nothing here but this electric face

issue 140 - 30th May, 2021

CJW: Welcome to another edition of the nothing here newsletter. We’ve got more of all the good (read: bad) stuff for you.

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The Team

• Corey J. White (CJW) - Changing my name to Earnest.
• Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - I’m also this guy. On a short break due to being Quite Mental. Live and work on Wurundjeri land.
• m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / ecopoet // Dark Extropian Musings / pryvt.rsrch
• Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey

Articles

MKY: On the wildest stretch of the Everest of rivers, China is preparing the mother of all mega dams

Experts believe it could be the riskiest mega structure ever built. Not only is the location prone to massive landslides and some of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded, it’s also precariously close to the disputed border between India and China. Meaning any major project could further escalate discontent in a tense territorial dispute between the world’s two most populous countries…

…the project is a good example of how the Chinese government plans to tackle its green energy targets: through its love of engineering solutions. “The way that they started talking about it, in the Chinese press, reminded me of the way that they’re talking about going to the Moon,” she said. “There is this thing about this being a technological challenge. ‘We’re up for it. We’ve done all the work. Here’s how we’re going to do it’.”

But there is concern about its approach to reigning in its emissions. Groups like International Rivers believe dams are not the answer and that China should be looking to other forms of renewable energy. “So I think we need to ask, ‘At what cost?’ ‘What would be destroyed in the process?’. I think this is not the only route that can or should be explored to carbon neutrality,” Ms Harris said.

‘The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.’

Or, yeah, it sure would be cool if China leapfrogged the west in every way and kept going - the sinofuturist in me loves that idea - but like, can it be done without completely fucking things up for everyone else? All signs point to no. Cool setting for a scifi war tho.

Related:

• Millions of electric cars are coming. What happens to all the dead batteries?
• Fallout from nuclear tests at Maralinga worse than previously thought

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CJW: Is Bioelectricity the Key to Limb Regeneration? - Matthew Hutson at The New Yorker (via Dan Hill)

In 2011, Dany Spencer Adams, a postdoc in Levin’s lab, bathed a frog embryo in a voltage-sensitive dye; in the area of tissue where the face would later form, she saw an electrical pattern, which Levin described as resembling “a paint-by-numbers puzzle.” It was a glowing image of a face.

The researchers suspected that, if they could re-create this “electric face” elsewhere in the body, they would be able to grow a face there, too. They induced the cells in what would become the embryos’ stomach to build extra ion channels, encouraging an electric image of an eye. In the spots where they placed this paint-by-numbers pattern, some of the embryos developed extra eyes. In time, their nervous systems began building optic nerves to connect the new eyes to the brain by way of the spinal cord.

On Michael Levin’s life and work. One for the sci-fi writers.

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DCH: Twenty firms produce 55% of world’s plastic waste, report reveals by Sandra Laville at The Guardian

Twenty companies are responsible for producing more than half of all the single-use plastic waste in the world, fuelling the climate crisis and creating an environmental catastrophe, new research reveals.

As big oil corporations like ExxonMobil pivot to new revenue streams they’re going all in on single use plastics. Same is true of chemical companies like Dow. With much of it being produced in Australia. All bankrolled by the likes of Barclays, HSBC, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase. Can we start guillotining these petrol death cultists yet?

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DCH: Facebook Calls Links To Depression Inconclusive. These Researchers Disagree by Miles Parks at NPR

“The correlational evidence showing that there is a link between social media use and depression is pretty definitive at this point,” said Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University. “The largest and most well-conducted studies that we have all show that teens who spend more time on social media are more likely to be depressed or unhappy.”

Facebook cries “but correlation is not causation” and then deliberately muddies or blocks research into the latter. They also argue that their internal data shows it’s how the kids use Facebook (and Instagram and WhatsApp) that matters. Zombie scrollers are the depressed ones they say. And yet their ad-driven business model benefits most from mindless scrolling. It’s all part of Facebook’s delay deny deflect playbook.

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DCH: ‘FIND THIS FUCK:’ Inside Citizen’s Dangerous Effort to Cash In On Vigilantism by Joseph Cox at Vice

Citizen had gotten a tip that the wildfire was started by an arsonist, and Frame had decided earlier in the night that the fire was a huge opportunity. Citizen, using a new livestreaming service it had just launched called OnAir, would catch the suspect live on air, with thousands of people watching. Frame decided the Citizen user who provided information that led to the suspect’s arrest would get $10,000.

