nothing here but impacts of industry

issue 247 - 18th February, 2024

CJW: Welcome to another edition of nothing here. We're glad to have you. 

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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. Middle-aged greying goth.

• Corey J. White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, glitch dreamer.

• Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Journalist, MA in semiotics, and PhD in Arts. 

Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: Global temperatures breach 1.5C warming limit over 12-month period, a first - France24 (via Foreign Exchanges)

Storms, drought and fire have lashed the planet as climate change, supercharged by the naturally-occurring El Nino phenomenon, stoked record warming in 2023, making it likely the hottest in 100,000 years.

The extremes have continued into 2024, Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) service said, confirming that February 2023 to January 2024 saw warming of 1.52 degrees Celsius above the 19th century benchmark.

I had expected a little pushback - or at least some eye rolls - last year when I said that 1.5C was already baked in. What I didn't realise is that we were actually already living it.

This is one case where I'm not at all glad I was right.

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DCH: Interview: Confronting the Riddle of Geoengineering by Dan Falk at Undark

UD: What are some of the other risks?

RB: There’s quite a lot. One of the other big ones, I suppose, is disruption to regional weather patterns around the world. So in particular, there have been several studies that have looked at the impact of the Indian monsoon quite significantly changing, potentially. So it could affect precipitation patterns in quite dangerous ways.

And there’s another one: With the stratospheric aerosol injection, in particular, there’s a concern about the depletion of ozone in the atmosphere, which is obviously another global environmental problem that we’re trying to try to deal with. So it wouldn’t necessarily help with that. Acid rain, obviously sulfur, when it falls out of the atmosphere again, would come down as acid rain in places.

Geoengineering sure seems like a giant monkey paw sometimes, huh?

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• Apocalyptic Optimism Could Be the Antidote for Climate Fatalism by Dana Fisher at Time

• How bad is Tesla’s hazardous waste problem in California? by Alex Castro at The Verge

• Can the 'sand motor' save West Africa's eroding coast? - Jake Bittle at Grist

Geopolitics & Empire

CJW: Netanyahu’s War on Truth - Jeremy Scahill at The Intercept 

There was no Holocaust survivor killed at Kibbutz Be’eri that day. There were no mass beheadings of babies, no group executions in a nursery, no children hung from clotheslines, and no infants placed in ovens. No pregnant woman had her stomach cut open and the fetus knifed in front of her and her other children. These stories are entirely fictional, a set of audacious lies weaponized to generate the type of collective rage used to justify the unjustifiable.

[...]

There is no doubt that widespread atrocities and war crimes were committed during the Hamas-led attacks of October 7. It is also true that Israeli military, government, and rescue officials have engaged in a deliberate misinformation campaign about the nature of many deaths that occurred that day.

A detailed look at Netanyahu/Israel's genocidal use of propaganda since October 7th. It demonstrates a calculated and cynical attempt to manipulate the narrative at every step in order to justify the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. If you've been following these events, a lot of this might already be familiar to you, but it's something else to see it all in one place and know that the latest volley of bullshit is being prepared somewhere to coincide with the next especially egregious war crimes.

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• “Under the cover of the relentless bombardment and atrocity crimes in Gaza, Israeli forces have unleashed unlawful lethal force against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, carrying out unlawful killings and displaying a chilling disregard for Palestinian lives,” said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s director of global research, advocacy and policy. - Israel’s ‘chilling disregard’ for life in occupied West Bank: Amnesty International - Al Jazeera

• “The PRCS accused Israel of deliberately targeting the ambulance. “The occupation deliberately targeted the Red Crescent crew despite prior coordination to allow the ambulance to arrive at the site to rescue Hind,” it said in a statement.” - ‘I’m so scared, please come’: Hind Rajab, six, found dead in Gaza 12 days after cry for help - Emine Sinmaz at The Guardian - CJW: It’s incredibly upsetting, and heartbreaking to know that there must have been thousands of untold stories like this one in the past four months. Related: Dem Senator Calls Israeli Leadership “War Criminals,” Votes to Send Them $14 Billion Anyway - Ryan Grim at The Intercept

