othing here but the real threat of being human

issue 258 - 9th June, 2024

CJW: Welcome to another issue of nothing here, where I’m personally still coming to terms with the fact that it’s June. Let’s get started shall we… But first, if you would like to support us (and if you’re able), you’ve got a couple of options:

Both will give you access to the bonus archive, as well as new bonuses as they are posted. Another thing you can do to help spread the word is forward this email to someone you think might enjoy it.

Thanks as ever for joining us. We really appreciate it.

The Team

Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Writer & visual artist. Middle-aged goth.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, world eater.

Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Journalist, MA in semiotics, and PhD in Arts.

Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: The War On Weeds - Laura J. Martin at Noema

Despite the ubiquity of 2,4-D, scientists have barely studied its human health impacts, as is the case for most synthetic chemicals. The World Health Organization classifies 2,4-D as a possible carcinogen and immunosuppressant, noting a lack of research. The chemical is a synthetic mimic of a plant growth hormone, indole acetic acid, that happens to also be a human metabolite, involved in our serotonin and melatonin pathways, which regulate emotions, digestion and sleep.
Are 2,4-D and other hormonal herbicides reshaping our moods, our waking and our sleeping, our desires? We have no idea, because nobody has asked.

A detailed history of the development and use of biocides (poisons that reduce biodiversity) in America.

Just the headlines:

AI Is Accelerating the Loss of Our Scarcest Natural Resource: Water - Cindy Gordon at Forbes

Geopolitics & Empire

CJW: Israel’s Rafah Tents Massacre, Yet Another Heinous War Crime - Seraj Assi at Jacobin

It was one of the most heinous assaults on Palestinian civilians in recent memory. Last night, Israeli forces pounded a tent camp housing displaced people in a designated safe zone in north Rafah, killing at least forty-five Palestinians, most of them women and children, and injuring hundreds others.
[...]
The Rafah tents massacre comes days after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Israel to halt its military offensive there, and shortly after the International Criminal Court (ICC) said it was applying for arrest warrants for Israeli leaders. Effectively in response, Israel has bombarded Rafah with unprecedented brutality. Observers estimate that Israel has bombed the refugee town over one hundred times since the ruling.

Do Western leaders need to be told that it's ok to change their stance? How many more Palestinians need to die before they can admit they were wrong?

Related: Biden Doesn’t Have a Real “Red Line” for Horrors in Gaza - Branko Marcetic at Jacobin

CJW: The Sisyphus Doctrine - Séamus Malekafzali

Israel’s strategy since the battle for Khan Younis has been as such: Israel pushes through an area once, and if Palestinian society continues to function in any way afterward, without descending into such anarchy that it will become unbearable to even exist as a human being inside of it, then it will punish that area with even further destruction, devastation, until the population demands to be able to leave Gaza forever. This strategy is governed by all parts of Israel’s mindset: revenge for the humiliation of October 7th, glee at the sight of dead Palestinians, and fury that Hamas has not buckled under the weight of the annihilation they have dealt out.
The criterion of victory is still told to the West that they will accept nothing less than the defeat of Hamas, but on the ground, the Israeli media, backing the army to a hilt, is willing to accept the continuing mass killings of the Palestinians as evidence of the righteousness of its cause.

Malekafzali does some of the best commentary on the "war" in Gaza - I've heard him on both Trash Future and Chapo. This is well worth your time.

CJW: Israel Is Starving Gazan Children to Death - Seraj Assi at Jacobin

Yesterday morning, Abu Ataya succumbed to starvation, dying in his father’s arms at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza. Held by his weeping father, he resembled a bare skeleton. Aged seven months at the time of his death, he was born and died in genocide.

This had me in tears. What more is there to say? My heart fucking breaks over and over again for the people of Gaza, yet our heartless fucking leaders do nothing.

Jabalia’s Mass Graves Are a Lesson in Horror - Seraj Assi at Jacobin

To starve the survivors, Israeli forces burned food storage facilities belonging to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which Israel now considers a terrorist organization. Armed with massive US bombs, they blitzed hospitals, markets, schools, and refugee shelters, destroying the last means of survival for Palestinians in Gaza.

