CJW: Hello again. It’s that time. Welcome. Thank your for joining us, and I hope you get something out of this issue.
Our latest bonus came from the mind of MKY - SUCCESSION: What strange beast of the global entertainment industry is this?, all about Succession and its place in the political-entertainment oeuvre. To get access to this bonus, future bonuses, and the full archive, just go here to become a supporter. For a preview, unlocked bonuses are listed here. Latest unlock is part 2 of MKY’s Field Notes from the proto-Invisibles Monastery.
The Team
Corey J. White (CJW) - Low-power mode. Naarm/Melbourne.
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - Author. I’m also this guy. Your fabulous goth aunt. Living and working on Wurundjeri land.
m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / ecopoet // Dark Extropian Musings / pryvt.rsrch
Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
Articles
Laws that were meant to stop financial crime have instead allowed it to flourish. So long as a bank files a notice that it may be facilitating criminal activity, it all but immunizes itself and its executives from criminal prosecution. The suspicious activity alert effectively gives them a free pass to keep moving the money and collecting the fees.
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The FinCEN Files expose an underlying truth of the modern era: The networks through which dirty money traverse the world have become vital arteries of the global economy. They enable a shadow financial system so wide-ranging and so unchecked that it has become inextricable from the so-called legitimate economy. Banks with household names have helped to make it so.
Banks like JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank, and Bank of New York Mellon continued to launder money for known criminals despite fines and prosecutions for misconduct. Capitalism is criminal. Pure and fucking simple.
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CJW: The Covid-19 pandemic shows we must transform the global food system
We need to have an honest public discussion on how to produce our food. Individually, we must stop eating animal products. Collectively, we must transform the global food system and work toward ending animal agriculture and rewilding much of the world. Oddly, many people who would never challenge the reality of climate change refuse to acknowledge the role meat-eating plays in endangering public health. Eating meat, it seems, is a socially acceptable form of science denial.
This opinion piece by Jan Dutkiewicz, Astra Taylor and Troy Vettese is right on the money. I know it’s always fashionable to trash vegans and veganism, but, y’know, our planet is being choked by industry, and factory farming is a huge factor.
Related: Never not using an opportunity to share this heart-felt/-breaking essay by Charlotte Shane: Can We Be Kind?
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MKY: Climate Disruption Is Now Locked In. The Next Moves Will Be Crucial.
“Don’t think of it as the warmest month of August in California in the last century,” Cristian Proistosescu, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, wrote. “Think of it as one of the coolest months of August in California in the next century.”
CJW: There’s a thought that I had recently that I hadn’t wanted to share because, frankly, it’s incredibly fucking depressing. Think back to 2019. Remember how terrible it seemed? How every year since 2015 has been worse than the one before it? Well, 2019 might have been our last “good” year. The last year where we could feign ignorance about everything that’s happening to the climate. From here on out, there’s a very good chance we’ll be witnessing extreme weather events with such frequency that we’ll beg for a return to those halcyon days…
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MKY: Did Xi Just Save the World?
Whereas Europe and China can sustain an emphatic public commitment to meeting the challenges of the Anthropocene with international commitments and public investment, the structure of the U.S. political system and the depth and politicization of the culture wars make that impossible. Perversely, the only way to build bipartisan political support for a green transition in the United States may be to pitch it as a national security issue in a cold war competition with China.
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CJW: To Cut Waste, Berlin Opens Its Own Secondhand Shop (via Sentiers)
These city-run stores […] won’t just be standard secondhand markets designed to save useable goods from going to landfill sites. According to the city’s press release, Berlin hopes to use the stores to “anchor the re-use of used goods in urban society”
I love this, especially the focus on changing the way people think about consumption. Could be a first step toward library socialism. That link (via Ed at Restricted Academy) is a great summary of library socialism, making reference to the SRSLY WRONG podcast episodes that outline it further: 189, 196, and 200. Read the piece, listen to those three episodes, or do both, but either way I think the concept of library socialism holds great promise for a fair and sustainable future (and I for one welcome positive outlooks for the future when my brain is often filled with the opposite).
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CJW: The Overwhelming Racism Of COVID Coverage | Indi Samarajiva (via Ed at Restricted Academy)
This is just racism, and western coverage is almost all like this. They attribute agency to rich/white nations like Germany or New Zealand but luck to anyone poorer or dark. And it’s just not true. Poorer nations have done better than the rich because they had robust public health responses. Because they worked together. Because they reacted early. These are all lessons worth learning, but the west is unable to learn them because they’re simply too racist to see.
