CJW: Welcome to the final Nothing Here for 2020. We hope you have a great holiday (of whichever sort you happen to celebrate), and hopefully have had (or will have) some time to decompress a little before we have to get up and do it all again in 2021.
Got some bonuses to share:
Prometheus: A Christmas Carol - Just in case you missed it last weekend.
Reconstituted - a piece of Xmas-themed micro-fiction from MJW, originally published in Apex Magazine
Refused Are Fucking (Un)Dead - another recent unlock, about the evolution of the band Refused (or the evolution and devolution as the case may be). I’m sure I could extend this to say more about their turn as the fictional band Samurai in Cyberpunk 2077, but not today, Satan.
More unlocked bonuses are here. For future bonuses and access the full archive, just go here to become a supporter.
The Team
Corey J. White (CJW) - Scrooge but broke. Naarm/Melbourne.
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - I’m also this guy. Quite mental. On Wurundjeri land.
m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / ecopoet // Dark Extropian Musings / pryvt.rsrch
Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
Articles
MJW:The reigning queen of pandemic yoga
If you’ve ever done youtube yoga, I don’t need to tell you who Adriene is. Yoga with Adriene is an institution and a great way to keep up a yoga practice for free (but if you can, go to at least one class so the instructor can show you how to get into the poses properly, then youtube away) because exercise doesn’t have to cost money (and free is my favourite price of things!)
In spirit, Mishler’s version of the internet harks back to the days of primitive message boards and GeoCities, when everyone was still innocently dazzled by the ability to connect with random people over shared interests and nobody was disseminating revenge porn or buying Uzis on the dark web. The “Yoga With Adriene” community receives her services with a kind of expansive gratitude and positivity that is freakish in the context of social media. Scrolling through the comments under a video of a gorgeous woman in tight clothing is usually a recipe for suicidal ideation, but there’s an eerie lack of trolling in Mishler’s realm. A part of this, she said, was because YouTube allows creators to filter out certain words — profanity and anatomical language, for example. But most of it is organic, and even the oddballs play nice. “The foot-fetish community,” Mishler said, by way of example, “is very respectful, very polite.”
Plus anyone who has a class called Yoga for when you feel dead inside is alright in my books.
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CJW: Webwaste by Gerry McGovern (via Dan Hill)
Digital “progress” and “innovation” often means an increasing stress on the environment. Everything is more. Everything is higher. Everything is faster. And everything is exponentially more demanding of the environment. Digital is greedy for energy and the more it grows the greedier it gets. We need digital innovation that reduces environmental stress, that reduces the digital footprint. We need digital designers who think about the weight of every design decision they make.
A while back on his other newsletter, DCH mentioned the cost of storing emails we don't need, and this piece takes that same environmental logic to the size (and carbon weight) of websites. Already it made me wonder about the size of some images on my own website. (And yes, I realise our Prometheus bonus was filled with images, but I downsized them all before posting.)
Also interesting was the attack on stock images, which are by their very nature vague (so they can be used for a variety of different purposes) and thus offer little useful information for a combined carbon cost that is extremely high. The fact that stock images are largely pointless is obvious. But the fact that they're actively harmful hadn't occurred to me before now.
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CJW: What’s Breakfast Cereal Got To Do With The Future? (via Sentiers)
First, persuasion technology has made the box of cereal into another attention demanding, distraction-inducing interactive screen. That has a certain resonance, doesn’t it? Screens, as you know, have become pervasive end-points to voracious, coercive algorithms that grab attention and/or revenue. There is a sense today of the inevitability of that trend into the future such that any surface that could accommodate a screen would be fitted out with one, one way or another.
I think it took me a while to grapple with the idea of Design Fiction because it was something I already did instinctually in my fiction (or at least tried to), but it’s also a discipline that a lot of people much smarter than I write about at length. Here Julian Bleecker uses the example of the cereal box from Minority Report to demonstrate what design fiction is, how it can work, and what it can demonstrate.
