nothing here but elite desperation

issue 251 - 31st March, 2024

CJW: Happy Trans Day of Visibility. Hi, I'm trans.

To paraphrase Jessica Kant on Bluesky, the problem at the moment doesn't seem to be a lack of visibility, but rather hypervisibility outside of our own agency - with constant streams of hateful bullshit online and in newspapers and magazines that should be doing a lot better if they actually gave a fuck about journalistic and editorial integrity.

So, allies and so-called allies - you need to educate yourselves, you need to pushback against the bullshit, you need to be loud for us because life for a trans person shouldn't have to be a constant fight.

Alright. If you want to support the work we're doing here at NH, you’ve got a couple of options:

Both give you access to the full bonus archive, as well as new bonuses as they are posted. Another thing you can do to help spread the word is forward this email to someone you think might enjoy it.

The Team

Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Writer & visual artist. Middle-aged greying goth.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, glitch dreamer.

Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Journalist, MA in semiotics, and PhD in Arts.

Climate Change & The Environment

DCH: The Planetary Risks Of Nationalism - Nathan Gardels at Noema

Let me ask an inconvenient question about an inconvenient truth. If time is an ethical dimension when it comes to curbing climate change before it is too late and tips over into irreversibility, shouldn’t we hasten to pull out all the stops available now to save our livable biosphere? Planetary realism would seem to dictate that lesser considerations of narrowly defined national interest should take a back seat and not impede the rapid transition to renewable energy resources.

Seems like The TikTok cold war could end up screwing up energy renewables in the US.

CJW: I hope the history books call it the TikTok Cold War, just to emphasise how incredibly stupid this whole thing is.

“Why is it so hard to stitch together a cross-class coalition for climate policy? One part of the answer may be that, for generations, electorates have been sold a political vision of modernity that is centered on the carbon economy. Legitimizing decarbonization with powerful electoral mandates to move sclerotic parliaments will require political leaders to persuade voters not just of its necessity, but also its desirability. It can’t just be a recipe for pain and sacrifice. The investment-based programs will have to differ from country to country. Worryingly, this is a task in which leaders in Europe and beyond are coming up drastically short.” Liberal Blindspots by Tim Sahay phenomenalworld

Geopolitics & Empire

CJW: International Legal Rulings Are Helping Block Arms to Israel - Branko Marcetic at Jacobin

Thanks to a combination of public pressure, the obligations that being party to various human rights treaties creates for states under their own domestic legal systems, and the geopolitical implications of shame and embarrassment for those — particularly in North America and Europe — that have very loudly embraced international law when it’s proven convenient the last few years, the ICJ ruling has had notable real-world ripple effects on global military support for Israel’s war. This is true even if it still falls far short of what we would ideally expect to see in a world where international law truly reigned supreme.

Detailing some of the responses by various governments and government figures to the ICJ ruling against Israel. It's a start at least, and with continued pressure from human rights groups and prosecutors we could see more action in the coming weeks and months. While I don't see the US ever ending its support for the genocide of Palestinians, if enough of the rest of the world stood against them it would prove how little they truly care for the "rules-based order" they claim to defend.

CJW: U.S. Doubles Down on Defunding UNRWA — Despite Flimsy Allegations - Prem Thakker at The Intercept

Congress passed the defunding measure as part of a $1.2 trillion spending package to avert a partial government shutdown. In addition to stripping funding from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, through March 2025, the bill includes the $3.8 billion the U.S. sends to Israel every year.
The bill also contains a long-standing provision that would limit aid to the Palestinian Authority, which governs the occupied West Bank, if “the Palestinians initiate an International Criminal Court (ICC) judicially authorized investigation, or actively supports such an investigation, that subjects Israeli nationals to an investigation for alleged crimes against Palestinians.”

"Not only will we materially and politically support the state conducting a genocide of your people, but if you dare complain about it we'll find new ways to punish you." The Great Satan strikes again.

