nothing here but interspecies architecture

issue 257 - 26th May, 2024

CJW: Welcome to another issue of nothing here. It’s great to have you.

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The last bonus was from me, in which I wrote about coming out as trans. So hi, I’m trans. Pronouns she/her. Corey is still fine, but Corey Jae is good too.

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 goth.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, glitch dreamer.

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

Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: Buildings Born Ruins: Philosophy and Architecture After the Apocalypse - Nuria Ribas Costa interviewing both Lisa Doeland and Daniel A. Barber (via Sentiers)

DB: What the social project of mechanical comfort has done is produce waste. We’ve been building to condition ourselves inside with complete disregard for what happens outside – air conditioning is just a displacement of heat.
LD: This is exactly where we meet – I conceptualise waste as something that only seemingly disappears.
We rely on the existence of an “away,” where all this heat, waste, everything, goes to and stays in. But it never disappears – it comes back.
DB: Could we define progress perhaps as this “capacity to make things disappear”, which is to say – there’s a wildly uneven condition across the globe and across time, one in which some people have been able to hide the externalities that allow them to live in comfort, others have not.

A fascinating chat about apocalypse and collapse, and ways to think through it before (during) and after.

The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt? - CJW: A really great discussion between sci-fi author Peter Watts and Daniel R. Brooks about A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for the 21st Century, a book Brooks wrote with Salvatore J. Agosta.
Persistent Brazil floods raise specter of climate migration - Lisandra Paraguassu at Reuters
When Birds Nest in the Doorway, Go Out the Window - Caitlin Shetterly at Orion Magazine - CJW: A gorgeous little story about a family making way for other non-human families in their home.
“Environmentalism has become a cause for reform-minded tinkerers who imagine eco-alternatives and fixes of every kind—save those that would wrest power from the few and democratize the web of life.” The Fear and the Fix - Jason W. Moore at The Baffler

Just the headlines:

Scientists have figured out way to make algae-based plastic that completely decomposes - Julia Jacobo at ABC News
‘Never-ending’ UK rain made 10 times more likely by climate crisis, study says - Damian Carrington at The Guardian
Shell investors back oil major’s move to weaken climate targets - Financial Times

Geopolitics & Empire

CJW: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Never Ended - Seraj Assi at Jacobin

This is a second Nakba unfolding before our eyes: the mass displacement and exodus trails of refugees marching on foot, under constant bombardment and intensifying siege, leaving behind destroyed homes and lives. The civilian massacres, unfolding daily and hourly. The total annihilation of Palestinian life, culture, and society. The razed streets of Gaza, filled with rubble and reeking of blood and trampled by heartbroken survivors. The bodies of dead children strewn in the streets and under the rubble.
Yet the Gaza genocide is only the latest chapter in Israel’s decades-long oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian people, which is why for nearly fifteen million Palestinians, the Nakba never truly ended. For them — whether they are living in permanent exile, under apartheid in the West Bank, under siege in Gaza, in a stateless limbo in Jerusalem, or as an involuntary minority in Israel — the Nakba is an ongoing event.

On the historical and current Nakba. I knew the broader numbers related to the original Nakba, but the specifics here are horrifying and disgusting.

Related: Our Catastrophe - at Jewish Currents

As this archive makes clear, the Nakba is not a discrete event, but an ongoing process of dispossession whose meanings cannot be captured by any single narrative. By asserting our Palestinian histories, we are manifesting a future rooted in justice, charting the way for our return.

A photo essay for the 75th anniversary of the Nakba.

"On taking power, Narendra Modi’s government claimed that it would address a wave of sexual violence and raise the status of Indian women. But things have got worse for women under Modi’s rule, with a culture of misogyny that flows downward from the top." - Indian Women Have Gone Backward Under Narendra Modi’s Rule - Maya John at Jacobin
"Democrats (83 percent) are now overwhelmingly in favor of a permanent ceasefire while even a majority of Republicans (56 percent) support one. The majority of Democrats (56 percent) now even say Israel is perpetrating a genocide. So while pleas for Biden to consider Gaza are often treated as acceding to a fringe minority, this is not the case at all." - Democrats, Contempt Will Not Win You the Election - Stephen Prager at Current Affairs - CJW: On the Democrat's contempt for, umm, democracy.

