nothing here but Thiel's Antichrist and her week of wonder

issue 301 - 12th October, 2024

CJW: Hey gang. As you can probably tell, we decided to do something fun for issue 300. Dan took the ball and ran with it, which is great because this past fortnight really got away from me, and I wasn’t able to find the time to add as much to it as I would have liked.

We still managed to put together a fairly standard size normal issue for you too as well. Plenty here to chew over, as usual.

Hope you and yours are well. Lots of love, and thanks for sticking with us for 300 issues.

If you would like to support us, those links are:

Another thing you can do to help spread the word is forward this email to someone you think might enjoy 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. Meme collector.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, HUNTR_SHAFR.

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

Climate Change & The Environment

Just the headlines:

Trump Sacrifices Alaska Wilderness to Help AI Companies by Gavin Feek, The Intercept

Geopolitics & Empire

DCH: The United Police State of America Has Arrived by Iain Blair, The Intercept

“Politics was always in their job description — whether by origin (slave catchers) or by election or appointment. But under this new order, the police — arm in arm with immigration agents, the military, and the rest of the federal agencies — are starting to function more as political police force. That is, an instrument of a specific regime. City by city, state by state, the police have been reorganizing themselves to align with the priorities of the White House. This is what the free agents of fascism do: They make themselves useful. They figure out how to stay in the mix, how to serve the emergent status quo.”

The Forever Wars have finally come home to roost. The police, immigration enforcers, and federal agencies aren’t merely following orders; they are pre-emptively aligning. That’s the critical distinction. The function of such systems isn’t to defend the state but to anticipate its desires. This is algorithmic governance expressed through bodies, not code: agents reading the drift of authority and repositioning themselves to remain relevant.

This is infrastructural obedience. It’s what happens when the logic of the platform enters governance: every actor, from precinct to federal bureau, becomes a node in a distributed network of compliance. “Making themselves useful” is the civic analog of “engagement optimization.” They don’t enforce because they’re told; they enforce because that’s where the attention and funding flows.

DCH: When a Superpower Declines, Shared Reality Dissolves by Joseph Kellner, Jacobin

“How easy it is to imagine that, in the near future, a patriotic sh*t-stirrer might start feeding key documents of early American history — royal charters, Aztec codices, plantation records, ship manifests, Puritan sermons — into their preferred anti-woke LLM (large language model), toward a revisionist history of this country. And when they find that Jamestown was settled by Slavic-Turkic colonists as early as the fourteenth century … who in America will have the intellectual authority to dispute it?”

Kellner doesn’t merely warn about conspiracy theories; he shows the mechanism by which they will be engineered, distributed, and normalized. The passage is a precise schematic of epistemic warfare: take the archival, feed the AI, warp the narrative, disarm the critic. The power isn’t in the lie; it’s in the capacity to erase the grounds for contestation altogether.

What does Hypernormalization look like in the LLM era? We’re all going to find out soon enough.

CJW: Proposal for Gaza's future governance revealed in leaked draft plan at ABC News (the Strayan one)

A leaked document has revealed details on how the authority charged with governing and rebuilding the Gaza Strip could operate, and how it could be structured.
The proposal suggests a few billionaires who could sit on the board and flags it would include an investment body tasked with generating "real financial returns".
Critics say the plan sidelines Palestinians while giving power to foreigners who are "motivated by capital interests".

Nobody who has been paying attention is at all surprised by this. This plan has nothing to do with Gaza or Palestinians and everything to do with developing a tract of land the genocidal IDF violently demolished for exactly this purpose.

It's disgusting, and if this happens it will be the final nail in the coffin of the idea that capitalism and liberalism are somehow compatible with humanity (as in benevolence, but maybe also the species…).

