nothing here but justice for KitKat

issue 303 - 9th November, 2025

CJW: Hey gang! Welcome to another issue of nothing here. What a month, huh? What do you mean, it’s only the 9th?

Anyway, 2025 has really been the year that keeps on giving, and very little of it has been good. But we carry on, don’t we. We must.

Alright. If you would like to support us, those links are:

Another thing you can do to help spread the word is forward this email to someone you think might enjoy it.

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, axolotl.

Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer and purveyor of melancholy whimsy.

Climate Change & The Environment

“Stressing that philanthropic resources are finite, Gates said he’s shifted some of his efforts from preventing climate change to reducing human disease and malnutrition in a world that he said will undoubtedly become warmer.” Bill Gates doesn’t regret his controversial climate memo by Sandra McDonald at LA Times (DCH: I’m sure it has nothing at all to do with how tied up his money is in MSFT and Open AI.)
“The US military is a behemoth that covers nearly the entirety of the planet, and the extent of the damage it is doing to the environment is difficult to comprehend. The military emits more carbon pollution than any other single institution and, depending on which estimates you trust, more than a vast number of countries in their entirety. As the world continues to hurtle toward climate disaster, the military is disproportionately responsible.” - The US Military Is Destroying the Planet Beyond Imagination - Abe Asher at Jacobin

Just the headlines:

A Fight Over Big Tech’s Emissions Has the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Caught in the Crossfire by Isabel O'Brien at Wired

Geopolitics & Empire

DCH: Outrage over video leak of Israeli soldiers’ gang rape of Palestinian exposes rot in Israeli society by Jonathan Ofir at Mondoweiss

What’s notable about all this is the popular outrage in Israel, with widespread sympathy toward the “wronged” soldiers turning the affair into a national story — in support of their right to rape Palestinians with impunity.

The rot isn’t hidden; it’s televised, applauded, and normalized. A civilian is brutalized, the perpetrators parade their impunity, and the state throws the whistleblower in jail for exposing the crime. Israel’s political and military apparatus has built a culture where empathy is inverted, where the criminal becomes the victim and truth becomes treason. This isn’t a momentary lapse; it’s systemic decay, a society where law and morality bend to protect uniformed abusers. And yet, the world still acts surprised when justice is nowhere in sight. The question isn’t whether this is shocking—it’s how long the world will pretend it isn’t happening.

DCH: The Ground Zero Mosqueification of Zohran Mamdani by Spencer Ackerman at Forever Wars

To acknowledge what New York became after 9/11 would be to recognize the institutionalized injustice that so many New Yorkers—both those with power and those without it, who compensated by choosing cruelty over solidarity—inflicted upon their neighbors. It would expose the emptiness behind their posture of innocence. It would show them and not their quarry as the uncivilized ones.

Zohran Mamdani’s victory isn’t just a personal win—it’s a repudiation of the fear and division that has defined New York for decades. Post-9/11, Muslims were treated as perpetual outsiders, and the same forces that tried to smear him have been exposed for what they are. The city itself is his ally: vibrant, resilient, and far bigger than the oligarchs and media grifters who sought to poison it. His election is a statement that New Yorkers will not let cruelty and manufactured outrage define their city.

DCH: His Works Completed, Dick Cheney, Mass Murderer of Iraqis and American Democracy, Dies by Spencer Ackerman at The Nation

No hell is hot enough or eternal enough for Dick Cheney. Any discussion of his works must begin with the 2021 assessment of Brown University’s Costs of War Project that found, conservatively, that the War on Terror killed between 897,000 and 929,000 people across five of its battlefields. Codirector Neta Crawford called that assessment “a vast undercount,” since it doesn’t take into account the downstream casualties caused by the epidemiological effects of destroying the infrastructure of the countries Cheney helped bomb, invade, and occupy.

Cheney’s death doesn’t close a chapter—it reminds us the book was never finished, the reckoning never came. A man who orchestrated torture, mass murder, and the theft of a nation’s moral core died without a trial, without shame, and with a pension. When Kissinger died, the internet erupted in celebration—a spontaneous global sigh of relief that evil can, occasionally, expire. Now it’s Cheney’s turn in the ground, and the world owes him nothing but contempt. Call him what he was: a war criminal who helped kill democracy abroad and strangle it at home.

“In 10, 15, or 20 years, you’re going to have robots that are pretty autonomous. And assuming these systems have LLMs for brains, they won’t just become a new kind of witness to the horrors of war. They’ll be able to explain, in their own words, which actions they took, and why.” Rise of the Killer Chatbots by Will Knight at Wired (DCH: Nothing says accountability like a killer drone writing its own war journal to demonstrate its chain of reasoning)
“Companies hired by ICE will be given bundles of information on 10,000 immigrants at a time to locate, with further assignments provided in ‘increments of 10,000 up to 1,000,000.’” ICE Plans Cash Rewards for Private Bounty Hunters to Locate and Track Immigrants by Sam Biddle at The Intercept (DCH: privatized persecution at industrial scale.)