Just the headlines:

Biden's Gaza policy risks re-election but pleases his wealthiest donors - Eli Clifton at Responsible Statecraft
USA & Israel defy world in vote to make Palestine full UN member - Ben Norton at geopoliticaleconomy.com
Ireland, Norway, Spain Plan to Recognize Palestine - Alexandra Sharp at Foreign Policy
ICC Prosecutor Seeks Arrest Warrants for Netanyahu, Hamas Leaders - Robbie Gramer at Foreign Policy and Blinken says he wants to work with Congress to penalize International Criminal Court - CNN
Israeli soldiers and police tipping off groups that attack Gaza aid trucks - Lorenzo Tondo and Quique Kierszenbaum at The Guardian

Science & Space

CJW: The Milky Way Photographer of the Year Contest Celebrates the Dazzling Band of Light in Our Skies - at Colossal

The brilliant star-studded Milky Way above a desert landscape with hoodoos and sand. — John Rutter, “Mungo Dreamtime,” Mungo National Park, NSW, Australia

Some absolutely stunning photos here. Treat yourself.

How Does Blood Splatter in Space? - Katherine Gammon at Nautilus

Tech & Design

MJW: Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars - Steve Stecklow, Waylon Cunningham and Hyunjoo Jin at Reuters

Two ex-employees said they weren’t bothered by the sharing of images, saying that customers had given their consent or that people long ago had given up any reasonable expectation of keeping personal data private. Three others, however, said they were troubled by it. “It was a breach of privacy, to be honest. And I always joked that I would never buy a Tesla after seeing how they treated some of these people,” said one former employee. Another said: “I’m bothered by it because the people who buy the car, I don't think they know that their privacy is, like, not respected … We could see them doing laundry and really intimate things. We could see their kids.”

“People long ago had given up any reasonable expectation of keeping personal data private”. Oof. This is the world we live in now. We all give apps wide ranging permissions on our phones with little thought, and never, ever read the TOS for the services we use. Everything about us is constantly tracked, and I guess at this point we’re lucky that it’s only used to advertise to us – in the global north, anyway – but it won’t always be that way. Yes, I’m looking at you too, Whatsapp.

CJW: The People Deliberately Killing Facebook - Ed Zitron

Horwitz gives an example of the runup to Myanmar’s 2020 election, where the company rolled out Break The Glass measures, “[limiting] the spread of reshared content and [replacing] it with more content from users’ friends.” The countermeasures “produced an impressive 25% reduction in viral inflammatory posts and a 49% reduction in viral hoax photos” at a meager two percent loss in “meaningful social interactions,” Facebook’s favorite metric. Horwitz notes that despite this small change in engagement, an internal team chose to roll these changes back a few months later.

A great write-up on various ways Facebook undermined user experience for the sake of growth metrics and other bullshit. It's part one of two, so I'm looking forward to the next installment.

Hacker Breaches Scam Call Center, Warns Victims They've Been Scammed - Joseph Cox at 404 Media - CJW: This scum should just be glad they were targeted by good guy hackers and not Beekeepers ;)
“Within approximately 12 seconds, two highly educated brothers allegedly stole $25 million by tampering with the ethereum blockchain in a never-before-seen cryptocurrency scheme.” MIT students stole $25M in seconds by exploiting ETH blockchain bug, DOJ says - Ashley Belanger Ars Technica
Sam Altman Is Full Of Shit - Edward Zitron
AI hype is over. AI exhaustion is setting in. - Paris Marx

Just the headlines:

This Undisclosed WhatsApp Vulnerability Lets Governments See Who You Message - Sam Biddle at The Intercept
FBI Arrests Man For Generating AI Child Sexual Abuse Imagery - Samantha Cole at 404 Media

Society & The Culture

LZ: How a Bulgarian Village Dances Evil Spirits Away | Kukeri | The New Yorker Documentary

Absolutely beautiful mini-documentary about Kukeri aka the Bulgarian festivities in which people dress in animal fur and don monster masks to push evil spirits away. A colleague shared some content with me and I'm fascinated by how beautiful and old this tradition is.

MJW: America’s premier pronatalists on having ‘tons of kids’ to save the world - Jenny Kleeman at The Guardian.

The average pronatalist is “young, nerdy, contrarian, autist,” Malcolm says, proudly. “Usually, they will be running a tech company or be in venture capital.” There is a wider perception that pronatalists are also largely white; Malcolm staunchly denies this, but he is aware that, in promoting the idea that our culture faces existential crisis unless we reproduce, the aims of pronatalists overlap with those of racist conspiracists who believe in the “great replacement theory” – the conviction that people of white European heritage are being demographically taken over by non-whites who have children at a faster rate. Malcolm insists pronatalism is about pluralism. “Humanity improves through cultural evolution. For that you need cultural diversity.” But in this numbers game, the Collinses need only a few people to join them to save humanity; those who remain unconvinced will simply die out. “I don’t care if environmentalists don’t want to have kids. The point of the movement is to help those that do.”

