nothing here but forbidden kites
issue 324 - 30th August, 2026
CJW: Welcome back to another issue of nothing here, where there is plenty here.
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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, future lover.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer and purveyor of melancholy whimsy.
Climate Change & The Environment
DCH: Cement's Stubborn Emissions by Jack Copley at Phenomenal World
To reward its investors, the German major Heidelberg Materials announced a €1.2 billion share buyback scheme in 2024, triple the cost of its one operational carbon capture plant. In China, too, credit conditions are tough: green cement plants have even lower profitability than their carbon-intensive rivals and take eight to ten years to repay their loans. As a result, most decarbonization progress has been the result of government intervention: foremost, European efforts to derisk green cement investments. Similar to other regions, European firms have faced huge excess capacity since 2008, yet they have enjoyed healthy profitability in recent years.
Heidelberg spent three times more rewarding shareholders than it spent capturing carbon, and still gets counted as an industry leader on climate. Decarbonization only happens when the state absorbs the cost and the risk, while capital keeps the upside and the exit option. Public money builds the green plant. Private capital still closes it when demand dips.
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Rewilded land remains green amid drought-stricken English countryside, images show - Sandra Laville - CJW: Another win for rewilding.
Geopolitics & Empire
CJW: How the Labor Party sold out to vampiric oligarchs and authoritarian Zionist dickheads - David Milner at The Shot
The Labor Party is not the lesser evil. It is the more competent evil.
And that is an entirely different equation. Because ultimately we don’t want our evil wearing slick suits and commanding massive parliamentary majorities, slaughtering a humane, livable future, and gaslighting us into numb submission on behalf of a cadre of genocidal pedophiles. We want our evil buffoonlike, ostracised, slipping on banana peels, shooting itself in the foot over and over. That would be true damage mitigation.
On Australian politics. I can't argue with anything presented in this piece. (DCH: ditto for the UK tbh)
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DCH: Children in Gaza are afraid flying their kites will get them killed by Tareq S. Hajjaj at Mondoweiss
"After having everything taken from them, their homes, their families, their schools, even their childhood, they now learn another lesson," his father said. "Even the sky isn't theirs."
Israel's own military confirmed these kites carried no explosives, yet Defense Minister Katz classified every launch as an act of war regardless. This is not a security policy responding to danger. It is a state manufacturing danger so it can keep deciding what a child in Gaza is allowed to feel. There is nothing left to bomb but what few moments of joy are left.
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The Sex Criminals and Child Abusers of ICE and CBP - Spencer Ackerman at Forever Wars - DCH: 86% of identified ICE and CBP criminal cases involve sex crimes, and the officer running "Operation Predator" exposed himself to a 16-year-old.
Opportunity Brokers - Raksha Vasudevan at The Baffler - DCH: Epstein spent $600k fighting to free a man who stole €178m, and called him "the most rational of all the africans."
Just the headlines:
After Hormuz: A Possible Geography of Mideast Violence To Come - Spencer Ackerman at Forever Wars
Bullshit Wars in a Multipolar World - Van Jackson at Un-diplomatic
Israel just took another major step towards West Bank annexation - Qassam Muaddi at Mondoweiss
Gaza isn't able to recover from famine as acute malnutrition soars across the Strip, new report finds - Tareq S. Hajjaj at Mondoweiss
Tech & Design
DCH: Revenge of the Nerds by Ali Winston at The Baffler
Consumer AI apps, the supposed saviors of the human race, are already being used to drive people into psychosis, talk children into suicide, and produce synthetic child sexual abuse material. Its masters promise it will also kill most of our jobs and replace human existence and experience with synthetic algorithmic realities. And all of it to create a fascist crypto casino that turns billionaires into trillionaires and turns ordinary people into their data-producing herd cattle.
AI psychosis, child suicide, and CSAM generation are not glitches in an otherwise noble project. They are the visible output of a machine built to convert human attention into billionaire equity. The cattle metaphor does the work a hundred pages of policy analysis couldn't.
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DCH: Meta to pay $17 billion, overhaul Facebook and Instagram in teen addiction settlement at Los Angeles Times
"One of the reasons the features were developed were to protect us in future lawsuits," said former Meta data scientist George Volichenko. Across hours of tense questioning, he and other witnesses revealed that they were told to keep such features "opt in" despite only a tiny fraction of users adopting them, a move meant in part to keep eyeballs on the app. "We received guidance not to proceed with the feature as opt out," Volichenko said of Meta's widely touted "take a break" tool.
