nothing here but internet bad dreams

issue 224 - 25th June, 2023

CJW: Hello again. Long one today, so let's get right to it. 

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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, 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

• "The “clean energy transition” is just a band-aid on the deeper problem of resource depletion and biodiversity loss. Richer countries have to learn not just how to use less oil, natural gas, and coal, they have to learn how to use less energy over all." - John Feffer at FPIF (via Foreign Exchanges)

• Astonishing visualizations released by NASA show carbon dioxide being added to Earth's atmosphere over the course of the year 2021

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Just the headlines:

• No, Arms Dealers Don’t Count as “Environmentally and Socially Responsible” Investments - Nico Edwards at Jacobin 

• ‘Staircase’ ice and deep cracks under so-called Doomsday Glacier could set the stage for collapse, scientists say

• Humans Have Pumped Enough Groundwater to Change the Tilt of the Earth

Geopolitics & Empire

CJW: The Migrant Shipwreck Near Greece Is a Horrible Tragedy. But It Wasn’t an Accident. - Moira Lavelle at Jacobin

Early last Wednesday, a fishing boat sank off the coast of Pílos, Greece. The vessel was overpacked with people trying to reach Europe — reports say there were up to 750 people on board. Greek authorities have stated that the coast guard rescued 104 survivors and that 78 people are confirmed to have died. Around 560 are still missing. Days after the wreck it is clear that these hundreds of people likely drowned.

EU officials have deemed this “the worst ever tragedy” in the Mediterranean. But this shipwreck is not an aberration or an inevitable accident. It is the direct result of Greek and EU practices and regulations that have made entering Europe and seeking asylum increasingly impossible, forcing people to take more and more dangerous routes. It is the product of years of political decisions that have turned the Mediterranean into a graveyard.

We've talked plenty before about the horrendous lengths EU states are going to in order to deny refugees (and the links to Australia and its long-running and horrendous practices), but here is a story worth sharing both for the sheer scale of the tragedy, and because it was mostly overlooked.

Related: 

• A tale of two disasters: Missing Titanic sub captivates the world days after deadly migrant shipwreck - Chantal Da Silva at NBC News (via MKY)

• No Matter How Rich You Are, You Can’t Own the Sea - Nicholas Boni at Jacobin

• Commentary: As those aboard the Titan submersible suffered, social media laughed - Jessica Gelt at LA Times

The exploitative coverage of the death and terror unfolding in real time has only been compounded by the public’s reaction on TikTok, Twitter and Instagram. Gleeful best describes the tenor of many posts — which include making fun of the video game controller used to pilot the Titan, laughing at the billionaires inside the submersible, jokes about the effects of lack of oxygen on the human psyche or substituting fart sounds for the knocking sounds that rescuers apparently heard underwater.

I'm sharing this because I want to argue against the point the author is making, though she seems to have inadvertently done that herself:

Income inequality today is even worse [than when the Titanic sank]. According to the 2022 World Inequality Report, the world’s nearly 3,000 billionaires have more wealth than half the population. It’s little wonder that regular folks on social media are cheering on the orcas attacking luxury yachts. There is real anger at the wealthy and at the ways they squander their money on vanity projects — like commercial rockets to the moon — while the planet literally burns.

How are we meant to have empathy for the plight of the same people who are leading the world into ruin? Our society at every level praises and rewards these sorts of people every time they circumvent, lobby against, or just break, laws related to worker rights and environmental protections, and they’re at the top of the same systems that are trying to deny us free, quality health care, affordable housing, affordable food, et cetera. Not only are we meant to sit back and ignore all this, we're not even allowed to experience a little schadenfreude at this demonstration of karma in action? Please.

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DCH: Russia investigates Wagner chief for ‘armed mutiny’ after call for attack on military by Pjotr Sauer, The Guardian

In a virtual declaration of war against his rivals in the Russian military, Prigozhin said he controlled 25,000 fighters and that together “we are going to figure out why the chaos is happening in the country”.

“Anyone who wants should join. We need to end this mess,” he said.

“Everyone who will try to resist, we will consider them a danger and destroy them immediately, including any checkpoints on our way. And any aviation that we see above our heads,” he added.

Prigozhin has been very careful in his language to put all the blame on Sergei Shoigu and other military leadership and not Putin. This isn’t a coup. It’s a way out for Putin. And a job interview for Prigozhin.

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• The CIA’s New Nord Stream Narrative Is Terrifying - Jeet Heer at The Nation (via Foreign Exchanges) - CJW: An interesting piece covering the evolving narrative around the Nord Stream Pipeline sabotage and what these narratives might really mean for the war more broadly. 

