CJW: This year is really getting away from us isn’t it? We’re officially in the second half of November, and I barely know where the year has gone. I guess I edited a novel, and planned the next one, wrote a couple of short stories, gave detailed feedback on 220,000+ words of novel, novella, and short story for some other folk, and attended an incredibly in-depth and helpful workshop in the States, and, y’know, I worked and paid rent and did all sorts of things that one has to do to be a useful human (because we can’t all be productive all the time).
Our latest bonus letter came from Austin - The Worst Excuse, about pessimism, music, magick, nicotine cravings, and synchronicity. To get access to it, our future bonuses, and the full archive, just go here to become a supporter.
Corey J. White (CJW) - Sci-fi author. Newsletter facilitator. Naarm/Melbourne.
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - Author & podcaster. Your fabulous goth aunt. On Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, Australia. @marleejaneward
Austin Armatys (AA) - Writer/Teacher/Wretched Creeper // Oh Nothing Press
m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / ecopoet // Dark Extropian Musings / pryvt.rsrch
Google sister company Sidewalk Labs is in negotiations to acquire a section of Toronto’s “derelict eastern waterfront”, which is considered “some of the most valuable underdeveloped real estate in North America”.
Sidewalk (wants) to control its area much like Disney World does in Florida, where in the 1960s it “persuaded the legislature of the need for extraordinary exceptions.” This could include granting Sidewalk taxation powers. “Sidewalk will require tax and financing authority to finance and provide services, including the ability to impose, capture and reinvest property taxes,” the book said. The company would also create and control its own public services, including charter schools, special transit systems and a private road infrastructure.
Apparently this project has been significantly scaled back recently, but plans for similar projects are popping up everywhere, like this cryptocurrency millionaire’s “Blockchain City”. Our Corporate Patchwork future cometh, folks, so sign up for your Premium Tier Nothing_Here LuxCom Burbclave now…
CJW: The opening paragraphs of this piece are very REPO VIRTUAL. Though I never went into property taxes, etc, it's definitely what I was thinking - a dark future of corporatocratic governance and control. This piece tells me that, if anything, I didn't go far enough. (But that's something for a future post on The Process - figuring out the line between useful worldbuilding and adding ideas that distract and detract from the story you're trying to tell.)
It's amazing that Sidewalk thought they could “overcome cynicism about the future,” when the main thing I'm cynical about is exactly this sort of corporatisation of every aspect of the world (and the continued legacy of colonisation, and continued degradation of the environment that go hand-in-hand with giving our society and world over to the corps [sounds like "corpse" not "core," because they'll be the death of us all if we let them]).
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CJW: Techno-fix futures will only accelerate climate chaos (via Sentiers)
As much as I want Fully Automated Luxury Communism, I thought it was simply a joke - either a Conservative example of the sort of nonsense us Leftists want/demand, or a parody thereof. Today I learned it is somehow both not a joke and so much more of a joke than I previously thought:
They imagine luxury as heavily based in material consumption – as author of FALC’s manifesto Aaron Bastani says: “Cartier for everyone, MontBlanc for the masses and Chloe for all.”
ETA: I thought the “luxury” part of FALC meant that people could live comfortably and with dignity without having to work endlessly at the whims of capital. Something about tying communism to over-priced designer goods feels wrong.
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MKY: How the U.S. betrayed the Marshall Islands, kindling the next nuclear disaster
The Tomb, which was built atop an unlined crater created by a U.S. nuclear bomb, was designed to encapsulate the most radioactive and toxic land-based waste of the U.S. testing programs in Enewetak Atoll.
[...]
According to a 1981 military document chronicling the construction of the dome, U.S. government officials met Feb. 25, 1975, to discuss various cleanup options — including ocean dumping and transporting the waste back to the U.S. mainland. Many “of those present seemed to realize that radioactive material was leaking out of the crater even then and would continue to do so,” the document reported.
A long read with pretty infographics etc about a place that sits next to Chernobyl and Fukushima as one of the most fucked up by nuclear shit - something something the Plutocene awaits.
CJW: How many tonnes of irradiated and contaminated soil and waste could fit into the hold of a military heavy cargo plane? And how close could said plane get to a certain House in Washington DC before being shot down?
I'm talking fiction ideas, obviously. (But if the Marshallese wanted to return to sender……)
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AA: How Green Was My Velocity?
If you know anything about online Accelerationist discourse, you’ll know it’s often a fucking multi-limbed shambling shoggoth of a thing, with a tendancy to disappear completely up its own arse. (Which is also part of why it’s interesting, I guess? You don’t get the New without a bit of the ridiculous...) There’s l/acc and r/acc and u/acc and z/acc and g/acc and now someone has come up with Appropriate Accelerationism aka app/acc.
