nothing here but murmurations and alien love

issue 239 - 26th November, 2023

CJW: Welcome to another issue, friends and fellow-travellers. What a week, huh. Hope you're getting through these closing months of the year alright. Take care of yourself and those close to you.

I just want to say thanks to you all for sticking around, and a special thanks to those readers who are able to support us. Every bit helps.

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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. Middle-aged greying goth. 

• Corey J. White (CJW) - Author, sin-eater, bad milk blood robot.

• Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Journalist, MA in semiotics, and PhD in Arts. Sci-fi writer, futurology researcher and essayist. @lidiazuin

Climate Change & The Environment

DCH: Burning Coal To Survive Climate Change by Stephen Robert Miller at Noema

At least, that’s how the countries’ leaders have sold Maitree and the steady industrialization of coastal Bangladesh to the rice farmers and fishermen being elbowed out to make room for economic progress. In a scene that’s playing out across the developing world, Bangladesh faces a terrible paradox: It needs money to pay for the consequences of climate-related disasters and, so far, the fastest way to get it is by continuing to develop fossil fuels, which exacerbates the very disasters they are trying to evade.

A good piece about the unique and severe climate risk factors and costly climate adaptation that beset Bangladesh and the catch-22 that puts them in with ramping up coal production. 

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• The floating desalination machines powered by the waves - BBC News (via Sentiers)

• "Humanity is barreling in the wrong direction. Unless nations get serious about increasing their ambitions, the world is on track to wildly overshoot the Paris goals, warming somewhere between 2.5 and 2.9 degrees Celsius, the report notes. That would be catastrophic, given the effects we’re already seeing at 1.1 degrees of warming, and considering that mere fractions of a degree add to the pain." - Emissions Should Be Plummeting. Instead, They’re Breaking Dangerous New Records - Matt Simon at Wired

• Tesla solar panels were going to change the world. What happened? By Nate Berner at The Financial Times

Geopolitics & Empire

CJW: Israel’s war on the people of Palestine continues (current truce not withstanding), with more civilian casualties and more dead children, our so-called leaders continue to demonstrate heartlessness (and spinelessness) in the face of ethnic cleansing, people across the global north are losing jobs and opportunities for daring to speak out against genocide, and we're seeing ever-more hateful propaganda and misinformation coming from state, media, and social media actors.

One thing I saw on social media that I haven’t seen outlined elsewhere, is that the people who are so vocal about Hamas’ hostages don’t seem to consider or care why Israel even has hostages to swap. These Palestinians have been held since before October 7th; their imprisonment has nothing to do with the war and everything to do with the system of apartheid they are forced to live under.

Anyway. All of this is to say that I’ve got fewer links this issue because a fortnightly newsletter isn’t the best format for keeping track of such a dire and ever-shifting situation, but hopefully you’re continuing to get your coverage from places that don’t uncritically report the latest bullshit from Israeli and US state sources.

• Biden’s Legacy Should Be Forever Haunted by Names of Gaza’s Dead - Jeremy Scahill at The Intercept

Over the past month, Biden has cast doubt on the extent of Palestinian civilian deaths, defended Netanyahu’s violent extremist agendas, and made clear that the U.S. position amounts to this: collectively punishing Palestinians for the actions of Hamas falls under the doctrine of “self-defense.” Biden has stood by Israel as government officials have openly described an agenda of ethnically cleansing Palestinians, proclaiming a “Gaza Nakba,” threatening to do to Beirut what Israel has done to Gaza, labeling hospitals and ambulances “legitimate military targets,” and accusing U.N. workers of being Hamas and journalists of being “accomplices in crimes against humanity.” More than 100 U.N. workers and at least 40 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since October 7. Approximately one in 200 Palestinians have died in Gaza since the start of Israel’s attacks.

Covers the history of Biden's support for Israeli crimes, though of course the administration is starting to feel the pressure as the civilian death toll mounts.

• Abolition.Feminism.Now and Free Palestine: Fighting for the rights of all oppressed peoples - Amy McQuire

But what is happening right now in Gaza, and throughout occupied Palestine – is unprecedented, the brutality so intense, and the silencing so fierce, that it feels incomprehensible. And yet we must comprehend it. I was honoured to share a stage earlier this year with Palestinian writer Saree Makdisi at the Adelaide Writer’s Festival, which was targeted by Zionist lobbies after Jewish Australian publisher Louise Adler programmed an extensive line up of Palestinian voices. Earlier this month Saree wrote: “What we are witnessing, in other words, is perhaps the first fusion of old-school colonial and genocidal violence with advanced state-of-the-art heavy weapons; a twisted amalgamation of the 17th century and the 21st...What’s worse, if anything could be worse, is the near total indifference on display by so many in and out of government in the Western world.”

