nothing here but fossil fuel colonialists

issue 269 - 13th October, 2024

CJW: It’s a short one this issue - cue collective sigh of relief. Dan’s been struck down by Covid, and I’ve been too busy with family and freelancing to do my usual (admittedly ungodly amount of) newsletter reading. But the few links gathered here are well worth your time.

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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. Barely engages with the internet at all any more.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, have trigger will travel.

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

Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: Our leaders are collaborators with fossil fuel colonialists. This is the source of our communal dread - Tim Winton at The Guardian

Fanon saw that the terrible hardships of the struggle for liberation could be endured because the promise of freedom kept hope alive in the people. Seventy years later, in the grip of a global emergency whose tribulations are being visited upon the poorest of us already, few of our leaders inspire the hope and solidarity that could help us fight, endure and survive. Liberation doesn’t interest them. Many are devoted servants of the status quo. Which is a polite way of saying they’re collaborators.
They’re so ensnared in webs of patronage and co-option they can neither see nor acknowledge our real predicament, which is a state of global subjugation to fossil capitalism. What they offer us – young and old – is business as usual, and for all their deluded airs of respectability and legitimacy, our leaders are largely agents of desolation.
Deep down we know it. This is the source of our communal dread. Few of us want to admit it, but what we’re experiencing is the horror of resignation, the humiliation of captivity and the shame of collaboration.

As an educational bookseller in my day job, I get sick of seeing the same few names pop up again and again in English class text lists, and here in Australia, Tim Winton is one of those names. (Use Repo Virtual in your classroom challenge. Or, more realistically, Marlee's Orphancorp.) Still, I can't deny that this piece is worth the read, drawing comparisons between the melancholy of colonised peoples in the past with the melancholy that the youth (and so many of us from older generations) experience today. Because of course it is fossil fuel colonialism we're being crushed beneath.

Geopolitics & Empire

CJW: How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war - Naomi Klein at The Guardian (via Peter Hollo)

Naomi Klein on the ways the Israeli state moved to "memorialise" October 7th - read: weaponise it to their own genocidal and propagandistic ends.

On particular "immersive experiences" and other kinds of recreations she says:

There is a difference between understanding an event, which preserves the mind’s analytic capacity as well as one’s sense of self, and feeling like you are personally living through it. The latter produces not understanding but what Sodaro has called a “prosthetic trauma”, which, she writes, is highly conducive to “a simplistic dualism between good and evil that has important political implications”.
Consumers of these experiences are encouraged to feel a distilled bond with the victims, who are the essence of good, and a distilled hatred for their aggressors, who are the essence of evil. The traumatized state is pure feeling, pure reaction. Vision is narrowed, tunneled.
In this state, we do not ask what isn’t included in the frame of the immersive experience. And in the case of the deluge of immersive art being produced to commemorate 7 October, what is not included is Palestine, specifically Gaza. Not the decades of strangled conditions of life on the other side of the wall that led up to the attacks – and not the tens of thousands of Palestinian people, including wrenching numbers of infants and children, whom Israel has killed and maimed since 7 October.
And that is precisely the point.

Emphasis mine.

Just the headlines:

U.S. Jewish Institutions Are Purging Their Staffs of Anti-Zionists - Shane Burley at In These Times

Science & Space

CJW: Your Consciousness Can Connect With the Whole Universe, Groundbreaking New Research Suggests - Manasee Wagh at Popular Mechanics (via Austin)

In quantum physics, a particle does not exist in the way classical physics observes it, with a definite physical location. Instead, it exists as a cloud of probabilities. If it comes into contact with its environment, as when a measuring apparatus observes it, then the particle loses its “superposition” of multiple states. It collapses into a definite, measurable state, the state in which it was observed. Penrose hypothesized that “each time a quantum wave function collapses in this way in the brain, it gives rise to a moment of conscious experience.”
If this quantum theory of consciousness tied to microtubules turns out to be correct, it could revolutionize our understanding of consciousness and even strengthen the trailblazing theory that, on a quantum level, consciousness is capable of being in all places at the same time. In other words, it can exist everywhere simultaneously, suggesting that your own consciousness can hypothetically connect with quantum particles beyond your brain, maybe entangling with consciousness all across the universe.

Researchers may have found the physical source of consciousness. Looks too early to draw conclusions, but I think we literally can't understand the implications of solving this until we've solved it.

Tech & Design

CJW: We deserve better than an AI-powered future - Jane Ruffino (via Ed Yong)

Sam Altman is making money, Elon Musk is making money, and Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel (whose name I really hope you know by now) are doing better than ever. There’s a small group of people, mostly men, who are connected to each other, and to people and plans to do things like ethnically cleanse San Francisco, the bad and deceptively named Long Termism and Effective Altruism movements, along with the extremely creepy natalist movement, and many of them are openly backing fascism. Those are the people getting rich off of AI, not because it’s revolutionary, but because they’ve figured out how to make money off of anything and everything, at the expense of anyone and everyone.

A great and long-ish piece on the many, many failures of "generative AI," with lots of links to further reading if you need more proof of the anti-human shittiness of AI (or since you're reading this newsletter, probably more likely that you want links to send to friends who haven't got the memo yet).

