If it was not for aerosol pollution emitted by humans, which cools the Earth, the IPCC said the greenhouse gasses we have emitted would already have heated the world by 1.5C.

MKY: all hope lies in doom.

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CJW: Climate report coverage prompts alarm, not action - Ketan Joshi at SMH

There are two stories buried in these estimates. The first is that both the least-bad and most-bad scenarios do not diverge all that much in the short-term – that is, the next 20ish years.

The second is that the decisions made today become deeply and massively consequential further in the future, with each new year seeing a widening gap between possible futures, depending on how aggressively we reduce emissions from today onwards.

These two stories were, in some parts, not reflected well in media coverage of the IPCC report.

Great piece detailing the findings of the IPCC report and the media’s failure in (headlining) its reportage.

Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather neatly explained how mangled this is: “This is NOT what the IPCC says. While I’m personally skeptical of our ability to mitigate emissions fast enough to avoid 1.5C warming, that’s a constraint of politics and economics not basic physics. The world is not committed to 1.5C at current CO2 concentrations.”

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CJW: We're Not in This Together - Ajay Singh Chaudhary at The Baffler

Although insurance companies and the emergency service contractors themselves focus on the high-end market, they are increasingly creating more affordable, less comprehensive packages for lower tiers of customers. This kind of tiered access to services is familiar to anyone who has encountered private or privatized social goods, like market-based health insurance. And yet it is also an extreme intensification, where there is seemingly no obstacle to privatized governance. In this example, we can see one microcosm of what I call right-wing climate realism.

One of the most common misconceptions concerning climate change is that it produces, or even requires, a united humanity. In that tale, the crisis in the abstract is a “common enemy,” and a perfectly universal subject is finally possible in coming to “experience” ourselves “as a geological agent,” through which a universal “we” is constituted in a “shared sense of catastrophe.” The story I am telling you is different. In this story, there is no universal “we.” Climate change is not the apocalypse, and it does not fall on all equally, or even, in at least a few senses, on everyone at all.

I could have grabbed more quotes from throughout this piece, so do yourself a favour and go read it. On climate injustice, business-as-usual thinking, and our divided presents/futures. A long read, but also a must-read, I'd say.

https://twitter.com/kaibosworth/status/1425072244036968454

MKY: if there’s one thing Gibson got right lately, it's that the Klept will be continuing their rich little larper lives long after the biosphere collapses and… and… and… ugh. UNLESS

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DCH: US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries – shrinking this war machine is a must - Benjamin Neimark, Lancaster University, Oliver Belcher, Durham University, Patrick Bigger, Lancaster University via The Conversation

In case you needed another reason to hate the American military...

Greenhouse gas emission accounting usually focuses on how much energy and fuel civilians use. But recent work, including our own, shows that the US military is one of the largest polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries. If the US military were a country, its fuel usage alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, sitting between Peru and Portugal.

MKY: yeah, learning wayback that even when the U of S was vaguely thinking of committing to cuts, they got an exception for the military… that was a big mood that’s never left me.

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DCH: The Far-Right’s Shift from Climate Denial to Ecofascism - Thomas Perrett bylinetimes.com

In August 2019, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius was arrested and charged with capital murder after shooting 23 people at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas. His manifesto – entitled ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ in an apparent reference to Al Gore’s film about climate change – described immigration as “environmental warfare” and claimed that “there is no nationalism without environmentalism”.

Crusius was a self-described ‘eco-fascist’, who believed that over-population had put a strain on the planet’s resources, and that the only way to mitigate climate change was to forcibly put a stop to mass immigration and multiculturalism.

Crusius isn’t alone. Whole swaths of the far-right across the globe (but especially in European nations like Spain, Germany, France, The Netherlands, etc.) are latching on to climate concerns as another front in their nationalistic culture wars. It’s a tactic that worked for The Nazis in their “blood and soil” campaigns.

MKY: who’s trying to save the world - and who are they saving it for? Loops around my brain like a 3D screensaver of olde.

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• Australians are three times more worried about climate change than COVID. A mental health crisis is looming - Rhonda Garad, Joanne Enticott and Rebecca Patrick at ABC News

• ‘Not too late’: Australian scientists call for urgent action to avoid worst of climate crisis - Adam Morton and Graham Readfearn at The Guardian

• Young people jettisoned on climate, vaccines and housing

• Cutting your carbon footprint matters a lot — if you’re rich - Maddie Stone at Grist

• A NASA scientist explains why the weather is becoming more extreme - Justine Calma The Verge

• How to Save the World in 15 Years - Nafeez Ahmed bylinetimes.com (DCH: this is the start of a good series.)

