nothing here but magnifica beaveritas
issue 318 - 7th June, 2026
CJW: Welcome welcome. Long one, so let’s get to it.
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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, monstarrr.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer and purveyor of melancholy whimsy.
Climate Change & The Environment
DCH: As floods get worse, Britain tries a new solution: beavers by Lauren Frayer at NPR
The beavers have also allowed the city to scrap expensive plans to dig a reservoir and levee. "We said the beavers can do it for a fraction of the cost, certainly more sustainably," McCormack says.
Britain spent centuries hunting beavers to extinction, then spent decades engineering around the floods that followed. Five beavers in a West London park have now outperformed the infrastructure replacement plan.
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DCH: How the West Could Turn a Trickle of Water Into an Endless Supply by David Byrne at Reasons to be Cheerful
"The toilet to tap push really set back water recycling a solid 25 years. But the way Orange County dealt with it was, they put the science right up front for everyone to see that there was minimal health risk. That educational effort was really successful, and so in Orange County they're very proud of the fact that they use so much recycled water, and the ick factor doesn't exist."
Las Vegas recycles 100% of its indoor water. Orange County treats sewage to drinking water standards and has been doing it for decades. Phoenix and Tucson are doubling down by 2030. The technology works, the public came around, and per-capita water use in Vegas has dropped by nearly half in twenty years. The West is running out of water and some of it is figuring that out in time.
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Just the headlines:
EVs are getting more affordable worldwide — except in the U.S. - Ananya Bhattacharya at Rest of World
Cops Are Spying on People Who Criticize AI Data Centers Online - Matt Sledge, Sam Biddle at The Intercept
Toxic Ground: Inside Oklahoma’s Massive Oil Field Wastewater Crisis - Katie Campbell and Nick Bowlin at Propublica
Geopolitics & Empire
CJW: I found a second vote.gov — and it's registered to the White House - The Drey Dossier
Here is something almost nobody outside of security research knows. Every website with a padlock in the address bar has a certificate, and there is a rule that every certificate issued anywhere in the world must be logged in a public ledger the moment it is created, no exceptions. The side effect of that rule is that every new website on the internet, even ones nobody has announced and even ones hidden behind a login, leaves a public fingerprint the moment it is built. There is a free search engine called crt.sh where anyone can look up those logs. I typed in the studio’s domain, and underneath the public sites I already knew about were roughly forty more, unannounced, with no links pointing to them from any public page. I started reading the names. Sites that looked like they belonged to the State Department. To NASA. To the Department of Homeland Security. And then two that stopped me cold: a working preview of vote.gov, and something called fbi-kirk-tipline. I checked the public ownership records for every subdomain, and every single one traced back to the same place, the Executive Office of the President. The National Design Studio had built pre-launch versions of websites belonging to other federal agencies and registered all of it to the White House.
[...]
After Florida 2000, Congress passed a law creating the Election Assistance Commission specifically because both parties agreed that voter registration cannot live inside the White House of any sitting president. The sitting president should not have visibility into who is checking their registration in the weeks before an election that decides whether they keep their job. So Congress built a wall, and today vote.gov is registered to the Election Assistance Commission. As of this writing, that wall is still standing.
But in the certificate logs, underneath the studio’s unannounced sites, was a working preview of vote.gov, built inside the studio’s staging environment, behind the same Cloudflare login, isolated deliberately.
There's so much to this piece, and it's worth the time, especially if you're a US resident. Trump is overseeing the launch of a new vote.gov website - which seems like a pretty strong signal for the end of American democracy (or at least the polite illusion thereof).
And don’t worry, it’s not as long as it first appears - a lot of the length of the page is her sources.
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DCH: Pax Silica, the Gaza genocide, and the crisis of global capitalism by William I. Robinson at Mondoweiss
The triangulated bloc brings together the giant tech companies, transnational finance capital, and the military-industrial-repression complex. Big Tech controls the entire ecosystem of digitalized capitalism, converting its enormous structural power into direct political control through the fascist state. To advance its agenda the bloc has turned to 'Global Trumpism' — one of several morbid political symptoms emerging as the post-World War II international order crumbles.
The top 20 tech firms held $20 trillion in combined market cap in 2025. The largest asset managers controlled four-fifths of global GDP. Robinson's argument is that the bloc doesn't lobby governments. It runs them.
