nothing here but plutocratic crimes
issue 310 - 15th February, 2026
CJW: Welcome back, gang. Lots more good stuff and awfulness! Yayyy!
If you wanna support us, those links are:
Another thing you can do to help spread the word is forward this email to someone you think might enjoy it. Or talk about it on sosh. Or scream about us from the rooftops. Whatever’s easiest.
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, drum.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer and purveyor of melancholy whimsy.
Climate Change & The Environment
DCH: UK joins European offshore windfarm plan to create world’s largest ‘clean energy reservoir’ - Lauren Almeida at The Guardian
The UK and nine other European countries have agreed to accelerate the rollout of offshore windfarms in the 2030s and build a power grid in the North Sea, in a landmark pact to turn the ageing oil basin into a “clean energy reservoir”.
Europe is converting the North Sea into shared public infrastructure because the old energy model is a liability. Decades of dependence on oil and gas created fragility, price shocks, and political blackmail, and governments are now rebuilding the grid around redundancy, surplus, and cross-border control. Offshore wind tied directly into multiple national systems is an admission that fossil markets fail predictably and that energy security has to be engineered, not wished into existence, no matter how loudly figures like Donald Trump complain.
//
This is what adaptation actually looks like: communities building redundancy because national infrastructure won’t, and because waiting for the grid to save you is increasingly a death sentence. How local energy networks are saving lives across the world - Katharine Sanderson at dialogue.earth
When meat gets more expensive because its emissions finally count, consumption drops fast, which means fewer emissions, less land abuse, and lower water and fertilizer use across the system. Just how effective would a European meat tax be for the environment? - Emma Bryce at Anthropocene Magazine
Just the headlines:
Geopolitics & Empire
CJW: Israel used weapons in Gaza that made thousands of Palestinians evaporate - Mohammad Mansour at Al Jazeera
According to the Al Jazeera Arabic investigation, The Rest of the Story, Civil Defence teams in Gaza have documented 2,842 Palestinians who have “evaporated” since the war began in October 2023, leaving behind no remains other than blood spray or small fragments of flesh.
Experts and witnesses attributed this phenomenon to Israel’s systematic use of internationally prohibited thermal and thermobaric weapons, often referred to as vacuum or aerosol bombs, capable of generating temperatures exceeding 3,500 degrees Celsius [6,332 degrees Fahrenheit].
And I foolishly thought I could no longer be surprised by the horrors Israel is visiting on Palestinians in Gaza.
I’m not sure where they got the figure, but I saw on Bluesky someone say that 280,000 Palestinians are missing. How many of them were simply vaporised by Israel? My disgust at, and contempt for, the Israeli regime, and all those that support them, knows no bounds.
//
DCH: Pentagon Inks Massive $200 Million Deal to Buy Controversial Cluster Weapons From Israel - Dan Glaun at The Intercept
“The U.S. wants all options,” said William Hartung, an arms industry researcher with the Quincy Center for Responsible Statecraft. “One of their arguments was it’s good if you’re in a close-packed artillery situation — a ground war. It clears more of an area.”
Inside the U.S. national security apparatus, lethal policy is being normalized behind paperwork. The Pentagon has approved a $210 million, no-bid contract to manufacture cluster artillery shells with an Israeli state firm, a rare and deliberate escalation buried in procurement language. Claims about ultra-low dud rates are administrative fiction; decades of evidence from Laos, Iraq, Bosnia, and Ukraine show these weapons contaminate civilian space long after wars end. This is how contemporary war planning treats civilians: as acceptable debris.
//
CJW: I’m Not Done With You - Mary Turfah at The Baffler
Examining the bodies returned to their people after the most recent so-called ceasefire, Palestinian doctors noted that, in some bodies “the rib cage and ribs were clipped with a sharp saw—a medical saw, a bone saw—and the sternum, along with the central part of the ribs, [were] lifted to allow for the removal of the heart and lungs without damage to the organ being taken.” Organ procurement, with few exceptions like skin and cornea, requires that the body be either alive—via brain death—or just-dead—via circulatory death. It is plausible that some Palestinian prisoners’ torture led to brain death. It is also possible their torturers felt no need to wait. Palestinian witnesses have reported that some prisoners were alive at the time they were taken for organ extraction. In one batch of bodies, the organs removed were those commonly transplanted: heart, liver, lungs. The transplant surgeon waits for a person to die; the soldier can’t. The settler surgeon wields his mastery over the body to serve the state. Here, the surgeon acts as—is—a soldier.
