Feb. 16, 2025, 1:06 p.m.
nothing here but the new aesthetics of life and death - issue 282
Nothing Here
nothing here but the new aesthetics of life and death
issue 282* - 16th February, 2025
CJW: Welcome to another edition of nothing here. Let’s get to it, shall we.
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*No, you didn’t miss an issue, there was just an issue with the back-end of Buttondown and this is the fix.
The Team
Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Writer & visual artist. Hates the internet.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, queen of the neighbourhood.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer, fulltime goth and metalhead.
Climate Change & The Environment
January sets 'surprising' heat record, defying La Nina cooling expectations - CJW: Hottest January on record, 1.75 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels, and that's with the cooling effects of La Niña.
Geopolitics & Empire
DCH: How The Federal Government Fell by Garrison Davis at Shatterzone
What is happening across the federal government right now is unprecedented. But this is not Germany in the 1930s; it’s not the fall of the Soviet Union. We grasp at analogies to help contextualize current events that escape understanding. There are similarities, but what’s happening is new, very American, and very 21st century. In 50 years it will be talked about in the vein of ‘What happened to the United States in the mid-2020s.’
This is singularly the best thing I’ve read about Musk’s coup d'état that I’ve read in the past two weeks (and I’m pretty sure I’ve read them all). It’s an almost forensic analysis of the culmination of events that have led us to this moment–from Peter Thiel’s invisible machinations to Musk’s overt embrace of the far-right to Trump’s own Agenda 47 and to the evolution of the idea of the “deep state.” Buckle up this is a long read and the next 4 years are going to feel even longer.
In addition to this piece I think it's worth mentioning the excellent work being done by Vittoria Elliot at Wired and Maureen Tkacik at The American Prospect as well particularly:
The Recruitment Effort That Helped Build Elon Musk’s DOGE Army
The US Treasury Claimed DOGE Technologist Didn’t Have ‘Write Access’ When He Actually Did
The Private Equity Hatchet Man Leading the Lost Boys of DOGE
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Trump plans to 'take over' Gaza, expel Palestinians & build real estate his family could profit from - Ben Norton at Geopolitical Economy Report - CJW: If it wasn't for the tens of thousands of dead Palestinians, and the millions displaced, it would almost be funny for Bibi to carry out his fucking genocide only for Trump and the fascist USA to come in and steal the lands Israel was trying to steal for itself.
Blowback Like Never Before Will Follow A U.S. Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza - Spencer Ackerman at Forever Wars - CJW: Some proper, intelligent commentary on the above.
Israel Escalates West Bank Military Assault, Invading Areas Across the North - Mariam Barghouti at Drop Site News - CJW: They are not going to stop until someone makes them stop.
Global South States Resist Israeli Impunity Over War Crimes - Harrison Stetler at Jacobin - CJW: Again the only international leadership worth a damn is coming from the global South.
Tech & Design
DCH: Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared” by Emanuel Maiberg at 404 Media
A new paper from researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University finds that as humans increasingly rely on generative AI in their work, they use less critical thinking, which can “result in the deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved.”
As if the boredom in your white collar salaryman day job wasn’t already making you dumber. Now this. Easy enough to imagine this as part of the plan from the oligarchs shovelling AI down our collective throats.
CJW: Yet another reason to avoid genAI. As if you needed it.
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DCH: We're getting the social media crisis wrong by Henry Farrell and Programmable Mutter
We tend to think of the problem of social media as a problem of disinformation - that is, of people receiving erroneous information and being convinced that false things are in fact true. Hence, we can try to make social media better through factchecking, through educating people to see falsehoods and similar. This is, indeed, a problem, but it is not the most important one. The fundamental problem, as I see it, is not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings. That is a more subtle problem, but also a more pernicious one.
A much more erudite formulation of what I’ve been talking about when I bang on and on about propaganda and social media. Emphasis mine.
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CJW: Salesforce Is Using A Hallucination To Sell AI - Alan Kluegel at Defector
It is at this moment that the true terror sets in. This ad is not a sales pitch; it is a vision of the dystopia to come. The world depicted in this commercial is one where AI has come to dominate our lives. AI will be what intermediates you and other human beings, it will direct you where to go and what to do, it will give you what it decides to give you, its decisions are binding on you and others, its judgment is irreversible, and you will have to sit there and take it.
A great write-up/tear-down of a recent Salesforce AI ad.