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DCH: Doom Loop by James Stafford at Dissent Magazine
Refusing to accept that fragmentation and polarization are the new normal in politics across the West, Labour has sought to build a hegemonic centrist position by triangulating with the far right. In so doing, they have alienated their core voters while failing to offer a distinctive agenda of their own, focused on what Green, Reform, SNP, and Plaid voters all have in common: deep frustration with the British political economy.
Starmer won 411 seats and used them to cut disability benefits, deport asylum seekers, bomb Iran from British soil, and call Palestinian solidarity a terrorist threat. He chased Reform's voters by adopting Reform's arguments, which just reminded everyone that if you want the real thing, Farage is right there. Labour is now polling in the teens.
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Zionism in real-time: insights from the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion - at Overland
Just the headlines:
How France hit the nuclear option to make Putin think twice - James Crisp at The Telegraph
The 'Lost' Villages of Myanmar's Rakhine - Pooja Chaudhuri, Miguel Ramalho at Bellingcat
The Pentagon Is Running an AI Propaganda Mill Targeting Latin America - Sam Biddle at The Intercept
Tech & Design
CJW: Exclusive: US military personnel are being targeted using location data, Pentagon letter shows - at Reuters
"Commercial location data can be used to identify where U.S. troops congregate and their pattern of life, which can be exploited by adversaries to target attacks such as missiles, drones, and roadside bombs, as well as for counterintelligence purposes," the letter warned. Wyden said in a statement that it was time to "start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat."
Not gonna lie, I kinda love this. The tech industry has been trying to entwine itself with the US military industrial complex, but this is what the tech industry does - sells all the data it can get its hands on to anyone with the cash to pay, including people that want to kill you, and a lot of people want to kill people in the US military.
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CJW: Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked - Jason Koebler at 404media
Hackers say that they used Meta’s AI support chatbot to break into a host of high-profile Instagram profiles by asking the support bot to change the email address associated with the target account. The claims coincide with a series of high-profile Instagram account takeovers, including the Barack Obama White House account, the Chief Master Sergeant of Space Force’s account, and Sephora’s account.
So, on top of all the other issues with LLMs, Meta literally gave their “AI” access to back-end account tools? How? Why? And how are techbros still ascendant when they show us how fucking stupid they are every single day?
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How to rip out Copilot from Windows 11 - at How to Geek - CJW: Seems like a lot of our readers might be interested in this. I’ve got both my computers running Windows 10 LTSC, so by the time this one expires I’m sure the whole AI bubble will have burst and they’ll stop trying to cram it into everything. And maybe W11 will be half-decent by then too. (LOL)
Just the headlines:
Cities Are Covering Flock Cameras With Trash Bags - Jason Koebler at 404 Media
'People are getting hurt': OpenAI sued by Florida over alleged safety risks - Queenie Wong at Los Angeles Times
AI Doesn't Have ROI - Ed Zitron
Nvidia and Microsoft Researchers Say AI Agents Don't Care About Safety or Reliability - Matthew Gault at 404 Media
‘It’s not progress, and we can stop it’: journalist Karen Hao on big tech, protest and the preventable AI future - Carole Cadwalladr at The Nerve
Society & The Culture
DCH: Magnifica Humanitas by Pope Leo XIV at vatican.va
Today, among the goods that are universally intended for everyone, we must also include new forms of property, such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data. In a context where the wealth of nations depends increasingly on knowledge and technology, when these goods remain concentrated in the hands of a few, without adequate forms of sharing and access, a new imbalance is created that contradicts the universal destination of goods.
The Pope just applied a doctrine older than capitalism to Big Tech's ownership of the infrastructure of modern life. Algorithms and platforms aren't neutral tools — by Catholic social teaching, they're goods that belong, in principle, to everyone. He also used this as a chance to troll the tech bros on Tolkien which I can respect.
Bernie Sanders is about to make the same moral argument with the introduction of the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act.
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DCH: The End of Trans Rights In the UK Is the Start Of Democratic Collapse by Guillaume A. W. Attia at Liberal Currents
This mass denial of care (and, in many cases, forceable detransition) was accompanied, predictably, by an explosion in the suicide rate among trans young people. Deaths linked to gender or sexual identity more than doubled in 24/25, and trans young people are now estimated to be taking their own lives at 7 times the rate of their peers. Campaigners for trans inclusion describe regularly hearing from parents who are sleeping at the bottom of their children's beds, terrified of what they might do.