For once this racism isn’t killing us in the Dirty South. We’re living. This time it’s killing you.
I think those of us who read widely online for our news probably have a better view of the world’s COVID response and haven’t fallen into the racist trap detailed here, but this is still an important piece. Particularly in America (thanks to American Exceptionalism?) it seems like the media and establishment have done a good job of normalising the fucking atrocious response there while the rest of the world looks at you in horror.
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DCH: Study Finds ‘Single Largest Driver’ of Coronavirus Misinformation: Trump
His lies have directly killed hundreds. His incompetence has killed hundreds of thousands more. I am beyond thrilled he’s finally caught it himself.
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At the same time Trump’s tax scandal broke, Trumpworld tried to throw one of their own under the bus in this blatant attempt at deadcatting. Didn’t work. Course Trump finally getting the rona did push the tax story out of the news cycle. Still – nice to see this asshole locked up courtesy of The Baker Act.
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DCH: A wargame designer defines our four possible civil wars.
Those are four plausible scenarios of civil war after this election. All wars are different, so we could see any number of variations on these themes. It should be clear that if you are facing one of these options, what you want is the clearest moral authority, the widest acceptance by your military, and the broadest coalition of international powers on your side. You want the tanks in the hands of the person who wants peace.
Mike Selinker, creator of the Axis & Allies reboot amongst others, imagines four possible Civil War 2 scenarios after the 2020 election:
A Biden blow-out leading to something like the original Civil War
A narrow Biden win leading to something like the Russian Revolution
A contested result leading to something like the Irish War of Independence
A Trump win leading to a bloodbath like The Rwandan Civil War
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DCH: Avoiding a Climate Lockdown
COVID-19 is itself a consequence of environmental degradation: one recent study dubbed it “the disease of the Anthropocene.” Moreover, climate change will exacerbate the social and economic problems highlighted by the pandemic. These include governments’ diminishing capacity to address public-health crises, the private sector’s limited ability to withstand sustained economic disruption, and pervasive social inequality.
We’re nearing the point where radical government intervention in the climate crisis will likely happen: limited private vehicle use, no more red meat, no more drilling, etc. If governments want to avoid that then they need to get that shit together three decades ago.
MKY: Welcome to the Bunker Era (per the ThreeBodyProblems books, obvz).
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Cutting Room Floor:
The Return of John Brown: White Race-Traitors in the 2020 Uprising (via Inhabit)
Degrowth and MMT: A thought experiment — Jason Hickel (via Sentiers)
Time Travel Theoretically Possible Without Leading To Paradoxes, Researchers Say - No paradoxes because time is probably self-correcting meaning you can’t really change anything. I’d rather have the paradoxes.
Compact Nuclear Fusion Reactor Is ‘Very Likely to Work,’ Studies Suggest [High Tech]
I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There. [Collapse Life]
Postwar prosperity depended on a truce between capitalism and democracy - they call it a truce, but I think it was really a conflict, but one in which government took the upper hand instead of happily giving it over to the wealthy.
Memes as a Glimpse of a Radical Future (via Ed at Restricted Academy) - on memes and architecture with a zero marginal cost.
Death to Humans! Visions of the Apocalypse in Movies and Literature
Palantir’s direct listing fizzled out (DCH: this does my heart good)
URL
DCH: Charting an Empire: A Timeline of Trump’s Finances
The NYT had a massive scoop on Trump’s tax records earlier in the week. But this interactive graphic displaying it all might make more sense to a lot of people. Long story short: he’s been more successful playing a business tycoon than being one. But we all knew that already. Still nice to see it in print.
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CJW: Bot or Not at Real Life Mag
Paywalls and other content barriers could be augmented with CAPTCHAs that don’t ask you to contribute time or money but instead demand that you verify your worldview. You’re presented with a smiling woman unloading a dishwasher: Select the correct squares and you can gain access to a men’s rights subreddit. You’re presented with a grid of cops: Select the correct squares to view meeting details for a local abolitionist group. Other signifiers, superficially anodyne but charged with subterranean meaning — the “OK” hand gesture, a red rose, a cartoon frog, a corncob, etc. — already serve as semiotic fulcrums for the selective partitioning of online discourse.
Much of this essay is dedicated to the history of CAPTCHAs, but near the end it gets to some interesting speculation (above).
The journalist Lili Loofbourow recently declared that “bad faith is the condition of the modern internet.” Bad faith, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s definitive formulation, is a particularly potent form of inauthenticity that fully encompasses those captured by it. Bad faith actors willfully lose sight of the stakes or the shared, discursive ground on which they might otherwise stand with their interlocutors. Put differently, bad faith is the refusal to account for context.
