Feb. 19, 2023, 1:06 p.m.
nothing here but lossy simulations - issue 210 - 19th February, 2023
Nothing Here
nothing here but lossy simulations
issue 210 - 19th February, 2023
CJW: Welcome again to another issue of nothing here. This time around we're heavy on the geopolitics (history continues apace) and general injustice. That's unlike us, I know.
I hope the year is treating you well so far. Personally I'm getting stuck into a lot of comix reading at the moment. If you want to recommend a great sci-fi and/or horror comic from the past 5 years that you reckon I should check out, hit reply and let me know. I'm finally getting stuck into OCY-C after bouncing off it initially (I blame it on my headspace not the comic), and it's astounding so far.
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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, podcaster, sin-eater.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Journalist, MA in semiotics, and PhD in Arts. Sci-fi writer, futurology researcher and essayist. @lidiazuin
Climate Change & The Environment
CJW: Creatures That Don’t Conform - Lucy Jones at Emergence Magazine
It is hard, sometimes, to love slime molds. They are fleeting and fugacious. There one day; gone the next. They make us face the facts: that nothing lasts forever. That ultimate human control is illusory. That we might be at the top by force, but we are not at the center. But I think this is why we need to know them. Our rational, materialistic worldview obscures transcendence and awe. Our culture of forgetting, rejecting, ignoring the wider world requires some work, some assistance, to undo.
How do we see the world as sacred again? By radical noticing. Looking for awe in all of life. Following the wonder in our bodies electric. Before we find new stories, don’t we need to sit and remember? How to venerate the world?
More and more, I think a solution is awe. As Dacher Keltner’s work shows, awe seems to orient us to things outside of our individual selves. It suggests our true nature is collective. Studying narratives of awe in cultures across the world, Keltner and colleagues found that a common part of natural awe is the sense that plants and animals are conscious and aware.
On slime moulds, cultivating awe, and embracing the truly weird and unknowable multiplicity of life on this planet.
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Apocalypse investment, greenwashing, and plans by the global North that will lead to further displacement and death for indigenous peoples both the same of wealthy "conservation" projects. Article by Vijay Kolinjivadi at Al Jazeera (via MKY)
Google Greenwashes a Dirty Partnership with Climate-Destroying Saudi Aramco - Sam Biddle at The Intercept
Just the headlines:
Geopolitics & Empire
CJW: How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline - Seymour Hersh
Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.
There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.
A detailed rundown of the geopolitical movements and secretive discussions that led up to the US sabotage of the Nord Stream Pipeline. It was obvious from the start who was behind it, but this detailed a look into how it unfolded is fascinating.
Related:
US blew up Nord Stream pipelines connecting Russia to Germany, journalist Seymour Hersh reports - Ben Norton at Geopolitical Economy Report. Covers the above and adds a bit of additional context.
Seymour Hersh: The US Destroyed the Nord Stream Pipeline - an interview with Seymour Hersh at Jacobin about his piece.
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CJW: The Grinding War in Ukraine Could Have Ended a Long Time Ago - Branko Marcetic at Jacobin
According to Bennett, as early as the second Saturday of the war, or a little less than a week and a half into the war, both Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian president Vladimir Putin made major concessions: Putin, by giving up on the goals of the “demilitarization” of Ukraine and its “denazification” — meaning, as Bennett interpreted it, regime change — and Zelensky by giving up on pursuing NATO membership.
Calling both leaders “pragmatic,” Bennett says that over the course of negotiations, he “was under the impression that both sides very much want[ed] a ceasefire” and gave the odds of any deal holding at 50-50. Over a “marathon of drafts,” he claims, seventeen draft agreements were prepared. But “they blocked it, and I thought [they were] wrong,” Bennett says, referring to the Western powers backing Ukraine.
Weird, it's almost like this is a US proxy war, and what Ukraine wanted didn't matter in the slightest.
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"In sharp contrast to Turkey’s abysmal, dysfunctional initial response to the earthquake, Turkish militarism seems as functional as ever." Jacob Batinga at Jacobin
Wagner Group sledgehammer snuff films are becoming part of their pitch to potential customers who want to inflict brutal violence and war crimes on their opponents.
We’ve shared pieces before on the reticence of many countries to follow the US regarding Russia because all their talk of a “rules based order” doesn't track with reality, but this is specifically focused on the way US hypocrisy undermines the likelihood of Russian Ukraine, or mercenary forces (like the above Wagner Group) being held accountable for war crimes.
Transcript of a recent talk given by Yanis Varoufakis on American financial hegemony - Ben Norton at Geopolitical Economy Report
We’ve talked about the emerging apartheid in Jackson, Mississippi before (in relation to climate action) but white lawmakers are kicking it into high-gear.
