nothing here but our contaminated futures

issue 206 - 8th January, 2022

CJW: Happy New Year, and thanks for joining us again. Whatever holiday/s you might celebrate at the end of the year, I hope they were joyous and restorative. Last week we shared a NYE bonus - Strange Days: Happy New Millennium, on Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 film.

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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, apocalypse witch, goth aunt.

• Corey J. White (CJW) - Author, podcaster, sin-eater.

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

Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: Life in Fukushima is a glimpse into our contaminated future - Maxime Polleri at Aeon

In Fukushima, I found a society collapsing under the weight of industrial pollution. But that’s only part of the story. I also found toxic solidarity.

Rather than giving up, Tanizaki and other farmers have taken matters into their own hands, embracing novel practices for living alongside toxic pollution. These practices go far beyond traditional ‘farming’. They involve weaving relationships with scientists, starting independent decontamination experiments, piloting projects to create food security, and developing new ways to monitor a changing environment. Among rice fields, orchards and flower beds, novel modes of social organisation are emerging – new ways of living from a future we will one day all reckon with.

A story on living with and adapting to environmental contamination in Fukushima. It’s fascinating on the whole, and sadly unsurprising that it’s largely been left to the victims of the disaster to clean up and carry on, with little (and little useful) support from the state, but a lot of assistance from scientists, researchers, NGOs, etc.

The given theme of the essay is that we can all learn from the people of Fukushima, but the only lesson I see is one I’ve reiterated here plenty before - don’t expect the state to help when shit hits the fan, we can only rely on each other.

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• On the wolves of Isle Royale, the complexities of nature and the failures of scientists to recognise same. By Kim Todd at Orion

• Communication and family dynamics of sperm whales. By Carl Safina at Orion

• A couple of pieces on recent sabotage actions by activists in France.

• A big yes to targeting luxury emissions (but next time consider sabotage…)

• The Quest to Defuse Guyana’s Carbon Bomb by Antonia Juhasz, Wired

Geopolitics & Empire

CJW: We Don’t Want a Post-Pandemic “Return to Normal,” We Want the End of Capitalism - Mack Penner at Jacobin

For anyone that bet big on returning to normal this year, the coming of 2023 is surely a marker of hopes dashed. But that is because “normal” is simply a naive stand-in for “good.” While the quotidian facts of daily life have normalized, they have done so alongside recurrent capitalist crises. The point, then, is that the bet on normality was wrongheaded in the first place, a vague hope floating on air rather than a demand based in reality. If there is a silver lining here, it may be that the future is yet to be made. The possibilities are not endless, but the interregnum is still to be seized.

A summary of 2022 through the lens of the much-desired (but impossible) return to “normal”.

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CJW: British empire killed 165 million Indians in 40 years: How colonialism inspired fascism - Ben Norton at Multipolarista

British colonialism caused at least 100 million deaths in India in roughly 40 years, according to an academic study.

And during nearly 200 years of colonialism, the British empire stole at least $45 trillion in wealth from India, a prominent economist has calculated.

The genocidal crimes committed by European empires outside of their borders inspired Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, leading to the rise of fascist regimes that carried out similar genocidal crimes within their borders.

That’s the long and the short of it, but more detail and methodology at the link.

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• Putin’s basically making his last stand in Russia, trying to hold on to power despite the fact that the country’s economy is tanking and its military is struggling. But hey, at least he’s got some good ol’ fashioned authoritarianism on his side. More detail from Michael Kimmage and Liana Fix for Foreign Affairs.

• Biden signs bill protecting same-sex and interracial marriage rights – as it happened at The Guardian

Just the headlines:

• CIA and NATO are waging sabotage attacks inside Russia - Ben Norton at Multipolarista

• Brazil’s President Lula is back - and Bolsonaro fled to Florida - CJW: Some good things on the horizon in South America (so long as the CIA can play nice, which remains to be seen).

