nothing here but kill chain addiction
issue 326, 27th September, 2026
CJW: Welcome back, gang. Dan is off this issue, so it’s a smaller one than usual. I swear, I read a lot this past fortnight, but not much felt worth sharing with you all. Fingies crossed for next issue.
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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, wor$t girl in Australia.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer and purveyor of melancholy whimsy.
Geopolitics & Empire
CJW: I saw the documentary the Israeli government doesn’t want you to see - Marisa Kabas at The Handbasket
NAZA is a Hebrew acronym used by the IDF that loosely means “collateral damage,” and which referred to the software’s estimated death toll in a potential military strike; one NAZA equals one casualty. One interviewee alleged a strike that estimated 500 NAZA got the green light—and that a 20 NAZA strike would be approved “without a second thought.”
Human targets were marked by the IDF by hacking into cell phone networks. One interviewee estimated 60-70k Gazans had been marked—clearly including many, many people beyond those considered Hamas fighters—and another said it did not distinguish between kids and adults. The interviewees said the targets were hit at night when they were home with their families, who they could hear through their phones before initiating strikes. “How could you bomb when you hear a crying baby inside?” Abraham asked one of them.
I feel like at this point, anyone who is open to the truth has already learned it, but maybe the documentary NAZA will speak so some people previously blinkered to the genocide.
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CJW: Exclusive: US military had close call after using AI for false intelligence report, sources say - CNN
The report, according to one of the sources, was “entirely false.” But it also “almost started a war,” the source said. Any US operation against a Chinese vessel could have risked spiraling into an armed conflict between the two nations.
I hate this fucking future and the people in charge of creating and moulding it...
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CJW: Inside the US ‘Kill Chain’ That Destroyed an Iranian School - Ben Bartenstein and Krishna Karra at Bloomberg (Archive link)
Related to the above. More “failures” (in quotes because the purpose of a system is what it does) of US military AI systems. We knew some of the basics already, but this goes into a lot of detail, with receipts, to show exactly how it happened.
Tech & Design
CJW: An addiction - Mandy Brown
If there is anything novel about the language of AI (and I’m not convinced there is), it’s not the mystification of capitalism or the threat of a power out of our control or the manner in which technology is used to obscure human choices and human agency. It’s that we seem to have forgotten how to talk about anything else.
Mandy Brown always hits the bullseye, and this piece explains why I've barely shared or discussed anything related to "AI" in the past couple of years.
It's not interesting, it's not important, it is a tool of/for mystification and control. People I used to respect are dedicating their time and energy to this thing that seems like it can and will only make life flatter, hollow out the core of what makes us human.
Society & The Culture
CJW: Go Fuck Yourself: Lesbian Gender and Desire at Camp Miasma - Talia Bhatt
Too many of us misunderstand patriarchy as the suppression of a naturally occurring class called “woman”, when the origin and endeavour of patriarchy is the creation, the construction of “the female”. To cordon off an entire range of human expression and emotion and yes, desire, as inexorably, inherently “male” is to continue to perpetuate our own psychic mutilation at the hands of a society that will always construe us as void, as lack, as absence.
As lesser.
So I’m glad to see a love story between a woman and her mirror, for once. To let myself get lost in the primal, libidinal experience of admiring your own reflection, of liking what you see so much you can’t help but want to sink into her.
Talia Bhatt on Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and female (specifically lesbian) desire.
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CJW: Nicolas Winding Refn: ‘I’d been given a gift to start over again’ - Juan Barquín at Little White Lies
A great interview with NWR on his new film, Her Private Hell, which I haven’t seen yet, but am very excited about. He went and fucking used AI at some point in the movie, but he worked with a trans screenwriter so I will let those two points balance each other out.
Newsletters
CJW: darwin's finches (Thraupidae)
On an evolutionary level, Darwin’s finches are as real and as important as any person you might meet. The beauty is not that this is all for us, but that we exist alongside it at all. We all began as one, then we split apart, and now I’m here, typing on my electrified rocks and plastic, telling you about how we know our own history. It is both a personal and an existential miracle that I am alive to do this. This is what I think about when I think about animals: finches and passerines, shells and ammonites, none of them made for us but still here, beside us, our fellow travelers unaware of our resistance to our membership of that category.
Another great essay from Dr Mo, this one about evolution and, in the end, beauty.
Books
MJW: The Castle by Jon Ronson
Look, I don’t know how I feel about Ronson. His “naïveté” is just incredibly grating because he’s obviously at least 300% savvier than he puts on, but he’s telling a somewhat entertaining and bonkers collection of stories in The Castle. You’d almost feel sorry for the book’s focus Chris Mark—in that Ronson is clearly taking advantage of a mentally ill man in order to profit from his story—except that Mark is an incredibly wealthy unhinged sexual predator who deserves every bit of exposure/punishment he gets from his inability to shut up about the innumerable ways he takes advantage of vulnerable women.
The subtitle to this book is “Adventures in a world of unravelling men”. While I understand that there is indeed a ‘crisis’ of masculinity in the modern age, and I do believe that so much needs to be done to steer men left untethered by their changing role in society, it’s hard for most women and others to care that much about it when men’s most common response is violence. Last week, in a span of 12 hours on a single Saturday, 3 women were murdered in one single state in Australia by a male partner or family member. One was 90 years old.
The men are certainly unravelling, and they are taking it out on the women in their lives. Ronson offers few solutions, and while I don’t think he necessarily has to, it means this book just serves as a document of the innumerable ways that men are flailing. Men are the fucking problem and men are the solution—they just need to actually step up, change for the better, and stop the women and children in their lives from bearing the brunt of their failures.
Movies + TV
MJW: The End of Oak Street (2026)
Spoiler: the dinosaurs have feathers.
The End of Oak Street certainly wasn’t anything special, but it was fun, and sometimes that’s what you need on a Saturday night in while the world is falling apart. In this 80s set comedy, Anne Hathaway and Ewan MacGregor (plus some standard kids) have their slice of 1982 dropped 80 million or so years back into the past. Suddenly there are dinosaurs violently tearing their neighbours apart on the front lawn. Don’t worry: the annoying neighbour DOES get ripped to shreds by pterodactyls, but the dog doesn’t die. The time travel physics make little sense, but that probably won’t annoy anyone but the space-time-informed and the autistic. The most shocking part to me was when the only copy of Hathaway’s character's type-written novel was destroyed in a basement flood. I felt that one deep inside. Otherwise, it’s just fun dinosaur fluff, a bloody suburban/Jurassic popcorn romp.
The Self-Promotion
MJW: Corey interviewed me about The Forgetting Navigations for Interstellar Flight Press. Read stuff I say about things, like the following:
I get inspiration from reading a lot, usually long-form articles, but also non-fiction books. I don’t do nearly as much of this as I used to, which is probably why I don’t have as many ideas as I used to. My attention span is in the gutter, and my brain is curdled and fried by the modern onslaught of daily horrors. So, I partially blame myself for this. I also blame paywalls, which have limited my access to the kinds of articles I most enjoy. There are methods to circumvent these, but they don’t always work. I read something recently that was like, “the truth is behind paywalls, but lies are free.” I understand that journalism is valuable, of course, but isn’t that what fucking ad revenue is for?
The Memes
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