nothing here but thirsty bots
issue 249 - 17th March, 2024
CJW: Hi all, and welcome back to another issue. We're happy to have you.
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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. Middle-aged greying goth.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, glitch dreamer.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Journalist, MA in semiotics, and PhD in Arts.
Climate Change & The Environment
DCH: Thirsty Bots Are Drinking Our Scarce Water by Nathan Gardels at Noema
According to a new study by University of California Riverside researchers, roughly two weeks of training for GPT-3 consumed about 700,000 liters of freshwater. The global AI demand is projected by 2027 to account for 4.2-6.6 billion cubic meters of water withdrawal, which is more than the total annual water withdrawal of Denmark or half of the United Kingdom.
AI likely to increase energy use and accelerate climate misinformation – report by Oliver Milman at The Guardian
“We can see AI fracturing the information ecosystem just as we need it to pull it back together,” Khoo said. “AI is perfect for flooding the zone for quick, cheaply produced crap. You can easily see how it will be a tool for climate disinformation. We will see people micro-targeted with climate disinformation content in a sort of relentless way.”
The obvious 1-2 punch of AI on the climate crisis. More consumption of scarce resources (and prolonging the use of coal) + more readily available climate disinformation. As with most things tech, the promise of AI to help fight off climate change is overhyped at our own peril.
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CJW: Dry Run - George Monbiot
Above all, we need to change our diets. Those of us with dietary choice (in other words, the richer half of the world’s population) should seek to minimise the water footprint of our food. With apologies for harping on about it, this is yet another reason to switch to an animal-free diet, which reduces both total crop demand and, in most cases, water use. The water demand of certain plant products, especially almonds and pistachios in California, has become a major theme in the culture wars, as rightwing influencers attack plant-based diets. But, excessive as the watering of these crops is, more than twice as much irrigation water is used in California to grow forage plants to feed livestock, especially dairy cows. Dairy milk has much higher water demand even than the worst alternative (almond milk), and is astronomically higher than the best alternatives, such as oat or soya milk.
Monbiot on our current and forthcoming water scarcity issues.
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The Extraordinary Lives Of Coast Redwoods - Daniel Lewis at Noema Mag - CJW: A fascinating long read. If you're interested in nature, make time for this one.
"The majority of children born today will never see the Milky Way." - Protecting Dark Sky Country - Caia Hagel and Tim Georgeson at Noema Mag
How Facebook Contributes to the Demise of Endangered Species by Marina Wang at Undark
Geopolitics & Empire
CJW: After Ukraine, US readies 'transnational kill chain' for Taiwan proxy war - K.J. Noh at Geopolitical Economy Report
In other words, Link 16 supplies a brain and nervous system to the various deadly limbs and arms that the Taiwan authorities have been acquiring and preparing on the prompting of the US. It ensures interoperability and US control.
It effectively prepares Taiwan to be used as the spear tip and trigger of a multinational war offensive against China.
[...]
This thus signals that aggressive total war against China is being prepared, in granular, lethal fashion on tactical and operational levels.
I'm sure this is fine. Cooperation in the face of existential climate threats just won't do.
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CJW: Israel’s Flour Massacre in Gaza Is a Horrific War Crime - Seraj Assi at Jacobin
On Thursday at dawn, Israeli troops unleashed a barrage of gunfire on a crowd of starving Palestinians waiting for aid trucks in Gaza City, killing over one hundred people and wounding more than one thousand others. The death toll is expected to rise as most hospitals in Gaza have ceased operating, having run out of fuel, medicine, and blood.
Footage shows Israeli soldiers firing indiscriminately at thousands of civilians who gathered at al-Nabulsi roundabout at al-Rasheed Street to receive flour from aid trucks. Medical sources report that most victims were shot directly in the head, chest, or stomach. Jadallah al-Shafei, the nursing director at al-Shifa hospital in northern Gaza, told Al Jazeera: “All injuries result from gunfire and artillery shells; [Israeli] claims of a stampede are entirely fabricated.”
If you ever start to think there might be a limit to the atrocities the IDF will gleefully commit, they will surely find a way to surprise you.
