nothing here but social murder
issue 321 - 19th July, 2026
CJW: Hello again, my lovelies. Welcome to another issue of nothing here. As ever, if you would like to support us, those links are:
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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. Meme collector.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, future lover.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer and purveyor of melancholy whimsy.
Climate Change & The Environment
DCH: Scorched Earth - Kate Mackenzie at Phenomenal World
Germany's far-right AfD party has opposed renewable energy for years but has recently made air conditioning a key focus of its campaign, with a spokesman declaring that his party wanted to stop people "being sacrificed on the altar" of energy ratings. Similarly, Marine Le Pen's National Rally, which has sought to block wind turbines and solar panels, has become an avid proponent for air conditioning.
The far right spent years fighting the turbines and solar panels that could have slowed the heat now killing thousands across Europe. Now they campaign on air conditioning, borrowing the language of sacrifice to sell relief from a crisis their own policies helped guarantee.
Geopolitics & Empire
DCH: Peter Thiel, precogs and 'non-human corporations' – welcome to the wild world of AI Argentina - Uki Goñi at The Nerve
As a guarantee, Milei has announced a government AI platform called the "Social Digital Twin" that will use public records, health records and even data about participation in protests to predict future scenarios in society – a kind of AI "precog" that would neutralise any attempt to derail Milei's libertarian utopia. It is not yet known if the AI platform will create digital twins of every individual inhabitant.
This is the actual function behind Milei's "AI age" pitch: a predictive surveillance layer built to flag dissent before it organizes. Health records and protest data feed a system explicitly designed to protect one man's political project from the people he governs.
Argentina ran this exact operation before but with paper files and phone taps, under a dictatorship that disappeared 30,000 people. The state just traded index cards for algorithms.
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The system wants you to feel despair - Yanar Alkayat at The Canary - CJW: I meant to put this in the last issue, but missed it when I was collating my links. It’s a good piece on resisting the impositions of power against your resistance, especially for front line activists and the like.
Science & Space
DCH: SpaceX Isn't a Company. It's a Metaphor for the Rapture of the Super Rich - Naomi Klein at Patterns
Which brings us back to SpaceX, which is really not a company in any traditional sense. Rather, it is best understood as a bolted-together wealth-extraction vehicle, marketed under whatever story moves money the fastest. For instance, as a Motley Fool analysis noted, the risk-factors section in SpaceX's S-1 filing (usually a place for boilerplate disclaimers), reveals that the company's growth plans rest largely on "unproven technologies or technologies that do not exist."
SpaceX filed a legal document with the SEC admitting its trillion-dollar valuation rests on technology that doesn't exist yet. Investors bought in anyway, staking money on Musk himself rather than the balance sheet. Goldman Sachs still projects a 25-fold revenue jump by 2030 for a company that spent twice what it earned last year. This is a clear scam but Wall Street doesn’t care because they’re in on it.
Tech & Design
DCH: Let AI Burn - Ed Zitron at Where's Your Ed At
Google does not have the next Google Search, Microsoft does not have the next Microsoft Office, Meta does not have the next Facebook, and Amazon does not have the new AWS. They need you to believe that AI is a big deal without them ever having to prove why outside of capital expenditures. They want you to assume that all this money can't be wrong, even though when you remove OpenAI and Anthropic, who represent 89% of the revenues of the largest AI companies, the AI industry is, at best, pulling in $20 billion in annual revenue.
Four of the most powerful companies on earth are running a hype campaign because none of them have a second act. Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon aren't spending on AI because it works. They're spending because $20 billion in actual revenue is the only thing standing between them and admitting they're out of ideas.
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DCH: Meta's Teen Safety Case Just Became a $1.4 Trillion Existential Threat by Ece Yildirim at Gizmodo
The states' filings are sealed, but per Reuters, the penalties were calculated by multiplying the number of violations, aka the rough amount of young users impacted by the addictive design choices, by the fine amounts designated by state law.
Scale is the whole defense strategy here: make $1.4 trillion sound insane so nobody looks at what it's built from. Every dollar in that number traces back to a violation, and every violation traces back to a child whose data got harvested for profit.
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Energy and the Matter Problem - Deb Chachra at Future Observatory Journal (via Sentiers) - CJW: Deb Chachra giving me some optimism for the future.