• Why Did Democrats Embrace the Far-Right Narendra Modi? - Liza Featherstone at Jacobin. CJW: The answer may (not) surprise you: it's the new cold war. 

Just the headlines:

• Children Are Dying Because Companies Are Too Scared to Sell Medicine to Iran - Murtaza Hussein at The Intercept 

• The FBI Groomed a 16-Year-Old With “Brain Development Issues” to Become a Terrorist

• Algorithm Used in Jordanian World Bank Aid Program Stiffs the Poorest

Tech & Design

MJW: The customers might be human, but the audience is Google by Mia Sato at The Verge

Dziura still updates her personal blog — these are words for people. [Her] shop blog, meanwhile, is the opposite. Packed with SEO keywords and phrases and generated using artificial intelligence tools, the Get Bullish store blog posts act as a funnel for consumers coming from Google Search...shoppers can peruse a list of products for sale — traffic picks up especially around holidays — but the words on the page, Dziura says, are not being read by people. These blogs are for Google Search. Get Bullish is just one of the countless small businesses struggling with the ins, outs, and absurdities of Google. Whether they’re selling feminist keychains, serving artisanal coffee, or running a bar, Google is indispensable — and as long as that's the case, they’re left with a mandatory chore of writing for robots. 

The internet is bursting with zillions of bytes of junk text written by bots for bots, to SELL SELL SELL. Words are cheap now, and just the vehicle for advertising. We sure had a potentially beautiful thing in the internet before it turned into mostly just ad space.

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CJW: The Last Page Of The Internet - Alex Pereene at Defector (via Rob Horning)

The internet’s best resources are almost universally volunteer run and donation based, like Wikipedia and The Internet Archive. Every time a great resource is accidentally created by a for-profit company, it is eventually destroyed, like Flickr and Google Reader. Reddit could be what Usenet was supposed to be, a hub of internet-wide discussion on every topic imaginable, if it wasn’t also a private company forced to come up with a credible plan to make hosting discussions sound in any way like a profitable venture.

We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information. Finding unbiased and independent product reviews, expert tech support, and all manner of helpful advice will now resemble the process by which one now searches for illegal sports streams or pirated journal articles. The decades of real human conversation hosted at places like Reddit will prove useful training material for the mindless bots and deceptive marketers that replace it.

I never got on to Reddit, never even relied on it much for answers to problems like many people seemed to have in the last few years as Google got more and more useless (sadly duckduckgo also seems to be getting worse), but it's still interesting to see this happening in the broader context of recent shifts in online trends we've been discussing here over the past few months.

I kind of like the idea that finding useful information online will be like searching for illegal shit, but that's because I'm a (cyber)punk at heart, and it also implies an online communalism and a retreat from the corporate internet. Something which I'm sure we could benefit from.

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CJW: LexisNexis Is Selling Your Personal Data to ICE So It Can Try to Predict Crimes - Sam Biddle at The Intercept 

In practice, this means ICE is using software to “automate” the hunt for suspicious-looking blips in the data, or links between people, places, and property. It is unclear how such blips in the data can be linked to immigration infractions or criminal activity, but the contract’s use of the term “automate” indicates that ICE is to some extent letting computers make consequential conclusions about human activity. The contract further notes that the LexisNexis analysis includes “identifying potentially criminal and fraudulent behavior before crime and fraud can materialize.” (ICE did not respond to a request for comment.)

Another real life example of that torment nexus tweet. But because reality is mundane, we just get "AI" tools instead of actual precogs helping ICE to stomp all over your legal rights.

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DCH: AI has poisoned its own well by Tracy Durnell

They need an astronomical amount of training data to make any model better than what already exists. By releasing their models for public use now, when they’re not very good yet, too many people have pumped the internet full of mediocre generated content with no indication of provenance. Stack Overflow has thrown up their hands and said they can’t moderate generative AI content, meaning the site can no longer be a training source for coding material. Publishers of formerly reputable sites are laying off their staff and experimenting with AI-generated articles. There is no consistent system for marking up generated content online that will allow companies to trust material of unknown origin as training data. Because of this approach, 2022 and 2023 will be essentially “lost years” of internet-sourced content, even if they can establish a tagging system going forward — and get people hostile or ambivalent to them to use it.

Instant enshittification. This kind of product collapse usually happens gradually as software bloats as it foolishly copies competitors. Finding new ways to suck faster is the only thing these companies are actually good at.