• “What is taking shape here is a whole pipeline for AI-moderated semi-autonomous decision making on the battlefield: Aerial and naval drone swarms for intel collection, generative AI for analyzing that intel for target selection, and autonomous aerial drone systems for attacks. All any human in the loop has to do is confirm.” The Dawn of the AI-Military Complex by Rene Walter at Good Internet (DCH: related here as well particularly looking at Palantir’s role: How Tech Giants Turned Ukraine Into an AI War Lab by Vera Bergengruen at Time)

Just the headlines:

• 'No evidence' for Israeli UNRWA claims in five-page dossier - CJW: Quelle surprise!

• Israel Has Killed Nearly 900 Palestinians Since ICJ Order to Prevent Acts of Genocide - Prem Thakker at The Intercept - CJW: A good rundown of Israeli and US actions/atrocities in the days immediately following the ICJ ruling.

• Exposed: US DEA used criminals to spy on, destabilize Venezuela, Mexico, Bolivia - Ben Norton at Geopolitical Economy Report - CJW: Headline has the basics, but click through for plenty more detail.

• Red Sea Rivalries by Kaleb Demerew at Phenomenal World (DCH: A nice history lesson)

Science & Space

DCH: Why now is the time to address humanity's impact on the moon by Christine Daigle at Phys.org

An increasing number of moon missions and extracting resources from the moon could destroy lunar environments. This mirrors what has happened on our planet: humans have used this collection of "natural resources" and produced enough waste and degradation to bring us to the current sixth mass extinction precipice.

And here’s a factoid from the article NASA estimates there are already 227,000 kilos of human garbage littering the moon. We’re just not content to muck up the Earth, we've just gotta drag our polluting colonising shit into the stars too. 

Tech & Design

CJW: Vision Con - L.M. Sacacas (via Austin)

So, for example, when Berry writes about the division between those who wish to live as creatures and those who wish to live as machines, he also warns against a willingness to allow machines and the idea of the machine to set the standard for how creatures ought to live. In certain contexts, machines can operate at a pace, scale, precision, and intensity with which creatures cannot compete. When machine-like consistency, efficiency, speed, or production is demanded of creatures, then creatures are made to live as if they were machines. This never ends well for creatures, including human creatures. Most people know this, it’s just that some see this as cause to transcend the human and others see it as cause to re-imagine the human-built world.

I'm a science-fiction writer, so of course I'm intrigued by the potentials of "spatial computing" - which is such a boring, if fitting, name. But I'm also an anti-capitalist punk and have absolutely no interest in any sort of future that comes from the crop of tech companies that dominate our digital lives.

I want open-source spatial computing, I want a digital future that stems from an updated version of the 90s vision of "cyberspace" as a radical opportunity for collective and collaborative creativity and problems-solving.

If Silicon Valley continues to choke those futures before they can be born, then I'll further embrace my creature-hood at the cost of time and attention paid to The Rectangle.

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DCH: The Cult of AI by Robert Evans at Rolling Stone

Cult members are often depicted in the media as weak-willed and foolish. But the Church of Scientology — long accused of being a cult, an allegation they have endlessly denied — recruits heavily among the rich and powerful. The Finders, a D.C.-area cult that started in the 1970s, included a wealthy oil-company owner and multiple members with Ivy League degrees. All of them agreed to pool their money and hand over control of where they worked and how they raised their children to their cult leader. Haruki Murakami wrote that Aum Shinrikyo members, many of whom were doctors or engineers, “actively sought to be controlled.”

Perhaps this feels like a reach. But the deeper you dive into the people — and subcultures that are pushing AI forward — the more cult dynamics you begin to notice.

