nothing here but smoking history

issue 288 - 11th May, 2025

CJW: Welcome to another edition of nothing here. We’ve got plenty to share, so let’s get to is.

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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 & visual artist. Hates the internet.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, distant.

Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer, fulltime goth and metalhead.

Climate Change & The Environment

For these women, caring for turtles is more than a job, more than a charity. It’s a devotion. “When I work on the bench with the turtles, I’m glad my parts don’t fit them,” admits Alexxia. “In a season or two, I’d be out of parts. My blood, my bones—I’d give it to them.” - Shell Shock - Sy Montgomery at Orion Magazine - CJW: A heartwarming (and a little bit breaking) piece about two women running a turtle hospital out of their basement, and the many turtle friends they've helped.

Geopolitics & Empire

DCH: ‘She’s dying in front of my eyes’: The Gazan children starving under Israeli siege - Ahmed Ahmed and Ruwaida Amer at 972mag

“I tell her the border will open soon, and I’ll bring her whatever she wants,” Shurooq said, holding back tears. “Rahaf’s health is collapsing every day. She’s dying in front of my eyes, and we can’t do anything.”
For a little over two months, Israel has prevented all food, goods, and medical supplies from entering the Gaza Strip. The consequences have been catastrophic: According to Gaza’s Government Media Office, over 70,000 children are now hospitalized with acute malnutrition, and 1.1 million lack the daily minimum nutritional requirements for survival.
The Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza reported that, as of May 5, at least 57 children have already died from malnutrition-related health complications since the start of the war, and another 3,500 under the age of five face imminent risk of death from starvation.

Emphasis mine. I couldn’t even cut and paste the above without welling up with tears. I’ve lost all faith in humanity. Hurry down doomsday.

CJW: From Gaza to Kashmir: India’s attack on Pakistan is straight out of the Israeli playbook - Maah-Noor A. at Mondoweiss

When Israel bombs a hospital, the world debates whether Hamas was hiding beneath it. When India bombs a mosque, it shrugs – wasn’t it probably a ‘terror hideout’? The fact that the international community has tolerated Israel dropping US-made bombs on refugee camps has set a chilling precedent for other governments to commit atrocities with the same blank check.
India has been paying attention.

I'm glad I found this article, because this was exactly my thought when I saw India using the justification that they were "only" hitting mosques and the like, rather than military installations.

This is what the West encouraged when it lets Israel get away with genocide.

The solidarity between Zionism and Hindutva is not metaphorical. It is material. India is now one of Israel’s largest arms buyers. Surveillance systems perfected in the West Bank now watch Kashmiri neighborhoods. Israeli drones that terrorize Gaza skies are sold to India to monitor unrest in Muslim majority regions. The exchange isn’t just in weapons, it’s in ideology, strategy, and impunity.

As US military prepares for war on China, Silicon Valley tech oligarchs are profiting - Ben Norton at Geopolitical Economy Report - CJW: At this rate there might not be a USA to go to war with China soon anyway, but I still can't believe the West is so hellbent on war when climate change is right there, waiting to be addressed (remember: the US military alone contributes more to runaway climate change than some entire countries).
Ukrainians Are Designing The Future Of Post-War Reconstruction - Joe Mathews at Noema - CJW: A fantastic piece on decentralised and locally-led governance in Ukraine, and the importance of maintaining that local approach when post-war reconstruction is able to begin.

Just the headlines:

U.S. Denies Picking Bombing Targets From Random Twitter Accounts - Matthew Gault at 404 Media
Organizers say Israel is behind drone attack on Gaza aid flotilla - Michael Arria at Mondoweiss (CJW: Because of fucking course it is.)
A Trumped Up Police State Is Coming - Intercept
Migrant Torture at Guantanamo Authorized by Trump Administration Memo - Spencer Ackerman at Forever Wars

Science & Space

CJW: When That Chickadee Is No Longer “A Machine With Feathers” - Brandon Keim at Issues (via Sentiers)

Today the scientific conversation has moved well beyond whether or not animals are intelligent. The most interesting and adventurous questions are now: What sort of intelligences might yet be found? How can welfare be assessed in species very different from humans? What is the interplay between instinct and reflection? What sorts of meanings do places hold for animals? How do animals understand death? Can animals have a sense of beauty? How does cognition shape ecology?
And the ultimate question, perhaps, is what we do with these insights. It’s entirely possible to take this deeper awareness of animal intelligence, and of the commonalities between human and animal experience, and do nothing at all with it. But that awareness makes our relationships to animals—not only as species and populations, but as individuals—a matter of greater moral and ethical weight. It nourishes a sense of kinship and compassion rooted in a shared experience of life as beings to whom one can relate. It makes it difficult to maintain the fiction that, per Burroughs, animals are “machines in fur and feathers.” These insights challenge us to consider anew our relationships and responsibilities to individual animals and to nature.

