MJW: Welcome to this, the fifty-eighth installment of this newsletter, coming to you from the endless, timeless void that is level four restrictions in Melbourne. I have no idea how long I have been here, how long I will continue to be here, my entire life is house.
But I’ve heard that there is a world outside of the 5km radius I am legally allowed to be in between the hours of 5am and 8pm, and here’s some stuff from it.
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The Team
Corey J. White (CJW) - low power mode. Naarm/Melbourne.
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - Author. I’m also this guy.Your fabulous goth aunt. Utterly bonkers sorry not sorry.
m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / ecopoet // Dark Extropian Musings / pryvt.rsrch
Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
Articles
CJW: David Graeber, anthropologist and author of Bullshit Jobs, dies aged 59
Graeber was such an important writer and thinker for our times. This is a huge loss for us all, but condolences to his friends and family who have lost so much more. Here is a selection of some of his shorter work:
Not sure if we’ve linked to any of these before, but I definitely read Of Flying Cars for my bonus piece on Simulation Theory, and I’m certain we’ve referenced Bullshit Jobs a number of times.
MKY: VALE! Only ever read Debt and a few essays, but that was enough for him to have a permanent impact on my thinking, and I’ll be working my way through the above curated list (thx Corey!) over the coming days for sure.
DCH: “Whenever someone starts talking about the “free market,” it’s a good idea to look around for the man with the gun. He’s never far away.” The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (David Graeber)
Still reeling from the sad news. I think Graeber’s work is right up there with Piketty in terms of getting so much of what’s wrong with the world today right. This short video on debt is worth your time too.
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CJW: The Thin Blue Line Between Violent, Pro-Trump Militias and Police
Several shots ring out. In the distance, you see the gunman in jeans and a green T-shirt. A man rushes up behind him. The gunman turns. More shots ring out and the man collapses to the ground. The gunman circles a parked car, then comes back to the man laid out on the pavement. He looks down at him and pulls out his cellphone. “I just killed somebody,” the shooter says, before jogging off. The man on the ground twitches and stares up at the sky, gasping deeply as bystanders work desperately to put pressure on his wound. Some cry, others yell for someone to call the police.
Don’t forget what’s really beneath the thin blue line:
(via Mutiny Information Cafe in Denver - buy the stickers here. Thanks to Justin Mitchell for the credit.)
They said something on a recent Chapo Traphouse episode about the Kenosha shooting that really struck a nerve with me - that this piece of shit Rittenhouse figured out a way to do his mass shooting and have it be defended by half of the country. They’re right, and it’s sickening to consider because it means America has gone well beyond any gun control debate. Sprees of gun violence aren’t even necessarily a bad thing any more, depending on the identities of the victims (who will invariably be smeared in the mainstream media because the American sickness runs deep).
Now, with this event, mass shootings are no longer unequivocally bad, and the shooters will no longer be universally despised by all but the most vicious trolls and far-right hatemongers. Expect more mass shootings.
(If you want to argue with me about the use of “mass” here, just wait.)
From QAnon to Kyle Rittenhouse, the Right is Sinking Deeper Into an Alternate Reality
In the span of a week, Trump and Carlson both gave the green light to extremist elements on the Right, QAnon conspiracy theorists on the one hand and armed pro-police adventurists on the other. In the process they each drew on the same bedrock narrative: that the streets of America — especially Democrat-run cities, but nowhere is safe — are teeming with lawless agents of anarchy who flout authority, terrorize innocents, and threaten civilization itself. Thus besieged, right-wing extremism of one variant or another is not really extreme at all. It is rational, even heroic and patriotic.
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CJW: Posthuman Fascism (via Ospare)
Anti-humanism refers to the way in which 20th-century fascism was geared toward, among other things, rolling back the universalist legacy of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Contemporary fascism, in contrast, is based on a “post-humanism” insofar as it is based upon the seeming obsolescence and disposability of entire categories of persons. The present COVID-19 pandemic makes this imminently clear and police murders of Black people drive the point home with particular force.
On 20th Century fascism vs our current moment. Read alongside The Future is Fascist, which we shared just over a year ago.
