CJW: Welcome to another issue of nothing here. Bushfires are raging across Australia while our government refuses to act and refuses to provide funding for the volunteer firefighters who have been battling said fires for weeks now. And in the UK… well, shit. You poor bastards.
Our latest bonus letter was Voyeur, a piece of original fiction by Marlee Jane Ward, about performance, exhibition, and self-harm in an alien zoo. I think it’s fucking great. To get access to it, our future bonuses, and the full archive, just go here to become a supporter.
With the gifting holidays upon us, you can also give a gift subscription to someone you think would appreciate all our links, rants, fictions, and other assorted bits and pieces.
And feel free to forward this email on to someone you think would enjoy what we do here.
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
CJW: From disbelief to dread: the dismal new routine of life in Sydney’s smoke haze by Charlotte Wood
[…] it isn’t obscene to find [the smoke] intolerable. It is intolerable.
After our petulance comes a stoic, patient reasoning. It’s good for us to get this wake-up call. And it’ll be over soon. But that was weeks ago, and the patience has been replaced by a grim, creeping dread. A fear that it won’t be over soon, or ever. It feels like karma. This is what the scientists have warned us about, begged us to think of, all these years. It’s here. And it’s going to get worse.
This is a great visceral and political look at life in Sydney these past few weeks as bushfires burn across NSW and smoke blankets our most iconic city.
Related: The Community Defenders helping to save a Gondwana rainforest from bushfire (via Jane Rawson)
The fire was contained just above the houses on the community’s land, and then something happened that no one could have predicted.
A small army of volunteers turned up at the main gates of all the communities in the valley, including Siddha farm, wanting to help stop the Mt Nardi fire.
“Volunteers from neighbouring communities and all over the northern rivers just turning up in utes with rakes, leaf blowers and backpack sprays and excuse the term, but manpower,” Mr Ross said.
The volunteers came not just to save houses but to also save the rainforest of Nightcap National Park.
With our Prime Minister acting as a perfect example of the uselessness of government in the face of climate change and its related disasters, here we see how we’re going to have to rely on ourselves and our immediate communities. I know that it’s so easy to live an insular life these days - that’s the way our society has trended recently - but building community might be the only thing that saves you. (I’m talking to myself here as much as anyone else.)
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CJW: Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against (via Sentiers)
Models suggest that the Greenland ice sheet could be doomed at 1.5 °C of warming, which could happen as soon as 2030.
Thus, we might already have committed future generations to living with sea-level rises of around 10 m over thousands of years. But that timescale is still under our control. The rate of melting depends on the magnitude of warming above the tipping point. At 1.5 °C, it could take 10,000 years to unfold; above 2 °C it could take less than 1,000 years.
Here’s a fairly depressing report on climate tipping points, and the domino effect we could expect to see if we don’t act, very quickly, to mitigate climate change. And here’s a simpler summary at the Guardian.
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CJW: Oil Is The New Data (via Sentiers)
On the surface, then, Microsoft appears to be committed to fighting climate change. Google has constructed a similar reputation. But in reality, these companies are doing just enough to keep their critics distracted while teaming up with the industry that is at the root of the climate crisis. Why go through the effort of using clean energy to power your data centers when those same data centers are being used by companies like Chevron to produce more oil?
The mea culpa from the pseudonymous author here is pretty fucking rich. He fakes environmental concern while literally working at the intersection of Big Tech and Big Oil. This is why things won’t change - because even people who know enough to cite climate concerns refuse to act (or not act as the case may be) when it affects their wallet.
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MKY: Humans placed in suspended animation for the first time
This is less about us storming the cosmos in ALIEN’esque hypersleep coffins and more about the war on death finding a new front. I think the Russian Cosmists would appreciate this nonetheless.
BUT WAIT… there’s more? Clearly ESA has been infiltrated by russian cosmists, ‘cause: Research suggests that hibernation is a likely option to make deep space exploration a reality
“For a while now hibernation has been proposed as a game-changing tool for human space travel,” explained research team leader Dr. Jennifer Ngo-Anh. “If we were able to reduce an astronaut’s basic metabolic rate by 75% – similar to what we can observe in nature with large hibernating animals such as certain bears—we could end up with substantial mass and cost savings, making long-duration exploration missions more feasible.”
Dr. Ngo-Anh added: “And the basic idea of putting astronauts into long-duration hibernation is actually not so crazy: a broadly comparable method has been tested and applied as therapy in critical care trauma patients and those due to undergo major surgeries for more than two decades.“
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MJW: Biopharma has abandoned antibiotic development. Here’s why we did too.
