nothing here but post-anthropocene orcaism

issue 225 - 9th July, 2023

CJW: Good morning all. Hope you're doing well and finding some lightness in a world that can feel crushing at times.

If you want to support us, you’ve got a couple of options:

Both give you access to the full bonus archive, as well as new bonuses as they are posted. You can also help by spreading the word - perhaps on one of the new twitter clones that just dropped!

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, sin-eater, future sweetie-pie.

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

Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: Inside The Controversial Conservation Efforts To Rewild Europe - Isobel Cockerell at Noema

Rubbers was eventually fined 500 euros for detaining and transporting a protected species, although he told me that the local administration forgot to claim the money. He has spent the following years watching with satisfaction as the beavers spread across Belgium, transforming its waterways. Frogs and fish came to lay their spawn in the slowed, dammed-up water, while bugs and beetles thrived in the rotting wood of the felled trees. Birds followed in their wake, feeding off the fish and insects. “Belgium should thank me for services rendered to the nation,” Rubbers said.
Rubbers is part of a secretive, underground network of wildlife enthusiasts who are returning species back into the landscape without asking permission first. It’s not just beavers: There are boar bombers, a “butterfly brigade” that breeds and releases rare species of butterfly and a clandestine group returning the pine marten — one of Britain’s rarest mammals — to British forests.

Really interesting piece on rogue rewilders and conversations around rewilding in Europe.

CJW: Post-Anthropocene Humanism - Nathan Gardels at Noema

At this caesura, the adaptive animal in humans is compelled to awaken in order to survive the consequences of technics. Peter Sloterdijk calls this awakening “co-immunism,” the species instinct for survival, wherein humans rebalance their exosomatic genius with the imperatives of bodily existence on the Earth. For the German philosopher, that entails a shift from the “allotechnology” of previous eras conceived to dominate nature toward a conscious “anthropo-technology” which is co-creative in alignment with nature.

A great essay on humanism, human adaptability, and technics in the face of climate change and the huge shifts it will require of us. Some really interesting provocations both for fiction and for how we might adapt in the coming years.

The Seductive Vision Of Green Aviation - Henry Wismayer at Noema - CJW: A long read, but worth it. As with many industries, aviation is rife with greenwashing while trying to change as little as possible for as long as possible. I for one welcome our new zeppelin pilot overlords.

Just the headlines:

Geopolitics & Empire

DCH: An Indian politician says scandalous audio clips are AI deepfakes. We had them tested by Nilesh Christopher restofworld.org

While experts have rattled off multiple alarming scenarios on how AI can play out in politics, in India, this could be the first high-profile case of the “liar’s dividend” — the ability of the powerful to claim plausible deniability of unflattering footage. Deepfake experts told Rest of World the rise of AI is being used as a ruse to sow information uncertainty in a new political era. On the one hand, they said, generative AI has the potential to tarnish reputations and manipulate public opinion, but on the other, the technology could be a way to evade accountability by dismissing any incriminating evidence as fake.

Spoilers: He was lying. Expect more of this shit as we run ever faster and deeper into our new post-truth world.

‘Ní Aoláin's bottom line is that even though only 30 people remain in cages at Guantanamo, out of 780 people once held there, abuse at Guantanamo is ongoing. She has nice things to say about the Biden administration's commitment to the rule of law, as manifested by the very low bar of allowing her access to Guantanamo. That's throat clearing ahead of this: "[S]everal U.S. Government procedures establish a structural deprivation and non-fulfilment of rights necessary for a humane and dignified existence and constitute at a minimum, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment across all detention practices at Guantánamo Bay."’
"What is frightening is that almost no political force is treating this revolt politically. The only answer the political class seems to give is a repressive one." - The French Riots Are a Result of Miserable Conditions in French Society - Tomek Skomski and Marion Beauvalet at Jacobin

Just the headlines:

The United States Wants to Poison Ukraine to Save It - Branko Marcetic at Jacobin - CJW: I mentioned this previously, probably when the UK announced they'd be sending depleted uranium ammo to Ukraine.
With Ukraine’s Cluster Bombs Killing Its Own Citizens, Biden Readies Order to Send More

Tech & Design

DCH: Inside the AI Factory: the humans that make tech seem human - Josh Dzieza at The Verge

The job of the annotator often involves putting human understanding aside and following instructions very, very literally — to think, as one annotator said, like a robot. It’s a strange mental space to inhabit, doing your best to follow nonsensical but rigorous rules, like taking a standardized test while on hallucinogens. Annotators invariably end up confronted with confounding questions like, Is that a red shirt with white stripes or a white shirt with red stripes? Is a wicker bowl a “decorative bowl” if it’s full of apples? What color is leopard print? When instructors said to label traffic-control directors, did they also mean to label traffic-control directors eating lunch on the sidewalk? Every question must be answered, and a wrong guess could get you banned and booted to a new, totally different task with its own baffling rules.

