nothing here but orchestrated killing
issue 296 - 17th August, 2025
CJW: Welcome to another edition of nothing here, we’re happy to have you. Lots of really interesting stuff this issue, 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, giggle.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer, full-time goth and metalhead.
Climate Change & The Environment
CJW: Animal Architecture: In Conversation - Places Journal
JH: Much of the discourse on sustainability is about tightening the building envelope and separating inside from outside, humans from animals and plants. That’s a western discourse. When I was in Cuba — and this would be the case across the Global South — if I were to say, “I’m an architect and I work on incorporating animal habitat into building structures,” they’d say, “There’s no need for an architect who does that, because that is just what happens.” Some buildings I saw in Cuba in 2023 (for example, on tobacco farms) had thatched roofs, and thatch is where barn swallows live. No one talks about this as “animal architecture”; a thatched roof is a human architectural modality.
Architecture academics — primarily in the Global North — are putting forward the argument for multispecies design, or the inclusion of nonhumans in design, as a counter-discourse to received thinking, but it is a western-centric discourse, a Euro-centric discourse, a North American discourse, just as the dominant discourse of tightening the envelope is. Sometimes an argument for multispecies design is a state of exception to architectural business as usual, a mode of working that has to be defined and debated. Sometimes such animal-friendly design is a vernacular condition. I’m interested in thinking through these differences.
A really interesting conversation about animal architecture and everything that entails. I think this represents the sort of future we desperately need if we're to adapt quickly enough to avoid climate change's worst outcomes.
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Just the headlines:
UK Asks People to Delete Emails In Order to Save Water During Drought by Matthew Gault at 404media
Butter made from carbon tastes like the real thing, gets backing from Bill Gates at CBS News
Geopolitics & Empire
DCH: Microsoft storing Israeli intelligence trove used to attack Palestinians by Yuval Abraham at 972 Magazine
In a meeting at Microsoft’s headquarters in Seattle in late 2021, the then-head of Unit 8200, Yossi Sariel, won the support of the tech giant’s CEO, Satya Nadella, to develop a customized and segregated area within Azure that has facilitated the army’s mass surveillance project. According to the sources, Sariel approached Microsoft because the scope of Israel’s intelligence on millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is so vast that it cannot be stored on military servers alone.
Yuval Abraham continues to hold the powerful to account for their role in the ongoing genocide in Gaza by Israel. Nadella is a liar with blood on his hands. If you’re able, boycott as much of Microsoft as you can.
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US-backed aid distribution points in Gaza are sites of orchestrated killing - Doctors Without Borders
“Barely an hour before he was killed, al-Sharif warned of the impending Israeli invasion. “If this madness does not end, Gaza will be reduced to ruins, its people’s voices silenced, their faces erased—and history will remember you as silent witnesses to a genocide you chose not to stop,” he wrote. “Silence is complicity.”” The Israeli Assassination of Journalist Anas al-Sharif and Five Colleagues in Gaza City by Abdel Qader Sabbah at dropsitenews
Just the headlines:
The U.S. Army Is Testing AI Controlled Ground Drones Near a Border with Russia by Matthew Gault at 404media
Tech & Design
DCH: AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified by Ashley Belanger at Ars Technica
If the appeals court denies the petition, Anthropic argued, the emerging company may be doomed. As Anthropic argued, it now "faces hundreds of billions of dollars in potential damages liability at trial in four months" based on a class certification rushed at "warp speed" that involves "up to seven million potential claimants, whose works span a century of publishing history," each possibly triggering a $150,000 fine.
Burn them to the fucking ground.
CJW: They've been fucking around (with people's lives, which is the worst part), so I hope they start to find out.
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HTML Zip Bomb - CJW: A HTML bomb to take out LLM web scrapers who visit your site.
A flirty Meta AI bot invited a retiree to meet. He never made it home. - Jeff Horwitz at Reuters - CJW: I like how the headline implies that the AI bonked him over the head and killed him.
