nothing here but failure colonialism
issue 315 - 26th April, 2026
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The Team
Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Writer & visual artist. Meme collector.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, pattern screamer.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer and purveyor of melancholy whimsy.
Climate Change & The Environment
DCH: “Data Colonialism”: Native Communities Fight AI Data Centers on Indigenous Land by Amy Goodman and Krystal Two Bulls at Democracy Now
Yeah, I think Indian Country is always a target for extractive industry. And what history has taught us is that anytime outside industry comes into Indian Country and has all these big, you know, promises of jobs and economic development and language revitalization and all of these things, that it tends to not work out for us. We are never the ones that actually truly benefit from that, and we’re always the one that ends up having to sacrifice our relationship to land, air, water, our communities and our nonhuman relatives, as well.
Tech companies are planting data centers on Native land the same way extractive industry always has: with NDAs, job promises that evaporate after construction, and consequences that stay forever. Honor the Earth is tracking over 100 proposed hyperscale projects on tribal lands, connecting the dots from water depletion to grid overload to ecological collapse. This is settler colonialism with server racks.
Related good news: Seminole Nation of Oklahoma Passes Moratorium on Data Centers (via Sentiers)
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DCH: “Colossus Failure”: Elon Musk’s Data Centers Face Lawsuit for Polluting Black Neighborhoods in Memphis by Amy Goodman and Keshaun Pearson
What Elon Musk said is basically smoke and mirrors, because what we know is that southwest Memphis continues to be targeted. Memphis Community Against Pollution has stood up against multiple corporations and billion-dollar organizations who have sought to see our community as the path of least resistance, where they could push forward these environmentally unjust and these environmentally racist projects. These projects specifically focus on a neighborhood, on a community and on a region where you see an increased poverty level and you also see an increased amount of Black families.
Elon Musk's xAI is running two dozen unpermitted methane turbines next to historically Black neighborhoods in Memphis with no permits, no community consent, and pollution levels exceeding the city's international airport. The NAACP is suing for Clean Air Act violations while children in southwest Memphis post the state's highest ER rates for respiratory illness. Memphis didn't end up with Colossus by accident; the city's mayor and chamber of commerce recruited it.
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“The impacts of sea level rise under climate change have been systematically underestimated,” concludes Matt Palmer, a specialist on sea level rise at the U.K. Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Science. “We could see devastating impacts much earlier than predicted — particularly in the Global South.” A More Troubling Picture of Sea Level Rise Comes Into View by Fred Pearce at Undark
The coming global food crisis (Archive Link) - The FT - CJW: A very detailed look.
Just the headlines:
AI is about to make the global e-waste crisis much worse - Ananya Bhattacharya at Rest of World
Geopolitics & Empire
DCH: Deadly deepfakes: A survival guide for the age of algorithmic war - Itika Sharma Punit at Rest of World
When truth becomes contestable and uncertain, it's those with the greatest institutional power — whether it's platforms, particular states, particular militaries — that are better positioned to assert their version of events, which can sideline citizens and civilians, particularly sideline local journalists, and smaller, less powerful states.
AI-generated disinformation is emotional engineering at scale, designed to manufacture fear, helplessness, and paralysis in the people who most need accurate information to survive. The inequity is structural: Western platforms under-resource content moderation everywhere that isn't America, and frontier model developers build no traceability into the systems spreading the lies. Who gets to define truth in a war has always been a question of power. AI just industrialized the answer.
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“The world becomes fragmented,” Jhally says. “A fragmented system that doesn’t allow for more concentrated understandings of the situation.” The result is a public that may recognize the meme, repeat the headline and still miss the conflict itself. This is the media literacy crisis in practice: an excess of exposure mistaken for understanding. War Memes Are Turning Conflict Into Content - Rand Al-Hadethi at Wired
Just the headlines:
Israel escalates attacks on medics in Lebanon with deadly ‘quadruple tap’ - at the Guardian - CJW: How many times will I be forced to post here about being unsurprised by the latest atrocity committed by the IDF?
Trump Wants to Double Production of New Nuclear Weapon Cores by Matthew Gault at 404 Media
Ukraine Says Russians are Surrendering to Robots - Matthew Gault at 404 Media
Tech & Design
DCH: The Tech Oligarch’s Republic - Spencer Ackerman at Forever Wars
A careful reader will also notice that the Palantir summary is aimed at those within "public life." These dire—theatrical, you might say—assertions of a lost digital arms race to China and internal social decadence feed the anxieties of nervous elites. They are not attempts to persuade a mass public. You don't need to offer any such persuasion when you have the money for elite capture. In our system, you can just buy your way to dominance and fund politicians to ratify it. It's worth reading Eliot Higgins' critique of the anti-democratic character of the summary. This part is just an exhortation to class war
Palantir published a manifesto dressing up AI militarization as moral obligation — the argument being that Silicon Valley owes the Pentagon a debt, and anyone squeamish about supplying targeting systems for a genocide is being "theatrical." The real target isn't China; it's the engineers and labor coalitions whose resistance is the only friction left between the tech oligarchy and total integration with the state. This is what elite capture looks like when it stops pretending to be anything else.