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CJW: Cyberpunk Needs a Reboot by Ryan Zickgraf
That Musk can seamlessly inhabit the role of a scrappy striver in a virtual dystopia while in real life firing workers for organizing a union to level up his wealth is further proof that cyberpunk needs a reboot. What once stood out as a vital genre of anti-capitalist fiction has mainly been reduced to a cool retro aesthetic easily appropriated by the world’s second-richest man to market uglyBlade Runner–inspired trucks to nostalgia-drenched Gen Xers.
[...]
The year is now 2020, and reality has regretfully caught up with the somber warnings of the ghosts of cyberpunk past.
Our elites have thoroughly exploited the COVID-19 pandemic — a virus that’s killed more than 1.7 million — to wage a nationwide class war against the working class and accelerate almost every looming crisis of the last several decades of neoliberal hegemony. Our democratic institutions — unions, public schools, and representative government — have receded into the twilight while Wall Street and Silicon Valley continue to fill up the power vacuum. Amazon and the Big Five tech companies’ profits are skyrocketing this year and already resemble too-big-to-fail borderless nation-states.
Good points made in this piece, but I can’t say I agree with the framing of it. Sure, it’s fair to say the cyberpunk of video games and films needs a reboot, but there has already been so much happening in cyberpunk fiction over the past few years (not to mention small, indie video games or TTRPGs). Besides, looking for something genuinely new and interesting amongst massively expensive mainstream products is a fool’s errand, so I don’t know what people expected.
I guess all I mean to say is don’t lament the state of cyberpunk if you’re not even going to look at the contemporary fiction in the genre. That’s where it started, after all.
Related to CP2077: At Least Now You Know Which Video Game Reviewers Are Sellout Clowns
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MJW: My Mommies and Me
The mommies are unconcerned about catching Covid. YOUR BODY IS NOT BROKEN, they post. GOD GAVE YOU AN IMMUNE SYSTEM FOR A REASON. The mommies have found the perfect chunky scarves for fall. The mommies believe that ten minutes a day of walking outside barefoot will safeguard you against any virus, that the fluoride in our water is a chemical weapon that makes us more susceptible to disease. The mommies’ husbands’ vasectomy reversals were successful; the mommies are expecting miracle babies. The mommies advertise a $425 water filter. The mommies are hiking in Utah, hiking in Hawaii. They know that the Earth has grown weary.
A friend let me read their as-yet unpublished book and in it they insult someone by calling them a ‘mummy-blogger’ and I was like *snort* until I remembered that I have dated an ex-mummy-blogger, and they aren’t all the worst. Just most of them.
Newsletters
CJW: Bro Culture, Fitness, Chivalry, and American Identity
In a moment of stagnant social mobility, rising inequality, and incredible uncertainty around the future, this strongly visual message of self-betterment and improving one’s socioeconomic status through literal sweat can resonate deeply. It’s all within the individual’s control, if they simply work enough - an antidote to all that uncertainty, everything that’s so obviously beyond an individual’s control and reckoning, no matter how misleading and incomplete the formula actually is.
I saw this newsletter from Patrick Wyman come up in a few different places online, so you might have already seen it. Interesting overview of current American Bro Culture, where it came from, what it might mean, and where it could go. Also, connections to the broader culture wars through a vein of white supremacy.
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MJW: I mean, yes, I’d read something that Annalee Newitz scrawled on the bathroom wall and be like, ‘omg it was so good’, but that’s because they’re really good. And now we can get their good stuff in our inboxes via The Hypothesis. (And their new book Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age is out Feb 2, you should pre-order it like I did.)
Books
CJW: Books of the decade in ecocultural theory (via Paul Graham Raven)
I have read a grand total of one (1) book from this list, but as ecocultural theory is something I’m interested in personally and as a topic to explore in my fiction, I’ve added a couple more to my list of books to check out. Sharing it here in case anyone else wants some new food for thought.