See also: The industry behind the industry behind AI by By Russell Brandom at restofworld

DCH: AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born by James Vincent at The Verge

The problem, in extremely broad strokes, is this. Years ago, the web used to be a place where individuals made things. They made homepages, forums, and mailing lists, and a small bit of money with it. Then companies decided they could do things better. They created slick and feature-rich platforms and threw their doors open for anyone to join. They put boxes in front of us, and we filled those boxes with text and images, and people came to see the content of those boxes. The companies chased scale, because once enough people gather anywhere, there’s usually a way to make money off them. But AI changes these assumptions.

As Patrick Tanguay at Sentiers puts it:

• Web 1: real content by real people for real people.
• Web 2: real content by ‘fake’ people pandering to recommendation algorithms for real people.
• Web 3 (the AI one, not the crypto one): fake content by fake ‘people’ for real people.

We’ve talked about how the early mass release of products like ChatGPT, Bard, etc is going to poison the LLMs well as AI eats itself. The business models are this close to not even caring about real people anywhere in the equation. Even as consumers.

Triple shot of quick links on the ongoing trainwreck at Elon Skum’s Twitter: on the rate limits and content throttling (which are largely to try to avoid paying their Google bill$), on how it's even easier to run influence ops on the platform now (but how much does that matter given the shrinking user base), and how Skum’s likely endgame is to declare bankruptcy and blame it all on regulators.
“Google updated its privacy policy over the weekend, explicitly saying the company reserves the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build its AI tools. If Google can read your words, assume they belong to the company now, and expect that they’re nesting somewhere in the bowels of a chatbot.”
"The genius and the curse of modern LLMs is that they are explicitly non-symbolic, eschewing the representative meaning of our own cognition for the unfettered madness of pure data." - The Scent of Knowledge - Kurt Schilling at Blood Knife
Hope, fear, and AI: We polled 2,000 people about how they’re using AI, what they want it to do, and what scares them about it the most. - Jacob Kastrenakes and James Vincent at The Verge

Just the headlines:

Society & The Culture

CJW: The Butchering - Jake Skeets at Emergence Magazine

Sheep represent so much more than food, so food sovereignty itself represents the inherent right of peoples to their own ways of living. “Sheep is life,” as the saying goes. Sheep offer nourishment, clothing, and tools. No part of the sheep is wasted. However, to get this harvest you must tend to the sheep, waking up early every day to ensure their survival. This shepherding gives way to a circle of care and attention that births a way of life. A way of life we have an inherent right to. This is food sovereignty.

A fantastic piece on food sovereignty, culture, and story, from Diné poet Jake Skeets.

MJW: Instagram Is Removing Sex-Positive Accounts Without Warning by Lydia Morrish WIRED

This is just the latest of myriad occasions seeing sex workers, adult content creators, and sex-related accounts being pushed away by social platforms. Members of the sex industry are often at heightened risk of on-the-ground subjugation, discrimination, and violent attacks, and so turn to digital outlets. But they are also under threat there, with their livelihoods on the line. Platforms that previously championed adult material have shunned it over the years, including fansite OnlyFans, which momentarily banned explicit content in 2021 before backtracking. Meta also apologized to pole dancers in 2019 for shadowbanning their accounts. It has also regularly shut down sex workers’ accounts and penalized sex-related content on Instagram.

Meta is up to its usual shenanigans doing shady things to sex-related accounts, but my dudes, it always has. Insta shuts down the accounts of sex workers as a habit - many workers I know have lost accounts with 10k + followers repeatedly - and now they’re going after other sex-or-sex-adjacent profiles. With Threads looking poised to take over the Twitter vacuum we’ve been left in since The Eloning, it’s more of the same. Twitter is a fucking hellhole, but it was a hell-hole where sex workers were… not free, but freer than on any other existing social media platform (we miss you, Switter.) It fucking sucks to exist in a social media environment that hates us, and if your solution to that question is to get off socials, then firstly, fuck off, and secondly, try running a small business (which is what sex workers are doing) without socials.

DCH: Man cited in Supreme Court LGBTQ rights case says he was never involved - Victoria Bisset and Jaclyn Peiser at The Washington Post

On Friday, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of a Christian graphic artist in Littleton, Colo., who argued that free speech protections allowed her to refuse to design wedding websites for same-sex couples.
Lorie Smith filed her initial case to Colorado district court in 2016, arguing that the state’s anti-discrimination law prevented her from including a message on the webpage for her company, 303 Creative, stating that she would not create wedding websites for gay couples.
In subsequent court documents, her lawyers cited a query that they said was sent by an individual named Stewart with contact information that matches the person The Post interviewed. The request asked for Smith’s services for Stewart’s forthcoming wedding to a person named “Mike.”
“We are getting married early next year and would love some design work done for our invites, placenames etc. We might also stretch to a website,” the message cited in the case read.
However, Stewart told The Post he had never contacted Smith.