DCH: Nowhere to Live, Nowhere to Die - Sarah Aziza The Baffler

If the UN’s definition of genocide comprises “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”—the living body of a people—then the widespread desecration of cemeteries should be understood as a further step, what we might refer to as necrocide. Though it doesn’t have a clear, agreed-upon definition, the term has been used by scholars of the Holocaust and Bosnian genocides to describe either the rushed and improper disposal of thousands of corpses after a mass killing, or the exhumation and physical destruction of bodies already buried in mass graves for the purposes of covering up Nazi or Serbian crimes, respectively. In the case of Gaza, necrocide should be applied differently. Israeli war communiqués have done little to convincingly challenge the meticulously documented mass killings in hospitals or ration lines, and the “evidence” disposed of in Gaza’s cemeteries is not Palestinians killed in this war but those who were already dead. The logic of Zionist settler colonialism not only requires the elimination of Palestine in the present; it asks us to believe that Palestine, and Palestinians, never existed at all.

Emphasis mine. And yes mass desecration of cemeteries is officially a war crime. Yet another one for the tally

The first step toward disintegrating Israel’s settler machine - Ori Kol at +972 Magazine - CJW: On the possible implications of the Biden Administration's recent sanctions on various Israeli "settlers", assuming these sanctions are a first step and not the only one.
US TikTok ban aims to weaken China & protect Big Tech monopolies - Ben Norton at Geopolitical Economy Report
"Among the many hawks on Capitol Hill, few have as effectively frightened lawmakers over Chinese control of TikTok as Jacob Helberg, a member of the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission. Helberg’s day job at the military contractor Palantir, however, means he stands to benefit from ever-frostier relations between the two countries." Tech Official Pushing TikTok Ban Could Reap Windfall From U.S.–China Cold War by Sam Biddle The Intercept
Moscow concert hall attack: How did ISIL recoup, five years after ‘defeat’? Al Jazeera

Just the headlines:

‘By Mistake’ - Israel Admits to Publishing False Photos of Hamas Leaders Arrested in Al-Shifa - The Palestine Chronicle
How Israel Weaponizes Tree Planting to Displace Palestinians - Arvind Dilawar at Jacobin - CJW: Israel even weaponised planting trees. + Gaza's Trees Disappear, Showing a Humanitarian Crisis by Pooja Chaudhuri at Bellingcat
FBI Warns Gaza War Will Stoke Domestic Radicalization “For Years to Come” by Daniel Boguslaw The Intercept

Tech & Design

CJW: The TikTok Ban Is an Act of Elite Desperation - Adam Johnson at The Column (via APH)

Ultimately, the TikTok ban should be viewed as an act of elite desperation. With an emerging bipartisan consensus of further border militarization, and climate chaos accelerating faster than even our most pessimistic predictions, the need to control and manage images of human suffering is more urgent than ever. Gaza isn’t a deliberate testing ground for this—it’s its own unique and discrete evil that stems from unique and discrete colonial conditions. But it is fast becoming one incidentally. Bipartisan national security consensus changing course and seeking political solutions to fundamentally political problems—solutions predicated on justice, redistributing resources, and expanding suffrage—is obviously not an option. And when it’s not, extreme violence and subjugation is the order of the day. Such an order becomes much harder to enforce if images of the human costs of this extreme violence and subjugation are flooding the timelines of the domestic population. And since meaningfully reorganizing society is off the table, censoring the inevitable and horrific negative externalities of continued oppression is all that’s left.

This is a great distillation of an argument I've only really seen touched on elsewhere.

CJW: The Descent of Elon Musk - Ed Zitron

This is not somebody with a deep adoration or excitement about his companies or the world around him, but one of a million boorish conservative men grinding their axes about the problems they've created. Musk feels bereft of passion and purpose, a man so utterly flappable and deeply bothered by any insinuation that he's made a single mistake that I am genuinely astonished he's made it this far.

