Welcome to the latest edition of the Nothing Here newsletter. It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas - the oppressively hot sun, the summer storms, the busy shopping centre carparks, and the slowly-filling social calendar. Well, set all that aside for now, and have a look below; there's sure to be something of interest in this luckiest of issues. This will likely be our last full issue of the year. I'm planning a hiatus issue for December 30th (yes, I realise "hiatus issue" is an oxymoron), which will be a recap of the year of the Nothing Here team, but who knows what will actually make it in! There's a good chance we'll have some more new things to share with you.
Corey J. White (CJW)
The VoidWitch Saga. Newsletter facilitator. Naarm/Melbourne. Tweets @cjwhite.
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW)
Writer, reader, weirdo. Author of ‘Welcome To Orphancorp’ and ‘Psynode’. Host of Catastropod. ADHD, spec fic, feminism, cats. Melbourne, Australia. @marleejaneward
Austin Armatys (AA)
Writer/Teacher/Wretched Creature // Oh Nothing Press // MechaDeath physical edition available now
m1k3y (MKY)
Wallfacer / Apocalyptic Futurist / #salvagepunk / @m1k3y
CJW: Doing the Doughnut at the G20? (via Sentiers)
We are all developing countries now. The Doughnut challenge turns all countries – including every member of the G20 – into ‘developing countries’ because no country in the world can say that it is even close to meeting the needs of all of its people within the means of the planet.
How have I not heard of the doughnut before? Instead of GDP, which exclusively details itself with economic growth, the doughnut is a system to measure a nation’s social and ecological indicators. Basically, is it looking after its citizens, while still functioning within its ecological limits? Spoiler warning: No, it isn’t. Out of all the countries examined, Vietnam comes closest.
This just seems like one of those obvious yet fundamental changes we need to make if we’re even going to be able to begin to think about addressing climate change. We need to consciously uncouple from the global economics of neoliberalism.
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MJW: Eighties Babies Are Officially the Brokest Generation, Federal Reserve Study Concludes
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CJW: Finally, the Self-Driving Car (by and via Alexis Madrigal)
Any time the car does something you would do as a driver, you impute similar reasoning. When it doesn’t, it becomes a machine again. We keep half-recognizing our own kind of behavior—and then it slips away. Our brains see other brains everywhere, too, even when we know we’re wrong.
The above quote from right near the end grabbed me, but this final paragraph is the real meat and potatoes of the article/issue:
If enough people can simply imagine that there is nothing all that different about self-driving cars, then Waymo can slip in to society. And once the robots are doing the driving without human minders, they can optimize in the way Silicon Valley does, grinding down the price through operational efficiency and increasing the availability of transportation that robots can deliver. This is the ghost of car-human past and capitalism future, available now in a desert boomtown and coming soon to a low-density suburb near you.
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CJW: The CRISPR Baby Scandal Gets Worse by the Day
Small groups of researchers can make virtually unilateral decisions about experiments that have potentially global consequences, and that everyone else only learns about after the fact.
He Jiankui’s experiment reveals that vulnerability in the starkest-possible light.
Honestly, the reason why I didn’t include any of the initial articles about He Jiankui’s CRISPR babies in the previous issue of the newsletter, is because I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s not that I knew he cut corners and conducted his experiments in ethically dubious ways, but rather so much of science reporting is about getting those clicks, with headlines so divorced from the mundane realities of science that they’re basically lies.
But that pull quote above is the real kicker. With technology like gene driving, “global consequences” means exactly that.
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CJW: This is something of a triple-feature.
The Best Technology for Fighting Climate Change Isn’t a Technology
Instead of putting our faith and future in potential, untested, and likely exorbitantly expensive and/or power-hungry technological fixes, we could instead focus on forestry. Makes no sense, right?
We could also rethink our agriculture and grow food cheaper, while also taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it in dirt. Dirt! And while we’re thinking about dirt, take a moment to consider exactly what’s beneath your feet: tread softly because you tread on 23 billion tonnes of micro organisms (via Gareth/MANYOYO).
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MJW: Hannah Gadsby meets Roxane Gay: A Conversation
A great conversation between two of the canniest, most insightful women working today.
RG: They’re also so angry that you’re not following the rules of having a body, and of being a woman…
HG: It helps that I’m pear-shaped. I remember once, when I first started comedy, I heard, “You don’t even know she’s fat till she stands up.” Oh, good God. But I’d written all those jokes: “I’m like an iceberg.” It’s wound into your self-worth and how you think about yourself. It’s woven in at that tender age when you first start seeing yourself, and it doesn’t stop.
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CJW: ContraPoints - The Apocalypse
This is a great video, and the point Natalie Wynn makes about the (ego-driven, violent) backlash against vegans is exactly the same point Charlotte Shane made in the newsletter I referenced last issue.
It’s all connected.
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CJW: Smearing the Senses: Tony Scott, Action Painter
I don’t know that I’d ever say Tony Scott is a “better” director than Ridley Scott, or that he makes “better” films, but in recently exploring Tony Scott’s work, I think I enjoy it more. Ridley has made absolute classics, but his directorial style is an utter lack of style (the same could be said for nearly every blockbuster director). Whatever else you could say about Tony Scott’s work, you could never say that he doesn’t have style. His films might be shallow, they might be ridiculous, they might feel like the visual equivalent of taking dirty speed, but they’re never not entertaining.
Deja vu is an actual sci-fi classic that could easily be mentioned in the same breath as Twelve Monkeys, and Man on Fire is such a brutal, hard-boiled thriller that (with the alternate ending) it could be my all-time favourite violent thriller.
