nothing here but shapeshifting animals

issue 151 - 19th September, 2021

CJW: Welcome to another instalment of the nothing here newsletter. We've had a huge influx of new subscribers - welcome! I'm not sure what brought you here, but I'm glad to have you join us.

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The Team

• Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey

• m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / ecopoet // Dark Extropian Musings / pryvt.rsrch

• Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Introverted exhibitionist. Apocalypse witch.

• Corey J. White (CJW) - Writer, 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

MKY: Animals ‘shapeshifting’ in response to climate crisis, research finds - Helena Horton at The Guardian - Relevant paper is here: Shape-shifting: changing animal morphologies as a response to climatic warming

the aliens of the new earth are becoming…

What do repopulated eastern quolls and resurrected mammoths have in common?

Best they can do is offer both as a tourist attraction in eco parks for the tourists to visit on their final laps of the dying earth, ya know, once all this COVID shit is over and we can g̴̜͒̐o̵̥̼͛͝ ̵͚͆͋b̴̖̯̅͑á̸̩̲̑c̴̯͔̈́k̸͕̚ ̵̻͕́̀t̴̗͈͒̆o̸͈͝ ̸͖͠n̴̅͑ͅọ̶͎͒̌r̴̡̰͘m̵͚͕̈́â̶̙̲̇l̸͈͓̍.̸͉̐

Koala numbers fall after bushfires, conservation group says government numbers inaccurate very normal, very cool.

Turns out, if we try though, small wins are possible - smol very cute wins - aka Bandicoots back from the brink as status downgraded to endangered (take the win m1k3y, take the win).

In conclusion, all hope lies in doom Black Summer bushfires triggered Southern Ocean algal blooms bigger than Australia (ABC News) - or, yay we got the local version of the Saharan dust seeding the Amazon… yay. So. Cool. Australian bush fires belched out immense quantity of carbon (Nature):

during the fires, vast black plumes of smoke, rich in nutrients, were swept thousands of kilometres away over the ocean. Within days, these aerosols had infused the waters with much-needed iron, nourishing phytoplankton, which sucked up carbon equivalent to as much as 95% of the emissions from the fires.

Which is like, the good part of the story. ‘Cause this is life in the Pyrocene and there’s no going back now: “Their final figure — 715 million tonnes — is nearly 80 times the typical amount of carbon dioxide emitted from fires in southeast Australia during the three peak months of the summer bush-fire season.”

Hell on Earth ain’t coming, it’s already here. (And that’s why I spend most nights playing DOOM. It’s a form of therapy).

Return of the devil - FINALLY AN ACTUAL GOOD NEWS STORY HOPEFULLY PLZ.

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DCH: Government inaction on climate change linked to psychological distress in young people - University of Bath at Phys.org

The inaugural study, based on surveys with 10,000 children and young people (16–25) across 10 countries, found 75 percent of young respondents believe 'the future is frightening'—jumping to 81 percent of youth surveyed in Portugal and 92 percent in the Philippines. It found, for the first time, that climate distress and anxiety is significantly related to perceived government inaction and associated feelings of betrayal. 58 percent of children and young people surveyed said governments were "betraying me and/or future generations," while 64 percent said their governments are not doing enough to avoid a climate catastrophe.

The kids are not alright but they are right.

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• Report: Climate change could see 200 million [refugees] by 2050 - Renata Brito at AP News (via Foreign Exchanges)

• Murders of environment and land defenders hit record high - Jonathan Watts at The Guardian

• Indigenous Resistance Instrumental in Stopping High-Profile Fossil Fuel Projects, Says Report - Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism

• ‘We’re going after creatives that greenwash fossil fuels’: the group targeting ad agencies - Jocelyn Timperley at The Guardian

• World’s biggest machine capturing carbon from air turned on in Iceland - Agence France-Presse (Via The Guardian)

• In First for Australia, Court Orders Government Agency to Take Climate Action - Jessica Corbett at Common Dreams (DCH: Not that that’s actually stopped the corrupt government from approving coal projects…)

• Landmark New York law passed, banning new fossil fuel vehicle sales from 2035 - Tim De Chant Ars Technica

• ProtonMail court order leads to the arrest of French climate activist - Russell Brandom The Verge (DCH: so much for those Ts&Cs about not tracking location…)

Geopolitics

CJW: Part 1: The Twenty Year Shadow of 9/11: US Complicity in the Terror Spectacle and the Urgent Need to End It

Part 2: The Twenty Year Shadow of 9/11 (Part 2): Why Did Key US Officials Protect the Alleged 9/11 Plotters?