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“In October 2024, the security firm Silent Push published a lengthy analysis of how Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure were providing services to Funnull, a two-year-old Chinese content delivery network that hosts a wide variety of fake trading apps, pig butchering scams, gambling websites, and retail phishing pages.” Infrastructure Laundering: Blending in with the Cloud by Brian Krebs
How DeepSeek ripped up the AI playbook—and why everyone’s going to follow its lead by Will Douglas Heaven at MIT Technology Review
DOGE-Backed Halt at CFPB Comes Amid Musk’s Plans for ‘X’ Digital Wallet by Jason Leopold and Evan Weinberger
Silicon Valley’s delusion machine - Ryan Broderick
Just the headlines:
Trump’s Purges May Mean Less Oversight for Musk’s Businesses by Katya Schwenk at Jacobin
Society & The Culture
CJW: Life and Death at the Ambassador Hotel - Stathis G. Yeros
The Ambassador would be a place where straight and gay residents, people of color, people with drug and alcohol addictions, and people too poor to pay rising rents could live without the constant threat of eviction, and access institutional support as needed. At the same time, Wilson wanted to cultivate social bonds across categories of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, based on a shared experience of marginalization. In other words, Wilson believed the Ambassador could help new forms of queer kinship emerge.
A long read about a group of incredibly selfless people putting together a place for people with AIDS, at the height of the crisis, to live with assistance and die with dignity and in community.
We need to look to examples like this, because these are the ways we will need to help each other in the coming years (or months for our readers in the US, who are seeing the state gutted from the top down).
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LZ: Was a fungus to blame for the Salem witch trials?
Very interesting piece recommended by a friend. Some of you might know the hypothesis proposed by the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg that sabbaths or even witchcraft (not in the sense of the practice of spells, charms, and concoction crafting) never existed but were possibly just people getting high on mushrooms. There are at least two films that tackle that: Hagazussa and A Field in England, both very atmospheric and artsy. Here the article suggests that the Salem witch trials might have actually exterminated people who were rather intoxicated by a fungus that grew in rye crops, so they weren't even getting high on purpose, but suffering from poisoning and having symptoms such as rage fits which tended to be explained as possession, for example. But no more spoilers, take a look at the article and if you like the topic, check the references I added here too. :)
CJW: There’s also a suggestion that ergot is behind the witchy madness in The VVitch.
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CJW: AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism - Gareth Watkins at New Socialist
I would not be the first to observe that we are in a new phase of reaction, something probably best termed ‘postmodern conservatism’. The main effect of this shift has been to enshrine acting like a spoilt fifteen-year-old boy as the organising principle of the reactionary movement. Counter-enlightenment thought, going back to Burke and de Maistre, has been stripped of any pretence of being anything but a childish tantrum backed up by equally childish, playground-level bullying. It is, and has always been, “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas,” and to ‘post-liberal’ ‘intellectuals’, that is in fact a good thing – if anything, they believe, the postmodern right needs to become more absurd; it needs to abandon Enlightenment ideals like reason and argumentation altogether.
The right wing intellectual project is simply to ask: ‘what would have to be true in order to justify the terrible things that I want to do?’ The right wing aesthetic project is to flood the zone – unsurprisingly, given their scatological bent, with bullshit – in order to erode the intellectual foundations for resisting political cruelty.
On AI art as the perfectly-suited aesthetics of the Far-Right, and just generally a great summation of where Western politics are at at the moment. A 15-minute read, apparently, but it's an easy to read piece, so it goes quickly.
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“Groyperism totally suffuses the cultural environment of the right. While mainstream media is still chasing after master figures and hidden intellectuals shaping elite consensus, the real story is that young righties look at the opinions and trends among the groypers as being far more interesting and important than respectable intellectuals. Many young righties in staff and media positions are essentially groypers or seek to emulate them as much as possible.” Groyperfication by John Ganz at Unpopular Front
AI-Generated Slop Is Already In Your Public Library by Emanuel Maiberg at 404 Media
How Fascists Infiltrated Gamer Culture at Hookshot, Charge Beam, Revive
Full-Throated Explicit Dehumanization - Paisley Currah at n+1
Health, Cooking, and Related
MJW: ADHD’s Sobering Life-Expectancy Numbers by Yasmin Tayag at The Atlantic
According to a study published last week that analyzed the deaths of more than 30,000 British adults, ADHD is linked with a lifespan that’s nearly seven years shorter for men, and about nine years shorter for women. Nine years! The findings suggest that the life expectancy of people with ADHD is nearly on par with that of smokers, and about five years shorter than that of heavy drinkers. When I sent the study to my husband, who also has ADHD, he texted back: “Damn.”