Another piece on animal minds and how it relates to science, conservation, etc. Never not going to share interesting pieces in this area, so I hope you're as passionate as I am about animals finally getting the recognition they deserve as our neighbours, collaborators, peers, and friends, rather than automata good only for whatever we can extract from/through them.

Tech & Design

DCH: DOGE Is Building a Master Database to Surveil and Track Immigrants - Makena Kelly, Vittoria Elliott at WIRED (related: ICE just ordered $30 million worth of new technology from Palantir to track immigrants - Rosemarie Ho at Business Insider)

Over the past few weeks, DOGE leadership within the IRS have orchestrated a “hackathon” aimed at plotting out a “mega API” allowing privileged users to view all agency data from a central access point. Sources tell WIRED the project will likely be hosted on Foundry, software developed by Palantir, a company cofounded by Musk ally and billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. An API is an application programming interface that allows different software systems to exchange data. While the Treasury Department has denied the existence of a contract for this work, IRS engineers were invited to another three-day “training and building session” on the project located at Palantir’s Georgetown offices in Washington, DC, this week, according to a document viewed by WIRED.

I know the US has pretty much jack shit for privacy protections but I’m pretty sure this shit is illegal given the privacy act of 1974. I’m sure any legal defense based on that would get ground down in Trump’s courts. But hey maybe start somewhere in pushing back on this shit.

CJW: In 2025, venture capital can’t pretend everything is fine any more - David Gerard

Here is the state of venture capital in early 2025:
• Venture capital is moribund except AI.
• AI is moribund except OpenAI.
• OpenAI is a weird scam that wants to burn money so fast it summons AI God.
• Nobody can cash out.

Great news, AI supporters - everything is going great! No, wait. The opposite.

The Trump economic disaster is the most important material fact for the venture capital sphere. The report goes on and on about the tariffs [but] somehow fails to mention the bit where the Silicon Valley VC and executive crowd worked their backsides off to elect Trump and several of them sat in the front row at his inauguration. Then they were actually surprised when the leopard ate their faces too.

"Just futures for all require interventions and technologies that fit the topography, that build on and complement the social and ecological contours of place. The real tech future isn’t in the cloud, but on land. So be here, in place. Take a step, take another, feel the ground beneath your feet. Now you are a wayfarer, mapping the future." - The Network State and Topological Fetishism in Greenland - Zane Griffin Talley Cooper at Data Society (via Sentiers) - CJW: A short but great piece that's fundamentally about the ignorance of tech bro types and their "network state" plans for Greenland.
“The Trump Administration’s willful destruction of the CFPB raises questions as to whether consumer financial protection is still a core mission of the agency — and whether it is even possible given the mass firings and abrupt terminations of policies and staff,” the Center for Digital Democracy wrote in its comment letter regarding the rule. “If the Trump CFPB decides not to enact the rule, it will place the majority of the American public at a new and higher level of financial risk, especially every time they go online or watch programming.” Big Tech Wants Free Rein to Sell Your Data - Freddy Brewster at Jacobin

Just the headlines:

OpenAI abandons plan to become for-profit company - France 24
Millions of Nigerian users in the balance as Meta threatens exit - Damilare Dosunmu at Rest of World
How a judge’s scathing rebuke to Apple could change the app store - Wendy Lee at Los Angeles Times
The AI Dragnet - Sophia Goodfriend at Dissent

Society & The Culture

MJW: Alt-Right Aesthetics: How the Internet Is Radicalizing Women Through Culture

DCH: Related: Tradwives Are the Harbinger of Systemic Breakdown - Meagan Day at Jacobin

CJW: The Viking Age is undergoing a revisionist transformation - Neil Price at Aeon

This is a fascinating look at the level of trade carried out by the Norse during the so-called Viking Age.

“Using an AI generated video to have a dead victim deliver “their own” impact statement is unprecedented. AI avatars are obviously not the real person, and what they say must either be scripted by a different person, or generated using an LLM that is not the person. In this case, the video was used to help determine the prison sentence of a living person. The video that Pelkey’s family played contained several minutes of video of Pelkey from when he was alive, but everything the AI avatar said was scripted by his sister.” 'I Loved That AI:' Judge Moved by AI-Generated Avatar of Man Killed in Road Rage Incident - Matthew Gault at 404 Media (DCH: This is Black Mirror territory)

Just the headlines:

New study suggests entertainment is key to populist political success - Eric W. Dolan at Psypost
The Supreme Court Just Imperiled the Rights — and Lives — of All Trans People - Natasha Lennard at The Intercept

Health, Cooking, and Related

DCH: Vaping doubles risk of serious lung disease, even without smoking history - study - rnz.co.nz

A longitudinal study published by Oxford University has found people who vape, even without a history of smoking, are 2.29 times as likely to develop chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

I’ve lost too many loved ones to COPD. It’s a terrible way to die. Please, please, please if you’re reading this and are vaping or smoking I implore you to stop.

