nothing here but the hyperreal mystery of armageddon
issue 312 - 15th March, 2026
CJW: Lots here to share, so let’s get to is. If you wanna 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, caught out there.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer and purveyor of melancholy whimsy.
Climate Change & The Environment
DCH: The Water Wars Are Here, And They're Not Woke by Spencer Ackermann
"In the Gulf, desalination facilities are not merely infrastructure," Abdullah Baabood, an Omani academic at Waseda University in Japan, told the New York Times. "They are essential lifelines that supply drinking water to millions. Striking them risks turning a military confrontation into a direct threat to civilian survival."
The “anti-woke” Iran war is now doing what all tough-guy wars eventually do—blowing up schools, poisoning cities with burning oil, and casually flirting with knocking out the desalination plants that supply drinking water to millions across the region. Because apparently the big strategic insight from the Pete “Maximum Lethality” Hegseth School of War Studies is that if Iraq and Afghanistan failed, it’s only because the military wasn’t reckless enough with civilians. We’re now stress-testing the bold new doctrine of bomb the water, torch the economy, and call it leadership—basically Mad Max with Pentagon branding.
More here: In Tehran, Iranians Struggle to Breathe After Israeli Oil Facility Strikes - Ariya Farahmand at Dropsite News
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“Industrial civilisation isn’t a permanent achievement; it’s a thermodynamic event powered by a one-time pulse of fossil energy, and like every dissipative system it eventually runs out of surplus and simplifies. Lambert’s argument is that ecological overshoot, energy decline, and a growth-locked political economy make collapse less a future catastrophe than a process already underway. The real question isn’t how to save the system, but how to live on the far side of it—rebuilding cultures and economies that actually fit inside the limits of the biosphere.” - Collapse: A Framework for Understanding and Navigating the Decline of Industrial Civilisation - Adrian Lambert at A Grand Unified Theory of Doom (DCH: honestly best blog name ever)
Just the headlines:
Global sea levels have been underestimated due to poor modelling, research suggests - Tara Russell at The Guardian
Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn - Leonie Cater at Politico
We can move beyond the capitalist model and save the climate – here are the first three steps - Jason Hickel and Yanis Varoufakis at The Guardian
This City Turned Its Rooftops into a Climate Shield - Michaela Haas at Reasons to be Cheerful
Amazon deforestation on pace to be the lowest on record, says Brazil - Rhett Ayers Butler at Monga Bay (oh! And related: Why Environmental Tipping Points Don’t Have to Spell Doom - Bela Starinchak at Undark)
Geopolitics & Empire
CJW: U.S. Troops Were Told Iran War Is for “Armageddon,” Return of Jesus - Jonathan Larsen
A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer.
From Saturday morning through Monday night, more than 110 similar complaints about commanders in every branch of the military had been logged by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF).
The complaints came from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, the MRFF told me Monday night.
These people are going to start WW3 because of a fucking fairy tale.
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“Geopolitical competition in the AI age will not take place solely in clean rooms or data centers. It will also involve the less visible realm of social institutions: labor markets, communities, social protections, and political legitimacy. Polanyi teaches us that markets are powerful only when societies can bear them. When they cannot, markets provoke their own undoing and often in rather spectacular fashion.” The Next Great Transformation by Jeremy Shapiro (DCH: AI isn’t a tech sprint—it’s a social stress test, and the U.S. runs naked, Europe tiptoes, and China rules by fear, while the world braces for collapse.)
Just the headlines:
Trump’s AI-Powered World Wars - The Intercept
Command-Shift-War - John Ganz
AI is a bureaucratic technology. So is fighting war. - Henry Farrell
Tech & Design
DCH: Anthropic’s AI tool Claude central to U.S. campaign in Iran, amid a bitter feud by Tara Copp, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Ian Duncan at The Washington Post
In order to strike a blistering 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of its attack on Iran, the U.S. military leveraged the most advanced artificial intelligence it’s ever used in warfare, a tool that could be difficult for the Pentagon to give up even as it severs ties with the company that created it.
Despite all the bluster about Anthropic being the “good guys” Claude, the AI from Anthropic, is now basically running U.S. war crimes on autopilot, deciding targets faster than humans can blink while a school in southern Iran gets turned into rubble and 175 people (mostly children) die because someone thought “speed of thought” sounded cool.