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CJW: Revolution or Ruin
For Wallace-Wells, ecological devastation has not been wrought upon the few by the many. Rather, “each of us imposes some suffering on our future selves every time we flip a switch, buy a plane ticket, or fail to vote.” Never mind that 1.2 billion people today have little to no access to electricity. Or that 80 percent of the world’s population has never flown. Or, most egregiously, that ExxonMobil executives already knew that their industry was destroying the planet in 1977 but chose to hide their findings and fund climate change–denying research because there was money to be made in killing future generations. To blame everyone equally in the face of such extreme inequality is to take the side of fossil capital. It denies rather than clarifies the obvious: the climate crisis is a space of class struggle.
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Capital’s self-expanding logic is indifferent to death.
On climate change denialism, eco-nihilism, and the (deliberate?) omission of class politics in climate disaster discourse. And also the contradictions inherent in the GND and GIR.
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CJW: What Have We Done to the Whale? (via Christopher Brown)
Whale blubber stores toxins that have made their way to the sea, in the form of agricultural and mining runoff or condensed emissions—an effect magnified by whales’ longevity. […] Orca in Washington’s Puget Sound have been declared among the earth’s most toxified animals; the carcasses of beluga whales that wash up on the shores of Canada are classified as toxic waste. The most prolific whale killers are no longer the whale hunters. They are, instead, the rest of us: creatures of late capitalism whose patterns of consumption make us complicit, however unwittingly or unwillingly, in an unfolding mass biocide.
This is incredibly depressing, but important.
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CJW: Why Facebook Is Bad, Twitter Might Be a Little Bit Good, and Social Media Is Rotting Our Brains (via Sentiers)
Lanier had been early to the idea that [social media] platforms were addictive and even harmful—that their algorithms made people feel bad, divided them against one another, and actually changed who they were, in an insidious and threatening manner. That because of this, social media was in some ways “worse than cigarettes,” as Lanier put it at one point, “in that cigarettes don’t degrade you. They kill you, but you’re still you.”
Interesting profile on Jaron Lanier, and his thoughts on our future.
I’ve not read this yet because it’s long, but it will surely be related: How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, a New Book by Cory Doctorow.
DCH: That Doctorow piece is well worth it.
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MJW: JobKeeper changes are now set in stone — here’s what you need to know
CRUEL, HEARTLESS FUCKING ASSHOLES
The Government argues that at the end of the month it will be time to start weaning Australians and businesses off of the JobKeeper payment.
Weaning onto what? Poverty? They’ve just a bill that is going to destroy the economy that they are so desperately trying to ‘protect.’ Do they not grasp that heaps of jobs are going to LITERALLY DISAPPEAR? Even the most bullshit of jobs are getting hundreds of applications. It’s just austerity for its own sake and it’s gross and I am mad.
It feels like they are trying to make us too overwhelmed, tired and desperate to put up a fight.
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MKY: The Privileged Have Entered Their Escape Pods by Douglas Rushkoff
Rushkoff’s ‘spiritual successor’ to hisSurvival of the Richest piece (which felt real familiar for some reason lol) that more directly maps onto that ‘luxe quarantine life’ we discussed last issue. He makes some decent points here - the major one prolly being him showing, but not saying for some reason, that eco-fascism is here, it’s not just…:
These solar-powered hilltop resorts, chains of defensible floating islands, and robotically tilled eco-farms were less last resorts than escape fantasies for billionaires who aren’t quite rich enough to build space programs like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.No, they weren’t scared for the Event; on some level, they were hoping for it.
Now a few crises back, post the GFC, Neil Strauss wrote this book called Emergency - which, ngl, I pretty naively consumed at the time, and was the one non-PUA dude who went to see him talk about it here, and his skeevy af previous work. Point being that looking back, pretty obvz this was a portent of what was to come, that Strauss was documenting just what the rich’s escape plan looked like (multiple residences, multiple passports… with some cool urban evasion cum zombie apoc survival training thrown in).
Instead of figuring out how to get away from the rest of us, I told them, they might want to focus on making the world a place from which they wouldn’t have to retreat.
So Doug can scream at them all from his Medium page for us to see, but it’s clear the message is lost on the Elite. And if the best a Futurist can hope for is ‘to serve as a kind of dungeon master for their fantasy role-playing session’ then I’ll just keep slaving away on my piece of shit novel instead. A mood.
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DCH: Asphalt is becoming a greater pollutant than the cars driving on it
Researchers isolated asphalt samples and heated them between 40 and 200 degrees Celsius (104 to 392 degrees Fahrenheit). Just from 40 to 60 degrees Celsius — typical temperatures for Southern Californian asphalt on a summer’s day — emissions doubled. When hit with solar radiation, emissions jumped 300 percent.