Geopolitics

CJW: The Collective Suicide Machine - Chris Hedges at Mint Press News (via Dan Hill)

The military becomes in late empire unmanageable, unaccountable, and endlessly self-perpetuating, no matter how many fiascos, blunders and defeats it visits upon the carcass of the nation, or how much money it plunders, impoverishing the citizenry and leaving governing institutions and the physical infrastructure decayed.

Chris Hedges delivering a concise but detailed history of America's recent blunders in the Middle East and how that parallels the decline of earlier empires.

Invading Iraq and Afghanistan, dropping iron fragmentation bombs on villages and towns, kidnapping, torturing and imprisoning tens of thousands of people, using drones to sow terror from the skies, resurrected the discredited radical jihadists and was a potent recruiting tool in the fight against U.S. and NATO forces. We were the best thing that ever happened to the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Includes some harrowing predictions of America's domestic decline.

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DCH: Afghanistan's Opium Business Boomed Under U.S. Occupation - Matthew Gault at VICE

Like other U.S. efforts in Afghanistan (and, separately, the war on drugs), the war against poppy is a complete and utter failure. Not only did the Pentagon fail to eradicate the drug-producing plant, it created the perfect conditions for it to flourish. The reasons why are well documented and simple to understand. Both the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction have produced dozens of reports detailing the failure of drug interdiction in the country.

From the country that brought you the Sacklers...

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CJW: World roundup: August 17 2021 - Foreign Exchanges

Foreign Exchanges with a great summary of the unfolding situation in Afghanistan, with plenty of links to follow if you've not kept up.

MKY: Afghanistan round-up:

• The Taliban's Mao-inspired return to power in Afghanistan shows the US is failing to heed the lessons of history

• https://podbay.fm/p/unauthorized-disclosure/e/1627303840

• View from Iran: US Withdrawal From Afghanistan Reflects A Weakened Empire, w/ Mohammad Marandi (thx Brendan!)

• This Could Be the Next Afghan Insurgency - foreverwars

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CJW: What I Learned While Eavesdropping on the Taliban - Ian Fritz at The Atlantic

“Do I have to [place the IED]?”

“Yes! Go do it!”

“I don’t want to.”

“Brother, why not? We must jihad!”

“Brother … It’s too cold to jihad.”

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• US Policing Is Linked to US Military Power Around the World (via Foreign Exchanges)

• ‘Deus Vult,’ Said The Cosmopolitans by Spencer Ackerman at foreverwars

Science & Space

• Black holes surrounded by massive, energy-harvesting structures could power alien civilizations

• The Scientists Exploring the ‘Dark Universe’ Linked by a Vast Cosmic Web - VICE

Tech & Design

LZ: The Transhuman Olympics

...or how this author is proposing that the Olympic games committee drops drug testing and embraces technology as a “regular” performance booster. They suggest that substances and technological accessories are just ways to improve an athlete’s performance but not a means to cheat or take advantage over other competitors. If the IOC was really worried about the disadvantages between competitors, they would prohibit athletes with more access to the best gyms and trainers, or athletes with genetic advantage to compete with those who don’t have such benefits.

It could be a controversial opinion for some, but it’s interesting to think about a transhumanist olympics -- would it merge with the paralympics? Wouldn’t it still keep disadvantages between competitors since not everyone will have access to better/most recent technological innovations? Would the Olympics become more elitist? How riskier would olympism become when you have these “add-ons”? With athletes retiring right after winning a gold medal and leaving the competition for the benefit of their mental health, there’s much more than simply physical performance involved here. Most of these topics are covered in the essay.

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DCH: What in the absolute hell does Palantir know that we don’t? - Andrew Paul at inputmag.com

Palantir, the Bond villain big data surveillance company with a Bond villain name that routinely and openly aids in killing people like most Bond villains do, announced it will soon accept Bitcoin payments for its Bond villain services. Speaking with Bloomberg yesterday, Palantir’s COO, Shyam Sankar, also explained the company cryptocurrency strategy comes alongside buying up nearly $51 million in gold alongside other investments in preparation for “a future with more black swan events,” a term that can be translated into layman’s terms as “catastrophic geo-political shitshows.”

That’s right. Palantir is buying up a shit ton of gold AND selling its nefarious services to the highest bidder via crypto. Insert thisisfine.jpg

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DCH: Global organizations urge Apple to drop child safety features - Issie Lapowsky at Protocol

More than 90 civil liberties organizations around the world sent a letter to Apple's Tim Cook Thursday, urging the CEO to walk back its plans to use machine learning to automatically detect child sexual abuse material on users' devices.