Movies + TV
MJW: Palm Springs
CJW and I watched this on boxing day. I was expecting some silly fun, but got really good silly fun. I love Andy Samberg, his silly rubber face often brings joy to my heart. I love JK Simmons too, and very much enjoyed watching him shoot Samberg with arrows. The premise might seem played out, but Palm Springs gave us something else, something new and familiar and relatable from the formula.
This is a perfect film to see out 2020. It captured the bleak, repetitive quality of the year so presciently, and coloured it with the quirky black humour we’ve all turned to to try and survive, and it was released on streaming too. VERY 2020.
Plus, I thought the snippet where Samberg’s Nyles experiments with his sexuality was just delightful, and you might too.
MKY: this film was def a highlight of 2020 for me. And best seen knowing nothing other than it’s gonna promise you a good time.
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MKY: Alice in Borderland (Netflix JAPAN)
You know how it goes, you’re doing normal things with ur mates, getting up to mischief, and all duck into a bathroom stall to hide from the fun police. Then after a beat you go back outside only to find you’ve been ‘left behind ‘or something. Walking out to completely empty Tokyo streets… and yeah, the edge of that is prolly taken off by the Year(s) of COVID, but still. An empty Tokyo is a thing. Only… it’s not quite. And thus begins ‘Alice’ [Arisu] & Co’s adventures in what’s basically Battle Royale meets Cube scaffolded with Alice in Wonderland references [the chars based on The Cheshire Cat and The Caterpillar are standouts]. It quickly becomes clear that the stakes are very high (cue the Red Queen: you’re all going to die.) It’s fucking brutal. Emotionally and physically. And a compelling af watch. This Japanese scifi survival horror mystery show shits all over every vaguely similar western show I’ve watched this year (and I think I’ve seen them all). The only negative thing I have to say is it ends on a cliffhanger just as it’s getting amazeballs, so I’m hanging for the second season already. And given it’s based on a long running manga with its own spinoffs, there’s plenty of material yet to be mined. So, like, watch it and tell ur frenz. I just did :D
URL
CJW: An Interview with McKenzie Wark
I actually shared this on the Cutting Room floor recently, but had cause to revisit it. Worth reading if you missed it the first time.
I don’t think it’s even capitalism anymore because if what capitalism did was [find] a way to extract a surplus out of labor, whatever this is is extracting a surplus out of, quite literally, our communism. Our desire to feel and be with others is the very thing that they extract.
I love this idea - that we’ve (accidentally?) created a form of online communism through the ways we share ourselves and our art online. That feels like a great way to describe those positive online spaces where interactions seem worthwhile. What I don’t love is the ways that the platforms we choose to do this on have turned this need of ours to communicate into more capital For themselves.
Or, the existence of Technocapital implies the existence of the Techocommune.
So they’ll give you a bit of information but “it” gets all of it, it gets all of the pattern recognition and all that data and not just to figure out how to advertise to you but how to plan it’s future in the world. It’s kind of this massive privatization of knowledge, culture, feeling, and it’s not just Google. Everything you interact with now is extracting that in one way or another.
Because as mentioned here, it’s not just that they get everything we share, they get the data behind what we share too - the metadata, the connections, and a sort of personal history (once they've been tracking us for any length of time).
I’m from mining country, so I sort of have some sense of whenever I look at a city skyline, when you’re coming in on the train you see the line of the city I imagine a mine that’s an open cut pit somewhere that goes down as far as the city goes up. ‘Cause to build that you dug a hole the size of it, probably bigger, and that hole is still out there somewhere. But the vectors connecting you to it have so many links and it’s so remote that you don’t always see that’s where this comes from.
And this thought also ties into that article I shared last issue - Human-made materials now outweigh Earth's entire biomass. Picturing the inverted, void-city where the resources were dug up out of the earth is an incredibly simple way to grapple with the scale of our environmental footprint.
There are also some interesting thoughts on theory as literature that will be worth reading for anyone interested in either theory or literature.
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CJW: Countdown clocks, zines, and an imagined website from 2001 (via Sentiers)
A post by Matt Webb from September that is incredibly interesting - a (half-imagined?) collaborative tool for creating zines. If anyone finds (or builds) a tool like the one he describes, let me know. I’d love to use something like it - hell, it’d be an interesting way to run this newsletter instead of our current system.
