CJW: Welcome to another issue of the nothing here newsletter. Marlee and I have been on a roadtrip down the Great Ocean Road this weekend, with a friend visiting from the States. This morning we saw the Sow and Piglets, it was beautiful, but chilly.
(Alright, alright, I'm talking about the Twelve Apostles. But seeing as there have only ever been 9 of the rock formations for as long as Christianity has been here in this old, red land, I say we go back to the original sailor's name.)
Hello from these eroded rocks, and the rest of the team...
The Team
Corey J. White (CJW) - author of the The VoidWitch Saga. Newsletter facilitator. Naarm/Melbourne. Tweets @cjwhite.
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - Author of ‘Welcome To Orphancorp’ and ‘Psynode’. Host of Catastropod. ADHD, spec fic, feminism, cats. On Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, Australia. @marleejaneward
Austin Armatys (AA) - Writer/Teacher/Wretched Creature // Oh Nothing Press // MechaDeath physical edition available now // @0hnothing
John English (JE) - Photographer - Solvent Image. Writer of upcoming comic CEL. Based in Brisbane, Australia @Herts_Solvent
m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / Apocalyptic Futurist / #salvagepunk / @m1k3y
Articles
MJW: An Equator Full of Hurricanes Shows of a Preview of End Times - Adam Rogers at Wired
The new normal is going to be pretty inhospitable for humans, especially at the equator. Makes me think of this tweet I saw the other day:
AA: I bet this bit had some Ted K fans / Treeaboos out there cheering:
“It’s true that an absence of people in the region might be a boon for all the other living things; editing people out of a landscape tends to make that landscape healthier in the end, if the people didn’t poison it or burn it down before they left. If people can’t live in the tropics anymore, that might increase the biodiversity of everything else there. "A dispassionate observer would ask the question: would the total biodiversity on Earth be higher before climate change or after climate change?" McKay says. "My off-the-cuff intuition is that total biodiversity on Earth would be higher after."
I’m sure there are anti-human environmentalists that are actually hoping for an accelerated capitalism to immanentise this increase in biodiversity. Capitalism, Baby: It’s The Cause And The Cure™
MKY: yeah, that’s why the next addition to my reading pile/research shelf is The Wrath of Capital: Climate Change and Neoliberalism. Meanwhile quite happy to see this kinda critique coming from inside the houses of power.
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CJW: Group Therapy for the End of the World - Kyle Chayka at Garage (Vice)
The workshop, called Home.. wasn’t just about record-high temperatures or the thousands of species that have vanished in past decades. It was more personal than that; we were concerned with the psychological impact in our lives of a world that was falling apart. “What if the culture you grew up in was broken in ways that you didn’t even have words for?” the workshop’s invitation asked, posing itself as “a pocket of resistance and hope.”
On the one hand, I feel like this retreat would very much be my jam, but on the other hand, it seems like a microcosm of climate change itself. A bunch of privileged white people talking about how climate change makes them feel bad while people living on Pacific island nations and people living in shore-adjacent areas of Asia are at very real risk of being wiped out.
It’s like that tweet about American Sniper - not only will Americans invade your country and murder you, but 10 years later they'll make a movie about how sad killing you made them feel - but instead of the American military it's the entire West, and instead of war it’s rampant consumerism.
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CJW: Bitcoin shows the scale of change needed to stop the climate crisis - Mathew Lawrence at New Statesmen
Bitcoin is essentially a computational race among a peer-to-peer network to crack increasingly complex algorithms without any intrinsic meaning or utility, calculations that demand ever more processing power to complete, devouring energy overwhelmingly sourced from fossil fuels.
I like to think I “solved” bitcoin in REPO VIRTUAL, though I'm sure a million bitbros will line up to tell me all the ways I'm wrong. (The other possibility is that everyone realises what a scam all these cryptocurrencies actually are, and by the time the book is out they're just a faint memory.)
Also:
we need to recognise that digitalisation does not mean complete de-materialisation, and the separation of economic and social activities from having a physical footprint.
This is something that was really brought home for me in Issue 0003 - we think of digital activities as being largely benign, but something as simple as streaming video has a huge economic cost: using either a tablet or smartphone to wirelessly watch an hour of video a week used roughly the same amount of electricity (largely consumed at the data-centre end of the process) as two new domestic fridges.