Just the headlines:

ICE Targets Unaccompanied Immigrant Children, Offering Payment for Deportation by Jonah Valdez, The Intercept
Trump Classifies “Anti-Capitalism” as a Political Pre-Crime by Ben Burgis, Jacobin

Science & Space

“It’s not the vibes; Earth is literally getting darker. Scientists have discovered that our planet has been reflecting less light in both hemispheres, with a more pronounced darkening in the Northern hemisphere, according to a study published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.” Earth Is Getting Darker, Literally, and Scientists Are Trying To Find Out Why by Becky Ferreira at 404 Media
“The sudden reduction in the Chandler wobble, a deviation between Earth’s axis and crust, may primarily originate in a powerful La Niña event, reports a new study.” Earth Was Mysteriously Thrown Off-Kilter In 2015. Now, Scientists Think They Know Why. By Becky Ferreira at 404 Media

Tech & Design

MJW: Extremely offline: what happened when a Pacific island was cut off from the internet by Samanth Subramanian at The Guardian

In the abyssal depths of the ocean, a data cable is a scrawny, unprotected thing, like a snail divested of its shell. Its core consists of fibres of glass, each roughly as thick as a human hair, through which light transmits information at roughly 125,000 miles per second. Around the fibres, there is first a casing of steel for protection, then another of copper to carry electricity to keep the light moving, and then a final sheath of nylon soaked in tar. All this swaddling may sound like plenty of protection, but the layers are all thin, and the final product is – to use the image I heard most often from people in the subsea cable industry – no fatter than a garden hose. These cables sit on the sea floor, conducting 95% of all the world’s international internet traffic. Humans have laid 870,000 miles of fibre optic cables under the ocean, connecting and reconnecting the eyelets on our shorelines, lacing the Earth tightly together. Cables set out from places such as Crescent Beach in Rhode Island, Wall Township in New Jersey and Island Park in New York, and end in locations from Penmarch in France to Bilbao in Spain and Bude in the United Kingdom.

DCH: Our Shared Reality Will Self-Destruct in the Next 12 Months by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker

“At the current rate of technological advance, all reliable ways of validating truth will soon be gone. My best guess is that we have another 12 months to enjoy some degree of confidence in our shared sense of reality.”

Gioia sounds the alarm on epistemic collapse: the substrate of communal trust, factuality, and coherence is under systemic assault. Once we lose reliable anchors — photos, videos, documents — then all discourse fractures, institutions evaporate, and power flows to those who control simulation. This isn’t a sidebar problem of AI; it is the ground war.

I can even imagine new career paths. In the near future, people might work as custodians of reality—a kind of high-powered version of today’s notaries. Their job will be validating the actuality of events and media.

Funny coincidence but I was thinking about this exact idea when I wrote most of the short fictions in our special issue 3000 before I read this piece by Gioia. We’re going to need a whole heap of Truth Architects as I called them.

The Gray Rhino of truth breaking down is pretty much a consistent undercurrent in like 85% of the links I’m sharing in this issue. Might be time for me to spin up another newsletter to tackle the topic specifically. Drop us an email reply if you’d be up for it.

DCH: The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Obsession by Laura Bullard, WIRED

“Instead of the United Nations, filled with interminable and inconclusive parliamentary debates … we should consider … the secret coordination of the world’s intelligence services, as the decisive path to a truly global pax Americana.”

When Thiel proposes the secret coordination of intelligence services as an alternative to parliamentary democracy, he is declaring war on the idea of visible, accountable public institutions. He’s not critiquing democracy so much as bypassing it. And it’s not rhetorical posturing — it’s tactical vision.

The gimmick of “the Antichrist rising by seducing through fear” is precisely how authoritarian narratives get sold. Identify anxiety (technology run amok, civilization unmoored), then offer a savior who promises to suppress the chaos — but only under closed conditions. That’s a durable authoritarian design: crisis, salvation, opacity.

What the article hints at — and what we must take seriously — is that Thiel’s obsession isn’t eccentric theology. It’s a frame for a politics of preemptive control. The myth primes the audience; the architecture enforces its logic. You don’t have to buy the Antichrist story to be governed by its machinery.

In Texas, a stray bullet struck a fiber-optic cable, causing service outages for around 25,000 people in and around Dallas, including in cities like Irving, Plano, and Arlington. A Bullet Crashed the Internet in Texas by Matthew Gault at 404 Media

Just the headlines:

Google Just Removed Seven Years of Political Advertising History from 27 Countries by Samantha Cole, 404 Media

Society & The Culture

DCH: The MAGA Media Takeover by David Karpf, The Atlantic

“What happens if social-media platforms’ data-gathering and profiling engine is turned not to selling merch or promoting political rhetoric, but to profiling enemies? … Imagine if it asks Ellison et al. to identify clusters of people who view, share, and comment on such media. Or imagine if it asks Ellison et al. to identify clusters of people who view and share videos attacking ICE, criticizing ‘Alligator Alcatraz,’ or protecting the undocumented. Look-alike models are a danger in the hands of a budding authoritarian state.”