• West opposes rest of world in UN votes for fairer economic system, equality, sustainable development - Ben Norton at Multipolarista

Science & Space

CJW: Fusion: have we achieved the holy grail of physics? - Cosmos Magazine

Despite the pace of technological advancement, it is unrealistic to base our hope for a climate change cure on fusion.

[…]

“All the heavy lifting for the energy transition will be done by renewable energy and nuclear fission (existing nuclear power) – with nuclear fusion at commercial scale unlikely to be available until later this century, well after the 2050 deadline needed to keep global warming below two degrees. But beyond that fusion might provide limitless energy for centuries to come.”

Celebrate, but not too much or too soon.

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• What dangers must we overcome before we can live on Mars? - Simon Jordan at Aeon

• How did transhumanism become the religion of the super-rich? by Jules Evans

• Aliens haven’t contacted Earth because there’s no sign of intelligence here, new answer to the Fermi paradox suggests by Stephanie Pappas, livescience

Tech & Design

CJW: AI Homework - Ben Thompson (via Sentiers)

Imagine that a school acquires an AI software suite that students are expected to use for their answers about Hobbes or anything else; every answer that is generated is recorded so that teachers can instantly ascertain that students didn’t use a different system. Moreover, instead of futilely demanding that students write essays themselves, teachers insist on AI. Here’s the thing, though: the system will frequently give the wrong answers (and not just on accident — wrong answers will be often pushed out on purpose); the real skill in the homework assignment will be in verifying the answers the system churns out — learning how to be a verifier and an editor, instead of a regurgitator.

What is compelling about this new skillset is that it isn’t simply a capability that will be increasingly important in an AI-dominated world: it’s a skillset that is incredibly valuable today. After all, it is not as if the Internet is, as long as the content is generated by humans and not AI, “right”; indeed, one analogy for ChatGPT’s output is that sort of poster we are all familiar with who asserts things authoritatively regardless of whether or not they are true. Verifying and editing is an essential skillset right now for every individual.

There’s a lot in this piece, but I found the above to be interesting and also to echo what I said last time on AI - but where I posited verification as a next necessary step in AI development, here it’s offered as the human’s task within a centaur utilising AI that stays more or less at this current level.

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CJW: Police seize on COVID-19 tech to expand global surveillance - AP News (via Damien Williams)

In the pandemic’s bewildering early days, millions worldwide believed government officials who said they needed confidential data for new tech tools that could help stop coronavirus’ spread. In return, governments got a firehose of individuals’ private health details, photographs that captured their facial measurements and their home addresses.

Now, from Beijing to Jerusalem to Hyderabad, India, and Perth, Australia, The Associated Press has found that authorities used these technologies and data to halt travel for activists and ordinary people, harass marginalized communities and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools.

One of the people quoted in this article refers to this sort of security overreach as a ratchet, in that it can always be ratcheted up, but it will never be lowered. We see that a lot with “security” measures of various types, like with there being no reduction to security theatre at airports even 20 years after 9/11. So we should not be surprised that various corporate, police, and intelligence groups sought to take advantage of the huge amounts of data being collected for COVID tracking, but we also don’t have to accept it.

Anyway, lots of important detail in the piece.

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CJW: Why the Twitter Files Are in Fact a Big Deal - Branko Marcetic at Jacobin

Many have been quick to dismiss or ignore [the Twitter Files] because so many of the illustrative examples disclosed so far have been genuinely repugnant people or politically unsympathetic. But this is a classic mistake.

Political suppression, if it’s allowed to get a foothold, always starts at the outer edges of what’s acceptable before bit by bit expanding to envelop legitimate but dissident voices that it was supposedly never meant to target.

Largely relevant to the US political milieu, but still worth reading.

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• Researchers have developed an AI that can sex real good after making it watch 69,000 hours of pornhub. Nice. (via Sentiers)

• TIL that cops have circuit board sniffer dogs to help find digital devices during searches. Makes sense when so much crime is done online these days, but I’d never considered it or heard about it before now.