Public measures designed to incentivize development of new antibiotics are woefully inadequate. No amount of grant funding will make up for a market that is hopelessly broken. Merck CEO Ken Frazier put it well: “Sometimes new drugs are not available, not because the price is too high, but because it is too low.”
Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Fuck you all in the new age of anitbiotic resistance, big pharma can’t make money off that shit.
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CJW: Podcast Passivity (at reallifemag.com)
The radio needled at a 20th century crisis of boundaries by admitting public experiences into private spaces. Podcasts have turned this inside out, allowing us to have private experiences as we go about in public. If to the turn-of-the-century listener the presence of the radio seemed like a haunting, in the age of podcasting, it’s more like we’re the ghosts — floating through the world in a fog of semi-presence, both deeply engaged and fundamentally checked out.
This piece jumped out at me because it could work as a companion to my bonus letter from September - Telepathy. Particularly this part:
Whether the medium is insidious, my mind a greedy assimilation machine, or both, it seems that at least some of the time, podcasts don’t just drown out my inner-monologue — they actually overwrite it. When I listen to a podcast, I think some part of me believes I’m only hearing myself think.
I’ve opened up that bonus letter to the public (it includes a bunch of podcast recs if you need something to help you get through the holidays), so consider it an Xmas gift?
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CJW: “Link In Bio” is a slow knife
But [Instagram] killing off links is a strategy. It may be presented as a cost-saving measure, or as a way of reducing the sharing of untrusted links. But it is a strategy, designed to keep people from the open web, the place where they can control how, and whether, someone makes money off of an audience. The web is where we can make sites that don’t abuse data in the ways that Facebook properties do.
I’d actually suggested a “Link in Bio” shirt to Austin for ONP, because I felt that the phrase had a sort of conceptual weight - the way all these people on Instagram are desperate for people to follow them off the closed platform, to buy their wares, subscribe to their channels, or just engage with them somewhere, anywhere else, while knowing that the best they can expect is the dopamine hit of another worthless like.
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CJW: The Decade Comic Book Nerds Became Our Cultural Overlords
This isn’t about what is or isn’t cinema. It’s about whether the corporations that already dominate so much of the cultural landscape through pure market share should also be allowed to set the parameters of what we can ask for from art. It’s not about whether superhero movies are capable of making us feel things, but about the need for movies that show us dimensions of human feeling more complex than Bruce Wayne’s childhood trauma or the raccoon that talks to the tree.
A great piece encompassing the recent backlash against Scorsese, and what it says about our current moment in time. The short of it: superheroes are strangling culture.
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Cutting Room Floor:
Exposed: China’s Operating Manuals for Mass Internment and Arrest by Algorithm (via Damien Williams)
Don’t Buy Anyone A Ring Camera (via Damien Williams) - related to last issue’s The Captured City link.
And if paying to join a surveillance dystopia wasn’t bad enough… How Hackers Are Breaking Into Ring Cameras
America is not the land of the free but one of monopolies so predatory they imperil the nation
The ‘Amazon effect’ is flooding a struggling recycling system with cardboard (via Dan Harvey) - the focus on profits from recycling seems broken, but, y’know, capitalism.
Why Racists (and Liberals!) Keep Writing for Quillette (via Dan Harvey)
A Genetic Dating App Is a Horrifying Thing That Shouldn’t Exist
How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real - Gibson says ‘fuck’ a lot and has a closet full of Acronym. Think you’ll be as cool as this OG at 71? Unlikely.
MJW: In The Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado
‘…our bodies are ecosystems, and they shed and replace and repair until we die. And when we die, our bodies feed the hungry earth, our cells becoing part of other cells, and in the world of the living, where we used to be, people kiss and hold hands and fall in love and fuck and laugh and cry and hurt others and nurse broken hearts and start wars and pull sleeping children out of car seats and shout at each other. If you could harness that energy – that constant, roving hunger – you could do wonders with it. You could push the earth inch by inch through the cosmos until it collided heart-first with the sun.’
I liked Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and other Parties, so I was looking forward to reading her memoir of queer domestic abuse (as much as anyone can look forward to something like that…) I read it all in one long afternoon, every fragment-y chapter, each one titled (‘Dream House as Stoner Comedy’, ‘Dream House as Famous Last Words’) and formed around myths. It is as interesting structurally as it is beautifully written.