Good news everyone! Vehicle emissions are down. But the road itself is killing us now.
MKY: Less roads, more parks / bike paths / greenbelts / nature corridors! In a vaguely sane world, that might even happen too. Casual convos at the dog park with people whose job it is to plan such things tell me it’s even probable - road maintenance is a huge cost for local councils. Parks etc, far less so - and everyone benefits. Beneath the asphalt, the forest. Etc.
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DCH: Amazon is explicitly recruiting union-busting internal spies now
Other positions take some reading to understand what, exactly, they entail — like the company’s open “Intelligence Analyst” positions, which sounds more like a CIA listing than one for an internet delivery company. A quick read-through of the position’s responsibilities explains the strange title: Amazon is hiring a corporate spy to report on any union-organizing activities.
Amazon has a long history of union-busting. And of killing its workers. And of putting brown kids in cages in the US concentration camps.
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DCH: Gen Z Largely Believes Climate Change Is Inevitable, Though Roughly Half Think It Can Be Slowed
A little more than a third responded that climate change is a natural phenomenon, and that nature’s whims are not humanity’s to control. For instance, one Gen Zer said, “We are only a small component of the system. That’s not to say we’re not important but our impact on shifting climates are negligible.” A smaller subgroup, closer to 8 percent, attributed climate change to God, similarly expressing the sentiment that humans do not have the control.
We fukt.
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DCH: Forest Fires Are Setting Chernobyl’s Radiation Free
August is typically the worst month of the Chernobyl fire season, and this year, public anxiety is mounting. The devastation left by the world’s worst nuclear disaster is colliding with the disaster of climate change, and the consequences reach far and deep.
Radiation was detected over 2000 miles away in Norway due to these fires.
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Cutting Room Floor:
Facebook’s Ban on Far-Left Pages Is an Extension of Trump Propaganda
Contact tracing in America is failing due to conspiracy theories (Thanks Trump! Thanks Zuck!)
Christian Site Raises Nearly $327,0000 For Alleged Kenosha Teen Shooter Kyle Rittenhouse
Newsletters
MKY and I have talked up Max Anton Brewer’s previous newsletter SCIOPS in these pages before. SCIOPS is dead, long live SCIOPS, but here’s a new newsletter from Max.
The dominant style of human-computer interface design is short-sighted and wasteful. Through the lens of whole-systems design, it looks like a system for making the maximum amount of human misery, at the greatest cost.
To understand why things are this way requires a grand vision for politics, economics, history and science, which I do not have.
What I do have is an obsessive interest in interface design, and your email address. Expect a weekly missive on the hows of interfaces:
How did these interfaces evolve, how do they work, and how can we make them better?
Books
MJW: Evolution by Stephen Baxter
I’ve only managed to read one new book since March, but I have been able to re-read and I’m dipping my toe back into 2003’s Evolution by Stephen Baxter. When I try to explain it to people, I’m all ‘the main character is like… human evolution. It’s really good, though!’
A series of connected stories make up the narrative, starting with mammals who burrow to survive the Chicxulub impactor, various furred scurriers, then wending through our primate ancestors and various Homos, diverting briefly to Neanderthals before their demise. Baxter gives us snippets of modern humans, then projects us into a weird and somewhat terrifying 500 million years onward, to the last gasp of humankind.
Baxter combines the hardest of hard science with imaginative fiction as he leads us through our known (or kinda-known) past, and onwards into the future. It’s a fucking bold and ambitious novel, requiring the kind of research that just thinking of makes me need to have a lie-down. And I think he pulls it off. The woodeness of Baxters characters (in books like the duology of Flood and Ark, as well as his fucking brutal Northland Trilogy) is actually perfect for this kind of massive-idea storytelling.
There’s a lot to like in it, and a few dud sections, but keep an eye out for the stories ‘The Crossing’, ‘Mother’s People’, ‘Raft Continent’, ‘The Swarming People’, and ‘The Kingdom of the Rats.’ I mean, keep an eye out for them because they are MY favourites.
If you can handle big ideas right now, then this has some of the biggest.
URL
CJW: Clothing as Platform
In commercial terms, data collected from clothes would present an array of opportunities for companies to set prices according to their perception of the customer, gain control of product resale, decide which consumers are able to resell garments or receive discounts, and wield algorithmic power in forecasting “user” behavior.