Part 3: Coming soon...

Aaron Goode, Ben Howard, Peter Dale Scott at Covert Action Magazine

this series presents a deeper exploration into the tragic events and catastrophic consequences of 9/11. In this first installment, we examine how the U.S. for decades has utilized Islamic terrorists as assets for its own ends. In Part 2, we look at how CIA figures actively prevented other government agencies from exposing the al Qaeda presence in the U.S. prior to the attacks. In the third and final article, we explore the deep political and historical implications of the U.S. government’s “emergency” powers in order to offer some conclusions about 9/11.

With the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, there have been some great retrospectives coming out. The authors of the above all recently appeared on an episode of TrueAnon, discussing much of what’s in this series of articles - if you prefer audio, that's a more concise overview, but the detail and references make the above links well worth the look.

I think I mentioned it at the time, but TrueAnon also did a series called Bush Did 9/11 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 teaser), which convinced me the official narrative is complete bullshit from top to bottom, and also features Ben Howard from the above.

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DCH: ‘Panic made us vulnerable’: how 9/11 made the US surveillance state – and the Americans who fought back - Ed Pilkington at The Guardian

If the Patriot Act was produced in a flash, behind the scenes secret systems for mass surveillance were being built at even greater speed. One of the most audacious plans was drafted by nightfall on the day of 11 September itself.

The plan, ominously titled “Total information awareness”, was the brainchild of John Poindexter, a disgraced former naval officer who had been Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser and a key figure in the Iran-contra scandal. TIA, Poindexter blustered, would act as an early-warning alarm for future 9/11s by gathering up the digital data of all Americans – innocent or guilty – and using it to search for patterns of terrorist activity.

No warrants would be sought. They would just do it, irrespective of laws or constitutional niceties.

“We must put introduction of new technology on a wartime basis,” Poindexter said. Weeks later he managed to sell the idea to the Pentagon in return for a $200m budget.

How could the spymasters have moved to put in place complex systems of mass surveillance just hours and days after 9/11? There is only one answer, many observers believe.

“They had it all ready,” said Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which defends civil liberties in the digital space. “This is what the NSA had long wanted – to ‘sit on the wire’, to watch all internet traffic and pick out whatever they chose. Now they finally had the crisis they needed to make it happen.”

A brilliant long read on the mass production and rapid rollout of the US surveillance state and the people -- like Snowden, Wyden, Asad Dandia, and others -- who fought to make the invisible visible.

CJW: This definitely sounds like it reinforces some of the points being made by Goode, Howard, and Scott above.

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CJW: Noam Chomsky: Average People Still Have the Power to Stop Wars - at Jacobin

We now know that the Taliban were willing to surrender in 2001. But defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld proudly announced, “We don’t negotiate surrenders.”

The Taliban’s proposed terms were that their leading figures be allowed to live in dignity. Why not? They hadn’t done anything. The story was that they had harbored terrorists. Don’t we do that? We harbor some of the worst war criminals in modern times — including people who are recognized to be terrorists, like Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada, who were allowed to live happily in Florida under US protection.

One last 9/11 related link, though it is mainly about the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Also covers America's long history of war, the role of the media, etc.

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• Secret radio stations, V2 rockets, offshore tax havens: the photographic explorations of Lewis Bush - Dave Stelfox at Coda

• In Australia, the Far Right Is Pushing COVID-19 Conspiracies - Jeff Sparrow at Jacobin

• Singapore reaches 80 pc double-vaccination rate but life is not returning to normal - Jason Dasey at ABC News

• Joe Biden Is Still Fighting a Vaccine Waiver for the Rest of the World - Cole Stangler at Jacobin

• How the N.Y.P.D. Is Using Post-9/11 Tools on Everyday New Yorkers - Ali Watkins The New York Times

• The Most Terrifying Thing About 9/11 Was America’s Response - Jon Schwarz The Intercept

Science & Space

• No Utopias: Gerard O’Neill, Gundam, and the Illusion of Space Colonization - Stephen Hero (via Sentiers)

• Scientists Want to Build Mars Bases Out of Human Blood - Becky Ferreira VICE

Tech & Design

DCH: Big Tech Has Made Billions Off the 20-Year War on Terror - Edward Ongweso Jr VICE

From 2007 to 2019, Department of Homeland Security contracts and subcontracts, for example, with Silicon Valley giants have increased 50-fold. Amazon and Microsoft have benefitted the most from this increase: from 2015 to 2019, Amazon saw a 400 percent increase in all federal contracts, while Microsoft enjoyed an 800 percent increase.

