nothing here but total collapse
issue 327 - 11th October, 2026
CJW: Welcome welcome good and fine people. We’re back, and so are you, so let’s get to it.
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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. Meme collector.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, see through.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer and purveyor of melancholy whimsy.
Geopolitics & Empire
DCH: CIA Report Warns Israel Could Head Toward Civil War, Total Collapse - Aida Chavez
CIA experts pointed to a volatile mix of pressures converging ahead of Israel’s elections on October 27: economic crisis and soaring military spending; heavily armed veterans returning from prolonged combat, many carrying serious psychological trauma; growing fury over ultra-Orthodox men who are exempt from military service; escalating settler violence in the occupied West Bank; and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fighting to hold onto power and igniting a constitutional crisis.
From the CIA’s mouth to God’s ears I suppose.
CJW: Inshallah.
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DCH: Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey’s new Pentagon roles raise ethics worries - Katie McQue and Tom Bowman at NPR
“It’s a massive conflict of interest,” said a former senior Defense Department official who requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal from the Trump administration. The official said that not only do both Luckey and Musk have billions of dollars in current defense contracts, but the study could also shape the types of munitions the U.S. buys in the future. For example, it could recommend more drones or space-based assets, which both Luckey and Musk build, and fewer tanks, which they don’t build.
The Pentagon has handed its future-of-warfare brief to the two men with the most to sell into it. SpaceX has already collected over $8 billion in defense contracts this year, and the department won’t say whether Musk and Luckey sit on the project as employees, who are bound by federal criminal law, or as contractors, who are not.
Tech & Design
DCH: Rogue None: Demystifying the Attack on Hugging Face - Kip Voytek
Despite the basic facts above, nearly all of the mainstream coverage and too much of the tech coverage uses volitional words ascribing intent and motive to these bits of software. I’ve become tedious to friends and even myself in “actually….” corrections, but eternal vigilance (in my case, eternal pissiness) is the price we pay to keep our heads on when it comes to AI. Volitional and anthropomorphic language is dramatic, helps create a narrative, and is easier to grasp than technical details. But that language ultimately diminishes our collective understanding of AI and reduces our agency as humans to regulate and use it.
Good read from a friend of the newsletter laying out the criti-hype around the “hugging face incident.”
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DCH: How the stories about all-powerful AI are swallowing the world - Brian Merchant
“I invented the term artificial intelligence,” the Stanford computer scientist John McCarthy said in 1973, “and I invented it because we had to do something when we were trying to get money for a summer study in 1956.” A more pedestrian, jargon-filled proposal had previously failed to get traction; “artificial intelligence” turned committee heads and got the funding.
Merchant on the history of AI branding and narrative building on the back of Trump’s “super intelligence” rebrand.
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"We must return to 1990s-type hysterics with regards to the internet. Refuse to take anything or anyone at face value. Assume that everything you see is a falsehood tailor-made to mislead or manipulate you. If it seems too good to be true, if it reinforces your beliefs in a neat little way, it's probably AI-generated." - Everything is Fake - Merritt K
Just the headlines:
Federal Judge Rules a Flock Search Was ‘Indiscriminate Mass Surveillance’ and Unconstitutional - Jason Koebler at 404 Media
Surveillance Finds a Way - Jason Koebler at 404 Media
Society & The Culture
CJW: An Editor on Generative AI: The Tool That Blunts the User - Lauren Elise Daniels at Ruadán Books
In Jon Winokur’s Writers on Writing, British novelist and Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing offered, “Always the same advice: learn to trust your own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad—including your own bad” (Running Press Book Publishers, 1986). Lessing emphasizes that writerly wisdom evolves from the practice itself. There’s no shortcut. Writers toil. We write and delete and rewrite. We get harsh feedback that makes us howl privately but we still look for the truth in the criticism and seek out where readers stumbled. We read, study, redefine our approaches, and our creations are born. Our voices solidify and we strive to experiment and reach even further next time. We can’t skip any of this, but skipping is exactly what gen AI encourages us to do.
I’ve seen dozens of people say similar things on social media, but this piece - building on writings from Doris Lessing, who is brilliant - should leave you with no doubts about the “value” of AI use in your writing practice.
This in particular landed hard for me:
Contemporary readers expect stories to be stronger and driven by accurate portrayals from qualified sources. Rather than skimming characters’ physical or psychological features, writers have been delivering more multidimensional cast members who read as reflections of our humanity. If writers borrow from another culture, it’s with sensitivity and endorsement. But I’m seeing gen AI inviting a return to a colonizer mindset of theft without recourse.
We’ve seen Own Voices be reduced to a hashtag and a marketing category, which is what we expect from capitalism, but the importance of Own Voices hasn’t been diminished by that. Read Alison Rumfitt’s Tell Me I’m Worthless or Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians and tell me that the authors’ identities and lived experiences aren’t a large part of how they were able to write such incredible books.
And now, we have generative AI models, trained on decades (centuries?) of stolen text, text that is often soiled by the prejudices of its time and/or author, and you’re asking it to write something that can speak to the current moment? Coloniser mindset is exactly right.
You need to figure out what you want to say - what you need to say - and a fucking LLM isn’t going to help you do that. In fact, it’s actively going to stop you from ever being able to do it for yourself.