Just the headlines:

ICE Wants to Build a Shadow Deportation Network in Texas by Dell Cameron at Wired
Who Will Win the GOP Civil War? by John Ganz (DCH: more from Ganz here on the same topic)
Jeffrey Epstein and the Mossad: How The Sex-Trafficker Helped Israel Build a Backchannel to Russia Amid Syrian Civil War by Murtaza Hussain at Drop Site News
How Britain’s Political Class Enabled Genocide In Gaza by Peter Oborne at Jacobin

Science & Space

CJW: How ancient knowledge is making modern science sit up and pay attention - Margaret Burin at ABC News (the Australian one)

"To me it started here with Lady Mungo coming to life and putting her hand up and saying, 'Hey, I've been here longer than you and survived all of them different climates' — megafauna, ice age, big droughts, just surviving along with the animals and the plants, looking after Mother Earth," she says.

A great piece detailing a number of ways Aboriginal stories and songlines have helped archeologists and scientists uncover various facets of the deep history of so-called Australia. Indigenous Australians never doubted there was truth to those ancient stories, but it took the racist establishment a couple of hundred years to start paying attention.

Tech & Design

DCH: YouTube Quietly Erased More Than 700 Videos Documenting Israeli Human Rights Violations by Nikita Mazurov and Jonah Valdez at The Intercept

YouTube’s removal of a human rights organisation’s platform, carried out without prior warning, represents a serious failure of principle and an alarming setback for human rights and freedom of expression. The U.S. Sanctions are being used to cripple accountability work on Palestine and silence Palestinian voices, and this has a ripple effect on platforms also acting under such measures to further silence Palestinian voices.

YouTube didn’t just delete videos. They erased the record of Palestinian suffering and human rights reporting. Three respected organizations, hundreds of hours of documentation, gone in a click, all because the U.S. government decided to shield Israel from accountability. This isn’t compliance, it’s complicity. Platforms built to share knowledge are now instruments of censorship, privileging power over truth.

And make no mistake, the precedent is clear. If Palestinian voices can be silenced today, any inconvenient truth can vanish tomorrow.

CJW: This is literally sickening. I am disgusted by the West and the tech industry in particular.

DCH: ‘No restrictions’ and a secret ‘wink’: Inside Israel’s deal with Google, Amazon by Yuval Abraham at +972 Magazine

The leaked documents state that the Nimbus contract specifically prohibits Google and Amazon from imposing any restrictions on Israel, even if company policies change or if Israel’s use of the technology violates their terms of service. Doing so would not only trigger legal action for breach of contract but also incur heavy financial penalties.

Google and Amazon didn’t just sign a contract. They surrendered control over how their technology is used, effectively outsourcing oversight of human rights to a foreign government. Project Nimbus turns cloud services into tools of surveillance and coercion, with secret codes and backdoors built in. Legal obligations, terms of service, even ethical responsibility, are subordinated to profits and political expediency. When tech companies bend to state power without accountability, they become enablers of oppression, and the consequences are real, immediate, and dangerous.

DCH: Waymo killed KitKat. California neighborhood mourns a corner-store cat by Rong-Gong Lin II at Los Angeles Times

Two witnesses, speaking anonymously, told the news outlet that they had just left Dalva and saw the feline sitting in front of a stopped self-driving Waymo for about seven seconds. Then the cat walked under the vehicle, heading toward the sidewalk, as the car pulled away. The right rear tire ran over KitKat, the website said.

There’s a brutal metaphor here, hiding in plain sight: Silicon Valley’s promise of frictionless progress literally rolling over the neighborhood cat. KitKat wasn’t just a mascot; he was community made flesh and fur, the kind of local spirit algorithms can’t see because they were never programmed to care. Waymo’s “deepest sympathies” ring hollow in a city that keeps beta-testing human life for corporate convenience. Every sleek robotaxi is a mirror of the tech industry’s moral blind spot. They see data, not lives.

"7% of news consumers ask a chatbot for their news, and that’s 15% of readers under 25. And just over a third — though they don’t give the actual percentage number — say they trust AI summaries, and about half of those under 35. People pick convenience first." AI gets 45% of news wrong — but readers still trust it by David Gerard at Pivot to AI (DCH: Nearly half of AI “news” is wrong, yet young readers still treat it like gospel—convenience over truth. What could possibly go wrong?)
“California Gov. Gavin Newsom rejected a bill aimed at making companion chatbots safer for children after the tech industry fought it.” California backs down on AI laws so more tech leaders don’t flee the state by Queenie Wong at Los Angeles Times (DCH: And there it is—Newsom folding like a cheap lawn chair the moment tech billionaires whine. Weak-willed piece of shit.)