Oh and while Anthropic was publicly feuding with The Pentagon for brownie points it was also actively pitching The Pentagon on voice-controlled drone swarms…
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DCH: When The War Goes AI, The Data Centers Will Be Targets (f/Engadget's Devindra Hardawar) - Spencer Ackermann
Iran's response—the guiding strategy of which we discussed on Tuesday; check out that edition if you missed it—indicates that Teheran takes U.S./proxy AI integration seriously. It sent drones to attack Amazon Web Services data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, targeting enemy cloud storage capability. (Iran claimed Thursday to have attacked Microsoft centers as well, but the company has so far reported no outages.) "We are working to restore full service availability as quickly as possible, though we expect recovery to be prolonged given the nature of the physical damage involved," Amazon said. The FT marvelled: "The strikes mark what is believed to be the world’s first military attack against the US 'hyperscalers' that dominate the global cloud computing market."
So now we’re sending kids to babysit data centers like they’re oil fields while Claude and the Pentagon run an AI war machine that turns the Middle East into a live-action tech demo, and somehow the adults act shocked when missiles start hitting Amazon servers in Bahrain—because yes, your cloud service is now a combatant, that’s war in the age of oligarchs and algorithms I guess.
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“Anthropic refused a Pentagon request to tweak its AI for “lawful” military use, and everyone rushed to applaud CEO Dario Amodei for his moral courage. But the bar in tech has sunk so low that not helping automate war crimes now counts as heroism, which is less a triumph of ethics than a grim sign of where Silicon Valley’s compass currently points. Yes, refusing to sell death-as-a-service is good—but that’s supposed to be the baseline, not a moment for a standing ovation and a cookie.” - A Cookie for Dario? — Anthropic and selling death - Anil Dash (dch: Dash is one of the few techies I’ve seen even talk about this while everyone is willfully ignoring it all so kudos to him at least for raising it.)
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Just the headlines:
U.S. Strikes in Middle East Use Anthropic, Hours After Trump Ban - Marcus Weisgerber, Amrith Ramkumar and Shelby Holliday at Wall Street Journal
Claude AI Helped Bomb Iran. But How Exactly? - Parmy Olson at Bloomberg
Society & The Culture
CJW: The Hyperreal Mystery of Roy Jay - Yakubian Ape
Sounds funny, but it’s no laughing matter. I’m not exactly sure how the Solar Plexus Clown Glider became a thing. I remember it being a rather obscure and difficult to understand Creepypasta, but the gist is this; a Solar Plexus Clown Glider is not, as the name would imply, a delightful clown performing loops in the sky in a solar-powered glider, but rather the name given to the concept of a supernatural mimetic parasite. A mimetic parasite is an organism that has evolved to resemble another species. This is not a paranormal concept, either - it’s just nature. Like one ant disguising itself as another species of ant and predating on them from within the nest, SPCGs are entities that have adopted the appearance and infest images or a certain string of words… like Solar Plexus Clown Glider. And even reading those words or seeing an image that a SCPG has infested is enough to infect someone with it, after which the SCPG feeds off of human misery and suffering, just as the term parasite would suggest. And, just like a parasitic strain of cordecyps, what does the infected host do? Spread the image or words for others to find, beginning the cycle anew.
This is a really interesting piece of internet weirdness.
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CJW: She’d Never Changed Her Gender Marker. Kansas Invalidated Her License Anyway. - Nate Zuke at Assigned Media
Andrea Ellis of Wellington, KS was one of many transgender Kansans who opened her mail on February 25 to learn that in less than 24 hours, her driver’s license would be invalid. The letter, issued by the Kansas Department of Revenue, informed her that because House Substitute for Senate Bill 244 (S.B. 244) “requires Kansas-issued driver’s license and identification cards to reflect the credential holder’s sex at birth,” her current license would become “invalid immediately” on February 26.
Ellis had been following the news closely in the past few months. She knew S.B. 244 would be going into effect. But she never expected the state to send her a letter invalidating her license.
That’s because Ellis had never changed the sex marker on her license in the first place.
One thing I hadn't thought of, but saw pointed out on Bluesky was the fact that if this woman never changed the gender marker on her licence, how did the government know to invalidate her licence? They must have a registry of trans people for the purpose of discrimination and attack. This is literally a step towards genocide. In America. Against American citizens. Because they happen to be trans. This should be global news, but the media has gotten a lot of clicks the last decade by supporting the anti-trans rhetoric cooked up and pushed by a cabal of literal paedophile elites.
