nothing here but horny ghost fusion

issue 215 - 2nd April, 2023

CJW: Welcome back, or if it’s your first time here, welcome welcome, and we hope you stick around. We’ve got a lot to share, so let’s get to it. 

If you wish to support us, you’ve got a couple of options:

• $5 monthly subscription.

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Both give you access to the full bonus archive, as well as new bonuses as they are posted.

The latest bonus is #ACAB UK Edition, by Dan, about the recent report on London’s Metropolitan Police, and the horrific crimes committed by its members.

The Team

• Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey

• Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Writer, apocalypse witch, goth aunt.

• Corey J. White (CJW) - Author, sin-eater, future sweetie-pie.

• Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Journalist, MA in semiotics, and PhD in Arts. Sci-fi writer, futurology researcher and essayist. @lidiazuin

Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: Equinox greetings: hard to believe - Spencer Glendon at Probable Futures (via Sentiers)

Climate change is usually portrayed as an industrial problem […]. However, over a decade of working on the topic, I have come to the conclusion that the roots of the problem lie much further back, principally in the Anglo-European models that now dominate but also in aspects of Chinese ones. I see climate change as a problem of old, deep cultural models being overwhelmed by the scale of modern humanity.

A fascinating and worthwhile long read about the ways our cultural and personal beliefs affect the ways we are able to understand models of the world and the world as it is.

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Just the headlines:

• Climate Change Is Speeding Toward Catastrophe. The Next Decade Is Crucial, U.N. Panel Says.

Geopolitics & Empire

DCH: Tracing the evangelical roots of white nationalism by David Conrads at Christian Science Monitor

As to what the future holds, the author acknowledges that the movement Trump has energized will continue even after Trump himself is out of the public eye. He also looks with apprehension at the continuing migration to the American Redoubt, an area composed of Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, and parts of Washington and Oregon, where white Christian nationalists and political extremists find a safe haven and a sense of separatism in an isolated region of the country. He sees the Redoubt Migration as the next step in the evolution of American politics that started with the Sunbelt Migration in the mid-20th century. Only this time, he speculates, the goal is not to take control of a political party, but to prepare for the collapse of the United States and a chance to rebuild a theocratic state.

When you dig into the history of the American Far-Right as Bradely Onishi has done in his new book, Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism – and What Comes Next” dystopias like Gilead suddenly don’t seem all that far-fetched

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• Biden Administration Splits on Prosecuting Russia for War Crimes in Ukraine - Alice Speri at The Intercept - “The shadow of U.S. war crimes in Iraq hangs over the Pentagon’s refusal to support probes into Russian atrocities in Ukraine.”

• Every Room A Battlefield – BLDGBLOG - Geoff Manaugh on his recent visit to a simulated town used for US military training.

Just the headlines:

• China & Russia pledge ‘changes not seen in 100 years’: Xi & Putin take aim at US dollar hegemony - Ben Norton at Geopolitical Economy Report

• UNESCO Made Ukraine a Priority, but Xinjiang Fell by the Wayside - Liam Scott at Foreign Policy

• Russia Calls for U.N. Investigation of Nord Stream Attack, as Hersh Accuses White House of False Flag - Jeremy Scahill at The Intercept

Science & Space

CJW: An Astounding Composite of 90,000 Images Unveils the Sun’s Hidden Atmosphere - Colossal

Comprised of approximately 90,000 individual images, “Fusion of Helios” showcases the usually invisible solar corona, the outermost layer that tends to be hidden by the sun’s powerful glare. 

Tech & Design

CJW: Our Threshold of Repugnance - Rob Horning

If TikTok puts a human face to every stray piece of social instruction, LLMs seem to do the opposite, offering statistically derived norms detached from specific human practice, from any particular person you could have any reason to identify with or judge. The models impose their normativity without any compensatory feeling of mastery or belonging, no “struggle for recognition” whatsoever. 

I think this is why everything I have ever seen LLMs produce feels so empty and unconvincing.

Some thinking here from Rob Horning pitting TikTok against LLMs - TT being a portal to a hypercondensed prism of human connection and advice, while LLMs are also a portal, but to a font of information completely stripped from the context of the humanity behind it.