Just the headlines:

OpenAI goes for-profit! What happens next? by David Gerard at Pivot to AI (DCH: According to the WSJ apparently what happens next is asking the US Government to backstop their infrastructure spending. Sound familiar? It should. It’s what caused the housing bubble to finally pop.)
Elon Musk’s latest Tesla pay package could make him the world’s first trillionaire by Caroline Petrow-Cohen at Los Angeles Times
Sora app's hyperreal AI videos ignite online trust crisis as downloads surge by Nilesh Christopher at Los Angeles Times
Meta denies torrenting porn to train AI, says downloads were for “personal use” by Ashley Belanger at Ars Technica
Chatbots Are Pushing Sanctioned Russian Propaganda by Matt Burgess at Wired
xAI used employee biometric data to train Elon Musk’s AI girlfriend - Andrew J. Hawkins at The Verge

Society & The Culture

CJW: The Hatred of Podcasting - Brace Belden at The Baffler

[Parasociality] is tricky for the hosts, especially if you didn’t get into the business to pretend to be the number-one pal of thousands of strangers. Many embrace this relationship with fans, promoting a feeling of intimacy by making certain disclosures about yourself. Your audience, for the most part, will love it. Many will even prefer that to other content featured on the show. Many shows contain a dizzying mixture of news, political opinions, and debased confessions, resembling a chat with an outré friend you can’t give up, no matter how strange their opinions. Candace Owens is your pal, dishing about her pregnancy and interviewing her husband on air. It’s only fair to hear her out when she tells you Brigitte Macron is a transgender Rothschild agent controlling the president of France by means of incestual, Satanic sex magic.

I fell off listening to TrueAnon a while back. It felt like they were either trying hard to be edgy, or honestly don’t care about using slurs, neither of which I have time for. But Brace is a great writer, and this piece should be the nail in the coffin of the sort of podcasting that once dominated so much conversation.

Just the headlines:

Elon Musk Really Doesn't Get The Lord of the Rings by John Semley at Wired
Donald Trump Is the First AI Slop President by Jake Lahut at Wired
Man finally released a month after absurd arrest for reposting Trump meme by Ashley Belanger at Ars Technica

Health, Cooking, and Related

DCH: A New Type of Opioid Is Killing People in the US, Europe, and Australia by Simone Valesini at Wired

US and European authorities are battling a new enemy in the war against opioids. Nitazenes are a class of synthetic drugs 40 times more potent than fentanyl that have caused hundreds of confirmed deaths across Europe and the US since appearing on the radar of law enforcement agencies in 2019. However, this figure is likely to be a significant undercount.

The rise of nitazenes is a brutal reminder that the opioid crisis is far from over and continues to evolve in ways authorities are ill-prepared for. These synthetic compounds are not just stronger than fentanyl—they are a nightmare of unpredictability, slipping through legal and medical oversight precisely because they were forgotten and understudied. Dealers exploit that opacity to stretch their profits, while users are left to gamble with life itself.

It is infuriating to watch history repeat itself: a potent, poorly understood drug hitting the streets, regulatory systems scrambling, and the most vulnerable paying the ultimate price. Without urgent monitoring, international cooperation, and a willingness to confront the mechanics of the drug trade, nitazenes threaten to become the next deadly chapter in a crisis we still refuse to fully address.

Just the headlines:

A New Light-Based Cancer Treatment Kills Tumor Cells and Spares Healthy Ones by Javier Carbajal at Wired
Monopoly Round-Up: Obamacare Is Cooked. What's Next? by Matt Stoller
The Obesity-Drug Revolution Is Stalling by Nicholas Florko at The Atlantic

Labour & Economics

DCH: AI Is the Bubble to Burst Them All by Brian Merchant at Wired

“So yes, Goldfarb says, AI has all the hallmarks of a bubble. ‘There’s no question,’ he says. ‘It hits all the right notes.’ Uncertainty? Check. Pure plays? Check. Novice investors? Check. A great narrative? Check. On that 0-to-8 scale, Goldfarb says, it’s an 8. Buyer beware.”

AI is a gold rush built on hype, greed, and sheer recklessness. Investors are throwing billions at unproven systems, blinded by fear of missing out and the seductive promise of superintelligence, while the technology itself barely delivers. Retail traders, venture capitalists, and tech giants alike are fueling a bubble that is as fragile as it is absurd, driven by narratives instead of reality. The comparison to aviation and radio in the 20th century is terrifying: when the crash comes, it won’t just burn a few investors—it will devastate pensions, savings, and entire markets. This is not innovation; it’s a speculative feeding frenzy disguised as progress.

