nothing here but overpriced Barre classes

Welcome to another edition of nothing here. This time around we’ve got billionaire bashing galore, the gamification of terror, and much much more.

If you want, and are able to, you can support us by becoming a paid subscriber and receive bonus letters as well as these ones.

Corey J. White (CJW) - Sci-fi author. Newsletter facilitator. Naarm/Melbourne.
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - Author & podcaster. Your fabulous goth aunt. On Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, Australia. @marleejaneward
Austin Armatys (AA) - Writer/Teacher/Wretched Creeper // Oh Nothing Press // @0hnothing
m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / salvagepunk / ecopoet // Dark Extropian Musings

CJW: The El Paso Shooting and the Gamification of Terror (via Ed Bisdee)

This poster and several others lambasted the shooter for his “shitty” and “0 effort manifesto”. There is nothing new in this killer’s ramblings. He expresses fears of the same “replacement” of white people that motivated the Christchurch shooter, and notes that he was deeply motivated by that shooter’s manifesto. In the article I wrote after the Poway Synagogue shooting I noted that 8channers had dedicated a great deal of time to spreading that manifesto, in an effort to inspire more shooters. The El Paso shooting is further proof that this strategy works.

Any mass shooting is tragic, but this breakdown of the way shitty messageboards are gamifying white supremacist terrorism is sickening.

Here is some coverage of the shooting itself.

MJW: I don’t know what inspires these places to be born, the places where people go to hate en masse. I’m sure they’ve existed in different forms over history, but they’ve coalesced into this form now, where the post/reply discussion of the slaughter of human beings is a casual affair. It’s fucking alarming. And to think I had such high hopes for the internet. Shit, you know, we all did.

CJW: The lesson from the ruins of Notre Dame: don’t rely on billionaires

Billionaires won’t save you - they won’t even part with the money they promised to donate to rebuilding Notre Dame cathedral.

“It is more blessed to give than to receive,” said Jesus. To which anyone surveying the Notre Dame debacle might advise the son of God to get a better brand manager. Because the billionaires who promised those vast sums have received all the credit while not giving more than a fraction of the money.
They have banked the publicity, while dreaming up small print that didn’t exist in the spring.

MKY: Building Utopia in Space

The shame and grief of our great moral failure—the spoiling of a planet some 6 billion years old in a few generations—has given cartoonish megalomaniacs like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk the cover they need to propose escapist fantasies in space. Human history is replete with examples of elites and designers working together around the idea that new technologies and spatial forms could undo the devastation wrought by colonialism, capitalism, and climate change, and allow us to literally build utopia atop our ruins. The longer we wait to pursue a moonshot like the Green New Deal here on Earth, the likelier it becomes that the future of our species will depend on settling space—not by choice, but to survive…
Though it went to press before the public release of Bezos’s Blue Origin project, Space Settlements serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of wild speculation and utopianism, and about the continued relevance of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine in the age of climate change. Klein’s book reminds us that “in moments of crisis, people are willing to hand over a great deal of power to anyone who claims to have a magic cure.” The spectacular, provocative ideas found in Space Settlements are now in the hands of global elites. Now that they have set this planet ablaze, men like Bezos are turning their gaze toward outer space as a site of both refuge and profit. And the images in Scharmen’s book have already begun to shape their visions for this future.
If prior plutocratic generations sought to escape ecological collapse through gated communities, private compounds, and fantasies like Peter Thiel’s floating-cities proposal, it’s clear that space settlements are the next frontier of capitalist redevelopment—a site in which the elite will decide who is welcome and who is left behind.

I have nothing to add to those pull quotes except that I need Fred’s book now and I’m glad it’s in the world, adding to that much needed decolonisation and contextualization of SPAAAACE.

CJW: Related: Humans Will Never Colonise Mars (via Sentiers)

A detailed breakdown of the many issues with colonising Mars that make the current technocratic obsession with the idea appear suitably ridiculous.