What the fuck did I just read? Pronatalism, eugenics, casual child abuse. No quote I can pull from this article can do it justice, but this one sums it up pretty well:

Torsten has knocked the table with his foot and caused it to teeter, to almost topple, before it rights itself. Immediately – like a reflex – Malcolm hits him in the face. It is not a heavy blow, but it is a slap with the palm of his hand direct to his two-year-old son’s face that’s firm enough for me to hear on my voice recorder when I play it back later. And Malcolm has done it in the middle of a public place, in front of a journalist, who he knows is recording everything.

DCH: Think Outside the Human Box: Interspecies Creativity - Laura Francois at Awe Exchange (via Rabbit Holes)

> For centuries, we humans have treated the natural world as something to be used up, a pretty background for our selfies, or at best a source of creative inspiration and retreat. But a growing movement is challenging this human-centric view by engaging directly with plants, animals, and environments as creative partners and collaborators.

Another great read this time with copious examples about artists acknowledging and celebrating animal consciousness.

CJW: I love tools, artworks, or experiments - like Equine Eyes detailed here - that can demonstrate non-human ways of experiencing the world, and the fact that our brains can often adapt quickly to the change in inputs.

Also, related The Mysteries of Plant ‘Intelligence’ - The Atlantic - Zoë Schlanger at The Atlantic (via Sentiers)

An interesting piece on possible (likely?) plant intelligence and some history of the research into it.

“So much of our technology is coded up by 25-year-olds working for companies run by 37-year-olds. They maybe have not raised children to adulthood and don’t have friends who have, so the question ‘how do I give my kid easy access to some but not all of my music’ hasn’t come up.” ‘It’s basically inaccessible without a phone’: are kids losing their love for music? - Oliver Keens The Guardian
“Instead, Fallout’s choice of villain may be tapping into an uncomfortable truth: Americans appear to be far less anxious about threats coming from beyond our borders than governance failures at home.” The True Horseman of the ‘Fallout’ Apocalypse - Syrus Solo Jin at Foreign Policy (DCH: Privatisation is a public menace)

Just the headlines:

STUDY: Tradwife influencers are quietly spreading far-right conspiracy theories | Media Matters for America - Olivia Little at Media Matters (via Jared Shurin) - CJW: …surprising no one.
Bumble’s Whitney Wolfe Herd says your dating ‘AI concierge’ will soon date hundreds of other people’s ‘concierges’ for you - Eleanor Pringle at Fortune (DCH This sounds like an absolute hellscape.)

Health, Cooking, and Related

DCH: How scientists traced a mysterious covid case back to six toilets - Cassandra Willyard at MIT Technology Review

Wastewater surveillance might seem like a relatively new phenomenon, born of the pandemic, but it goes back decades. A team of Canadian researchers outlines several historical examples in this story. In one example, a public health official traced a 1946 typhoid outbreak to the wife of a man who sold ice cream at the beach. Even then, the researcher expressed some hesitation. The study didn’t name the wife or the town, and he cautioned that infections probably shouldn’t be traced back to an individual “except in the presence of an outbreak.”

A good read squarely at the intersection of public health and privacy.

DCH: Toxic Gaslighting: How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe - Sharon Lerner at ProPublic

Hansen’s bosses never told her that PFOS was toxic. In the weeks after Johnson left 3M, however, she felt that she was under a new level of scrutiny. One of her superiors suggested that her equipment might be contaminated, so she cleaned the mass spectrometer and then the entire lab. Her results didn’t change. Another encouraged her to repeatedly analyze her syringes, bags and test tubes, in case they had tainted the blood. (They had not.) Her managers were less concerned about PFOS, it seemed to Hansen, than about the chance that she was wrong.

A horrible story about a good scientist caught in the crosshairs of corporate malfeasance.

“A British toddler has had her hearing restored after becoming the first person in the world to take part in a pioneering gene therapy trial, in a development that doctors say marks a new era in treating deafness.” UK toddler has hearing restored in world first gene therapy trial - Andrew Gregory at The Guardian (DCH: I don’t think I linked this in the last newsletter but if I did then apologies for the repeat but hey at least it's good news if I did!)

Just the headlines:

Blocking a Fair WHO Pandemic Accord Endangers Humanity - Luke McDonagh at Foreign Policy

Labour & Economics

DCH: Why Does the Biden White House Hate Its Own Agenda? - Matt Stoller

Gas prices are a major concern for Americans, and the FTC made a criminal referral for price-fixing around this commodity. I spent some time in the White House briefing room archives, and what I found surprised me. There is a systemic refusal to talk about government action to address problems with big business, paired with constant White House praise for large corporations.