In regards to the bolded section, how have I not read about this before? Of course the agency working to help Palestinians survive a genocide is a terrorist organisation, but not the IDF…

The article itself though is about the horrors, war crimes, and crimes against humanity being committed by Israel in the Jabalia refugee camp. It's harrowing but important.

Evidence Is Mounting That the Saudis Had a Hand in 9/11 - Branko Marcetic at Jacobin. Pair that with this: Joe Biden's Israel Policy Is Really About a Deal With Saudi Arabia - Aída Chávez at The Intercept
"As a human being, I’m offended by the idea that administrators think students need rudimentary instruction on moral reasoning because they protested a genocide. As a philosophy professor, I’m professionally offended that this is what they think such instruction looks like." - NYU’s Vapid Reeducation for Palestine Protesters - Ben Burgis at Jacobin
"Biden wants to tie the U.S. to one of the most abhorrent regimes in the world for decades to come, striking a far-reaching security deal with Saudi Arabia — an agreement that would put American lives on the line to protect the Saudi dictatorship and lock us into a new cold war." Joe Biden’s Terrible Israel Policy Is Really About Getting in Bed With Saudi Arabia by Aída Chávez at The Intercept
"Top Israeli government and security officials have overseen a nine-year surveillance operation targeting the ICC and Palestinian rights groups to try to thwart a war crimes probe, a joint investigation reveals." Surveillance and interference: Israel’s covert war on the ICC exposed by Yuval Abraham at 972 Magazine

Just the headlines:

Amount of Israeli bombs dropped on Gaza surpasses that of World War II - Muhammed Enes Çallı at AA - CJW: I don’t know anything about this news outlet, but the figures apparently come from Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.
Hundreds of Palestinian Doctors Disappeared Into Israeli Detention by Kavitha Chekuru at The Intercept
Sudanese Militias Are Committing Genocide in Darfur—Again by Mutasim Ali at Foreign Policy
Burning Villages: Violence Escalates as Myanmar Military Reacts to Territorial Losses by Pooja Chaudhuri at bellingcat

Science & Space

"Here’s a breakdown of five of the biggest threats to future Mars astronauts — and what scientists are doing to overcome each hurdle between us and a multiplanetary future." T-Minus: How to not die on (the way to) Mars by Kristin Houser freethink (DCH: You know what else is challenging? Eradicating poverty. Ending hunger. Solving homelessness.)

Just the headlines:

Femtosecond Lasers Solve Solar Panels’ Recycling Issue - Emily Waltz at IEEE Spectrum (via Sentiers)

Tech & Design

DCH: The Case for the Butlerian Jihad by Andrew Dana Hudson (via Paul Graham Raven)

The Butlerian Jihad is also the answer to this claim that “the genie is out of the bottle” and we have no choice but to accept these products. There’s lots that we could do that we have chosen, collectively, to try to forbid. Slavery, for instance, or child marriage, or incest, or various war crimes and weapons of mass destruction. We’ve made these choices because of a combination of practical and moral considerations. None of these prohibitions are baked into human society; they were won with organizing and argumentation. So we could, if we chose, put the genie back into the bottle — or at least chase it out of our homes and workplaces and platforms.

The Genie camp exists to spread a sense of learned helplessness across society. As ADH rightly argues here just because LLMs and GPTs have been released, it doesn’t mean we should just rollover and accept them blindly.

When’s the best time to stop a problem? Before it starts. When’s the next best time to stop a problem? Now. Time to pick up the hammers and smash the machines, folks.

Hat tip to friend-of-the-newsletter Paul for sharing the link (and the great pull quote) to also friend-of-the-newsletter ADH’s original post.

CJW: The Danger Of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think - Shannon Vallor at Noema

But OpenAI and researchers like Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio are now telling us a different story. A self-aware machine that is “indistinguishable from the human mind” is no longer the defining ambition for AGI. A machine that matches or outperforms us on a vast array of economically valuable tasks is the latest target. OpenAI, which led the way in moving AGI’s goalposts, defines AGI in their charter as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.”