A fantastic piece drawing parallels between the oppression of Palestinians and the forms the genocide against them has taken with the oppression and genocide of Aboriginal Australians, which is an incredibly important point, and one that any Australian standing in solidarity with Palestinians needs to recognise. She also points out that Queensland's "Aboriginal Protection Act" was in fact the inspiration for Apartheid South Africa. Which is not surprising, but is something I didn't actually realise. First apartheid and more recently offshore and indefinite detention of refugees - Australia sure knows how to innovate when it comes to racism and white supremacy.

A genocide is committed when there is a forcible amnesia of history: in which the histories of these blood-stained places we walk on are mythologised to make settlers and the colony seem victorious, brave, and benevolent. Palestinian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah has written of this as “illegal mourning”, in which Palestinian histories of the Nakba are silenced in what she calls an “Israeli version of terra nullius”. This is true, ever so true, of this place: in which there are national celebrations on our day of mourning, on our nakba – January 26. A day of invasion canonised by the colonisers as “Australia Day”.

• These Evangelicals Are Cheering the Gaza War as the End of the World - Talia Lavin at Rolling Stone 

• Progressive Governments Across Latin America Are Condemning Israel - Hilary Goodfriend at Jacobin

• Al-Shifa Hospital, Hamas’s Tunnels, and Israeli Propaganda - Jeremy Scahill at The Intercept 

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• "As the United States was beginning its forever wars in 2002 and 2003, the State Department counted a total of just nine terrorist attacks in Africa. This year, militant Islamist groups on that continent have, according to the Pentagon, already conducted 6,756 attacks. In other words, since the United States ramped up its counterterrorism operations in Africa, terrorism has spiked 75,000 percent." - In Africa, the Legacy of the US War on Terror Is Death and Chaos by Nick Turse at Jacobin. Related, and also by Turse: A Drone Strike Killed a Woman and Child. Pentagon Found No Fault. 

• Secret Intelligence Documents Show Global Reach of India’s Death Squads - Murtaza Hussain, Ryan Grim at The Intercept

Just the headlines:

• LexisNexis Sold Powerful Spy Tools to U.S. Customs and Border Protection - Sam Biddle at The Intercept

Science & Space

• “The moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn appear to have subsurface oceans — tantalizing targets in the search for life beyond Earth. But it’s not clear why these seas exist at all.”

Tech & Design

MJW: TikTok Says It's Not the Algorithm, Teens Are Just Pro-Palestine by Jules Roscoe at Motherboard

TikTok has come under GOP fire in recent weeks after the app showed an apparent spike in pro-Palestine content after the IDF began its bombing campaign of Gaza following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. Republican politicians have publicly claimed that the company is intentionally promoting pro-Palestine content with the goal of “brainwashing our [American] youth” into supporting Hamas. But the proliferation of pro-Palestine content on TikTok isn’t due to the app’s algorithm, the company stated in a press release on Monday. Rather, it claimed that teenagers simply tend to support Palestine more. “Attitudes among young people skewed toward Palestine long before TikTok existed,” the release stated. “Support for Israel (as compared to sympathy for Palestine) has been lower among younger Americans for some time.”

The youth are so weird but many of them are also kind, and I love them for that.

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LZ: GPTarot.ai

A friend of mine developed this application that uses generative AI (aka ChatGPT) to make tarot readings and I just love it and think everyone should try it! It's a bit generic as it uses only major arcana, but it's still fun.

MJW: omg, this IS fun!

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DCH: Column: OpenAI’s board had safety concerns. Big Tech obliterated them in 48 hours by Brian Merchant at The Los Angeles Times

The working narrative now seems to be that Altman’s expansionist mind-set and his drive to commercialize AI — and perhaps there’s more we don’t know yet on this score — clashed with the Sutskever faction, who had become concerned that the company they co-founded was moving too fast. At least two of the board’s members are aligned with the so-called effective altruism movement, which sees AI as a potentially catastrophic force that could destroy humanity.

So to summarise the EA dominated board of directors didn’t think Altman took their concerns about Big Tech AI domination and Terminators seriously enough so they ousted him. Then MSFT CEO blew them up and got Altman reinstated and a dummy board put in place.

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• "Companies that provide Big Tech with AI data-labeling services are inadvertently hiring young teens to work on their platforms, often exposing them to traumatic content." - Underage Workers Are Training AI - Niamh Rowe at Wired 

• “A.I.’s prominent role in Argentina’s campaign and the political debate it has set off underscore the technology’s growing prevalence and show that, with its expanding power and falling cost, it is now likely to be a factor in many democratic elections around the globe.”

