CJW: Thanks for joining us for another issue of nothing here, and a big welcome to our new readers. Hope you enjoy what we’re doing here.
If you know someone you think might appreciate this newsletter, go ahead and forward it along.
The latest bonus was the opening couple of chapters to a gonzo, psychedelic spy-fi novel Austin and I wrote a few years back - In League with the Devil. To read it, future bonuses, and the full archive, you can become a supporter. A list of unlocked bonuses is here if you want to see what you’re in for.
The Team
Corey J. White (CJW) - Your burnt-out burn out. Wrote some sci-fi books. Naarm/Melbourne.
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - Author. Apocalypse witch. I’m also this guy.Your fabulous goth aunt. Utterly bonkers sorry not sorry.
m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / ecopoet // Dark Extropian Musings / pryvt.rsrch
Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
Articles
CJW: How Not to Lose the Lockdown Generation
In the panic about this “lost generation,” there has been a lot of talk about how there is no work for young people. But that is a lie. There is no end of meaningful work that desperately needs doing — in our schools, hospitals, and on the land. We just need to create the jobs.
This piece on the US response to conditions during the Great Depression that parallel today by Naomi Klein is brilliant and follows some of the points Cory Doctorow made recently.
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CJW: The Great American Sci-Fi: Utopia or Dystopia? (via Sentiers)
[...] wherever women have their full set of legal rights and equal opportunities, the population growth rate immediately stabilizes, flattens and sometimes even drops below the replacement rate. Social justice is in fact good environmental policy, it is a kind of technology, in that it is a political software, critical to human survival. And the hyper-consumption of the rich and the deep poverty of the poor are among the worst environmental impacts of any human activities, so solving inequality is not just the right thing to do; it’s the optimally survivable thing to do.
I could have grabbed a few different pull quotes from this talk recently given by Kim Stanley Robinson. As with Naomi Klein and Cory Doctorow's pieces, there are sustainable paths forward if our politicians can find the will to deny capitalist impulses long enough to consider the needs of the planet and the future.
The possibility for utopia is still here: we are powerful thinkers, and we can think our way out of this crisis by using such technologies as language, the rule of law, the scientific method, and justice.
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DCH: Facebook abandons broken drilling equipment under Oregon coast seafloor
Today, about 1,100 feet of pipe, a drill tip, various other tools and 6,500 gallons of drilling fluid sit under the seafloor just off the central Oregon coast. Facebook has no plans to retrieve the equipment.
Facebook is the new big oil. Now it’s literally acting like it.
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DCH: Apparently the only thing not allowed to kill me is a robot
I simply don't understand why I'm allowed, neigh encouraged, to die from climate change, viral pandemics, unsafe drinking water, gun violence, lack of healthcare, war, drones, suicide from lack of mental healthcare, police brutality, addiction (especially opioids!), the consequences of government surveillance, and apparently onions, but we're suddenly taking an anti-robot murderer stance?
Slaugherbots are not yet a reality. Job destruction from AI-enabled automation is. People like Elon Musk who loudly talk about the former often benefit from the latter. That said Project: Maven goes live next month. Not good.
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DCH: 'Hundreds dead' because of Covid-19 misinformation
At least 800 people may have died around the world because of coronavirus-related misinformation in the first three months of this year, researchers say.
About 5,800 people were admitted to hospital because of it too. And this is a low estimate because it’s just tracking things like drinking Clorox and shit. Never mind people fucked by not wearing masks.
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MKY: “All These Rich People Can’t Stop Themselves”: The Luxe Quarantine Lives of Silicon Valley’s Elite
If you think this is bad now, just wait a few years as the privilege bubble of the elite begins to encompass and fortify itself around the shrinking habitable zones of the planet we all share.
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DCH: Uber would rather pull out of California than give its drivers benefits
The company would rather horde its cash and fully pull out of California than deal with the implications of calling its workers what they are. The company’s view of its drivers — as pawns for a legal game — is very revealing about its priorities, and about the dangers of letting companies build unsustainable models built on landgrab-orientated pricing models that hurt workers.
As I’ve written about extensively, Uberiscorruptasfuck. If your business model demands that you can’t call the people who work for you EMPLOYEES, then your company should burn to the ground. The gig economy is a scam.
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MKY: After 40 years, researchers finally see Earth’s climate destiny more clearly
…the future is looking worse than we hoped, but not quite as bad as we feared. So we’ve got that going for us.
Getting used to the idea that a min. 1.5C warming is a thing of the past, and just what a planet with at least 2.6C warming is gonna be like now is a whole ‘nother story…
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Ludlam was one of the few Australian politicians I had any respect at all for, but if this kinda optimistic scenario / magical future conjuring accomplished anything, I’d be ingratiating myself with the militant vegan crustpunks that seized the nearby shopping centre as soon as the retailers shuttered it and went home to fuck over their employees and collect dat big govt monies… and he’d be the town crier at the West Australian Thunderdome, where Billionaires face off against each other until the dead earth is replenished with their blood. AMA.