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CJW: There’s Nothing Unnatural About a Computer - Claire L. Evans interviewing James Bridle (via Sentiers)

In that case, artificial intelligences interceded between the humans and the nonhumans, in order to allow that information, that awareness, to cross over, and therefore that relationship to be built. So there are points at which the use of these technologies allows us to see things, and realize things, about the nonhuman world that just weren’t accessible to us before. 

But I have this very strong sense that one of the broader roles of AI in the present is really just to broaden our idea of intelligence. The very existence, even the idea of artificial intelligence, is a doorway to acknowledging multiple forms of intelligence and infinite kinds of intelligence, and therefore a really quite radical decentering of the human, which has always accompanied our ideas about AI — but mostly incredibly fearfully. There’s always been this fear of another intelligence that will, in some way, overtake us, destroy us. It’s where all the horror of it comes from. And that power is completely valid, if you look at human history, the human use of technology, and the way in which it’s controlled by existing forms of power. But it doesn’t need to be read that way.

A great interview about Bridle’s latest book. The chat covers non-human forms of intelligence, intelligence as collaboration (inherently), climate adaptation, and the endless task of preserving and recontextualising knowledge and culture.

Alright, alright, I’ll start reading Ways of Being this week.

Related: The stupidity of AI - James Bridle at The Guardian

This mostly summarises arguments we’ve shared previously, but it’s Bridle so it’s still worth reading. 

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CJW: You Don’t Have to Be a Jerk to Resist the Bots - Katherine Alejandra Cross at Wired

Bots perform the labor of service workers, and treating service workers with respect requires you to not be overly familiar with them. You maintain professional boundaries. You respect them by both avoiding abuse and refusing to treat them like underpaid therapists. Just because someone isn’t your best friend doesn’t mean you suddenly have license to be cruel to them, after all. Bots aren’t real people, but their simulation of humanity is cause enough to recognize that our own humanity might be degraded by practicing abuse on them. The only way we could make that worse is by pretending such abuse is virtuous resistance to Big Tech when, in truth, it’s capitalism’s fullest realization. Service workers serve as corporate cannon fodder, there to absorb the customer’s vitriol and direct it away from management.

In that way, the more you abuse a bot, the more you’re giving in to Microsoft or Google’s implicit demand that you see them as human. You’re not evading the anthropomorphic fallacy—you’re surrendering to it. You can’t dehumanize someone you don’t already see as human. […] Refusing the exploitation of your empathy requires decency as well as self-awareness. You’re not resisting the bot, you’re resisting the business model behind it.

An interesting piece on cruelty and kindness toward chat bots and how this relates to dehumanisation of actual people (including and especially service workers).

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• Matt Webb on LangChain, a new GPT-related tool.

• “To expand on this, the fear that some people may lose their superior status to a machine is the same fear that they may lose it to people they already deem inferior. It’s part and parcel of a blowback against human rights being extended to Black people, to women, to trans folks, to the disabled, to everyone they long assumed was deservedly less worthy (of money, care, attention, or respect) than themselves.” - Smoke screen, by Mandy Brown

• “In the future, how will we know how to be who the algorithm doesn’t show us we can be? Would we even dare to want to? And what would that kind of totalizing assimilation mean for global mental health, wellbeing, and the human experience in general?” - AI and the American Smile, by jenka 

• Doctorow argues that the hype surrounding AI resembles that of cryptocurrencies, driven by investment and marketing interests rather than a genuine understanding of its capabilities. Highlighting AI’s limitations, such as job displacement and bias, Doctorow calls for a more nuanced understanding of AI to avoid repeating the mistakes of the cryptocurrency hype bubble. See also: For the Love of God, AI Chatbots Can’t ‘Decide’ to Do Anything

• “Fashion brand Levi Strauss & Co has announced a partnership with digital fashion studio Lalaland.ai to make custom artificial intelligence (AI) generated avatars in what it says will increase diversity among its models.” Or you know you could just fucking hire real models. Synthetic media representation isn’t the same as the real thing or financial opportunity.