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Wearing clothes ceases to be an aesthetic performance of identity and becomes more a form of alienated aesthetic labor: The wearer becomes a “user,” and the “user” becomes an object to be manipulated and traded among brands and corporations.
A great piece from Real Life Mag on the dystopian (and otherwise) potential in fashion joining the IoT.
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DCH: I Created an A.I. Clone of Jesus
I present to you A.I. Jesus. An artificial intelligence of my invention created from the King James Bible and nothing else. This A.I. learned human language from reading the bible and nothing else; absorbing every word more thoroughly than all the monks of all the monasteries that have ever been.
Highly recommend you have a go with rolling your own biblical prophecy to help you through the end times. My friend Frank did and he came up with some great Revelations. It also set my friend Matt’s brain on fire. So much show he’s still playing with the GPT-3 engine behind it.
CJW: 10 Billion Days or 100 Billion Nights.
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DCH: God Is Dead. So Is the Office. These People Want to Save Both
In simpler times, divinity schools sent their graduates out to lead congregations or conduct academic research. Now there is a more office-bound calling: the spiritual consultant. Those who have chosen this path have founded agencies — some for-profit, some not — with similar-sounding names: Sacred Design Lab, Ritual Design Lab, Ritualist. They blend the obscure language of the sacred with the also obscure language of management consulting to provide clients with a range of spiritually inflected services, from architecture to employee training to ritual design.
So divinity consultants are a thing now. What’s next? McKinsey adding “chaos magicians” to their rate card? P.S. Neither God nor the office are worth saving.
Comics
CJW: Blame! Master Edition, Volume 1 by Tsutomu Nihei
I bought the Volume 1 (and maybe 2?) ebooks for Blame! ages ago, but the black and white tones didn’t play nicely with my tablet, leading to weird artifacting that made it impossible to read. This manga is almost entirely focused on visual spectacle and action, so screen-distorted art just wasn’t going to cut it. I recently bought the paperback of Volume 1 and was not disappointed.
The story follows a mysterious man with an extremely powerful weapon, searching a seemingly endless city in search of genetic traits from before a cataclysmic event that happened at some point in the past. It has the feel of a post-apocalyptic road story with different factions and strange creatures/creations all fighting to survive the hostile artificial environment they find themselves caught in. But there are no vehicles rolling over endless flat plains, just hyper-detailed architecture stretching in all directions.
All this means you’re just as likely to flip the page to find this:
Or this:
The Blame! Netflix anime movie seems (from my reading of Volume 1 only) to be a pretty good distillation of the manga, and it’s pretty fucking great on its own merits, so maybe give that a look, and if you still want more, track the manga down.
Podcasts
MJW: I’m listening to ‘Once Upon a Time in the Valley’, a podcast about the whole Traci Lords scandal in the eighties. I honestly don’t know how I feel about it. It’s heavily scripted and there’s something that feels a little.. cruel about the tone? It’s also released weekly, so I’m not sure where it’s going. It is an interesting example of the intangibility of experience and the subjectivity of memory, though. And it’s a story I’d always heard of, but knew no details about. Hrmmm…
Video
DCH: Meritocracy is a myth.
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DCH: Cybernetically-enhanced locusts. What could go wrong?
Art
DCH: Preppers and the YOYO (You’re on your own) culture
Loren Kronemyer is an artist living and working in remote lutruwita / Tasmania, Australia. Her works span interactive and live performance, experimental media art and large-scale worldbuilding projects exploring ecological futures and survival skills. As part of duo Pony Express, she is co-creator of projects like Ecosexual Bathhouse, a touring queer sex club for the entire ecosystem. I asked her to tell us more about her work and her view of prepper culture.
Fascinating.
The Self-Promotion
MJW: Jeez, I’ve had so, so much self-promo to add, but have been so, so unable to engage with pretty much anything. Lockdown 2 is hard, friends. So I’m doing a big chunk of it here.
Yep, I totally had a new book come out under my pseudonym in July (Money for Something by Mia Walsch) and it’s… certainly a time. My advice? Don’t release a book during a pandemic. Anyway, I got interviewed by Penthouse! I’ve done a bunch of radio interviews! I got a bunch of reviews! Some are good and some are kinda middling! Here’s an extract!
MJW: That’s it for this fortnight. Join us again in two weeks, when the world has once again irrevocably changed and we must all recalibrate our lives, expectations and futures! YES! CAN’T FUCKING WAIT. Xx