Xenogothic’s (typically well-crafted) response to this exploration of accelerationism’s “tenuous relationship with ecology and green politics” includes a slew of worthwhile ideas and associations, so if you care about the debate between various Accelerationist offshoots (poor you/me), then have a read. Here’s a bit I liked:
The place of the human subject within accelerationism has been — and we really need to stop forgetting this — the foundational tension since the original publication of the Urbanomic reader (...) the contemporary subject of late capitalism, shaped by a mandatory individualism, amongst other things, finds itself torn in two directions — towards the collective (communist) subject of L/Acc and the inhumanism of R/Acc.
Accelerationism is worthy of ridicule in many ways, but it has often proven to be an interesting lens through which to view the world/history/our potential futures, even as the theoretical realm itself fragments. It’s also worth noting that Xeno’ gives some hints here about the content of his own upcoming book, Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher.
CJW: The bits of this I had the context to grasp were super stimulating, but yeah, for the sake of my own sanity I try not to dive too deep into accelerationism online.
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AA: The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising
The story that emerged (...) is about much more than just online advertising. It’s about a market of a quarter of a trillion dollars governed by irrationality. It’s about knowables, about how even the biggest data sets don’t always provide insight. It’s about organisations and why they are so hard to change. And it’s about us, and how easy we are to manipulate.
CJW: I can’t remember where I came across it, but recently I heard this true-ism: The first lie of advertising is when the advertising execs tell you their ads have any worth. Great to see this detailed breakdown, complete with graphs and explanations for those of us who can’t speak economese.
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AA: Topham Guerin: The team that helped Scott Morrison win is now working for Boris Johnson and Brexit
They run what has been dubbed a 24-hour meme machine — a social media firehose of attention-grabbing, emotion-manipulating, behaviour-nudging messaging designed to corral the faithful and convert the fence-sitters.
CJW: These two arsehole have some of the most punch-able faces I have ever seen. It's also difficult to say what effect they have when our entire commercial media industry is thoroughly conservative and anti-Labor at the best of times.
AA: Yeah, they’re really paddling with the current when it comes to our cesspool media environment. The actual efficacy of their techniques, I suspect, may be overstated. Still, file this under Know Your Enemy.
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MJW: Why Run for Office if a Vindictive Ex May One Day Release Revenge Porn?
“As I’ve matured into my career and found my voice, I’ve felt like maybe there could be a place for me in politics,” Adrienne says. (Adrienne is a pseudonym, as are the names of the other women in this article women who are referred to by their first name only.) “In my mind, you have to be someone who is exceptional at listening and connecting with others, and you have to be equally as shrewd in getting shit done and not taking shit. You’re the ultimate power broker between the system and the people.”
Running for office “is something people have brought up,” she says. “And I’ve just shut it down and said, nope, too many nudes out there.”
I too have been grossly socialised to think that I should avoid being any kind of public figure (or -- ye gods, release a book series for young adults) because of all the naked photos of me floating around in the ether, as if somehow those images make me a bad fucking person or something, and that notion is stretching ALL THE WAY TO THE TOP because being a fucking woman in this world is FUCKED.
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MKY: Next stop Earth: Hayabusa2 bids farewell to asteroid Ryugu
While the world continues to fall apart, a little robot just started its journey back from an asteroid that’s just a bundle of loosely packed rubble floating thru space, and will return and deliver a payload from it - which science fiction tells us always works out just fiiiiine - to give us yet another kray background news story to play out during the chaos of whatever the fuck happens during/after the US Presidential Election.
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MKY: Cosmological crisis: We don't know if the universe is round or flat
Either this is nothing but a weird glitch or EVERYTHING WE KNOW ABOUT THE UNIVERSE IS ABOUT TO CHANGE.
-Galaxy Brain Mode- FLAT UNIVERSE TRUTHERS ARE GONNA BE A THING.
CJW: I have to admit I'd never thought about this before, but I would have assumed the universe was spherical and not flat because… how the fuck is it flat when we can see things out in Space in all directions? Sometimes science hurts my brain.
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AA: Ghost 3.0, An Interview with Ghost CEO John O’Nolan
Ghost is an open-source content-management system (CMS) managed by the not-for-profit Ghost Foundation, and today the Foundation announced Ghost 3.0 with support for paid memberships.
This might be worthwhile to look into if you’re interested in the paid-subscription content game but don’t want to give Substack/Memberful their cut. The downside is that you’ll need to have the time and technical know-how to host the service on your own server.
With Ghost you have a vertically-integrated membership database and publishing system in one (…) you also own all of the data, so you own the customer records, you own the Stripe account, you own the site, you own the hosting, nothing runs through any single point of failure or centralized system. So even if Ghost (...) were to go away at some point, your site would keep working, your business would keep running, and you would still maintain ownership of every part of the intellectual property.
CJW: It reads mostly like advertorial, but at the same time it's an interesting system, and I sure could use something more attractive looking than WordPress. Sadly, I have neither the money for Ghost Pro, nor the knowledge/skills needed to self-host regular Ghost.
