Nov. 14, 2021, 1:20 p.m.
nothing here but the dirty dozen - issue 157 - 14th November, 2021
Nothing Here
nothing here but the dirty dozen
issue 157 - 14th November, 2021
CJW: Seems I need to apologise - each issue I tell you that you can support us by becoming a premium subscriber, but the link I was providing didn’t actually take you to the right place. My bad. I’ve sorted that out now, so if you would like to support us, you’ve got two options:
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Our latest unlocked bonus is from Marlee: You're Wrong About: A Love Letter
With COP26, we’ve got a lot of climate change related news… Sorry?
The Team
Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / ecopoet // Dark Extropian Musings / pryvt.rsrch / @eattrainrevolt [twit/insta]
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch.
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
MKY: The dirty dozen: meet America’s top climate villains - Georgia Wright, Liat Olenick and Amy Westervelt at The Guardian
Working- and middle-class people must stop blaming themselves for the climate crisis. Instead, it’s time to band together to seek justice and hold these profiteers accountable. Only in calling out their power and culpability is it possible to reclaim the world that belongs to all of us, together.
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CJW: Surface Tension - George Monbiot
Regardless of which complex system is being studied, there’s a way of telling whether it is approaching a tipping point. Its outputs begin to flicker. The closer to its critical threshold it comes, the wilder the fluctuations. What we’ve seen this year is a great global flickering, as Earth systems begin to break down. The heat domes over the western seaboard of North America; the massive fires there, in Siberia and around the Mediterranean; the lethal floods in Germany, Belgium, China, Sierra Leone – these are the signals that, in climatic morse code, spell “mayday”.
You might expect an intelligent species to respond to these signals swiftly and conclusively, by radically altering its relationship with the living world. But this is not how we function. Our great intelligence, our highly evolved consciousness that once took us so far, now works against us.
One of the best pieces I think I've seen from Monbiot - and that's saying something when he is consistently writing great pieces.
MKY: Nice. I used to explain this as when a spinning top starts to wobble.
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CJW: Indigenous Knowledge Has Been Warning Us About Climate Change for Centuries - Malcolm Harris at Pacific Standard (via Aaron Stewart-Ahn)
The philosopher Timothy Morton calls climate change a "hyperobject": It's so widely distributed and conceptually sticky that we can't really perceive it except in partial local instances. "When you feel raindrops falling on your head, you are experiencing climate, in some sense. In particular you are experiencing the climate change known as global warming," Morton wrote in 2010. "But you are never directly experiencing global warming as such." Humans don't have the right sensory faculties.
Maybe it was possible to think that way in 2010, but, less than a decade later, I think many of us have developed the ability to see global warming. We are no longer empiricists who route information through our senses to our brain for analysis; we're conspiracy theorists, every raindrop or sunbeam encountered as hyperobject. Now the totality hits us first.
I grabbed the above quote because I thought it was interesting to consider that in just 11 years we’ve gotten to the point where maybe we can perceive the hyperobject of climate change perhaps due to its rapidity or the increased media coverage.
But this essay is actually about Indigenous knowledge on climate change, and the colonialist extractivist ideology that has driven our climate to this point, and on the causes and effects of an insect megadeath. (Caveat: this piece is a couple of years old now, and I remember there being some question as to whether the original research on insect extinctions was actually accurate or not. That said, all the points on the devaluation of indigenous knowledge are still sadly relevant.)
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CJW: The climate won’t wait. We need a carbon tax now - Tim Harford at Financial Times
As strange as it may sound, this piece about the implementation and costs of a carbon tax actually gave me hope for the future. It’s a simple and practical step that governments could take which could have a big impact on logistical networks and their carbon output without needing to impact individuals greatly.
We had a carbon tax in Australia and it worked to reduce emissions, but our conservative government dismantled it for ideological reasons, and if Australia’s outing at COP26 is any indication, it seems doubtful they would reintroduce it, or indeed introduce any efforts to mitigate climate change that might impact their friends in big business.
MKY: what other-me sed:
https://twitter.com/eattrainrevolt/status/1456815955586129924
But yeah… idk… just maybe the Market _can _fix it?!. Maybe we can just put in EV charging stations everywhere. Maybe the future is bright for those that can afford to get a Telsa or a second-hand Prius or whatever the fuck… bright with the flames of a world on fire as they just drive on. Maybe the rest of us can go back to bicycles and horses or something. I really don’t know. What even is leadership? What is leading by example? Why is the only long-term thinking about billionaires' problems? Why anything Marge.