An interesting piece about the semantic drift happening with the concept of superhuman AI or AGI, away from philosophical (and sometimes neuroscientific) concepts of the mind, and toward a purely commercial concept. It's a shift that undermines both non-biological and human intelligence (in distinct ways), and is obviously entirely driven by those who wish to see "AI" tools flourish and help them to capture more wealth.

Perhaps it's a good thing that they're no longer concerning themselves with non-biological minds, because (as I argue in Repo Virtual) they can't be trusted not to abuse and enslave such minds in their endless fucking quest for shareholder value.

Good pairing with the Butlerian Jihad thinking above as it ends with very Luddite thoughts and questions concerning the few places where AI might actually be used for the benefit of society.

AI-CSAM Is Not a ‘Victimless Crime’ - Sam Cole and Emmanuel Maiburg at 404media - CJW: I decided to skip the pull quotes because this whole thing is utterly disgusting.
“But there are at least two people in every deepfake: the one being impersonated, whose face is being used, and the one whose face has been erased entirely, plastered over by an algorithm, leaving their body exposed. The latter is almost always a porn worker, someone who makes their living with that body and carefully chooses who to share it with in their work.” Laws About Deepfakes Can’t Leave Sex Workers Behind by Samantha Cole at 404 Media
A plethora of articles on how the AI-fueled enshittification of Google has the company scrambling to remove dangerous AI and other dubious answers from its results:
Why is Sam Altman so obsessed with 'Her'? An investigation by Brian Merchant at Blood in the Machine

Just the headlines:

After Pegasus Was Blacklisted, Its CEO Swore Off Spyware. Now He’s the King of Israeli AI. by Georgia Gee at The Intercept

Society & The Culture

CJW: A friend and a falcon went missing. In pain, I turned to 'Slaughterhouse-Five' – and found a new vision of sorrow and time - Emily Polk at Aeon

If ‘So it goes’ helps us to face each other through our shared suffering, then how did Vonnegut want us to face our dead? I think he offers us a way to do this by describing linear time as an illusion. By showing us that time doesn’t really follow a linear sequence, ‘like beads on a string’, he was imagining us freed (if only for a moment) from the constraints of grief. ‘When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse,’ Billy explains, ‘all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.’ The possibility of time travel, of nonlinearity, lets us take a breath from the pain, by imagining a nonlinear escape, even if there was nothing we could do to stop the arrival of our suffering in real time.

On loss and grief, told through the disappearance of Annie the peregrine falcon, the death of a dear old friend, and Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five.

Health, Cooking, and Related

DCH: When Health Care Crowdfunding Fails by Libby Watson at The Baffler

If you wanted to break my brain as quickly as possible, you would only have to strap me into an Oculus headset and set the browser to scroll through the thousands of medical GoFundMe campaigns that are active at any given time. I’d be toast in an hour. The platform is a horrifying wasteland of people in desperate need of solutions to problems that would be largely nonexistent in a country with a humane health care system, people whose hopes of success are dim and who feel guilty, somehow, for even asking.

The kindness of strangers is not a reliable health care system. People shouldn’t have to endure feelings of shame on top of whatever crisis they’re already going through. This is 21st century poverty porn.

DCH: Opinion: AI, Health Care, and the Realities of Being Human by Arjun V.K. Sharma at undark

I spend a significant amount of time learning about my patients’ plights: the lack of money and food, the troubles with finding a job or a house, or the addictive substances that can hold a person tight in their grip. These situations are so often messy and convoluted, and so rarely possess straight through lines to a solution, that I increasingly wonder: How do they fit into a future of health care that strives to be so tidily packaged, helmed by the algorithms of artificial intelligence, or AI, that many are so eager to adopt?

I’ve worked in health tech companies for years now. “The Doorknob phenomenon” is virtually impossible to reproduce at scale with the current tools or business models companies use. It occurs because of intimacy and vulnerability. Those feelings rarely happen in online forms or chatbot dialogs. They have a stronger chance in telehealth calls but those are so often rushed and sit to specific topics or tight time tables that it rarely does.