Do you want to be cool and listen to trans people when we tell you about our lives and our needs and pay attention to our art (because it's very fucking good, I promise you), or do you want to listen to paedophiles, TERFs, and their useful idiots?
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CJW: Powerful right-wing regressive weirdos gather to plot at Atlas-linked conference in Australia - Lucy Hamilton at The Shot
Australians cannot begin to understand the Right’s collective shrug at the horrific toll of Israel’s violence without understanding that there is a transnational Islamophobia Industry of massive family foundations and “think tank” operations that have been generating fear and loathing of Muslims since the 1990s. There is no genocide if Muslims are not understood as fully human.
This is a really great read - one that’s necessary for any Australian subscribers, and still important for anyone who’s interested in the many ways the right-wing undermines our media, our institutions, and our democracies.
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Louis Theroux has finally wandered into the manosphere—the internet’s lucrative sewage system where grown men scream about women, race, and masculinity while quietly selling teenage boys crypto courses and “alpha universities.” And the big revelation? Most of it isn’t ideology, it’s a business model—because in 2026 the easiest way to get rich online isn’t talent, insight, or journalism… it’s simply being an absolutely colossal dick on the internet. Louis Theroux on the Manosphere: ‘It’s Highly Profitable to Be a Dick on the Internet’ - David Gilbert at Wired
“I date worlds-as-a-medium to the invention of Dungeons & Dragons in the mid-1970s. D&D wasn’t the first fictional “world”, but it was the first techno-social system to make world-inhabitation mechanical and ongoing. In D&D the unit of play is campaign. Your characters persist between play sessions, unlike a board game, the world doesn’t end when you close the book. It continues right along every Thursday evening when everyone comes back.” World Literacy - Jaymo (DCH: I know everyone is fed up with stuff like the MCU and whatever but I still genuinely think there’s something special about me having grown up in a time where I’ve seen all of the examples Jaymo touches on play out in real-time.)
Just the headlines:
At Largest ICE Detention Camp, Staff Bet on Detainee Suicides, AP Reports - Katie Herchenroeder at Mother Jones
Labour & Economics
DCH: Grammarly Is Facing a Class Action Lawsuit Over Its AI ‘Expert Review’ Feature - Miles Klee at Wired
Superhuman, the tech company behind the writing software Grammarly, is facing a class action lawsuit over an AI tool that presented editing suggestions as if they came from established authors and academics—none of whom consented to have their names appear within the product.
Grammarly decided the best way to improve your writing was to hallucinate a panel of famous experts who never agreed to be there, cheerfully putting words in the mouths of people like Stephen King and Julia Angwin while the AI mangled sentences in their name.
Now it’s facing a lawsuit for what is essentially intellectual identity theft as a product feature—because apparently in Silicon Valley the line between “AI assistant” and “impersonating a bunch of writers for profit” is something you only discover after the lawyers show up.
Turns out the future of writing tools wasn’t better grammar—it was deepfaking your editors and hoping nobody notices.
Books
CJW: What we can learn from Doris Lessing’s experiments in living - Marina Benjamin at Aeon
A really great write-up on Doris Lessing’s writing and life, and all the contradictions contained therein. I’ve only read 2 of her works, The Golden Notebook (talked about at length in this piece), and Shikasta, which is very similar to The Golden Notebook whilst also being a very strange piece of science fiction.
Worth a read if you’re interested in feminist memoir and feminist writings of the 20th C more generally.
Movies + TV
LZ: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
This is a bit of an odd recommendation, in the sense that I didn't watch Game of Thrones but did watch this prequel to the series. When GoT was released, I wasn't as interested in medieval fantasy as I am now, and the whole hype was overwhelming to me. But now that I'm more into these things, I gave it a shot and really liked this prequel series. For some reason, I love prequels – Caprica used to be my favorite series for a long time, and it's the prequel for Battlestar Galactica (which… I didn't watch).
The tone of A Knight is a little different, I would say, now that I'm finally starting to watch GoT. I think the latter has a more serious tone, whereas A Knight is more light-hearted and starts very unseriously with our hero taking a shit standing behind a tree that would then become his symbol.