• Big Tech on Trial: Is Google’s Reckoning Finally Here? By Matt Stoller 

• Has Elon Musk finally gone too far? By Paris Marx

Just the headlines: 

• People are speaking with ChatGPT for hours, bringing 2013’s Her closer to reality - Benj Edwards at Ars Technica (via Sentiers)

• Big Tech Is Lobbying Hard to Keep Copyright Law Favorable to AI by Freddy Brewster at Jacobin

• Giant AI Platform Introduces ‘Bounties’ for Deepfakes of Real People by Emanuel Maiberg at 404 media (DCH: non-consensual AI porn funded by techno-optimists Andressen-Horowitz)

Society & The Culture

MJW: A Hiker and a Terrier Climbed a Peak. The Dog Came Home 72 Days Later by Frederick Dreier at Outside

> On October 30, a hunter on horseback discovered Moore’s body. Standing nearby was a small white dog—it was Finney, and she was alive. When news trickled through the community that Finney had survived 72 days in the backcountry, she became an overnight superstar. When Holby got the news, she felt a potent blend of grief and amazement. Happy to have her dog home, but crushed by the loss of her husband. “I was in disbelief and frankly still am that Rich isn’t here,” she says. “Finney coming home was otherworldly.” Holby and her son, Cesar, picked Finney up at a local animal hospital on October 31. Finney usually weighs ten pounds, but when Holby got her back she had dwindled to less than half that. Her ribs shone through her abdomen, and a deep gash on her nose was coated in scabs and dirt. Since then, nursing Finney back to health has become a full-time job for Holby, who is 78.

I mean, loudly crying face emoji, right???

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• “But capital is always seeking new sites to redevelop. In Appalachia, the prison-industrial complex has quickly and thoroughly filled the void. As Brett Story reminds readers in her pathbreaking Prison Land, “prison growth in Central Appalachia is part of a dramatic trend in rural prison siting across the United States . . . in communities where industrial decline and soaring poverty rates render land cheap and residents eager for new forms of employment, detention spaces are commonly pitched as economic development projects.” In Appalachia, many of those detention spaces are built atop the abandoned mine lands of the nearly defunct coal industry.” 

• “It's because these guys read those cyberpunk novels and mistook a dystopia for a road map. They're rich enough to bend reality to reflect their desires. But we're not futurists, we're entertainers! We like to spin yarns about the Torment Nexus because it's a cool setting for a noir detective story, not because we think Mark Zuckerberg or Andreesen Horowitz should actually pump several billion dollars into creating it. And that's why I think you should always be wary of SF writers bearing ideas.”

• “At the start of The Matrix, Neo retrieves some minidiscs from a hollowed-out copy of Simulacra and Simulation — that’s what cyberpunk is, hollowed out from its inspirations.” 

Health, Cooking, and Related

CJW: Invisible Landscapes - Jennifer Brandel at Orion Magazine 

The structure of the interstitium is fractal; it exhibits the same pattern at various scales. It’s unified. While scientists had seen glimpses of this mesh-like network before, they had not realized that it connected the entire body — just underneath the skin, and wrapping around organs, arteries, capillaries, veins, head to toes. It’s juicy. It moves four times more fluid through the body than the vascular system does. The fluid isn’t blood, it’s a clear and “pre-lymphatic” substance, carrying within it nutrients, information, and new kinds of cells that are only just being discovered. It’s also a conduit for cancer spread. Turns out that cancer cells moving through the interstitium’s channels are fast.

In short: it’s very important. And it’s wild that, although the interstitium can be seen with the naked eye during surgery, it wasn’t really noticed until now. There is an entire scientific revolution set to unfurl as more studies are peer-reviewed and more science books and classrooms integrate its existence into their cosmologies. We are at the beginning of it all.

This was my first time hearing about the recently-discovered organ (?!) the interstitium, so I assume it'll be a first for a lot of people reading too. Though this piece is as much about the interstitium as a metaphor as it is about the bodily system itself, and about the usefulness of these metaphors for interconnectedness (forests, mycelial networks, etc) in changing the ways we think and changing the ways we approach the problems of our current and coming moment/s.

Just the headlines:

• The First Crispr Medicine Just Got Approved - Emily Mullen at Wired

Labour & Economics

DCH: Nobody Wants Their Job to Rule Their Lives Anymore by Eloise Hendy at Vice

The anti-work debate is often dominated by buzzy internet trends – “quiet quitting”, “lazy girl jobs” etc – but what we’re really witnessing is a massive social shift. Between 1981 and 2022, the percentage of the British public who said it would be a good thing if less importance was placed on work rose from 26 percent to 43 percent, according to the World Values Survey. Speaking about the findings, Professor Bobby Duffy, director of the Policy Institute at King's College London, said they signalled a “steady drift towards a greater focus on getting work-life balance right”, with “people less likely to think work should be prioritised over spare time, that hard work leads to success, or that not working makes people lazy.”

