nothing here but false promises
issue 320 - 5th July, 2026
CJW: Welcome back and fuck America.
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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, endless teeth.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer and purveyor of melancholy whimsy.
Climate Change & The Environment
DCH: Europe's Come-to-AC Moment by Beth Gardiner at The Atlantic
Britain's Climate Change Committee, which advises the government, put the problem bluntly in a report in May: "The UK was built for a climate that no longer exists." Making changes like those the committee recommends will take money — potentially $10 billion annually between now and 2050 — and time. The climate panel recommended that temperatures be kept to safe levels in all hospitals by 2035, in long-term-care facilities by 2040, and in schools and prisons by 2050.
More than 200,000 people have died from heat in Europe in four years. This week, patients sweltered and MRI machines broke down as emergency rooms filled with heat casualties. The response is a timeline that gets hospitals sorted by 2035, care homes by 2040, and schools and prisons by 2050. The local architecture was never designed for this. Neither was the politics.
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DCH: False Promises: The 'Solution' to the Climate Crisis That Won't Work by ProPublica and Drilled at ProPublica
For more than 40 years, oil companies have been funding research at prestigious universities into climate change "solutions" that would not require the public to stop using oil and gas. The same modelers who overestimated the potential of geological carbon storage repeatedly underestimated solar power — one of the energy technologies that would allow more oil to remain in the ground. Over the last several decades, solar power is the technology that has thrived. Carbon capture and storage remains elusive.
The fossil fuel industry didn't just fund denial. It funded the next line of defense: a technology so expensive, so unbuilt, and so convenient that it could absorb forty years of climate policy without requiring a single barrel of oil to stay in the ground.
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Amoc collapse could change Europe’s climate 10x faster than expected. We aren’t ready - Penny Holliday, Femke de Jong, and Sjoerd Groeskamp at The Guardian
“Some 262,000 premature deaths attributable to car exhaust’s effect on the risk for lung cancer, stroke, respiratory diseases, and heart attack, along with 75,000 all-cause deaths estimated to be a result of air pollution, have been avoided according to a study using pollution data modeling.” EV Popularity in China Accounts for 262,000 Fewer Deaths from Air Pollution - Andy Corbley at Good News Network
Just the headlines:
County With 37 Data Centers Asks Schools to ‘Conserve Electricity’ - Matthew Gault at 404 Media
Geopolitics & Empire
DCH: British Police Built a Sprawling Crime-Prediction Machine. Some Results Couldn't Be Trusted by Matt Burgess at Wired
"Most of these models produce low precision scores, meaning a high proportion of the individuals they flag as risks are incorrectly identified," the data review found. A model used to help predict burglars appeared to operate with a precision rating lower than 10 percent for more than three years, according to the police data. According to Eticas, that meant fewer than one in 10 flagged as high risk would actually offend. Other concerns included performance metrics for various models shifting sharply. "This is not typical of well-governed models in operational use," the audit observed.
The story here isn't that the models were bad. It's that they were bad for years, quietly scrapped without documentation, and are now being used as a template for national rollout. Andy Marsh, the former chief constable who presided over this program, now runs the College of Policing and is hosting PoliceAI, the £75 million body tasked with spreading these tools to every force in England and Wales.
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“Keir Starmer marketed himself as a human rights lawyer who stood up for the downtrodden. As Britain’s prime minister, he showed nothing but contempt for human rights law, and he now leaves behind a disgraceful record of authoritarian policies.” Keir Starmer Used His Power to Trample on Human Rights by Daniel Finn at Jacobin (DCH: the worst decline in civil liberties in 40 years came not from a Tory government but a centrist Labour one. Fuck this guy. So glad to see him gone.)
Just the headlines:
The Left Just Keeps Winning. It's Time for Democrats to Bend the Knee. - Katherine Krueger at The Intercept
The Socialist Future Is Being Written in New York - Branko Marcetic at Jacobin
How Jeffrey Epstein’s Israeli Network Shaped Congo’s Deadly Mineral Trade - Murtaza Hussain at Dropsite News
Tech & Design
DCH: How we'll fight the platform war against Big AI by Anil Dash
An entire generation needs to discover that enshittification is not only not inevitable, it is downright preventable, and the power to do so rests in our hands. If you're a developer, you have an extra responsibility: are you vetting your work against this list? If nothing else, you need to be doing so just to ensure that you have a chance of having a career over time. But it's also the right thing to do.
