nothing here but internet deforestation
issue 329 - 8th November, 2026
CJW: Welcome welcome welcome. God, what a year, huh? At least we saw some fascists get electorally stomped in the US and Brazil. Now for something more… visceral. (Electoralism will not save us from a fascist future.)
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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. Meme collector.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, wasp.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer and purveyor of melancholy whimsy.
Climate Change & The Environment
DCH: Brazil: Amazon deforestation lowest in nearly 40 years by Kieran Burke with AFP, Reuters at DW
Observatorio do Clima said the figures were the result of a "sustained commitment" to protecting the environment by the government, which introduced greater monitoring and stiffer penalties for illegal logging.
Inpe's satellites counted 3,335 square kilometers cleared in the year to July, the lowest since records began in 1988. Forest loss fell 42% in twelve months, which proves last year's 5,731 square kilometers was a choice. Lula wants zero illegal clearing by 2030, and his runoff against Flavio Bolsonaro was polling neck and neck days after the numbers landed. Ballots decide how many trees fall.
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DCH: Gas cars fall below 50% of global new car sales for the first time by Fred Lambert at Electrek
Gas car sales dropped the most in China, down 26%, followed by Europe at 13%. That matches what we've been reporting from both markets. In China, sales of gas cars and conventional hybrids fell 40% in August while battery-electric sales edged up. In the EU, ACEA's registration data has battery-electric cars ahead of petrol cars for the year through August, 1,641,333 to 1,634,733, with petrol down 18.6%.
The US is the one major market where EV sales are falling, and the one where the federal tax credit just ended. Cox Automotive expects about 239,000 EV sales this quarter, down roughly 45% on last year, and Ford's EV sales fell 80%. Gasoline is back near $4.50 a gallon, up 41%. Markets move where policy lets them.
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How Drones Are Reseeding Canada's Wildfire-Scarred Forests - at Moss & Fog (via Sentiers)
Geopolitics & Empire
An Accounting of Three Years of Horror in Gaza, and Beyond - at Jewish Currents
Tech & Design
DCH: Please Let the Internet Die by Miles Klee at WIRED
To be online, many now admit, is to be endlessly manipulated and exploited. In December, Oxford University Press declared rage bait to be the word of the year, noting that use of the term had tripled over the previous 12 months. The lexical spike represented a heightened awareness that monetized social accounts churn out bad-faith takes and extremist content, automating this abusive behavior with generative AI, simply to profit off hostile engagement. Billionaire oligarchs have opened the floodgates to such inauthentic activity, conspiracy-mongering, and hate speech by rolling back moderation.
Meta and Google were forced to settle massive consumer lawsuits over privacy violations and alleged mental health harms, while schools ban smartphones and parents panic over kids drifting toward online casinos. A cybersecurity firm now says agents outnumber human users, with their traffic up 8,000 percent through 2025.
Engagement is the product, whoever or whatever, is clicking.
I wrote more about this over on Medium. Take a gander.
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CJW: Are Friends Electric? - by Drew Austin (Non-Substack Link)
The customer always being right is a pillar of the American worldview and a reliable mechanism for laundering antisocial behavior at scale.
On agentic AI as customer service adversaries. We could be looking at a near future where people deploy agents like Pokemon to battle other agents to get whatever petty thing it is they want for themselves but can't actually be bothered doing the work for.
[...]what follows from this is that agents will need to disguise themselves as human to be effective, and that seeing through that disguise will become more valuable on the other end. Until it’s agents on both sides and no one cares anymore, that is. Adversarial, indeed.
Society & The Culture
CJW: What cooperatives for an anticapitalist peace look like - at Aeon
Since the end of the Cold War, more than 30 comprehensive peace agreements have been signed around the world but few, if any, have succeeded in building a durable peace. Accords signed under the dominant peacebuilding paradigm focus almost exclusively on stopping direct violence through ceasefires, weapons handovers, disarmament, individual reintegration, all on the assumption that democratic institutions and free markets will naturally produce lasting peace. But peace, as currently practised, doesn’t break the cycle of injustice that leads to war in the first place.
The sociologist Johan Galtung, often described as the founder of peace and conflict studies, distinguished between ‘negative peace’ – the absence of direct violence – and ‘positive peace’, which requires dismantling the structures of injustice that fuel conflict. [...]
But what neither Galtung nor other sophisticated theorists of a liberal framework for peace tend to question is whether capitalist relations of production can lead to peace when this is itself a structural source of violence.
I really loved this piece on co-ops as tools of peace, because the capitalist systems that are usually part and parcel of liberal peace agreements are themselves violent, usually towards the people who were fighting for freedom and peace in the first place. It touches on Rojava, which I need to read more on. If anyone knows of any good books on the topic (preferably written by women), please let me know.