CJW: But I love smoking history. Nothing else gives me the same sort of terrifying buzz. (Sorry, bad joke.)

Labour & Economics

DCH: The AI jobs crisis is here, now - Brian Merchant

It’s unclear whether these kinds of layoffs are enough to register in the economic data, though there are signs it is. Writing in the Atlantic this week, business journalist and abundist Derek Thompson points to an alarming phenomenon in the job market: The unemployment rate for recent college graduates is unusually high—and historically high in relation to the general unemployment rate. Why might that be? One theory: Firms are hiring fewer grads into white collar jobs, and using more AI. “When you think from first principles about what generative AI can do, and what jobs it can replace, it’s the kind of things that young college grads have done,” as the Harvard economist David Deming told Thompson.

Merchant uses the recent Duolingo layoffs as a jumping off point to go broad on how the managerial class is using the hype around generative AI to gut creative and public sector jobs while also denying a new generation entry into the job market itself.

Just the headlines:

Wall Street Tells Google to Break Itself Up - Matt Stoller
Your Children’s Children Will Die in Our Factories - Jason Koebler at 404 Media
Workers Can Say Goodbye to Heat Protections Under Trump - Sam Pollak at Jacobin
The Labor Abuses Behind Your Chicken Nuggets - Alex Park at Jacobin
“They Actually Had a List”: ICE Arrests Workers Involved in Landmark Labor Rights Case - Noah Hurowitz at The Intercept

Books

CJW: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

American War is one of my favourite books of the 21st Century, so obviously I was going to read Omar El Akkad’s book on liberal hypocrisies surrounding the genocide being perpetrated against Palestinians by Israel. (Though at first I assumed it was going to be a novel and would still really love to see what El Akkad would do with that considering what he did with the War on Terror in American War.)

It’s an incredible book in the way it skewers Western government, institution, and media responses to the genocide, and feels especially relevant to me as a writer when he’s talking about the complicit silence of peers and writing-related institutions. In Australia at least, I’ve seen very few peers keeping quiet, but our institutions are captured by similarly spineless types who care more about funding than tens of thousands of children being murdered.

MJW: You can see it now, the way that media and institutions will spin their concern for Palestinians suddenly, and then retcon their message from all along. I keep waiting for it to happen, keep thinking that this is the thing that will change everything, or this, or this. And it’s not. El Ekkad has always seen the lies that we westerners tell ourselves, the narrative we create about our lives and motivations because we’re comfortable and well-fed and naive. It’s a beautiful and sad and angry book

Movies + TV

LZ - Black Mirror Seasons 6 and 7 (mild spoilers ahead)

Over the past weeks, I finally caught up with Black Mirror's last two seasons. I was surprised that season 6 had barely any science fiction topics, but I thought it was a good season anyway. It reminded me a lot of Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams series from Amazon, with all the famous actors, different historical periods, and a more soft sci-fi approach. I really liked the sort of true crime episode Loch Henry, I thought it was well built and engaging, but definitely not a Black Mirror episode. Same goes for Demon 79 and the 70s racist UK background. I thought the season was very entertaining and refreshing overall. Joan is awful, being the only “actual” Black Mirror episode, but it also gave a lot of Devs vibes and is very meta.

In season 7, we get original Black Mirror vibes again, including continuations of other episodes. Plaything was especially curious because it extends the previous episode Bandersnatch which was a sort of breakthrough with its interactive options, but there was also the continuation to USS Callister. While this season is exciting, it stretches our understanding of technology waaaaaay too much at some points. If you are not so strict about that, you can still enjoy these episodes and forgive the writers for being too liberal. The only one that is unforgivably bad is Bête Noire. It was promising, but the ending is ridiculous and proves how quantum computing and quantum physics are the new deus ex machina for sci-fi. Also, Common People is very obvious, but it's well executed, and I think it covers the common trope of “what if our lives depended on services’ subscriptions?”.

CJW: “I Don’t Do Horror, Ryan Coogler” — Black Magic’s Dr. Yvonne Chireau on Sinners and Bringing Hoodoo to Life - Megan Goodwin at Religion Dispatches

If you've seen Sinners, this is an interesting chat with the film's Hoodoo consultant. If you've not seen the movie yet, you should. It's as good as people have been saying.