The argument Dash is making is that people who've only ever known monopoly don't know they're living in one. Big AI is counting on that. The whole capture strategy depends on moving fast enough that alternatives feel impossible before anyone thinks to build them.
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DCH: The AI Industry Is Losing by Ed Zitron
There is simply no logical or rational reason to invest any further capex in AI, outside of the mistaken belief that OpenAI or Anthropic could actually afford to pay without Google, Amazon, or Microsoft handing it to them. Hyperscalers do not have meaningful AI revenues of any kind outside of their own pseudo-startup investments, and it is equal parts ludicrous and irrational that they are continuing to invest and that the markets, analysts and journalists are acting as if everything is fine.
The numbers Zitron lays out are not complicated. Microsoft invested $13 billion in OpenAI. The actual infrastructure cost has run past $100 billion. OpenAI spent $17.2 billion on Azure in a year it lost $20.9 billion. The revenue flowing back is largely the same money going in a circle. Three of the largest companies on earth are funding their own customers to buy their own products and calling it a market.
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Just the headlines:
What the Anthropic fight says about AI regulation by Henry Farrell at Programmable Mutter
Online Age Verification Law Could Kill Whistleblowing by Caitlin Vogus, Aliya Bhatia at The Intercept
Society & The Culture
CJW: Umyazu - Mandy Brown
There’s a prevailing narrative that says we’ve lost our ability to pay attention, that we need drugs or discipline or sternly-worded warnings about the dangers of social media to deal with this growing public health threat. This narrative completely obscures the fact that annihilating attention is a political project with clear benefits for the billionaire class: if we cannot attend the world, neither can we intercede in it. We become passive recipients of their worldbuilding, disenfranchised from our own responsibility to make sense of—and therefore to remake—the world around us.
There's a lot of great stuff in this piece, but the above seemed like the most relevant pull quote to share. Be sure to stay for the final paragraph.
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CJW: The thinking style that makes people vulnerable to extremism - Leor Zmigrod at Psyche
To give a sense of what this means concretely: in my research, the people who struggled most to adapt their strategy on the card game were also the ones most likely to endorse statements such as ‘People should be willing to fight and die for their group’ and to agree that strict obedience to authority is among the most important values a person can have. They were also the most likely to reject evidence that challenged their existing beliefs and to dismiss alternative perspectives outright. I haven’t placed cognitively rigid and flexible thinkers in Milgram’s lab – no one can ethically run those experiments today. But the attitudes that my research links to cognitive rigidity map on directly to the kind of unquestioning obedience and conformity those classic experiments were designed to test. The difference is that my approach reveals something the situationists missed: these tendencies are not universal. They are traits that vary between individuals, measurable even in tasks that have nothing to do with politics.
Interesting piece on cognitive rigidity making people more likely to fall into extremist thinking.
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“There's a lot of young people that are becoming homeless now, and I know that a lot of their first reactions are going to be to go to the internet, and a lot of them are pretty naive,” he says. “So I worry that a lot of people are just going to get taken advantage of pretty quickly.” The ‘Almost Homeless’ Subreddit Is a Stark Glimpse at Soaring Wealth Inequality by Miles Klee at Wired
“We’re trained in obedience and rule-following from a very young age. We need equivalent practice in breaking rules, in recognizing when a rule or law is unjust and needs to be broken, and in acting in accord with that recognition. We need this all the time, but damn if we don’t need it especially now. One day, possibly soon, we will be called on to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality. Be ready.” - Anarchist calisthenics - Mandy Brown
Health, Cooking, and Related
CJW: Who are the fire-tamers? - Susanna Crossman at Aeon
As a result, consulting a fire-tamer in Brittany today is an ordinary – albeit dissident – experience. When I tell Breton hospital colleagues that I’m writing about fire-tamers, the only bewildered staff member is myself. Everyone has a fire-taming tale. A pregnant occupational therapist tells me: ‘My dad, a headmaster, can fire-tame. He wants to give the gift. But I don’t have the time.’ A nurse recounts how his brother, a dairy farmer, discovered he was a fire-tamer by accident, curing his entire cow herd of mastitis. There are anecdotes about burns that required no skin graft, pain relief from radiotherapy, teething babies calmed. Even the non-believers join in, and a chic senior hospital lecturer tells me: ‘I am very Cartesian but my best friend tamed fire through knowing the “secret”.’