I wasn't sure if I was going to share it because everyone has read about the flour massacre by now, but of course, it has happened again. As I said on BlueSky, the term "flour massacre" is so dense with horror it should be the name of a single historical atrocity, but for the IDF it's just a fucking tactic.
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"Twenty-one years have passed since the Gujarat pogrom, and I can now see how right he was. The India of my parents is not just gone; it’s ruled by the man who helped orchestrate the pogrom, and in the years since he came to power, anti-Muslim hatred and violence has only skyrocketed into a genocidal crescendo." - The US Hindu Right Is Still Whitewashing the Gujarat Pogrom - Safa Ahmed at Jacobin
The IMF’s Policies Are Destroying Kenya, Again - Nicholas Ford at Jacobin - CJW: IMF lending is just colonialism through financial instruments. A better way is possible, but current arrangements suit the West too much for things to change.
“Israel’s investments over the past decade began to pay off as the details of the Oct. 7 massacre spilled over into the policy discourse. Several artificial intelligence (AI) companies in Israel and the United States that were supporting Israeli information warfare before the war began were ready to roll into action. Within days of the Hamas attack, Akooda, an Israeli technology company, created Words of Iron, an AI-powered application users could use to amplify social media posts and narratives supporting Israel and report posts critical of Israel—all while seeming grassroots and authentic.” How Israel Mastered Information Warfare in Gaza by Alessandro Accorsi at Foreign Policy
“Two of the three victims specifically singled out by the New York Times in a marquee exposé published in December, which alleged that Hamas had deliberately weaponized sexual violence during the October 7 attacks, were not in fact victims of sexual assault, according to the chief spokesperson for the Kibbutz Be’eri, which the Times identified as the location of the attack.” Kibbutz Be’eri Rejects Story in New York Times October 7 Exposé: “They Were Not Sexually Abused" by Jeremy Scahill, Ryan Grim The Intercept
The West Is Still Oblivious to Russia’s Information War by Ian Garner at Foreign Policy
Just the headlines:
UNRWA report says Israel coerced some agency employees to falsely admit Hamas links - Times of Israel
US sends Israel 100+ weapons shipments. Most Americans oppose it – but Biden ignores them. by Ben Norton at Geopolitical Economy
Science & Space
CJW: Exo-Ecologies: Notes on Intra-planetary and Inter-planetary Becomings - Jonas Staal at e-flux (via Territories)
Musk argues that either “we stay on Earth forever and then there will be an inevitable extinction event” or “become a spacefaring civilization, and a multi-planetary species.” But this is a false representation of the facts. Musk himself is a chief cause of the extinction event from which he is fleeing. One could even say that extinction is a marketing tool to pitch new electric cars, geoengineering industries, and martian settlement projects. In other words, this extractive model is the extinction event, a culmination of the slow violence manifesting across five hundred years of colonial extermination and empire-building on earth, and now beyond. This means that to alter the conditions of our exo-ecology we have to establish intra-planetary solidarity among human and nonhuman earth workers. Intra-planetarism, rather than inter-planetarism, aims to deepen earthbound social and ecological relations. Only the recognition and dismantling of the colonial and imperialist mindset and the infrastructures that are driving climate collapse on earth can lay the foundation for becoming interplanetary in a meaningful way—not as “colonists” and “pioneers,” but as guests and comrades. Travel not to “discover” but to encounter.
A great essay - written in conjunction with an art installation also detailed here - about confronting and meaningfully addressing our current colonial and hierarchical systems so we don't take them into space as we expand beyond the Earth, looking at the history of space research and travel and also the private industry/billionaire-fuckwit aspect of current space development.
Tech & Design
DCH: Are We Watching The Internet Die? by Edward Zitron + Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI by Erik Hoel at The Intrinsic Perspective
I am not saying that user-generated content will disappear, but that human beings cannot create content at the scale that automation can, and when a large chunk of the internet is content for robots, that is the content that will inform tomorrow's models. The only thing that can truly make them better is more stuff, but when the majority of stuff being created isn't good, or interesting, or even written for a human being, ChatGPT or Claude's models will learn the rotten habits of rotten content. This is why so many models' responses sound so similar — they're heavily dependent on the stuff they're fed for their outputs, and so much of their "intelligence" comes from the same training data.
