nothing here but the rise of resilient communities

issue 287 - 27th April, 2025

CJW: Welcome to another edition of nothing here. Thanks for joining us, we really appreciate it.

As ever, if you would like to support us (and are able to), you’ve got a couple of options:

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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. Hates the internet.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, Mother of Bunny.

Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer, fulltime goth and metalhead.

Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: To survive the Chaoscene, we will need resilient communities - Rupert Read at Aeon

[...] when one gets serious about adaptation, one can no longer deny the desperateness and immediacy of our climate predicament. That might sound like an advantage of adaptation-centrism (and indeed it is!), but it feels like a disadvantage as long as one tacitly wants to deny the desperateness and immediacy in question. And such a desire to deny what is happening is by no means confined to the extreme Right. It remains common to most of us, most of the time, and is a well-recognised form of psychological defence. So long as decarbonisation is our focus, we can (falsely) reassure ourselves that perhaps everything is going to work out fine, that we will succeed in smoothly transitioning to a different energy source, and then, well: ‘Job done.’ We are now being forced to let go of that fantasy. But we don’t welcome that act of forcing.

A piece on climate adaptation rather than decarbonisation. Some might find it confronting for the reasons mentioned above, but it's a viewpoint to consider. For instance:

Adaptation work builds agency. It counters the attitude of ‘There’s nothing I can do’/‘I’m too small to make a difference.’ This is because, unlike decarbonisation work, it is by definition focused, local, concrete and tangible. One then reaches the point of people being able to say to themselves something like this: ‘Our climate concern isn’t just a story, there’s nothing abstract about it; no, preparing for impacts is something we do together, every day.’

In the Wake of the Sandbound - Nick Hunt at Emergence Magazine

Just the headlines:

Data centres will use twice as much energy by 2030 — driven by AI - Sophia Chen at Nature
Revealed: Big tech’s new datacentres will take water from the world’s driest areas - Luke Barratt, Aliya Uteuova, Andrew Witherspoon at The Guardian
EPA Plans to Stop Collecting Emissions Data From Most Polluters - Sharon Lerner at Undark

Geopolitics & Empire

MJW: The Rise of End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor at The Guardian

Our opponents know full well that we are entering an age of emergency, but have responded by embracing lethal yet self-serving delusions. Having bought into various apartheid fantasies of bunkered safety, they are choosing to let the Earth burn. Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet.
[…]
In a strange twist on the Old Testament tale, Musk and his fellow tech billionaires, having arrogated god-like powers to themselves, aren’t content to just build the arks. They appear to be doing their best to cause the flood. Today’s rightwing leaders and their rich allies are not just taking advantage of catastrophes, shock-doctrine and disaster-capitalism style, but simultaneously provoking and planning for them.

This piece sums up stuff from a lot of articles that we have shared with you via the newsletter, but this one kinda aggregates it all into one, and it’s co-written by Naomi Klein so you know it’s good. The nice thing about the incredibly depressing text is that as it nears the end, it offers solutions, instead of just dooming out. We need to know the facts, but we also need some hope too.

“From a small courtroom in a remote immigration jail in Jena, La., Judge Jamee Comans ruled on Friday that the government can deport Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil based solely on his advocacy for Palestine.” What Comes Next in Mahmoud Khalil’s Fight Against Deportation - Jonah Valdez at The Intercept
“U.S. President Donald Trump welcomed El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele to the White House on Monday. Their meeting centered on bolstering migration cooperation, with Trump saying that he is open to sending U.S. citizens to prisons in El Salvador if they commit violent acts—though immigration experts say there is no legal way for the Trump administration to do so.” Trump Again Floats Deporting U.S. Citizens to El Salvador During Bukele Meeting - Alexandra Sharp at Foreign Policy
Trump advisor reveals tariff strategy: Force countries to pay tribute to maintain US empire - Ben Norton at Geopolitical Economy Report

Just the headlines:

Leaked Data Reveals Massive Israeli Campaign to Remove Pro-Palestine Posts on Facebook and Instagram by Waqas Ahmed, Nicholas Rodelo, Ryan Grim, and Murtaza Hussain at Drop Site News

Science & Space

“One of the most compelling cases for extraterrestrial life has been found on K2-18b, a planet 124 light years from Earth.” Behold, a Genuinely Promising Sign of Alien Life - Becky Ferreira at 404 Media

Tech & Design

DCH: ICE Just Paid Palantir Tens of Millions for ‘Complete Target Analysis of Known Populations’ - Joseph Cox at 404 Media

Last week Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) paid contracting giant Palantir tens of millions of dollars to make modifications to a powerful ICE database and search tool to allow “complete target analysis of known populations” and to update the tool’s targeting and enforcement priorities, according to procurement records reviewed by 404 Media.

This is a build-out of Palantir’s Investigative Case Management (ICM) system which I first wrote about back in 2020. Not surprising that the system was first leveraged for detention centres back in Trump 1 and now it’s being expanded to service their deportation agenda in Trump 2.

“A new dataset, visualized as maps, reveals the extent to which African workers are indirectly employed in the tech sector, doing content moderation, customer service, and data annotation for AI models, among other jobs.” How Big Tech hides its outsourced African workforce - Stephanie Wangari at Rest of World
“Everything that I'm describing is the result of a tech industry — including media and analysts — that refuses to do business with reality, trafficking in ideas and ideology, celebrating victories that have yet to take place, applauding those who have yet to create the things they're talking about, cheering on men lying about what's possible so that they can continue to burn billions of dollars and increase their wealth and influence.” OpenAI Is A Systemic Risk To The Tech Industry by Ed Zitron
Narcissus and Artificial Intelligence: Inconclusive Thoughts on Self-Ignorance

Just the headlines:

This ‘College Protester’ Isn’t Real. It’s an AI-Powered Undercover Bot for Cops by Emanuel Maiberg and Jason Koebler at WIRED
Regrets: Actors who sold AI avatars stuck in Black Mirror-esque dystopia - Ashley Belanger at Ars Technica

Society & The Culture

DCH: UK creating ‘murder prediction’ tool to identify people most likely to kill - Vikram Dodd at The Guardian

Statewatch says data from people not convicted of any criminal offence will be used as part of the project, including personal information about self-harm and details relating to domestic abuse. Officials strongly deny this, insisting only data about people with at least one guilty conviction has been used.