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MKY: Few willing to change lifestyle to save the planet, climate survey finds - Jon Henley at The Guardian
yeah, we should really be blaming the individuals. Here’s a handy doc on that:
Carbon Inequality in 2030: Per capita consumption emissions and the 1.5⁰C goal.
The richest 1% alone are expected to generate almost double the total emissions of the poorest 50%, concludes briefing note titled Carbon Inequality in 2030, written by Tim Gore of the Institute of European Environmental Policy (IEEP), with research from the IEEP and the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI).
The report assesses the world’s population in four segments, each with its own carbon footprint:
The richest 1%: By 2030, the richest 1% will be responsible for 16% of total consumption-based emissions, up from a 13% share in 1990, Oxfam reports. In order to achieve per capita emissions consistent with 1.5°C warming, the 1% will need to reduce their emissions 97% by 2030.
According to studies cited in the note, the “carbon footprints of the rich and famous” include homes, vehicles, aircraft, and yachts (including super-yachts that emit 7,000 tonnes a year), and lately, space tourism. In addition to direct consumption, their footprints include emissions associated with capital investments, a large and growing share of the total.
The richest 10%: Inflated emissions are not limited to the uber-rich. Next in line, the top 10% of global emitters are expected to contribute 32%—almost a third—of the global total by 2030. By themselves, emissions from the top decile will be almost equal to the global maximum required to limit warming to 1.5°C. To achieve an equal share, the richest 10% will need to reduce per capita emissions by 90%. BBC says an income of US$55,000 is enough to put someone in the world’s richest 10%.
The middle 40%: The next group, the middle 40% of emitters, will be responsible for 43% of per capita emissions in 2030. This group is expected to achieve a 9% reduction, mostly in the lower and middle income ranges, but will need to reduce its emissions much more—by 57%—to achieve the average per capita emissions target.
The poorest 50%: The poorest 50% of the global population will be responsible for only 9% of per capita emissions by 2030. Although their individual emissions are expected to climb slightly, by 17%, they will still only represent a small fraction of the 1.5°C target (an increase of 233% would be needed to achieve 2.3 tonnes/year).
In other words, those who blame the world’s poor for rising emissions have got the wrong end of the stick, Oxfam concludes. Although much fewer in number, the top 1% and top 10% contribute a much greater share of emissions: 48% vs 9%.
That means emissions reductions must target the rich, who “appear to feel they have a free pass to pollute,” said Oxfam Climate Policy Specialist Anya Knechtel. The rich have an impact beyond their personal footprint as role models, political influencers, and business leaders. They also have the greatest resources to spend on reducing their personal emissions. Recommended measures include heavy taxes and even outright bans on high-emitting luxury consumption like SUVs, mega-yachts, private jets, and redirecting investments toward a low-carbon economy.
In other news, I’m fleeing the city to breathe the air outside its realm for a whole 48hrs and reading fun things like this - John Lanchester · Warmer, Warmer: Global Warming, Global Hot Air · LRB 22 March 2007 - as i schlep it in the back of the bus.
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The Morrison government’s emissions projections are a farce based on technological pipe dreams - Greg Jericho at The Guardian
Climate scientists: concept of net zero is a dangerous trap - James Dyke, Robert Watson, Wolfgang Knorr at The Conversation
Groundtruthed - George Monbiot
The Montreal Protocol — an ozone layer success story to remember amid the gloom of COP26 - Kate Doyle at ABC News
The industrial re-revolution - Ed Conway (via Sentiers)
Australia shown to have highest greenhouse gas emissions from coal in world on per capita basis - Adam Morton at The Guardian
Geopolitics
‘Time can break your heart’: the harsh toll of eight years in Australian immigration detention - Ben Doherty at The Guardian
Israel escalates surveillance of Palestinians with facial recognition program in West Bank - Elizabeth Dwoskin at Washington Post (via Foreign Exchanges)
'Surveillance' doesn't begin to describe what Beijing is doing to Uyghurs - Isobel Cockerell interviewing Vicky Xiuzhong Xu at Coda
Pakistan's biometric ID scheme is stripping citizenship from thousands of people - Alizeh Kohari at Coda - CJW: A long read, but worth it if you're interested in the intersection between tech, bureaucracy, surveillance, and authoritarian creep.
