nothing here but the eternity rebellion
issue 316 - 10th May, 2026
CJW: A day late on this issue because the weekend got away from me. Happy Monday, we’re glad to have you.
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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, pattern screamer.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer and purveyor of melancholy whimsy.
Climate Change & The Environment
CJW: When The ‘Eternity Glaciers’ Disappear - Klaus Thymann at Noema
The glaciers, known by locals as Salju Abadi or “Eternal Snow,” and often called the “Eternity Glaciers,” will disappear within the next decade. When they go, a rare part of the tropical cryosphere will be erased, along with a part of the cultural and environmental identity of the Papuan highlands.
Most people don’t realize there are glaciers in the tropics — mention the tropics and we think of palm trees, not ice — and Papua is a very exciting chapter in a line of tropical ice that starts in the Rwenzori Mountains in East Africa and extends to the Andes in Bolivia. Across three continents, I am racing to visually preserve tropical glaciers before they retreat. In each place, I am working to produce 3D photorealistic models before the ice disappears. The models become a kind of visual Noah’s Ark for the future — a high-resolution visual legacy created in minute scientific detail.
Some beautiful imagery here, and important work being done to at least catalogue what we’re losing to climate change before it’s gone.
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“In paleo-climate terms, New Orleans is gone; the question is how long it has.” - ‘Point of no return’: New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level, study finds - The Guardian
Just the headlines:
University Claims Withholding Water From Nuclear Weapons Data Center Is 'Unlawfully Discriminatory' to Data Centers - Matthew Gault at 404 Media
Geopolitics & Empire
DCH: A Growing Rat Infestation Plagues Tent Cities in Gaza - Ahmed Dremly at Drop Site
“The scale of destruction in Gaza has created ideal breeding grounds,” Sukar said. “The Israeli blockade on rodenticides, the mountains of uncollected waste, and untreated sewage are the primary drivers of this crisis.” “We’ve lost most of our municipal vehicles in Israeli attacks,” Sukar said. “We simply don’t have the capacity to remove waste or respond effectively.”
Israel blocked the rodenticide. Israel bombed the sanitation trucks. Israel built, decision by consecutive decision, the conditions in which 1.45 million people sleep in rubble while rats bite their children's faces at night. Majd Sukar called it a public health catastrophe. He is being generous.
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DCH: Why the United Arab Emirates is leaving OPEC and what it means for the future of the Middle East - Mitchell Plitnick at Mondoweiss
The UAE has fully embraced the U.S.-Israel alliance, at a time when Saudi Arabia and most of the rest of the region have come to realize that the United States is an unreliable partner and that Israel is a regional menace. The UAE expressed its displeasure at this recently by calling in $3.5 billion that Pakistan owes them. The sudden demand for payment drained nearly a fifth of Pakistan’s reserves and endangered a proposed International Monetary Fund bailout. Not coincidentally, Saudi Arabia deposited $3 billion into Pakistan’s reserve fund shortly thereafter.
Abu Dhabi punished Pakistan for brokering a ceasefire it didn’t want, Riyadh covered the damage, and both called it finance. The Gulf cold war has been running for years. This is just the first time it wiped out a fifth of a country’s reserves in one move.
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Just the headlines:
How Israeli settlers are weaponizing water against Palestinians in the West Bank - Qassam Muaddi at Mondoweiss
Maker of AI Targeting System for Drones Faces Protests for Shipments to Israeli Military - Noah Hurowitz at The Intercept
Ron Wyden Is Pissing Off the NSA’s Biggest Backers. Tom Cotton Warns There Will Be “Consequences.” - Matt Sledge at The Intercept
Tech & Design
DCH: The data center rebellion is only the beginning by Brian Merchant at Blood in the Machine
As a result, these data center fights have essentially become proxy sites for democratic governance of AI; places where citizens can still register a vote about their future in a world that feels increasingly dominated by dark money and tech oligarchs.
The AI lobby spent millions killing legislation, so people started showing up to city council meetings instead: farmers, indigenous activists, working class residents in towns with median incomes under $50,000. Merchant’s argument is that this is where AI governance is actually happening. Google and OpenAI would very much like it to stop.