Robert Evans on the inherent laziness drizing the agency abdication behind the rush to AI and the parallels it has with cult behaviours more broadly.

CJW: This small quote jumped out at me:

The whole week [of CES] was like that: specific and devastating harms paired with vague claims of benefits touted as the salve to all of mankind’s ills.

The specific and named harms don't matter as much as the vague promises because it's marginalised people experiencing the harms and the wealthy who are in place to reap whatever benefits come of it. 

// 

CJW: Software Is Beating The World - Ed Zitron (via Sentiers)

As Breland notes, e/acc is intellectually hollow, and I’d argue it’s also inherently childish. These people aren’t complaining about “decels”; they’re complaining that resources, governments, and society itself will not move every roadblock and ethical concern out of the way so that Daddy Venture can make another billion dollars. Though they dress themselves in the trappings of the manosphere’s “tough guy” mantra, they build their beliefs on a weak, manipulative, and limp ethos where they cry and squeal every time they’re faced with a thing that they don’t like. They claim to loathe privilege, yet they crave a privileged existence where society doesn’t get in the way of anything they want to do.

Ed Zitron is a regular guest on Trash Future, so I've heard him there a number of times, but haven't tracked down his newsletter before, but I signed up right away after reading this. Fantastic rundown of the current VC/SilVal ideology and its many glaring faults.

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• AI is fueling a data center boom. It must be stopped. - Paris Marx - CJW: This could have gone under Climate Change and The Environment with the computation boom cloud server companies are pushing on us impacting energy requirements and slowing the transition away from fossil fuels.

• Meta Considering Increased Censorship of the Word “Zionist” - Sam Biddle at The Intercept 

• “The near-total context collapse we are now experiencing was already baked into the workings of the Mosaic web browser and the dream of the “information age” that it encapsulates. Information does want to be free, as it turns out — free of context, free of pleasure, free of empathy, even free of comprehension. The effort to just cut to the chase and give us the information has actively destroyed the conditions for understanding and using that information in an intelligent way. The Dewey Decimal System and the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature gave us access to information in a much more authentic way than any means commonly available now — and indeed, even library databases are being cannibalized from within by the informatization of search (so that reviews of a book come up, sometimes in the dozens, before the book itself, for instance).” The Information Environment: Toward a Deeper Enshittification Thesis by Adam Kotsko at itself.blog

• “One of the more striking findings came when Mozilla counted the trackers in these apps, little bits of code that collect data and share them with other companies for advertising and other purposes. Mozilla found the AI girlfriend apps used an average of 2,663 trackers per minute, though that number was driven up by Romantic AI, which called a whopping 24,354 trackers in just one minute of using the app.” Your AI Girlfriend Is a Data-Harvesting Horror Show by Thomas Germain at Gizmodo

• The new technocrats are ostentatious in their use of language that appeals to Enlightenment values—reason, progress, freedom—but in fact they are leading an antidemocratic, illiberal movement. Many of them profess unconditional support for free speech, but are vindictive toward those who say things that do not flatter them. They tend to hold eccentric beliefs: that technological progress of any kind is unreservedly and inherently good; that you should always build it, simply because you can; that frictionless information flow is the highest value regardless of the information’s quality; that privacy is an archaic concept; that we should welcome the day when machine intelligence surpasses our own. And above all, that their power should be unconstrained." The Rise of Techno-authoritarianism by Adrienne LaFrance at The Atlantic

• The unsettling scourge of obituary spam - Mia Sato at The Verge

Just the headlines: 

• A crowd destroyed a driverless Waymo car in San Francisco by Wes Davis The Verge

• Two warring visions of AI by Ethan Zuckerman at Prospect

• How AI is quietly changing everyday life by Anna Kim at Politico

Society & The Culture

MJW: 4Chan Chuds Used AI to Clothe Her. She Fought Back by EJ Dickson Rolling Stone

The photo had been manipulated with AI, David says, to make her look like “some strange parody of a woman.” Her waist and thighs had been edited to look smaller, but her head had been edited to nearly twice its size. What’s more, the person who edited it had clothed her in a demure white A-line dress and surrounded her with three adorable children, all of the same approximate stature and wearing similarly beatific white garments. Far-right influencer Ian Miles Cheong had tweeted it with the caption, “When given pictures of thirst traps, AI imagines what could’ve been if they’d been raised by strong fathers,” a post that had racked up seven million views.