Now that generative AI has dropped the cost of producing bullshit to near zero, we see clearly the future of the internet: a garbage dump. Google search? They often lead with fake AI-generated images amid the real things. Post on Twitter? Get replies from bots selling porn. But that’s just the obvious stuff. Look closely at the replies to any trending tweet and you’ll find dozens of AI-written summaries in response, cheery Wikipedia-style repeats of the original post, all just to farm engagement. AI models on Instagram accumulate hundreds of thousands of subscribers and people openly shill their services for creating them. AI musicians fill up YouTube and Spotify. Scientific papers are being AI-generated. AI images mix into historical research. This isn’t mentioning the personal impact too: from now on, every single woman who is a public figure will have to deal with the fact that deepfake porn of her is likely to be made. That’s insane.
If this was a game of Clue the solve would be “Venture Caplitalists, in Silicon Valley, with generative AI." The real question to me is how long can their monopoly position protect them from whatever commercial blowback that might come from this mass enshittification of the internet. “Personal rejection” on an individual basis hasn’t seemed to change much so far…
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"Personal rejection is a welcome development, but as the web declines, we need to consider what a better alternative could look like and the political project it would fit within. We also can’t fall for any attempt to cast a libertarian “declaration of independence” as a truly liberatory future for everyone." The digital revolution has failed by Paris Marx
"The warning message and chatbot were deployed by Pornhub as part of a trial program, conducted with two UK-based child protection organizations, to find out whether people could be nudged away from looking for illegal material with small interventions. A new report analyzing the test, shared exclusively with WIRED, says the pop-ups led to a decrease in the number of searches for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and saw scores of people seek support for their behavior." - A Pornhub Chatbot Stopped Millions From Searching for Child Abuse Videos - Matt Burgess at Wired - CJW: Not surprising to see Pornhub doing more about CSAM on its platform than Meta.
The Deeper Problem With Google’s Racially Diverse Nazis by Chris Gilliard at The Atlantic + Practico-inertia by Rob Horning + Google made an A.I. so woke it drove men mad by Max Read (DCH: a trio of good reads about Google’s latest fuck up.)
Here Come the AI Worms by Matt Burgess at Wired
The brief history of artificial intelligence: The world has changed fast – what might be next? by Max Roser ay Our World in Data
AI Prompt Engineering Is Dead at IEEE
Society & The Culture
CJW: In the Gold Castle With Aaron - Charlotte Shane
What Aaron did was holy. I can’t explain that to anyone, and I won’t argue about it. You either see it or you don’t. The vicious bickering online, about suicide and mental health and the military and which white American deserves the badge of caring the most about Palestinians, the aggressive denial of the point, was so corrosive to me until I reminded myself that it’s not for me and I don’t have to read it. Other people not knowing doesn’t change the truth, so why would their not knowing change my recognition of it? People in Gaza know, and people in Yemen. Millions of people around the world don’t worry that acknowledging the sacredness of Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation is proof that they're actually, somehow, very bad. And I don’t need anyone apathetic in the face of genocide to tell me what does and doesn’t matter. I don’t trust people who don’t know what it means to live to tell me what it means to die.
Emphasis mine. I wouldn't have thought of it in those terms, but I agree with Shane wholeheartedly. That sacrifice in the face of so much hate and death and loss is sacred. A life given to send the message that This is enough. It's awful too - that the world has to lose someone who cares about their fellow people to such an intense degree, that we lose the work they might have done if not for the crushing weight of witnessing genocide and the normalisation of it. And it's awful that so many pushing for, carrying out, and facilitating the genocide in Gaza will never face justice.
The only thing we can do is continue to stand and shout and fight. Free Palestine.
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CJW: The World as Data - Frank Lantz (via Drew Austin)
A fantastic write-up of some new(ish) video forms and their unique affects culminating in a sort of "consciousness porn." No obvious pull quotes, but have a read and check out any videos that interest you.
DCH: I used to work with Frank back in the late 90s
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MJW: So You've Found Out Your Adult Child is a Sex Worker by Jessie Sage at The Tryst Blog
My parents, on the other hand, grew up in a world where sex work stigma has colored their perception of who sex workers are and what it is we do. Talking to them about my work, as it turns out, has been one of the hardest things that I’ve ever done. This is not hyperbole. The rift that my work caused in my relationship with my mom, who I was closest to, has been so devastating that I have not (until now) been able to talk about it publicly. I also haven’t been able to talk to her about it. Indeed, there was a time when we couldn’t speak to each other at all.