“But these two states’ laws leave out an important condition: Unlike the laws passed in other states, they don’t state that this applies only to sites with “33.3 percent” or one-third “harmful” material. That could mean Wyoming and South Dakota would require a huge number of sites to use age verification because they host any material they deem harmful to minors, not just porn sites.” Wyoming and South Dakota Age Verification Laws Could Include Huge Parts of the Internet by Samantha Cole at 404media (DCH: as Cory Doctorow right says this is all bullshit)
Just the headlines:
Meta just hired a far right influencer as an 'AI bias advisor' by Taylor Lorenz
Hundreds of Former Israeli Spies Are Working in Big Tech, Database Shows by Murtaza Hussain at dropsitenews
How much money do Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Pinterest, and Snapchat make from you? at Sherwood (DCH: tl;dr: the last 3 make about $2.40-$2.80. Meta makes 10x that at $26)
Monopoly Round-Up: BOOM! Google Finally Loses Its App Store Monopoly by Matt Stoller
Society & The Culture
CJW: The Influencing Machine - Nyx Land
Most normal people who are used to having a stable sense of reality that is affirmed by their peers, by culture and the state, are not ready for algorithmic LLM slop brainworms that are literally tailor-made for normies because LLMs are designed to return a statistically probable (i.e. lowest common denominator) response to inputs. But none of this could have been possible if the internet had not ended up being weaponized by capital in the beginning of the 21st century to groom an entire civilization into not only desiring their own repression but to actively be complicit in it. Instead of simply choosing to not use the torture nexus because using it makes you feel bad, the passive consumer mentality of capital when it locked into the internet economy of data and information created a dystopia of psychosis and mind control on a massive scale. Influencing machines, a common schizophrenic "delusion" that was first identified in the early 20th century, turned out to be a prophecy of torture nexus that the System has created for us to spend our last days in.
What a barn-burner of a piece. Don't know that I agree with every point, but on the whole it's entirely on the money.
A second golden age of internet piracy is upon us if only we kill the consumer in our heads and download Soulseek.
Close this world, open the next.
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LZ: Is fitness culture making us sad and boring? - Laura Pitcher for Dazed
I saw this article on Instagram, and people were already furious in the comments. I think most of them didn't even read the text, because it's pretty reasonable and interesting. As someone who had dealt with eating disorders and exercising for compensation, it hit home. Also, I have met different people who would fit the same description: avoiding social interaction for the sake of working out, using their bodies as trophies, and their discipline (or obsession) as an excuse to feel superior, or to ultimately avoid emotions. I have been reading a lot about attachment theory, and this last point makes so much sense, especially when you consider the sort of people who are on dating apps these days. The gym is not only somewhere you go for your own health, but it's a culture, a personality, a lifestyle. Shirtless pictures are not just a thirst trap; they're a statement of what's a priority in their lives.
At the same time, the declaration of this guy who was obsessed with the number six and making it a core thing in his life also made so much sense to me. Even now that I'm recovering from my ED, I have found in intermittent fasting a sense of control that allows me to organize my life in a way that simply “living” wasn't enough. Having routines, time schedules, predictability, and certainty is such an important thing these days when you can't even fathom what's coming next – a world war, an economic crisis, a lay-off, sudden death? The only thing you have control over is your body and yourself, though barely, so one might as well rely on these artificial life buoys.
Still, it's interesting to see how one fitness influencer was candid about her own experience: she spent hours at the gym, going twice a day, because her life was lonely and miserable, not the other way around. I wish more people were honest like that, and also self-conscious.
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LZ: Missouri Nun Calls Sister Wilhelmina's 'Incorrupt' Body a 'Miracle'
This was actually reported last year, and investigations were supposedly conducted for why the body of the nun had not decayed in 4 years since she was deceased and buried. According to the Kansas diocese, the investigation didn't find anything abnormal in the soil or in the body to prove why not even her clothes were decomposed. However, the Catholic Church apparently doesn't have a protocol to tell what can categorize a body as incorruptible or not.
In the past, some religious people who had their bodies found to be incorruptible were turned into saints, but I don't know if this is still a practice these days, although proving that the person performed a miracle is one of the requirements… so… not decomposing is sort of a miracle, if they don't find any substances that could have led to the preservation. It is said, though, that Wilhelmina's body was covered with wax, something that many other incorruptible saints and bodies also shared in common, so maybe that's the reason? In any case, people were being invited to see the body and even touch it, if they wanted. It's not only raves that are going back to medieval times, it's a whole trend!
