nothing here but the many casualties of absence
issue 317 - 24th May, 2026
CJW: Welcome to another issue of nothing here. Big one today, so let’s get to it.
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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, inertia creep.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer and purveyor of melancholy whimsy.
Geopolitics & Empire
DCH: The Many Casualties of Precision Warfare - Jaclynn Ashly at Jacobin
Coalition forces carried out roughly 35,000 airstrikes across Iraq and Syria and dropped 120,000 bombs yet acknowledged only about 10 percent of civilian casualties documented by civil society. France acknowledged none. The UK acknowledged one — a case that did not exist. Mosul and Raqqa, meanwhile, were 70 to 80 percent destroyed. In Raqqa, the coalition acknowledged twenty-three civilian deaths; Amnesty International later identified around 1,600.
The architecture of coalition warfare isn't designed to win wars cleanly — it's designed to distribute blame until it disappears. The US identified the target, supplied the intelligence, approved the mission, led the casualty investigation, and then redacted its own findings before sharing them with the Netherlands. The Dutch flew the planes. The Iraqis died. A decade later, no individual compensation has been paid, no soil has been tested, and a seven-year-old named Rania was born without a normal arm into a crater nobody has officially measured. Precision was never the point. Deniability was.
//
Just the headlines:
‘They can shape the outcomes they claim to forecast’ – could Polymarket influence an election? Ian Tucker at The Nerve
Tech & Design
DCH: Dark Mode Merch by Protein at protein.xyz
And now it sells clothes. Not as an afterthought, but as an extension of that worldview. Logo-heavy basics sit alongside more considered pieces – chore coats reframed as design objects, not giveaways. The stated ambition to become more of a "lifestyle brand" is less surprising when you realise the clothes aren't meant to soften the company's image – they're meant to aestheticise it. Critics call it aesthetic laundering. Internally, it reads more like narrative control.
Defence contractors are using fashion to pre-empt the politics — make the brand wearable before the audience has time to form an opinion about what the brand actually does. Palantir capped its chore jacket run at 420 units, sold out in minutes, and called it "not political." The product is the argument. The clothing is the infrastructure.
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DCH: Palantir's access to identifiable NHS England patient data is 'dangerous', MPs say by Robert Booth at The Guardian
Palantir, which also supports Donald Trump's ICE immigration crackdown and the Israeli, US and UK militaries, was awarded a £330m contract to help build the FDP, installing AI systems to integrate scattered health datasets and bring efficiencies to medical treatment. But the deal has been dogged by warnings from campaigners and MPs concerned about the security of patient records.
The NHS granted Palantir admin-level access to identifiable patient data for every person in Britain, then an internal briefing note acknowledged the public would object, and then officials accepted the recommendation to cap it only after the access was already in place. Palantir won a £330 million contract to build the system it now has unlimited visibility into. That's not a data processor. That's a landlord.
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DCH: The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born by Baldur Bjarnason
The software industry has shifted its entire value proposition from "we make tools that help you make or save money" to using political clout and the dollar hegemony to capture, control, and loot entire sectors of the various economies of the world. That strategy only works when you're in charge.
The US tech industry didn't build an empire, it borrowed one. Every platform that operates across dozens of countries under effectively American law, every regulation that conveniently only incumbents can afford to comply with, every copyright regime that criminalises researchers for exposing bad DRM: none of it works without Washington’s full-throated support of it.
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“A spokesperson for City Hall said "a broader question remains over whether a company's values and ethics should be considered during public procurement". "The mayor believes Londoners would want public funding to go only to companies that share the city's values, but this is not currently possible under procurement law," they said” Met Police Palantir contract blocked by City Hall - Adriana Elgueta at BBC (DCH: best news all week)
Just the headlines:
There’s no such thing as “age verification - Cory Doctorow
Pushing back from Big Tech: Africa’s hard road to AI sovereignty - Ananya Bhattacharya at Rest of World
Society & The Culture
CJW: Her Name Was Juniper Blessing - Katelyn Burns
This is the problem with turning a marginalized community's identity into a political issue. You can't be having all these trans women being murdered by men in the headlines when you're trying to convince the public that the safest thing would be for trans women to use the men's bathroom and locker room.