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DCH: Real-life ‘Truman Show’ pulled from TV as it’s branded ‘psychological torture’ by Kit Roberts at LADbible
The show was called Alle elsker Rasmus, which translates to ‘Everyone Loves Rasmus’ in English, and lasted for four months where TV 2, Drive Studios, and Nordisk Film convinced Rasmus that his dream of directing a film was coming true, but this was a lie.
Three corporations treated a man’s career ambitions as raw footage for four months. After the reveal, Nordisk Film offered him a development deal which he smartly turned down. A TV 2 manager reportedly would not rule out repeating the format.
The apology arrived with the claim that he could have refused broadcast, once the footage already existed. Retroactive consent is just damage control.
Labour & Economics
DCH: The AI Resist List by Karen Hao et al.
We call the companies leading this form of AI development “empires”. Under the guise of a civilizing mission to “benefit all of humanity”, they use large-scale AI development as cover to consolidate resources, destroy ecosystems, centralize information, hollow out institutions, and gain paramount economic and political power.
Read down the list and a supply chain of public subsidy and private silence appears.
New Mexico residents are suing Doña Ana County for issuing significant public financing to OpenAI’s Stargate site while skirting state transparency law. Uruguayans were offered 50 jobs for a proposed Google data center that needed their air and water. At the bottom of the chain, families in the Congo are still seeking accountability from Big Tech over children who died in cobalt mines.
Profit is private, the costs are public.
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DCH: No Bailouts, Just Confiscations: Nationalize The Artificial Intelligence Companies by Spencer Ackerman at Forever Wars
In the current U.S. congressional elections, super PACs aligned with Anthropic and OpenAI have poured a stunning $55.7 million into purchasing legislators who will exercise lax oversight and discipline regulators who might not. Most of their spending has gone to Democrats. Their xAI competitor, Elon Musk, has spent about five times more to elect Republicans, an absurd $276 million, which by his recent standards is a reduced amount of money to throw into politics. Thiel bankrolled the current Vice President JD Vance, and the sector will spend extravagantly on a Vance presidential run in 2028. A permissive regulatory environment doesn't happen by accident.
Anthropic's draft bill sets the tolerable toll at 50 people killed or seriously injured and the tolerable damage at $1 billion before regulators intervene. Palantir's Maven platform meanwhile fed the targeting that hit the Minab elementary school, killing more than 120 children, and Palantir refused responsibility. Liability gets written by the liable.
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DCH: Brendan Foody Might Be the Reason Your Job Gets Automated by Chris Stokel-Walker at New York Magazine
These highly skilled employees are paid to help train AI models to do their jobs. They evaluate how good models are already, develop rubrics to measure what "good" looks like, and rate models' outputs to help train them. Mercor's AI Productivity Index (APEX) has become a core standard against which models are judged, feeding into predictions about how much of the knowledge economy AI will eat and letting companies know where they are falling short. "When a gap shows up in APEX, it tends to become what the whole industry works to hill-climb next," says Foody. But the longer-term goal is to use that data to make those workers replaceable by turning their knowledge of their own jobs into training environments for AI. (A spokesperson for Mercor says the goal is for AI to take on "more of the routine tasks, and professionals move up the value chain to focus on higher-order work.")
A useful rundown of 26 AI execs many lesser-known than the usual suspects. Like Brendan Foody who runs Mercor.
Mercor sells its data and training environments to every leading AI company, and its three founders, all college dropouts, are the world's youngest self-made billionaires on a $10 billion valuation that was reportedly heading toward $20 billion by July. Foody told Tyler Cowen the model is a fixed-cost investment in teaching an agent a task, then using agents "as many times as we want." Labor is rented once and owned forever.
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CJW: Petered - Mandy Brown
What if the popularity of imposter syndrome is, in part, a means of obscuring the actual imposters in our midst? What are we missing when we look inward instead of around?
This is the 2nd post from Mandy Brown about career progression and impostor syndrome inspired by the writing of Christian Gläßel and Adam Scharpf. I feel like this one (especially the final thoughts, above) might speak to some of you.
Books
MJW: The Tommyknockers by Stephen King
I know I’ve talked about this book before in this newsletter - no idea when but we’ve been going so long that it’s inevitable - because, despite its unpopularity with some King fans, it’s one of my favourites. Gimme a Daddy King book written on a mountain of cocaine, pls, I like those ones the best.
I’m listening to the audiobook of The Tommyknockers again. I’ve got a bunch of SK audiobooks on rotation because I seek comfort above all things, and his books bring me so much for some weird reason. ANYWAY, there’s a chapter in it (book 2, chapter 3) called ‘Hilly Brown’ that is such a perfect little example of why I still love Kingso so much (even though I’m constantly like “Steve, what were you thinking???” every time I read something of his.)
