nothing here but fire in the waymo

issue 291 - 22nd June, 2025

CJW: Hello again, beautiful people. So glad to have you back.

A huge thank you to those that have been choosing to support us financially - it means a lot when everything is so difficult out there for so many. We don’t take you for granted.

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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. Hates the internet.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, babydoll (2 of 2).

Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer, fulltime goth and metalhead.

Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: Fire in the Belly - Tyson Yunkaporta at Emergence Magazine

More cyclic models of time suggest that entropy is not bound by beginnings and endings in regenerative systems. Energetic feedback loops between the earth and sky and all the systems within these domains maintain the infinite nature of creation. The fixing of nitrogen in soil by lightning strikes is a measurable example of this process. The death and the waste of one system is always another system’s lunch, which is why shit is sacred in the Lore of the land. Your brain and gut relation mirrors those cosmological processes.

An interesting piece on the difference between mind thought and gut thought (or intellect vs instinct), indigenous tradition vs neoliberal modernity, and more. Yunkaporta always makes for a worthy read.

Blue Medicine Line - Robin Wall Kimmerer at Orion Magazine - CJW: A great piece by Robin Wall Kimmerer about the medicinal properties of the plants in the Adirondacks, used for generations by the Native American tribes of the region.

Just the headlines:

Climate Change Warps Brains in the Womb, Scientists Discover - Becky Ferreira at 404 Media
Copenhagen is adapting to a warmer world with rain tunnels and 'sponge parks' - Ron Schmizta at NPR

Geopolitics & Empire

DCH: The Prince of War - Ben Makuch at The Baffler

In March, President Daniel Noboa of Ecuador—who declared the country was in a state of “internal armed conflict” last year, effectively imposing martial law—announced a “strategic alliance” with Prince to “strengthen our capabilities in the fight against narco-terrorism and to protect our waters from illegal fishing.” A month later, Prince was making audacious promises to another embattled regime, angling to secure mineral extraction sites for the Democratic Republic of Congo. Then, in late May, reports surfaced of Prince’s newest venture setting up a drone assassination program for Haiti aimed at hunting down criminal gangs.

Never take your eyes off this fucking war criminal.

CJW: The Annexation of the West Bank Is Complete - Jasper Nathaniel at The Baffler

Israel’s critics responded with the familiar refrain that Smotrich had “said the quiet part out loud.” But that was the whole point. His provocation was a smokescreen, drawn from the black clouds of Gaza’s hellfire, which have drifted north and settled over the centers of Israeli power—from the Knesset in Jerusalem to the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv to the Civil Administration in the Beit El settlement. There, an army of messianic bureaucrats under his command is working furiously and diligently to erase the Green Line that separates Israel from the occupied West Bank.
Smotrich’s next comments were far more consequential than his passing observation about what the world could already see unfolding in Gaza. He reported that after thirty years of delays due to international condemnation, Israel was finally set to begin construction in E1, a twelve-square-kilometer stretch of land strategically located between Jerusalem and the Ma’aleh Adumim settlement. The project would sever Palestinian East Jerusalem from the West Bank, cut off northern and southern Palestinian villages from one another, and establish uninterrupted Jewish sovereignty across the Green Line—“a historic opportunity,” as Smotrich put it, to “kill the Palestinian state de facto.”

Fuck Israel. Fuck the West. None of this should have been allowed to happen - and I don't just mean the current intensified stage of the genocide, but everything from the Nakba onwards…

“Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, OpenAI Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil, and former OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Bob McGrew have all signed up for Detachment 201: Executive Innovation Corps. They are being appointed as lieutenant colonels in the Army Reserve.” US Army signs up Band of Tech Bros with a nerdy name - Iain Thomson at The Register

Just the headlines:

House Dems push to ‘Block the Bombs’ amid Israel’s widening war - Michael Arria at Mondoweiss

Science & Space

DCH: Humans Have Now Seen the Dawn of Time from Earth After Breakthrough - Becky Ferreira at 404 Media

Scientists have captured an unprecedented glimpse of cosmic dawn, an era more than 13 billion years ago, using telescopes on the surface of the Earth. This marks the first time humans have seen signatures of the first stars interacting with the early universe from our planet, rather than space.

Amidst all the chaos of the permacrisis, scientists are still doing some pretty cool shit.