Just the headlines:
The Backlash Is So Strong That People With "Pervert Glasses" Are Afraid to Use Them in Public - Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism
Meta’s new AI creep glasses will record 24-7 without a light - David Gerards at pivot-to-ai.com
“Instagram’s Darkest Secret”: BBC Investigation Finds Ads for Child Sex Abuse Material in India - Democracy Now
Society & The Culture
CJW: The Promise of Cruelty: Fascism and Social Murder - Adam C. Jones at Prometheus Magazine
This is why social murder is a revolutionary concept, because it is fundamentally anti-reformist. There is no liberalism compatible with an analysis of social murder that does not find itself implicated, and we should note that the ease with which liberalism denies genocide is a trained habit from the ease with which it shrugs off the slaughter of its own history, even within its own territory.
A great essay on social murder as a fundamental aspect of (even liberal) capitalism, and also how it is utilised under fascism.
It feels important because too many people think we can reform the politics of the current moment, return to the (façade of) fluffy liberalism akin to what we had during the Obama administration, but fascism and capitalism and liberalism are all too easily entwined, and the only effective way to rid our world of fascism is to rid it also of capitalism and liberalism (which, honestly, just looks more and more like polite fascism the further we slide into this fascist future).
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CJW: I Am Not Sorry Lindsey Graham is Dead - Magdalene Visaggio at Assigned Media
That’s the worst part. The hate infected me. I am now petty, and cruel, and voracious for their suffering. I have no kindness to offer them, no forgiveness to extend, no love, and I still believe everyone deserves love. So I am a hypocrite. I spit venom, same as them. I want their suffering. I mock their dead. I’m still not sorry, but God, I am angry at that, and at them, and at myself, for the simple pleasure the suffocation of Lindsey Graham’s pathetic candleflame of life gives me. I hope he died in pain. I hope he died alone. I hope he understood, at the end, that everything he did was monstrous and vain, and felt every ounce of pain he facilitated on the bodies of others. I hope he is in hell, and I don’t even think hell exists. He has returned to the universe, as we all must, and he has left it a little worse than he found it, and I don’t think there will ever be an accounting of that fact.
A powerful and beautifully written essay on the death of Lindsey Graham, on the impossibility of love when faced with so much overwhelming hate just for being who you are. It resonated with me a lot.
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“To trans people in Wales, in our congregations and who serve God faithfully in the Church: you are known. You are loved. You are welcome here, as you are, always.” - Statement of the Bench of Bishops of the Church in Wales on the publication of the EHRC Draft Code of Practice - DCH: I’m not one to typically cheer on the Church but when they’re right, they’re right. Fuck the EHRC.
Just the headlines:
AI Fiction Is Easy to Detect Because It's Stupid and Bad, Research Finds - Matthew Gault at 404 Media
Labour & Economics
DCH: Umyazu - Mandy Brown at A Working Library (via Sentiers)
There's a prevailing narrative that says we've lost our ability to pay attention, that we need drugs or discipline or sternly-worded warnings about the dangers of social media to deal with this growing public health threat. This narrative completely obscures the fact that annihilating attention is a political project with clear benefits for the billionaire class: if we cannot attend the world, neither can we intercede in it. We become passive recipients of their worldbuilding, disenfranchised from our own responsibility to make sense of, and therefore to remake, the world around us.
Brown reaches for Le Guin's novel The Telling to make her case, where an alien sect gives a planet industrial technology and the planet's old reading culture gets criminalized in exchange: books pulped, storytelling gatherings banned, citizens flattened into "producer-consumers."
The lesson she draws is that no technology hands you a neutral tool. It hands you the politics baked into it, whether that's an AI feed or an industrial economy. Small presses, zines, and secondhand bookstores are what's left resisting that trade. Every one still standing is a small mutiny.
CJW: I shared this in the last issue, but take this as a second and third recommendation (via Patrick Tanguay) to check it out. It’s important.
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Just the headlines:
Porn Platform Gives Sex Workers Stake in the Company's Profits - Samantha Cole at 404 Media
The Case for Nationalizing Artificial Intelligence - Dustin Guastella at Jacobin
How the Luddites took over New York City - Brian Merchant at Blood in the Machine
Bosses Are Becoming Obsessed With AI, Using It to Make Every Decision, Barraging Their Employees With Nonsensical ChatGPT Directives, and Even Asking It Who to Fire - Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism
Movies + TV
LZ - Keeper (2025)
Learned about this movie through Instagram as being a folk horror film, but… I’m not sure if I would count as one? Well, it does follow some sort of folklore; however, it’s not a historical movie. In fact, it is very contemporary and tells the story of Liz, a cosmopolitan artist who’s gonna spend her anniversary with her boyfriend in his secluded cabin. Very unoriginal, yes. Obviously, things get weird, and she is always suspicious because she’s a smart woman, and dating is not for the weak these days, yada yada.
