nothing here but modern slave patrols
issue 309 - 1st February, 2026
CJW: Welcome to another issue of nothing here. All day yesterday bluesky was kicking off about the latest Epstein Files release. All of it is disgusting, none of it is surprising. These people need to be exiled from society, preferably down to the Titanic in a flimsy submarine.
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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, dummy.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer and purveyor of melancholy whimsy.
Climate Change & The Environment
Just the headlines:
Microsoft responds to AI data center revolt, vowing to cover full power costs and reject local tax breaks by Todd Bishop at Geekwire (DCH: Believe it when you see it.)
Geopolitics & Empire
DCH: 'Wet tent syndrome' is killing Gaza's infants by Amos Brison at 972mag.com
Last week, Mohamed Abu Jarad returned to his tent in Gaza City’s Al-Daraj neighborhood to find his three-month-old daughter, Shaza, freezing cold and no longer breathing. The family rushed the baby to hospital, where doctors pronounced her dead from hypothermia.
Infants in Gaza are dying from hypothermia as families shelter in flooded, unheated tents, a crisis doctors now call “wet tent syndrome.” Blocked housing materials, mass displacement, and a collapsed health system have turned winter exposure into a predictable, preventable killer. This is intentional, targeted slaughter of Gaza’s next generation.
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DCH: Your Leaders Were Lying. Now The People Are Driving by Spencer Ackerman
Someone in Minnesota is driving. It is not Walz or Frey. It is not Greg Bovino or Kristi Noem or Donald Trump, and it won't be Tom Homan. It is the people themselves: the outraged, galvanized, multiethnic working class, who see the imperial boomerang spinning toward their heads, even if they might not use that term. They are not only building power from necessity. They are laying a foundation that, should they choose to, can take the reins of state power by ousting those who either are failing to protect them or who promise to use state power against them.
Alex Pretti, Renee Good, Keith Porter all killed in the streets by ICE.
Heber Sanchaz Domínguez, Victor Manuel Diaz, Parady La, Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz, Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres, Geraldo Lunas Campos dead while in detention centres.
That’s just in this year alone.
Ackerman is hopeful, on the back of recent general strike and community resistance, that people are waking up from the stupor of hypernormalization. It’s going to be an uphill battle given the Democratic Party is more than willing to fund ICE and its barbarism. At least Zohran Mamdani and AOC still have spines.
CJW: Related: Welcome to the American Winter - Robert F. Worth at The Atlantic (eww) (Archive Link)
This piece had tears welling in my eyes. Heartbreak at what is happening to these people that are just trying to live their lives, as well as hope in and love of the solidarity they're sharing.
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CJW: How ICE Is Mimicking 19th Century Slave Patrols - Kahlil Greene at The Preamble
Northup wasn’t targeted by accident. He was targeted because he was Black, and in antebellum America, any Black person could be turned into property if no one was around to stop it. Northup had papers. He was a citizen. It didn’t matter then, and as we are seeing today with the normalization of racial profiling and widespread arrests of citizens by immigration officers, it does not matter now.
A piece comparing ICE not to the Gestapo, but to the slave patrols of the 19th Century. People, Americans in particular, love to make comparisons between the latest American injustices with something that happened elsewhere in the world, but the fact is that America has always been a white supremacist project built on genocide and sustained by the constant degradations of POC (if you haven't seen 13th Amendment it's a very watchable documentary explaining how slavery never really ended in America, it just mutated).
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CJW: Invasion Day 'explosive' device hidden inside Disney Frozen sock, witness says - ABC News
A homemade "fragment bomb" thrown into a crowd at a Perth Invasion Day rally yesterday was hidden in a child's Disney-themed sock, according to a woman who picked it up.
Police alleged the device was packed with chemicals and designed to explode on impact, but it did not detonate.
The attack at Bondi was obviously horrific, and has been used by all the worst people in our society to clamp down on free speech, protest, and the ability to criticise Israel. But an attempted bombing of First Nations people and their supporters at an anti-nationalist rally? It’s fucking crickets. The genocide of Australia’s Indigenous people never ended, and our politicians and pundits simply don’t care about threats to their safety because otherwise they’d do something about the incarceration rates of Indigenous people, particularly children (and I do mean children as well as teenagers), or their worse health outcomes than the rest of the population.
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Just the headlines:
“Rupture, Not Transition”: Canada’s PM, Gramcsi, and World Order by Van Jackson at Un-Diplomatic
Leaked Document Outlines Trump’s Plan to Rule Gaza at Drop Site News
The Doomsday Clock Ticks Closer to Midnight. Does Anyone Care? by Matthew Gault at 404 Media
Tech & Design
DCH: Revealed: Palantir deals with UK government amount to at least £670m – including £15m contract with nuclear weapons agency by Carole Cadwalladr, Charlie Young and Max Colbert at Nerve
EXCLUSIVE Nerve investigation finds Trump ally Peter Thiel's surveillance firm has won at least 34 contracts, including management services for Britain's nuclear deterrent, with MPs warning of 'gaping vulnerability' as US president threatens Nato allies.