This is a really awesome article where Jessie Sage interviews her mother on what it was like to find out her daughter was a sex worker, and not take it well. It’s a heartfelt and honest piece, and serves as a really great resource for parents who aren’t as open to their adult childs career choices.
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DCH: Kate Middleton and the End of Shared Reality by Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic
For the uninitiated: Yesterday, in celebration of Mother’s Day in the U.K., the Royal Family released a portrait on Instagram of Kate Middleton with her three children. But this was no ordinary photo. Middleton has been away from the public eye since December reportedly because of unspecified health issues, leading to a ceaseless parade of conspiracy theories. Royal watchers and news organizations naturally pored over the image, and they found a number of alarming peculiarities. According to the Associated Press, “the photo shows an inconsistency in the alignment of Princess Charlotte’s left hand”—it looks to me like part of the princess’s sleeve is disappearing. Such oddities were enough to cause the AP, Agence France-Presse, and Reuters to release kill notifications—alerts that the wire services would no longer distribute the photo. The AP noted that the photo appeared to have been “manipulated.”
Let me preface this by saying I could not care less about the fucking royals. If Kate’s recovering from surgery then whatever. If she’s been turned into a Sleestak then whatever. I just don’t care. waves hands at the rest of the email There are more important things to spend your worry on.
The reason I share this at all is because I’ve personally seen this turn into a gateway drug into conspiracy thinking for good friends who really should know better. Is it great that there’s a demonstration of visual literacy at play here? Yes. Would it be better used being more critical of government propaganda propping up a genocide? Also yes. I worry this Kate Middleton mess is going to turn into a Pizzagate moment for center-left adjacent folks.
I know people think this is just them engaging with what seems to be a playful conspiracy of old but that ship sailed a long time ago.
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The Spectacle of Policing - Rick Perlstein at American Prospect (via Dr Damien Williams)
Just the headlines:
Biometrics Giant Accenture Quietly Took Over LA Residents’ Jail Reform Plan by Akela Lacy at The Intercept
Health, Cooking, and Related
CJW: Disabled people's exclusion from indoor spaces is a civil rights violation, not an annoyance - Julia Doubleday
Long COVID is the faulty, load-bearing beam in the rickety pandemic denial superstructure. Were the public to grasp how common and how severe it is, the entire post-pandemic facade would come crumbling down.
Therefore, as Long COVID patients become louder, as their presence becomes more undeniable, as their numbers grow, the COVID normalization project must pivot from attempting to disappear these victims to steadily stigmatizing them.
A great response to the bullshit piece in NPR recently, where a woman complained about her husband being "afraid" of getting Long COVID again.
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DCH: Palantir’s NHS-stealing Big Lie - Cory Doctorow
This approach is cheaper, safer, and more effective than handing hundreds of millions of pounds to Palantir and hoping they will manage the impossible: anonymising data well enough that it is never re-identified. Trusted Research Environments have been endorsed by national associations of doctors and researchers as the superior alternative to giving the NHS's data to Peter Thiel or any other sharp operator seeking a public contract.
I was one of a handful of whistleblowers that leaked Palantir’s involvement with NHSX at the start of the pandemic so I’m always keeping an eye out for how this develops. Great read from Cory about how much more effective trusted research environments are than whatever slop Palantir would deign to share.
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Mystery in Japan as dangerous streptococcal infections soar to record levels - Justin McCurry at The Guardian
Syphilis Is Killing Babies. The U.S. Government Is Failing to Stop the Disease From Spreading. by Anna Maria Barry-Jester at ProPublica
The Soaring Cost of Long COVID by Cameron Abadi at Foreign Policy
The Return of Measles by Daniel Engber at The Atlantic
Roe Was Never Enough to Ensure Reproductive Freedom by Jordan Smith at The Intercept
Labour & Economics
DCH: The Real Reason Britain Can’t Change by Marie Le Conte at Foreign Policy
This is, or ought to be, the real thesis of Turning Points: Britain keeps muddling through, largely unchanged, because it cannot escape from the vicious circle governing it. The political class isn’t especially interested in the past and the lessons it can hold. It finds the idea of thinking deeply and precisely about the future to be a waste of time. Anything that happens today might just about be of interest, though it will probably be forgotten tomorrow.