• “When all is said and done, it seems like the net result of this massive advance in computational power will be to drown us in noise and make everyone a little less kind.” - On Generative AI, phantom citations, and social calluses, by David Karpf (via Sentiers)

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Just the headlines:

• AI recreates what people see by reading their brain scans

• How and when Facebook decides to break its own moderation rules - Andrew Deck Rest of World

Society & The Culture

MJW: The Delphi murders were a local tragedy. Then they became “true crime.” by Aja Romano at Vox

It’s extremely difficult to describe Delphi — “Delphi” here encompassing the murders, the town, the investigation, the online community of true crime enthusiasts following it, and all of their complex interactions with one another. It’s too vast and tragic to put into words, and also too messy and complicated. Of all the recent “big” cases, Delphi has developed an entire true crime ecosystem of communities — all wanting justice for two tragically murdered girls, and all too often at odds with each other in their pursuit of it.

I consume true crime media and feel reasonably shitty about it. There’s nothing more simultaneously numbing and wrenching than listening to an horrific podcast. But lately I have switched off numerous new TC podcasts, sickened by the salaciousness, graphic detail and the gross entitlement of the media and the audience, of which I am shamefully a part. Here’s a look at the True Crime Media Complex through the lens of one particularly horrific case.

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MJW: The Bad Guy List: How New Mexico’s Sex Workers Keep Each Other Safe by Cecilia Nowell and senstivity review by Geneveive Lafleur at Cosmopolitan 

Jaramillo listens closely, mentally compiling the details of Dilia’s account: white man, brown hair, 30something. Later on, after she and the other volunteers pack up the van, Jaramillo will write up a full incident report—not for the police but for the Bad Guy List.

It’s scrappy and low-tech, just a photocopied sheet of paper filled with crowdsourced reports like Dilia’s. Jaramillo produces the Bad Guy List through Street Safe New Mexico, a “guerrilla” nonprofit she cofounded in 2010 when a series of murders in this community—her community—went unsolved. Part neighborhood watch, part resource hub, Street Safe exists to empower sex workers and other people on the street, anyone living at the intersection of criminalization, social stigma, and an ever-present possibility of violence.

The Bad Guy List is not new - sex workers have long been writing up lists of bad clients, posting and printing them for other workers to help keep them safer. Here we call them an ‘ugly mug’ list and theyd be printed in the outreach magazine dropped round to brothels, and later shared via email lists. Sex workers have long needed to use their own resources and networks to share information, and in the post SESTA/FOSTA USA, these lo-fi methods are still super valuable when the work is done outside the law. Workers keeping workers safer.

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• US reactionary vigilante double-feature: Texas GOP Wants Citizens to Stop Migrants. Critics Say It’s a “Vigilante Death Squads Policy.” and Texas Republicans Just Proposed a Bounty on Drag Shows 

• Even Baroness Louise Casey thinks all London cops are bastards (more on this in our latest bonus issue). 

• “I thought I was doing what I could to help secure my safety and be OK when it actually did the opposite of putting me into a position of something I couldn’t carry emotionally or physically or mentally.” Jeff Thomas, Peter Thiel’s kept romantic partner before he allegedly committed suicide.

Health, Cooking, and Related

DCH: We spent 7 months examining the AR-15’s role in America. Here’s what we learned. Washington Post

While handguns account for the most gun-related killings in the United States, sales of AR-15s surge in times of tragedy and political change. They soared in the run-up to the election of Barack Obama in 2008, and after the mass killing at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 and a high school in Parkland, Fla., in 2018, and again ahead of the turbulent 2020 presidential election. AR-15s, which once accounted for a small fraction of guns produced in the United States, now represent nearly 1 in 4, according to industry and government figures.

Another day, another murder spree in the USA. AR-15s are uniquely suited for mass killing and should be banned outright.