Still, things go to shit eventually, and her boyfriend and his cousin are setting up something. It then becomes something much bigger than just a case of domestic violence and feminicide, but some sort of curse with a feminist turnaround.
Even though this sort of story is totally my cup of tea, I thought this movie was extremely slow, very predictable, and not really fulfilling. We barely have time to grow disgusted with the boyfriend as he leaves her alone quite quickly. Good thing Tatiana Maslany is a great actress, but unfortunately, she wasn’t able to save this film, which had beautiful photography and a tongue-in-cheek soundtrack.
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CJW: Obsession (2025)
There’s been a lot of (ugh) discourse about the money this film made - but I’m not going to comment on that except to say that the director better attempt to do right by the crew by, I don’t know, hiring the same people for his next movie and paying them well, because he’ll obviously have all the money he wants on this next project. Anyway, the film itself is incredibly well done - it looks stunning, to the degree you would never guess how cheaply it was made, so big props to the production designers, cinematographers and all the rest - and the two leads are brilliant in it.
It’s about a “nice guy” who uses a One Wish Willow to make his crush fall in love with him, with disastrous results. It’s easy to view the film through a feminist lens - both the way that this “nice guy” throws away the woman’s agency (and consent) the first chance he gets because his desires are more important, and also the way that women are driven “crazy” (colloquially or literally, depending on the exact circumstances) when they’re stuck in toxic relationships that they can’t get out of because of the hold the man has on them. That said though, if you won’t want to see a woman suffer because of a man’s weakness, I absolutely understand.
So yes, great movie. If anyone (any man, in particular) describes this as a romcom gone bad or anything like that, give them the widest possible berth, because this is horror about men’s power over women, even when they see themselves as shy nice guys with only the best intentions.
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LZ: The Ghost in the Shell (2026)
GitS got a new anime, once more. But this time it looks different, especially because it's following the original manga, the animation style is very 90s/early 2000s coded, and it's… funny? After Mamoru Oshii's classic movie from the 90s, GitS has always had a darker tone, which apparently didn't exist in the manga. I haven’t read it yet, but that's what's been spread.
In this first episode, there's so much going on, and it's so fast-paced that I could feel my age hitting every nerve. It's not bad, but there's so much going on and so little explanation that I wonder whether the following episodes are going to be more didactic, or if it's going to be just for pure amusement of seeing fights and minds being hacked, almost like an Overwatch game.
Still, I like that they kept Kusanagi more adult-like. A previous rendering of GitS got me freaked out with her infantilization, while now she has more of an Evangelion's Misato vibe to her. Also, no screechy anime girl voice, thank god! And we do have the “vein” sign on the top of the head to show annoyance back, as well as the teardrop for embarrassment. Good times in anime, I just don't know if I want GitS to become that?
CJW: I’ve seen a lot of people say similar online, but that’s how the manga was. The complaint I have isn’t with the style of it, per se, but rather that if it’s going to stick so closely to the manga, what’s the point? Like, it looks great, and they included the Major’s lesbian polycule in episode 2, so I’m going to watch it all, but it feels like another entry in the endless parade of adaptations/remakes/reboots/sequels/prequels we keep getting. Like, Mike Flanagan is helming a TV adaptation of Carrie… Why? Let him do something original. Especially when Stephen King didn’t come out of some recent political discourse looking particularly good…
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LZ: The Last Viking (2025)
So I gave myself the challenge of watching this Danish movie with Swedish subtitles, as I’m learning Swedish. I was surprised by how much I understood! Which means I can properly write a review and recommendation here. If you’re watching this to see Mads Mikkelsen and enjoy his beauty, I’m sorry to say, but he’s absolutely horrendous playing a man with dissociative identity disorder who is the brother of a bank robber who has just been released from jail after 17 years.
Manfred (Mikkelsen) still lives with his sister, Frida, who mostly takes care of him as he became even worse after his brother Anker went to prison. When he’s back, he learns Manfred is now John – but not any John, John Lennon, and if you don’t call him that, he’s gonna throw himself out of the closest window… no matter if it’s from the third floor or the car in motion.