Just more men being gross on the internet, this time assisted by AI. The only good thing to come out of the situation is the huge jump to Davis’ income on OF.

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• “Safety is a rhetorical weapon wielded to make people feel less safe. We are in an endless cycle of fear, which generates an authoritarian reaction, generating more fear and more authoritarian reaction. How do we break free?” Illusions of Safety by Mariame Kaba at The Baffler

Health, Cooking, and Related

CJW:  Biggest ever survey of trans Americans finds 94% happier after transition -  Jessica Glenza at The Guardian

Now will The Guardian stop platforming transphobes?

The headline summarises the piece neatly, but there's more information on the survey etc too.

Related: Researchers dive into common gender-affirming care youth misconceptions, questions - ABC News (the American one)

I thought this was a useful resource that you might be able to share with friends/family with questions (sans bigotry) about trans healthcare, especially with the way conservatives in the US have been vilifying it constantly.

And this piece offers a history of 3 waves of pseudo- and anti-science backlash against trans healthcare, including the current one: Pseudoscience Has Long Been Used to Oppress Transgender People - G. Samantha Rosenthal at Scientific American

Unsurprisingly, the first wave was perpetrated by the Nazis.

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DCH: UK Government Secretly Shuts Down NHS Pride Programme by Ben Hunte at Vice

After approving more funding for the project several months ago, whistleblowers tell VICE News that NHS England suddenly “u-turned and ghosted” those involved. Services have now been “wound down,” and some staff are struggling to work while NHS England refuses to communicate with them about what has changed. Responding to these claims, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care said, “taxpayers rightly expect value for money, which is why we expect the NHS and all of the department’s arms-length bodies to continuously review whether their diversity and inclusion roles are good value, and to always consider ways to improve.”VICE News understands that many people working directly on the project have not been told it will be ending. Those familiar with the plans said hospitals can expect to be briefed on the project closure “within the next few weeks.”

Speaking of bigotry…

My friend Dr. Michael Farquhar started the programme. And my wife Martha Bogert designed the first badge prototype. We’re all pissed at the news. More from Mike over on Twitter. 

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DCH: Her Incredible Sense Of Smell Is Helping Scientists Find New Ways To Diagnose Disease by Alix Spiegel, Elena Renken at NPR

To begin, this was a new scientific discovery, but also, Joy had smelled the disease on Les more than a decade before his symptoms got severe enough for them to seek medical help. If Joy could predict Parkinson's before its well-known symptoms, such as shaking and sleep disruption, even started to appear, maybe she could work with researchers. It might lead to a breakthrough.

This is the most batshit crazy thing I’ve read over the last two weeks. What an incredible story. 

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Just the headlines:

• Nanorobots shrink bladder tumours by 90% at irbbarcelona.org

• Experts Confirm: US Is Dealing With an 'Out-of-Control' STI Epidemic by Carly Cassella at ScienceAlert

Labour & Economics

DCH: The high cost of Uber’s small profit by Paris Marx

Uber turned a net profit of nearly $1.9 billion in 2023, but what few of the headlines will tell you is that over $1.6 billion of it came from unrealized gains from its holdings in companies like Aurora and Didi. Basically, the value of those shares are up, so on paper it looks like Uber’s core business made a lot more money than it actually did. Whether the companies are really worth that much is another question entirely — but that doesn’t matter to Uber. 