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LZ: GnosticMaiden - Instagram profile
Social media sucks but sometimes you find people who make it worthy (partially). This is a very interesting profile managed by a researcher whose focus is on occultism, paganism and Gnosticism. She posts very informative content making differentiation between, for example, what is occult and what is pagan, how satanism is not a pagan tradition of the different forms of satanism. She has some critical perspectives too, so it’s not just a collection of “fun facts” but also a commentary on these topics. I have the feeling she has some beef with LaVey or how he made satanism sound to common sense as a synonym for hedonism only, but well, take a look at the posts and see if that’s your jam. :)
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The great myth of empire collapse - Richard Fisher at Aeon - CJW: An interesting essay on how the collapse of empire doesn't necessarily mean horror and ruin for regular people. You might find it… encouraging.
Philosophy in prison is a rowdy, honest and hopeful provocation - Nigel Warburton at Aeon - CJW: This is great. More of this.
Just the headlines:
Health, Cooking, and Related
DCH: Guy Gives Himself 19th Century Psychiatric Illness After Consulting With ChatGPT by Rosie Thomas at 404media
A man gave himself bromism, a psychiatric disorder that has not been common for many decades, after asking ChatGPT for advice and accidentally poisoning himself, according to a case study published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Maybe the killer use case for AI is increasing Darwin Award cases?
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DCH: Canada Is Killing Itself by Elaina Plott Calabro at The Atlantic
When Canada’s Parliament in 2016 legalized the practice of euthanasia—Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAID, as it’s formally called—it launched an open-ended medical experiment. One day, administering a lethal injection to a patient was against the law; the next, it was as legitimate as a tonsillectomy, but often with less of a wait. MAID now accounts for about one in 20 deaths in Canada—more than Alzheimer’s and diabetes combined—surpassing countries where assisted dying has been legal for far longer.
Emphasis mine. We’ve talked about this in the newsletter before and the terrifying truth of it all is that the poor are disproportionately choosing to end their lives to avoid financial ruin–even in a country with decent healthcare like Canada.
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CJW: AI Eroded Doctors’ Ability to Spot Cancer Within Months in Study - Bloomberg - at Bloomberg (via Dr Damien Williams)
AI helped health professionals to better detect pre-cancerous growths in the colon, but when the assistance was removed, their ability to find tumors dropped by about 20% compared with rates before the tool was ever introduced, according to findings published Wednesday.
[...]
The AI in the study probably prompted doctors to become over-reliant on its recommendations, “leading to clinicians becoming less motivated, less focused, and less responsible when making cognitive decisions without AI assistance,” the scientists said in the paper.
I am entirely unsurprised, because it seems like 99% of people using AI do it as an excuse to be able to switch off their higher cognitive functions, but I'm still disappointed with the way these tools have been pitched, rolled out, and utilised (ie almost exclusively as a cost-cutting exercise), because these sorts of specialist medical use-cases were one of the few areas where I thought AI might actually be useful.
Fuck it all. Butlerian Jihad approaches.
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MJW: Mary Had Schizophrenia—Then Suddenly She Didn’t - Rachel Aviv for The New Yorker
In May, a month after Mary finished chemotherapy, Christine and Angie asked a psychiatrist at the hospital to examine her. Christine said, “The psychiatrist was, like, ‘Why have you called me here? I don’t understand. She has no symptoms.’ And we were, like, ‘Yeah, that’s the reason we’ve called you here.’ ”
Christine had the same feeling in her body that she’d had when her mother first became ill—the sense that something at Mary’s core had changed. She tried to get the doctors to grasp the scale of her mother’s recovery. By the summer, her cancer was in remission. She hadn’t taken antipsychotics for months, and yet “her psychotic symptoms are gone,” a doctor wrote. Christine told the doctors, “She had a twenty-year psychiatric history. Have you heard of this? Could any of her medications have caused this?” She spoke with a neurologist at the hospital, but he didn’t have an answer. Omid Heravi, one of Mary’s oncologists, didn’t understand what had happened, either. “Medicine is very specialized—we don’t get involved in other fields,” he said.
On the possible medical causes of some kinds of schizophrenia, and what it Might mean for treatment.
