nothing here but quantum pollution

issue 202 - 11th December, 2022

CJW: Bit of an odd one this issue as Dan is off (COVID has taken another NH scalp), and I’m in the process of figuring out how I want to relate with/through this newsletter. Last fortnight’s retrospective made me realise that I wasn’t enjoying my more recent approach to newslettering - reading too much because I felt I had to, regardless of whether I wanted to or not. Covering topics that are important but don’t actually spark interest in me.

So with this issue you’ll see fewer links, but hopefully more worthwhile discussion.

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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, podcaster, sin-eater.

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

Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: Arctic Ice | Gallery - Issues.org

Iceberg Portraiture, 2022, aluminium, ink, and wax pastel, 84 x 42 inches

Integrating field data, remote satellite imagery, scientific analysis, and multimedia visual representation to document Arctic ice that is disappearing due to climate change, this artwork is the outcome of a four-year collaboration involving art, design, and polar science between artist Cy Keener, landscape researcher Justine Holzman, climatologist Ignatius Rigor, and scientist John Woods. With this work, Keener and Holzman’s goal is to make scientific data tangible, visceral, and experiential. They ask how artistic and creative practices can contribute to scientific endeavors while making scientific research visible to the public.

I could have even put this down under Art, but I found these pieces stunning and thought they would be a great way to open the issue. Follow the link to see all the related works and more details on the process and thinking behind them.

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CJW: Qatar’s gas output increase could cause catastrophic global heating, report says - Oliver Milman at The Guardian

Look, fuck Qatar - there are thousands of dead migrant workers buried beneath their World Cup stadium and other human rights abuses beside - but this piece fails to mention the many other countries (incl the US and UK, probably Aus too, though I can’t remember) that scrambled to open up new gas fields in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The problem isn’t Qatar, it’s that seemingly no one is willing to leave money on the table/fossil fuels in the ground.

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CJW: Addressing Climate Change Will Not “Save the Planet” - Christopher Ketcham at The Intercept

When it comes to effects on wildlife, climate change is more like a mule, slow and plodding. Yes, a warmed atmosphere is projected to be a significant factor in the extinction crisis in future decades, but what’s destroying species today is habitat fragmentation and loss, overhunting and overexploitation, agricultural expansion, pollution, and industrial development. It isn’t climate change that caused a 69 percent loss in total wildlife populations between 1970 and 2018, according to a World Wildlife Fund study published this year. The cause is too many people demanding too much from ecosystems, or human overshoot of the biophysical carrying capacity of the Earth.

I’m of 2 minds on this article - on the one hand, I totally understand how the focus on climate change could distract from other issues, and it also emphasises why climate-focussed geoengineering projects aren’t enough, even if they work. But then on the other hand, is there anyone serious about addressing climate change who is literally only talking about temperature rise? I think of it as a shorthand way of discussing all of the related environmental issues that need to be addressed.

But I guess the word “serious” above is the operative word in that sentence, as many governments, corporations, organisations, people, etc, aren’t actually serious - they only wish to address climate change within a narrow greenwashed capitalist status quo.

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• The rich world’s governments arrived at [Cop27] in Egypt saying “it’s now or never”. They left saying “how about never?”. - George Monbiot

Just the headlines:

• A tiny Wisconsin town tried to stop pollution from factory farms. Then it got sued. - John McCracken at Grist

Geopolitics & Empire

• A detailed interview with Adam Curtis about TraumaZone and Russia, by Samuel McIlhagga at Protean Mag

Just the headlines:

• German military preparing for potential war with Russia, leaked internal report reveals - Ben Norton at Multipolarista

• Europe angry that US profits from Ukraine proxy war while destroying EU economy - Ben Norton at Multipolarista

• Journalists Targeted as Neofascists Rise to Power in Italy - Alice Speri at The Intercept

Science & Space

CJW: Physicists Create a Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer - Natalie Wolchover at Quanta Magazine (via Sentiers)

A decade had to pass before Maldacena, in 2013 (under circumstances that “to be frank, I do not remember,” he says), realized that his discovery might signify a more general correspondence between quantum entanglement and connection via wormhole. He coined a cryptic little equation — ER = EPR — in an email to Susskind, who understood immediately. The two quickly developed the conjecture together, writing, “We argue that the Einstein Rosen bridge between two black holes is created by EPR-like correlations between the microstates of the two black holes,” and that the duality might be more general than that: “It is very tempting to think that any EPR correlated system is connected by some sort of ER bridge.”