• We’ve touched on some of the same issues discussed here in the past, but this is a succinct encapsulation of a number of intersections between Silicon Valley and environmental damage across the world.

• An interesting piece on aligning AI with human values, by Melanie Mitchell at Quanta

• Meta’s ad practices have been ruled illegal under E.U. law. More headwinds for Fuckerberg. Fuck that guy.

Society & The Culture

CJW: Closing Paradise’s Gate - Nicholas Smaligo at Ill Will (via Inhabit)

This positing of laws of history worked against the worker’s movement, and [Walter] Benjamin counters by centering the role of memory [Gedächtnis] in informing a revolutionary orientation to the present: revolutionary affects and action are “nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than by the idea of liberated grandchildren.” The vulgar Marxist targets of Benjamin’s criticisms have long since disappeared from the field of communist theory. No serious theorist of revolution today believes that communism will be the result of a natural process of development in human society. But however distant their project may seem, Graeber and Wengrow’s critical intervention is strikingly analogous in its aim. […] Whereas the historicists of Benjamin’s time led the revolutionary movement astray by reading every present event as a signal of the inevitable revolution to come, those of our day strive to erase the possibility of revolution altogether by convincing us that any sober assessment of human history must lead to a reconciliation with institutions of domination.

A great review of Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. I really need to read it this year.

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MJW: America’s culture warriors are going after librarians By Erica Hellerstein

2022 will break records on book challenges, according to the data that the American Library Association began tracking more than two decades ago. As of September, there had been efforts to ban or restrict access to 1,651 different books in 2022, more than three times the number recorded in 2019… “What we have been observing is a growing effort to censor books that reflect the experiences of marginalized groups under this idea that, somehow, either that it’s morally unacceptable for any young person to know that there are gay people in the world, or that a narrative about U.S. history that illuminates systemic racism is somehow un-American and Marxist.”

I saw someone say that no one who banned books has ever been on the side of good. Fucking hell, going after librarians? Those keepers and directors of knowledge and ardent shushers? Appalling.

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DCH: Hyperconnected Culture And Its Discontents by Rogers Brubaker, noema

Digital hyperconnectivity — the condition in which nearly everyone and everything is connected to everyone and everything else, everywhere and all the time — has colonized the self, recast social interactions, reorganized the public sphere, revolutionized economic life and converted the whole of human culture into an unending stream of digital content served to us by personalized algorithms.

Thanks. I hate it.

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MJW: Friend of Satan: how Lucien Greaves and his Satanic Temple are fighting the religious right by Adam Gabbatt at the Guardian

A statue of Baphomet – a pagan idol used in popular culture as a representation of the devil, with the head, horns and feet of a goat, the torso of a man and the wings of an angel – is the centrepiece of the Satanic Temple’s headquarters in Salem, Massachusetts. More than 8ft (2.4 metres) tall, jet black and altogether unnerving, Baphomet serves as a reminder of what brought the Satanic Temple to fame. In 2013, the group, which is acknowledged as a religion by the US government, responded to the installation of a Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of the Oklahoma state capitol building – seemingly a flagrant abuse of the US constitution’s separation of church and state – by demanding that its own Baphomet statue also be positioned in the grounds. According to the first amendment, which protects freedom of religion, public spaces should be open to all religions or none, it argued.

It turned out that Republican politicians did not want a big statue of a goat-headed pagan deity on capitol grounds. Amid lawsuits, the Oklahoma supreme court eventually ordered that the Ten Commandments monument should be removed. The tactic, with its wry and anarchic undertones, is typical of the Satanic Temple’s battle against the religious right in the US. In the decade since the spat over the statue, the Temple has tackled prayer in classrooms, religious holiday displays and the distribution of Bibles in schools. Now, it is taking on another fundamental issue: the right to abortion.

Bless the Satanists.