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MJW: Male Birth Control Study Killed After Men Report Side Effects - at NPR
It’s pretty predictable that the side effects of birth control are too much for trial participants to handle - they’re notoriously hideous and women have been dealing with them for years.
CJW: Here's some good news for fans of Children of Men: men today are producing half the sperm of their virile, studly grandfathers (Daniel Noah Halpern at GQ), and it appears to represent a continuing downward trend. (Sadly, I could imagine this article providing ammo for the types of people who throw around insults like “soyboy beta cuck".)
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JE: Spider-Man on the PS4 is a great example of AAA development working at its best - Ben Kuchera at Polygon
There’s something about games development that is absolutely fascinating to me. In this age where there is frequent bad press about the culture at development studios, this article was a heart warming read. I’ve been playing this game this week (a lot) and the level of detail is incredible. Not only that - you can tell a lot of heart has gone into this. I always admire when teams of people pull something like this off. Having to do justice to a beloved character and universe, appease a slathering fan-base while organising hundreds of staff, deadlines and budgets is truly a feat that should be lauded. Here’s some screenshots that show off the minutia they managed to include:
CJW: Related - The Other Side of the Spider-Man Proposal Story - Jef Rouner at Houston Press
JE: I think the blame for this lays with the journalists who didn’t do their research rather than the devs who tried to do something nice for a fan, I mean how were the devs supposed to get her side of the story without spoiling the surprise of the proposal?
AA: Speaking of games development, this article about the making of Goldeneye (Quinn Myers at Mel Magazine) had me all types of nostalgic. This oral history depicts a much less polished era of vidya, and I like the scrappy, make-it-up-as-you-go-along narratives of stuff like this and, say, Masters of Doom.
BONUS THING I JUST REMEMBERED: Bill Gates Puts On A Trenchcoat And Kills Demons to Promote Windows 95
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JE : Nerd City: PARENTS WORST NIGHTMARE
This youtuber takes a deep dive into the Paul brother’s (mostly Jake) unstoppable juggernaut and exposes how blatantly they exploit children for money. It’s disturbing to say the least.
Also the whole thing is done in character, as a mad scientist, but the research and presentation is solid. This is pure Youtube so you have been warned.
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CJW: Why Technology Favors Tyranny - Yuval Noah Harari at The Atlantic (via Sentiers)
We should instead fear AI because it will probably always obey its human masters, and never rebel. AI is a tool and a weapon unlike any other that human beings have developed; it will almost certainly allow the already powerful to consolidate their power further.
I thought this was an interesting take on the notion of AI, and honestly, it sounds right on the money to me. Unless/until we have genuinely sentient AI (which may never happen) the greatest threat of machine learning is it being used to aggressively police minorities, political activists, minority political activists, and anyone else the police and/or government feel threatened by. Many current machine learning systems are black boxes, with the engineers themselves not being entirely sure how the algorithm comes to its conclusions. Add that complete lack of oversight to a system that will literally kill someone, and tell me it’s a good idea.
Check out this other article - Welcome to the metadata society and beware (Adrian Lobe at Gulf News):
“We kill people based on metadata,” former NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden boasted.
The cold-blooded contempt for humanity expressed in this sentence makes one shiver. The military target is no longer a human person, but only the sum of its metadata. The “algorithmic eye” doesn’t see a terrorist, just a suspicious connection in the haze of data clouds. As a brutal consequence, this means that whoever produces suspicious links or patterns is liquidated.
Thousands of people were killed in drone attacks ordered on the basis of SKYNET’s findings. It is unclear how many innocent civilians were killed in the process. The methodology is controversial because the machine’s learning algorithm only learnt from already identified terrorists and blindly reproduced these results. What this means is that whoever had the same trajectories — that is, metadata — as a terrorist, was suddenly considered one himself. The question is how sharp the algorithmic vision is set.
These aren’t horrific fears for the future, these are things that are already happening right now, to people that our military, our media, our society itself can disregard because they’re a) “terrorists”, b) brown, c) on the other side of the world, or d) some combination of the above. To paraphrase William Gibson - the horrifying dystopia is already here, it’s just not equally distributed (yet).