The interesting thing about the interview Zitron is talking about here is that you have to assume Don Lemon wasn't even being particularly aggressive in his questions because the interview was meant to launch his new show on Twitter. Even so, the tiniest bit of push back has Musk falling apart. He's not a smart man, he's not a charismatic man, and whatever glamour (in the magical sense) he had been able to maintain previously is quickly failing. And not a moment too soon.

Second half of this piece details a lot of numbers detailing Musk's cascading downfalls.

CJW: How Digital Twins’ Virtual Realities Will Transform The World - Joe Zadeh at Noema Mag

A skeptic might catch the faint rumble of a hype train and wince as a new multibillion-dollar industry intent on making spectral replicas of things that already exist comes to life. One has to wonder: How accurate can these things truly be? Whom do they serve? What damage to the environment will the necessarily massive amounts of computation do? Are we really interested in having yet more of our lives and shared public goods uploaded into digital realms and controlled by a tiny group of techno-capitalists?
Digital twin technology is still in its infancy, and many of these projects are in varying degrees of incompleteness. But there is a sense that this is all now a matter of time. Reflections of ourselves and our worlds are enticing, beckoning us. Digital twins are already changing how people think across many academic disciplines and professional fields. You see, they aren’t just being made of objects, places and processes — they are being applied to living entities and organisms. And this is where things get a bit weird, because these twins might just save your life. In fact, some of the most scientifically advanced and potentially life-changing projects are coming from the world of healthcare, where there is an ongoing quest to make a digital twin of you.

A really interesting write-up about the people working to create human digital twins to aid in medical research, diagnosis, and treatment. It's interesting and potentially exciting stuff, but as a sceptic I had to include the first paragraph of the above pull quote because it matters greatly who owns or has access to these models and what purpose they use them toward. One could easily imagine these simulations being used by health insurers to deny treatment for any and all conditions that could be "predicted" by your model.

CJW: AI search is a doomsday cult - Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day (via Jared Shurin)

Why even bother making new websites if no one’s going to see them? At least with the Web3 hype cycle, there were vague platitudes about ownership and financial freedom for content creators. To even entertain the idea of building AI-powered search engines means, in some sense, that you are comfortable with eventually being the reason those creators no longer exist. It is an undeniably apocalyptic project, but not just for the web as we know it, but also your own product. Unless you plan on subsidizing an entire internet’s worth of constantly new content with the revenue from your AI chatbot, the information it’s spitting out will get worse as people stop contributing to the network.

This piece on AI search asks a lot of interesting questions that the creators and pushers of this technology don't seem to have considered. Or more to the point, they'll worry about it later when they've "revolutionised" (read: ruined) X or Y and made billions in the process.

DCH: The End of the Extremely Online Era by Thomas J Bevan

I believe it will end, this so-called way of life. Not through the Silicon Valley oligarchs spontaneously developing a conscience or being legislated into acting with a modicum less sociopathy. I don’t believe people will be frightened into changing how they act or suddenly shamed into putting their phones down for once in their lives. Such interventions don’t work with most addicts and more and more people are legitimately hooked on their devices than we are currently willing to countenance. No, I think this will all end, as T.S Eliot said, with a whimper. People will simply lose interest and walk away. Because the internet now is boring. People spend all day scrolling because they are trying to find what isn’t there anymore. The authenticity, the genuinely human moments, the fun.

Emphasis mine. Social media will die a death by a thousand cringe posts essentially.