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• A new memo from NEMESIS, who previously brought us the Umami Theory of Value. Sounds like we’re still spinning our tires trying to escape the quagmire of Clown Town, but their prediction for Max Pain sounds about right to me…

• “In the 21st [Century], the domestication of plants reflects how our lives are shrinking, rather than growing: the emphasis is on houseplants’ suitability for the individual, and their confinement to the apartment.” Against houseplants. Sydney Smith at Dirt

• A report by Contagious suggests that the dominant creative narrative for advertising in 2023 will be “Eat the Rich” which reflects the public’s increasing anger and frustration with wealth inequality

Health, Cooking, and Related

DCH: One Day With an Ambulance in Britain: Long Waits, Rising Frustration by Megan Specia, nytimes

Countless harrowing incidents have called attention to the ambulance problem in Britain, including that of an elderly man whose family covered him with a tarp as he waited seven hours after falling outdoors and a 17-year-old soccer player who waited for four hours lying on a rainy field after suffering a neck injury.

All thanks to 12 years of Tory governments trying to hobble the NHS so they can privatize it.

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DCH: How We Learned to Be Lonely by Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic

The most salient social feature of the pandemic was how it forced people into isolation; for those fortunate enough not to lose a loved one, the major trauma it created was loneliness. Instead of coming together, emerging evidence suggests that we are in the midst of a long-term crisis of habitual loneliness, in which relationships were severed and never reestablished. Many people—perhaps including you—are still wandering alone, without the company of friends and loved ones to help rebuild their life.

Definitely including me. My already frail social systems took a debilitating hit thanks to Covid.

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• Is ‘feeling fat’ really a manifestation of underlying sadness? - Stephen Gadsby and Bence Nanay at Psyche - CJW: I’m not on the relevant parts of the internet, so I’d missed the “fat is not a feeling” discourse, but this piece on ED and proprioception was really interesting.

• A great piece on the history of DIY trans healthcare, by Jules Gill-Peterson at The Baffler

Labour & Economics

DCH: The Nokia Risk by Herman Mark Schwartz, phenomenal world

Finland is not the only economy facing “Nokia risk.” A larger group of seven countries—all of them relatively small, rich, and with stable governments—are similarly exposed. In Denmark, Israel, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, and Taiwan a handful of firms account for a hugely disproportionate share of both profits and R&D spending. The firms which dominate these seven economies have all been extraordinarily successful in the knowledge economy of the past three decades: Samsung Electronics in Korea, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. in Taiwan, Novo Nordisk (pharmaceuticals) in Denmark, and Roche and Novartis (pharmaceuticals) in Switzerland. For the decade of 2011–2020, these firms have had large shares of cumulative profits both domestically and abroad. It is largely thanks to these profits that these small countries have such a significant share of global profit (larger than their share of global GDP) and, in turn, a relatively high per capita income.

Another way of looking at monopoly risks and harms.

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• A coalition of female-led countries want to do away with GDP as the core metric for economic progress. Instead they want to move to well-being measures that tackle the polycrisis and patriarchy.

• “Ultimately, it was a combination of government action, a stock crash, tight labor markets, and deglobalization (if not yet major war) that curbed the upward trend of rising inequality — just as Piketty might have predicted.” Inequality might be going down now by Noah Smith

• The government is trying to take away our right to strike and protest, and it’s all because they don’t want us to stand up for ourselves and demand fair treatment. They want us to keep quiet and accept whatever scraps they toss our way, but we won’t stand for it. We won’t be silenced and we won’t be controlled. It’s time to fight back and take control of our lives and our future.

• Who’s surprised to learn that working for Amazon in Germany is as bad as working for Amazon in the US?

• When humans are just friction slowing the advances of the tech-driven, exploitative, on-demand economy, by Paris Marx at Jacobin.