The pandemic opened up Pandora’s Box. And once all the monsters and bad things had left it apparently work-life balance was left behind. Or something like that. 

The battlefields are already moving from back to the office style arguments. The 4 day work week is the new warfront. But maybe soon we can all be working part-time for full-time pay? 

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• "A black-market trade in delivery app accounts allows underage teenagers to sign up as riders, the BBC has found. The family of a 17-year-old who died while working as a Deliveroo rider - despite 18 being the minimum age - say the company is "unaccountable"."

Just the headlines:

• The UAW’s Next Fight: Organizing Nonunion Companies Like Tesla by Alex N. Press jacobin

Books

LZ: Septology, by Jon Fosse

A trilogy of books containing seven interconnected stories, this was the work that granted Jon Fosse a Nobel prize. And when you read it, you can totally see why. I think I mentioned the first or second book before, but now I finished the trilogy and I can only echo what the author himself said: his books should be read not for the plot, but for the experience. However, even the plot is interesting. It follows the dynamic of a doppelganger novel, in some ways, but you are always wondering if the doubles are really doubles, existing in physical reality, or if the narrator is schizophrenic. Spoiler alert: we won't know by the end of it. Or at least Fosse won't give that for free. However, there are a few interviews with him that help with connecting the dots. You find out that the narrator, Asle, is basically Jon: in physical appearance and in terms of his experiences in life. Like Asle, Jon also converted to Christianism after marrying. Like Asle, Jon also started wearing black velvet jackets. Like Asle, Jon also has a cottage in Dylgja.

Movies + TV

CJW: Netflix Killed 'The OA.' Now Its Creators Are Back With a Show About Tech’s Ubiquity - Angela Watercutter at Wired

Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij have a new mini-series coming, so expect me to write something about the show after it ends in December. This is about their new show A Murder at the end of the World, and the cancellation of their previous one The OA.

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MJW: Bodies on Netflix

This combines two of my fav genres: British crime dramas and time-weirdness sci-fi. It’s based on the DC/Vertigo graphic novel of the same name, written by Si Spencer and illustrated by Tula Lotay, Meghan Hetrick, Dean Ormston, and Phil Winslade. Set over four timelines (1890, 1941, 2023 and 2053) it’s about the discovery of one body in each era. But it’s the same body. And in one of them he’s not a body - injured but not dead. I’m half way through, but I am pretty into it. Yes, it’s called Bodies, but it’s about so much more. And the 2023 ‘event’ that causes a creepy, shiny future Britain? What IS IT??? Anyway, the series better not fail me in the last eps.

Podcasts

MJW: The Polyester Podcast

This is a podcast about arts and culture through a feminist lens, presented by Ione Gamble. I have particularly liked the eps ‘Selena Gomez, Amy Schumer, & the Problem with Celebrities Getting Political Online, and ‘Live at the Barbican: How Feminism and Climate Change are Irrevocably linked’. 

Art

CJW: Søren Solkær's Enigmatic Photographs Capture Flocks of Starlings in Evening Skies - Colossal

Since 2017, Danish photographer Søren Solkær has traveled Europe in search of the mesmerizing phenomenon of starling murmurations. Occurring before dusk during spring and autumn, cool weather and an instinct for safety gathers thousands of the black songbirds into enormous, undulating clouds. Solkær captures these enigmatic evening shows in his ongoing series Black Sun, and a survey of these works opens at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle, Washington, next month.

Follow the link for more photos. They are incredible.

The Process

MJW: Other people who lost the ability to write in the past few years - are you starting to get it back? A few weeks ago a pal I haven’t seen for ages asked me how writing was going. I said, ‘I don’t really write any more,’ and for the first time it didn’t hurt to say it. Maybe that was some kind of blocker, because I’ve actually been writing, which means I’m also starting to be able to be alone with my thoughts long enough to think of what to write. If you got the block at the beginning of the pandemic, I hope it’s coming back for you, too. Maybe if you try not to let it hurt you any more, it might be able to smash on through.

The Self-Promotion

LZ: Reproductive Rights and Alien Love in Octavia Butler's "Bloodchild"

I just noticed that I haven't translated this essay that I published a couple of years ago. It is about Butler's novelette Bloodchild and how it tackles topics such as gender and pregnancy, loving a completely different species than human, and how science fiction can be a means to philosophise about these big questions.

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MJW: I’ve been illustrating articles (as Mia Walsch) on the Tryst Blog pretty regularly this year. Here are some of my new pieces, and links to the articles, which are also rad.

The Memes