Maybe a wormhole links every entangled pair of particles in the universe, forging a spatial connection that records their shared histories. Maybe Einstein’s hunch that wormholes have to do with particles was right.

The science covered in this piece (as well as I can grasp it anyway) is actually exactly how I thought of - and hopefully described - wormhole-based space travel in the VoidWitch books - that there are wormholes everywhere leading everywhere with the calculations involved being the AI working out how to open the exact right one.

It also looks like this paper is positing a direct connection between space-time and the informational layer of reality - which sounds exactly like M. John Harrison’s Light that I just started the other day wherein it’s literally The Mathematics that allows Seria Mau Genlicher to navigate space in her K-ship.

The actual titular experiment is less interesting to me because it sounds too divorced from reality (read it and maybe you’ll see what I mean), but I found all of the science and math behind it really interesting.

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• New minerals discovered in massive meteorite may reveal clues to asteroid formation - Adrianna MacPherson at University of Alberta

Tech & Design

CJW: What of the National Throat? - Rob Horning

With respect to generative AI, the point is to think of it not merely as a gimmick or computational magic but as an emerging aspect of the culture industry, with the same implications for social domination. Generative AI is a form of propaganda not so much in the confabulated trash it can effortlessly flood media channels with, but in the epistemological assumptions upon which it is based: AI models presume that thought is entirely a matter of pattern recognition, and these patterns, already inscribed in the corpus of the internet, can mapped once and for all, with human “thinkers” always already trapped within them. The possibility that thought could consist of pattern breaking is eliminated.

There’s been a lot of words written (and generated) on generative “AI” the past couple of weeks - too much to cover here, but I’ll share some bits and pieces.

This is an interesting missive from Rob Horning, kind of taking both sides of the argument that have erupted around AI - above relating to one side, the below the other.

Nonetheless, it seems alarmist to think that AI models will eventually lead to the atrophy of human thinking. Instead they seem like whetstones. You can see this in how people test ChatGPT’s limits, trying to expose its errors, much like some people play video games not to win but to find the glitches. Every refinement to the model prompts a deeper exploration of how it falls short of cognition and a clarification of what can’t be totalized into the simulation.

I like the idea of using GPT in the same way people speedrun games - say, speedrunning an essay. Though, as “speedrunning” implies, it would still need active input from the “player” and time, effort, and skill to pull off. I’m wary of GPT as a useful tool because most seem to approach it as a shortcut rather than a tool. And GOT as shortcut is just a way to flood the internet with upgraded lorem ipsum SEO trash.

Here’s a million-dollar idea: someone needs to train an adversarial neural network to recognise text written by large language models so it can then be filtered out or otherwise ignored. As someone who’s already put off by the internet’s general pivot to video over the years (fuck you, Zuckerburg), it seems likely that we’ll see a widespread blahification of text online as anyone with an iteration of GPT can output pointless text at an astounding rate. Google search already has a massive problem with SEO clickbait, and now it will be even cheaper to churn out that crud.

There’s also the question of trust - GPT can put words together, but it has no way of knowing if what it says is true. Can it write you an essay? Sure. Will anything in that essay be accurate? The obvious solution would be to take a large language model as the basis for a new product that would become something like a Large Knowledge Model, which can cite its sources - a project well-suited to Google or Wikipedia. But then we hit the dicey territory of attribution, ownership, and payment. The creators of all the current language and art LLMs are carefully skirting around that problem (even while letting you ape an artist’s style using their name).

It’s a weird, interesting, and rapidly-evolving space… except more of it in these pages.

Related:

• The Internet’s New Favorite AI Proposes Torturing Iranians and Surveilling Mosques - Sam Biddle at The Intercept

• The Dawn of Mediocre Computing - Venkatesh Rao

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CJW: Virality! What Is It Good For? - Katherine Cross at Wired

The panoptic awareness created by virality is [a] potentially a liberating force, if it can be trained on the genuinely powerful for long enough. But far more often than not, the people Twitter’s user base “cannot look away” from are powerless and easily obliterated for the sin of a small but memeable faux pas. Sometimes—oftentimes—they did nothing wrong at all. Virality is all about being in the right place in the right time. Or the wrong one.