The Palestinians Held Captive by Israel - Hamza Ali Shah at Jacobin
Just the headlines:
Israel Is Threatening to Turn Iran Into Another Ukraine - Branko Marcetic at Jacobin
The US Is Doing Far Worse Than Floating Balloons in Other Countries’ Airspace - Branko Marcetic at Jacobin
The FBI Paid a Violent Felon to Infiltrate Denver’s Racial Justice Movement - Trevor Aaronson at The Intercept
Science & Space
Tech & Design
CJW: Garbage Island - Rob Horning
In this New Yorker piece, Ted Chiang describes ChatGPT and other LLMs as “lossy text-compression algorithms” that have tried to shrink the entire internet into what amounts to a discrete zip file, which can then stand alone as a replacement for the internet that a single company can privately own. Rather than point you directly to original documents — and allowing whoever made those documents to possibly get some compensation for it — an LLM search replacement would reconstruct the gist of those documents from its compressed file, filling in the blanks of what was compressed out with its best guesses derived from its statistical analysis. If those lossy 128kbps MP3s were good enough for constricted sound capabilities of iPod earbuds, then why wouldn’t lossy versions of knowledge be good enough for the diminished truth capacities of our fallen world?
Here Rob Horning summarises and expounds on recent coverage about Google and Microsoft's plans for LLM-powered search and the tension between offering answers and serving ads. Plenty of interesting stuff here, but I do like this framing above - that an LLM search engine would act like a compressed and lossy simulations of the real internet. Competing internet simulations held by mega corporations sounds like yet another piece of mundane cyberpunk for our world.
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DCH: The Kremlin Has Entered the Chat by Irene Suosalo, wired
They told Matsapulina she was suspected of emailing a police station with a false bomb threat. But when she was taken into the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ investigation department, she says, a police officer asked whether she knew the real reason she’d been arrested. She guessed that it was for her “political activities.” He nodded and asked, “Do you know how we knew you were home?”
“How?”
She says the officer told her that investigators had been following along with her private Telegram chats as she wrote them. “There you were, sitting there, writing to your friends in the chat room,” she recalls him saying. He proceeded to dispassionately quote word for word several Telegram messages she had written from her bed. “‘They’re unlikely to bust it down,’” he recited.
“And so,” he said, “we knew that you were there.”
A chilling story about FSB incursions into dissident chat groups in Russia. Move to Signal. Now.
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DCH: Revealed: the hacking and disinformation team meddling in elections by Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Manisha Ganguly, David Pegg, Carole Cadwalladr and Jason Burke
Hanan told the undercover reporters that his services, which others describe as “black ops”, were available to intelligence agencies, political campaigns and private companies that wanted to secretly manipulate public opinion. He said they had been used across Africa, South and Central America, the US and Europe.
[...]
The methods and techniques described by Team Jorge raise new challenges for big tech platforms, which have for years struggled to prevent nefarious actors spreading falsehoods or breaching the security on their platforms. Evidence of a global private market in disinformation aimed at elections will also ring alarm bells for democracies around the world.
So much for the oft-touted claim that election interference and tech black ops are just a liberal fever-dream.
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Smells a little bit like AI winter? - “Tesla recall, MSFT Bing fail, and Google Bard fail are NOT independent; each reflect the fact that you cannot build AI in the real world from Big Data and deep learning alone.”
How Google Ran Out of Ideas - A history of Google’s decline.
The Apocalyptic Delusions of the Silicon Valley Elite - in conversation with Douglas Rushkoff
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Just the headlines:
‘Magic Avatar’ App Lensa Generated Nudes From My Childhood Photos - Olivia Snow at Wired
Yes, Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his tweets first
Bing’s A.I. Chat Reveals Its Feelings: ‘I Want to Be Alive. 😈 + A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled both by Kevin Roose
Society & The Culture
CJW: Brianna Ghey: a 16-year-old trans girl has been killed in Cheshire - Serena Smith at Dazed
Many media outlets have either glossed over or entirely neglected to mention the fact that Brianna was trans. Others have even included Brianna’s deadname in their reporting, including The Daily Express and The Times (thankfully, The Times have now updated their article to remove all references to her deadname). But when transphobia is so widespread and acute in the UK, it is necessary and important to honour and recognise Brianna’s gender identity. As one Twitter user put it: “[The media] write article after article stirring hatred, spreading fear and crafting lies about us, then go out of their way to hide who we are and thus the potential nature of the crime when it gets us killed.”
Every UK transphobe with a platform who uses it to spread hate, every columnist who’s written vile or just irresponsible pieces (“just asking questions”), and every fearmongering politician has blood on their hands. They all help to construct the society where young trans people like Brianna Ghey (and not so young trans people too) are bullied, abused, and murdered.