You run the risk of people seeing through the propaganda that way.
This isn’t just about Juniper Blessing, who deserved to live a long and beautiful life like every trans person does, it’s also about the broader anti-trans propaganda push we’ve been seeing for years now.
Related: This pain has to become foreign and unknowable - Victoria Scott at Welcome to Hell World
[Juniper Blessing] was an exceptional person according to essentially everyone that ever met her, but she was also a normal kid, in the sense that she was living a life she wanted to and not one where she was artificially hemmed in and trapped by being transgender. Until she was brutally, horrifically murdered by a stranger. Then in death I saw as she was misgendered by the press, many of whom previously had credulously reported lies that made her childhood and her short life sound much more fraught than it needed to be. I read the already familiar arguments that this was simply an isolated incident, something that Just Happens, rather than a set of circumstances intentionally fomented by the worst people on this fucking planet. Cause and effect are just theories, after all.
Then I flipped to the next page of the news and read that Texas had forced its largest children’s hospital to start a taxpayer-funded conversion camp for trans kids. Then I flipped to the next page of the news after that and read that the feds are apparently subpoenaing one of the biggest providers of youth trans care in New York City, one of the last safe havens for trans people, to get a list of trans kids’ names. Presumably to charge their doctors with crimes. I kept flipping through pages of the news and it never stopped – it never stops – just one attack after another, day in and day out, on children.
These horrible fucking people building the world that kills trans children have institutional power, mass media reach, and more money than God. And yet they seem to be determined to ensure that the trans people of the future are just as scared as the ones of today. Juniper’s tragic loss is a mission accomplished moment for their project, and they know it.
[...]
We can’t keep doing this. We can’t let this keep happening to trans kids. This pain has to become foreign and unknowable to future generations or we will have failed Juniper and everyone like her. I don't know how we build that future but we must.
Emphasis mine.
//
“Even having Farage on I'm a Celeb, you know? That, no doubt, has been extremely helpful in creating this image whereby he's seen as a man of the people who will sit down and chow down on a kangaroo's anus. We sort of forget the fact that he's then receiving multimillion-pound donations or popping off to Kuala Lumpur to speak at an event which happens to advise rich foreigners how to avoid paying the appropriate tax. It just pushes the important stuff to our periphery.” WWE wrestling formed the blueprint! Munya Chawawa on Trump's journey from Wrestlemania to the White House by Jude Rogers at thenerve.news
"I find that liberating. It removes the one excuse that keeps most of us stuck: the fear that whatever we do will not be enough. Of course it will not be enough. That is the point. Do it anyway." Anti-Dystopia by Johannes Kleske at Future Lens (via Sentiers)
“There’s a particular kind of cognitive dissonance involved with being trans and visible online in 2026. Scroll your newsfeed long enough and trans people are treated like abstractions, talking points, threats. Scroll just a little further and those same people are being loved, tipped, subscribed to, flirted with, obsessed over, chased. While anti-trans lawmakers increasingly pass legislation restricting where and how trans people can exist, trans people are also the target of intense romantic and sexual desire.” - Trans Porn Is Booming. Trans Rights Are Fading at Playboy
Health, Cooking, and Related
DCH: Ebola Outbreak Rages After Trump Gutted Global Health Safeguards by Nick Turse at The Intercept
"They're the people standing between us and disaster," said Margaret Harris, a former senior WHO official and a medical doctor who responded to Ebola outbreaks in West Africa in the mid-2010s and Congo in the late 2010s. "They are protecting global health security," she told The Intercept, adding: "And they were also simply doing good for ordinary people."