More heinous atrocities that are simply business as usual for Israel.
Israel’s systemic mutilation of Palestinians, especially children, who today represent the largest pediatric amputee population in the world—a previously unimaginable term made possible by Israel’s knack for cruelty—emerges in part because it inflicts pain, in part because it transfigures the Arab body into a marker of Jewish supremacy—think of the permanent disfiguring of the pager attacks—and in part because it drives a wedge between the Israeli and their enemy. Israelis only recognize themselves against our image. In a world like that, everything becomes relative: a limbless Palestinian child is a way to see strength in your own.
//
"Epibatidine can be found naturally in dart frogs in the wild in South America. Dart frogs in captivity do not produce this toxin and it is not found naturally in Russia.” Russia killed opposition leader Alexei Navalny using dart frog toxin, UK says- Adam Goldsmith and Tom McArthur at BBC
How Human Rights Watch Killed a Report Calling Israel’s Denial of Palestinians’ Right of Return a Crime Against Humanity at Drop Site News
The War on Terror in Minnesota - Spencer Ackerman at Forever Wars
Welcome to the Jade Helm Presidency - Sam Biddle at The Intercept
Just the headlines:
Britain’s Rulers Have Been Partners in the Gaza Genocide - David Jamieson at Jacobin
Palestine Action activists acquitted over Elbit action - Michael Arria at mondoweiss (DCH: finally!)
Tech & Design
CJW: Here's how Epstein broke the internet - Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day
I had a front row seat to the collapse of the global order. And I believed at the time that I understood what was going on. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, far-right extremists, aided and amplified by Russia’s Internet Research Agency and funded by Republican dark money, infiltrated fringe online spaces. They weaponized disaffected young men, and used sites like Reddit and 4chan to organize a flood of content that influenced the unthinking algorithms on larger platforms like Facebook and YouTube. But there were always holes in that explanation that I could never quite account for. A feeling — one that can be quite dangerous for a journalist trying not to fall into the void of conspiracy theories — that there was something bigger going on. And while I can’t say that we have the complete story yet, it does increasingly feel like I was actually, without knowing it, following Jeffrey Epstein around the world the whole time.
[...]
Epstein’s messages give us a glimpse, one we were never meant to see, of a shadowy world of international espionage, deregulated finance, far-right politics, eugenicist race science, information warfare, and unfathomably intricate human trafficking networks. Epstein wanted to break the internet and, eventually, democracy, to cover his tracks and cash in on the chaos. Here’s everything we know so far about how he planned to do it.
Great breakdown from Broderick on how the various online far-right cultural movements/moments were likely fomented by Epstein and his network of paedophile rapist elites.
//
CJW: How the men in the Epstein files defeated #MeToo - Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge
Being able to see their emails makes something very clear: The “anti-woke” movement was not a genteel intellectual inquiry, made by disinterested parties who cared deeply about free speech. It is a social circle of powerful people who feel threatened by #MeToo. Reading through the emails, it’s possible to see that Epstein himself coordinated pushback against #MeToo. Looking back, it seems obvious that sinking #MeToo also led to where we are now: a place where laws simply don’t apply if you have enough money and power. The same players are involved.
No one will be surprised that the backlash against MeToo was coordinated by some of the worst people, but that it was literally connected to Epstein's cabal of paedophile rapists is almost too on the nose. This fucking reality, right?
And of course we're seeing some of the same people push back against the idea that there should be repercussions for the people in the Files. We're seeing some movement in Europe at least, but if we see nothing happen in America, I will be sick (and sadly unsurprised).
//
Ring’s Super Bowl ad pitches AI-powered lost dog detection as neighborly tech, but what it actually demonstrates is a consumer-built surveillance dragnet, networked, searchable, and ready to be repurposed. This isn’t a pivot—it’s a return to form: a company that has always positioned itself as a law enforcement adjunct is now layering facial recognition and AI over millions of privately owned cameras, because fear scales and liberty doesn’t. You didn’t just buy a doorbell—you helped wire the block into the carceral state. With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet by Jason Koebler at 404 Media (DCH: and this is why I’ve always told people to not buy Ring doorbells. They were already being used by law enforcement during the George Floyd protests years ago.)