“But try as they might, the anti-abortion movement is unable to force people to want babies they don’t want. The World Health Organization has repeatedly shown that prohibition does not reduce rates of abortion. Where it is illegal, pregnant patients turn to untrained and criminal providers, and as many as 13 percent of them don’t survive.” Sterilization, Murders, Suicides: Bans Haven’t Slowed Abortions, and They’re Costing Lives by Judith Levine at The Intercept
There is nothing new about gender fluidity and nonconformity - Chris Wheatley at Psyche - CJW: We've always been here.
Why Extreme Syphilis Symptoms Are Showing Up Now by Rachel E. Gross at The Atlantic

Just the headlines:

Urban gardening may improve human health – Research subjects benefitted from microbial exposure that boosts the immune system (DCH: Interesting research out of Finland. Good for your health, good for your mental health, and good for the environment)
Huge study links ultra-processed foods to heightened depression risk by Eric W. Dolan at Psypost

Labour & Economics

DCH: Understanding the real threat generative AI poses to our jobs by Brian Merchant at Blood in the Machine

There will almost certainly be no AI jobs apocalypse. That doesn’t mean your boss isn’t going to use AI to replace jobs, or, more likely, going to use the specter of AI to keep pay down and demand higher productivity

Pull quote from the tldr Brian serves at the top of the very good, long read about generative AI and your ability to earn a livelihood.

The real threat is a mix of good enough outputs from AI paired with outsourcing and downsizing. As ever management has their own interests often at odds with your own. Unions are historically how labor fought this disparity. Collective action is vital. No one else is going to fight for you EXCEPT your own fellow workers.

Pick up your hammers. Smash the machine.

“There is a yawning disconnect in the business. Companies themselves are doing fantastically well. And yet staff numbers are being pared back and many artists themselves, unless they are in the Taylor Swiftian top 1%, say that a proper living from recorded music income or songwriting royalties is a cruel pipe dream.” How the Music Industry is in a New Age of Arrogance by Luke Turner The Quietus
"The Department of Justice is clearly deep in an investigation of RealPage and its cartel. And this one looks criminal. It’s also fascinating that the FBI is involved. The FBI, though historically it had a big role in antitrust investigations for its first hundred years, hasn’t really done much in this area since the early 2000s." Monopoly Round-Up: FBI Raids Big Corporate Landlord Over Nationwide Rent Hikes by Matt Stoller (DCH: Digital racketeering pure and simple)

Just the headlines:

Amazon’s AI Warehouses Isolate Workers and Hinder Union Organizing, New Report Finds by Jules Roscoe 404 Media
Amazon Labor Union Looks Set to Affiliate With the Teamsters by Luis Feliz Leon at Jacobin
Bolt’s drive-to-win insurance scheme is putting drivers’ lives at risk by Jesusegun Alagbe at Rest of World

Art

LZ: Tanya Gomelskaya

An oil painting of a human arm possibly laying on an armchair handle, wearing a black sheer lace dress with long sleeves. From the painting, a sculpture of a hand comes out giving a 3D impression to the art. The canvas is oval and framed with black and golden rococo details.

I have been following this artist for a while on Instagram and she never ceases to impress me with how she combines oil painting on canvas and the addition of sculptural appendices that make the image "3D". Of course, she has a darker, horror-inspired style, but it's just amazing how realistic her pieces are. More recently I was in shock with this painting including a popping hand covered in tattoos. The coloring and the addition of a ring were so on-spot that they really give you the feeling that it's a real hand and not just plastic or clay, whatever the material she uses for that.

The Self-Promotion

LZ: The Sound of Cosmic Pessimism

After reading Eugene Thacker's trilogy on the horror of philosophy, I had the idea of writing an essay about cosmic black metal and how this subgenre can encapsulate the ideas proposed by the author, especially when it comes to the concept of cosmic pessimism. Here's my contribution to the discussion :)