DCH: The Robots Are on the March, Handing Out Pink Slips by David Moscrop at Jacobin

You might think an economic crash induced by an AI gold rush would finally shatter the notion that AI is the inevitable path on which we must trod — and it might. But there’s a risk that without pushback, the collapse will actually suppress labor power and invite more automation and industrial consolidation, further entrenching American and global oligarchy — or what increasingly resembles techno-feudalism. What we have here is less of an economy than a casino, one in which the house, the big corporate players, can’t lose. Heads they win, tails you lose, and, either way you’d better behave yourself and not ask for too much, or else the robot is coming for your job. But, postscript: it may come for your job either way.

Every pink slip is a warning shot in the fight for the future. That fight looks like unions that actually strike, not just file papers. It’s worker coalitions across industries demanding control over automation and AI deployment. It’s pressuring lawmakers to enforce regulations that make corporations accountable for every job they replace. It’s organizing, coordinating, and refusing to accept a hollowed-out labor market as inevitable.

"The facilities on average offer about 90 positions, and some have as few as 20. Former workers and local campaigners told Rest of World that most of the positions are in security and cleaning." Microsoft, Google say their data centers create thousands of jobs. Their permit filings say otherwise by Laura Rodríguez Salamanca at Rest of World (DCH: Promises of thousands of jobs shrink to a few dozen when someone actually checks the paperwork—classic tech PR magic.)
“Second, the company will need you to sign a waiver, allowing human operators to see through the robot’s eyes and help it perform tasks around your home.” This $20,000 Neo Robot Will Clean Your Home, But There’s A Catch by Erik Kain at Forbes (DCH: the future of luxury convenience is letting a stranger pilot your robot butler through your living room.)

Just the headlines:

The AI Data Center Boom Is Warping the US Economy by Louise Matsakis at Wired

Books

LZ - The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Goethe

I recently re-read this classic book that was the “poster girl” of Romanticism. There was all this controversy of people committing suicide, influenced by the protagonist’s decision after getting himself into an unrequited love situation. The book is organized in letters Werther sends to his friend Wilhelm about his stay in this nameless town, where he meets Charlotte, this woman whom he finds so lovely and who has so much in common with him. He quickly gets enchanted by her, but she is already promised to another man, who, Werther soon finds out, seems to be a good person after all. Well, the friendship between the two men doesn’t last so much because, with time, Werther’s feelings for Charlotte become obvious and even a little bit over the top. Goethe writes in a way that we are sort of forced to believe that Charlotte is, indeed, an angel of candor, but, honestly, I hate her so much.

It’s not obvious whether she also loved Werther and only stayed loyal to her fiancée because, well, norms and all, or if she really didn’t like him more than just a friend. The thing is that she keeps feeding Werther’s illusions and doesn’t cut him off entirely, but allows him to come closer and often, until he loses his marbles. I tried to find out if more people shared the same opinion as mine, but, to me, she’s a horrible person who manipulated him for his attention. She liked him more for the fact that he was so obsessed with her, not for who he truly was. I might be wrong, but that’s the impression the book left on me now that I am an adult.

The novel somewhat reminds me of a Brazilian book I read in high school, Dom Casmurro, which also presents a very ambiguous situation that the author leaves open – whether the female protagonist has cheated on her husband or not. But Werther is much more exaggerated; after all, it’s romanticism. I won’t say I don’t like the exaggeration, but at some points I wanted to slap sense into his face.

Podcasts

LZ - Back from the borderline

I have been listening to this podcast for a while now, and, as I mentioned before, I’m not typically a fan of podcasts, but this one is simply brilliant! Mollie aims to break down mental illness diagnosis and their stigmas by talking about mental health, but also from an archetypal perspective. The episodes that I listened to talked about archetypes in the dating sphere, the presence of occultism in psyops and the American governments, an overview of who Aleister Crowley is, people pleasing, trauma, desire, and more recently how people, or more specifically women, can fall prey of dangerous people for their inability to listen to their gut feeling – all of this from a psychoanalytic, mythologic, esoteric perspective. She not only discusses Western traditions, such as Kabbalah, but also explores Eastern philosophies and religions to address all the topics she raises. I love how she makes wild connections, and it reminds me of my time as a researcher, when I did the same thing, but through writing. Her episode on psyops reminds me of my research about Serial Experiments Lain, and I bet she would love this anime if she even cares about it. Anyways, please do yourself a favor and listen to one of the episodes – I assure you it’s worth it!