nothing here but ecosystem revival

issue 141 - 13th June, 2021

CJW: Welcome to another edition of the nothing here newsletter. MKY is taking a break but I hope we’ll have him back next month. In the meantime we have special guest Lidia Zuin! Lidia is a Brazilian semiotician, journalist, researcher, futurologist and professor.

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The Team

• Corey J. White (CJW) - Left intentionally blank.
• Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - I’m also this guy. On a short break due to being Quite Mental. Live and work on Wurundjeri land.
• Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
• Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Journalist, MA in semiotics, and PhD in Arts. Sci-fi writer, futurology researcher and essayist. @lidiazuin

Articles

DCH: Beyond the green smart cities, solarpunk can also be dark By Lidia Zuin

In Multispecies Cities, I learned that solarpunk doesn’t need to be a science fiction subgenre that imagines a future that looks like folders distributed by Jehovah’s Witnesses, but it could be a genre that poses the opportunity to criticize, resist, and address metaphors about other philosophical topics that are not necessarily related to concrete issues coming from climate change or the side effects of late capitalism.

The inestimable m1k3y is on a temporary break from the newsletter. Corey asked me for recommendations on who could fill in for a bit. Lidia Zuin was the first name that sprang to mind. Lidia’s a Brazillian futurist who’s got an inclusive and dynamic worldview. Read the link above for an introduction to her work.

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CJW: World must rewild on massive scale to heal nature and climate, says UN - Patrick Greenfield at the Guardian (via MKY)

The world must rewild and restore an area the size of China to meet commitments on nature and the climate, says the UN, and the revival of ecosystems must be met with all the ambition of the space race.

Existing conservation efforts are insufficient to prevent widespread biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, the global body has warned at the launch of the decade on ecosystem restoration, an urgent call for the large-scale revival of nature in farmlands, forests and other ecosystems.

Emphasis mine. Can nerds get as excited about ecosystem revival as they got about Musk launching his trash (1, 2, 3, 4) into space?

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LZ: How ‘Roblox’ Became a Playground for Virtual Fascists - Cecilia D’Anastasio (via Bruce Sterling on Twitter)

While Silicon Valley techbros celebrate Roblox getting an IPO and hosting “metaverse concerts”, the game is also working as a home for fascist cults and of course this is connected to 4chan.

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CJW: Fort Bragg Murders: String of Violent Deaths at US Military Base - Seth Hart at Rolling Stone (via TrueAnon)

A Rogue Climber Running From the Law Was Fleeing His Own Trauma - Dave Phillips at New York Times (via Christopher Brown)

These are both interesting pieces, and worth a look. I think the latter helps bring the former into even greater relief. If you’re a black veteran of the US military you can expect felony charges for minor, victimless crimes (trespassing and minor property damage), but if you’re a tier one operator out of JSOC (the military within the military that basically acts without oversight) you can literally get away with drug trafficking, impersonating a police officer, and even murder.

There are some really heinous details in Seth Hart’s piece.

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DCH: Farewell, Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy by Kevin Roose at The New York Times

Some of these companies have been tightening their belts for years. But the pandemic seems to have emptied what was left of the bargain bin. The average Uber and Lyft ride costs 40 percent more than it did a year ago, according to Rakuten Intelligence, and food delivery apps like DoorDash and Grubhub have been steadily increasing their fees over the past year. The average daily rate of an Airbnb rental increased 35 percent in the first quarter of 2021, compared with the same quarter the year before, according to the company’s financial filings.

The entire gig economy is a sham that’s been propped up by VC cash for a decade. The strategy back in 2012 was to flood the zone with cheap shit, get to monopoly as quickly as possible, and then jack up the prices to finally make a profit. Thankfully that middle bit didn’t happen and now these shitty companies are crumbling. Good. Fuck ‘em.

CJW: The framing of this piece irks me a little in the way it implies millennials are taking advantage of poor, struggling VC-backed firms (“millennials are killing the unicorn industry”), rather than the truth which is that millennials have no money and are thus bargain hunters by necessity. Still, interesting piece in that it makes me wonder how many of these business will fold when people can’t afford to use them at all. Perhaps the issue isn’t price per se, but rather decades of wage stagnation and the absence of a broad labor movement.

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DCH: Amazon warehouse workers suffer serious injuries at higher rates than other firms Jay Greene and Chris Alcantara At The Washington Post

In 2020, for every 200,000 hours worked at an Amazon warehouse in the United States — the equivalent of 100 employees working full time for a year — there were 5.9 serious incidents, according to the OSHA data. That’s nearly double the rate of non-Amazon warehouses. In comparison, Walmart, the largest private U.S. employer and one of Amazon’s competitors, reported 2.5 serious cases per 100 workers at its facilities in 2020.

There’s a whole lot of misery behind all that one-click shopping. And more death than you probably know.