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AA: In this article from The Monthly, Richard Cooke discusses the idea of what he calls “Artefacts”, peculiar and often disturbing incidences of “semiotic collapse” that are caused by the overwhelming information density every Perma-Online person is exposed to (which is mostly everybody, and definitely anybody who reads this newsletter and its barrage of content).
A great example of one of Cooke’s artefacts is the peculiar case of the “Ok Symbol” - an innocuous hand gesture that was transformed by the trolls of 4-Chan into a symbol of white power as a joke… but also, uh, not. As Cooke says, “ Some (on the left) took the bait (about the hand signal representing “White Power”); others, like the Anti-Defamation League, did not, and insisted the sign was benign. Then real white power advocates began to use the symbol themselves, making it a “fake” white power symbol co-opted by real white power fans...So is it a real or unreal symbol of white supremacy? It is both, and neither. It has non-Newtonian properties. It is an artefact.”
The overwhelming, otherworldly fluidity of meaning demonstrated in this case - and in the other examples given by Cooke - is part of the reason, I think, why modern life can be so psychically draining: we are asked to constantly navigate a multiplicity of meaning in the world around us, ever-vigilant to the intents of those that would supposedly manipulate us for their ideological causes. It’s an impossible, and an impossibly thankless, task. We are expected to be historians of ever-shifting meaning, decoding irony, intent and layers of allusion in an attempt to ascertain some objective truth. No fucking wonder we’re all so tired!
CJW: It’s kind of brilliant actually, the way these white supremacists have co-opted something so mainstream. For a few months the OK hand symbol was a huge meme, so now there are photos and videos of hundreds (or thousands?) of different people making the sign. Now, after this pivot, all those people are suddenly viewed as white supremacists, and the “movement” itself gains legitimacy by (seemingly) being so mainstream.
Next they need to convince people that “Hey guys” is some secret anti-semitic code, and claim every youtuber and countless podcasters to their ranks.
AA: In other meme/4-Chan/pol news, the tweet below alerted me to one of the most diabolical and fiendish “trolls” ever conceived. Check it out:
This is the message that one of the fake coupons displays when its QR code is scanned:
Fortunately, this didn’t get anyone hurt (or worse) but the level of Actually Evil here is frankly incredible. You can read more about this situation on Snopes.com here.
CJW: Yeah, that’s terrifying. A twisted and racist new take on the idea of Swatting.
Books
MKY: WE’RE DOOMED. NOW WHAT? Essays on War and Climate Change by Roy Scranton
Roy is an Iraqi vet, and author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. I’m halfway through his collection of essays which, it turns out, are about War and/or Climate Change. Which means you start out riding around Galveston with him and Tim Morton, as Roy gets Tim to define his ideas of dark ecology and hyperobjects whilst they tour one of the great anthropocene regions. Later, you’re with him as he returns to Iraq in an extended version of his Rolling Stone feature, giving the reader the kind of solid intellectual context that was missing from Generation Kill (the HBO series on soldiers in Iraq, framed by the insights of a more traditional Rolling Stone journalist). Scranton’s writing style is infused with the techniques of literature, and makes a welcome change from the far more drier non-fiction books I’ve been reading around this subject.
CJW: Not the first time Scranton has graced these pages. Personally (as someone who reads a lot on climate change and the Anthropocene) I found Learning to Die in the Anthropocene far too light to be interesting, but you've sold me on checking out this book.
Movies + TV
JE: Hereditary
Holy Fucking Hell. I avoided this until now because I can't stand ghost movies, which I assumed this is. After a fortnight of my brother berating me daily I finally caved. First time in forever I can remember getting literal chills. First time since It Follows I didn't feel safe in my house after viewing. I sat silent for a good 30 minutes after the credits, dumbfounded by the profound horror.
Fans of Kill List, Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist will be right at home here. This isn't just some stupid ghost movie.
MKY: sold.
[…]
Okay, I watched this back-to-back with We Need To Talk About Kevin and… there’s something in the common structure, other than -problemchild problems- involving Sacrifice and *looks pleadingly at the other panelists to finish this thought for him*
JE: ...destructive family dynamics?
MKY: that might be it… I should rewatch Kill List tonight and see what that does to my head huh.