Before Anker went to prison, he asked Manfred to bury the money bag somewhere near their family house in the countryside. But now that he’s back, he wants the money. Manfred, or rather John, doesn’t want to tell him where he buried it, and so we end up in a comically dark whirlwind with a psychiatrist reuniting other people with dissociative identity disorder to fill the whole Beatles at the family house, where a weird couple currently lives.
When a debt collector appears, things get very grim, but you’ll still laugh at the absurdity of Danish comedy. It felt a little like watching Lars Von Trier’s Riget – maybe other people who are not so much into dark humor and Scandinavian references won’t get so much (as I didn’t, when I first watched the series), but it’s amazing and worth watching no matter where you come from.
Needless to say, I cried at the end of it, which is an absolute seal of approval.
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MJW: Backrooms (2026)
I’m impressed by anyone who doesn’t spend their twentieth year avoiding uni work by punching bucket bongs in their lounge room, so Kane Parson’s efforts on Backrooms is pretty awesome to me. Good for him. On to the movie itself: I’m not a horror fan, I’m easily frightened and have too good of an imagination for hectic scary movies, but so much of the interesting stuff coming out lately is horror. I’ve been trying my best to be brave.
Backrooms wasn’t so much scary as it was creepy, with some truly unnerving parts that relied on glimpses of figures, fragments of images, shadows moving behind closed doors. The creepiness was implied by smears of dark matter on the yellowed walls, piles of familiar clothes, stillness, the hum of fluorescent lights (my absolute fucking nightmare.) Somehow, the unpredictable placement of a wrong-sized door made me want to cover my eyes, the placement of three doorknobs thereon became horrifying. Still, I was waiting for some truly terrifying stuff that did not come; I can’t say I wasn’t relieved by that.
I loved the 1990 aesthetic (a horrific time for fashion and interiors), thought the grainy, era-appropriate video footage worked super well, and the two lead actors gave wonderfully understated performances. Watch if your nightmare is flickering fluoro lights, things being wrongly out of proportion, and hearing something moving towards you from the next room, the next room, the next room…
Games
LZ: Death Stranding Director’s Cut
I’m playing this game once more. It was my first and only Kojima game, so I didn’t have much baggage except for what my friends talked about Metal Gear Solid. I knew he was a great storyteller, but I never grasped it until I played Death Stranding
The pandemic had just started, and the timing couldn’t be more insanely accurate for this game to be released. What do you mean, a game about a post-apocalyptic USA where couriers are essential to human survival, and everyone is isolated and craving connection? Not only that, but the topics that are discussed in this game, when it comes to the technologies used and the symbolism.
You find most of these references in the game files, where you learn about what they call Homo demens and Homo ludens. I studied this during college and my Master’s degree. Huizinga was one of my supervisor’s go-to references, so when I saw him there in the game, I was very surprised. Then, the references to transhumanism and all the discussion about death, soul, and immortality when I was just working on my PhD thesis about transcending death through images and art.
Now I’m playing the director’s cut, but I don’t really know what the difference is. However, I noticed things I missed completely on the first run. And I got to play it on my birthday, so I got flowers from Mads Mikkelsen <3 I also noticed I have grown much more impatient with the deliveries, but at the same time, I love these task-based games. So I’ll come back when I’m finished once more.
Art
LZ: Iris van Herpen injects glass-covered gown with glowing plasma
That Iris Van Herpen is no newbie when it comes to experimenting with materials and making dresses out of basically anything is no surprise, but now she's even tackling other states of matter… plasma! I've seen this dress everywhere, and while the little bubbles thing is something she already made 10 years ago, I was surprised to learn that the plasma injected into these hand-made glass horns was activated by the model's body itself. Impressive work, and I'm looking forward to seeing what else she's gonna be doing with this new discovery.
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MJW: This piece from Desiree Fonseca caught my eye the other day. Love me some watercolour sapphic vampires and cerberus cats.
The Self-Promotion
CJW: Nowhere Town in Interzone #305
My story, Nowhere Town, is available now in Interzone #305. It's kind of an anti-nostalgia piece, inspired by Stalker and Roadside Picnic, it’s also long, personal/vulnerable, and should come with a CW for childhood abuse and sexual assault (nothing graphic though).
I really hope people check this one out.
The Memes
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