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CJW: “AI” Design Changing the Way Aircraft are Built (via Sentiers)
By dreaming up radical new structures, designers are helping aircraft to become lighter, stronger and more efficient. Yet the minds behind these innovations are not human.
This kinda reads like a breathless advertorial for Autodesk, but even so, the ideas here are interesting - particularly the organic-looking machine designs, and being able to include manufacturing restrictions into the generative design system.
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AA: Slavoj Zizek X Abercrombie and Fitch (2003)
In 2003 Slavoj Zizek wrote copy for Abercrombie and Fitch. Yes, that actually happened. The end result is a very weird combination of Marxist-Lacanian philosophy and A&F’s soft-focus, milquetoast aesthetic - a strange collision between horny All-American consumerism and its critique. As the website critical-theory.com points out, “Abercrombie & Fitch decided to try a permutation of softcore porn and Slavoj Zizek’s rambling. The results are amazing.”
They sure are. Have a look at this shit:
You can find a pdf of the full publication here.
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AA: The Spiritual Research Foundation
This site has been a source of great fascination for me recently. If you’ve ever thought that your favourite religion needed more tables, quasi-mathematical calculations and helpful infographics, then have I got good news for you! The Spiritual Research Foundation has you well and truly covered. Check out, for example, this handy illustrated guide to the mysteries of life after death:
O’Neil is a Left-leaning journalist who has written for the likes of Esquire and Huffpost. He also has an active Twitter presence. His latest venture is a newsletter called Hellworld - I’ve just started poking through the archive, and there is some great stuff there.
O’Neil writes with insight and clarity about politics, but also unflinchingly examines dark, often harrowing, aspects of his personal life. Topics addressed include being sexually assaulted in Disneyland as a teenager, his experiences with addiction, and about witnessing a random act of extreme violence.
I like the way O’Neil writes here - it’s conversational, kind of stream-of-consciousness, and there are insights I found profoundly moving. Here’s an excerpt from an issue about (amongst other things) Mac Miller, Kurt Cobain and addiction:
My football coach broke the news to me in a football coach voice because that was how you found out about things back then. You’d walk around not knowing some shit until someone would tell you and then you had to wait to bump into someone else and go ahead and tell them. I don’t remember exactly what he said but it was something like Your boyfriend Kurt Cobain killed himself.
Kurt was 27 years old which everyone remembers as the famous age to be dead at. I remember my coach mispronounced his name, Co-burn, he said, which is something a football coach would do on purpose to fuck with you and then we had to go and lift weights. I don’t remember if we listened to Nirvana while we lifted the weights but I hope we did not.
Hellworld has a tiered subscription model - you can receive occasional updates for free, or pay for more frequent instalments.
CJW: Thanks for that. I’m already completely sold on this after those three issues you pulled out of the archive. This quote grabbed me:
When you struggle with depression and addiction you think about being dead a lot which is something I can attest to because I’m addicted to everything. Also my best friend is an addict and depressed and tells me he wants to be dead a lot and I have tried a lot of different things to get him to stop thinking that but sometimes I think I’m maybe not the best person to present the case because I tell him things like Yes, bitch, I do too but you can’t do it. You have eternity to be dead so just wait like everyone else there is no point in rushing to be dead.
AA: I loved that particular passage too. It’s a great example of how O’Neil cuts to the heart of his subject matter in an unadorned and powerful way.
MJW: I’m making my way through Roxanne Gay’s Hunger. It’s a memoir of her body, and it’s a heavy read, which is why it’s taking me so long to get through. I really admire Gay’s insight into herself, her behaviours and her body. It’s no small feat to look at yourself with eyes open, and write it out, even if it hurts.
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AA: This interview with Cristina Rivera Garza in the LA Review of Books has piqued my interest in her latest novel The Taiga Syndrome (translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana). Garza talks eloquently about a number of topics, with the discussion broadly themed around the concept of “borders”. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:
Sometimes borders allow me to know the world, to generate certain kinds of knowledge about this world in which I live. And establishing or investigating or crossing borders all can be seen as political tactics. And danger escalates as we approach certain borders, while a sense of ease arrives when we cross certain other borders. So I can’t think of a vaster area of investigation, or of a series of specific questions that come up for me more constantly.
A lot of the discussion here is technical talk about the use of various language techniques and approaches that I found useful in thinking about my own approaches to writing.
AA: The Road Movie
I unabashedly love things like Jackass, TV Carnage & Worldstar videos, so this trailer for a feature-length compilation of insane Russian dash-cam footage called The Road Movie looks great to me. There’s something totally Ballardian about the whole thing too…
MJW: I recently made it through the hardest part of a story (for me, anyway): the ending.
The heady rush of beginning something new is so easy to get lost in. I slammed 10k words on this in the first few weeks, which is an accomplishment for me, ever the turtle-writer. Once that gleam has worn off, and I’m grinding through the middle and end, things get so much harder. I’m glad to have this first draft finished, and excited to see what I can wrangle it into in the second.
CJW: I’m assuming my love of “denouement” is rubbing off on you. It’s just a fantastically wanky word for “the winding down after the climax”.
MJW: The third episode of Catastropod came out last week. It features author Justin Woolley talking about zombie apocalypses, worldbuilding and his novel A Town Called Dust. Added bonus: two white people have an awkward conversation about ownvoices and cultural sensitivity! Find it here.
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CJW: How are you? How are things? Whatever particular holiday you celebrate at this time of year, I hope you had/are having/will have a great one. It’s been a rough year for a lot of people, for a lot of different reasons, but you’re still here. Keep doing the work, keep looking after those close to you, but also look after yourself. I say this a lot, and that’s because I need to hear it. I’m sure some of you need to hear it too.
As ever, if you enjoyed this issue, feel free to forward it to your friends, and tell the world.