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“Four and a half years ago, fresh off the success of Operation Warp Speed, mRNA vaccines were widely considered—as President Donald Trump said in December 2020—a “medical miracle.” Last week, the United States government decidedly reversed that stance when Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. canceled nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of grants and contracts for mRNA-vaccine research.” COVID Revenge Is Supercharging the Anti-Vaccine Agenda by Katherine J. Wu at The Atlantic (DCH: Just as mRNA vaccines for HIV treatment were going into testing as well)
Just the headlines:
Veterans Are “Guinea Pigs” in Trump’s First National Abortion Ban Experiment by Jessica Washington at The Intercept
Beyond Dobbs: How Abortion Bans Enforce State-Sanctioned Violence at The Intercept
Americans get more than half their calories from ultraprocessed foods, CDC report says at the AP
Labour & Economics
DCH: Corporations Want to Prevent Workers From Leaving Their Jobs by Luke Goldstein at jacobin
These are all examples of how millions of workers across the country are increasingly finding themselves bound by Training Repayment Agreement Provisions (TRAPs), a new form of “stay-or-pay” contract that indebts employees to their bosses. Often inserted into contracts without workers’ knowledge, these restrictive labor covenants turn employer-sponsored job training and education programs into conditional loans that must be paid back — sometimes at a premium — if employees leave before a set date.
Emphasis mine. Only in America would a 21st century version of indentured servitude be branding unironically as a TRAP.
CJW: Jesus, they’re not even trying to hide what an anti-worker (and anti-human) dystopia they’re creating.
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DCH: What Trump’s Decertification of Federal Employee Unions Means by Marc Kagan at Jacobin
As Hamilton Nolan has pointed out, this is 2.5 percent of all American unionized workers — making this “by far the largest single action of union-busting in American history.” The Center for American Progress estimates that Trump’s executive order covers four-fifths of all federal workers represented by unions. An earlier federal order to strip almost 50,000 Transportation Security Administration workers of their contractual bargaining rights is temporarily on hold.
What passes for the labor movement in the US should be taking to the streets over this but nary a peep.
Books
LZ - Medieval Bodies, by Jack Hartnell
I haven't finished this book yet, but it's already a delight! What I wanted to share is not really a review of the book but something that I learned while reading it and that seemed too interesting to me. It's the story of the nun-turned-saint Clara of Montefalco. She was an Augustinian nun who used to say she literally had Jesus in her heart. We know these days people use the word “literally” incorrectly, but Clara meant it.
After she died, her body stayed intact for almost 20 days, despite the hot weather of a summery Italy. Fellow nuns decided to open her body and preserve her heart as a relic, but Francesca, one of the nuns, had some sort of insight and thought… no! Let’s open her heart and see if Jesus is there, like she said.
Well, turns out Jesus was indeed there — in the form of a cross, the nails, Longinus’ spear, and other items related to the Passion, made of the very substance of her heart (flesh). The heart is still preserved until these days, though blackened… either due to the conservative substances used or to the holiness of Clara who, eventually, was canonised.
Her reliquary is stored in a convent in Italy that bears her name. I'm not sure if people can visit and see it, possibly not, but I would definitely love to take a look.
Movies + TV
MJW: I was laid up this past fortnight, first with a sprained ankle, then covid (fml, right?), and watched more movies than I can count, most of them terrible pieces of ‘content’. One thing I was drawn to was Liam Neeson’s action thriller oeuvre mainly because there are just so many of them, plus he’s in the media a lot rn due to his relationship with Pamela Anderson and I’m finding him a little delightful. Highlights include: Non-Stop–an action thriller set on a plane where some guys set Neeson up to take the fall for a hijacking and he takes matters into his own hands, Unknown–an action thriller set in Berlin where Neeson wakes up from a coma to find that someone has stolen his life and he takes matters into his own hands, and The Commuter–an action thriller set on a train where mild-mannered insurance dude Neeson is offered a hundred grand to locate a stranger on his commuter train for some shady types and takes matters into his own hands. The others were less memorable and have all blurred into one long action thriller where Liam Neeson takes matters into his own hands. Four fever-ridden stars!
Music
LZ - Malicorne
I learned about these French folk revivalists on Instagram. They formed the band in the 70s and broke up a few times during the years, but the main singers were actually a couple — Gabriel Yacoub sadly passed away last January.
I’ve been listening to folk music more often these days, especially to set the mood when I’m reading one of my current books — Green Man: The Archetype of Oneness with the Earth. I found it in the discount shelves at Watkins in London, which is a bookshop known for selling occult books (and sometimes they even have a tarot reader available there).
Well, but back to Malicorne, I love how they blend old instruments with electric guitars and a more melodic or even melodramatic take with violins. If you like Garmana, I think you'll appreciate their music too.
Art
MJW: Love these sensual, hypnotic pieces by er0sphere.
The Memes