There’s an amazing Tweet that goes into even more detail about how this case was a total fiction that I’ve linked in case you can luck into getting it to load because ha ha Twitter sucks. In case you can’t I’ll summarise: SCOTUS removed LGBTQ rights on the basis of a lie. The inciting incident for the lawsuit never actually happened. The person the litigant cited isn’t even gay, has been married to a woman for ages, and just happened to be a designer that worked on HRC’s social media campaign.

What’s more this sham went through the entire legal system with people knowing it was all a lie. When rightwingers in the court system were pressed on this being a fabrication they just say shit like “it’s not on us to prove something actually happened” or “why should this poor woman have to wait to be punished by an unjust law (the law that made it illegal to deny services to lgbtq folx) before we strike it from the books?”

What's worse is this isn’t even the first time SCOTUS has pulled this shit but more on that in our next bonus letter…

"The travesty of TERF moral panics is that, fundamentally, what is being policed is other people’s capacity for joy. At base, there is perhaps no more banally evil crime. It is the promotion of a very amorphous kind of unfreedom." Better Queer? - Matt Coloquhoun - CJW: The bulk of this post is very personal, but this bit struck me. It's the same thought/feeling that bubbles up for me whenever I hear about the latest attacks on freedom for trans people, especially trans kids. Just let them find themselves and find some joy in this world that's too often short on it. Ultimately these attacks are a fascist impulse, like so many facets of the culture war.
“The question is, do we really want our best filmmakers, screenwriters, and actors tied up in what boils down to multimillion-dollar adverts for a toy corporation? (As one viral tweet puts it: “branded content with a wink and movie stars is still branded content! bring back the concept of selling out!”) Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have just one (1) original idea, as a treat?” - Daniel Kaluuya’s Barney film will be a ‘surreal, A24-type’ work of art - Thom Waite at Dazed
A Blatant Injustice - George Monbiot - CJW: Another way protestors (specifically climate activists) in the UK can be punished purely for the threat they make to capital. Haven't seen it mentioned elsewhere, so any UK readers should check it out.

Just the headlines:

The Titan Submersible Was “an Accident Waiting to Happen” (from expired carbon fibre to a widowed crew member with a death wish)

Health, Cooking, and Related

Meet the Psychedelic Boom’s First Responders - Chris Colin at Wired - On psychedelics, connection, and the history of trip-sitters.

Just the headlines:

The first fully A.I.-generated drug enters clinical trials in human patients

Labour & Economics

DCH: The Summer of the Whale by lyz

“Americans’ wages remain stagnant even as corporate profits hit record highs and inflation keeps rising, and support for labor unions is at an all-time high. America has the largest income and wealth inequality gap of all the developed nations. America also has a gender pay gap that hasn’t budged for 20 years — a pay gap that’s even greater when race is taken into account. And none of these gaps are closing. 100 million people in America have medical debt — debt they acquired for having the audacity to stay alive. America is a country where the poor get poorer, the rich get richer, and in response, workers are told they aren’t working hard enough.”
We, too, are being wounded and killed by the larger structure in which we’re all embedded. Directly and indirectly, we are drowning.

Good cross-referenced read that weaves the timely orca meme-making, historic data on such attacks, and late-stage capitalistic economics. We here at Nothing Here are #teamorca4lyfe

Corporate profits were biggest driver of inflation in Europe, IMF admits - Ben Norton at Geopolitical Economy Report - 'The IMF economists noted that “the results show that firms have passed on more than the nominal cost shock, and have fared relatively better than workers”.' Quelle surprise.
“The Dunning-Kruger effect is the hemophilia of dynastic capitalism. The dynasty is perhaps best understood expansively, as encompassing friends, and relatives’ friends, and loyal retainers with up to four legs, but nevertheless insular and exclusive, rarely open to true upstarts. Entrepreneurship in this system is a euphemism for a set of favors dispensed from above, from a consortium of patrons that might or might not include the innovator’s literal daddy.” - (DCH: Elizabeth Schambelan is writing like a demon here in her jeremiad about capitalism that deftly threads the needle from Stockton Rush to Elizabeth Holmes to Elon Musk.)