Science & Space
As Earth Warms, Old Mayhem and Secrets Emerge From the Ice - Franz Lidz at New York Times (via Chris Brown)
Researchers develop microrobot designed to deliver stem cells via intranasal pathway - Park Sae-jin at Aju Business Daily (via Maderas)
To Save the Whales, Feed the Whales - Ed Yong at The Atlantic
Tech & Design
Facebook Is Now Meta. And It Wants to Monetize Your Whole Existence. - James Muldoon at Jacobin
The slab and the permacomputer - Robin Sloan (via Sentiers) - CJW: Some interesting ideas on possible futures of computing.
Activists are Designing Mesh Networks to Deploy During Civil Unrest - Ella Fassler at Vice (via Inhabit)
LAPD ended predictive policing programs amid public outcry. A new effort shares many of their flaws - Johana Bhuiyan at The Guardian
Society & The Culture
CJW: How COVID and Syria Conspiracies Introduce Fascism to the Left. Part I - Emmi Bevensee at Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (via Ospare)
Last issue I dropped in a link from The Gray Zone that I’d only had a chance to skim, but which seemed relevant to discussions we like to have in these pages about the media, journalism, propaganda, and the New Cold War that the US is seemingly desperate to make happen. In response, Ospare reached out with the above link, the first of a three-part series (Part 2, Part 3) on the red-brown media sphere (red-brown being the term used for a crossover between leftism and fascism).
From Part 3:
While The Grayzone blog attempts to discuss many important issues such as criticisms of US imperialism, yet they do so without offering any meaningful critique whatsoever of other imperialist governments such as Putin’s Russia or the Chinese free-market (state-capitalist) state. Ostensibly, this is because they think that criticizing Russia or China somehow causes the US imperialists to exist as if a multi-partial critique was impossible. On closer inspection, the revolving door between them and the Kremlin and other red-brown media partially explains their unflinching support as this section will address.
In short, whilst the Gray Zone staunchly opposes US imperialism, it’s seemingly willing to deny the war crimes and human rights abuses of the Russian and Chinese states (as though there can only be one evil empire…). There’s a lot to unpack across the three parts, and indeed there are names brought up in relation to the red-brown media sphere that I see pop up in leftist spaces, who Bevensee is able to convincingly link to fascist and far-right commentators, publications, and events. It’s not to say these people and their writings are necessarily suspect, but that they contribute to publications that help to legitimise far-right talking points through their connections to other, undeniably questionable, publications.
Generally I think useful reporting and ideas can come from all sorts of places, but it’s always best to know the ideological stance of the people and publications involved. For instance, the author of the above works for/with bellingcat which is also a useful resource despite (and occasionally maybe even because of) its connections to US intelligence.
It’s a muddy fucking media ecosystem out there, so here’s your latest reminder to be wary of what you consume…
MKY:
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CJW: Memory in the age of impunity - Peter Pomerantsev at Coda
This is a new mission for journalism. To work out why an issue in Manila is also about Silicon Valley and about Moscow and about you. To find the sudden intersection between countries no one ever thought about as part of a single map before. Because these new lines are there, they don’t need to be created—they need to be unearthed. And then one discrete event can have meaning for many, one newspaper article can resonate across borders. New publics, who never even thought of each other as having anything in common, can be brought together.
This seems relevant to the discussion above - the muddying of waters around historical narrative and how we are (and are not) able to understand the world through the twin lenses of history and journalism.
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CJW: Endless Nameless - Vivian Lam at Real Life Mag
[...] the question is no longer “What am I, really?” but “What do I want?” and “What will make me happy?”
This is one way we can “make gender trouble” — to delight in the act of creation, and to refuse to be intelligible. Because in a year when an unprecedented number of anti-trans bills are moving through state legislatures, when entrenched notions of gender continue to be used to justify violence, having a space where gender lies not in physicality but in pith, where we can craft and share the vision of a life written, directed, and produced by our own hands, is vital.
Some interesting thoughts on gender as a vibe, and gender and vibes more generally. Pull quote is from the end of the essay, but there’s plenty throughout about the impact and influence of memes on online gender discourse and vice versa.
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CJW: Talking Radical Imagination with Max Haiven - at Resilience
[...] there’s a sense that we go about our routines as we have, not necessarily because we like them or we think they’re going to bring us to a better place in our personal lives, ecologically, socially, but simply because we can’t envision what a different world would look like and how we could get there from here. We are absolutely still in the grips of a crisis of imagination, and that is really compounded by the kinds of ways that our mediascape and the spectrum of ideas is so tightly controlled by a very few corporations, or orientated towards profit, in ways to limit us from communicating with each other and thinking about alternatives.