USAID wasn't foreign aid. It was the early warning system. The Trump administration dismantled it anyway — pulled out of WHO, gutted the domestic public health workforce, cut the NGOs doing contact tracing in conflict zones — and now Bundibugyo Ebola is spreading undetected through Ituri Province, a region with over 100,000 newly displaced people and an international airport two degrees of separation away.
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DCH: What the Hantavirus Story Reveals About Medical Mistrust by Prem Menon at undark.org
That knowledge helped crack the mystery, identifying the cause of the outbreak as hantavirus — the first time it was identified in humans in the Western hemisphere and the first time it was found to attack the lungs rather than the kidneys. The CDC's current web page on reported cases of hantavirus makes no mention of this Indigenous-informed history.
Medical mistrust in Indigenous communities isn't a failure of health literacy — it's an accurate read of the record. Diné oral tradition identified the epidemiological chain, named the vector, and described an ICU protocol before ICUs existed. The CDC used that knowledge to crack the 1993 outbreak, then erased it from the official history.
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Just the headlines:
DOJ Escalates War on Trans Youth Healthcare With Criminal Subpoenas - Natasha Lennard at The Intercept
Labour & Economics
CJW: To fund human rights we need a global fair tax convention - Attiya Waris
There is a conventional way of talking about human rights. It is a language of courts and covenants, constitutions and obligations, of states that are either compliant or in breach. It is a language I respect and have spent my career working within. But it has a blind spot. Rights require money.
You cannot protect the right to healthcare without funding hospitals. You cannot guarantee the right to education without paying teachers. You cannot deliver justice without funding courts. And you cannot ensure the right to movement and economic participation without building the infrastructure and regulating the service providers to make it possible. The people of Nairobi know this with their bodies every single morning.
This point is obvious on presentation, but I don't know that I've seen it laud out so succinctly before. It's absolutely the problem with neoliberalism/liberalism/centrism - if you aren't going to fund what your citizens need, then you are depriving them of their rights. And often this money is going to the military, police, polluting industries, and the like, funding systems that actively deny us and/or others of further rights.
The article itself focuses on Africa, and is well worth the read.
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DCH: AI as the new avatar of American capitalism by Brian Merchant at bloodinthemachine.com
At a time when consumer sentiment is stuck at all-time lows, housing costs are sky-high, the price of basic goods is spiking, entry level jobs are disappearing, tech firms have concentrated enormous power and "broligarchy" was shortlisted for Dictionary.com's 2025 word of the year, AI has become the avatar of the ills of unrestrained capitalism. "AI populism" is really just "21st century populism" or just, "populism."
The students booing weren't making a political argument. They were describing their lives. They inherited the housing crisis, the debt, the gig economy — and now, before their careers have started, entry-level jobs are gone too. A VP of Strategic Alliances telling them this is the next industrial revolution isn't wrong. She's just on the other side of it.
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DCH: Industrial Capitalism Needed Us. Primitive Accumulation Doesn't. - Van Jacksin at un-diplomatic
AI is expanding the surplus labor population at the same time that it's making the policing and repression of surplus populations more efficient. Silicon Valley bros are not wrong to believe the emergent mode of capitalism is producing a "permanent underclass." But they are the key agents accelerating that problem while positioning themselves as the solution for managing it.
The welfare state wasn't generosity — it was a business requirement. Fordist capitalism needed workers who could read instruction manuals and show up healthy. That bargain is over. The argument here is that the rights and protections most people treat as civilisational defaults were always contingent on labour being necessary, and labour is becoming unnecessary. What comes next?
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Just the headlines:
It’s Not Neofeudalism, It’s Hypercapitalism - Stephen Maher at Jacobin
What AI race? China and U.S. AI worlds are tightly connected - Viola Zhou at Rest of World
AI is minting new billionaires, and workers want their share - Rina Chandran at Rest of World
The Real Cost of Union Busting Is Much Higher Than You Think - Chris Brooks at Jacobin
Books
CJW: Absence, by Andrew Dana Hudson (Read the first chapter at the link)
Friend of the pod, Andrew Dana Hudson, has a new novel out! (I meant to share it last issue, but you know how it is.) A few years ago now, I read the short story that would become this novel - I don’t think I was the first person to say so, but I remember telling Andrew that it was bigger than a short story, so I’m glad to see he explored the idea and the world with all the depth it was asking for. Excited to read it when I get the chance.