MKY: I was literally logging on to the network to post that frankly exhaustive piece by George Dvorsky on what a dumb fucking idea settling Mars as a backup civilisation / exit strategy for the 0.001% and their cronies is (short of Full Posthumanism in SPAAACE) - so here’s a great takedown on that guy who won’t stfu about it, Elon failson Musk to go with it, courtesy of the AshesAshes podcast [jump about 24mins in to get the goodness]. All of which is a necessary pause, a brief moment of catharsis before we face the stark fact that this failing planet we call Earth is all we have… or as Robinson Meyer just put it: This Land Is the Only Land There Is - ending his analysis of the latest IPCC report rather emphatically and poetically:

You and I are not free-floating minds that move around the world through text messages, apologetic emails, and bank deposits. We are carbon-based creatures so pathetic that we need a lot of silent plants to make carbon for us.
Climate change requires us to alter the biogeochemical organism that we call the global economy on the fly, in our lifetimes. Such a task should command most of the time and attention of every economist, agriculturalist, investor, executive, and politician—anyone who fancies themselves a leader in the physical workings of the economy, or whatever we call it. It is our shame, and theirs, that they don’t.

A-freaking-men.

CJW: More tangential Musk-bashing - he helped fund an Afrofuturism exhibition in Berlin that included a grand total of ZERO black artists (via Ed Bisdee). I just… what? How?!

CJW: Tarek Loubani on 3D-Printing in Gaza (via Sentiers)

When I first started going to Gaza, I thought that I was going to see a place abandoned by capitalism. Then I got there and guess what? [I] saw billboards everywhere for Coca-Cola and Pepsi, which weren’t readily available at the time. There were also billboards for products that people could never afford, like a BMW or a Mercedes. And they weren’t just in rich districts — they were everywhere.
That’s when I realized, “Oh shit, these guys understand that [the occupation] is almost over too.” […] They’re thinking, “We want to be there first.”
How does that translate into medicine? The moment that medical companies think they can get in there, they’re there. But what if we had the ability to create the alternative before the bad guys show up?

In this interview, Tarek Loubani literally refers to big business as the bad guys, so you know I’m in. He founded a company that 3D prints basic medical equipment in order to bypass Israeli blockades and get this gear to doctors working in Gaza.

MJW: Athleisure, barre and kale: the tyranny of the ideal woman

But the endurance that barre builds is possibly more psychological than physical. What it’s really good at is getting you in shape for a hyper-accelerated capitalist life. It prepares you less for a half marathon than for a 12-hour workday, or a week alone with a kid and no childcare, or an evening commute on an underfunded train. Barre feels like exercise the way Sweetgreen feels like eating: both might better be categorized as mechanisms that help you adapt to arbitrary, prolonged agony. As a form of exercise, barre is ideal for an era in which everyone has to work constantly – you can be back at the office in five minutes, no shower necessary – and in which women are still expected to look unreasonably good.

Does it say something about me that I’m actually intrigued by Barre? Like, the me who has to exist in this late-capitalist hellscape aches for something that might prepare and gird me for it. And from my Muay Thai days I know I’m enough of a masochist to derive some pleasure from a punishing routine barked at me by an intimidating woman. I know this isn’t what the article wants me to take away, but… can I harden myself into a perfect 21st Century cyborg with one exacting exercise regime? I don’t know, but I want to find out.

++++

Cutting Room Floor:

CJW: Ridgeline, a newsletter by Craig Mod

You’re probably already subscribed to Ridgeline, but if you’re not, a recent edition had a section that really grabbed me (as someone who both writes books and is critical of surveillance capitalism):

In my talk I espoused the need for books today as totems of attention control, but more importantly, as objects with which the contract between user and media is clear. You buy a book, you know what you’re getting. There is no other “business model” at play. No other information being (necessarily, relatively) sold. This clarity of contract is especially lucid in physical form. The book has edges. The transaction has edges. The transaction completes. Given time, you complete the book. It has an ending. Contracts are clear. Usually, there’s no tracking.

The above link is to the full letter I quoted from - you can subscribe at the bottom of the page.

CJW: Weird and Deadly Interesting a newsletter by Ahmet A. Sabancı

This year in the newsletter I’ve been talking a lot about community. But maybe the “community” branding sounds a little boring. Maybe it sounds like some normie shit you’re too cool for. But what about a Global Frequency of Weird?