Meta built the safety feature to survive a courtroom, not to protect a child. Making it opt-in rather than opt-out was the whole point: a tool nobody uses is a tool that keeps generating engagement revenue while still appearing in a deposition transcript.
$17 billion is roughly a third of one year's profit, deducted from a company that budgeted for exactly this outcome.
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DCH: Why shaming people about AI slop isn't enough to stop Big AI by Anil Dash at anildash.com
People being embarrassed or ashamed while still using the technology does not bother the authoritarian owners of those platforms in the least, as long as they're profiting off of those ashamed users. That pattern repeated with the gig economy. Though the #DeleteUber movement early in the first Trump administration was briefly very effective at scaring Uber's leadership, they quickly adapted to the criticisms people had, and most people have forgotten they were ever supposed to be angry in the first place. In short, the venture capitalists and CEOs of Silicon Valley have priced the costs of shame into their business plans.
Dash names the actual mechanism: shame is a line item, not a threat. Big AI doesn't need people to feel good about using it, only to keep using it, and embarrassment has never once cut into a platform's retention numbers. The critics who mistake stigma for strategy are handing the industry a controlled release valve for guilt while the extraction continues underneath.
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We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility - Emanuel Maiberg at 404media - CJW: The logo (AI-generated, of course) is of a dinosaur tearing apart a book. Real subtle, guys.
AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt - Victor Tangermann at Futurism - DCH: Meta hid $420 billion the way Enron hid its debt, except this time everyone's cheering the shell game as innovation.
The AI Hater's Manifesto - Ed Zitron
Charting the rise of tech fascism- Brian Merchant at Blood in the Machine
Just the headlines:
The revolt against Meta’s ‘pervert glasses’ is part of a growing storm - Brian Merchant at Blood in the Machine
Society & The Culture
CJW: Boycott The New York Times - Trans News Network
No excuses, no exceptions. If you are giving so much as a dime to the NYT, you need to cease your support today. This is not optional if our lives and rights mean anything to you. This extends to sharing their articles on social media or, if at all possible, clicking on them, as they generate revenue through ads and virality. If you really need to talk about a piece, share a screenshot or quote snippet without a direct link to the article, as the NYT derives revenue even from gift articles.
Technologically-inclined activists can support this movement by creating Bluesky labelers that automatically hide posts with NYT links in order to decrease their engagement from the website, which represents a significant chunk of their revenue. Basically, treat them like you would a hate site, as that’s now what they are.
I can’t believe this still needs to be said. But yes, just as The Guardian led the anti-trans media push in the UK, the New York Times has been doing the same in the US. A lot of people give it a pass for being a ‘paper of record’ and a lot of people are materially supporting it because of their fucking games…
"It should not have to be said that no word puzzle app is more important than our lives. No amount of recipes, book reviews and “serious” journalism are worth our rights to exist, as ourselves... These things can all be found elsewhere, in better quality and far less stained by our blood."
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CJW: The Forbidden Deleuze: For Palestine, Against Genocide - Pasquale Liguori at Ill Will
Already in 1978, in “The Troublemakers,” Deleuze argued that Israel was elaborating a universally exportable machinery of control. Its war on “terrorists” anticipated America’s preemptive war and the planetary control of bodies and flows. Israel, he wrote, “is establishing a model of repression that will be converted for other countries, adapted by other countries.” It was the prefiguration of the societies of control: a fusion of State, intelligence, and military industry, along with the transformation of every “security zone” into a surveilled desert. Israeli colonialism as the technical and moral vanguard of securitarian Western modernity, a politics of administered genocide.
I don't know to what degree the above quote from Deleuze was accurate when it was written (versus being prophetic), but it has certainly become true/r in the decades since. Israel is a lab for colonialists and genocidaires to develop their anti-human technologies, and a big part of why Australia and the US (for 2 examples) are so tightly entwined with Israel is because they want those technologies for their own continuing colonial projects.
As Deleuze put it, “Zionism, then the state of Israel, will demand that the Palestinians recognize its right [droit]. But the state of Israel will never stop denying the very fact of a Palestinian people.” This statement enunciates a general principle: law does not merely guarantee existence, it produces and cancels it. It is upon this founding asymmetry that international law has erected its normative role.
[...]
Humanitarian legalism, so loudly invoked today, still operates within the logic of restoration: reconcile, manage, normalize. But if justice does not interrupt the order that made the crime possible, it becomes part of the very machine that reproduces it.
We saw this quite literally with Kier Starmer, the human rights lawyer, siding with Israel in its genocide and continuing with business as usual in terms of supplying arms and legitimacy to the genocidal state.