The insinuation that the only people who could ever find Twitter toxic are white millionaires who were butthurt over getting clowned on by Black Twitter or dril or some Twitch streamer “ratio’ing” them is not just a lie but a staggeringly offensive one. The people who suffered the most from Twitter’s toxic culture were often the very queer people, or disabled people, or people of color, or the poor who Twitter’s offer of free and easy celebrity was supposed to benefit. A few did—I’m actually one of them. Many more did not. And yet again, they are being erased and forgotten in the latest ideological crusade to write soaring hagiography about how Twitter changed the world for the better.

This is a really great essay on Twitter - largely a sort of cultural retrospective in light of Musk’s takeover, with a focus on virality, particularly the ways it harms normal people who found themselves as the Main Character, and how it can be weaponised against members of minorities.

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MJW: Amazon, Ashton Kutcher And America’s Surveillance Of The Sex Trade By Thomas Brewster at Forbes

The role of Spotlight hasn’t been previously detailed. That’s not a surprise: Thorn has been reticent to show the public how its technology works and has only given a handful of examples of its use since Thorn’s founding in 2012. But after being shown a police demo, reviewing previously unreported court filings and interviewing current and former police, as well as sex workers and their advocates, Forbes has learned that Spotlight is one of three tools widely used by U.S. law enforcement that do much the same: Scrape sex advertisements from across the Web every day to fill vast, easily searchable databases containing names, numbers, images and payment details of not just trafficked individuals but also consenting sex workers as well. Fed a phone number or name, machine learning tech in the products will attempt to find a person’s previous ads and possible connections to other individuals, drawing out a map of what it believes are trafficking networks.

“That’s crazy to think that somebody is being trafficked, and you’re going to let her get physically, sexually abused, you’re going to watch the trafficking occur, all so you can build a case on [the trafficker], it’s absolutely ridiculous,” said Scaramucci, the Waco detective, who also trains police across America on how to investigate trafficking. “It’s crazy, but it’s not uncommon.”

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• […] electric vehicles are also software-defined vehicles. And they’re networked, so they can do anything that networked software can do. UNREALISED POTENTIAL. - some interesting provocations from Matt Webb

Just the headlines:

• Elon Musk, “Free Speech Absolutist,” Has Launched a Crackdown on Left-Wing Twitter Accounts - Branko Marcetic at Jacobin

• Hate Speech’s Rise on Twitter Under Elon Musk Is Unprecedented, Researchers Find - Sierra Frenkel and Kate Conner at NYT

Society & The Culture

CJW: What is the News For? - Adam Kotsko

One is forced to conclude that political coverage is not meant to inform us about how to vote. What, then, is it for? I have said that the business press is meant for people who are making daily ongoing decisions in pursuit of a clear goal, so what is the equivalent for the mainstream press? I would suggest that such coverage exists primarily to encourage us, each and every day, to make the decision to care less. The very disproportion between the information we are provided and our miniscule ability to influence events encourages us into habits of passivity and apathy, and “both-sides” framing sends the message that it makes no ultimate difference who is in charge. The effect is similar to the familiar dynamic of decision fatigue, except instead of standing paralyzed between dozens of brands of toothpaste, we stand transfixed by the spectacle of a political world that does and can have nothing to do with us.

[…] A media source that was truly proportionate to our task of voting, by contrast, would surely serve to illustrate how inadequate voting is as a tool to shape our shared life. A news source that actually informed us as well as the business press informs the investor class would have to correspond to a truly self-governing citizenry, who would make daily ongoing decisions in the same way investors do. Until we can embrace this aspiration to self-government, a media that exists to do anything other than beat us into submission will remain literally unimaginable.

Hard to argue with this post from Adam Kotsko.

The only thing I’d perhaps add is that it only really holds for media that is attempting to “both-sides” an election. Here in Australia our media has so long been in the grip of Murdoch that things skew quite far to the right with often little attempt at hiding that bias. Our recent Victorian state election was an obvious win for the Labor party, but the (nominally right-wing) media had to play it up as some huge rout against “Dictator Dan,” partially to sell papers I’m sure, but also in some flailing attempt at a magickal working.

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CJW: Why Queer Communities Are Welcoming Armed Antifascist Protection - Natasha Lennard at The Intercept

In the past century, too, white supremacist, far-right deadly violence in this country has so dwarfed the number deaths caused by Black, Indigenous, and queer armed struggle that talk of mutual escalation is obscene. In the last 30 years alone, over 85 percent of extremist killings are attributable to far-right actors. A separate New York Times report last weekend found that at 700 armed demonstrations since January 2020, 77 percent of those openly carrying guns were right-wing.