Just the headlines:

Was FTX a Ponzi scheme from the beginning? (DCH: signs point to yes)
Overworked and unable to quit: Delivery drivers in Brazil found something worse than gig work (DCH: Gig work is already precarious. Now add in predatory logistics firms that handle outsourcing of gig work and you have something even more monstrous)
Super-rich warned of ‘pitchforks and torches’ unless they tackle inequality
FTC prepares “the big one,” a major lawsuit targeting Amazon’s core business
Will the Biggest Tech Merger of All Time Go Through? - On Microsoft's planned purchase of Activision.
On the brink of a possible SAG-AFTRA strike, some actors are wary of AI. Here’s why.

Movies + TV

LZ: Rebecca (1940) + Rebecca (2020)

Alrighty! This was supposed to be in the last issue, but here we are. I finally managed to watch both the Hitchcock version and Wheatley's. I'm gonna be controversial and say that I like the Wheatley's the most, but I'm probably being anachronistic since the reason why I like it the most is because it is much more contemporary. Although Wheatley does pay homage to Hitchcock, especially on the way Mrs Danvers is portrayed and a specific scene when she tries to convince the protagonist to kill herself, the other characters are pretty different. I found Wheatley's adaptation more loyal to the book when it comes to the way the characters are interpreted by actors.

In Hitchcock, the acting is too affected but that's something typical of the period. It works better when representing the naivety and nervousness of the protagonist (who is unnamed, thus the way I address her here), but Lily James' take is much more interesting. That's why Wheatley also revamps the ending of the story, so strong Lily's rendition is.

Both movies are not loyal to the end of the book and both are good in their own way. Wheatley opted for a fanfic that adds a little bit more spice to the narrative by making the characters less defined as either good or bad, but more nuanced. Hitchcock's is classic and dramatic, but also inaccurate if you consider the original plot. I also love the outfits in Wheatley's movie. It definitely has a pinch of feminist in it and perhaps some anachronism when you see the protagonist dressed much more in a 70s fashion rather than of the beginning of the century, but it's gorgeous.

Wheatley's De Winter is also better, more controversial than Hitchcock's – in the original movie, you can't really understand why the protagonist doesn't feel loved. In Wheatley's adaptation, you can clearly see the protagonist being mistreated by the characters, especially because of her social position. Hitchcock doesn't address the fact that the protagonist is a servant, lower class woman, whereas this is clear and even suffocating in Wheatley's Rebecca.

Like I said before, you could expect that the British director would tackle class struggle in his movie and that is much clearer and stronger, and perhaps that's exactly why I like it more. It has a Gone Girl aftertaste or at least this feeling that the protagonist, under Lily James' interpretation, can satisfy the millennial insatiable thirst for girl bosses – which is quite weird when you consider how submissive the protagonist is in the book. Maybe this is already a spoiler, so I'll leave it to you to check both movies – the first on YouTube and the second on Netflix.

Podcasts

DCH: Why AI is a Threat to Artists Tech Won’t Save Us

Paris Marx is joined by Molly Crabapple to discuss why AI image generation tools are a threat to illustrators and why we need to refuse the idea that Silicon Valley’s visions of technology are inevitable.

Hourish long sharp and incisive pod. Nice supporting links for more context.

Video

DCH: Analysing the Cost of Wagner Revolt by Dennis Kovtun, Brendan Currie-O'Brien, Polina Ilinykh and Jake Godin at bellingcat

Highway and energy infrastructure sabotaged, at least 7 downed aircraft, with added death for good measure.

Music

LZ: Corps Fleur - Sea of Trees

If you like Deafheaven, MØL, Bosse de Nage, and Agriculture, be sure to check them!

MJW: Divide and Dissolve - Systemic

Melbourne-based instrumental doom-metal group Divide and Dissolve consists of saxophonist and guitarist Takiaya Reed and percussionist Sylvie Nehil. The new album Systemic is full of tracks that are dark, sludgy, and grinding, but threaded through with lighter moments of reprieve and orchestral interludes. I actually came across them in an article in The Guardian, of all places, and I’ve been listening to their music a lot while writing. From their website:

Divide and Dissolve’s new album Systemic examines the systems that intrinsically bind us and calls for a system that facilitates life for everyone. It’s a message that fits with the band’s core intention: to make music that honours their ancestors and Indigenous land, to oppose white supremacy, and to work towards a future of Black and Indigenous liberation.

The Self-Promotion

MJW: I’ve got new art up under Mia Walsch at the Tryst Blog. I’ve been getting more and more into visual art recently, and have done a few pieces for this blog. (Article by Vixen Temple.)

July 9, 2023, 12:28 p.m.

nothing here but post-anthropocene orcaism - issue 225 - 9th July, 2023

nothing here but post-anthropocene orcaism

issue 225 - 9th July, 2023

The Team

Climate Change & The Environment

Geopolitics & Empire

Tech & Design

Society & The Culture

Health, Cooking, and Related

Labour & Economics

Movies + TV

Podcasts

Video

Music

The Self-Promotion

The Memes