Great piece, which lays out Deleuze’s stance on Palestine and questions why these views have been elided by so many of his followers.
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Why the Andoque of the Amazon fear the seductive dolphin Eliran Arazi - CJW: A really fantastic piece. Evil dolphins, Indigenous Amazonian myth, colonial horrors.
Texas Secretly Started Torturing Trans Prisoners By Forcibly Detransitioning Them ‘a Few Weeks Ago’ - CJW: This is yet another example of the ways the genocide against trans people is unfolding in the US.
Health, Cooking, and Related
CJW: A hungry woman is easier to dismiss than a well-fed woman - Sarah Berg at Aeon
I became a physician to name things clearly, because naming is what makes treatment possible. You cannot address what has not been described, and you cannot describe what everyone has agreed, quietly, not to say out loud. So here it is, said out loud: the hunger that women are trained to override is not a personal matter. Not a discipline issue, not a health choice, not evidence of character in either direction. It is a cognitive tax, levied broadly and consistently on the thinking of half the population, beginning in childhood and running across decades, collected so quietly and for so long that most of the women paying it have come to believe it is simply the cost of being themselves. What might women have thought about if the noise had not been there? What arguments finished, what ideas followed all the way to the end, what patience held long enough to matter? We cannot answer that. We can only register that the question has never been asked seriously.
A well-fed woman is harder to dismiss. Harder to exhaust. Harder to convince that her own thinking is not worth following to its end.
This is such an interesting way to look at women's hunger and weight loss. Yes, there is the obvious misogyny in play about a woman's appearance, but what if it's also part of the patriarchal system of control that seeks to put and keep women beneath men?
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CJW: Fat people cannot win, regardless of what we do. And I’ve had enough - Rebecca Shaw
When someone quits smoking with medication, we don’t say they’ve cheated. We know that medication can be a tool. We don’t insist they go cold turkey to prove that they really wanted to quit. We understand in all other cases that making something easier, with less suffering, doesn’t make the outcome less legitimate. But when the body in question is fat, suddenly we become moral arbiters. Suddenly it matters how they do what we have savagely demanded they do.
Related to the above, but obviously this piece is focused on the state of discourse around fatness and fat people since GLP-1s became available.
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Just the headlines:
More American Families Are Refusing Vaccines - Katherine J. Wu at The Atlantic
Labour & Economics
DCH: Marx, Keynes, and A.I. by John Ganz at Unpopular Front
Its most advanced productive force, artificial intelligence, depends on the accumulated intelligence of society as a whole, the labor of thousands of years and millions, if not billions, of people, yet that collective intelligence still appears in the economy as the private property of capital. Having appropriated the general intellect, capital then tries to use it to dispense with the living labor on which both its own profits and the livelihoods of the population still depend. It just won't work.
Every firm racing to automate is behaving rationally and producing collective ruin, which is the oldest trick capitalism plays on the people running it. Ganz shows the economists rediscovering, with regression tables, what Marx and Keynes already knew: competition doesn't optimize its way out of contradiction, it multiplies it. The proposed fix is a tax. The actual problem is who owns the machine built from everyone's labor.
Movies + TV
LZ: Interview with the Vampire
So I finally started watching the series after a couple of friends told me that I must. And they were completely right. I love this show SO MUCH! I binge-watched it some days, others I only watched one episode, but now I'm finished and just started The Vampire Lestat. Wow, I am really impressed by the writing and the dialogue. Daniel, the journalist, is so clever and sharp, and Sam Reid's Lestat is perfection. So captivating, so theatrical, so sophisticated and yet dramatic. The accent, the posture, the facial expressions.
First, the contact lenses made me think they looked a little goofy, but I noticed they edited some scenes to make the pupils look dilated. I have a real pet peeve with contact lenses because they make people look like dead fish, since there is no nuance in light and the differences in the pupil. But there's also the fact that the color sometimes needs to match the person, and I thought, for example, Claudia's eyes matched very well. Also, the actress changed in the second season, which was a pity because the first actress was great. Not that the second is bad, but it was just different.
But if you're in for a toxic romance, dramatic turnarounds, and clever takes on contemporary topics, go for it.
CJW: Agreed on all points. It’s some of the best television of the 21st Century, and there’s been a lot of great TV already.
DCH: Thirded. It’s everything you want out of a big gay gothic romance.
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LZ: Severance Season 2
I also finished Severance's second season and was a bit surprised by how things turned out. The series got a much darker, trippier take that I didn't think was there before. Of course, the feeling of a liminal space is still there everywhere – in the office, on the street, even in nature. It also gets very fucked up when you learn what happened to Mark's wife. The ending is infuriating but understandable, both given how the narrative has developed and as a means of keeping people hooked.