It makes sense that people with a condition that leaves them prone to impulsivity, substance use, and reckless driving would have a shorter life expectancy than those who don’t, but it’s still sobering to hear it. The funny thing is that meth helps to treat it. 🤷
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Big Pharma Is Pushing Potentially Deadly Alzheimer’s Drugs - Jeanne Lenzer at Jacobin
Dozens of new obesity drugs are coming: these are the ones to watch by Elie Dolgin at Nature
The Impact of Trump’s Order On Gender-Affirming Care by Julie Appleby at Undark
Just the headlines:
Lung cancer diagnoses on the rise among never-smokers worldwide by Andrew Gregory at The Guardian
Labour & Economics
DCH: FAFOnomics: How Chaos Became America's Economic Strategy by Kyla Scanlon
And of course, there is an important point to all of this, which is that it is all noise. It’s what Tyler Cowen and Ezra Klein have both pointed out as strategic chaos: overwhelming the public's already limited capacity for attention until exhaustion sets in. It's the attention singularity that I wrote about last week in action, where power, narrative, and wealth merge into a self-reinforcing system of perpetual disruption.
Welcome to FAFAnomics - F*ck Around and Find Out Economics, something that feels like the policy equivalent of a TikTok influencer doing increasingly dangerous stunts off the side of a building for views. The goal isn't good governance; it's capturing attention at any cost. And it's working! While we debate whether each new crisis is legal, ethical, or even real1(as we should) the broader transformation of American fiscal policy continues.
Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with bullshit” take on politics but applied to economics courtesy of the second Trump administration.
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DCH: When Tech Bans Stimulate More Than Stymie China by Nathan Gardels at Noema
This paradox of Western efforts to stymie China’s tech development actually stimulating it is not new. As Zheng Yongnian, a Shenzhen-based scholar closely listened to by the Chinese leadership wrote in Noema in 2018, the tech restrictions already then imposed may slow the pace of China’s leap forward but will “not be able to stem its high-tech catch-up. China’s enormous reserves of state capital, its substantial pool of ready talent and its huge market will continue to drive it forward.”
It’s almost as if China’s whole thing is cheaper and faster… lol. If America’s plan to control global AI is dependent on export controls and tariffs and the tech bros being right about AGI then odds are even stronger that China has more wins under its belt coming up.
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“Biggs, an Arizona Republican who is running for governor, earlier this month introduced the Nullify OSHA Act, or NOSHA, a bill that would abolish the government agency that since 1970 has set federal health and safety standards in U.S. workplaces.” Arizona congressman Andy Biggs wants to abolish OSHA oversight nationwide by Rey Covarrubias Jr. at USA Today
Why Delta Air Lines Workers Are Fighting for a Union by Amie Stager at Workday Magazine.
Just the headlines:
Google ends hiring targets tied to diversity by Queenie Wong at Los Angeles Times
Thomson Reuters Wins First Major AI Copyright Case in the US by Kate Knibbs at Wired
Big Companies Are Already Asking Trump for Favors by David Sirota at Jacobin
Books
LZ: Melancholy, by Jon Fosse
This is my second (or fourth if you consider Septology a trilogy) Jon Fosse. I thought I would get in the mood again like I eventually got with Septology, but this one didn’t hit me as hard. It is also an almost dream sequence with all the long paragraphs and lack of full stops, the repetition, and the confusion about whether something is real or if the character is hallucinating. Here again, there’s the feeling that you’re inside the mind of a schizophrenic, but this time you know that he is that. Fosse fictionalizes a biography of the Norwegian painter Lars Hertervig, so it’s again a book about a fucked up Norwegian painter. But this time I couldn’t really empathize with him and couldn’t really get in the mood, which made me drag to this book for months.
At the same time, now I am reading On Mysticism by Simon Crichtley, which is basically a book about Christian or catholic mystics and their way of writing through superlatives, an excess of words that contradict themselves and put you in an almost hallucinogenic state like those of their ecstasies. Somehow I think what Fosse tries to achieve is a contemporary mystic experience through his literature. It’s possible that this is the case especially because he tackles a lot on his late conversion to Christianity and, like Crichtley says, the writer and the mystic write to erase themselves through the words, but the truth is that you can never escape yourself. So all in all his stories are all about himself, even when it’s supposed to be about an actual other person. But I will get back to this hypothesis later on when I finish this other book!
Movies + TV
LZ: Horror movies I watched so you don’t need to:
Creep
I don’t even know how this has a sequence while being so boring and predictable. All the shit about the lying to hide the guy is a psycho and the other character is gonna get murdered. It's like a Blair Witch meets Saw but make it bad and boring.
We are the flesh
I was fooled and somehow saw that this had something to do with Iñarritu and Cuarón, when it didn't. I think the synopsis wanted to compare this film with the dystopian vibe of Children of Men, but there's not much going on apart from closeups of penises, a lot of sex, and incest even. I get that this might be a metaphor for Mexico, colonization, how the nation was built, being myself a Brazilian and knowing too well how these things go… but the shock value just got me bored. It's like some kinds of contemporary art: a lot of things that have a meaning that you only get if you read the description, or then you can't take anything from it. Hard pass.