I skipped sharing this last time because all I could muster was dumb jokes about Minority Report. Sharing now because upon further reflection this is just one more horrific overreach in state surveillance in an island already riddled with it.

CJW: How the last letters of the condemned can teach us how to live - Daniel R. Brunstetter at Aeon

Bargaining to be there in that instant. To see her eyes, her smile. To smile back. To soak up all the non-verbal gestures that define a person, a loved one, her. To blow a kiss. How seldom do we remark these moments in normal times? They seem unremarkable when lived day to day, but in the last scene, between death and oneself, the emotions, hopes and regrets that comprise the human condition are heightened a thousandfold. What if we were attuned in such a way that daily encounters with loved ones were heightened a thousandfold? Or even just tenfold?

I found this piece on the last letters written by captured French resistance fighters/organisers prior to their executions to be quite moving and worth consideration. I feel like HRT has helped me experience some of this heightening. Maybe you should try it ;)

Health, Cooking, and Related

DCH: UK Supreme Court rules 'woman' means biological female - Danyel VanReenen at STV News

“The judgement seems to say there will be sometimes where trans people can be excluded from both men’s and women’s services, but its not clear where we’re then supposed to go.”

The UK play acts at culture war nonsense most of the time but when it comes to oppressing trans people they aren’t fucking around. Early on I thought this was all smoke and no fire because the country is literally full of gender neutral bathrooms so I couldn’t fathom how any of this was taking off given so much of the argumentation was based off of bullshit, made up bathroom violence scenarios.

The whole hearing itself was travesty. No trans people or trans arguments were presented. Just a whole bunch of TERF nonsense and fiction. With a portion of the legal bills paid for by cash donated by JK Rowling.

The spineless Labour Party is gleefully accepting the ruling as “providing clarity.” Tell that to trans people who are left out in the cold with no fucking clarity about what spaces, services, or systems they should now be using/

This is a terrible ruling that creates a separate but equal doctrine for trans women and men.

"What I was discovering, as I read, is that our food system is actually a driver of new infectious diseases, and that the global expansion of animal agriculture is intensifying the risk of viral outbreaks. Alongside climate change, our food system is contributing to the arrival of what science writer Ed Yong has called the “Pandemicene” — an era whose accumulating challenges we are less and less prepared to meet." - Pandemicene Blues - Timothy A. Schuler at Places Journal

Just the headlines:

World's first "nonstop beating heart" transplant is a medical breakthrough - Bronwyn Thompson at New Atlas

Labour & Economics

DCH: Google Found GUILTY of Monopolization Again by Matt Stoller

"The essence of antitrust law is to try to keep the system working by recognizing that, at certain points, some companies may get too big for their own good, they're self-imploding, or the technology may become so dominant that it's just crushing all other elements where there can be innovation." - Judge Leonie Brinkema, 2023, United States v. Google LLC

Last time it was for search engine monopolization. This time it’s over their dominance of ads and ad exchanges. That $1 million donation to the Trump inauguration fund sure doesn’t seem to be paying any dividends

DCH: Here’s How To Share AI’s Future Wealth - Saffron Huang at Noema

AI stands at a similar crossroads. Maybe its gains will build hospitals and safety nets; maybe it will replicate some of the Industrial Revolution’s worst chapters. Predistribution offers a way to realize the former. By ensuring productivity gains from AI automation are broadly shared, we can embrace technological advancement while mitigating the social upheaval that characterized the Industrial Revolution.

The argument for predistribution of wealth in the face of AI’s potential impact on the economy. Give it a read this isn’t just the usual UBI will save the day prattle.

Books

CJW: A War of Fragments: World Versus America. J.G. Ballards last-planned novel - Stephen Barber at Diaphenes

Ballard positions his project’s evocation of a terrorist war against America’s maleficent neo-colonial and consumerist dangers as a deadly serious one, with satirical elements, but with no element of irony; the project’s temporal focus is on the contemporary moment, but its timeframe also extends backwards across seven decades, to historical exemplars such as the Vietnam War and the Second World War. In his plan for the project’s development and its ending, America will be approached ‘as if the country was as dangerous as Nazi Germany or the Stalinist S.U. [Soviet Union]. Not an ironic and ambiguous ending. Given that most people’s feelings are broadly admiring of the US, taking it as the enemy (like a book written by a Viet Cong) would be all the more startling. An ironic ending would weaken it... Sept 11 suggests a psychological approach striking at the US’s main weaknesses — its sentimentality, religiosity, adolescence...’. The planned end-phase of the conflict, and America’s elimination, will form an all-consuming cataclysm with a ‘frenzied and brutal’ form.

This piece from 2017 about Ballard's plans for a book, World Versus America, has been getting shared around Bluesky for perhaps obvious reasons. I want to say the man truly was a prophet, but nah, he could just see the unvarnished reality of liberalism and modernity.

Video

DCH: This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like by Carole Cadwalladr

DCH: AI Slop is Breaking the Internet as we Know it by Jason Koebler, Sam Cole, and Brian Merchant

Music

LZ - Mahnwache

Atmospheric Black Metal band from the Netherlands with female vocals. They only have three songs, but they are all bangers. Please do check it and keep an eye for their new releases if you like the style :)