I think the best discussion they raised this season was about Dylan's wife visiting his innie, and they both fall back in love, while Dylan's outtie is still a distant, kinda douchebaggy husband. It made me wonder about true love, since both Dylans have fallen for the same woman, but also who people would become if they were given the chance to be themselves from a blank page.
The innies don't have any memories beyond what happens in the office; they don't necessarily carry any emotional baggage or trauma. It's almost like an Eternal Sunshine made corporate, but it's more than that: it's about who or how you would be able to fall in love if you weren't carrying everything you have as a person.
CJW: Season 2 was really interesting to watch because so many shows that start off with a high-concept mystery type set-up fall apart when they’re given a second season. But Severance absolutely carried itself. And I feel like the ending is heartbreaking in a couple of different ways, interesting, beautiful, and was kinda the only way it could have ended (even if it surprised me that they went there).
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CJW: The Strange World of... Adam Curtis - at The Quietus (via John Coulthart)
If you’re not across Adam Curtis’ work yet, this is a great primer. Bitter Lake and Hypernormalisation are my two picks for his best work, but I also haven’t seen his last two projects yet.
Podcasts
MJW: What to Carry, What to Burn Episode 9
I LOVE a survival story (in fact, my next book is about survival… or will be if I can finish it.) And the story of Juliane Koepcke’s plane crash survival is one of the ones I find most interesting. Koepcke was raised in Peru by biologist parents. When travelling by plane across the Amazon at the age of 17, she survived a TWO MILE fall (that’s over 3 kilometres for those of us who use the sensible measurements) when the plane was struck by lightning and broke apart mid air. If that wasn’t bad enough, she then had to spend eleven days alone walking out of the jungle. Anyway, enough of me telling the story, because you can listen to survival expert Blair Braverman tell the story in episode 9 of her podcast What to Carry, What to Burn.
(Interestingly, this ISN’T the record for surviving the world’s highest fall without a parachute: that honour goes to Vesna Vulović, a Serbian flight attendant who survived a fall from over 10,000 metres after the plane she was travelling in exploded in 1972. I’m a fucking font of this information!)
Music
So, apparently, there's a subgenre of black metal that is called medieval black metal. Of course. This French band has put together a very interesting album with energetic guitars and great vocals, sometimes accompanied by more traditional instruments such as a bagpipe or a hurdy-gurdy. It's very subtle how they add the medieval touch to their music, so I wouldn't say you should expect something like Summoning or Caladan Brood, although it can get very similar at some points in the album.
Art
MJW: I’m all for Glam Beckett’s simple black and white illustrations:
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MJW: Check out Jimmie Arroyo’s pencil figure sketches, they are amazing:
The Self-Promotion
LZ: Sublimation
I just wanted to share this painting I recently finished, which I am very proud of! I rarely like things I do, but this one refreshed my self-trust as an artist. It's a fanart, something I haven't done in many years, but it's Astarion from Baldur's Gate 3 and my original character, a drow sorceress, and the inspiration is, obviously, Klimt's The Kiss. BG3 had a deep impact on me as I played it during a very difficult period of my life and the character Astarion also made me consider several things, as he did with many other people. It's already well-known how well developed the character is and how impeccable Neil Newbon's performance was.
If you want to keep seeing my art, you can follow me on Instagram.
The Memes
![Twitter post from @andrewisliv111d
Dolly just visited me I'm shaking
[below is a photo of two sheer green curtains that are tied together, being caught by the wind to form a massive pair of ghostly breasts.]](https://assets.buttondown.email/images/1acf557b-3078-48ad-b800-724b004e247b.jpg?w=960&fit=max)
![tumblr post from youkai93
The clover has finally grown enough for her to munch again.
[Beneath is 2 photos side by side of a spiky lizard (a bearded dragon?) amongst some bright green clover]
Reply from metradell-vyorei
Imagine a kindly giant of unknown species and origin just picking you up and carefully placing you in a pile of chicken nuggets
reply from braggie-gyllenhaal
it hurts seeing lizards living your dream](https://assets.buttondown.email/images/19583842-1bd3-4a62-bbc9-0c8f60969fac.jpg?w=960&fit=max)
![tumblr screenshot from fredersen
a meba [amoeba emoji] is almost like a really really small anermal but not quite](https://assets.buttondown.email/images/1b403aae-63c7-46e2-81d2-7078354d09cb.jpg?w=960&fit=max)
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