The Verge has a great takedown of its bullshit manifesto that you should read too.
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"In the place of problem-solving technology, companies have jumped on successive bandwagons like NFTs, the metaverse, and large language models. What these all have in common is that they are not built to really solve a market problem. They are built to make VCs and companies rich. NFTs, like crypto, let VCs quickly unload investments with abbreviated lockup periods. The metaverse promised to enrich companies like Facebook by having people move all their socializing online, where it could be surveilled and monetized. In addition, Facebook’s metaverse required the purchase of hardware, which would then need regular upgrades." - Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want - Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge
ChatGPT’s latest stylistic quirk is sinister, infuriating – and absolutely everywhere - Stuart Heritage at The Guardian
Why the AI backlash has turned violent - Brian Merchant at Blood in the Machine
A brief history of techno-negativity - Brian Merchant at Blood in the Machine
Just the headlines:
Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out, According to an Independent Audit - Matthew Gault at 404 Media.
Society & The Culture
CJW: Our Longing for Inconvenience (Archive Link) - Hanif Abdurraqib at the New Yorker
Recently, I’ve been spending far too much of my time doing cost-benefit analyses of various inconveniences. I want to embrace minor discomforts if doing so can make me feel even slightly more alive and engaged in the world. For example, I wake up early on a Saturday morning in winter to help my best friend move, which inconveniences the part of me that would maybe like to stay in bed for an extra hour (though the word “like” is used loosely here, as that time in bed would probably be spent awake, scrolling through bad news on my phone, and watching the occasional video of a dog as a chaser). In the moment, as my friend and I put together her son’s bed, it feels like simply another task. But almost immediately afterward I am struck by how beautiful it was to get to share in another milestone in the life of my friend, who I have seen in many apartments and homes before this one, who I have watched grow into a loving parent, the kind who organizes her child’s new bedroom on moving day, before almost anything else in the new home is put in proper order. To have that as something that will live in my memory is worth whatever mental or emotional friction exists in rising from the comfort of my bed and putting my feet down on the floor.
This is a piece that has very much been let down by the headline given it by its editor (it used to be a sub-editor, or subbie, who did those, but I doubt there are multiple editorial staff like that these days). Every response I saw on Bluesky was to the clickbait and not the article itself, which is actually nuanced and interesting.
But I’m also inclined to think about the work that older devices demand of a person compared with the frictionless present day, when we are told that any and all content is at our fingertips (a myth, but a myth that sells.) And I can’t help but think of the reality that there are many significantly larger and more consequential inconveniences that Americans, plainly, do not have the heart or stomach for. One example might be the inconvenience caused by a mass political uprising, one that risks the security, safety, and comfort of its participants.
This is an interesting connection. Would people be more likely to begin or join a revolt if life was filled with more friction? If capitalism hadn't been dedicated to sanding away all friction from our lives - even the friction of thought or intent that they're trying to remove with "AI".
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CJW: How Our Grandmothers Made Us and Saved Us - Orion Magazine - Angela Pelster at Orion
"If women are as smart as men, why haven’t they invented anything important?”
“How about humanity, motherfucker?” I could shout back now, but back then, I had nothing. No proof but my own deep knowing and a rage that pulled me forward. Or, not only that. I had an army of grandmothers behind me. Inside me. I had a billion other women. I just didn’t know it yet.
A really great piece (an excerpt from Pelster's book) about gender, misogyny, life, history, and complexity.
This part about her trans child spoke to me too, for obvious reasons (emphasis mine):
If there’s hope for different ways to be a human body in the world again, I find it in my own kid and their friends, in their refusal of binary declarations of male or female for themselves, neither of the two options fitting quite right. They have no use for categories that land them in an either-or world, so they’re building something else. And why shouldn’t they? The world has always been ours for the making because we are of its making. It made and remade us over and over again from single cells to vertebrates, to crawling fish, to bodies of fur and homes in the trees. We used to swing from our tails. Who are we to imagine we could outimagine the world?