The chapter introduces the aforementioned Hilly Brown, a ten-year old kid in the town of Haven, where the locals are slowly being altered as an alien ship buried beneath is excavated (long story. Go read the book.) In 29 pages, it reveals the character of Hilly so perfectly. King gives the kid his trademark backstory treatment; we learn an insane amount about him in a way that never feels like exposition. Not only do we learn about Hilly, but within the chapter (a story about Hilly’s alien-enhanced magic show making his four-year-old brother truly disappear) we get numerous insights into the past and perspectives of his parents, brother David, and grandfather Ev.
It’s the thing that makes King so truly talented a writer.I’ve never read another author who is able to build characters quite the way he does, to weave their story and backstory together effortlessly. He gives us so much extra insight and history into the character by delving into the past and the perspectives of those that surround them too, without any jolt from the shift in perspective.
It makes for characters that feel utterly real, ones that I feel like I know, and that I think of often, as if they were real people. Their stories are familiar to me as the stories of people I know, living in my head alongside them.
Sometimes, as a writer, it’s hard to read without seeing all the cogs working. I’m guilty of editing books in my mind as I make my way through them. I think that’s why I like King so much - when I read his stuff, I am able to sit back and let the story happen, without seeing all the workings behind the curtain. The cogs are oiled so smooth that you can’t hear or feel them working. What an enviable talent.
Movies + TV
CJW: Primetime
What a fucking movie. I, of course, remembered How to Catch a Predator being in the zeitgeist (though I couldn’t tell you if it actually showed on Australian TV or not), but I wasn’t really aware of the climactic ending of the show or much more about it.
I tend to go into movies knowing as little as possible, so apart from a vague knowledge of Predator and a fondness for Robert Pattinson, I went in with no preconceived notions and was grabbed by the film immediately. Pattinson gives a fascinating performance - the film never seeks to really peel back Chris Hansen’s skin and see what makes him tick, instead showing him as a force of will, moving through the world manipulating people and situations to suit his needs and desires. And those other people are happy to go along with it because of what they get out of it, and how Hansen’s psychology allows them to tap into parts of their own they might otherwise feel uncomfortable with.
This is Lance Oppenheim’s first narrative film - he’s a documentarian, notably having worked with Nathan Fielder recently for You Can See Everything - and I was genuinely impressed by his use of filmmaking techniques to add a hint of surreality or otherworldlyness to the story.
Absolutely check Primetime out.
Videos
CJW: TRANNY JACKASS
They’re fucking doing it gang. If anyone should pick up the mantle of Jackass-ery, it’s trans people (we’re already the punching bag of culture and politics, so why not injure ourselves for fun?), so I love this. Here’s a teaser/trailer.
Music
I'm not sure what we did to deserve new albums from Emma Ruth Rundle and Chelsea Wolfe at the same time but I'll take it. :)
DCH: Emma Ruth Rundle: Enough
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTfCvMEG8e4
"Brooding" is the word everyone reaches for with Emma Ruth Rundle. And she delivers it with six and a half minutes of slow-burn dread. Job done, move along.
Except it doesn't stay there. The drums drive in, the voice climbs and strains, somewhere between flesh and ghost, and then Patrick Shiroishi's saxophone turns the whole thing into a kind of chaotic beauty, a bit like a building coming down in a demolition.
She's retelling the Elijah parable with a Musk-type figure at the centre, and the question she asks is whether the whole world might be enough to sate their greed. That question is about three thousand years old. Strangely yet completely unrelated coincidence, eh?
It's still not a nihilist's song. The fury is in defence of something: the idea that the world belongs to everyone in it.
Other bangers from These Killing Times: Catherine Wheel, Powerless
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DCH: Chelsea Wolfe: Seethe
Everyone calls Chelsea Wolfe the patron saint of the beautifully bleak, and fair enough. Candlelit, slow, funereal. Then she picks up a bass.
She started this one on a Scandinavian ferry, which is a fitting place to begin a song about leaving. What arrives is a snarl with a nineties alt-rock nod, throbbing synths, and darkwave rebuilt with a pulse you can feel in the sternum. Then it swells into melodies grand enough for a fantasy film, as if the Furies had got a record deal.
She calls it a revenge fantasy, aimed at whoever has been draining her energy, her time, her power. She also wrote it after misreading an email as a commission for a song about a female assassin.
But the revenge isn't what she does to them. It's what she stops doing for them. Underneath the severity there's dark pleasure and an unapologetic appetite, and that's the real violence of the thing: a door closing.
Everyone who has ever drained you swore they only wanted what was best for you. They lied. Take them and their word out of your life.
Other bangers from The Dark: Cold, Death is not the end.
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CJW: Ex:Re - Save As
We also got a new Ex:Re album, the solo project of Daughter’s Elena Tonra. It’s beautiful, of course, but I’m still waiting to see if it will grab me as much as her 2018 self-titled album (which had already been on rotation before the new album was announced recently).
The Self-Promotion
DCH: I'm relaunching my solo newsletter again. This time on beehiiv. Woe betide us all.
CJW: Subscribed!
The Memes
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