Silicon Valley has stopped building apps and started dismantling the state, fusing venture capital with military dominance to construct an "Authoritarian Stack" where corporate boards, not public laws, dictate reality. By privatizing the core pillars of sovereignty—from the currency in your wallet to the satellites in orbit—this network has engineered a system where government dependency is the feature, not the bug. The result is a hollowed-out democracy functioning merely as a legacy interface, while the true machinery of power is quietly, permanently handed over to a caste of unelected oligarchs. (DCH: on its coming to Europe next) The Authoritarian Stack by Prof. Francesca Bria
Just the headlines:
Waymo self-driving cars, powered by AGI — A Guy Instead by David Gerard at Pivot to AI (DCH: Most AI is invisible labour done by remote humans. The mechanical turk is just a ghost in the machine.)
Elon Musk's French office raided by Paris authorities as they release statement by Callum Jones at Unilad (DCH: Viva La France)
Uber found liable for sexual assault by driver and ordered to pay victim $8.5m at The Guardian
The world is trying to log off U.S. tech - Rina Chandran at Rest of World
How Jeff Bezos and Amazon became instruments of authoritarianism - Brian Merchant (DCH: I wrote about this during Trump’s first term. Bezos and Amazon have only become even more active participants since then.)
Society & The Culture
DCH: Jeff Bezos’s Destruction of “The Washington Post” Is a Disgraceful Plutocratic Crime by Chris Lehmann at The Nation
As any competent editor will tell you, Lewis’s use of the passive voice is telling. Audiences don’t halve themselves in a vacuum; the responsible parties were Bezos and his handpicked adjutant Lewis—an eager tabloid handmaiden for clownish and disgraced former British prime minister Boris Johnson, when he wasn’t running interference in the UK Telegraph’s phone-hacking scandal. It turns out that democracy doesn’t die in darkness at all—it succumbs to repeated group muggings at the hands of the moneyed power elite. But that’s a story you’re never going to read in Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post.
At the Washington Post, institutional decline has followed ownership priorities. Since Jeff Bezos took control, newsroom capacity has been cut across sports, local, foreign, and opinion desks, while management declined to defend journalists facing political pressure and reshaped editorial output around market ideology. These were not isolated decisions; they reflect what happens when a major news outlet sits inside a vast corporate and defense-entangled empire. The paper stops constraining power and starts negotiating with it.
//
DCH: An Anti-Trans Bathroom Bill With a Cruel New Twist - Natasha Lennard at The Intercept
With masked paramilitary forces grabbing nonwhite people from the streets and shooting civilians with impunity, it can be difficult to keep focus on all the other ways Republicans are entrenching a fascist status quo nationwide. For trans people, however, the legislative and policy assaults, which have been escalating red states for nearly a decade, are only getting worse — and, as ever, drawing all too little concern from Democratic leaders.
Kansas didn’t just pass another bathroom ban—it bolted a bounty hunter clause onto it, inviting private citizens to sue trans people for up to $1,000 for using a restroom, as if basic bodily functions are now a civil offense. Safety? Don’t insult anyone’s intelligence—the same lawmakers who shrug at gun violence are suddenly deputizing strangers to police stalls and IDs, because cruelty scales and fear mobilizes a base. This is not about bathrooms and it never was; it’s about constructing a regime of humiliation so pervasive that trans people are pushed out of public life altogether.
//
CJW: My Grueling Quest To Buy A Switch 2 By Riding Citi Bikes - Chris Person at Aftermath
If farming points is work, and I’m unsure it is, it’s calm work that brings you all kinds of places if you allow it to. Like Pokémon GO before it, a computer algorithm points your body in capricious directions. Unlike Pokémon GO however, it forces you to consider the structure of the world rather than a fictional world laid over it. To farm points is to contemplate the structures that lead you down a single road again and again. Haul a cumbersome bike down a stretch of asphalt a hundred times and you begin to know its shapes better than the face of your first grade teacher.
Years ago when I read Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal, I saw the evil in it right away. McGonigal saw it purely as a tool to influence people's behaviours in positive ways - like gamifying education to get kids more interested in learning. But I knew it would be used by the worst people in the world to make their products addictive and/or to wring labour and value out of people without properly paging them for their work.
This is a perfect example of that, but it's an interesting read, and this particular example of gamification isn't as evil as plenty of others. You used to even get paid in real money, but of course they ended that.