The report also found that Google has netted $16 million in contracts with the Pentagon, another $2 million with DHS, and nearly $4 million with the Department of Justice (the majority of that with the FBI). Facebook has just over $167,000 in contracts with the Pentagon and $363,600 with the Department of Homeland Security. It also received funds to promote a Voice of America news outlet titled "Extremism Watch", now run by an anti-Muslim and homophobic bigot; Twitter, meanwhile, secured a $255,000 contract with DHS, according to the report.

I’ve written previously about Amazon, Google, and MSFT lobbied themselves into massive profits with DHS but the contracts with Facebook and Twitter are news to me. Not surprising but still new to me.

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DCH: Why We Must Monitor the Sale of Surveillance Tech - Jack Poulson prospect.org

Importantly, I learned that Project Maven also tied into both social media and cellphone location-tracking surveillance, which can be nicely combined on a map to provide military operators a sense of the political climate in a given area. This so-called “Publicly Available Information” (PAI) is then aggregated within the U.S. Army’s Secure Unclassified Network (SUNet), making heavy usage of data fusion software from the notorious surveillance-tech company Palantir. The primary contractor for these projects is named ECS Federal, and it previously led a similar aggregation effort of public information for the elite U.S. Special Operations Command and its J2 Intelligence Directorate. Presumably, Special Forces have also found internet surveillance a useful component of their situational awareness.

What happens when a data scientist resigns in disgust from Google and starts a non-profit to use FOIA requests to build the biggest map of surveillance contracts to date?

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DCH: Leaked documents reveal the special rules Facebook uses for 5.8M VIPs - Tim De Chant Ars Technica

“For a select few members of our community, we are not enforcing our policies and standards,” reads an internal Facebook report published as part of a Wall Street Journal investigation. “Unlike the rest of our community, these people can violate our standards without any consequences.”

“Few” must be a relative term at Facebook, as at least 5.8 million people were enrolled in the program as of last year, many of them with significant followings. That means a large number of influential people are allowed to post largely unchecked on Facebook and Instagram.

In case you needed extra validation that there are different rules for us and them…

MKY: this is my extremely shocked face (verification pending)

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• People Are Spending Millions of Dollars on Loot for Games That Don't Exist - Mathew Di Salvo

• Anonymous leaks gigabytes of data from alt-right web host Epik - Ax Sharma Ars Technica

• Remote-controlled armed robot to patrol borders and battlefields unveiled by Israeli firm via CBS News

• NASA Lab Studies Sleepiness and Use of Automated Systems (DCH: Turns out “self-driving cars” are more prone to accidents than we thought. “A new study conducted by the Fatigue Countermeasures Lab at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley suggests this passive role can leave drivers more susceptible to sleepiness – especially when they’re sleep deprived.”)

• The Downside to Surveilling Your Neighbors - Todd Feathers themarkup.org

• 20 Years After 9/11, Surveillance Has Become a Way of Life - Albert Fox Cahn WIRE

• A secretive Pentagon program that started on Trump’s last day in office just ended. The mystery has not. - Craig Timberg at The Washington Post (DCH: Control of 6% of The Internet was bestowed to a company based in Florida as part of a “cybersecurity project” in the 11th hour of Trump’s administration…)

• How Cambridge Analytica’s Digital Propaganda Failed in Afghanistan - Zamaan Qureshi bylinetimes.com

Society & The Culture

CJW: Judith Butler: ‘We need to rethink the category of woman’ - Jules Gleeson at The Guardian

Politically, securing greater freedoms for women requires that we rethink the category of “women” to include those new possibilities. The historical meaning of gender can change as its norms are re-enacted, refused or recreated.

So we should not be surprised or opposed when the category of women expands to include trans women. And since we are also in the business of imagining alternate futures of masculinity, we should be prepared and even joyous to see what trans men are doing with the category of “men”.

A quote where Butler called TERFism “one of the dominant forms of fascism in our times”, was cut from the article… which is unsurprising considering how many TERF columnists are on the Guardian UK payroll.

Also, thanks to friend of the pod Lucy, who pointed out that the question that was cut related to a real crossover of TERF and Far Right violence, as reported here.

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CJW: I'm Not There - R.E. Hawley at Real Life Mag

If the psychiatric definition of dissociation and the wellness industry-infused version are each pathologizing visions, the “dissociation” of memespeak is perhaps something different: an acknowledgement of the phenomenon’s strategic dimension, as a coping mechanism aimed against the claustrophobic overload of being seen constantly. Through this lens, the flurry of “don’t perceive me” memes appear almost tactical, sharing among them a vision of the internet free from compulsory body awareness.