Revenge
A movie by Coralie Fargeat, the same director of The Substance. You can get here how she was prepping for the most recent film. Same formula of a super hot skinny girl being filmed closely, always almost naked, then being raped and killed only to come back for revenge with superpowers coming from peyote. She uses a lot of synthwave and tries to get the feeling of a Carpenter movie with saturated colors that give this neo-giallo feeling, but it's pretty average. I'm gonna be that bitch and say Coralie, sweetie, I get that you wanted to be the Californian hot bae, but get well soon. Her other movie Reality+ doesn't look much different either.
The Pope's Exorcist
ABSOLUTE shite. Don't. Just don't waste your time on it. I don't even want to write about it as it doesn't deserve even an extra second or neuron connection anymore.
(CJW: I loved The Pope’s Exorcist. I loved it because it was stupid and with the ending they seemed to be trying to set up an Exorcisor Cinematic Universe, which is equally stupid-hilarious. Anyway, back to Lidia…)
Re-Animator
I know it's a classic and actually it shouldn't be on this list, but it's another movie that I watched. It's pretty dated, especially the way the female protagonist is portrayed (the only rational voice but never heard, sexualized, gets naked and abused eventually), but… oh well, it's based on a Lovecraft story and it's about this mad medicine student who develops a serum that can bring people and animals back to life but mostly as violent mindless zombies. The serum is exactly just like The Substance's, which makes me think Coralie got her inspiration from here as well as many other parts of the movie, which were a nod to older horror movies (The Shining being the most obvious). It's ok, the soundtrack has the iconic crescendo violin like in Psycho, but I wasn't mesmerized by it or anything.
The Nightingale (2018)
Ok, this is one that you should watch. I don't know why it was in the catalog of Splatter, a Swedish streaming service that is the equivalent of Shutter. I watched this movie before but got to watch it again and it's a shoutout to my fellow Australian newsletter writers :) What a brutal movie, as it needed to be in order to show the violence and the massacre caused by the English on the eve of the Black War.
The story revolves around a convict Irishwoman who is a servant of the colonial force and is trying to get her freedom from a corrupt, psychopath lieutenant who is played by Sam Claflin, who plays the protagonist in the romantic drama/comedy Me Before You with Emilia Clarke. Well, if he was already a douche there, here he's the ultimate bastard who basically incorporates the archetype of cruelty and ruthlessness in his pursuit of power and dominance over anyone deemed weaker by him — especially women and natives.
It is a movie that drags a little bit longer than necessary, but it's beautiful as much as it is sad and violent. Aisling Franciosi is absolutely stunning and a great actress who composes a great performance alongside Baykali Ganambarr, who plays her tracker in the wilderness.
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MJW: 1899
This Netflix series from the makers of the super popular and rad German series Dark is reasonably enjoyable but also kind of frustrating. Set on a steam ship crossing from England to the USA in the titular year, the cast is international and the dialogue comes in English, German, Danish, Portuguese, Cantonese and more. The steamship Cerberus is steaming it’s way across the Atlantic when they get a distress call from the Prometheus, another ship that went missing four months prior. They decide to go to its aid, and what comes next is a mixture of weirdness that includes spooky pyramids, creepy kids, and an unforgettable few scenes where (spoiler) the vast majority of the passengers throw themselves into the sea. I still don’t know if 1899 was good exactly, but I did enjoy it, even if I didn’t know what the hell was happening half the time.
Music
LZ - Turia
Did I already say that I love female-fronted black metal bands? Well, I do. I love it so much and someday I want to learn how to sing like that. Probably won't, but the wish is still in me. Anyway, this is a Dutch band that will appeal to those who like Fluisteraars as they not only have a similar sound but also a member that plays live for the latter. The vocals are crazy good and the music is quite melodic while being dark and heavy. It's been on my repeat for at least two weeks. Highlight to the album Dede Kondre but honestly, all songs are fucking amazing!!
I learned about this band from a recommendation and dug it a lot. This is a Slovakian group that is considered to play Post-Black/Progressive Metal. This album in particular was the one that was recommended to me and it is also my favorite as it is a bit more melodic than the others. It's their first full-length, the second being released this year. According to this review, the lyrics are about “conflicts of opinions, crimes of past regimes in Slovakia, human tragedies, the climate crisis and the dystopian world.” It is a band that tackles societal and ambiental issues while also addressing national identity (I take it from the cover art).
The Self-Promotion
CJW: Mirrored in Interzone #301
More short fiction from yours truly, this time published in Interzone #301. I wrote about the piece and how it related to my transition here. If any of that sounds interesting, please check out the issue and/or subscribe to Interzone.
The Memes