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"Eight children were murdered in a horrific mass shooting in Shreveport, Louisiana over the weekend. Forbes published an article about the violent killings — and, alongside that reporting, included a prediction game widget that encouraged readers to place bets on upcoming gun control regulation." - In Article About Horrific Shooting That Killed Eight Children, Forbes Lets Readers Place Bets About Gun Control - Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism
“Social media posts and group chats show members of so-called active clubs from Texas, Tennessee and Pennsylvania have in recent weeks and months traveled to Lynchburg, Virginia, to train together at a secretive compound. The compound is run by the Wolves of Vinland, which the civil rights watchdog the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies as a neopagan white nationalist hate group. Also present were members of the white supremacist hate group Patriot Front and the neo-Nazi skinhead group known as the Hammerskins.” - Members of neo-Nazi ‘active clubs’ join combat events at secretive Virginia compound - Sean Craig and Wiley Cope at The Guardian (DCH: Lynchburg is about 100 miles away from where I grew up this news distresses me to no end.)
Health, Cooking, and Related
DCH: 'A punch in the gut': After years of waiting, many opioid victims will be shut out of Purdue settlement by Craig R. McCoy and Bob Fernandez at The Philadelphia Inquirer / ProPublica
Court records show the new plan slashed payments for victims, imposed tougher eligibility requirements, and eliminated compensation for teenagers who bought Purdue drugs on the street. Estimated settlement amounts for people whose family members fatally overdosed dropped to as little as $8,000; the previous payout for an OxyContin death had been $48,000.
Most significantly, the new plan removed a key provision that allowed victims to submit a sworn affidavit, in lieu of a prescription or other medical or legal records, to prove they purchased Purdue opioids.
The story here isn't a flawed settlement — it's a coordinated erasure. The affidavit option was standard practice in the Boy Scouts and Catholic Church bankruptcies, acknowledged in early court pleadings by the very firms representing victims, and then quietly crossed out in a five-week flurry with no public hearing and no explanation. ASK LLP, which signed up 30,000 victims for up to 40% of their awards, endorsed the new plan. The lawyers got paid. The victims got expunged.
Labour & Economics
DCH: A Pascal’s Wager for AI Doomers by Cory Doctorow
The difference is, the artificial lifeforms that worry me aren't hypothetical – they're here today, amongst us, endangering the very survival of our species. These artificial lifeforms are called "limited liability corporations" and they are a concrete, imminent risk to the human race
Cory Doctorow's argument is simple: the AI doomers are right that a remorseless, colonizing artificial lifeform has already captured the state and is destroying human life — they've just misidentified the species. Limited liability corporations are the alien invaders, and they're already here. The $1.4 trillion being spent to summon a hypothetical evil god is asbestos in the walls; the real crisis is that Trump can brick Denmark by revoking its Office365 license.
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DCH: Capitalism Is Coming for Your Literal Dreams - Ryan Zickgraf at Jacobin
The film’s most alarming segment is about the next frontier of advertising: your dreams. Adam Haar Horowitz, a scientist at MIT, warns of the emerging practice of “targeted dream incubation” in which companies engineer ads into the subconscious through audio and video clips — and, they note, Coors had already tested it publicly in the lead-up to Super Bowl LV to manipulate people to buy their beer. It’s a new incursion so preposterous it was a gag on Futurama twenty-seven years ago. That the final frontier of producing consumer desire could be our subconscious is a scarier thought than any horror film could provoke.
A documentary about consumer capitalism's century-long project of manufacturing need — from Edward Bernays recruiting women into lung cancer as a feminist act, to corporations now engineering advertisements directly into your dreams. The internet didn't replace the shopping mall; it became one and colonized every quiet moment you had left. The film diagnoses the machine precisely and then, like most documentaries of its kind, loses its nerve at the prescription.
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DCH: ‘There’s a lot of desperation’: skilled older workers turn to AI training to stay afloat - Aaron Mok at The Guardian
As opportunities narrow, many turn to what Joanna Lahey, a professor at Texas A&M University who studies age discrimination and labor outcomes, calls “bridge jobs” – lower-paying, less demanding roles that help workers stay financially afloat as they approach retirement. Historically, that meant taking temp assignments, retail and fast-food work and gig roles like Uber and food delivery. Now, for skilled workers – engineers, lawyers, nurses or designers, for example – using their expertise for AI data training is becoming the new bridge job.
Skilled professionals — a software engineer who lived in a Toyota Highlander, an ER doctor with a decade of experience, a PhD academic — are training the AI models that will replace them, for $20-26 an hour with no benefits, because the job market has left them nowhere else to go. The companies extracting this expertise are the same ones whose products destroyed their careers. They call it a "bridge job." The bridge leads off a cliff.