Karpf stares us in the face with the central danger of platform capture: that the surveillance, profiling, and “look-alike” modeling infrastructure will be weaponized, not for commerce, but to identify and track dissenters. This is not a speculative turn — it’s exactly how data, attention, and algorithmic power mutate when subsumed by state or ideological regimes. He doesn’t merely warn — he shows the blueprint.

CJW: ‘Amoral, evil’: vitriolic backlash builds against comics who played Riyadh festival - Hannah Jane Parkinson at The Guardian

Tim Dillon had his invite rescinded after making a quip about slavery in the kingdom, as did Jim Jefferies after he said: “One reporter was killed by the government … unfortunate, but not a fucking hill that I’m gonna die on.” Outing himself as an absolutely awful person and then not even getting the cash? Unfortunate. Oh, and then there’s the fact that Bill Burr, who did perform, confirmed there was censorship. But “the royals loved the show”, he said – so that’s nice.

Most of these comedians had already shown themselves to be awful people, but this piece really lays it all out in a way that’s hard to deny for any of the parties involved. In the last 2 years we’ve really seen how many people are happy to discard their humanity, for either cash or ideology.

CJW: Alien Minds - KM Nelson at Heat Death

No pull quote because if you haven’t seen the film Nope (written and directed by Jordan Peele) yet, you should really do that first, but I thought this was a really interesting essay. I’ve been meaning to rewatch the movie for months now, and this essay has bumped it up to the top of my list.

I feel like it explains everything that people missed about the film and its point/purpose on its initial release - or at least it’s an angle I didn’t see anyone discussing at that time.

Labour & Economics

DCH: AI Is an Attack From Above on Wages by Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine

“So that sense of the middle quality is getting attacked most, by AI … it makes products that are so much cheaper that they out-compete not on quality, but on price. I think that’s the expectation that we should be operating under with AI … we should see that as an attack from above on wages.”

AI is a scalpel on wages, slicing out the middle, flattening quality, commodifying labor. That phrase “attack from above” is not rhetorical padding; it names the actual direction of force. This is not automation that “replaces jobs” in abstraction: it is engineered wage compression, competitive undercutting via cheap outputs that degrade the value of skilled work.

Blix’s framing subverts the usual AI narrative: it's not about productivity or future shock, it’s already class warfare. The tech doesn’t “disrupt”; it depresses. It undermines the dignity of work, erodes agency, and rewrites what constitutes acceptable labor. The middle, the domain of professional, skilled, stable work, is the battleground. When the machine competes on price instead of quality, it doesn’t need to eliminate jobs entirely to win. It just collapses the wage floor.

DCH: Organizing Amazon Should Be a Priority for Labor Globally by Tom Vickers and Jonathan Roseblum, Jacobin

“Management leaned on workers’ insecurities to threaten that union recognition could lead to delayed pay increases or even the warehouse closing. … They also brought in more than thirty managers from other warehouses … who spent many weeks speaking to workers one-on-one … trying to persuade them against the union.”
“This success in building unity and a democratic process involving hundreds of workers across nationalities and cultures was all the more impressive because Amazon works hard to divide workers.”

What Jacobin captures here is the clash of two architectures: Amazon’s anti-union regime, and the emergent counter-system forged inside the warehouse. The first quote shows how the employer weaponizes isolation, fear, uncertainty, and fragmentation not with brute force but with infiltration and narrative. The anti-union campaign isn’t a surprise, it’s baked in the logistics of control.

The second quote reveals the insurgent logic: unity is structural, not just rhetorical. The triumph is not in winning a ballot (though that matters); it’s in producing relational capacity, cross-language solidarity, and democratic practice inside a workplace engineered to prevent it. They are creating a counter-architecture inside Amazon’s command system.