“Scientists have directly confirmed the location of the universe's “missing” matter for the first time, reports a study published on Monday in Nature Astronomy.” One of the Universe’s Biggest Mysteries Has Been Solved, Scientists Say - Becky Ferreira at 404 Media

Tech & Design

CJW: Is Grok liable for sexual harassment? - Kat Tenbarge at Spitfire News

One of the things that disturbed me the most about Grok’s sexual harassment was reading the comments below Brooke’s plea for justice. There was a man telling her there’s nothing she can do, so keep scrolling, and a man telling her she would have to stop posting selfies if she wanted it to stop. This is the ideology behind sexual harassment. It’s a tool to oppress women individually and at scale. The message being sent is to stop participating in online life or endure violence and humiliation for being a woman. Brooke is a famous gamer, and many of the women I’ve seen targeted by this kind of harassment and rhetoric are succeeding in male-dominated spaces.

I’m not surprised by any of the awful shit happening on Twitter, I’m only surprised that people stay on the platform.

DCH: Do large language models have a legal duty to tell the truth? - Sandra Wachter, Brent Mittelstadt and Chris Russell

Careless speech is a new type of harm created by large language models (LLM) that poses cumulative, long-term risks to science, education and shared social truth in democratic societies. LLMs produce responses that are plausible, helpful and confident, but that contain factual inaccuracies, misleading references and biased information. These subtle mistruths are poised to cumulatively degrade and homogenize knowledge over time. This article examines the existence and feasibility of a legal duty for LLM providers to create models that ‘tell the truth’.

The legal argument (in the UK anyway) to hold tech companies accountable for the lies their LLMs produce.

CJW: Toward an Architecture of Belonging - Oona Robertson at Orion Magazine

And yet, my favorite thing about humans is that we are animals. No matter the uses or (un)welcome a space mandates through its design, we will find ways to adapt to it. Just like other creatures, we will cross the wrong part of the road, take the most direct route until our feet create a worn path beneath us, assist our friends and elders and toddlers over the barriers that others have built. Through creativity and sometimes force, we will make spaces work for us and the people we love. Adaptation can create radical accessibility for bodies that move and use space against the standard. What if this form of adaptation was actually an origin point for design—what possibilities might that open for comfort and access? What if the way we built things was a little bit more animal?

On designing with nature. Lots of interesting ideas in here about the animal, the human as animal, hostile design, etc, using woodworking as an example and metaphor throughout. Contains parallels to the Tyson Yunkaporta piece above too.

“What is slop, exactly? Slop is the sinister child of scandal and banality, it is Pinterest board Cronenberg, it is the exact midpoint of a bell curve. It is a punishing, cynical aesthetic that has infected the very texture of our lives in the form of brief videos disseminated on rotted-out, post-peak, tumbleweed-swept social media platforms.” Another Bullshit Night in Slop City - Will Harrison at The Baffler (DCH: emphasis mine.)
The Same Old Fantasies Behind AI and New Technology - Henry Farrell at Lawfare (DCH: Too many good quotes to pull out and showcase in the other sections. Go read it.)
The New Legislators of Silicon Valley - Evgeny Morozov at The Ideas Letter

Just the headlines:

Bad brainwaves: ChatGPT makes you stupid - David Gerard at Pivot to AI

Society & The Culture

DCH: Bananas are the worst food on earth - Rob Horning

For Munger, this betokens a kind of post-authenticity: “The people who have been raised on quantified audience feedback for their every creative gesture have an unrecognizable conception of authenticity,” he writes, which is typified by MrBeast’s onscreen behavior. “MrBeast also turns his entire life into content — by skipping the step of having a life outside of content,” Munger notes. This is akin to being unable to escape from ads because ads have become the only recognizable structure for experience — all activity is a form of influencing.

Rob Horning may very well be the Walter Benjamin or Marshall McLuhan of the 21st century. His thinking is deep and varied and his writing is nuanced and opinionated. What’s more he’s able to connect the dots between our culture and technology and the impact they have on one another in ways that many others simply can’t. All of that is on display here in his takedown on Mr. Beast and the world he’s a harbinger of.

Just the headlines:

Disney sues AI image generator Midjourney - David Gerard at Pivot to AI

Health, Cooking, and Related

DCH: How Ivermectin Became Right-Wing Aspirin - Benjamin Mazer at The Atlantic

The whole exchange provides a sad illustration of this delirious and desperate time. Before it turned into a conservative cure-all, ivermectin was legitimately a wonder drug for the poorest people on Earth. Since its discovery in 1973, it has become a leading weapon in the fight against horrific infections such as river blindness and elephantiasis. Yet now that substantial success seems to have given birth to a self-destructive fantasy.