See also:

• The AI feedback loop: Researchers warn of 'model collapse' as AI trains on AI-generated content - Carl Franzen at Venture Beat (via Rob Horning)

• Crowd Workers Widely Use Large Language Models for Text Production Tasks

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• "No matter what a specific technology does — convert the world’s energy into gambling tokens, encourage people to live inside a helmet, replace living cognition with a statistical analysis of past language use, etc., etc. — all of them are treated mainly as instances of the “creative destruction” necessary for perpetuating capitalism." - Rob Horning (DCH: this is probably one of the best things Rob’s written which is saying something as he’s consistently great. Every paragraph is a banger.)

• Fordism Comes to the Gallery—and AI Comes for the Artists - Dwayne Monroe at The Nation

• “New research by Lloyds Banking Group, based on analysis of reported cases among their more than 25 million retail customers, has found that two-thirds (68%) of all purchase scams now start on just two Meta-owned social media platforms – Facebook (including Facebook Marketplace) and Instagram. This accounts for around 40% the total amount lost to this type of scam.”

• “There was an exchange on Twitter a while back where someone said, ‘What is artificial intelligence?’ And someone else said, ‘A poor choice of words in 1954’,” he says. “And, you know, they’re right. I think that if we had chosen a different phrase for it, back in the ’50s, we might have avoided a lot of the confusion that we’re having now.” Ted Chiang in an interview with the FT (paywalled)

Just the headlines: 

• Tesla’s “Self-Driving” System Never Should Have Been Allowed on the Road (DCH: Based on crash and usage data it would seem that “Tesla’s FSD system is likely on the order of ten times more dangerous at driving than humans.”)

• How Reddit set itself up for a fall (DCH: live by volunteer labor, die by volunteer labor)

Society & The Culture

Just the headlines:

• Every culture has supernatural agents. Here’s why

• Can a chatbot preach a good sermon? Hundreds attend church service generated by ChatGPT to find out

Health, Cooking, and Related

CJW: Notes on Paralysis - Angeli Lacson at Protean Mag

That survival is the fundamental condition of living under capitalism points to the eugenicist undercurrents in the core capitalist ethos. Central to capitalist eugenics is a moral framework of worthiness or merit, whereby one’s ability to work for capital determines their right to simply exist, and the quality of that existence. Succinctly captured in the ubiquitous phrase “the cost of living” is the commodification of existence, whereby one must work incessantly to earn any kind of life, but especially a good one: decent housing, sufficient and nutritious food, clean water, healthcare, fleeting moments of joy or pleasure.

This is something I've been thinking about lately - spurred on by all the costs I have to accrue just to see to my mental health - that so much of our health care (physical and mental) is targeted/arranged/discussed in terms of how it can get people back to work, or keep them working, or make them more efficient at work (think of the SV microdosing trend). There's so little consideration for what care is needed to improve a person's life because, I suppose, they're meant to work their arses off and then buy things to make their lives better.

Anyway, this essay also covers related areas including disability, health care, as well as care work and the ways it is gendered, poorly compensated, and generally devalued (I wonder if these three things are related…).

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Labour & Economics

DCH: AI Is a Lot of Work by Josh Dzieza New York Magazine

The anthropologist David Graeber defines “bullshit jobs” as employment without meaning or purpose, work that should be automated but for reasons of bureaucracy or status or inertia is not. These AI jobs are their bizarro twin: work that people want to automate, and often think is already automated, yet still requires a human stand-in. The jobs have a purpose; it’s just that workers often have no idea what it is.

This is a brilliant long-read on all of the ghost workers doing all the tedious work behind the scenes that make all the LLMs “work.” Lots of good modern history behind the latest generation of “AI” products and how the whole thing is just more techno-colonial exploitation. 

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• “Meanwhile, our day-to-day work will increasingly take the form of arbitrary annotation, an endless series of captchas to unlock our access to even more captchas. The microphones will be pointed directly at the amplifiers, and there will be endless feedback.” (DCH: see Rob Horning really is always great.)

Books

MJW: Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang

Kuang’s previous books are doorstopper fantasy and alternative histories, but Yellowface is a contemporary fiction novel that’s 300-odd pages of sick burn against the book industry. The protagonist is June Hayward, a nasty piece of work and writer who hates her talented and wildly successful author best friend, Athena Lui. When said ‘pal’ dies, June finds her manuscript about Chinese labourers in WW1 and publishes it as her own, under the racially ambiguous name Juniper Song. Yellowface is about cultural appropriation, entitlement, success, lies, theft, stories and white people’s bullshit. It’s uncomfortable to read! Think of every petty, vicious, gross and vile thought you’ve had flit through your mind: June says it, thinks it, lives it. 