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CJW: Haunted By Genre: A Paranoid Reading of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach - Zachary Gillan at Ancillary Review of Books
Words used to hypnotize characters recur in supposedly-unrelated narrative description. These manipulations and subterfuges all but demand a paranoid read of the books.
A really interesting essay providing a paranoid reading of the Southern Reach books. I’ve been meaning to re-read them all too.
Movies + TV
LZ - The Boys
So this week we had the series finale. I’ve been following the show since it was released and I was never someone who cared about tv series before. Now I get the feeling people have when they become a “show orphan”. Cried my ass out with this last episode.
I've been seeing a lot of content about Anthony Starr’s acting and it’s really impressive in many ways: how talented he is and how he was never awarded for that. I also saw a lot about the controversies of the show, like hiring an Israeli actor who was part of the army before as well as the fact that the authors are Israeli, so obviously they mock the US but don’t talk about their own homeland.
I never cared about superheroes, and I’m having a hard time watching the new Invincible series, but The Boys was a really entertaining show, really fucked up in many ways, but also fun. I will miss the show. I know there’s Generation V (which is also great), and the Soldier Boy spinoff. let’s see if it’s good too.
I understand that it is not something that everyone would appreciate, but I found the main cast very charismatic and with great chemistry among them. So, all in all, if you didn’t check it or you were waiting until the series was over so you could binge-watch, now it’s the time!
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LZ: Attack on Titan
This is another thing I only started to watch now. I used to watch a lot of anime when I was younger, but then I got tired of the jiggly tits and pedo aesthetics. It’s hard to find exceptions, and sometimes the story is great, but the aesthetics and characters are somewhat insufferable. It took me a long time to watch Evangelion (which I love now) and Madoka Magica because those same anime tropes piss me off.
But AoT is widely known as an amazing anime with great writing. You don’t understand much for the whole season one, but slowly things start to unravel, and you just find yourself with your mouth wide open, because like… what the fuck? It’s worth watching the OVAs in between seasons as well, so you can dig a little bit further into some characters’ backgrounds. It’s nice how all the characters are very well written, even if they seem a bit shallow or silly at first (like Sasha as the potato girl. I’m still waiting for more things coming up for her).
The soundtrack is also very epic. It took me some time to get used to the animation style because the characters and objects have a different style than the background, and it first felt like old, lowbrow animation when you just have a static background, and stuff is manually added over it. I’m not sure if it’s a deliberate choice or something else, but as the plot thickens, you don’t care about this sort of stuff anymore. It’s also interesting how all characters have Germanic names, but then there’s Mikasa and her Asian ancestry, so I’m looking forward to seeing what’s behind that.
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LZ - Gaua
This Basque folk horror movie really surprised me. I am a sucker for this sort of film and have been trying to check them all out. Hagazussa is one of my top 5 favourite movies, so I’m always trying to find similar titles. Anyway, this one is a gem. It’s both aesthetically immaculate and entertaining, with historically accurate and curious details. I don’t know anything about Basque folklore, so it was great to delve into this movie’s universe because it also brings some common tropes like familiars, witch trials and the Spanish Inquisition, as well as a big nod to the painting Witches Going to Their Sabbath by Luis Ricardo Falero. I’m definitely watching it again.
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LZ - The Devil’s Bath
This is also a folk horror movie, Austrian this time and starring Anja Plaschg, also known as Soap&Skin, who sang the opening song of the series Dark. Her song Me and the Devil is painstakingly used on Instagram, so you definitely know her. But this is the first time I’ve seen her acting, and she only acted twice before this movie, which is impressive considering that I think she did a great job. She also made the film’s soundtrack. I love to see multitalented women working on dark stuff.