A Nerve investigation reveals that Palantir is deeply embedded across the British state, with at least £670m in contracts spanning defence, policing, health, and even the nuclear weapons programme. This is a US surveillance firm takeover of the British state led by Trump-aligned ideologues sitting inside the UK’s most sensitive systems, protected by opacity, untendered deals, and legal frameworks that give Washington ultimate leverage. If you’re looking for a national security vulnerability, this is it.
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DCH: ICE Is Using a Terrifying Palantir App to Determine Where to Raid by Edith Olmstead at The New Republic
According to a user guide obtained by 404 Media, the app provides ICE agents with a digital map populated by potential deportation targets, each of which has their own detailed dossier, including information such as their name, date of birth, Alien Registration Number (a unique identifier assigned by the U.S. government), and a photograph of the target. The dossier also includes a “confidence score” out of 100 as to how certain the app is of the target’s address.
The app is called ELITE (Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement) and reeks to the same sort of targeting algorithms running Israeli genocide tech like Lavender, Where’s Daddy? and Habsora. It doesn’t take much to imagine these “catch lists” turning into kill lists. It was never going to be a killer robot crushing your skull, it was always going to be a masked Proud Boy with a gun and a shitty app with a crappy name straight out of a Marvel comic.
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CJW: Payment processors were against CSAM until Grok started making it - Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge (Archive link)
In the past, payment providers have been aggressive about cutting access to websites thought to have a significant presence of CSAM — or even legal, consensually produced sexual content. In 2020, Mastercard and Visa banned Pornhub after a New York Times article noted the prevalence of CSAM on the platform. In May 2025, Civitai was cut off by its credit card processor because “they do not wish to support platforms that allow AI-generated explicit content,” Civitai CEO Justin Maier told 404 Media. In July 2025, payment processors pressured Valve into removing adult games.
In fact, at times financial institutions have threatened people and platforms because it seems like they didn’t want reputational risk. In 2014, adult performer Eden Alexander’s fundraiser for a hospital stay was shut down by payments company WePay because of a retweet. Also in 2014, JPMorganChase abruptly shut down several porn stars’ bank accounts. In 2021, OnlyFans briefly tried to ban sexually explicit content because banks didn’t like it. (Widespread backlash to the move quickly made OnlyFans reverse itself.) This is legal, consensual sexual content — and it was deemed too hot to handle.
But Musk’s boutique revenge porn and CSAM generator is, apparently, just fine.
As someone who cares about sex workers, artists, writers, and game developers, all of whom have been harmed by the sorts of debanking mentioned in this article, I’m fucking incensed. Musk has to be one of the worst people on the planet, and because capitalism rewards awful behaviour, he’s also the richest. What he’s allowed to happen at Twitter with this CSAM, revenge porn, and generally just shitty misogynistic and invasive imagery should have him thrown in jail. It’s disgusting.
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“The move signals the first potential legislative move against the app after 404 Media first revealed Mobile Fortify’s existence in June based on leaked ICE emails. Since then, 404 Media has covered its continued use against U.S. citizens, the 200 million images it uses, and the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) plan to roll out a version of the app to local law enforcement.” New Legislation Would Rein In ICE’s Facial Recognition App - Joseph Cox at 404 Media (DCH: This is a start but hey maybe stop giving those techno-fascists contracts in the first place.)
“404 Media has obtained material that explains how Tangles and Webloc, two surveillance systems ICE recently purchased, work. Webloc can track phones without a warrant and follow their owners home or to their employer.” Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods - Joseph Cox at 404 Media
How Right Wing Influencers Used AI Slop to Turn Renee Good Into a Meme - Owen Carry at 404 Media
He Leaked the Secrets of a Southeast Asian Scam Compound. Then He Had to Get Out Alive - Andy Greenberg at WIRED (Archive link) - CJW: A thrilling long read about a pig butchering whistle-blower.
Just the headlines:
X shows why stricter tech regulation is necessary - Paris Marx
The State-Led Crackdown on Grok and xAI Has Begun - Maddy Varner at Wired
TikTok has finalized its U.S. joint venture, ending saga over its fate - Cerys Davies at The Los Angeles Times (DCH: Under the thumb of Larry Ellison, best buds of Trump and Netanyahu)
The AI-Powered Web Is Eating Itself - Hamilton Mann at Noema
Amazon discovered a 'high volume' of CSAM in its AI training data but isn't saying where it came from - Anna Washenko at Engadget - CJW: If you’re using image gen, you’re engaging with child pornography. Not directly, but it’s in there, tainting whatever you’re creating. But hey, maybe AI supporters love that.