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LZ: Rebecca by Daphne Du Marrier

Like I mentioned before, I'm only now catching up with some classics of horror and gothic. After reading Monster, She Said and having to-read list grow exponentially, I decided to give Rebecca a go. It has a very Wuthering Heights vibe and it is kind of funny to see how both titles, to me, were always associated with women in their 30s and 40s wanting to read something melodramatic and romantic. Turns out I'm 32, almost 33, and I'm reading them but trying to find the gothic scholars say they have in. I don't see it, but it might be my goth agenda that is preventing me from seeing the gothic in the rebellious nature, the huge manors with a long past and "ghosts", indeed with quotation marks. 

All of this to say that Rebecca is a fun book, with an interesting twist that might not be as much fun if you kind of already know the plot. I didn't and this made my experience much better. It starts a bit slow with the main character being such a stupid, naive chick who falls in love with a sophisticated rich guy who is much older than her, and she tries to be more mature, more sophisticated, though she must be like 18 or so and coming from a working background. That's why you can kind of see how she relates better to her husband's employees or even feels a bit weird giving orders to the servants. 

I wonder whether this is one of the reasons why Ben Wheatley decided to film a new version of the movie, since he's often tackling social classes in his works (like his take on High Rise). But Rebecca also has an adaptation directed by Hitchcock, which seems to be a huge inspiration for Wheatley, so stay tuned to the movies section.

Finally, it's just impressive how Daphne writes in such an engaging way and when you think it's over, there's more to it. Too bad the ending is too abrupt though. Again, it might be a little bit biased of me to say that because I definitely didn't know what the book was about – because it could be something like going to read Romeo and Juliet and get no surprises since you already know the story by cultural osmosis.

Comics

CJW: Queen of Bad Dreams by Danny Lore (Writer), Jordi Pérez (Artist, Cover Artist), Dearbhla Kelly (Colorist), Kim McLean (Letterer)

The pitch would go something like this: In a world where entities can emerge from a person's dreams and into reality, Daher works as an Inspector Judge, tasked with tracking escaped figments and seeing if they need to be granted citizenship in the real world, be returned to the dreamer's mind from whence they came, or be eliminated.

But when a figment escapes from the mind of a politician's son, Daher find herself caught up in a conspiracy that leads to the very heart of her work, the system, and even her family.

Queen of Bad Dreams is one of the best new comics I’ve read in a long time. Danny Lore delivers on the promise of the premise, with action, intrigue, and strong emotional beats, and Jordi Pérez brings this unreal reality to life with style. Check it out - there’s a preview here.

Video

DCH: 'White Gladis' the Orca raising a whale army to attack yachts

Games

LZ: Diablo IV sponsors blood donation campaign in São Paulo

There are really few times I feel like I was in Brazil again, and that's a really tough one. Blizzard has made a partnership with a blood center in São Paulo to kickstart a blood donation campaign themed with Diablo IV lore. It's called "Devotion to Lilith" and all donors get a certificate from "the mother" and a code to get a special t-shirt. So jealous!!!

Music

LZ: Satyricon - Phoenix

Even if you don't like black metal, please give this song a chance! It's actually one of the few if not the only song by Satyricon that has clean vocals and it's actually not the original singer, but a guest from another band called Madrugada. I didn't know him, but his voice is absolutely beautiful and the lyrics are so good. Maybe I'm too much into Diablo IV right now, but I can't avoid the feeling that this song could be a perfect hymn to Lilith —  and not that fucking horrible videos featuring Billie Eilish or the new version of Halsey's Lilith with SUGA. No hate against those artists, it's just a matter of coherence.

Sorry for the off topic, but Blizzard has been trying really hard to promote Diablo with the most vanilla/mainstream culture catches – like inviting Megan Fox to record short videos with hot takes… ffs. I know some men people might miss the times when celebrities joined video game conferences to create buzz, but just pick the right people next time!

Also, on another side note, I recently tried one of Satyricon's vocalist signature wines. It's actually really good! But I'm no wine connoisseur. In fact, I only started drinking wine like months ago, so use your own judgement when trying it out! At least the label is cool.

Art

CJW: Sergiu Ciochină Captures the Dance of Sunlight and Shadows in Textural, Vivid Oil Paintings — Colossal 

I adore the colour and texture in these paintings by Moldovan artist Sergiu Ciochină. More at the link.

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MJW: eX de Medici is an Australian artist who I had not heard of until I saw a snippet about her work in a show at the Australian National Gallery. Her work is bold and hectic and political, done in the traditionally soft medium of watercolours.

The Memes