I couldn’t quite follow this movie, but I suspect it was made to be confusing and maybe show how women were accused of witchcraft for the pettiness of people who didn’t like them for absolutely no reason. There’s also some ambiguity on whether her character is actually pursuing some Pagan rituals, but it’s the sort of thing that might have been common in small, isolated communities, and it would be harmless if other bored, evil people wouldn’t use that as a subterfuge to get rid of someone. I should watch it again and pay better attention to details, or find an essay about it, because I suspect it’s the sort of movie that has more than what it seems on the surface.
Podcasts
CJW: November Reign
In a world that’s trying to atomize everyone into total loneliness, she’s trying to connect people. Even as humans are encouraged to sand off their rough edges and talk and think like brands, and as they’re drowned in AI slop that pushes them toward a hyper-homogenized middle, [November] Kelly argues that using your brain—specifically the broken things only your singularly traumatized brain won’t stop doing—are the only things worth doing. As the powerful try to make queer and trans people retreat to the shadows, she says the way to stay alive is to get smarter and weirder.
A great profile on one of my personal favourite podcasters, November Kelly of Trashfuture et al.
Videos
DCH: How the World Became a Casino by Emanuel Maiberg at 404media.co
The interview is about prediction markets but it's really about a design philosophy that migrated from casino floors into every screen you own. Robinhood, Polymarket, your iPhone's notification system — same mechanic, different skin. The slot machine didn't go mainstream rather dopamine got mainlined.
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MJW: I love this video from prosperdoesthings on insta. “The only thing I ever aspired to be was a loser and now I’m not even allowed to do that…”
Games
CJW: A Vivisection of Battlefield 6 - Steven Stoermer at Stop Caring
Battlefield 6 cannot “stay authentic” because it does not engage with the radically shifting craft of war, which today is ever more defined by indirect fire, precision guided munitions, drones, and cyberwarfare. Contemporaneous conflicts like the Russo-Ukrainian War and the American-Iranian War have demonstrated the importance of indirect fire. Russia and Ukraine fire thousands of artillery rounds per day, which are responsible for the majority of casualties. There are approximately 10,000 drones launched every day of the war, mostly small first-person-view (FPV) drones that can hunt and kill through cover. In the absence of meaningful commitment of ground troops, the war with Iran has been characterized by an exchange of long-range missiles and drones. Battlefield is mostly an infantry-focused game, but its differentiation from other entries in the genre is predicated on “combined arms.” Yet, it is chronically disinterested in how that term is changing, instead trotting out the usual stable of tanks, planes, and helicopters.
I thought this was an interesting write-up. It would be incredibly interesting to see a studio try and make a game that's accurate (or "realistic") to the recently-emerged style of modern combat, but of course no big publisher is going to risk that big a change to one of their tentpole franchises. Still, what would that game look like? Where cutting fibre-optic cables to cut off your enemy's ability to guide drones is more important than planting or defusing a bomb. Where tanks are covered in mesh and spikes as anti-drone protection. Where guided munitions could destroy your entire team in a moment.
Art
MJW: I’ve posted Jocelin Carmes’ haunting illustrations before, but this one jumped out at me the other day and it can’t hurt to remind you.
The Memes
![Tumblr posts. by cursed and haunted.
Whenever I see an Ivan Aivazovski painting, the sea monster in me goes absolutely feral
[A painting of a big old ship in choppy seas, with dark storn clouds overhead and a couple of seagulls on the wing. It's beautiful.]
I see this and I've never wanted to sink a ship so much in my life I'm biting through wood as we speak
God if I saw this in person I'd straight up start slithering. Start writhing](https://assets.buttondown.email/images/9213d652-a122-46b8-bea0-d4affb8f88cb.jpg?w=960&fit=max)
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