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MKY: BEAST
I had no idea what I was about to watch with this film, other than I’d caught a few seconds of the trailer on tv and the impression I was left with was it was a film like The Loved Ones. That was enough to get my attention… and I was totally wrong. Doesn’t mean I didn’t dig this lil psychological thriller, wondering just who the ‘beast’ was as the plot unfolded, gripped by the drama.
This is set in a moral universe adjacent to Luther, and my only complaint is that it feels like a story just getting started. I want more. I want a high quality, episodic drama showing the further the adventures of our (anti?)hero following their origin story. Or at least a sequel.
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MKY: THE LOVED ONES (2009)
Ok, so after watching Beast I had to go back and rewatch The Loved Ones. And damn does it hold up! This lil Australian horror provides the best depiction of the regional australian culture that I grew up in, and I wish it was more well known. I won’t give anything more away other than I’d file it next to The Descent and [REC], and that’s all you need to know.
JE: I think this might be my favorite Australian horror movie, and god damn that soundtrack. Might need to watch this again myself.
MKY: the set of people who never thought they’d like a Kasey Chambers song so much include…
JE: I meant more the Ollie Olsen stuff, for the record (rep upheld?)
MKY: I have no idea who that is. Does that mean I’m not pretty enough?
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MKY: AMERICAN HORROR STORY: APOCALYPSE
I haven’t watched this particular horror anthology since Coven. Then I got tipped off to the premise of the new season, and holy shit this was written just for me… and anyone else a bit obsessed with how the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it might unfold. Like, there’s Fallout vibes, the 1% just assuming they get to live, elite conspiracies, breeding programs and um… that’s just the first ep. Curious to see just how fucked up this all gets and what, if any, social commentary they directly drop.
CJW: Sounds like this season might be worth checking out then.
Podcasts
AA: Slavoj Žižek – Collected Recordings
I’ve really been enjoying this podcast, an unofficial collection of talks/debates/lectures featuring Slavoj Žižek. There is a lot of content here, and if you appreciate Žižek’s analysis (and I’m aware many don’t) you will be kept entertained and engaged for a long time. I’ve become curious about philosophy of late, a kind of self-prescribed remedy for the sometimes tedious routines of parental responsibility, and Zizek’s Lacanian/Communist takes are accessible and stimulating. I also enjoy his sense of humour - even his much-parodied sniffing and verbal tics are somehow endearing. The podcast’s latest release is a discussion/debate with Jean-Claude Milner titled “Is Sexuality Compatible WIth Human Rights?” and there was lots of food for thought contained within. I particularly like when audience members challenge Žižek on his beliefs and his often purposefully outrageous statements. If anyone out there is listening to interesting philosophy or theory podcasts suitable for dilettantes like me, please drop a line by replying to this newsletter!
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JE: Office Hours with Tim Heidecker
I’m a huge fan of the call in show format, from classic Loveline to Coast to Coast and The Best Show; it’s an era of radio that thankfully lives on in podcast form. This podcast hosted by Tim of Tim and Eric fame had a rough start (technical issues mostly) but now is in full swing. Since the recent addition of Doug Lussenhop (Dj Douggpound) as co-host the show has never been better. A good mix of politics, music chat and general silliness it’s sure to scratch that call-in itch.
AA: I just want to add… TAYNE!
Tayne action figure by Obvious Plant
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CJW: Desert Oracle Radio
The latest episode covers Climate Change, PKD and “outer” intelligences making contact, UFOs, intergalactic colonisation and conservation, Charles Manson, and a variety of other topics. Basically, if you enjoy this newsletter and the topics we tend to cover, you'll likely enjoy DOR.
Music
JE: Ivy Lab
Fantastic cinematic hip hop, I mean get a load of this.
Well their new album has dropped, collating a lot of their singles from the last year or so.
It’s a doozy.
The Process
MKY: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw
my process is apparently taking heart from the hit’n’miss process of others, or: how this talk by @tinysubversions made me feel better about ppl often ignoring the shit I’ve spent 100s of hours on...
The Self-Promotion
MJW: I’m a finalist for this year’s Melbourne Prize Residency and I’m pretty excited. While the residency is decided by a panel of judges, the Civic Choice Award is open for voting. You can register your vote for me here: http://www.melbourneprize.org/vote/
CJW: And that's it for another issue!