I’ve talked before about the implicit racism baked into neighborhood narc apps like Citizen and Nextdoor (NeKKKdoor) but full-blown live streaming bounty driven vigilante bullshit is practically a Purge movie. Moreover, Citizen has a private security force demanding police powers. Citizen has gone neighborhood watch to a poor man’s VC backed Blackwater in a few years.

Data Viz

CJW: Mapping Israeli occupation - Mohammed Haddad at Al Jazeera

In the following series of graphics Al Jazeera describes why Israel’s military occupation of Palestine remains at the core of this decades-long conflict and how Israeli colonialism shapes every part of Palestinians’ lives.

A lot of information on the history of Israel-Palestine since 1948, with maps and figures.

For more context, I found this recent chat on the Androids and Assets podcast to be really interesting: Palestine +100, In Conversation with Basma Ghalyini and Ra Page. Basma Ghalayini is the editor of the short story collection Palestine +100 (a collection of short stories from Palestinians about Palestine 100 years after the Nakba), and Ra Page is the co-founder of the book’s publisher. They talk about the anthology, some of the stories within it, and also the experience of Palestinians under Israeli occupation.

Related: Throttling Gaza - Dana El Kurd at Sidecar (via Foreign Exchanges)

The [Palestinian Authority] leaders were absent from the resistance efforts in Sheikh Jarrah and the Old City, while Hamas, too, played little role in the uprisings until the airstrikes began. The protest movement of early May was led by grassroots activists, not political parties.

More on the political situation, and US complicity in the ethnic cleansing taking place.

Related: Israel Rounds Up Palestinian Protesters as World Looks Away - Robert Mackey at The Intercept

Newsletters

CJW: The Roads Are Alive - Rob Horning

Generated text can be used to overwhelm human content moderators in any situation, which would presumably drive the adoption of AI for moderation tasks. Together they could function as a generative adversarial network of sorts, producing ever more refined examples of generated text that can evade moderation. As Farrell and Schneier argue, “the danger isn’t just that fake support can be generated for unpopular positions, as happened with net neutrality. It is that public commentary will be completely discredited.” As with deepfakes and the like, the danger is not just that fakes will be taken for real, but that it will become increasingly burdensome to substantiate anything as real. “Reality” would belong to those with the resources to prove it out.

Emphasis mine. After my week of experimenting with GPT-3, I found this section on generated text in the Real Life Mag newsletter to be really interesting, the above section in particular. I can imagine that soon the only way to avoid the plethora of generated text will be to stick to your own carefully moderated silos of trusted media/writers, private chats, and private communities like forums and discord servers (increasing the echo chamber effect, blah blah blah). Same goes for deepfake videos. As ever, the less savvy/discerning will get caught in outrage loops, while important information is lost to the churn. So it’ll be like now, but more accelerated, I guess.

Worth subscribing to the newsletter for Horning’s musings each issue.

Books

CJW: The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins

Bevins did the rounds of a bunch of leftist podcasts when The Jakarta Method came out, but for whatever reason it still took me a few more months to buy it, and a few more months after that to finally read it. I shouldn’t have waited.

If you have any doubts about America’s status as the evil empire of our times, this book should dispel those, detailing US-backed “anticommunist” purges all across the Third World (scare quotes because many of those killed weren’t even communists, and even those who were communists were peaceful, law-abiding citizens whose only crime was daring to hope for something good to come from end of the colonial era).

If you consider yourself a leftist, or even if you’re just concerned about state overreach and imperial/colonial atrocities, this is a must-read.

Reading it has made me entirely sympathetic to the view of some on the left that we should be armed and prepared to defend ourselves.

MKY: very much enjoyed those interviews he did on his podcast tour, and now wishing I’d at least bought that book too. SOON.

Movies + TV

CJW: Way of the Househusband [Netflix]

Tatsu found infamy as the Immortal Dragon - a feared enforcer in the yakuza underworld. For reasons not revealed (in Season 1 at least), he has retired from the yakuza life, taking his attitude and skills into the realm of… domesticity.

I’m not a real anime nerd, so I don’t know the proper terms to describe the format of Way of the Househusband - but each episode is between 15 and 18 minutes long, featuring a few short vignettes of about 3-minutes each. It’s not even fully animated (relying on panning over stills and the like), but it works for what the show is trying to do - the quick cuts and still images help condense things into the small bites of story. (And saying “it works” is an understatement - I laughed out loud during three different sections of the first episode.)