When I thought about GF of Weird, I was not talking about forming a secret organization but instead an organic community already formed in a loose way, filled with artists, thinkers, writers, journalists, academics who deal with the weird things (or weird and deadly interesting things, if you will) through their work. They all influence each other, always in touch in one way or another. Of course they don’t have the special phone line or toolbox but as far as I’ve seen, they’re always ready for each other and can create their own tools quickly.

Fuck yeah, sign me up.

CJW: SCIOPS a newsletter by Max Anton Brewer

This is not the first time I’ve recommended SCIOPS and it won’t be the last. Issue 03.24 was another nugget of pure gold from start to finish.

Egregores like capitalism or Christianity are said to be exo-toxic: they kill other memes, demand purity from their hosts. They are jealous gods. But not all egregores are this way: geology and astronomy and physics don’t fight each other for supreme control of your brain. They swap thoughts and recombine in new and interesting ways, forming a memetic community. They cooperate.
The more room there is in your ideology for cooperation, the bigger your egregore can grow.

CJW: The Ascent to Godhood, by JY Yang

With The Ascent to Godhood, JY Yang continues weaving together the disparate threads of the Tensorate world. Instead of a simple, linear series, these books slots together like a jigsaw puzzle, with each piece illuminating more of the whole.

Not only is each beautifully written, filled with unique worldbuilding, and populated with fully fleshed-out characters, but with each Yang has pushed themselves to explore different narrative styles to great effect.

I hardly read fantasy, but I love these books.

MKY: McMafia (2018)

This is a solid international crime drama drawing on the book of the same name - that now I have to buy, along with the book Queen of the South is based on, and I would sit those two shows and books together - that is centred on London and Oligarchs in Exile there, but spans the globe from Moscow to Tel Aviv to Mumbai. It literally shows how money is moved around to finance crime. Also I’m here for anything that has a City banker doing systema training at night.

MKY: Better Luck Tomorrow (2002)

Fast’n’Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw made The Italian Job (remake) part of its Extended Cinematic Universe. What I didn’t know until Emily Dare pointed it out, is that Justin Lin did the origin story of Han before making Tokyo Drift, and turning that film series into a mega-franchise. This is a great little movie about Asian American high school kids playing at that gangster life. Something I enjoyed far more than a certain massive budget buddy movie that left no room to develop its far more compelling antagonist and wouldn’t even say Chernobyl outloud.

MKY: Once Upon A Time In Hollywood

The best part of this film is a massive spoiler, but I’ll give you a hint as to who is the real star of this star-studded film:

The worst part of this film has rightly been called out by Shannon Lee.

Honestly, I wish Tarantino had stopped at Inglorious Basterds now. Though that ultraviolent Star Trek movie he was mumbling about at one point would’ve been cool.

MKY: The Rook [UK]

Or, why isn’t this show called The Gestalt? Sigh. This is a very british spy/psi-fi that I only kept watching for one reason (with four bodies)…

CJW: Square Eyes, by Anna Mill and Luke Jones

I was put onto this comic thanks to the About Buildings + Cities podcast, and the series they did on Katushiro Otomo’s Akira. For the final episode of that series, Luke and his co-host, George Gingell, also had Anna Mill on, and they talked a bit about Square Eyes, and the influence of Otomo on Mill’s art. (You may have also seen it mentioned in Orbital Operations, because we can’t go one issue without referring back to the President of the Republic of Newsletters.)

The Akira comparisons aren’t obvious or immediate, but that hardly matters because Mill’s art is phenomenal. The characters, clothing, buildings, and assorted ephemera of city life are exquisitely rendered, and the colours almost glow on the page, soft but vivid at the same time.

The story concerns a software designer/engineer/superstar who has dropped off the grid for a few months, forcibly interred at a sort of digital detox facility. The book starts with her return to the city, desperate to be reconnected to the digital realm. The digital and physical facades of the city are shown subtly, the ways the digital has come to usurp the real (similar to my upcoming Repo Virtual). As Fin tries to regain her memories and her old life, we see images of overlaid memory and reality, blurring together in hallucinatory moments, multiple layers of art pressed down on one another as the disparate bleeds together. And in one section we see Fin and her friend George navigate parts of the city hidden from the digital realm in a way that could only be done in comics.