"Bankman-Fried is likely to spend a significant amount of time in prison for the fraud he engineered. But with no changes to how the industry operates and no watchdogs to check the abuse and greed that have defined it over its now-15 years of existence, we are doomed to see history repeat itself. More Bankman-Frieds will emerge to take his place, drawn by the promise of easy money and the low likelihood of consequences. How many like him have escaped punishment or even scrutiny?" Sam Bankman-Fried is going to prison. The crypto industry isn’t any better for it - Molly White at The Guardian
"I believe that artificial intelligence has three quarters to prove itself before the apocalypse comes, and when it does, it will be that much worse, savaging the revenues of the biggest companies in tech. Once usage drops, so will the remarkable amounts of revenue that have flowed into big tech, and so will acres of data centers sit unused, the cloud equivalent of the massive overhiring we saw in post-lockdown Silicon Valley." Have We Reached Peak AI? by Edward Zitron wheresyoured.at (DCH: the next AI winter is coming. If not this year then probably next.)
Age Verification Laws Drag Us Back to the Dark Ages of the Internet by Emanuel Maiberg 404me
How the GOP muzzled the quiet coalition that fought foreign propaganda by Kevin Collier NBC News

Just the headlines:

As The US Freaks Out About TikTok, It’s Revealed That The CIA Was Using Chinese Social Media To Try To Undermine The Gov’t There - Mike Masnick at Techdirt (via Ahmet A. Sabancı) - CJW: Every accusation a confession.

Society & The Culture

CJW: There Are Dark Corners of the Internet. Then There's 764 - Ali Winston at Wired

They don't even go into great detail in this piece and I still found it horrifying and disgusting. These people are truly evil.

DCH: What’s the Price of a Childhood Turned Into Content? by Fortesa Latifi at Cosmopolitan

Now a young adult in her 20s looking back on her childhood, Vanessa says the reality of the blog being the family’s main source of income put an enormous amount of pressure on her. “There was this idea that you have to look perfect and pretty and like nothing is wrong all the time in front of the camera,” she says. “And if it seemed like I wasn’t trying hard enough to maintain that image, like my smile wasn’t as bright as it should be or I didn’t say a line with enough enthusiasm…that would usually devolve into accusing me of not caring about our family. I was told by my mom, ‘Do you want us to starve? Do you want us to not be able to make our payment next month on the mortgage?’

Your biweekly reminder that influencers are often garbage people.

Related: A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men - Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Michael H. Keller at The New York Times

“You sell pics of your underage daughter to pedophiles,” read one. “You’re such a naughty sick mom, you’re just as sick as us pedophiles,” read another. “I will make your life hell for you and your daughter.”

In case you already forgot.

"[San Diego] appears to be achieving the primary goal of the takeover, which was slashing response times by eliminating the financial incentives that private ambulance companies have to reduce service and hours." - San Diego's ambulance takeover is making for faster service, fewer violations. But why are there more ambulance calls? - San Diego Union Tribune - CJW: Privatisation of public services has always been a fucking rort that damages the services the public receives for the benefit of company executives and shareholders.
“It’s no coincidence that the widespread adoption of the technology has evolved in parallel with increasingly draconian laws against protest. As part of its “Protect the Protest” project, Amnesty International tracks repressive legislation that imposes illegitimate restrictions on protests, with examples across five regions. Facial recognition tech helps enable this repression by offering a way to enforce such regulation on a sweeping scale.” The changing face of protest by Darren Loucaides Rest of World (DCH: Here in the UK the Tory Govt are increasingly taking steps to effectively criminalise protest. A one-two punch of techno-surveillance + policy.)

Health, Cooking, and Related

MJW: Endo Days by Jess McAllen at The Baffler

The surgeon-influencers and contentious patient groups like Nancy’s Nook are symptomatic of a broken health care system, especially in the United States. The lack of robust research and training around endometriosis has created conditions that allow individual providers to achieve cult status, while treating health care as a market incentivizes doctors to think of themselves as proprietors and their patients as potential customers. And while social media might contribute to the spread of false or oversimplified information, these posts can still be helpful—if you mix them all together in your head and manage to wring out the truth.

The wilds of endometriosis treatment, a confusing and complex system created by patients with few other options and proliferated on social media.