I loved reading this piece, knowing that in France there is a widely recognised group of healers working outside and alongside medical systems.
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DCH: Autopsying Abortion Rights by Kristen Martin at The Baffler
"I think the hard reality to face in this moment is that the antiabortion movement was better organized at pretty much every stage. In particular they were organized at the local and state level, where they were able to channel their base of churches and religious communities into establishing crisis pregnancy centers, picketing outside abortion clinics, electing people to office on the single issue of abortion, showing up in state legislatures to pass reams of antiabortion bills. And progressives writ large have never had the state-level ground game, especially in red and purple states, where those reams of antiabortion bills chipped away at access to abortion and shaped people's lives in a really important way, even prior to Dobbs."
Roe wasn't ambushed. It was outorganized over fifty years by a movement that understood state legislatures when the left was still writing op-eds about the Supreme Court. Littlefield's book traces the real kill chain: the Hyde Amendment, the crisis pregnancy centers, the single-issue voters, the grassroots churches — all of it running decades before Dobbs gave it a capstone. The lesson isn't (just) that the right cheated. It's that they showed up.
Labour & Economics
DCH: ‘How to Think About AI': Cory Doctorow on Big Tech, Understanding AI, Labor Automation & More at Democracy Now!
The industry spent $1.4 trillion on AI so far. It's doubled in the last year. Their global revenues — all the money all the companies make per year — they claim it's $60 billion a year. It can't be more than $50 billion, because $10 billion of that $60 billion is the money that Microsoft gives to OpenAI, and OpenAI gives back to Microsoft. That's not revenue. So, they've got $50 billion a year. They're spending $1.4 trillion a year. What do they think they're going to do? Every new AI customer loses more money for the AI businesses. Every new use of AI loses them more money. Every new generation loses it.
The bubble math has always been obvious. What Doctorow adds is the exit strategy: the $1.4 trillion doesn't need to make sense as a business if the plan is to fire enough high-wage workers to claw it back. The investment isn't in AI. It's in the leverage AI gives you over labor. The product is the layoff.
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Just the headlines:
Gig Workers in Mexico Are Organizing - Natascha Elena Uhlmann at Jacobin
Movies + TV
MJW: Mother Mary
Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel’s dreamy pop-star/fashion designer film is a surreal experience of floating fabric, queer…baiting?, and incessant metaphors that takes place mostly in a cavernous barn/design studio with bolts of fabric and many pairs of vicious-looking scissors lying around. It looks great, though. Hathaway’s costumes in the spectacular concert shots are chef’s kiss.
The long shot montagey performance scene is lovely and balletic. Red fabric convolutes in the air, a silky ghost. But there’s a point where Hathaway’s character says “These metaphors are exhausting”, and I kinda got that. Michaela Coel speaks very… slowly… and… dramatically a LOT. FKA Twigs plays a sweetly-voiced possessed fan with aplomb and throws her body around the set like a dervish. Hunter Schafer is lovely as assistant Hilda, but could have featured more. I really liked looking at it. It didn’t answer all its questions and I know that sometimes that’s okay but I wanted some of them answered. Overall, it’s a dreamy trip through fashion, pop-fame, faded (or cast-aside) friendship, and Anne Hathaway’s endlessly overflowing tears.
Art
MJW: I was delighted to stumble across Emma Grace Hapner on insta, her pink-hued portraits are lovely.
The Memes
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