The British government banned puberty blockers via emergency powers, then made the ban permanent under Labour, without a parliamentary vote, against their own manifesto, funded in part by American dark money. Children are dying at seven times the rate of their peers. No vote was taken. No accountability followed.
CJW: This is genocide. If you think I’m being hyperbolic then you haven’t been paying attention and aren’t prepared to stand up in any way that’s needed in this current moment.
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CJW: My favourite terrorpop artists of the 2020s so far - Maddison Stoff
What’s crucial about understanding both of these emerging movements [terrorpop and terrorpunk] is that they exist across all mediums of art right now, both mainstream and independent, basically wherever any artist has a voice. Hyperpop has taken both the promise and power of bedroom pop to blur the lines between all genres and create a world where anyone can be a pop star if they have a vision and an internet connection. Terrorpop is taking full advantage of the lyrical and musical possibilities enabled by that, while also fighting back against the steadily-increasing power of technofascists to control what can be thought of, seen, and created on the internet.
A follow-up to Maddison’s Terrorpop manifesto - both are well worth reading, demonstrating a clear ideological vein coming through in the work of various independent pop artists as a response to end-stage capitalism and the rise of fascism.
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Just the headlines:
Google Is Making Huge Changes That Are Poised to Decimate What's Left of Journalism - Frank Landymore at Futurism
Health, Cooking, and Related
DCH: Ozempic may be reshaping the brain, scientists say by Ariana Eunjung Cha at Washington Post
Tens of millions of people are now taking the medications worldwide, turning what began as an obesity and diabetes treatment into what could be modern medicine's largest unplanned neuroscience experiment.
GLP-1 drugs are showing effects on addiction, cognition, anxiety, and possibly Alzheimer's and Parkinson's — none of which were the original target. Some of that is genuinely exciting: dampening compulsive behavior, clearing brain fog, replacing antidepressants. Some of it is unresolved: researchers don't know how much crosses the blood-brain barrier, what the brain changes mean long-term, or what they do to the adolescent brain specifically. Is it a legit wonder drug? Or an uncontrolled experiment? Two things can be true…
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CJW: Trans teens have something to say - Grace Byron at The Verge
What are the options left for trans kids and their parents? HRT and surgery for trans youth have become practically outlawed. Across the country, trans kids have demanded a voice in response to these dire developments — at protests, in op-eds, online, and in person. They are far more scrappy, resourceful, intelligent, cynical, and determined than they’re given credit for by the mainstream media.
Great to see an outlet actually talking to trans teens and daring to give a fuck. These kids are the future. If I had been able to grasp at the self-knowledge they've already gleaned, I could have avoided decades of depression before figuring my shit out. They deserve a society that embraces them, not the fucking fascist regression we see now.
And this bit just made me roll me eyes, because of course the Trump administration would do something to callously cruel:
(Speaking out in support of trans care for youth may even be penalized soon by the FTC for “consumer fraud.”)
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Just the headlines:
Welcome to the Injection Age - Daniel Engber at The Atlantic
Labour & Economics
DCH: Monopoly Round-Up: Private Equity Blocked from Buying Homes. Mostly. - Matt Stoller at thebignewsletter.com
Big builders are now working with Wall Street to construct single family homes that never go on the market, but instead are rented out from the beginning. This "Build to Rent" sector took off, doubling in market share from 2021-2024. And it is now where institutional capital is focused. Build to Rent allows Wall Street to augment an asset class, and it enables control of housing supply to keep prices up.
Congress just banned Wall Street from buying existing single-family homes, 396-13. Which is great but the carve-out tells you everything: the ban covers homes that already exist, but Build to Rent is explicitly protected. Private equity keeps the right to construct housing that never enters the ownership market.
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DCH: The SpaceX IPO works like a crypto fraud, but with AI at pivot-to-ai.com
Nasdaq really wanted to be the exchange that listed the SpaceX IPO and beat the NYSE. So they just tossed out the long-established previous rules so they could fast-track SpaceX onto the official Nasdaq index. The new rule is that any "megacap" stock IPO will get added to the Nasdaq 100 after just 15 days of trading. Crucially, megacaps are exempt from standard seasoning and liquidity requirements.