A nice long screed about Uber’s cruelty, exploitation of workers, attacks on labour rights, and march toward monopoly

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DCH: AI Could Actually Help Rebuild The Middle Class by David Autor at Noema

The industrialized world is awash in jobs, and it’s going to stay that way. Four years after the Covid pandemic’s onset, the U.S. unemployment rate has fallen back to its pre-Covid nadir while total employment has risen to nearly three million above its pre-Covid peak. Due to plummeting birth rates and a cratering labor force, a comparable labor shortage is unfolding across the industrialized world (including in China).

This is not a prediction, it’s a demographic fact. All the people who will turn 30 in the year 2053 have already been born and we cannot make more of them. Barring a massive change in immigration policy, the U.S. and other rich countries will run out of workers before we run out of jobs.

Political wonks have been pointing to “demographic facts” for why the Democrats are ascendant throughout my adult life. That never seems to turn into anything though. Still I think this is a read worth sharing. A lot of existing criti-hype around AI related job destruction is still largely tbd in the long run and in the short term it helps capital reign in labour. 

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• “Across Europe, platform workers have won a series of court cases ruling that they are employees, not self-employed. Moves for new EU-wide legislation have faced serious resistance from lobbyists but now look set to deliver some new protections.” In Europe, Platform Workers Are Winning Limited Protections by Ben Wray at Jacobin

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Just the headlines:

• [Australian] Employers could face criminal penalties for contacting employees out of hours after right-to-disconnect laws pass - ABC News - CJW: Australia passing a good law?

• Tesla worker killed in fiery crash may be first 'Full Self-Driving' fatality by By Trisha Thadani, Faiz Siddiqui, Rachel Lerman, Whitney Shefte, Julia Wall and Talia Trackim at The Washington Post

• Kenyan Courts Keep Telling Meta to Let Workers Unionize by Jody Ray at Jacobin

• Lyft Wants to Run LA’s Bike Share. Workers Are Saying No by Joe Versen at Jacobin

• Roses are red, violets are blue, Uber drivers deserve fair pay too by Tesnim Zekeria and Rebecca Crosby at Popular.info

Books

MJW: Stahr Gunn-Heron ‘Shagger’ and ‘Bampot’

Stahr Gunn-Heron is margotthr0bbie on insta, or Mistress Marilyn on other platforms. However you might know her, she’s just released part 2 in her memoir series, Rotten Apple. Bampot is the followup to Volume 1: Shagger. I got both, and devoured them pretty quickly. They are colourful, illustrated with diary entries, pics and notes. For you if you like memoirs by hilarious badass dommes about sex, kink, mental health and more. I love love love that so many great people are publishing their own shit, it’s so exciting.

Music

MJW: Kesha - Gag Order

People keep showing me pop music that is fucking weird and I love it. Despite rarely listening to new music (look, I’m comfortable in my rut), somehow Kesha’s 2023 album Gag Order made it into my rotation. It's delightfully weird, with only slivers of the brat rap she is known for. Many songs are spare and broken down, broken up, layered with her voice. The lyrics aren't about empowerment, they are mired in the reality that no matter how empowered you might feel, life is often going to get in the way of that. Highlights for me are Something to Believe In, Eat the Acid, Peace and Quiet, and Only Love Can Save Us Now.

Art

CJW: Spanning Four Decades, Edward Burtynsky's Photos Document the Devastating Impacts of Industry - Colossal

Opening this month at Saatchi Gallery in London is Extraction/Abstraction, the largest survey of his work to date. Comprising 94 images and 13 large-scale murals, the exhibition showcases the disastrous effects of human consumption from distant, often aerial perspectives that at first glance, appear as alluring, colorful compositions. A closer study reveals the horrific nature of many of the photos as they capture a brilliant orange river of nickel waste or concentric trenches etched into the Turkish landscape to mitigate erosion.

Just some incredible images here - utterly beautiful but devastating.

The Memes