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Cutting Room Floor:
Beyond Smart Rocks (via Sentiers)
How Taiwan’s Unlikely Digital Minister Hacked the Pandemic (via Sentiers)
Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You! (via Dan Hill)
COVID-19 depleting ranks of California inmate fire camps (via Gareth)
The Future That Was: The Future is Born (A Triptych Moment) (via Ed at Restricted Academy) - on cyberpunk by Elizabeth Sandifer, author of Neoreaction: A Basilisk
Comics
CJW: LODGER by David Lapham and Maria Lapham
Look, STRAY BULLETS is indisputably a classic of the comics medium, but it’s also MASSIVE. LODGER is a self-contained graphic novel very much in the vein of SB, with a dash of YOUNG LIARS. I don’t want to say too much about the story because the way it builds up in layers is better to be discovered for yourself, but if you enjoy Lapham’s work, you want this book.
And if you haven’t come across Lapham’s work before, he writes (with the help of his wife) and draws seedy, smart, and violent crime comics, infused with a touch of the weird. Being self-contained, LODGER is possibly the best introduction to his work you’re likely to find.
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CJW: Where can you be safe in this world? Maybe we’re asking the wrong question
This is me, on a rock, having a cry because sure, I’m safe right now, but what is the point of being safe if everyone else is drowning and burning and starving and all the things you love are desiccating in the ever-hotter, ever-drier atmosphere? In a world like this world, safety means isolation and loneliness. It’s a jerk act to smile when everyone else is weeping in pain. There are no moments of spontaneous wonder in a bunker.
This is a great personal essay about safety and anxiety in the modern condition, by friend of the newsletter Jane Rawson.
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MJW: Greed, cruelty, consumption: the world is changed yet its worst persists by Omar Sakr
There is talk, all the time, of restrictions easing, and not easing, of who deserves to die, of letting the old go, of the “economy” needing to start again, which is to say the rich need to get richer again (a phenomenon that actually never stopped), and a sense already of an acceptable level of sacrifice in order for this to occur. This is evil at its most banal and it shows no sign of abatement. Let the nurses and doctors suffer, let the labourers build and break, let them all grind their bodies to the mill, for somewhere a bank balance must grow.
CJW: Part of the same series as Rawson’s piece. If MKY was unconvinced by Ludlum’s piece above, this essay by Omar Sakr is much closer to the POV we hold and share here…
MKY: “My normal and your normal is a relentless march to a ruined climate, the dismissal and undermining of scientists these past few decades, the lack of leadership and vision that dares to imagine a sustainable way forward.” ok yes very much this.
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DCH: Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom
Every prism — the name was a near acronym of the original designation, “Plaga interworld signaling mechanism” — had two LEDs, one red and one blue. When a prism was activated, a quantum measurement was performed inside the device, with two possible outcomes of equal probability: one outcome was indicated by the red LED lighting up, while the other was indicated by the blue one. From that moment forward, the prism allowed information transfer between two branches of the universal wave function. In colloquial terms, the prism created two newly divergent timelines, one in which the red LED lit up and one in which the blue one did, and it allowed communication between the two.
Lovely short story from Ted Chiang over at OneZero.
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MKY: Cities are a borderland where the wild and built worlds meet
Dreams of a future in which technology saves us from ecological collapse seek to preserve the firm boundary between people and environment, city and hinterland, urbanisation and wilderness. But these binaries don’t reflect the multiple, intertwined ways in which cities, habitats and people are made. It is time we left them behind, and began to learn new ways of sensing and thinking the city.
If you only read one longread challenging how we think about cities and nature, make it this one.
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CJW: Home Body
Unfortunately (or fortunately), we can’t take care of ourselves alone. Within the city, especially, our ability to live comfortably and maintain our bodies and communities depends on the branching networks of pipes and tubes and the labor that feeds into them. We’re enmeshed in the infrastructures of the collective cyborg even when it’s clearly failing us, undermined by rot and capital.
An interesting essay on the house as being both a part of our cyborg selves and part of a greater cyborg collective.
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CJW: Accelerate the Metaverse: Epic Games and the Networked Individual Mindset
Rentism, as far as I am concerned, is the bleakest future available to us. It’s a truly Sisyphean existence of endless drudgery in return for endless monthly payments. I reckon extinction sounds more palatable. The horror of rentism is also that, were it to establish itself absolutely, there’d be no way out — not unless we had a kind of technological revolution like the kind that led to the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the first place. The very idea of that kind of revolution has long been in crisis. My fear is we’d stay in this stasis forever. It would be the true end of history.
This is a very interesting post from Matt Colquhoun, covering the current Epic vs Apple kerfuffle and what it might represent technologically, economically, and politically going forward.
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CJW: And that’s it for another issue.
To be honest, I’m struggling. Could be Melbourne’s lockdown measures wearing me down, but I just hit a wall with the internet in general. I am very fucking burnt-out.
It just feels like over the past few years we’ve collectively turned social media into an engine for miscommunication. You can’t tweet something (even something innocuous) without someone misunderstanding or misconstruing what you said and/or taking you to task for some perceived slight (I’m not even necessarily talking about my own tweets here, just what I see when I scroll through the feed).
Tade Thompson said something related recently - he was specifically talking about people’s responses to writing advice, but I think the sentiment is true for twitter as a whole. Monica Valentinelli had some real smart replies to the thread which tied it into the cult of individualism that I think has poisoned so much of our discourse and culture. (If you’re confused about me calling individualism a poison, just consider anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers as the most obvious examples of what I mean.)
So, yeah, I’m off Twitter for the time being, and trying to maintain connections through a couple of Discord servers and the Restricted Academy forum.
Anyway, hope you’re doing better than I am. Look after yourself.