Just the headlines:

• How Cigna Saves Millions by Having Its Doctors Reject Claims Without Reading Them - Patrick Rucker ProPublica

Labour & Economics

DCH: Consultancies Have Been the Handmaidens of Neoliberalism by Nathan Akehurst at Jacobin

Economists Rosie Collington and Mariana Mazzucato return to this ground in their new book The Big Con — excoriating McKinsey, its close peers Boston Consulting Group and Bain & Company, and a host of similar firms. The authors race through a medley of involvement in misconduct — price gouging vital medicines; corruption in South Africa and Angola; forest destruction from Brazil to Guyana; ICE detention camps; the asset-stripping of public services from health care to railways; brutal economic restructures of struggling economies; mass layoffs; tax-dodging; the 2008 crash; and the Enron scandal, to name a few. One quickly gains the impression that there isn’t a single major act of state or corporate malevolence in our lifetimes free of the big consultancies’ fingerprints.

This is why consultants are high-up in my personal guillotine queue. More here.

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DCH: Workplace Data Is a Tool of Class Warfare by Brishen Rogers at Boston Review

For more than a decade, scholars, journalists, and tech leaders have focused on two ways that data-driven technologies are altering jobs: by automating tasks and therefore displacing certain workers, and by discriminating on the basis of race, sex, national origin, or disability. Those are critical issues, but surveillance technologies are having another effect on work as well. Companies across today’s vast service economy are using such technologies as tools of class domination, deploying them to limit wage growth, prevent workers from organizing, and enhance labor exploitation. Workers’ increasing resistance to surveillance is therefore also a process of class formation—and reforms that support such resistance could encourage a more democratic politics of workplace technology.

A great long-read on how “bossware” is being used by capital to suppress workers.

CJW: Tech types are obsessed with autonomous processes (factories, cars, etc), but they hate the idea of autonomous workers.

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CJW: How Tech Companies Reshape the Economy - Paris Marx (via Sentiers)

Amazon is not only transforming the businesses that get created, but also shapes how they function to serve its ultimate ends of expansion and growth. Weigel describes this reliance on a large network of third-party sellers as being like a form of decentralization that then encourages a further recentralization as breaking things apart allows Amazon to build a more dominant position. It also means those “mini-Amazons” are beneficial to the main entity in other ways: Amazon can not only use the presence of so many small businesses on its platform for PR and lobbying purposes, but also to get them to advocate for policies that ultimately benefit Amazon’s further expansion while appearing to be about supporting small business.

A piece on how Amazon is able to reshape the economy, even when that’s through third-party sellers, and uses that starting point to discuss similar reshapings from other companies and platforms in the “creator” “economy”, streaming, etc.

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• “Since 2017, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has issued $15 million in fines against Dollar General in connection with ‘180 inspections nationwide for numerous willful, repeat and serious workplace safety violations related to unsafe conditions.’” from Popular Info’s piece on The Dangers of Dollar General

• The American government gives the most help to those who need it least.

• “Two major education worker unions just walked off the job for three days in Los Angeles, grinding the school district to a halt. Their actions resulted in a 30 percent raise.” Solidarity. ✊

Just the headlines:

• The Problem With AI Is the Problem With Capitalism - Nathan J. Robinson at Jacobin

• The Right To Be Free From Automation - Ziyaad Bhorat noemamag

IRL

MJW: Horny Ghosts by MV Pask (aka Queenie Bon Bon) at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

Are you haunted by the never-ending and repetitious nightmares of being contained by your fleshy vessel? Does your body leak and ooze? Are bots stealing your image and creating alternative versions of you in 00 and 11s? Cursed messages in lipstick on you mirror? Ectoplasm left on your personal massager? Spectres blasting whale song while you’re trying to give someone a relaxing hand job in your local suburban massage parlour?  Don’t worry – you’re not alone. 

Pask’s Horny Ghosts is an intimate little chat/treat, a special swirly show by a chronically ill sex worker, reading you a bedtime story about whores, bodies and the kinds of ghosts that only live inside the internet and also Illegal brothels closed by lockdowns.

And look, you’re probably not in Melbourne, but you can get a sample of Pask’s brilliant and unique words/voice here and here. 

Podcasts

CJW: Love and Radio - Revisiting Eyes Wide Shut

I’ve mentioned Love and Radio at least once before. I stopped listening for a while as they put themselves inside a walled garden a few years back and only recently emerged. This recent episode stuck out to me - the show’s host in conversation with poet and sound artist Tracie Morris about the film Eyes Wide Shut. We discussed Eyes Wide Shut on Buddies without Organs, but Morris still brought up a number of points I hadn’t considered.