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Mallory, the mother who’d hoped to have a two-bedroom home one day, said she is tired of waiting, as much as Cairo has always felt like home. In mid-March, she applied for a housing assistance program in Chicago. She worries Cairo can’t give her daughter all she needs to thrive. “I want more for her,” she said. “I thought I was going to be able to get a two-bedroom apartment.” 3D-Printed Homes, an Abandoned $590,000 Deposit, the FBI: What Really Happened in This Small Town? - Molly Parker at ProPublica
Just the headlines:
An Undemocratic Union Was Key to César Chávez’s Sexual Abuse - Frank Bardacke at Jacobin
Trump Officials Built an AI Tool to Turbocharge Deregulation - Freddy Brewster at Jacobin
Newsletters
CJW: tarsier (Tarsiidae) - Dr Mo
Suicide prevention as a cause sounds nice on a flyer, but actually doing it effectively is more much about economics than people like to admit. If suicidal behaviour comes from when an animal can’t survive its conditions, then suicide isn’t some beast we can slay. It's about the conditions of living. To figure out how to stop people from dying, we must ask what it takes for the human animal to live. The answers are often boring: shelter, food, social support. That's the thing about real suicide prevention: it's kind of boring. It’s about welfare policies, and social safety nets, and reforming mental healthcare. I grow suspicious of organisations that aim to prevent suicide without engaging with the above conditions of living.
I’ve shared most of Dr Mo’s updates here since I started reading, and that’s because they’re all that good. This one in particular hit me where it hurts. Mind the CW.
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CJW: Authentic Brands Group: The $20B Empire That Makes Nothing - Worse on Purpose
This is a great new resource that details all of the ways that shitty financialisation has undermined previously good-quality brands. Nothing in it will surprise you, but there’s all the detail and all the receipts you could want.
Movies + TV
LZ - The Last Kingdom
I recently started watching this British historical drama series. I've been reading the book “Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It” by Janina Ramirez, and she talks a lot about a certain period in British history, before England existed, or around the time of Alfred's kingdom, and that's where this series starts. I wanted to watch it mostly to see how they portray Alfred's daughter, Aethelflaed, but I think this is coming up only a few seasons later.
In the meantime, it's interesting to see how real people were reimagined as characters, but it's kinda weird to have everyone revolve around Uhtred, who is loosely based on an actual man known as Uhtred the Bold, but who was never captured by the Danes and raised as a Viking. It's a little cringe how they portray Uhtred as this super sexy, hot-headed fighter, but if you can ignore that and stick to the historical parts, then it's a really cool series.
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MJW: Margo's Got Money Troubles
This Apple TV series, based on the novel by the same name by Rufi Thorpe, is about a young single mother (Elle Fanning) who, struggling to pay the bills, becomes an OnlyFans creator. Margo’s a writer, with a roommate who's into cosplay, and a lineage that includes a Hooters waitress mum (Michelle Pfeiffer) and former pro-wrestler dad (Nick Offerman), so unsurprisingly her OF output is kooky, colourful, imaginative, and often downright weird (her dick ratings? “Your penis is filled with a quiet menace.”)
Currently, the fourth episode has just been released, and so far this series is a breath of fresh air. Fanning is great, straddling both real single-mom-with-leaky-tits vibes and otherworldly-neon-sparkly-beautiful in her HungryGhost OF persona. Nick Offerman is a delight, both masculine and vulnerable. Michelle Pfeiffer is excellent! Nicole Kidman is there in pro-wrestler spandex! They’ve hired real sex workers in their cast! (Lindsey Normington, who was in Anora and who also lead the charge to unionise her strip club in Los Angeles.) I’m really enjoying this show, and am so looking forward to seeing the rest of the series (and reading the book)!
Videos
DCH: Is another financial crisis brewing in the US economy? Economist Michael Hudson explains the dangers - Ben Norton at Geopolitical Economy Report
Ben Norton from Geopolitical Economy Report on the other ponzi scheme roiling the US economy.
Music
LZ - Liquid DnB and Jungle for the sake of nostalgia
I researched a little while ago what this sort of soundtrack of the future was for the 90s and 00s, what some people relate to Playstation ads and games. I thought it was mostly trip hop and IDM, but liquid drum and bass and jungle also play a big role in this sensation of the blobby future we didn't quite get. There are plenty of playlists like that on YouTube and elsewhere, but this one can be a good starter for you to get the feeling if that's the jam you're missing out.
The Self-Promotion
LZ - Schranz setlist DEAD INSIDE, but still hitting hard
I've been listening to a lot of hard techno and schranz lately while I play Deadlock and some tracks just got stuck in my head, so I made this setlist on Mixcloud for those who want a hit of angry energy :)
The Memes
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