Speaking of, there's a good chance you already saw Guillermo del Toro's thoughts on AI, but in case you missed it:

“A.I. has demonstrated that it can do semi-compelling screensavers. That’s essentially that,” said del Toro.
“The value of art is not how much it costs and how little effort it requires, it’s how much would you risk to be in its presence? How much would people pay for those screensavers? Are they gonna make them cry because they lost a son? A mother? Because they misspent their youth? Fuck no.”

I'm about due for a Pan's Labyrinth re-watch - that ending makes me cry every time (and that was before HRT).

Society & The Culture

A Secretive ICE Program Trains Civilians on Firearms and Surveillance, Documents Show - Maurizio Guerrero at Documented - CJW: This is fucking disgusting - ICE training civilians to be racist vigilantes, including assault rifle training and advising them to shout "Drop the gun" as cover when you're about to murder someone…
An Orientalist History of Transmisogyny - Julianna Neuhouser at The Center for a Stateless Society

Books

LZ: Recent purchases

Medieval Cats: Claws, Paws and Kitties of Yore

This book obviously caught my eye when I went to the local science fiction bookstore that exists heres in Malmo, and conveniently close to my apartment. I hesitated a little bit before buying it because I already had the book Weird Medieval Guys and already read another one about medieval bestiaries, but… I’m an impulsive buyer and I really want to support this store which is not quite indie, but still very niche. Anyways, I haven’t read it yet, but it kinda disappointed me to realize that it doesn’t have an author. It says it was written by Cathleen Nappinton, which made me actually furious (lol), especially because there is another book about the same topic written by a researcher called Kathleen Walker-Meikle. I just hope it’s gonna be fun and with funny pictures, not a rip-off, Chat GPT-esque book – especially because it was released this year, maybe in September even. Well, hopefully it’s just a very shy writer, not a scam book.

The little book of superstitions, by Orange Hippo

Another example of a book without an author, but at least you can track back to see it’s a coffee table book label. Speaking of superstition, the second or third page that I shuffled contained a Brazilian superstition that porcelain elephants bring luck – something that my mother-in-law collects for years, and always an inspiration when it’s time to give her some gift. I thought that was a sign. Am I superstitious? Not really, but I love the coincidences in life and I try to keep track of these things ‘just in case’. It’s the same thing with tarot, which I finally started (sort of) trying to learn a bit. And speaking of which…

Macabre Tarot, by Sam West

Though the deck is beautiful, I don’t recommend Sam West's Macabre Tarot because they changed the name of the cards and minor arcana suits. Not a good deck for a beginner at all, it is just absolutely not helpful to change paige to massacre or the empress to apocalypse or whatever. The tarot card names and illustrations are a very important part of the reading, symbolism, and tradition. I understand that not all people stick to the most traditional ones, like the Marseilles or whatever, but that annoyed me a bit – and some illustrations are pretty badly made, sorry.

The book of Forgotten Witches, by Balazs Tatrai

Now this one is a thick book with a lot of stories and summaries of different entities and witches that tint folklore around the world, including Asia – because, yes, most of the times when they say around the world it’s still just Europe and maybe America.

I’m not sure if the title ‘Forgotten Witches’ is fair because it’s not a collection of not so well stories of witches, but a compendium of supposedly actual (if you consider those who were condemned as witches) and fantasy witches.

The illustrations are very pretty too, and they were created by Lilla Bolecz. And I’m a sucker for black and golden stuff, so props for the palette choice.

Movies + TV

MJW: Big Mood

Nicola Coughlan is by turns effervescent and relatably, realistically depressed as bipolar Maggie in this comedy drama series. She can do little wrong rn, I love her in everything I see her in. Lydia West as Eddie is the supportive bestie with her own shit going on. I loved the way this captured the very real feeling of a mood disorder – the ‘great’ ideas you have when you’re up, the way everything falls apart when you’re down. Both characters captured the essence of how it’s both easier and much harder to ignore your problems, even when everything is poised to fall apart. Highlights are Eddie throwing a surprise birthday party for a very depressed Maggie who tries to take the edge off with mushrooms, and Maggie’s disastrous dinner party with her agent.

IRL

MJW: Ethical Sleazebag

If you’re in Melbourne, the late night variety hour Ethical Sleazebag features different guests every week, performing drag, standup, and more. Who knows what will await you? Like last night, it could be me, reading my words on stage! With lots of great performers, the lineup is often trans and sex worker heavy. Host and producer [Redacted] brings together a fun show every Friday night at 10pm at the Butterfly Club. Tickets here.

The Self-Promotion

CJW: Flesh and Blood

I haven’t mentioned this before, but I’ve recently started writing freelance short fiction for the Flesh and Blood TCG. It’s been a fun and interesting challenge, writing to a brief and learning about the world of Rathe as I help to flesh it out.

My first story, Bloodied Sands, which was written for Heavy Hitters, has been up for a few weeks now, and my second story (which will likely be split into two parts when published) will be up soon. I literally can not tell you anything about it, ha. Being under NDA is a new experience for me.

So yeah, that’s been keeping me busy lately, on top of the day job, my own writing (including collabs with Maddison Stoff that will hopefully find a home someplace soon, and a new novel), and just existing as a human. Gets tiring, y’know. Yeah. You know.