Researchers have already identified hash collision in the processes Apple intends to use to identify child porn. Never mind the obvious risk of false positives from people spamming other people files (remember people bearming women dick pics on the tube?). And you know the overall privacy invasion of scanning camera rolls. Plus the tendency for Apple to kowtow to the Chinese Govt especially when it comes to oppressing the Uyghur population. And...

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DCH: The Indefensible Cruelty of OnlyFans’ Porn Ban - Alex Kirshner at Slate

OnlyFans’ decision to sell out porn creators fits neatly into a narrative of greed. Anyone can see that OnlyFans would be a fraction of its current self without this specific class of worker, and few misdeeds in business are easier to grasp than a company freezing out the people who helped build it. But OnlyFans’ move is actually more insidious than that. Because of the relationship the platform has with its creators, the structure of U.S. labor law, and the exploitative and abusive tendencies of the porn industry, what OnlyFans is doing is not just shameful, but fundamentally cruel.

This is straight out of the SiliCON Valley playbook. Like Instagram and Snapchat and so many others before it, OnlyFan’s created an empire on the back of exploiting sex workers. A bevy of actors from payments processors, to VC investors who want “cleaner money”, to Apple and Google and their censorish app stores all demanding a pivot to puritanical bullshit.

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• I'm a Luddite. You should be one too. - Jathan Sadowski at The Conversation

• How AI-powered Tech Landed Man In Jail With Scant Evidence - The Associated Press

• Zuckerberg deflects questions about vaccine disinformation on Facebook - The Guardian

Society & The Culture

CJW: Delta Has Changed the Pandemic Endgame - Ed Yong at The Atlantic

In simple terms, many people who caught the original virus didn’t pass it to anyone, but most people who catch Delta create clusters of infection. That partly explains why cases have risen so explosively. It also means that the virus will almost certainly be a permanent part of our lives, even as vaccines blunt its ability to cause death and severe disease.

Emphasis mine. I was saying the same thing to Marlee even before I read this piece. Anyway, as this is coming from Ed Yong, you know it's a detailed overview, simply written.

Vaccines remain the best way for individuals to protect themselves, but societies cannot treat vaccines as their only defense. And for now, unvaccinated pockets are still large enough to sustain Delta surges, which can overwhelm hospitals, shut down schools, and create more chances for even worse variants to emerge. To prevent those outcomes, “we need to take advantage of every single tool we have at our disposal,” Bansal said.

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DCH: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever. This Is How We Live With It. - Sarah Zhang at The Atlantic

An excellent companion piece to the link above. I spent most of 2020 working on tech projects related to Covid so this is heartening to hear. The task now is to make sure we get to endemicity with as little loss of life as possible.

The good news is this virus is unlikely to evolve so much that it sets our immunity back to zero. “Our immune responses are so complex, it’s basically impossible for a virus to escape them all,” says Sarah Cobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. For example, levels of antibodies that quickly neutralize SARS-CoV-2 do indeed drop over time, as happens against most pathogens, but reserves of B cells and T cells that also recognize the virus lie in wait. This means that immunity against infection may wane first, but the protection against severe illness and death are much more durable.

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DCH: A $100,000 Chicken McNugget Triggered a Child-Sex-Trafficking Conspiracy Theory - EJ Dickson at Rolling Stone

Quick. What do eBay, TikTok, YouTube, K-Pop Superstars BTS, the meme economy, and oddly-shaped chicken nuggets have in common? QAnon fueled outrage, that’s what.

As Rolling Stone previously reported, part of the reason why such outlandish sex trafficking hoaxes tend to take root on TikTok is because the format of the platform allows attention-grabbing yet inaccurate content to circulate at an astoundingly rapid rate. “Panicky videos are very engaging,” disinformation researcher Abbie Richards previously told Rolling Stone. “If you are just watching someone say, ‘Oh my God, this happened to me,’ that’ll go viral. Scary content goes quite viral.” TikTok’s For You page also delivers content that is algorithmically engineered to meet the user’s interests, providing little opportunity for content debunking such viral misinformation to surface.

Tech pundits like to talk about the attention economy a lot. Fact of the matter is we live in an outrage economy. We click, tap, and swipe more when we’re angry. Social media platforms make their profits from our anger.

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DCH: Why is Deadly Misogyny Not Recognised as a Form of Extremism? - Dr Maria Norris at The Byline Times

Here in the UK we’ve recently had our first mass shooting in over a decade. And as with similar killings last summer in the US, it was at the hands of a blood thirsty incel. Police and the media are failing to recognize this for what it is: domestic terrorism.