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CJW: From Annihilation to Acceptance: A Writer’s Surreal Journey
This piece is a few years old now, but if you’re as big a fan of The Southern Reach trilogy as I am, this is really interesting.
AA: Apparently VanderMeer’s process involves drinking a ton of red wine and inducing an essentially “schizo” state where everything is hypercharged with meaning? Cool.
Everything is eating everything else now and I’m as disoriented as my characters. This doesn’t bother me that much—it seems right for what I’m working on, so I encourage the tendency so long as I’m happy with the results on the page.
File this under “writing as magic” self-hypnotism, VanderMeer splicing his everyday life and fiction together to get deep and weird.
AA: http://exmilitai.re (via Ospare)
Lots of stuff on this page for the doomed theorycel reading this - includes a lecture by Andrew Culp (author of Dark Deluze) about Invisibility and a full book by Mark Fisher (you can DL the PDF for free BB).
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CJW: Towards Anarchist Superheroes
I found this to be quite interesting - taking anarchist ideas and thinking about how they might fit into the superhero mould. I mean, we’re all sick of superheroes, but at the very least maybe they don’t need to be defenders of the neoliberal status quo.
Also, I’ve decided that if I ever do the VoidWitch follow-up novel trilogy, it will be a properly anarchist space opera. I don’t know exactly what that means, because I need to read more on anarchism, but his essay was as good a place as any to start.
MKY: you mean i’m not the only one trying to do this? HURRAH!
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CJW: Some new ways to visualise the city, taken from a great thread at Restricted.Academy:
Twice a year the sun aligns with the midtown grid in NYC […]
London Cutaways (via Oliver)
AA: These remind me of BERG’s amazing (pre-Inception, keep in mind) “horizonless projection” map called “Here & There” (2009). You can read some of Berg’s influences for this project (via the increasingly useful Wayback Machine) here.
Luigi’s Mansion is one of the influences, btw.
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CJW: The Shape of Clothes to Come (via Ospare)
A great look at futurism through 20th Century fashion, ending on friend of the newsletter, Erolson Hugh. (If I say it enough times, maybe he’ll give us some free clothes…)
I really want this Helmut Lang Astro Jacket…
In this epic osteogeographical podcast recorded entirely on location, (Urbanomic) go back to the future and take a tour around Cornwall with author Thomas Moynihan to discuss his book Spinal Catastrophism.
This is a very long but very interesting podcast, clocking in at over 4(!) hours. The combination of interesting chat with field recordings works well.
AA: Why It’s Hard To Maintain Eye Contact, Explained
A liar tries to hide his eyes so another person won’t sense that he is lying. However, not all liars hide their eyes - there is a special type of liar. This video is based on ancient tradition rediscovered and refined by Frankfurt School of Social Research, namely by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno.
Trippy gonzo academia in video essay form. There’s a subtle menace to this video by the collective (?) Meta Intent: a disconcerting combination of subtly-modulated voice-over narration, dream logic editing and theorypunk subject matter. This video features Twin Peaks, insect biology, hypnotic self-help and Paul Laffoley-esque animated sequences. Pretty good shit if you ask me. It’s also weird and a bit worrying, as discussed in the comments I’ve excerpted below…
“I’m foreign, not trying to do a mind control on you.” A LIKELY STORY.
CJW: A+ Would get brainwashed again.
AA: I really love the tumblr blog “Jewel In The Skull” - it regularly features gorgeous classic sci-fi and fantasy art, billing itself as “World-building, one image at a time”. Here are some recent gems:
Art by Manuel Perez Clemente
Art by Pat Boyette
Art by Juan Gimenez
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CJW: I know a lot of people thought this UK election was going to be a turning point - a turning away from right-wing fascist creep. I thought the same thing about the last Australian election. It seemed obvious to me that the current government was (is) corrupt, bigoted, backward, climate change denying, racist, anti-LGBTQI, and all the rest, and surely people would see that voting for them was not in our best interests… And yet, here we are.
This is the state of politics in the West at the moment. We can no longer rely on our governments to help or protect us (or even just to leave us alone). We need to get (more) used to the idea of looking after ourselves and those closest to us, because our governments are going to continue to put corporate profits and the wealthy above the interests of the people and society as a whole. There might not be enough of “us” to successfully push back against the massive machinery of the right-wing media, but there are enough of us to build networks and communities to assist one another.
The word for this year has been community, but it needs to become more than just a word for all of us. It needs to be our plan, and our goal. Because we only have each other.