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CJW: Easy Answers by Megan Marx (via Austin)
A recent article in the Rhode Island Medical Journal argues that doctors’ ability to easily look up medical information causes overconfidence that leads to misdiagnoses. “Self-questioning,” the authors write, “morphs from ‘What do I know?’ to ‘Where can I find it?’”
Comfortingly for the searcher, this metamorphosis elides the possibility that the answer is “nothing.” But not-knowing, however uncomfortable or painful, is intrinsic to life. [...] To the extent that it hides the unknown behind a scrim of facts, and encourages us to see the world’s plurality as something we can skim, Google also reduces our equipment for living.
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Designed to reduce the world to the answers it can provide, Google belies (or tries to belie) the universe’s infinite elusiveness.
Great essay at Real Life mag about Google and the way its search engines affect the way we search, the questions we ask, and what knowledge means in Google’s wake.
One thing I love is when I’m with a friend or a group of friends arguing about/discussing something that we could easily look up, but none of us doing so. The fun part isn’t having the answer, the fun part is the discussion, the shit-talking, the riffing. Only after the conversation has started to wane should Google be consulted, because then the new piece of information can spark new discussion, whereas if a search is done immediately the conversation dies on its arse. I remember seeing this a lot when smart phones were newer, but I think most of us have realised that the answers are the least interesting part of these discussions.
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CJW: Posting Into the Void: Studying the Impact of Shadowbanning on Sex Workers and Activists by hacking//hustling (via Damien Williams)
The results of our survey indicate that sex workers and AOP have noticed significant changes in content moderation tactics aiding in the disruption of movement work, the flow of capital, and further chilling speech. The negative impact of content moderation experienced by people who identified as both sex workers and AOP was significantly compounded.
This is a research paper into shadowbanning and other practices used by social media platforms to censor sex workers and sex work advocates, organisers and protestors (AOP).
Podcasts
CJW: Trashfuture Unwrapped feat. Dan Boeckner
I know Spotify is “easy” and “convenient,” but please listen to this episode of the fantastic Trashfuture podcast about the myriad of ways Spotify is shit, monopolistic, and damaging to artists (and thus culture).
I didn’t even buy that many albums from bandcamp this year, but even so I know with almost 100% certainty that a lot more of my money reached the artists themselves than the money spent by your average Spotify Plus user, no matter how constantly they might stream via the service.
CJW: That’s it for another issue and another year. Thank you for joining us.
I know that with New Year’s Eve just around the corner, the temptation is to think that 2021 can’t possibly be worse than 2020, that as soon as this year is over things will be better or back to normal. It’s a comforting thought, I know, but it’s far more likely that 2020 is just a preview of the coming years and decades.
I just wonder how long it’ll be before people realise that next year isn’t automatically going to be better just because the one we’re in was particularly awful. There’s a very good chance it will be worse. We can’t just expect or hope for a better next year, we have to do something to reach toward it. We have to fight for it in whatever way we can. Maybe it won’t mean much compared to the inertia of the status quo propped up by immoral billionaires, but it’s better than just hope alone.
I hate to be a downer, but you’re reading this newsletter so you already know that I can’t really help myself. It’s in my nature. Yeah, it kinda sucks, but it is what it is.
We’ll adapt, because that’s what we do. We just need to stand up for a more equitable future than the ones planned by the richest men on Earth. We deserve better than their futures.
Cutting Room Floor
City-states are back (via Sentiers)
The curse of 'white oil': electric vehicles' dirty secret (via Sentiers) - it’s a sadly familiar story, but worth reading because people are going to continue to push green growth either ignorant of its potential damages or in full knowledge of it…
Facebook Lets Vietnam's Cyberarmy Target Dissidents, Rejecting a Celebrity's Plea Sam Biddle
Detroit is Suing Black Lives Matter Protesters for “Civil Conspiracy” - Disgusting tactic from the State here, but entirely unsurprising.