I’d love to see her performance. From the way they describe it in the show, it sounds like she performs poetry during a screening of Eyes Wide Shut, and I think that could be fascinating.

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DCH: Trashfuture - Edict of Brainworms

We take an in depth look at a an article by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher about how AI is going to re-catholicise the entire world, and turn Patagonia vest nerds into a class of priests.

Fun takedown on the criti-hype surrounding the new AI hype bubble.

Music

LZ: Outlaw - Reaching Beyond Assiah

Killer black metal from Brazil. Also, good chance to mention that recently Mayhem went to Brazil for a few concerts but ended up cancelled – both the band and the concerts.

Especially in the southern part of the country, there’s a big community of European immigrant descendants – mostly coming from Germany and Italy, I think. There’s quite a few festivities there that try to emulate these other national costumes, like Oktoberfest and so on, so there’s a really strong sense of belonging even though the last actual European person (as in born in Europe) in your family was your great grandparents. 

But it’s still one of those places where racism is more blatant, neonazi groups are more active (or less discrete) and more classicist ideals are shamelessly reinforced. While Brazil is a racist country by definition (despite having more than half of their population composed of people of colour), the southern part is even worse. 

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LZ: Turns out that Mayhem was supposed to play in a city there, but local politicians and activists readily went on Twitter to explain that this Norwegian band is nazi, racist etc. People outside of the metal fandom obviously started to share their hot takes and then the shitstorm happened successfully. 

While I’m not here to argue that Mayhem is not sketchy, there’s barely anyone in the metal scene who is a decent person. It’s very hard work enjoying metal and especially black metal, because if you dig deeper, you may always find trouble. That is not to say that you should just ignore the politics and listen to national socialist black metal at leisure, since this is a subgenre that is open about their racism/nazism, but it’s very possible that the band you like offends some minority or is at least is known for religious intolerance.

There’s plenty of sexist album cover art and sexism is very strong in the scene as well, as much as homophobia and so forth, BUT at the same time you have bands that are openly left-wing and anti-fascists. What made this whole controversy on Mayhem playing in Brazil even funnier, to some extent, is that people outside the scene started to complain that besides being nazi and racist (not bad enough titles), they were also intolerant towards religion (take the church burnings, the satanist tropes, the anti-Christianity commonplace etc). I mean, REALLY? 

So please name one musician that does not have any dodgy stuff in their history. Not even Beyonce (think about the copyright lawsuits raised against her). We are fucking humans and we are shit. Period. Don’t expect to see gods and saints playing guitars and singing about depressed wolves in the forest. No, you should definitely not support fascists, but please chill the fuck out.

CJW: Related - on the Acid Horizon podcast they recently had an episode about black metal and leftist black metal: Repeater Books Presents ‘Tonight It’s A World We Bury’ with Bill Peel and Dawn Ray’d.

I’m not even into black metal, but I found it to be a great discussion.

Art

CJW: Meet the Rick Owens collaborator backsliding into the primordial soup - Daniel Rodgers at Dazed

I don’t even know who Rick Owens is, so the article’s framing just seems insulting to ἄnthromorph, the trans artist that this piece is actually about. Anyway… I wanted to include this mostly because I find it deeply unsettling in a compelling way - a sort of primordial posthuman hybridisation that understands and then twists and subverts the visual language of social media to present something equal parts aesthetically pleasing and disturbing. Or maybe that’s just me? Art!

The Self-Promotion

LZ: No, The Whale is not about obesity or fatphobia, it’s about self-destruction 

Instead of just leaving a few comments here in the movie section, I actually wrote this essay after watching the movie. I was deeply impacted by it as many facets of the story have echoed to my own life experiences. I didn’t want to write a personal essay though, but I put in words what some people might be struggling to say.

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LZ: What if virtual reality was a mental process instead of computer-generated graphics?

This is a translation of a column about technology that I published on a Brazilian website. If you like Paprika, Inception and The Cell, here’s my attempt to check what current scientific research has on their plate to make these movies real.

The Memes