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DCH: Google, Nvidia and other tech titans sign AI deal with the Pentagon by Queenie Wong at Los Angeles Times
“Guardrails are something that are negotiable based on what they are with all the companies, and they have different views on that,” he told CNBC. The guardrails also have to be consistent with the government’s values and restrictions, he added.
Anthropic pushed back on military AI without adequate safeguards and got labeled a supply chain risk. Eight companies watched that happen and signed anyway. The Pentagon just told you what the terms are. More here from Sam Biddle at The Intercept
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DCH: Tech Billionaires Want Christians to Believe in AI by Kiera Butler at Mother Jones
“They’re trying to imbue wealth with meaning,” he said. “But they’re also trying to imbue a certain kind of meaning with wealth.” In other words, Christianity gets an elite, luxury-set rebrand, and in return, the tech titans get to sanctify their vast fortunes.
Thiel, Boyle, Stephens, and Vance are running a mutual sanctification racket where religion buys respectability and money buys absolution. Greg Epstein named it plainly. The theology is cover for the deregulation.
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Just the headlines:
Polymarket celebrates insider trading scandal - Judd Legum at Popular Info
ICE Plans to Develop Own Smart Glasses to ‘Supplement’ Its Facial Recognition App - Joseph Cox at 404 Media
U.S. companies back Sam Altman’s World ID even as much of the world pushes back - Ananya Bhattacharya at Rest of World
Society & The Culture
DCH: "Clavicular and the Right-Wing Project to Radicalize Young Men" by Alain Stephens at The Intercept
The modern far right, which has stepped in to fill the space the erosion of our institutions and social fabric have left behind, understands something even modern liberals tend to flatten: Misogyny is not a secondary issue. It is foundational to the entire right-wing project. Researchers have described misogyny as a gateway into far-right radicalization, and scholars who research white nationalism have shown how "Great Replacement" ideology is soaked in reproductive anxiety — the fantasy that white decline is caused not just by immigration but by women refusing their assigned breeding role. In these circles, women are not citizens. They are demographic assets and currency.
Clavicular isn't a fringe curiosity. He's the retail layer of a radicalization pipeline with a clear political destination. The far right recruits through male despair because despair is scalable.
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CJW: Into the gap - Mandy Brown
When we speak against war we find our words drowned out, lost in the deepfakes and the advertising, the psyops and the slop, the stock market reports, the casual declarations of war crimes, the oil futures, the gilded festivities, the chattering and nattering among a purportedly progressive political class concerned with the appearance of civility but indifferent to its obligations. No knowledge moves through such mediums, only information, a ravening, unending stream of data in which knowing anything is nigh impossible.
And such is that information that it is frequently as odious as the war it both directly and indirectly leads to: racism, misogyny, eugenics, transphobia. (That last a word that implies fear or aversion when the reality is much more violent, both speech and act that seek to eliminate a people whose courage in seeking their own liberty is among our brightest beacons.) But are these notions not the collaborators and soldiers of capital, and so of war? Are not racism and misogyny the masked recruits who go door to door, kitchen to bedroom to workplace, demanding labor and loyalty and love from an underclass who are threatened with suffering and death if they do not deliver it?
A great piece from Mandy Brown on the relationship between wealth and war. Every word of this is utterly true and necessary.
The racists and misogynists of today work the same power: they create a world in which a few wealthy men dictate the material conditions of the lives of millions of others who must serve them, who toil for scraps, whose every step, however small, towards more freedom is violently and immediately resisted, and with overwhelming force—an impulse that you will agree is very much like the impulse to war.
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“Most artists say that they feel that they're now competing with AI-generated artwork on the marketplace. Well over half say that they've lost income due to image generators, while an overwhelming majority feel that their livelihoods have become more precarious and insecure, and 90% feel that AI has taken away commissions, jobs, and career opportunities.” The AI-inflected crisis artists are facing, in 4 charts by Brian Merchant at Blood in the Machine
Health, Cooking, and Related
Just the headlines:
Babies Are Bleeding to Death as Parents Reject a Vitamin Shot Given at Birth - Duaa Eldeib at Propublica
In Coal Country, Black Lung Surges as Federal Protections Stall - Kate Morgan at Undark
Labour & Economics
DCH: Wealth Of The 1% Reaches Decade High In The U.S. by Katharina Buchholz at Forbes
While they owned an (already meager) 2% of U.S. wealth in mid-2007, it took them until mid-2020 to get back to this level — a disheartening historical rupture clearly visible in the Fed data. Regular Americans, on the other hand, took 3.5 times as long to recoup their recession losses. For the top 10%, this was the case as early as Q3 of 2009.