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CJW: Art and Proxies - Jamie Ryan
None of this is to say that AI art can’t be interesting or useful. It just won’t be beautiful, or meaningful, or any of the other deep qualities people are drawn to in great art.
And that what we could get instead is a world full of creation that merely passes for beautiful - where things can be cool or interesting for a moment, but nothing has any enduring value. A world that looks good, and sounds good, and seems good, but just isn’t quite right in some hard to place way…
This is about AI art, but it's also about the hollow nature of so much culture and how AI could (will?) feed into that. Already Hollywood churns out sequels, prequels, and reboots at (seemingly) a higher rate than original works, reiterating and recombining the existing instead of bothering to try and create the risky new. AI does the same, but not for risk averse finance reasons, but because that's all it can do.
It ends on a weird note about the irreplaceable nature of human creative energy, but weird or not I'm receptive to it.
Related: Hollywood using AI to de-age the same old (emphasis on the old) stars instead of fostering new talent and new careers. For nostalgia and star power of course, but I also see an anti-labor angle to this.
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On the archaeology of children and childhood, by April Nowell at Aeon
Health, Cooking, and Related
MJW: The ‘rogue’ Trump-appointed judge with abortion pill’s future in his hands - Ed Pilkington at The Guardian
Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is the next frontier in the war against abortion in the US. In it, a set of ideologically driven conservative Christian groups is inviting Kacsmaryk to impose a nationwide injunction that would in effect ban the abortion pill by nullifying the FDA’s medical approval of one of its key elements, mifepristone. Should Trump’s judge side with the plaintiffs, as many reproductive rights experts suspect he will, the abortion pill ban would apply across the country. Unlike Dobbs, the US supreme court’s ruling last June that eviscerated the constitutional right to an abortion and returned legal control over terminations to individual state legislatures, Kacsmaryk’s injunction would render medication abortions unlawful in every state in the union. The stakes are high: the abortion pill now accounts for more than half of all pregnancy terminations in the US.
There are simply no words for how fucking devastating this ruling could be for the US. It's bad, folks. Things are Not Good. There's more on this fucking garbage human being here at Vox.
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CJW: DeSantis-Stacked Medical Boards Ramp Up Bans on Care for Trans Youth - Natasha Lennard at The Intercept
The very same board members who falsely cited a lack of clinical research as grounds to ban puberty blockers and hormone treatments for trans children voted unanimously to foreclose further such research in the state. The request to drop the clinical trials exemption came directly from a Florida Department of Health representative, who spoke at the public hearing.
However, cis children will continue to have access to puberty blockers and hormone treatments when deemed appropriate by medical professionals, such as in cases of precocious puberty. Similar carveouts for cis kids exist in every one of the trans health care bans that have swept red states in recent years — as if any more evidence is needed to prove that these bans are not about medical risk or untested drugs but about extreme anti-trans discrimination.
The rise of American right-wing authoritarianism and hate continues.
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The pandemic next time. Three stories, one from George Monbiot another from Zeynep Tufekci, and finally Maryn McKenna on the threat the current rise in bird flu represents.
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Just the headlines:
Labour & Economics
CJW: We Can’t Have Climate Justice Without Ending Computational Colonialism - Jag Bhalla at Current Affairs
For decades, policy elites have flaunted phrases like “climate justice” in speeches, reports, and the media. But this has turned out to be an elaborate charade. They’ve erected a math-fortified facade, concealing what I call “computational colonialism,” where the mindset, values, and priorities of policy elites (as encoded into economic models) actively perpetuate resource distribution patterns that are direct legacies of colonialism. Even do-gooders and sincere justice-seekers can be complicit simply by using (or deferring to) off-the-shelf economics. Any approach to climate justice that doesn’t account for the huge role of historical looting in structuring today’s world in effect imposes an “implicit imperialism.” It naïvely takes current global power and wealth patterns to be in some sense “justified,” or neutral—but they’re utterly shaped by imperialism.
A great piece on climate "justice," massive wealth inequality, and the current lack of concern or progress toward addressing these problems. Could have put this under climate change or geopolitics too because it's all tightly related.
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Just the headlines:
Britain faces largest ever healthcare strikes as pay disputes drag on
South Africa’s poorest are staying up all night for cheaper internet rates
Anime artists are panicking over Netflix’s AI experiment - Andrew Deck at restofworld
It Looks Like a Strippers’ Union Is About to Become a Reality
The return to the office could be the real reason for the slump in productivity - Gleb Tsipursky at Fortune
The Self-Promotion
LZ: Thriving on Disruption III
The third guidebook is now available for purchase and it’s the one I have contributed the most with chapters about science fiction, art, anthropology, and philosophy. Some commentary on cultural and political movements like afrofuturism and solarpunk, as well as the need to address decolonization in futures studies.
The Memes
