nothing here but gamifying truth

issue 314 - 12th April, 2026

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CJW: Here we go again. Welcome back, my loves.

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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, bell ringer.

• Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer and purveyor of melancholy whimsy.

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Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: Suzanne Simard says Indigenous knowledge must save the Earth - Erica Gies at Psyche

He recounts a time when he and Simard came upon such a culturally modified tree, and he recited the prayer for pulling cedar bark: ‘I will breathe life into you as you breathe life into me.’ The idea, he says, is reciprocity – the understanding that the forest needs human interaction as much as people need the forest. Western science has documented a related phenomenon: when trees are harmed by animals, insects or fungi, they send distress signals to other trees. For example, Simard’s lab group has shown that trees who are stressed by soil disturbance send more carbon resources to each other. Humans are part of that web, too. ‘If we’re not there to pull the bark, we won’t activate those [responses],’ Cook explains.

We've been sharing pieces here for years about the importance of Indigenous knowledge in repairing and maintaining natural systems, so of course this is one I found worth sharing. It's about the Indigenous peoples of the coast of British Columbia and their efforts to return to their lands, and keep Western interests from destroying the forests (though mostly about a Canadian scientist whose work aligns with theirs and who argues for Indigenous practices).

They discovered that when conditions flipped – when birch dropped its leaves in autumn and temporarily lost its ability to photosynthesise and produce energy – the net flow of resources flipped too, moving from fir to birch instead. Upon observing that seedlings near the biggest, oldest trees survived in the deep shade, despite not getting enough light, and in harsh sunny areas, seemingly without sufficient water, Simard hypothesised that the big trees might be helping the seedlings. Subsequent experiments found that they were, and even that big Douglas firs favour their kin. This too was Indigenous knowledge. Years later, she learned that her PhD adviser, Dave Perry, was a descendant of the Athabascan people. He told her: ‘We believe the big trees nurture the little trees.’

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Just the headlines:

• “Economic Civil War”: States Push Laws to Shield Oil and Gas Companies From Accountability - Abrahm Lustgarten at ProPublica (DCH: the majority of which are being backed by right wing petrol death cultist Leonard Leo.)

• An American Company Drilled for Oil in Kenya — and Left Behind Soaring Cancer Rates - Georgia Gee, Nelly Madegwa at The Intercept

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Geopolitics & Empire

DCH: Inside The Israeli Army’s Propaganda Wing - Illy Pe’ery at 972 Magazine

“This process culminated in ‘Bearing Witness to the October 7 Massacre,’ or what became known in Israel as the ‘atrocities video’: a 47-minute compilation of raw footage produced under the supervision of Major (res.) Yuval Horowitz, head of the campaigns division.

‘It was like the Wild West — there was no censorship,’ said a soldier who served in the unit and worked on the film. ‘We were flooded with material and saw everything. I was in shock, but at the same time, there was pressure to distribute as much as possible — it was like in a social media [advertising campaign]: What works? What doesn’t? What gets attention?’“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit produced a 47-minute atrocity compilation and distributed it like a social media ad campaign — optimizing for attention, not accuracy. It launched fake “fact-checking” channels on YouTube, Instagram, and WhatsApp, presenting military propaganda as independent journalism. It ran covert psy-op campaigns under fabricated nonprofit branding and recruited influencers to amplify the messaging without disclosure.

None of that works without a press corps willing to play along. Sixteen journalists sit in a privileged correspondents’ cell — briefed first, published first, commercially dependent on staying there. The military didn’t corrupt the media. The media built a business model that made corruption the logical outcome.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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DCH: Inside the stealthy startup that pitched brainless human clones - Antonio Regalado at MIT Tech Review

And he’s talked about how to grow a clone. Since artificial wombs don’t exist yet, brainless bodies can’t be grown in a lab. So he’s said the first batch of brainless clones would have to be carried by women paid to do the job. In the future, though, one brainless clone could give birth to another.

They want to build Axlotl Tank!. This is not a thought experiment — this is a funded startup with investor decks and ARPA-H partnerships. It’s the torment nexus meme all over again: someone read Frank Herbert’s most visceral warning about what happens when you reduce human biology to a supply chain, and decided the problem was execution, not ethics.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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• How the hypercuriosity of ADHD may have helped humans thrive - Anne-Laure Le Cunff at Aeon - CJW: On a slightly different approach to thinking about ADHD and how it can be a positive, at least in environments that don't actively suppress the sorts of thinking and approaches to learning and working that are common among people with ADHD.

Just the headlines:

• Prediction Markets Make a Bet Against Public Health - Ayesha Khan at Undark 

• The Family That Decided to Have Their Stomachs Removed - Sarah Zhang at The Atlantic

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Labour & Economics

DCH: How Prediction Markets Polymarket and Kalshi Are Gamifying Truth - Christopher Beam at Bloomberg

“In late December and early January, an anonymous blockchain user placed a series of Polymarket bets on Nicolás Maduro’s ouster, including a final one hours before US special forces descended on the Venezuelan president’s compound. In all, the bets turned a $400,000 profit.”