The press, on the other hand, is opinionated and has a fierce memory. It doesn’t forgive or forget, and it is clear in its aims. More than inform its readers, it seeks to reshape the country in their image. Speaking of former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre, journalist Peter Oborne once said that “he articulates the dreams, fears and hopes of socially insecure members of the suburban middle class.” In practice, this can look like support for “traditional” families, an inherent suspicion of local authorities, mistrusting anything that feels “foreign,” sneering at feminists, stoking anti-immigration sentiment, and fighting for good, honest, British values, whatever they are. These days, hatred of anything deemed “woke” is likely to feature in tabloid pages.
It's a rare book review that works harder at making its points than the book being reviewed. Marie Le Conte does more in a single article to concisely explain the root cause of British political malaise than all the books mentioned in the piece. The media establishment has dominated the political class since at least the 60s. First during Cecil King’s dynasty and then after with Rupert Murdoch.
And this is also probably why we’re the second saddest country in the world…
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Forty Years Later, the Miners’ Strike Leaves Bitter Memories by Diarmaid Kelliher at Jacobin
Books
LZ: El alfabeto simbólico de los animales. Los bestiarios de la Edad Media, by Francesco Zambon
Bought this book while visiting the Prado Museum in Madrid. It is a compilation of medieval bestiaries and their takes on specific animals, both real and fantastic such as the dove and the phoenix. Zambon focuses mostly on The Physiologist, the first and most known bestiary, but he also goes through poetry and religious artwork to address the depiction and the meaning of these animals in medieval times. While ancient Greeks tried to be more scientific when describing animals, bestiaries take on a more moralistic approach, so most of the animals, such as the dove and the phoenix, end up being analogies to Christ or Christian morality. It's still very interesting if you consider gargoyles in churches or even the inclusion of animals in religious images. And, coincidentally, it was in the Prado museum that I had the pleasure and happiness of seeing the actual Zurbarán's Agnus Dei painting.
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MJW: Spread Edited by Rachel Aimee, Eliyanna Kaiser and Audacia Ray
Spread was a NY-based magazine for sex workers published between 2005 and 2011, and now some of the essays contained therein have been republished by The Feminist Press. It wasn’t strictly US-centric, with perspectives from Thailand and India as well as the US. Separated into sections (workplace, labour, family and relationships, clients, violence, resistance, and media and culture), Spread has a wide range of essays and articles about the issues sex workers faced then, and still face now. But there’s room for joy too!
Games
Upcoming game that might be the cup of tea of those who liked playing Alien or Dead By Daylight and watching Prometheus and The Thing. One can't guess if the graphics will be as sick as they look in the preview videos, but if they are, holy crap I need to play this one. It gives somehow Half-Life vibes, I think, so only the OG influences here. However, it's a multiplayer game, so this could be the death of all the good intentions. Still, I hope it's not a flop!
Music
Absolutely obsessed with this new and second live album released by the Siberian band Grima. As if Hunger God wasn't already mesmerizing when recorded in the studio, it being played live is just breathtaking. They also released their first video clip, which is actually a 24-minute footage of them playing the album in the forest and in the dark, of course. It has more or less the same vibe as Mephorash's live footage released during Covid too – both great watches.
The Self-Promotion
LZ: Instagram profile for my paintings
My personal profile is locked, but I created this one to share my drawings. I will soon start selling prints in case anyone is interested.
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LZ: Here we are, waiting for you
I also published the translation to English of a short story that I published last year, originally in Portuguese. It is based on an urban myth about the subway stations Alberdi and Pascal, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Some say that they have seen hauntings there and they are possibly the ghosts of the workers that were killed in a landslide accident that happened at the beginning of the last century. They were Italian workers that moved to Argentina, where you can still find the biggest community of Italians outside of Italy. The format is a bit more experimental, so hopefully you'll enjoy this horror tale with some bits and pieces of politics.
The Memes