• The Indictment of SBF Is a Bombshell Federal prosecutors have broken new ground with his shockingly fast arrest

• Bitcoin hashrate drops nearly 40% as deadly U.S. storm unplugs miners

• Britain’s winter of discontent is the inevitable result of austerity + Nostalgia for decline in deconvergent Britain

• Starbucks Workers Are Unionizing. Their Bosses Are Refusing to Bargain. by Alex Nabaum, New Republic

Newsletters

MJW: It’s Not Cool to Overreact: How Normalcy Bias Will Define Our Future by Jessica Wildfire at Okay Doomer

We’re well into the social shaming stage of the pandemic. It doesn’t seem to matter how much evidence we have. People won’t adopt the simplest measures to protect themselves or anyone else. A disturbingly large portion of the public seems totally unmoved by stories of children dying in hospitals. Many of us have struggled to understand how tens of millions of decent people could possibly act like this. Normalcy bias explains everything. Like it or not, they’re doing what their brains have evolved to do. It’s not new. During any given crisis, you can count on 30 percent of the public to respond appropriately and do the right thing. About ten percent will freak out… Another ten percent will get in the way, insisting that everything’s fine and everyone should just calm down. Everyone else will stand around waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

Books

CJW: Chimeras: An Inventory of Synthetic Intelligence

I haven’t seen any online discussion of this book at all, so I think it might have slipped below a lot of people’s radar.

Chimeras took me about half of 2022 to read, but that’s more because of the format of the book rather than the density or difficulty of the text. The subheading gives you some idea of what the book entails: it’s an inventory of the current state, and possible future states, of AI development, with perspectives from scholars, philosophers, artists, and more besides. There are over a hundred individual entries - mostly written, but with a whole section of related artwork - so rather than sitting down and reading it for large sections, it’s more the sort of book you dip in and out of. Read a handful of entries, and then put it down until later.

Obviously we cover AI a lot in these pages, so if you’re keeping up with the advancements (and philosophical questions inherent in AI discussions) here, then there are sections of the book that read very 101 compared to what we point to and discuss, but there are still plenty of sections that ask interesting questions or make interesting provocations, and my physical copy is flagged with a lot of post-its for later reference the next time I’m thinking about writing something with an AI slant.

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MJW: The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century by William Rosen.

‘Natural disasters are most disastrous when humanity gives them a push’.

I heard about this book on a podcast (okay, okay, it was MFM.) I’ve always been so interested in all the little things and events that come together to cause a crisis or disaster, so I got it. This comprehensive history of the famine has its slow points (the first third is a roundup of the monarchical and political climate of the British Isles that got a little endless.) But it saves itself by weaving these complex ingredients of disaster into a pretty easy-and-fun-to-read narrative. Climate + population expansion + feudalism + various other stuff = the famine of famines in Europe.

Movies + TV

LZ: Relic (2020)

Following the previous issue where I added some links about hagsploitation, I watched this recent Australian horror movie directed by Natalie Erika James. The premise is very simple, even trivial: mother and daughter visit grandma, who lives in a small town and is reportedly having some issues with dementia. I bet many readers have experienced this in their own family or with close friends, but the twist here is that James gives a horror touch to something that is already, actually, truly scary. Not because it startles you with a scare jump, but because ageing and diseases like dementia and Alzheimer may change someone completely just like in horror movies, except that it is real. For those who have experienced taking care of people who are dying, this movie can be very triggering. It was for me, but I tend to like movies that leave me completely destroyed. I wrote a piece about it. Link is below in the “self-promotion” section.

CJW: Relic is a fantastic film, right up there with The Babadook for Australian horror.

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CJW: You Won’t Be Alone

Here’s one for Lidia’s Hagsploitation explorations - the best witch horror film since The VVitch. You Won’t Be Alone is a slow-burn Macedonian-language horror film written and directed by Goran Stolevski, a Macedonian born Australian-based filmmaker who has earned a lot of recognition for his short films and is now branching out into feature length projects.

In some ways, You Won’t Be Alone has the feel of a dark fairy tale - an infant girl is marked by a witch, and her voice stolen. The girl’s mother hides her in a cave so that the witch won’t be able to find and claim her, leading the girl to grow up mostly feral. Of course the witch still finds the girl, but the girl is more interested in the world that was taken from her by her mother’s actions than the powers the witch can offer.