Because the main character, ser Duncan the Tall, is going to a tournament and we learn how he became a squire to a knight and then a knight himself, the series, which has only six episodes of 30-40 minutes for now, felt more like a film to me. It was almost like those 90s/00s films with the basic hero journey formula and the very medieval tropes all included – the feasts, the dancing and singing, puppetry, a very kind-hearted hero that is even a little dumb, but clearly a good person, and how other people bend to his purity even when there is so much violence and corruption (especially with the Targaryens playing the obvious antagonist role).
I think it was a very heart-warming first season, despite all the gruesome things that still happen. Perhaps it's a product of our times, when we ourselves are lacking resources to feel hope and reasons to be good and kind. I might be missing the bigger picture, since I only watched a few episodes of GoT, but it seems like a good starter if you want to get into this universe.
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DCH - Small Prophets
If you’re a fan of gentle, whimsical comedy with a touch of magic, Small Prophets is an absolute must-watch. Pearce Quigley delivers a captivating performance as Michael, a man trying to reconnect with his lost love through the help of charming stop-motion Homunculi, while Mackenzie Crook’s signature warmth and clever storytelling shine throughout. Blending heartbreaking + heartwarming moments, quirky humor, and enchanting animation, this series promises to delight both longtime fans of Detectorists and newcomers alike.
Comics
DCH: Absolute Martian Manhunter Vol. 1: Martian Vision
We’re big fans of Deniz Camp’s work here at the newsletter and I’ve spent time in the same comics forums as Camp back in the day, so have been following his rise for years. Absolute Martian Manhunter Vol. 1: Martian Vision delivers everything we’ve come to love: clever plotting, darkly funny moments, and a buddy-comedy twist with J’onn and his alien sidekick that keeps you on edge. Paired with Javier Rodriguez’s stunning, expressive art, this volume reinvents Martian Manhunter in a way that’s thrilling, original, and impossible to put down.
Videos
DCH: How Epstein Warped the Entire Internet by Taylor Lorenz
If, uh, you needed to see receipts from Taylor and Ryan about Epstein had a hand in all sorts of toxic internet shit from 4chan to Gamergate then here’s 40 minutes of it.
Games
LZ: Disco Elysium
I recently started playing Disco Elysium, and my first gameplay already put me in a 3-hour-long dive into this grim world that is both futuristic and retro in a very unique way. The graphics of this game are great – it's a blend between comics and 3D, and the artwork for the avatars is gorgeous and super creative.
I think I saw a meme about how good the narrative of this game was, to the point that it could be taken as our contemporary Proust. I'm not sure if that's the case, but it's a very fascinating story with many layers and, definitely, a lot of terms and information. Easter eggs are carefully placed and not so obvious, which I appreciate a lot.
I also love how, despite one of the themes in the game being racism and immigration, everybody is mixed, accents coexist, and words from different languages are used as slang or specific terms… It's very similar to William Gibson's style, I would say, and one of the first Easter eggs is precisely the nod to Night City, Neuromancer's, or The Sprawl trilogy's main city.
You're basically a fucked up detective or cop who wakes up hungover in a thrashed hotel room, and you have no idea who you are, where you are, or when this is happening. Slowly, you gather the pieces, but your own mind is your worst enemy. Themes like self-destruction and depression are combined with politics and history – from communism to revolution and feminism. The humor is very dry and acid, and you don't need to be a yes-man to actually go through the game – or so it feels, up until now. It's a game for non-gamers but also those who enjoy good stories, point-and-click adventures, and a mix between noir detective stories and a millennial take on how boomers can sometimes be cool.
CJW: One of my absolute favourite games of all time. I want to play it again to discover some bits and pieces I missed the first time around, but it also feels like such a singular experience I don’t know if I want to sully what came before. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking and hilarious and human.
Art
MJW: I’m loving this strip club back room illustration by Sally Nixon, you can find her here on instagram.
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MJW: Michelle Reviglio’s blush pink erotic illustrations are really cool, check out more of her art here.
The Self-Promotion
MJW: Introducing THE FORGETTING NAVIGATIONS by Marlee Jane Ward
My book The Forgetting Navigations is now available for pre-order! Sorry about the evil empire link, but I don’t make the rules of books, just follow them.
The Memes
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