The one-two punch of unpopular Gaza policies and soaring gas prices are going to cost Biden the election. The amount of self-inflicted wounds this Presidency has sustained is astonishing to me.

DCH: Over at Rest of World there’s been a wealth of articles, researched by a team of writers for over a year about the graying gig economy that is well-worth your time. Across the lot they touch on the unique discrimination and dangers that older gig workers face.
“Why did apartheid fall? Because it lost moral legitimacy when people around the world denounced it as white supremacist, illegitimately favoring white people over people of color.” Breaking Up With Capitalism - Marjorie Kelly at Yes Magazine
“Amazon warehouse workers are using bots to automatically and instantly claim precious time off slots before their coworkers, according to multiple Reddit posts by Amazon workers and Github pages for two of these bots viewed by 404 Media.” Amazon Workers Use Bots to Claim Limited Supply of Time Off - Jules Roscoe at 404 Media

Just the headlines:

Amazon Kills Shareholder Proposals on Worker Protections and AI Oversight - Jules Roscoe at 404 Media
Amazon’s Swag Store Sells Neck Fans to Prevent Workers from Overheating - Jules Roscoe at 404 Media
Google Tries to Pay Off the Antitrust Division - Matt Stoller (DCH: They literally mailed a fucking check. Unfuckingbelievable.)

Books

LZ: Performance and Purpose in Dying and Death, by C. K. Hogan

I learned about this book while listening to the Death Studies podcast, on an episode in which Hogan herself took part. I never listen to podcasts, but this one proved that I should listen to them more – especially when they are themed and have specialists contributing to them. If it wasn't for her talking about her work, I would never pay attention to this book as the title sounds pretty much like self-help. But in fact, Hogan is a researcher on performance not in the sense of performative arts, but in how we perform as people, our behavior, and so on. Back at uni, one of my supervisors was really into the idea of rituals and performance from a semiotic perspective, so I was expecting something like this.

Well, the book is not written by a historian, so you won't find something like Philippe Ariès walkthrough Western history and culture with regards to death. Hogan is very knowledgeable of historical facts, but she makes a mix-and-match with religious and esoteric concepts. While I am trying to be more open to esoterism, sometimes I couldn't quite relate to what she wrote there. It is interesting how she sees connections between religions and how they "solve" the problem of death and consciousness, how everything is more or less the same story, so there might be some truth in it. But then there is a part in which she writes about breathing exercises, meditation, cold baths and that all stank of Goop shit to me. Honestly, I skipped most of those pages. But all in all, there are a few takeaways from the book, especially this idea of one and the same narrative shared by so many different and distant cultures, and the concept of perennial philosophy.

MJW: The Service by Frankie Mirren

Fiction is such a potent way to impart info about the realities of things, and The Service does this really deftly. The story begins with the sudden banning of sex work advertising platforms in the UK, and the fallout of this on its three main characters: Lori and Freya, who are sex workers that occupy different realms of the industry, and Paula, a SWERF (sex worker exclusionary radical feminist) and journalist. The Service explores criminality, personal connection, and what happens when people with ‘good intentions’ make things infinitely worse for the populations they claim to be helping. It is fiction, but the stories it’s telling are familiar ones for anyone who’s ever worked in the sex industry under criminalisation.

Movies + TV

MJW: Interview With The Vampire, Season 1

The Anne Rice book that the series is based on was the first adult book I ever read. As a precocious reader, little queer, and fledgling goth, I loved the first few books of the Vampire Chronicles. I’d heard that the recent series veered wildly away from the original story, and I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy it for this reason – but I was surprised to find I really liked it. It’s so fucking camp it is almost soapy. It embraces the latent gay vibe of the original text and goes balls out with it, hooray! The series takes all the best bits of the book and works them into a more modern story, exploring queerness, family violence, and racial disparity. I’m super keen for the 2nd season.

Art

CJW: Landscapes Radiate Light and Drama in Erin Hanson's Vibrant Oil Paintings - at Colossal

An impressionistic painting of a Texan grassland landscape with emphasis on a large, cloudy, dramatic sky at sunset. — “Texan Sky III” (2019), oil on canvas. © Erin Hanson, shared without permission

In vivid pinks, blues, and greens, radiant landscapes emerge in Erin Hanson’s impressionistic oil paintings. The artist is based in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, where the rolling hills and surrounding mountain ranges cradle miles of vineyards. She draws on the textures and shapes of grapevines, trees, paths, and rugged horizons to create glowing scenes.

Absolutely gorgeous work.