A really interesting read on dissociation and perception. The recent backlash I've seen against "do not perceive me" is disheartening precisely because of the tactical value I see in being unperceived and imperceptible. It's also a reminder that the person you are perceiving online is actually nothing like their real self. We are selves interacting with partiality, fighting with shadows.

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CJW: The man snatching Africa's 'stolen' treasures from the museums of Europe - Allan Clarke and Lisa McGregor at ABC News (the good one)

At the Musée d'Arts Africains, Océaniens, Améridiens in Marseille, he took a ceremonial ivory spear and, clutching the intricately carved object in two hands, walked out into the courtyard to deliver a fiery monologue.

In September, he left France for the Netherlands where he took a Congolese funeral statue from the Afrika Museum. Then in October, he marched into the Louvre, grabbing what turned out to be a sculpture from the island of Flores in Indonesia.

For every one of his acts of "diplomacy", Diyabanza has been arrested and charged, even spending time in jail. But he's also using the legal hearings as a political stage.

Killmonger was right…?

MKY: damn fucking right he was. I wish the Lupin reboot got on board with this..

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LZ: Girlboss culture isn't dead, it's rebranded as "that girl" now - Laura Pitcher at i-D

As a Millennial myself, I was betting my chances that Gen Z would destroy all the ridiculous stuff that my generation cultivated until now. But even though trends say Gen Z are against hustle, they are all up for body neutrality and gender fluidness, there’s still that “rotten apple in the barrel” which turns out to be this new TikTok trend “that girl.” While women in their thirties might be already tired of this BS of fake wellness and beauty standards (or maybe some are still making Gwyneth Paltrow et co even richer), I hope that today’s teenagers (who are the main audience on TikTok) may be able to see how stupid these discourses are. Laura criticizes it in her article, so I am dying to believe that this isn’t going to become the norm. Please pay attention to girls like Billie Eilish and Lizzo talking about body neutrality and not these f* influencers that still work for BS-oriented algorithms. :(

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• Michael K. Williams Had a Future as a Serious Left Activist - Ryan Zickgraf at Jacobin

• The New Matrix Resurrections Trailer Reclaims the Red Pill Narrative - Angela Watercutter WIRED

• Inmates Weren't Told They Were Given An Anti-Parasite Drug Instead Of COVID-19 Meds The Associated Press (Via NPR)

• Why Satanists may be the last hope to take down Texas’s abortion bill - Nicole Goodkind at Fortune

Labor & Economics

DCH: ‘Just Get Me a Box’: Inside the Brutal Realities of Supply Chain Hell - Brendan Murray at Bloomberg

The system underpinning globalization—production on one side of the planet, connected to consumers on the other by trucks, ships, planes, cranes, and forklifts—is too rigid to absorb today’s rolling tremors from COVID-19, or to recover quickly from the jolts to consumer demand or the labor force. It’s I

Your deeply unethical supply chain sure looks brittle. Would be a real shame if something happened to it…

CJW: Yes. The pandemic has merely highlighted supply chain issues that have been in place since the advent of "just in time" logistics chains. Expect shortages to be commonplace going forward until such a time as things change on a grand scale (which may never happen). As they say on Trash Future, our current capitalist state is Soviet Russia but shit and expensive.

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MJW: Amazon’s New ‘Factory Towns’ Will Lift the Working Class

I fucking hate it when my dystopian fiction predicts the… present.

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• There’s a gig worker-sized hole in Biden’s vaccine mandate plan - By Charlotte Jee MIT Technology Review

• Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out 6% of office workers - Katherine Anne Long at The Seattle Times

• An Outdated Grid Has Created a Solar Power Economic Divide - Eric Niiler WIRED

• CORPORATE TAKEOVER NHS Spending on Private Sector is Up – But Patient Outcomes Are Down - bylinetimes.com

• With 38 Million Facing Food Insecurity, Hunger in US Soared by Nearly 9% in 2020 - Kenny Stancil at Common Dreams

Newsletters

CJW: Counterfeit Capitalism: Why a Monopolized Economy Leads to Inflation and Shortages - Matt Stoller (via Brendan)

Uber’s attempt to monopolize the taxi market with cheap prices, and the resulting shortage years later after the market was ruined, is a very simple way to understand the situation, if you imagine that taking place across multiple industry segments beyond taxis. Monopolistic business models often appear to be efficient or good for consumers - for a time - but end up destroying productive capacity on the backend, which then creates or worsens a shortage. In that case, cab drivers, who used to be able to make a reasonable living, haven’t really come back.