Not only that, but it seems like the show is saying something about toxic masculinity, without relying on cheap gags about how various domestic chores are “women’s work” or any bullshit like that. People who recognise Tatsu from his yakuza life might think that domesticity is below his station considering his reputation, but it’s literally that they’re commenting on - his reputation. They’re not denigrating domestic life itself. Even then, Tatsu inevitably brings these other yakuza into line, performing his duties with honour and skill that none could deny.

Whilst his former life was no doubt soaked in blood, we only see Tatsu use violence to snap other yakuza out of their current way of thinking so they’ll pay attention to his way of the househusband. It demonstrates something important about masculinity (and maybe being more generally), that even when you’re trying your hardest to be a good person it’s easy to fall into these ways of being that have been drummed into you by society, your family, or your associations.

For instance (spoilers for a great gag in the first episode), Tatsu is disappointed that his gift to his wife didn’t work out, and his reaction - to offer to cut off his pinky - is the wrong reaction, but he could only get to that place by caring deeply for his wife and by wanting to do something nice for her. That sort of thoughtfulness is something that we’re told “real men” don’t bother with (recall countless TV shows where the husband forgets about his wife’s birthday full stop, let alone making the effort to know what she would want and going out to buy it for her), and here it’s shown to be a duty that a man can take pride in. There is honour in honouring your wife… even if the transposition of wife and yakuza boss isn’t exactly healthy.

It’ll be interesting to see if/how the show changes as it continues, because a lot of the show essentially relies on the one gag (he’s a tough yakuza guy, but he’s cleaning the house, etc), but I very much enjoyed the first season.

It’s not one to binge though - each episode is already quite condensed, so I think it’s more enjoyable if you stick to watching one a night.

URL

CJW: Can Palestinian Lives Matter? - Sarah Aziza at The Intercept

Palestinians, as a people, are visible but rarely seen. We do not “exist” as others do; we have neither a formal country nor any economic or military power to speak of. We have a history and culture, but these are eroded and appropriated more with every passing year. Mostly, we are collectively obscured by what people think they know, what they think we are: threats, troublemakers, terrorists.

This is how we can be in so many headlines and yet die such endless deaths. We die, in part, because that is what the world expects of us. Our name is invoked only in connection to brutality and strife, which are presented as inevitable, our natural state. Reports read like weather reports: The “climate” “heats up” then “boils over” into “another wave of violence.” Our casualties are like the seasons — a crop of dead every few years, usually in Gaza.

A great piece that draws parallels between apartheid Israel and the white supremacy of the US state in the author’s efforts to highlight the humanity of Palestinians and how it is so often ignored. It’s a shame that parallels need to be drawn in order to make people better pay attention to Palestine and to recognise the humanity of Palestinians, but at least it is happening, and the narrative is beginning to change.

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CJW: Becoming Black: a conversation with Olúfémi Táíwò and Achille Mbembe - at Roar Mag

And so once we think of this aspect of coercive state power as about distributing security by distributing insecurity, it is no longer contradictory that we see the rise of militarized policing, incarcerrality and colonialiaty at the same time as the welfare state recedes. Because both of those are actually moving in the same direction to make some people secure while and by means of perpetuating the insecurity of other people.

So much great stuff in this interview with both Olúfémi Táíwò and Achille Mbembe. The “universalisation of the Black Code,” as Mbembe puts it, is how I see things going if we don’t soon address both climate change and the inequalities inherent in our rampant capitalism (and the white supremacy that underpins it).

This isn’t just turning people into numbers, but rather turning them into a code, into data, that can be stored, circulated and also speculated on, including by finance capital. So there is a de-materialization of the state itself, as it cedes some of its functions to these technologies, which may seem neutral but are not.

Sadly, the above speculation on people has already been pitched by at least one start-up. Silicon Valley seems determined to turn any dystopia we could imagine into reality.

We need an emancipation, which includes humans and non-humans, because the fate of the humans is now more than ever before tied to the fate of other species. The times we live in require a multi-species project.

I could have kept quoting, so instead go read it. And one of these days I’ll get around to reading one of Achille Mbembe’s books…

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CJW: Future Myopia - Mehitabel Glenhaber at Real Life Mag

[…] arguing that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow, [Thomas Schelling] mused that it was possible to “discount” the effects of climate change beyond the year 2000 in economic calculations. Though rising global temperatures would undoubtedly be catastrophic, he acknowledged, there was much uncertainty about how people in the future would live — in other words, maybe future generations would simply, miraculously, solve the problem.