//
“Over the past six months, HuffPost spoke with about a dozen people — including detainees, lawyers and advocates — and reviewed over 1,000 pages of court documents, medical records and emails to uncover new levels of cruelty for trans migrants. Three said they were subjected to serious medical neglect, harassment and solitary confinement for weeks at a time — which the United Nations considers to be a form of torture. All said they felt they were uniquely targeted for abuse for being transgender.” - ICE Treats Trans Immigrants With New Level Of Cruelty Under Trump - Levi Kalish at Huffpo
Health, Cooking, and Related
DCH: Our Obsession With Personal Responsibility Is Making Us Sick - Jatinder Hayre at Jacobin
Across high-income countries, inequality is routinely misdiagnosed. When life expectancy gaps widen, when preventable illness clusters among poorer communities, and when disadvantage hardens into predictable patterns of premature death, the explanation offered by governments is rarely political failure. Instead, responsibility is displaced onto individuals. Health outcomes are framed as the cumulative result of choices made well or badly, rather than conditions imposed or protections withdrawn. The state recedes, then moralizes about the space it vacates.
This article demolishes the lie at the heart of modern health policy: that widening illness and early death are personal failures rather than political outcomes. The evidence is settled—interventions that reduce harm automatically through welfare, housing, and regulation work, while “personal responsibility” programs offload risk onto people with the least capacity to carry it, which predictably widens inequality. Blaming individuals isn’t a mistake or misunderstanding, it’s a governing strategy that preserves power by moralizing the damage it refuses to prevent.
Labour & Economics
DCH: Epstein Geopolitics And the Age of Primitive Accumulation - Van Jackson at Un-Diplomatic
Geopolitics is the name we give to the sum of states pursuing “national security” in this way. And geopolitics as practiced today is increasingly a way of unlocking wealth through primitive accumulation (dehumanizing others by stealing their shit, killing them, poisoning their environments, or forcing them to flee their land).
The latest tranche of Epstein emails are a blueprint for predation at the highest levels of power: when growth stalls, profit from collapse. “Finding things on their way to collapse” is the business strategy of vulture capitalism, one that treats war zones, sanctions, and state failure as revenue streams for oligarchs who can bend geopolitics to their will. This is not late-stage capitalism misbehaving; it’s primitive accumulation with a Bloomberg terminal—chaos monetized, humanity leveraged.
//
Just the headlines:
Silicon Valley can’t import talent like before. So it’s exporting jobs - Ananya Bhattacharya at Rest of World
Unions Are Going to Die Unless Something Big Changes Soon - Chris Brooks at Jacobin
In Chile, Starbucks Workers Have a National Union Contract - Jane Slaughter at Jacobin (DCH: Lets end the newsletter with some good news for a change)
Extreme Inequality Presages The Revolt Against It - Nathan Gardels at Noema
IRL
LZ - The Open Book
This lodging in Scotland lets you experience working in a bookshop in exchange for your stay in their apartment. I thought this was really lovely. While there's obviously a romanticisation of what it means to work in a bookshop, if you can do it not for a living, but for fun, and also get a place to stay, it could be worth it. Too bad it's really popular, and there are only open spots in 2028.
//
LZ - New East Finchley Cafe Finch Serves Flat Whites (and the Community)
If you watched Fleabag and can go to London, the actress Jenny Rainsford, who played Boo, opened a café on the outskirts of the city. In the series, both she and the protagonist run a café, so I thought this was really fun, and I hope I can visit it someday!
Games
CJW: Miniver Cheevy: Tabletop roleplaying games and violence (via 70s Sci-Fi Art)
This is a selection of quotes from various tabletop games about violence and how it’s dealt with/used in the game. Really fascinating to see what some individual creators have done, and the breadth of variety across the field.
Art
LZ - FLOOR796
This website has been updated over the years and features complex urban architecture, with multiple pop culture characters and memes interacting as animated pixel art. Really impressive work and it's fun to “treasure hunt” characters and references that you know.
//
MJW: Love this lil comic from demonicas_
//
MJW: These beautifully coloured images are from Diana Naneva.
The Self-Promotion
MJW: My next book, The Forgetting Navigations, comes out in May through Interstellar Flight Press. It’s just been put up on Netgalley, if that’s your thing. Check out the couple of reviews it has at Goodreads, if that’s your thing. Once it’s up for pre-order, I’ll be sure to let you know.
The Memes
![Twitter screenshot. @CornOnTheGoblin: the dick sucking factory just called [lowers hat] your mom was in an accident](https://assets.buttondown.email/images/799902b1-b583-46ac-b214-8ee8ad47db66.jpg?w=960&fit=max)
You just read issue #310 of Nothing Here. You can also browse the full archives of this newsletter.