The 1% recovered from 2008 in two years. The bottom 50% took thirteen. Every crisis runs the same way: the rich collect the difference and the Fed publishes the receipts.
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DCH: Chinese court rules it illegal to replace workers with AI purely to cut costs” by Abby Jackson at The Cool Down / Yahoo News
The court published an article stating, “The termination grounds cited by the company did not fall under negative circumstances such as business downsizing or operational difficulties, nor did they meet the legal condition that made it ‘impossible to continue the employment contract.’”
Firing people because AI is cheaper does not qualify as restructuring, and a Chinese court said so explicitly. Every mass “efficiency” layoff in the last two years used exactly that framing. The ruling does not stop it, but it at least removes the alibi.
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“One possible answer is that these companies are not actually selling AI, they are selling tokens, aka cloud computing. So the more inefficient their model, the more revenue they get from corporate America buying their cloud computing. It's a bit like oil companies making cars — of course they want to make gas guzzlers, not Honda Civics. And once American companies are locked into one AI system, it's hard to move to something cheaper and more efficient.” Monopoly Round-Up: How Big Tech Earnings Show the Stock Market Is Being Manipulated by Matt Stoller at The Big Newsletter
Just the headlines:
Progressive Democrats Propose Banning Surveillance Pricing, Breaking Apart Corporate America If They Win in 2026 - Matt Stoller at The Big Newsletter
A financial crisis may be coming — it won't be like last time - Simon Jack at BBC
Books
MJW: Even The Good Girls Will Cry by Melissa Auf Der Maur
No, but really, MadM’s new memoir is a love letter to 90’s rock and the analog age. From a bohemian upbringing in Montreal, to joining Hole at 22 and touring the world, Melissa details her life with a focus on the years 1991 to 2001. It’s really wonderful to see her dedication to the love of music unfold into such an illustrious career and to get an insight into what it was like to join one of the biggest bands in the world at the most tumultuous time of its existence. I’ve always loved Hole, and been a big fan of Melissa (especially her solo albums Auf der Maur and Out of Our Minds), so getting this insight into the band and the world and her experience was a joy.
Art
MJW: Check out hirosemaryhello on insta. I adore their comicesque stylings!
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MJW: I stumbled across fedesalis the other day and fell in love with the hyperpop, sorta art nouveau-ish, stylised figures in their work.
The Self-Promotion
MJW: The Forgetting Navigations is out in the world! I did a little online launch last week, and have loved seeing friends and well-wishers receive their copies in the mail. After so many years (I wrote it for the first time in 2018!), it’s amazing to know that it is being read, finally. If you’re interested, it was inspired by two pieces of media that you can take a look at: the first is this GQ article on The Truck Stop Killer by Vanessa Veselka from 2012, and the second is Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette (2018). If you want to order it in book form, you can find links to do so here. If you like it (or I guess even if you don’t?), please leave a review on Am*zon or Goodreads. Warning: it’s kind of heavy, but it’s also full of quiet, gentle moments, lots of drinking tea, and a little hope. Xx
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Monsterfuck, with a story from Maddison Stoff and I, is now out and available for order. We travelled to Sydney for the launch, and Maddison did a fantastic reading from the story (she’s great at readings, trust me), and had a great time at the launch. Lots of kink and cool photography and other great readings from some of the other authors featured in the book. If you love monsterfucking and/or weird erotica, this is a book for you.
The Memes
![Twitter screenshot. @paddlearound:
david attenborough: [mumbling] skip. i dont like this animal. skip it.](https://assets.buttondown.email/images/ceb2a224-863c-4717-a11b-5b83b67b3b9f.jpg?w=960&fit=max)
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