These numbers aren’t incidental but reflect something inherent about how white supremacist, anti-LGBTQ ideology operates: The goals are eliminationist. This is what makes the “bothsidesing” so horrifically off base: The far right has made clear their commitment to eradicate trans people, either through violent law or extralegal violence.

I think it makes sense to be wary of escalating violence, but as outlined here, preparation and protection make violence less likely because these fascists are currently looking for permission from a broader audience. Give it to them now and that’s when/why we’ll see a real escalation in violence.

Remember, it’s never wrong to punch a Nazi.

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MJW: A Woman Alone: On History’s Survival Show, There’s No Escaping Gender, Not Even in the Woods By Tracy Clark-Flory at Jezebel

This article is from 2020, but I’ve just started bingeing Alone, so it’s all new to me. This piece from Jezebel explored a whole bunch of things I’d been thinking about the show, and raised some new thoughts as well. The most interesting or alarming things raised by season 2 contestant Nicole Apelian was a particular fear:

It wasn’t fear of wild animals that made Apelian keep weapons at her bedside: Bears, wolves, cougars—they’re all predictable, she explains. Apelian was worried about humans.“I was in a cove by myself in the middle of nowhere and there are boats around,” she said. “My main concern was, boy, if someone knows I’m here and comes by—.” She continued, “It’s a scary thing, having lived through that more than once: violence perpetrated on me by men, which I was sometimes able to stave off and sometimes wasn’t.”

There’s so much more to take away from this article on gender and isolation. It also reminded me of something I’d read in The Indifferent Stars Above, an horrific history of the Donner Party:

In the early 1990s, research emerged showing that nearly twice as many women as men survived in the Donner Party, the group of pioneers who famously resorted to cannibalism. Researchers suggested that women benefited from greater body fat and a lower metabolism. The research also led to questionable interpretations—with no care toward distinctions of nature and nurture—about “a female temperament that relies more on cooperation than aggression,” as an Associated Press article put it at the time. Two decades later, the author of a book on the Donner Party spoke to the emotional component of survival in less deterministic terms, noting in an interview that “the men fell apart psychologically much more readily than the women did.”

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LZ: #GothicAdvent

Before moving to Sweden, I never heard about the Advent Calendar, but now that I’m here, I guess Twitter is feeding me with more geolocalised content. It helped me learn about this darker version of the ritual, or how Christmas could also be seen as a creepy continuation of Halloween, but make it snowy. Worth following the accounts feeding this hashtag.

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• Our culture is so steep in nostalgia even the Satanic Panic is getting a reboot: Demons, blood harvests and occult rituals: inside the new Satanic Panic - Günseli Yalcinkaya at Dazed

Health, Cooking, and Related

MJW: What If COVID Reinfections Wear Down Our Immunity? - Andrew Nikiforuk at The Tyee

Leonardi will be the first to say he is no expert on COVID. The soft-voiced Californian, scientist, public health student and water polo player, wrote his PhD thesis on T cells in 2017 while working for the U.S. National Institutes of Health. In particular his thesis looked at how T cells can be cultivated and fine-tuned to battle cancer. He spent years studying healthy and unhealthy T cells. So he knows a thing or two about how T cells work and how they regulate the immune system. And he has learned that science debates can be as rough and tumble as a water polo game.

And then along came the pandemic. In the Twitterverse he was one of the first scientists to openly speculate about COVID’s ability to disarm the immune system. He reasoned that a weakened immune system would have profound implications for the severity of disease, the effectiveness of vaccines and the health of the elderly over the course of the pandemic. Given nearly five years of work on T cells, Leonardi got a bad feeling while reading a Lancet study that appeared at the beginning of the pandemic. The study described the unhealthy state of the first patients in Wuhan, China. Scientists noted that the virus had diminished the patient’s white blood cells — the ones responsible for fighting infection. Moreover, descriptions of the patients suggested that a blood infection might be contributing to shock and death. That profile looked like a super antigenic infection whereby a particular molecule has set off an extreme immune response. As a result the immune system began to attack the body, it appeared to Leonardi.

I was talking with my hairdresser the other day about covid - this happens often because I’m usually the only person who is wearing a mask in a given location and people always ask me about it. Anyway, I was telling her about how covid damages organs, blood vessels and your brain and she said, ‘stop, I don’t want to know, it’s too scary.’ I feel like most of the world is saying that right now, and we really, really can’t bury our heads in the sand over this.