Nasdaq changed its own rules to get the listing. Index funds are now forced to buy in. Pension funds follow the index funds. Insiders hold 95% of shares and can dump after 180 days. The exchange that exists to protect investors engineered the mechanism for fleecing them.
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Just the headlines:
The AI bubble isn't like the internet bubble - Cory Doctorow
Books
CJW: Reading Weird Fiction in an Age of Fascism - Zachary Gillan at Ancillary Review of Books
The first step toward envisioning a better world is recognizing what is wrong with this one. Weird fiction prepares us for the process of seeing society’s dominant ideology not only as Wrong—an unsettled, disturbing way of interpreting and interacting with the world—but also as irreal, as fictional. It gives us a metaphor—dark, disturbing, alarming—for the theory and structure of thought that precedes the action of praxis, and engage in active resistance. This action is key: not to fall into the nihilistic madness of the Lovecraftian victim or the passivity of the status quo. Weird fiction must prepare us not to surrender to or deny the horrors of the world, but to read and understand them. Before it was killed and messily reanimated as a boogieman by the Right, this is what Black activists meant by “woke”—the injunction to have your eyes open and consciousness aware of the horrific structures underlying daily life. Weird fiction is a useful metaphor for this awakening; we must, in other words, read the social world in which we live as a work of weird fiction.
A really interesting essay that explores exactly what it says on the tin. I'm not a big reader of weird fiction, but I've liked what I have read and want to explore more. Gillan makes a great argument for why I'm right to want to do so.
And I thought this was an interesting way to think about writing weird fiction:
Brian Evenson refers to a process of “denarration,” where his work “presents something, narrates it as if it’s real, then it takes it away,” makes it qualified or compromised, “destabilizing the story’s world”, tracking to the metaphorical removal of false consciousness.
Movies + TV
CJW: scificorridorarchive.com - via feuilleton
As a sci-fi girlie, this tickled me. Have a scroll and enjoy.
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DCH: We Rarely See Films as Fresh as I Love Boosters by Eileen Jones at Jacobin
Riley claims to use only practical effects, no computer-generated imagery, in his films when achieving such marvelously surreal comic moments, which is even harder to believe watching I Love Boosters than it was when watching Sorry to Bother You. It's one of the many admirable commitments Riley honors that make his films unique and important. His casual lived-in communism is even more central to his projects.
Boots Riley makes communist films for mainstream audiences and nobody calls it propaganda because the craft is too good to dismiss. The politics aren't a message bolted onto the story. They're the architecture.
I’m dying to see this and its driving me absolutely nuts that there’s no distribution to the UK yet and internet gossip suggests it might not land here until October.
CJW: I absolutely have to see this movie.
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MJW: Over Your Dead Body
There’s something about Jason Segel that just makes me laugh. He doesn’t even have to do anything, his presence is enough to put me in a giggling mood. Perhaps it’s the memory of his full frontal nudity breakup scene in the now-unwatchable Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Anyway, Over Your Dead Body, a remake of the Norwegian film The Trip, was a gory little delight not just because of this, but also for Samara Weaving’s natural accent and Timothy Olyphant getting to show off his psycho killer grin. It’s about a married couple whose weekend-away plans to kill each other are derailed by murderous escaped convicts, leading to… a lot of blood.
CJW: I watched The Trip a couple of years ago, and the American remake might actually be better - it’s just a bit more slapstick, and it has a great cast.
Podcasts
MJW: Blair Braverman has featured on the You’re Wrong About podcast a bunch of times, as the ‘survival correspondent’, re-telling stories of The Dyatlov Pass Incident, The Andes Plane Crash, and Balto. She’s an adventurer, a dogsled racer and a writer, and she even featured on the reality show Naked and Afraid. I am in awe of her outdoor prowess, being one of those yearning-for-the-outside indoor cats myself. She has a new podcast that she’s experimenting with called What to Carry, What to Burn. It’s only got three episodes at the moment, but I’ve really enjoyed it so far. You can find it here, or on your preferred podcast app.
Art
MJW: Check out Giulia Rosa’s amazing illustrations. I love the colour, the detail, the attitude. Check out their insta here and their print store.
The Memes
![Twitter screenshot.
@coolmathgame_:
dentist after examining my teeth: [frowning] i don't like this [taking his tools out of my mouth] i don't like teeth anymore](https://assets.buttondown.email/images/80f6c297-e81d-4884-8b18-fa72a06e6188.jpg?w=960&fit=max)
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