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Cutting Room Floor:
Who is the real Dice Man? The elusive writer behind the disturbing cult novel
Amazon's The Boys Has Something to Say About Neoliberalism, the Military, and Superhero Entertainment by Tom Syverson
CJW: Something That Has Nothing To Do With Nature (via Ospare)
As far as I'm aware, I've not come across any of Nina Kock's work before, but this essay on landscape (real and digital), light, and air, really spoke to me. It resonated at that distinctly Creeper frequency (which can be like that old definition of pornography - I only know it when I see it). And the way she compares the way an eye views the desert with digital draw distance might give fuel to all those people wanting to believe Bostrom's Simulation Hypothesis...
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AA: Cosmic Dyspepsia
This is “experimental independent academia” at its best. An engagingly written combination of deep research and abstract connections. Dryly amusing, fascinating, wild...
A tangled and excrementitious tale of how Pepsi Cola prophesied its invention, in the 1890s, through the writing of Milton’s Paradise Lost, during the 1660s. Discover how the bowel movements of the unfortunate poet augur the unleashing of fizzing beverage from the great internal fountains of the earth.
Traced via the occultural story of cola’s secret alchemical provenance, and imbricated with awareness of the fundamental dynamics of techonomic capitalisation, the entwined history of sugar and fizzy drinks here dovetails into the obscurities of Reformation theology and its complete re-invention of Time itself.
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CJW: We Are All Survivors, We Are All Perpetrators (via Ospare)
The language of perpetrator and survivor can also promote a false sense that sexual assault is the only form of boundary violation worth addressing. Describing sexual assault and the survivors and perpetrators that experience sexual assault as distinct from other, presumably "normal," experiences of sexuality misrepresents any experience not labeled sexual assault as free of coercion. On the contrary, in our authoritarian society, domination infects everything, resulting in even our most intimate and cherished relationships being tainted with subtle—or sometimes not so subtle—unequal power dynamics. A division between "sexual assault" and "everything else" lets everyone off the hook who has not been labeled a sexual assaulter; it thus focuses attention away from the ways we all can stand to improve our relationships and our sensitivity to one another.
I think there is a lot worth considering here, but I also worry that certain people could take some of the argument in this short essay in bad faith, and use it to muddy the (already very fucking muddy) waters of discourse about sexual assault and other problematic behaviours.
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CJW: Notes on Ritual #1
We shared an interview/manifesto from Gruppo Di Nun a little while back. This is a little update for people interested in that interview and ritual magick.
CJW: Chapo Traphouse Episode 366
I know these folks don’t need my sending any more traffic their way, but in this episode they’ve done a great job of succinctly offering a good (Leftist) perspective on both the recent coup in Bolivia, and all of the Billionaire discourse that’s been happening online the past few weeks.
MJW: Exotic Cancer is an artist and stripper and I’m WAAAAAYYY into their amazing creations. The art is gnarly and real and weird and they’ve got a cool store with prints and stickers and so much more.
Exotic Cancer has an AMAZING Instagram, and a Patreon you can support. I marred the pristine exterior of my laptop with EC stickers and I’ve no regrets.
CJW: 8 Writing Tips from Jeff VanderMeer
There looks to be a lot of interesting and helpful stuff here from Jeff VanderMeer (author of the fantastic Southern Reach trilogy, among other things). A lot of this is advice I’ve come across or even offered myself before, but Jeff offers quite a nuanced look at his process, and his thinking behind each point. I daresay some of it is a lot easier when you’re a full-time writer, and many of us don’t (and may never) have that “luxury”, but I offer it here so you can take what you can to tweak your writing habits into their best and most useful version.
CJW: Struggle Session Episode 208
I was recently on an episode of the Struggle Session podcast, talking about Snowpiercer and Parasite - two fantastic films from Bong Joon-ho, who is arguably my favourite director working today. So if you want to hear my chatting on a Leftist pop-culture podcast, track down episode 208 on your podcast app of choice.
I’ve mentioned Struggle Sesh before, because it’s the only pop culture podcast I listen to and I’ll often hear arguments about films, TV, etc that are missing from the general conversation. Also, to be honest, I’m sick of the breathless enthusiasm for the flat cultural products being pushed out by The One Company that I see online and heard on other podcasts I no longer subscribe to. Yes, people can enjoy whatever they want (and yes, I still watch the supers when I want to switch off). Yes, increased diversity on screen and behind the scenes is a good thing, but everything else about The Mouse is fucked up and harmful to the industries they’re involved in and culture at large. And at Struggle Session they aren’t afraid to talk about that.
Anyway, I’d love to guest on more podcasts… Just putting that out there. To talk my books, other people’s books, or other pop culture.
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CJW: I'm not going to lie - this week has been rough. Maybe things are rough for you too, but you'll get through it. We need you to, because this world would be so much worse without you in it. Maybe you can't see that now, but someone else can, even if that someone else is you looking back from a brighter moment in the future. Stay strong, and allow yourself some kindness.