Movies + TV

CJW: Watch the trailer for Robert Pattinson and Bong Joon-ho’s new sci-fi film - Dazed

Like the director’s 2013 outing Snowpiercer, the plot of Mickey 17 _has been adapted from already existing source material, namely Edward Ashton’s _Mickey 7. Ashton’s novel was only released this February, suggesting Bong was keen to snap it up and start work on a screenplay, which he’s also penned.

In the book, Mickey is part of a crew sent to colonise the ice world of Niflheim, and the “expendable” of the group: if a task proves too difficult or potentially fatal, Mickey is sent in to fulfil the mission, sacrifice himself and eventually reincarnate – but he only has seven lives, hence the numerical name.

This a teaser rather than a trailer, but consider me teased (and the movie isn’t even out until 2024). Not only am I keen to see Hong return to sci-fi after Parasite (and its spin-off TV show), but the source material itself sounds interesting. I might check it out, though fuck knows I already have enough books to keep me going until the movie is out…

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LZ: Severance

An Apple TV original, this is a weird series. First, it is directed by Ben Stiller (???), it has all the dystopian appeal with minimalistic, brutalist design, somewhat coming from Netflix’s Maniac heritage, but it’s something else. You may think it is criticism against capitalism, but it is also addressing religion, and bureaucracy, and emotional intelligence, and the concept of identity, and sects, and… I mean, it’s a lot. It might not make much sense if you are a more critical viewer, but you need to enjoy the ride and just let the brilliant actors guide you. Especially recommended to fans of Cloud Atlas, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, Maniac, perhaps even Devs, 1984, Kafkaesque narratives, and 70/80s tech minimalistic aesthetic.

CJW: I can’t remember if I mentioned Severance when I watched it a couple of months back, but yes, this is easily one of the best Science-Fiction TV series to come out in recent years. Though I think you’ll probably get more out of it if you’re a more critical viewer…

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LZ: Trailer: Infinity Pool, by Brandon Cronenberg

Oh to be a Cronenberg and inherit the fucked up mind of your father! After Antiviral and Possessor, Brandon is back with a new horror movie starring Alexander Skarsgård and Mia Goth – information that should be sufficient to convince you to watch this. But there’s also the visuals, the daylight horror feeling. It made me think of Shyamalan’s Old but also Speak no Evil, this recent Danish-Dutch horror which I highly recommend too. Looking forward to it.

CJW: It was such a long wait between Antiviral and Possessor, I wasn’t expecting another film from BC for a while yet. Trailer makes it look fucking amazing and bizarre.

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LZ: Hagsploitation: Horror’s Repulsion Of The Ageing Woman - Billie Walker at Refinery29

How the hell didn’t I hear about hagsploitation before? As a fan of horror movies and a nerd who even got to pregnancy horror, I haven’t seen this term before, but reading this piece opened up my mind for many things. It’s a little bit outdated now that Pearl is out (it was originally focused on X), but it surely takes you to other related links that are great. In case you miss them or don’t want to hunt for them, here they are:

• What is gerascophobia: or how Millennials don’t deal well with the fact that we all age

• 10 grand hagsploitation movies

• Hagsploitation is also known as psycho-biddy

Music

CJW: A Southern Code | EROS

EROSA Southern Code

Einstürzende Neubauten producer Boris Wilsdorf, Karl O’Connor aka Regis and MY DISCO’s Liam Andrews assemble as EROS.

Austin put me on to this one, though I’m surprised I didn’t hear about it through MY DISCO channels. I’m not familiar with the work of the other members, but any fan of MY DISCO’s last three albums will notice a similarity in sound/vibe here. At the same time it’s very different, and very much its own thing, with elements of 90s Brit EDM, or the sort of electronica made by VAST and others of that period, but with a thick layer of gloom settled (and unsettling) over it all.

The Self-Promotion

LZ: Know your history, know yourself: the importance of history in future thinking

Available in English and French, this is my latest essay and it’s an overview of Georges Minois’ book “History of the Future”. I address the importance of history (that is, past and present) to be considered in assessment of futures. It also shows the connection between esoteric practices like clairvoyance or fortune telling with the formalisation of futures studies. So yeah, if you thought once that futurology sounded like astrology, it is because it has some historical connections indeed.

The Memes