[…]

[…] we were tasked before birth with saving them from the guilt of their own inaction.

This made me fucking angry. I hate economists.

He knows that my life must be very different from his, because he knows that his way of life is not sustainable. And, yet, he does not seem to have put much work into imagining how I might feel about the whole thing.

None of our lives in the West are really sustainable, and the resistance to that realisation may be a big roadblock going forward. I still hear hotted-up cars hooning around the streets near my house and wonder what it must be like to live without this knowledge, grief, and guilt. It’s probably nice, but it’s not exactly helpful.

Anyway, this is a really great essay.

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CJW: The Anxiety of Influencers - Barrett Swanson at Harpers

But I think the issue here is even more mysterious and complex. After all, these kids were very young when their parents gave them iPhones and tablets—they’ve never known a self that wasn’t subject to anonymous virtual observation. And so it may well be that whatever we mean by “authentic” here isn’t the standard definition that Rousseau and the Romantics first fathomed—a true effusion of your unvarnished personality—but is “authentic” in the sense that their identities have been made in perfect, unconscious sympathy with whatever their mob of online followers has deemed agreeable and inoffensive.

I have precisely zero interest in TikTokers, Youtubers, Twitch streamers, etc, but this quote from near the end of the piece gets to the heart of why these are phenomena still worth considering:

[…] if we sneer and snicker at influencers’ desperate quest to win approval from their viewers, it might be because they serve as parodic exaggerations of the ways in which we are all forced to bevel the edges of our personalities and become inoffensive brands.

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DCH: PROTOPIA FUTURES [FRAMEWORK] by monika bielskyte

Both Science Fiction and corporate foresight visions directly influence reality, and their predominantly dystopian/utopian stereotypes limit our understanding of the possibility space of tomorrow’s choices. Protopia research is intended to open such imagination doors so that many others can “walk through them” and take our ideas further than what we could ever do by ourselves. We are here to journey together — with you — in crafting Speculative Fiction world design and foresight practices that challenge, not further entrench, the status quo.

I’m allergic to most people who brand themselves as a “futurist.” Too often they’re myopic and can’t see beyond their own vested interests in capitalism. Monika is different. She’s worked with indigenous communities across the globe and can imagine a better, more inclusive way forward.

Cutting Room Floor

• 11 Children Killed in Gaza Were Part of a Programme Helping Them With Trauma - Matthew Champion at Vice World News
• ​This is not a conflict. This is apartheid - Inès Abdel Razek at Roar Mag
• Israel Airstrikes Tatter Strained Gaza Health Care System - Shrouq Aila and Anna Therese Day at The Intercept
• Nations Must Drop Fossil Fuels, Fast, World Energy Body Warns - at New York Times (via Foreign Exchanges)
• Loophole lets soya farmers tear down the Amazon - Andrew Wasley, Alexandra Heal, André Campos, Daniel Camargos at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
• Chileans Voted for an End to Neoliberalism - Pablo Abufom at Jacobin
• German soldier who posed as refugee on trial for terror plot
• The billionaire boom: how the super-rich soaked up Covid cash
• How the cult of Bill Gates is leading us towards a climate disaster - Verner Viisainen at Varsity
• Manufacturing mRNA Vaccines is Surprisingly Straightforward - Cory Doctorow
• We’re going to radically transform our cities — or abandon them - mentions Cities of Light which we featured here recently.
• An incomparable intellectual who fell through the cracks of history
• Tom Holland, Zendaya’s ‘Lip Sync Battle’: How It Happened
• Breaking the Waves: Britney Spears and Lars von Trier in Lockdown - Philippa Snow at LA Review of Books - CJW: Powerful stuff.
• We have great disaster movies. Now we need climate survival movies - by Maddie Stone for Polygon
• As You Were - Alexander Billet at Real Life Mag
• The Gig Economy’s Business Model Is a Roadblock to Fighting Climate Change and The Gig Economy’s Business Model Is a Racial Justice Issue by Edward Ongweso Jr at Vice
• Chinese hackers posing as the UN Human Rights Council are attacking Uyghurs by Patrick Howell O’Neill at MIT Technology Review
• Facebook says U.S. is among top 5 sources of influence operations by Igor Golovniov at Protocol