The failure to understand the ideological underpinnings of the Plymouth shooting betrays an old-fashioned and outdated way of looking at terrorism.

The threat is no longer only emanating from formal groups with distinct symbols and membership, it is now far more nebulous – emerging from diaphanous online communities which are more dangerous precisely because of their non-corporeality.

Modern terrorism is a mindset not an org structure. Ideologies are fomented in online groups and forums not centuries old scriptures. And when it comes to incels recognizing that intersects with the casual misogyny that comes from living in sexist societies that already devalue and other women.

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• Suspected saline switch sparks vaccine stir in Germany - Reuters

• Australian conspiracy theorists and anti-lockdown groups share fake Covid check-in apps - Christopher Knaus and Nick Evershed at The Guardian

Labor & Economics

LZ: Deepfakes Are Now Making Business Pitches - Tom Simonite at Wired

Deepfakes have joined the startup game and now the technology is being used to create audiovisual business pitches. In spite of that, I was speculating how this could rather evolve from the pandemic’s overload of lives and video calls, to those background pre-recorded videos where someone faked they were paying attention to the meeting/presentation, and now a whole deepfake to set you free from redundant calls and presentations. I myself would love to have something like that? But then again… what happens to human interaction, feelings, and the so-called soul? Can’t say many people would enjoy this kind of interaction.

I remember back at the beginning of the pandemic, I was invited to join a random live in which a woman said that back in the day, scheduling an online call was considered impolite, that the person might not be so interested etc… but with the pandemic, this changed. Will it change again when the age of corporate deepfakes arrive for real?

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DCH: Zillow, Other Tech Firms Are in an ‘Arms Race’ To Buy Up American Homes - Maxwell Strachan at Vice

While small relative to the $36 trillion residential real estate market, the nascent industry is growing rapidly with unforeseeable consequences as firms compete to establish themselves as the predominant brand. An analysis published this week by Mike DelPrete, a scholar-in-residence at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies the iBuyer market, found that iBuyers have recently shifted “to a free-for-all, acquire at any cost strategy.” At present, both Opendoor and Zillow’s homes division are losing money in the process.

Straight from the SiliCON Valley playbook: Use inordinate amounts of VC cash to acquire stock (usually your eyes, in this case homes), amass market share, fuck a whole bunch of shit up. You can’t even go this ‘unforeseen consequences” either. Based on the housing crisis that caused the 2008 global financial meltdown AND on how AirBnB has disastrously affect housing prices it’s actually rather easy to see what’s coming.

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• End of the line for Uber - Cory Doctorow

• Berlin’s referendum and the housing costs fury - Financial Times (via Cory Doctorow)

• Globalization, Specialization, and the Division of Labour - Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism

• Going, Going, Almost Gone: UK Government Speeds Up Privatisation of National Health System Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism

Books

LZ: Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro

I’m still in the middle of it, but I’m finding it both cute and sad -- the very combination that makes me enjoy Miyazaki animations, for instance. Anyways, the book is about a near future when kids are able to purchase robots called AF (artificial friend). The story is narrated in the first person, by this robot called Klara, who is super intelligent and sensitive etc. I saw some reviews saying that the book was about the impossibility of humans to love robots, but it’s somehow interesting to see how religiosity also appears as a strong element in the story when you realize that the Sun is rather some kind of god for Klara -- both because she uses solar power to recharge her batteries, and because she sees it as a mystical, grandiose being. Dunno if this is going to end up like Spielberg’s A.I., but for now I’m finding it a soothing read.

Movies + TV

LZ: Thrice Upon a Time: The new and last movie for Evangelion

Evangelion is one of those universes that have been built, rebuilt, remixed, refined, rewritten, and you never know what really happened or what was changed in another film or special content. In any case, the canonical anime has grown cult for the past decades, especially with the rise of memes around it. But it’s crazy to see how many science fiction works are currently dealing with the same pathos: series like Devs and Dark revamped Frankenstein’s Promethetic curse and Evangelion has fallen into the same arch with this new movie.

Don’t want to spoil it and tell the ending, but it’s kind of crazy for me to see so many contemporary titles, most of them remakes or reboots, that end up with the conclusion that we need to get over it, we need to accept death, and to grow up. I think after some critics (like Alan Moore) have concluded that the superhero thing was infantilizing adults, and after titles like The Boys and Invincible became popular among more or less the same demographic, we may be (finally and hopefully?) reaching a turning point in this industry. Or not, if you consider what Disney and Marvel are doing.

The Memes

MJW: I’m a little sad that we won’t get to this point. Except for the mask thing. That’s def gonna happen.