We’re given an insight into her thoughts through her internal monologue, her lack of education and socialisation rendering her language poetic, her every thought tinged with a deep longing for understanding and connection. I won’t say much more than that because it’s a brilliant movie, but the actors are all phenomenal in the ways they embody the girl, especially Sara Klimoska.

LZ: Oooooo I haven’t seen this one yet, but it’s on the top of my list already!!

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LZ: Don’t Worry Darling (2022)

Ignoring all the newsflash and gossip around the movie, I decided to watch it because I absolutely love Florence Pugh. And well, once again, she is carrying the entire film on her back. The idea was interesting, but so many cliches were inserted there when it comes to dystopian stories, virtual vs real, and the Jordan Peterson impersonator. The visuals are great, but it misses the opportunity to update the dystopian lore by repeating the same hero journey premise. I never forget one piece that I read years ago that suggested that dystopias like Brave New World could be seen rather as utopias nowadays. Because imagine what a blessing it would be if you could only take one pill and all your psychological illnesses are gone? So many people struggle to find a good doctor, a good combination of meds, a tolerable set of side effects… Don’t Worry Darling addresses the miserable world we live in, how some work hard to earn a minimum wage and others are unemployed and on the brink of meaninglessness.

Here’s a mild spoiler, but I suppose that many couples or even single people who are unemployed, living in terrible housing situations, with no access to good healthcare, education, and food, would definitely sign up for this shit and don’t give a damn if it’s all simulation, provided that they can have quality of life. Too bad this other perspective is only approached very quickly by Olivia Wilde’s character when she says she knew it was all fake but she chose to be there. But then again it’s just another Florence Pugh joins a cult and realizes there’s something wrong when someone suicides by jumping from somewhere.

MJW: I totally agree that FP held this entire thing together, and was a delight to watch even if the movie was a bit basic.

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LZ: Wednesday (2022)

After having an average of 50 people/day comparing me to Jenna Ortega, I decided to watch the show. I don’t like Tim Burton very much as I think he has got into a loop of self-referenced cliches, but this series is actually fun, very light-hearted, with some funny/cute takes. There is no discussion about how Jenna is a great actress and I love how she’s getting into the Kristen Stewart/Jesse Eisenberg/Aubrey Plaza school of acting (meaning, speaking super fast with a deadpan face). It’s a fun time to spend and it’s definitely nostalgic. Many people have compared the series with Harry Potter, since I didn’t follow the franchise, I cannot say much about that, but there are some videos comparing both works.

Comics

CJW: In The Flesh - Scott Base

I mentioned Scott Base’s Bad Space Comics soon after they launched - if you missed it the first time, go and subscribe now because they’re always interesting bits of SF flash comix.

I wanted to point out this latest entry in particular as it’s an example of what I called CrispSF in a manifesto I wrote (after a prodding by Ganzeer). It’s distinct from biopunk because it’s not about rebellion against the old (which I feel is the albatross hanging heavy on the neck of all the -punk SF subgenres) but about a reaching toward the new - equitable, sustainable, non-anthropocentric futures.

It’s a simple take on the premise (it’s only 10 panels after all), but one I still enjoyed. I have a story in a forthcoming issue of Interzone that is CrispSF-ish, though there’s also a rebellion aspect to it too. Looking forward to that one being out in the world soon.

Music

CJW: LORN - ENTROPYYY

I promise I’m not just going to share it every time LORN drops a new track, but I thought this one was worth it for the music video. With the sheer amount of related discourse in 2022 I think a lot of people are already getting sick of thinking/reading about “AI” “art,” but the music video here uses “AI” art to good effect by utilising the uncertainties and malleability of the outputs to create something ever-shifting, a dreamlike dystopian cyberpunk vision.

The Self-Promotion

LZ: When watching horror movies makes you cry

Here’s a more in-depth take on Relic and why horror movies/gothic fiction are rather good for our mental health. How fear and repulsion can be catalysts to catharsis.

The Memes