If you thought the right’s obsession with Ivermectin was a thing of the past then you’re mistaken. Content warning for people literally coughing up their lungs.

Just the headlines:

RFK Jr. Is Barely Even Pretending Anymore - Katherine J. Wu at The Atlantic

Labour & Economics

DCH: The weaponization of Waymo - Brian Merchant

Yet the ICE protestors who torched the Waymo cars and hurled Lime scooters onto the flames, are turning what the tech companies see as an asset into a vulnerability, and they’re exploiting it. There is no one around to stop them from hailing a Waymo car and destroying it, and no one to intervene in the untimely demise of the Lime scooter. They have turned these indifferent and extractive technologies into instruments of protest. They are weaponizing the accountability sink.

You love to see it.

Just the headlines:

Samsung is desperate to compete on chips. Workers say it comes at a cost. - Michelle Kim at Rest of World

Books

CJW: Bridge to eQualia by Blackle Mori (visual novel version, plain text version)

The dragon lady next to me at the Second Life rave was too close. Her wings kept clipping through my player model. I didn't mind, but she /whispered an apology each and every time it happened. My chat window was filled with scores of variations of "oop sowwie >_<!! xoxo" and "uaah! not again! orz" by the end of the night.
We hung out after the set. Her, myself, and some of her friends. We loitered among the flowers in a digital recreation of the hanging gardens of Babylon. Her crew complimented my avatar. I was a girl with rabbit ears, pressed down by her hat, sweatshirt sleeves far too long.
One of the friends, a flock of seven crows, guessed my model had come from a PS2 game. It looked the part. But no. It was a commissioned work that I'd ported to every virtual world I visited, be it Second Life, VRChat, Garry's Mod… It was my way of defining myself. Most people did that with usernames, but mine had always been eminently forgettable. Just Maggie, with some numbers at the end for disambiguation.

Not a book, but a 14k word novelette (technically), available to read for free either laid up as a linear visual novel or plain text, about a self-styled amateur sleuth searching for a missing person in the forgotten recesses of the old internet. Basically, if those opening paragraphs above have tickled your fancy, then you already know you're going to love it. On the other hand, if you're young enough to have never heard of Second Life, you might learn a bunch of weird online ephemera.

Either way, it's a great read.

Movies + TV

CJW: Planet of the Apes Reboot Series

Marlee and I have recently watched all the Monkey Planet movies - I'd heard for years that they were actually good films, but I found it hard to believe. A reboot series? A reboot series picking up after the failed Tim "Ughhhh" Burton reboot? Surely it couldn't be good. But they are!

The basic premise (and storyline of the first film, which deftly sets up the series) is that a pharma company tried to make an Alzheimer's cure, and when testing it on monkeys it increased their intelligence. But then they fucked something up and turned it into a virus that wiped out most of mankind, giving the intelligent apes a chance to become ascendant.

But that's all abstract, and what actually makes the films work is the personality of the apes, particularly the leader Caesar. It's with/through him that the films take on a mythic approach, similar to the Mad Max, especially with the many tragedies he is forced to endure and overcome.

With so much utter trash hitting our screens, the quality of this series is almost surprising. If you avoided them before like I did, go check them out.

Art

LZ: Cranach’s Obsession with Severed Heads

Because who doesn't love the motif of women (more often Judith) holding or serving the severed head of a man? I think the most famous depictions are by Cranach, but also Caravaggio and especially Artemisia Gentileschi. But unlike the two male painters, I think Artemisia represented female rage in this trope more vividly, because, of course, she was a woman who was abused and also never taken seriously in her art because she was a woman (despite being rich). On the other hand, while doing my research yesterday, I was also reminded of that Medusa statue that became the symbol of #metoo, and I think that is the epitome of the archetype, indeed. The symbolic iteration of Medusa beheading a man, naked, unapologetic.

MJW: I think I've posted Jocelin Carmes’ art before, but I love this new piece. Very relevant to my love of disaster fic. Excuse the music symbol in this screenshot, insta is so, so shit.

A digital painting of an orange car skidded to a stop in the middle of a city street, with a massive wave crashing into one side of the street ahead.

The Process

MJW: I’m currently working through the very last proof of my next book, The Forgetting Navigations. It will be out soonish through Interstellar Flight Press. It’s about two bookish women who chase a killer through space, but it’s mostly about trauma. I’ve been working on this novella sporadically since 2018 and I’m so glad it will finally see publication.