A really interesting interview with Max Haiven about the radical imaginary - I could have grabbed a few pull quotes, so make some time for this if you're interested in how we might imagine our way out of the myriad crises we currently face.
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Taking the Fiction Out of Science Fiction: A Conversation about Indigenous Futurisms - Pedro Neves Marques interviewing Grace Dillon at e-flux (via Inhabit)
What David Graeber, 'Dawn of Everything' Author, Left Behind - Molly Fischer at NY Mag - CJW: A great read on Graeber’s life and work.
Labor & Economics
LZ: ‘My students never knew’: the lecturer who lived in a tent - Anna Fazackerley at The Guardian
This is terrifying and saddening in the same massive proportion. We had major cuts in the budget for public scientific research here in Brazil, but the fact that high education is something that actually condemns your life in rich countries like the UK or the US is absolutely unacceptable to me.
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From a 'class divide' to 'intergenerational theft', Australia's real estate frenzy leaves many behind - Stephen Long at ABC News - CJW: No wonder your 3 Australian NH correspondents are living in sharehouses.
Books
LZ: K. Allado-McDowell - Pharmako AI
This is a very interesting book, the first one that is written in partnership with an AI -- in this case, the engine GPT-3. It shows the many possibilities of the chatbot, including the creation of essays, poems, lyrics, and fiction. At first, the book may look a bit weird, even nonsensical. Not because the AI doesn’t formulate intelligible sentences, but because it’s too hard to make sense of what it is talking about. I wonder if this next step of collaboration between humans and AI could be defined by humans trying to make sense of what AIs are communicating or if it’s just a matter of improving the engine of natural language processing. This is one thing that intrigued me a lot, because humans can make sense out of anything and sometimes that is just pure info dump, not really a philosophical treatise.
In the proposal of the Object Oriented Ontology as a philosophical movement, some researchers argue that this is much more plausible in the field of art than philosophy because it is too abstract, metaphorical, experimental. Well, I guess Pharmako AI could be considered an OOO art piece with philosophical implications then.
Movies + TV
MKY: The Third Generation (1979)
Peter Lenz, a mogul merrily funds terrorists to boost his computer sales, by panicking West German government and industry c. 1980, as the third generation of Western European left-wing activists forms, after the crippling of the violent Red Army Faction.
https://twitter.com/eattrainrevolt/status/1455344406131724293
Combo it up with The Baader Meinhof Complex for a fun night in.
Video
Not a new video, but it’s been more than a year since the date they announced they would be releasing the album Millennial Garbage Preach. I love that name so much that I’m dying to listen to their new tracks. This first glimpse with the song and the video for Order is just mind blowing. I know, I have this weakness for experimental dance.
Music
LZ: Emma Ruth Rundle - Engine of Hell
Emma returns with a new album and some music videos that will make you shiver - believe me. I really enjoyed her previous album Protection and though this one is different, it’s still carried with a lot of emotions and depth. Another thing that I like is that Emma is not your regular female singer when it comes to aesthetics. She had already used a photo of herself with hairy legs for an album cover and now I love that she is featuring portraits of herself with no filter to cover her wrinkles and her ageing process. Beautiful.
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LZ: Lana Del Rey - Blue Banisters
Ok, this is cliché, I know, but it’s been a while since any of her releases caught my attention. For those who enjoyed her Born to Die and Ultraviolence era, this album is definitely your cup of tea.
MJW: Oh, oh, I love those albums because they’ve got more clever little boppy songs, and I get tired and depressed listening to her albums of slow, sadcore torch songs. I reckon Blue Banisters is a step between gloom-dirge and pop-dirge.
Lana’s songwriting is so strong these days, but I miss songs like ‘Off to the Races’ and ‘West Coast’ and even some of the cute little pieces like ‘Smarty’ and ‘Mermaid Motel’ from her Lizzie Grant album.
Art
LZ: Елизавета
Obsessed with this artist and the complexity of the compositions. Highlights to their interpretation of the tarot deck.
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MJW: Australian writer Eloise Grills just won the Melbourne Prize’s Writers Prize 2021 for The Fat Bitch in Art, a beautiful illustrated essay published in Meanjin. Read if you like soft, luxurious belly rolls.
I’m only a Rubens model when my body sprawls like a fat lump and my mind slackens too, when I’m too relaxed to notice. But O fuck, I want to be one of these women, golden and expansive, a pancake drizzled in sun syrup.
The Memes