"Rising divorce rates, forgoing condoms as there is no risk of pregnancy, the availability of drugs for sexual dysfunction, the large number of older adults living together in retirement communities, and the increased use of dating apps are likely to have contributed to the growing incidence of STIs in the over 50s", Justyna Kowalska, who is presenting the research, said in a statement." Twice As Many STIs as a Decade Ago by Robyn White at Newsweek

Just the headlines:

House Republicans Want to Ban Universal Free School Lunches by Prem Thakker The Intercept (DCH: I got by on free school lunches as a kid. Republicans hate this program for two reasons 1. Fuck poor kids 2. It was pushed into being because of The Black Panthers)

Labour & Economics

DCH: Why the world cannot afford the rich By Richard G. Wilkinson, Kate E. Pickett at Nature

The evidence gathered by social epidemiologists, including us, shows that large differences in income are a powerful social stressor that is increasingly rendering societies dysfunctional. For example, bigger gaps between rich and poor are accompanied by higher rates of homicide and imprisonment. They also correspond to more infant mortality, obesity, drug abuse and COVID-19 deaths, as well as higher rates of teenage pregnancy and lower levels of child well-being, social mobility and public trust3,4. The homicide rate in the United States — the most unequal Western democracy — is more than 11 times that in Norway (see go.nature.com/49fuujr). Imprisonment rates are ten times as high, and infant mortality and obesity rates twice as high.

Good research and a good argument for why economic equality is essential for any long term progress of sustainability and climate justice.

“In the chapter dedicated to delivery workers, Treré and Bonini show how drivers explore loopholes and cheat their algorithmic bosses in an attempt to regain some agency, improve working conditions, organise forms of collective action and build solidarity bonds. Their practices of everyday microresistance can be put to the service of different intentions, some of which are not necessarily positive or morally acceptable to the majority. More often than not, however, couriers have developed practices of cooperation and solidarity that challenge the neoliberal logic and competitive behaviour encoded in algorithms. The forms of mutualism not afforded by the apps range from online private chat groups where workers exchange information, coordinate collective actions and provide mutual support to platform cooperativism which emerged a few years ago as an alternative to commercial platforms.” - Algorithms of Resistance. The Everyday Fight against Platform Power by Regine T we-make-money-not-art

Just the headlines:

Uber drivers are melting amid Nigeria’s historic heat wave and record fuel prices by Kimberly Mutandiro at Rest of World

Books

LZ: Underworlds: A Compelling Journey Through Subterranean Realms, Real and Imagined, by Stephen Ellcock

Found this beautiful book at Tate Modern's and bought it right away. Despite being relatively thick, most pages are images and a few quotes from several sources: Dante's Divina Comedia (of course), The Odyssey, The Illyad, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and all the other proto-goth peeps. It's cool that Ellcock not only includes classic paintings and sculptures but also contemporary art, so you can have another take on the subject… Funny enough he picks several contemporary works that look like old paintings or tackle mythological and religious topics. In any case, there are a few curious learnings like what a fatberg and iterative evolution is. It's not a very deep approach to the topic of underworlds if you are already into it, but it is comprehensive and has a few gems of knowledge.

Music

LZ: Einstürzende Neubauten - Ist ist

New track by Neubauten and it seems they are fully back to their industrial, noisy roots! I love it. Looking forward to listening to their upcoming releases.

LZ: Walg - Mourning Palace

This is a cover of the famous, classic Dimmu Borgir track. It's funny because DB is kind of seen as a poser/fake black metal band, and I get where these claims come from, but this cover smashes it and gives a new life to the epic keyboard!

Art

CJW: Unearthly Characters Populate Spencer Hansen's Salvaged Universe - Colossal

four wooden characters, two with astronaut-style masks and two with antennae

Sporting pinecone-esque suits or masks with gilded antennae, the alien creatures that surface in Spencer Hansen’s Bali workshop appear to be both of this world and not. The artist recycles familiar, natural materials like wood, fur, and bone, envisioning mysterious but friendly characters with skeletal features and chiseled bodies. Ranging from a few inches high to life-sized, the uncanny sculptures are part of an ever-growing universe salvaged from the scraps of waste materials.

I love these little guys. I hope you enjoy them too.