Prediction markets — platforms where users bet real money on real-world events — have exploded from niche curiosity to billion-dollar infrastructure embedded in mainstream media, finance, and politics. They’re being sold as truth machines, but the evidence tells a different story: insider trading, market manipulation, arbitrary rulings, and platforms that actively engineer the events they’re supposed to only predict. If this model gets to financialize everything — elections, press conferences, your boss’s next sentence — the question isn’t whether markets will distort reality. It’s whether we’ll notice when they already have.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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• DCH: Amazon is the General Motors of our time — and if labor doesn't organize it, the entire working class pays the price. - Amazon Will Be This Century’s Biggest Labor Battle Interview with Benjamin Y. Fong at Jacobin

• DCH: 6 years ago I wrote about how Ontario was getting fucked over by Uber. Shame to see Toronto fall to the same/similar scams.Toronto’s Transit Crisis Is a Class Crisis - Edgardo Sepulveda at Jacobin

Just the headlines:

• New York Is Closing In on Amazon’s Shady Delivery System - Alex N. Press at Jacobin

• Nations priced out of Big AI are building with frugal models - Rina Chandran at Rest of World

• Workers around the world are not getting what they want from AI - Adrian Brown at Rest of World

• The global tech boom is over. American AI companies won - Issie Lapowsky at Rest of World

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Newsletters

CJW: Dead Language - Charlotte Shane

Language had gone dead like a battery or (better) a plant: desiccated and brown yet still composed, holding onto its shape without receiving sustenance. Because the words were as empty as hollow reeds, when they punctured one’s consciousness they drained out sensitivity, clarity, faith in others, faith in self. I felt this lessening in the true sense of the verb, as an embodied experience. And I knew other people were undergoing the same, probably—or especially—the people speaking. “The right language starts to feel dead,” says the poet Ariana Reines. “Language is alive [but] we’re not taught about language this way. We’re not taught that it’s actually living.” Phenomena can’t be cut off from process, from receiving, if they are to stay alive. You can’t take from something that’s never replenished, or rather you can’t take from it for very long.

William C. Anderson said something similar while speaking about Buddhism late last year: “When you’re dealing with dogma, those phrases and terms that you use, they become dead… So many of the words, so many of the questions, so much of the rhetoric that we have…is already dead and it’s already worthless.” He adds that the same happens in political contexts; words like “solidarity” and “mutual aid” and “liberation” lose their impact. That loss occurs in communication between people, but the impact dulls in one’s brain, too. Thinking becomes stagnant. Here is Ariana Reines again: “Language very quickly becomes a tool for foreclosing upon possibility and expansion…it also forecloses thought and actually stops intimacy very easily.”

Shane on language and words in our present moment. Reflects a lot of what I've been thinking and feeling, the reasons why I don't engage as much with political commentary. It's all been said, there is nothing of value that I can add, just more anger and frustration. So I'll be quiet, I'll try and listen more, find ways to interact with people that aren't shared responses to the fucked-upedness of our society/culture/politics. 

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Games

CJW: My Year as the Killjoy - Autumn Wright

Writing a manifesto for doing games criticism during the Palestinian genocide did make me more isolated. I find myself at a pole of an industry libidinally driven by fun and nostalgia and insecurity. I no longer view the willful ignorance of the majority of games media as hypocrisy or contradiction. Today, I see the progressive posturing beneath it all. Outlets and editors who were vocal 12 months ago cover Microsoft published games without even a cursory acknowledgement of their abetting the deaths of tens of thousands of people nor mention of the calls for solidarity from our siblings who are feeling the imperial boot directly while we watch from below. I am sick of sinking further below other bodies as the boot comes down, my space to retreat into fun and distraction shorter than those comfortable maintaining their ignorance. But the boot will reach them one day, too.

A powerful piece on being a games journalist against genocide at a time when too few care - a follow-up to Wright’s piece Games Media Can't Ignore BDS Xbox Boycott.

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CJW: Everything is Permitted - Andrei Filote at Stop Caring

If I told you that Assassin's Creed Unity was about a man pursuing the love of his life while doing political assassinations during the French Revolution, you might be thrilled. If I proposed a story in which the American Revolution was experienced by a Native American haunted by visions of a white supremacist future, your ears would perk up. If so, it's probably because you don't know the creators of such games are Ubisoft, and Ubisoft are makers of touristy romps through romantic settings littered with historical cameos and not much substance.

Filote points at the many obvious failings in Ubisoft's approach to history in the Assassin's Creed games (especially the first game, and the absence of the name "Palestine"), and the ways they elide actual history in favour of telling a Davinci Code-esque conspiracy story, but I wanted a deeper analysis. Though perhaps if you've not played the games yourself you'll find the piece more interesting.

Though I was unaware, but unsurprised to learn, that it's Zionist forces that developed the use of suicide bombings:

>Altaïr is able to blend into the crowd, and although this recalls the methods of Islamic suicide bombers, this style of terror attack was originally pioneered by the Irgun and LEHI, two Zionist paramilitaries folded into the IDF in 1948. 

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The Memes