Books

LZ: Invisible Planets - Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation

Award-winning translator and author Ken Liu presents an anthology of short speculative fiction from China. Including prominent names like Liu Cixin (The Three-Body Problem), other authors featured in this collection were also awarded or well reviewed. It is a specially interesting anthology for those who want to refresh their ideas and sci-fi inspiration, because many of these stories have nothing to do with the Netflix-Hollywoodian tropes. In spite of being a translation, Ken Liu takes good care to feature some experimentalism in the poetics of these stories.

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CJW: The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway

After I first had a book (a novella, to be precise) published, I’d seen how the sausage was made and my relationship with novel reading changed somewhat. I’d always known that a writer writes a first draft of a novel and then hones it (with professional assistance) until it becomes the book that is sitting on the shelf, but I didn’t properly grasp it until I’d been through the process myself. It became demystified for me, and I was able to start to see the seams in books - it didn’t mean I enjoyed them any less, but I could imagine how the author wrote it (and how I might write something along similar lines), and the idea of a novel ceased to be an insurmountable challenge.

Then I read Nick Harkaway’s Gnomon. The artistry on show in that novel in the way he gave voice to those characters is phenomenal. He has a skill with voice that I don’t know I’ve ever seen equalled. It’s not a book I could grapple with as a fellow author - I could not see the seams.

Even though it impressed me so much, it took me until now to finally get around to reading another of Harkaway’s books - this time his debut, The Gone-Away World. Where Gnomon is very much in the literary speculative vein, TGAW is a deftly realised, incredibly imaginative apocalyptic adventure with a light and playful tone even while discussing serious issues like war and death (and love) and the end of the world. It is such a different book to Gnomon, but equal to it in the way it infuriates the writer in me. Harkaway has skill I would kill for (preferably a billionaire).

When I had about 200 pages left, I thought I knew where the story was going, and for a moment I told myself that maybe the book was dragging a little for the story it was telling… Then 50 pages later I get side-swiped and can only shake my head at my stupidity at thinking I could ever preempt the book.

URL

LZ: Olivia Little on Twitter

Grimes has gone fully automated luxury communist on a new TikTok video, but what the hell is that?

The Canadian singer is talking about the proposition of a system known as Fully Automated Luxury Communism, which has its own manifesto written by Aaron Bastani.

But since she is Mrs Musk now, it’s very possible that she was influenced by other Silicon Valley peers, like Peter Diamandis, who has been talking about this at least since the release of his book ‘Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think.’

Now, disclaimer: the gossip is that Grimes met Musk and they fell in love after they joked about Rocko’s Basilisk, the proposition that working on the development of a super A.I. is the only way to be forgiven by it when it becomes the ultimate overlord. A cyberpunk version of Pascal’s theorem about believing in God (better to believe it and not be punished in case He truly exists), it is said that the punchline is part of the reason why they super matched.

In the meantime, let’s see if Zola Jesus is up for another round after that feud about Silicon Valley fascism and the “look how they massacred my girl” moment when Zola realised what happened to Grimes.

CJW: AI is Good Actually: Notes on Commie Grimes and Intelligence & Spirit - Xenogothic

Philosophy and politics are largely disconnected from technology and science in the popular imagination. If anyone does attempt to think about politics and AI or philosophy and the blockchain, the immediate assumption is that it is some bad-news, reactionary, capitalistic project trying to bridge incompatible worlds. This is understood as the smart and sensible approach. It is not.

[…]

To hold every new technology or innovation up against a pre-existing ideal of what communism is and see how it fits into our dreams is to always be disappointed, and it is to effectively fall back on a kind of transcendental miserablism, denying yourself a role in shaping the future because you think you already know what it will look like.

I really appreciated this piece from my buddy, Matt. I definitely fall into the trap of predicting doom based on our current power structures, but as Matt points out that’s evidence of still being completely enmeshed in capital realist thinking. Yes, I agree that the entities currently working on AI and automation can’t be trusted to have any sort of good intentions, but that doesn’t mean we can’t imagine and work towards better - and communist - futures that use these currently-capitalist tools. For instance, Amazon’s logistics network, once expropriated, could form a backbone of a library socialist society.

We owe it to ourselves to imagine better futures, to undermine the restrictive capitalist thinking of figures like Musk to show him for the charlatan that he is. If we leave the futurism to people like him then we’ll get the futures we dread.

Fuck, that’s part of why I wrote REPO VIRTUAL, but I still get caught up in the miserablism.

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CJW: Emergency Breaks - Erik Baker at Real Life Mag

I’m sharing this because it’s directly at odds with my comments above RE: expropriating Amazon, but it hasn’t convinced me that I’m wrong. The author seems to be suggesting that taking something like Amazon’s logistical network for a socialist enterprise would perpetuate capitalist exploitation, and I just can’t agree with that. Being a delivery driver isn’t inherently a bad thing (to imply otherwise would be classist, surely) - it’s become a terrible job because of the conditions imposed by profit-seeking. If drivers worked a shorter day for more money, with more relaxed quotas, the work would get done (a little slower, surely, but next day delivery is hypercapitalist bullshit we can sure do away with), and the drivers could take their breaks and get home at the end of the day feeling like they’ve contributed without feeling like they’ve been exploited.