DCH: The Loofbourow piece is really great. You should read it too: Illiberalism Isn’t to Blame for the Death of Good-Faith
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CJW: No Escape From Reality at Real Life Mag
Elaborating on Hoffmann’s argument, Os Keyes argues that data science is inherently “the inhumane reduction of humanity down to what can be counted” and, as currently constituted, “responds to critique only by expanding the degree to which it surveils us.” That is, data science sees the solution for problematic data collection to be more and better data collection, aspiring ultimately to what theorist Mark Andrejevic calls “framelessness”: a complete picture of the world “in machine-readable form,” positing a “post-subjective perspective of the view from everywhere.”
More data science dystopia, this time using as a starting point the horrifying overlap between HR and VR.
Proponents claim that VR data could be used to avoid some of the problems with algorithmic bias by offering rich data about what people are thinking and doing that can be retrieved by no other means — a direct and unmediated pathway from the brain to the algorithm. But the fantasy of perfect data […] is based on normative and exclusionary assumptions. Its likely training on data sets of neurotypical male able-bodied engineers is a form of what Shea Swauger (borrowing from disability scholar Lennard J. Davis) calls a eugenic gaze, codifying xenophobia, ableism, and white supremacy behind the black-box of algorithmic bias “while avoiding equity-based critiques because of our belief in the neutrality of data and technology.”
Eugenic gaze is a terrifying phrase, but compelling and sadly relevant.
Podcasts
Friend of the newsletter Gareth Jelley continues to release his deep and fascinating conversations with science fiction authors, focusing on the diverse and progressive contemporary of the genre, and not the stale canonical past. When listening to Intermultiversal Space, it seems so obvious - of course there should be a podcast where the interviewer takes great pains to read a wide variety of an author’s writing, and gets a real sense of them and their work, and then asks them intelligent and layered questions. But before Gareth began, I’d never actually come across one before, and I couldn’t imagine anyone doing a better job of it.
If you’re interested in the current moment of SF fiction, you need to subscribe to IS.
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CJW: #166 Country of Liars | Reply All
Obviously QAnon is bullshit, and the related Save the Children movement is just a hugely successful email chain letter filled with the usual selection of baseless facts. (If you want to learn about American sex-trafficking, look no further than Epstein. You don’t need to make up any new conspiracy when there’s a real one that likely has real connections to US intelligence.)
Anyway, on the off-chance that you still think there could be something to Q, I recommend this episode of ReplyAll. Sometimes the show is fairly light, and other times they dig deep into some serious issues; this ep is an example of the latter. In short, they do a great job of breaking down the origin of Q and present strong evidence that Q was created by one piece of shit chan board operator and then was hijacked by another. For all the “research” Q heads do into the drops, you’d think some of them might have spent time researching the origins of their own cult… but that would spoil their fun.
Considering the prevalence of Q online and in American politics, I consider this a must-listen.
Related: How QAnon Conspiracy Theories Spread in My Hometown
I remember one time my sister shared with me a warning about men approaching women in supermarket car parks, pretending to be perfume salesmen. They would hold a bottle of perfume out for you to smell, but it was actually ether and you would be immediately rendered unconscious! I had to inform my sister that ether doesn’t work like that at all. 15 years ago I spent a NYE aggressively huffing a bottle of ether and all that happened was I had a fantastic night (and spent the next few days reeking of ether while my body sweated it all out).
DCH: See also: Changing Conspiracy Beliefs through Rationality and Ridiculing – turns out good old fashioned logic and mockery can work… with the right factors.
CJW: This outing I’m giving you homework: think of an absolute favourite album, and give it a listen. Don’t put it on while you’re doing something else and can only give it half the attention it deserves. Listen to it while you’re out walking, or grocery shopping, or play it loud while you do the dishes. Or, think back to your teenage years, and listen to it while lying on the couch, reading the liner notes.
I recently listened to Mars Volta’s Deloused in the Comatorium, and not only does the album still hold up, but it made me realise that I don’t often listen to music for anything other than background noise while I’m writing. It also made me wonder how different TMV might have sounded if Jeremy Michael Ward had lived, because his work on that album is brilliant and distinctive, and also understated. RIP JMW, RIP Ikey Owens.
If you want to tell me - or any of our other readers - what you listened to for your homework, sign off in the comments below. For me it might be Noctourniquet, or The Shape of Punk to Come, The Idler Wheel…, or Easter.