I’m not entirely sure what I think of the story, but artistically and aesthetically, Square Eyes is unparalleled. Just the lettering alone is fantastic, and I hope other letterers take notice of what they’ve done here. This style won’t suit every project, but with a setting like this, where layers of reality are laid one atop the other, the see-through word balloons add another subtle layer to the whole project.

AA: The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Tempest

An extensive discussion of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Tempest, quite possibly Alan Moore’s final comics work. The comprehensive analysis presented here is by Brian Nicholson, who also blogs regularly about comics at Longbox Coffin.

…the mainstream comic book industry is a metonym for larger trends within American culture. The diversity on offer is superficial, with much sharing the same hollow and empty core, in love with violence and empire, indifferent to anything outside increasing its share of the market, as the resources needed for something sustainable in the long term deteriorate. There’s a glut of product so there is no way to be aware of what might truly be good or transcendent, there is just something niche-marketed to atomized individuals, to play off their smug self-satisfaction, whether they want to be flattered for their superficially clever and earnest-approximating aspects, or just have their lizard brain stoked by sadistic cruelty towards an imagined other.

CJW: I thought this section also resonates with some of what we’ve talked about here:

The book is dense, and reading each issue as it came out, it was difficult to find a throughline by which to ascertain meaning. This, however, is how life has felt from 2016 until now: like so much of the citizenry is lying to themselves, believing in multiple conspiracy theories, that consensus reality is essentially irreconcilable, and can only be made sense of by those who are versed in the insane systems of thought that other people believe in.

AA: Egregores are really having their moment, aren’t they? Looking into the concept late the other night lead me to the bizarre individual known as Sorcerer Tal.

I first found this video, evocatively titled: Experimental egregore creation with living fossil part 1chaos magick. Tal is very genuine about his practice, and he confidently provides amateur would-be sorcerers with a range of pointers (EG: Did you know a triop can make a great vessel for your egregore?).

After this I watched another video, this one about ST ridding a home of a malevolent spirit. I have to admit that I started watching these videos ironically (and there are some truly funny/absurd moments here), but Sorcerer Tal’s earnestness and goofy charm ultimately won me over, for realsies.

In some ways I was reminded of no-budget fringe-dweller documentaries like GOTHIC KING COBRA or the recent Full Force; there’s certainly the same lack of artifice or polish.

I wouldn’t be too surprised if this channel of particularly grimy lo-fi folk magick gains a bit of internet infamy sometime soon - Sorcerer Tal is just the kind of singular outsider that the internet loves to embrace (and occasionally destroy).

AA: Miyu Kojima Creates Miniature Replicas of Lonely Deaths via Spoon & Tamago

I love these ultra-detailed dioramas, despite how grim their subject matter is. These little people-less pocket worlds convey loneliness and raw, tragic humanity in a way that’s compelling and confronting:

Twenty six-year old Miyu Kojima works for a company that cleans up after kodokushi (孤独死) or lonely deaths: a Japanese phenomenon of people dying alone and remaining undiscovered for a long period of time.
Part art therapy and part public service campaign, Kojima spends a large portion of her free time recreating detailed miniature replicas of the rooms she has cleaned. A word of caution: although recreated without the corpses, some of the replicas can be quite disturbing.

If you want to know more about the artist’s career as a kodokushi cleaner, you can read this Al Jazeera article about her.

RELATED: A link in the comment section lead me to the story of Frances Glessner Lee:

During the 1940s and 50s, Lee spent years creating the ‘Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death’, 19 (originally 20) painstakingly-accurate dioramas to train budding forensic investigators on the crucial skills of crime scene observation and analysis. Each model cost between $3000 – $4,500 to produce and were based on real crime scenes and autopsies Lee encountered throughout her career. She spent countless hours recreating her miniature macabre worlds, including real working doors and windows, and complete sets of clothes for each victim.

When I’m finally (FINALLY!) obscenely (OBSCENELY!) rich, I’m going to acquire some of these pieces for my mansion-sized cabinet of curiosities.

MJW: My story, The Beasts and the Birthday was featured over at Curious Fictions last week.

CJW: We’re butting up against the limits of substack, so that’s all folks.

Aug. 11, 2019, 10:07 a.m.

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