I think I could write a proper rebuttal to this (but I won’t), that takes into account the necessity of work and how the problem isn’t work but rather the lack of dignity in our work. Capitalism is slowly squeezing the dignity out of work (more work for less pay, gig economy bullshit, precarity keeping people too afraid to ask for better pay and conditions, etc etc), but there will always be work that needs to be done - building and repairing infrastructure, growing and distributing food, etc.

Anyway, I’m writing this part very last minute and wish I could take more time to get my thoughts down properly…

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CJW: Coexistences in the Holy Land - Ussama Makdisi at LARB

Zionism was forged in the cities and towns of Eastern and Central Europe, not in the Middle East. Its leaders were European, not Middle Eastern. They were inspired by and reacted to European currents of nationalism, antisemitism, and colonialism. This led them to call for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine under the slogan “land without a people for a people without a land.”

The bolded part above is obviously bullshit - Palestine was not a land without a people - and also parallels the equally-bullshit claims of terra nullius that led to the establishment of the Australian colonial project.

I didn’t realise the history of Zionism went back as far as the 19th Century, so I definitely learned something here.

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CJW: The Ghostchain. (Or taking things for what they are) - Geraldine Juárez at Paletten (via Sentiers)

Capitalisation is the extraction of value without direct involvement in its production, but instead by making a claim on its future benefits. The production of fictitious capital is a ghostly process of accumulation that, as Marx put it, transforms value into a “mere phantom of the mind”.

On crypto-art as it relates to art theory (Magritte, notably), and economic theory (Marx, of course). Worth sticking with it right until the end for the conclusions. A lot of really interesting thinking about the broader implications of NFTs, particularly the assetisation of everything (and every_one_, because our mundane cyberpunk dystopia of the now still has the potential to become far darker if SV isn’t slowed by regulation or revolution).

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DCH: Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny by RS Benedict at bloodknife.com

And yet, these characters fucked. Blue Velvet’s Dorothy Vallens and Jeffrey Beaumant fucked. Michael Keaton’s Batman and Michelle Pfeiffer’s domme Catwoman fucked. Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor fucked. Snake Plissken didn’t fuck on screen, but the character radiates overwhelming sex-haver energy. And I defy you to find a mainstream film with a moment as horny and gay as the Sexy Saxophone Solo from The Lost Boys.

What a fabulous read. From Starship Troopers to Inception to the MCU, Benedict skewers the wanton sexlessness of modern cinema. And she does so with the skill of a talented semiotician who threads the needle on how this lack of fucking harbingers hard-ons for war.

Data Viz

DCH: Understanding QAnon’s Connection to American Politics, Religion, and Media Consumption by prri.org

A nontrivial 15% of Americans agree with the sweeping QAnon allegation that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation,” while the vast majority of Americans (82%) disagree with this statement. Republicans (23%) are significantly more likely than independents (14%) and Democrats (8%) to agree that the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.

As dismal as that is, I’ve seen other past studies that clock that percentage 10% higher or more so I’m going to choose to take some solace in this. And as Steven Monacelli sas in the Byline Times the Christofacists aren’t going to go away completely without a fight.

Art

DCH: Japanese artist & designer Ikeuchi Hiroto creates fully functional hypebeast couture from the future. Particularly the future as seen in series like Neon Genesis Evangelion. Yes the antennas and other fiddly bits are just for aesthetic maximalism but the pieces work: be that as VR headsets or respirators or whatever else they’re designed to do.

Cutting Room Floor

• The invention of whiteness: the long history of a dangerous idea - Robert P. Baird at The Guardian
• There Is No “Birth Rate Crisis” - Lyta Gold at Current Affairs - CJW: On the racism and white supremacy inherent in talk of population figures, and how sexism underpins so much of our society’s discussion of pregnancy, and care more generally.
• Satellites may have been underestimating the planet’s warming for decades - Stephanie Pappas at Live Science
• CO2 levels are at an all-time high — again - Justine Calma at The Verge
• Green Utopias - Paul Graham Raven at Vector
• Steven Donziger Describes Contempt Case as a “Charade” as Trial Comes to a Close - Sharon Lerner at The Intercept
• Journalists in Australia Censured for Demanding Better Coverage of Israel and Palestine - Akela Lacy at The Intercept
• Atlassian’s Vision for the Future of Work Is a Cyber-Taylorist Nightmare - Ben Conway at Jacobin
• What the “Nefertiti Hack” Tells Us About Digital Colonialism - Sarah E. Bond at Hyperallergic
• Drone Autonomously ‘Hunted Down’ Human Target, UN Experts Say - Alyse Stanley at Gizmodo (via Sentiers)
• How they pinned a single, momentous number on the Universe - Corey S. Powell at Aeon
• The West’s Not Very Hidden Hand in Debt Oppression in Central Asia - Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism
• Facebook keeps touting its labels, but data suggests labels actually amplified Trump’s misinformation by Kayla Gogarty at Media Matters
• Amazon Prime Is an Economy-Distorting Lie by Matt Stoller at BIG