Just the headlines:

California bans algorithmic price-fixing by Cory Doctorow

Movies + TV

LZ - Valerie and her week of wonders (1970)

You might have seen these pictures before, maybe on Tumblr or any other witchy/aesthetic harbor you may have docked in. I decided to watch the movie from where this comes from, and it seems this is a cult Czech movie that has some On the silver globe vibes, but it also gives The Love Witch, since it was indeed inspired by 70s movies. It's a little chaotic, blending folk traditions with Catholicism and witchcraft, controversial sexual topics, vampirism, witchcraft, female puberty… It's a mess. It's one of those movies that work better as a collage of concepts and symbols than an actual, cohesive narrative about something in particular.

We follow the journey of Valerie, a 13-year-old girl who got her first period and is now discovering herself as a woman, while her grandma makes a pact with a devil figure called Polecat, but also Richard (?) to become young again. She needs Valerie for that though, and it seems that despite her being burned at the stake at one point, she's considered the epitome of purity, and that’s why she's so powerful. It's also a bit complicated because the actress who portrays Valerie was indeed 14 at the time of the filming, and there is nudity, pedophilia, and a nod to incest. It's not that these topics are treated as taboos or in a horror-like way; it's quite normalised, and maybe that's why it's so disconcerting…

LZ: Berserk (1997 series)

I also finally watched Berserk and preferred the old animation. I really like 90s anime, so that was already a pleasure, but the fact that Susumu Hirasawa did the soundtrack was a great surprise that really amazed me. He is also the guy behind Paprika's soundtrack, which I think is monumental as much as the movie itself.

Here we follow the story of this mercenary warrior, Guts, who joins a group of bandits led by Griffith, a guy who dreams of having his own kingdom. He, somehow, manages to form an army, convincing people to fight for his dream, whether for money or by being amazed by his leadership and strategy skills – notoriously, he has never lost a battle. The addition of Guts to the Band of the Falcon only makes their victory streak even longer, until he decides to leave the group to pursue his own dreams.

This is when everything starts to fall apart, and we have the famous event of the eclipse. What was simply a cavalry story of mercenaries conquering fortresses becomes an unhinged occultist animation when Griffith sells his and his fighters’ souls to some entities that grant him godhood. The animation ends in this cliffhanger, and to know what happens next, I need to either watch the new animation or read the manga. I guess I will go for the manga, but we will see. Highly recommended watch, and the hype is not just hype, indeed.

Music

CJW: BLiND | DAMAG3

DAMAG3 has dropped her latest album BLiND, and it’s a fucking blinder. I shared their track Put a Landlord in a Landfill before, which is an all-timer, and this album backs it up brilliantly. Highlight for me is HUNTR_SHAFR, for obvious reasons…

CJW: Magdalena Bay - Second Sleep

Beautiful new song with a gorgeous and weird video clip from Magdalena Bay. I can hear a bit of a Fiona Apple influence coming through (they’ve talked about their shared love of her previously, so I know I’m not imagining things), which I welcome wholeheartedly. Their last album Imaginal Disk is phenomenal from start to finish, so I have high hopes for their next one. I feel like they’re always ahead of the zeitgeist in terms of their visual aesthetics, and the above video is a clear continuation and evolution of what they did in the Imaginal Disk videos, so I can’t wait to see the next ones off this album.

Oh, shit, I haven’t mentioned the new Ethel Cain album yet, have I? Weird, because I’ve been listening to it non-stop (ok, alternating with her album Perverts from earlier this year) for the past month… I will natter on about it next time.

LZ - Łysa Góra - Oj Dolo

I came across this Polish folk band and found it super interesting. It gives some Heilung vibes at times, but with a Slavic inspiration instead. I'm not very knowledgeable about Slavic folk music or folk music in general, besides maybe British, but I found it a good soundtrack while I was reading about history! Props to the track that gives the album its name and also the cover art, and the song Matulu moja that definitely sounds like The Witcher's soundtrack.

LZ: Nihongo Scream! (mix)

This one is a borderline self-promotion, but from time to time, I remember this mix that I created in 2013 with some Japanese rock tracks that I really like and I thought they fit together so well. Not all of them are on Spotify, but I'm attempting to create a similar and complementary playlist there too, if you want to follow. There's a bit of punk, alternative, visual kei and more experimental tracks. Some bands that you will find include Thee Michelle Elephant Gun, Bloodthirsty Butchers, WORLD'S END GIRLFRIEND, Supercar, and also movies/anime/games soundtracks composed by geniuses like Kenji Kawai and Susumu Hirasawa.