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DCH: The 4chan-Coded Ideology Behind Elon Musk’s War on Normies - Julia Métraux at Mother Jones
DOGE, with its infamous squad of young engineers, offers a deeply relevant case study in reckless, egotistical overconfidence. With almost no applicable expertise, Musk and his DOGE bros have stormed the government, canning nuclear safety officers (whom they were swiftly forced to rehire), erasing living people from Social Security databases, accessing sensitive health and tax information. As seen earlier in his Twitter takeover, Musk’s certainty that he knows best manifests as an unhesitating eagerness to “disrupt” and dismantle services without regard to the harms to employees or the public at large.
Silicon Valley spent two decades marketing a diagnosis as a competitive edge, and Musk is the heir who cashed it in. Peter Thiel called a mild form of Asperger’s an entrepreneur’s advantage, Sam Bankman-Fried’s defence team turned the same label into a plea for leniency, and 4chan built a brotherhood around it that rates robot wives above women. Tech bros found a way to weaponise a diagnosis.
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CJW: The Reason Why Colleges Still Fail to Address Sexual Violence (Archive Link) - Andrea González-Ramírez at The Cut
One of the biggest myths is that men rape by mistake. Like, “Oh, they need consent training.” But research is very clear: Sexual violence is not a mistake. It is an intentionally made decision by people who know they don’t have consent. They just don’t prioritize consent over things like status, power, domination, and sexual gratification.
For my research, I got a certificate of confidentiality from the National Institutes of Health, so my notes couldn’t be subpoenaed. One of the reasons I call them perpetrators in my work is because every single person I interviewed confessed in that context. The first question I would ask them was, “When you received that email from Title IX that you were under investigation, did you know what it was about?” Every perpetrator I interviewed said “yes.” If sexual assault were a miscommunication, you would be wondering, What have I possibly done wrong? That is not the way that any of them reacted because they knew.
On the absolutely fucked state of Title IX rules under the Trump administration.
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Tragedy called for a radical change in my male friendships - Rajeev Balasubramanyam at Psyche - CJW: For now obvious reasons, I often really struggled to know what it meant to be a man and to do it well. I’m not a man, but some of you might genuinely be, so give this a read and see if you couldn’t do with something deliberate like this in your life.
Labour & Economics
DCH: California just passed the strongest AI labor laws in the US - Brian Merchant
They cover a lot of ground: One bans managers from using AI to discipline or fire workers without human oversight, one outlaws any kind of AI surveillance in workplace bathrooms, one bans the use of AI to surveil or predict workers’ emotional states—and yes, a growing number of companies really try to do this—while another designates that licensed healthcare workers must remain the decision makers in clinical settings; not AI.
Gavin Newsom remains an obsequious turd but these new laws are at least a start. Hopefully other states and countries take note and follow suit.
Movies + TV
LZ: Monster (2004)
It took me a while to watch this anime, even though it was recommended so many times. Although it has 74 episodes, they are all 20 minutes. Some of them are pretty much fillers, so it can get a little annoying at some point, but I guess that’s normal for anime that was released back in that time, for TV. It tells the story of a Japanese brain surgeon who has built his career in Germany. He saves the life of a boy who was shot in the head after being put in a dilemma on whether to save the child or the mayor. Believing that all lives are equal, he decides to save the child despite political pressures, but it turns out that the boy grew up to become a serial killer.
The anime is mostly a discussion on evil and good, if we are born or raised to be evil, if justice is even something that exists, and if fairness is possible. But despite the bleakness of the topics, I think the overall message is quite positive: there are many more good people than evil ones, though evil ones do exist. I’ve seen people question, even if the main villain, the serial killer himself, is definitely someone to be labeled as evil, because of the circumstances of his life. But all in all, while the anime is very well built, it can still leave you a bit frustrated at the end, so be aware of that.
CJW: I’ve started Monster twice, after my old editor at tordotcom publishing suggested it to me between the writing of Killing Gravity and Void Black Shadow. I wouldn’t say I bounced off it, rather that the pacing issues that Lidia brought up got in the way. But I’ve been meaning to get back to it, because what I watched was interesting.
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LZ: The Coffee Table (2022)
A friend recommended this one to me and wanted to know how I would feel while watching it, since he perceived it as being very anxiety-inducing. Well, that's really it, but at the same time, it felt so trashy that I almost thought of Troma movies.
It tells the story of this Spanish couple, Jesús and María (yes, I know), who go shopping for furniture for their apartment right after they have just had their first child. They are met by a questionable seller who is really pushing this Swedish table with an even more questionable aesthetic.
It's quite interesting how the characters deal with that common trope in horror movies, especially in times of Obsession – María keeps asking the seller why he's so pushy with that table, if he himself has one, and so forth. So there were many opportunities to just let it go, but apparently, María is very dominant in this relationship, so Jesús decides to buy the table out of spite.
Turns out the table wasn't really cursed or anything; the problem is Jesús's chronic inefficiency. I obviously felt anxious during the movie, but it mostly pissed me off and made me laugh because there are some really silly jokes. I can't really tell what happens after that, or I'll spoil the movie, but I can only say that, to me, it's a movie about useless, passive men and how the very moment you count on them, they fuck up big time.
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MJW: The Fall (2013)
I’ve been made redundant, so I have been unhealthily coping (not coping?) by doing nothing but watching extremely dark British crime dramas. My first was three seasons of 2013’s The Fall starring Gillian Anderson and Jamie Dornan (over two days. Eeep.)
The Memes
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