Matt Stoller writing on monopolies (as is his wont), and the way monopolies have created brittle supply chains unable to withstand the stresses of a global pandemic, trading resiliency for economic "efficiency".

Books

LZ: Producing Power: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry Book by Sonja D. Schmid

For those who are passionate about nuclear power and want to know more of the USSR history with the technology before and right after the Chernobyl accident, this book is a very complete research with all the minutiae. It provides a very comprehensive analysis of what happened and what were the conclusions about the accident -- was it the operators’ fault? Was it a design problem? How activism against nuclear energy has influenced the industry and how the fact that the Soviet Union was ahead of this technology has shaped our perception of the dangers and opportunities of relying on nuclear energy -- even after Fukushima. I found this interesting to know more about the history of the USSR but it’s not exactly a book to understand the current picture, for instance to learn why environmentalists like James Lovelock argue that nuclear energy is the only clean source of energy etc.

Movies + TV

LZ: Nine Perfect Strangers

Miniseries with Nicole Kidman, Michael Shannon, Melissa McCarthy, and Luke Evans based on a book with the same name. First I thought it was a parody of the Goop Lab and related, but sometimes the series get a little bit more ambiguous and you don’t really know if they are criticizing toxic positivity and capitalist spirituality… In any case, all characters are very interesting and they reflect a lot of contemporary stereotypes and dilemmas -- especially Samara Weaving and Melvin Gregg’s characters, who are a couple of a lottery winner and a digital influencer.

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DCH: Brand New Cherry Flavor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOzM3c33TVg

Lisa N. Nova (Rosa Salazar) comes to LA dead set on directing her first movie. But when she trusts the wrong person and gets stabbed in the back, everything goes sideways and a dream project turns into a nightmare. This particular nightmare has zombies, hit men, supernatural kittens, and a mysterious tattoo artist who likes to put curses on people. And Lisa’s going to have to figure out some secrets from her own past in order to get out alive.

Finally got around to watching this gem. BNCF is a surreal and supernatural revenge fantasy for the Post-Weinstein era. Stylistically it owes a lot to Cronenberg, Raimi, and Lynch. It features terrific performances from Rosa Salazar, Catherine Keener (as Boro the aforementioned tattoo witch and boy does she deserve an Emmy for this), and Eric Lange (as the ultra smarmy back-stabbing producer). Oh and the soundtrack is a love letter to 90s alt rock.

Well worth a binge.

Video

LZ: Let’s Talk Religion (YouTube Channel)

I am a very curious person when it comes to religion, though I myself don’t follow any. A friend sent me a video from this channel and I am loving how didactic (and calm) this guy is. He is mostly focused on Eastern religions and he is also specialized in Sufi.

Music

LZ: Fuck Bolsonaro! Punk against fascism. Brazilian compilation

September 7th is a holiday here in Brazil and we celebrate our independence from Portugal. However, supporters of the president decided to use this date to go to the streets and “protest in favor of the status quo” (what a concept!). It was during my research about artists against Bolsonaro that I found this compilation of Brazilian punk songs, but couldn’t find the whole cassette. So I created this playlist for you all!

The Self-Promotion

LZ: REQU13M crowdfunding

Hey all, don’t know how many of you speak/read Portuguese, but I’m crowdfunding a science fiction book that I wrote. :) It is basically a cyberpunk adventure focused on a hacker so messed up she cannot tell what’s real and virtual anymore. The novel is a combination of several short stories that I wrote in 2013 and now turned into a full narrative, with some additions of papers and . There’s quite a lot of references to Buddhism, Hinduism, semiotics, subcultures, industrial music, death, and some classic 90s cyberpunk movies like Strange Days and Avalon. Anyways, soon I will be publishing an ebook with the translation of one of the short stories! So keep an eye for updates! :)

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LZ: New translation: From Dystopia to Facebook: How Desirable is the Metaverse?

An essay that I wrote some months ago after the news that Zuckerberg wants to turn Facebook into the Metaverse. Some authors argued this was a dystopian idea, but here I give my two cents about the topic: does it really need to be like that?

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CJW: Buddies Without Organs - Nomadology: The War Machine

Another episode of the Buddies Without Organs podcast, with myself, Sean, and Matt, and also featuring special guest Lucy from the Wyrd Signal podcast. We talk about the D&G plateau Nomadology: The War Machine, and have a lot of fun doing it.

I also have some notes here: US Military in the Modern Day

And more notes going up on the blog in the coming weeks.

The Memes

CJW: Long thread of the best of Twitter…

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DCH: Wake me up when they start using these at the Met Gala

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MJW:

All benches are communist if you're with a comrade.