Society & The Culture
DCH: If You Read This You Are Gay by Will Harrison at The Baffler
In September, when I’d heard about the missives that Tyler Robinson carved into his bullets, I immediately jumped back to being bullied in middle school, thinking, “If you read at all, you are gay.” Even though I had thought—as I rewatched clips of Eldertiktok or searched for clues about Robinson—that I wanted clarity and order and cleanly-applied labels, I was beginning to realize that I needed to reshape my logic and reconsider the meandering, spiraling, oblong forms I admired as a reader, teacher, and writer. These forms insist that you hold contradictions long enough for connections to emerge organically, insist that you reject instant algorithmic associations, insist that you undertake the much slower work of watching one idea complicate another.
The essay uses the viral spectacle around Charlie Kirk’s death to examine how online politics flatten people into incoherent symbols. Influencers, extremists, students, and even universities are caught in the same algorithmic machine, where context collapses, ideology becomes à la carte, and attention replaces understanding. This is not confusion by accident but by design. it’s what happens when platforms reward speed over meaning, and we mistake labels for thought.
Related: The Discourse is a Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack by Joan Westenberg
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CJW: If a Tree Falls - Rosa Lyster at Harper's
In the annals of moronic behavior, driving forty minutes out of your way in the middle of the night in order to secretly and skillfully cut down everybody’s favorite tree does not come up. People seemed to badly want that to be the case, though; they wanted to believe that Carruthers and Graham had done it because they were very stupid, or not thinking at all. I could understand why. The alternative and obvious explanation—that they had thought about it quite extensively—is much more disturbing.
Interesting long read on the Sycamore Gap killing.
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China’s AI Boyfriend Business Is Taking On a Life of Its Own - Johanna Costigan at Wired
Interview: Kim Stanley Robinson, Science Fiction Maestro and Utopian, in 2026 - Sam Matey-Coste at The The Weekly Anthropocene
Just the headlines:
Comic-Con Bans AI Art After Artist Pushback - Matthew Gault at 404media
Labour & Economics
DCH: BOOM: Congress Imposes Public Utility Rules on UnitedHealth, CVS, and Cigna by Matt Stoller
We know how problematic these corporate PBMs are because when they get replaced by public versions in state Medicaid programs, the results have been terrific. In Kentucky and Ohio, there were dramatic savings for patients and taxpayers, higher revenue for independent pharmacies, and an expansion of the pharmacy network available to patients. But state-level reform only affects Medicaid, a program for low income residents. The health care programs most Americans use are Federally regulated.
This was legislation that would have been passed months ago if not for Elon Musk’s meddling. And as Stoller himself says there are still gaps in the new legislation but it’s at least a very strong step in the right direction. Fuck PBMs.
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“Right now, it appears the overwhelming majority of billionaires have chosen to stay in California past the Jan. 1 deadline,” said Suzanne Jimenez, chief of staff at SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West. “Only a very small percentage left before the deadline, despite weeks of Chicken Little talking points claiming a modest tax would trigger a mass departure.” Explaining California’s billionaire tax: The proposals, the backlash and the exodus - Queenie Wong at The Los Angeles Times
Death of an Indian tech worker - Parth MN at Rest of World
Just the headlines:
Workday sued for AI-powered hiring discrimination - David Gerard at Pivot to AI
Data workers are being forced to work on-site during earthquakes and typhoons - Anita Zhang at Rest of World
Movies + TV
LZ - Prisoners (2013)
I've seen so many snippets of this movie recently on Instagram that I decided to watch it. Dennis Villeneuve is a great director and, besides the recent sci-fi blockbusters, I really enjoyed Incendies. Prisoners has that feeling of detective movies from the 90s/early 2000s with a fucked up detective full of quirks and a riddling crime with symbolisms. I love how Villeneuve builds up the tension and sweeps the rug, especially with sort of open endings.
You just clench your jaw and stop breathing for a while when something bad happens, something that spoils the whole plan, and then boom, the movie is over and the ending is as gut-wrenching as it was in Incendies. I guess in Incendies it's worse than in Prisoners, but still… the silent ending and the clues it leaves you to guess what could happen are just pure nihilism and a sense of defeat, no matter what you do. An almost Sisyphean feeling – life sucks, but you try your best, but all in all you're gonna die anyway. I love stories like that!
MJW: I watched Prisoners for the first time two or so weeks ago, and was surprised at how perfect a thriller it is. Everyone is great in it, it was exactly dark and taut enough. I was also delighted at the nihilistic, choose-your-own-adventure nature of the ending.
The Memes
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