nothing here but toxic feudalism

issue 163 - 9th January, 2022

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CJW: Happy New Year! As they say, New Year, New Sletter.

I don’t know how things are in your part of the world, but omicron sure is surging here in Melbourne (and other parts of Australia). I could say more (I did, and then I deleted it, because we’ve all heard/said it before), but instead I’ll just say: look out for those closest to you and embrace mutual aid. Sometimes it seems like that’s all we have, because sometimes it is all we have.

Anyway. The start of a new year is a great time to jump on board with a premium subscription, nudge nudge, wink wink. We really appreciate the support.

If you would like to support us, you’ve got two options:

• $5 monthly subscription.
• $50 annual subscription.

Both options will give you access to the full bonus archive, as well as new bonuses as they are posted.

Our latest bonus is Batman Returns: A Bativity Scene, spiritual sequel to our 2020 holiday special Prometheus: A Christmas Carol.

And our latest unlocked bonus is Big tech enslaves and murders Muslim minorities from DCH.

Now, let’s begin.

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The Team

• Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey

• m1k3y (MKY) - @eattrainrevolt

• Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Author, memoirist, very short person.

• Corey J. White (CJW) - Author, podcaster, sin-eater.

• Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Journalist, MA in semiotics, and PhD in Arts. Sci-fi writer, futurology researcher and essayist. @lidiazuin

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Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: The Democratic Republic of Congo faces pressure to preserve its peatlands or develop them for profit - Max Bearak, Chris Mooney, John Muyskens at Washington Post (via Foreign Exchanges)

At around 56,000 square miles (about the size of Iowa) and more than 30 feet deep in places, the peatland Congo shares with its neighbor, the Republic of Congo, holds at least as much carbon as the whole world currently emits in three years of burning fossil fuels.

[…]

Will Congo follow history and replicate European and Asian peat-to-farmland economies? Will the government move forward with drilling for the vast quantities of oil some claim lies underneath the peat; will it lease the rainforest to loggers? Or will conservation-minded institutions, mostly in the West, come up with a better offer, one in which the carbon stays in the ground and Congo still gets a payout? The answer could have global implications.

On a massive carbon sink in Congo, the people who live amongst it, the scientists who study it, the history of colonial exploitation and genocide in the area, and global carbon science/politics more broadly.

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CJW: Nobody Likes Dolphin Meat, but Times Are Hard - Akua Banful at LARB

Perhaps because of this essay’s snarky title, I believe this tenet merits repetition: for many coastal peoples, there are taboos around hunting and eating whales, dolphins, and sea turtles. The steady decline in fishing stocks has eroded the taboos, and in some cases, the distaste surrounding the consumption of dolphins. There’s a reason most people who resort to eating dolphin meat opt to smoke it: the preparation masks its taste, and so they can forget what it is they are eating. This is a matter of scarcity, not of preference. […] Nobody sets out to eat a dolphin. It is bloody business. But let us not be naïve about what any of us would do, hemmed in by hunger, ecological collapse, and a net empty of any desirable fish: nobody likes dolphin meat, but times are hard.

This is ostensibly about a mass beaching of dolphins and other sea creatures, but also delves into climate change, economics, cultural differences, the Atlantic Slave Trade, and related topics.

MJW: There’s so much black humour in this piece, and a sad inevitability that imbues the whole essay. I interpreted the title as less snark and more somber. Times are fucking hard, they’re going to get harder, so hard that soon we’ll all feel it.

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CJW: COP/out - Peter Watts (via Dan Hill)

So nobody’s talking about “success” any more. How can they, when we’re still on track for 2.4°C even if every country at COP26 honors all its shiny new commitments? Progress is the new buzzword. The COPpers have promised to nudge the Titanic a few more degrees to the left; keep it up and we’ll have changed course enough to avoid the iceberg entirely in just another hour or two.

Too bad we’re going to hit the fucking thing in thirty seconds.

COP26 feels like forever ago now, but this is from Peter Watts, so I had to share it. And here’s Watts in parallel to my thinking in the novel I have out on sub:

Anyone familiar with my own recent work might anticipate my own blue-sky solution: rewire Human Nature. Save Humanity by turning it into something else

Based on Watts’ work in Blindsight and Echopraxia, I assume here he’s talking about changes to neuro architecture/function, whereas my “solution” is far more in the body horror vein.

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• A powerful and underappreciated ally in the climate crisis? Fungi - Toby Kiers and Merlin Sheldrake at The Guardian (MJW: I for one welcome our fungi overlords.)

• How to fix the disaster of human roads to benefit wildlife - Darryl Jones at Aeon - (MKY: is it ban cars? Is it? IS IT?)

• The Ground Is Literally Exploding Due to Climate Change in Siberia, and It’s Going to Get Worse - Becky Ferreira at Vice

• Scientists watch giant ‘doomsday’ glacier in Antarctica with concern - John Vidal at The Guardian

• Newspapers Accepted Money to Publish Positive Environmental Stories About Saudi Arabia Around COP26 Climate Change Summit - Byline Times (via Dan Hill?)

• 2021: Year in Review for Climate Change Wins and Losses - Nick Cunningham at DeSmog

• Meet the Mining Billionaires Ransacking Australia - Zacharias Szumer at Jacobin (these people, they have names… presumably they have addresses too ~MKY)

• Day Zero still looms over Cape Town - Joseph Dana at MIT Technology Review

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Geopolitics

CJW: The Secretive Prisons That Keep Migrants Out of Europe - Ian Urbina at New Yorker

In the past six years, the European Union, weary of the financial and political costs of receiving migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, has created a shadow immigration system that stops them before they reach Europe. It has equipped and trained the Libyan Coast Guard, a quasi-military organization linked to militias in the country, to patrol the Mediterranean, sabotaging humanitarian rescue operations and capturing migrants. The migrants are then detained indefinitely in a network of profit-making prisons run by the militias. In September of this year, around six thousand migrants were being held, many of them in Al Mabani. International aid agencies have documented an array of abuses: detainees tortured with electric shocks, children raped by guards, families extorted for ransom, men and women sold into forced labor. “The E.U. did something they carefully considered and planned for many years,” Salah Marghani, Libya’s Minister of Justice from 2012 to 2014, told me. “Create a hellhole in Libya, with the idea of deterring people from heading to Europe.”

Here in Australia we’re deeply familiar with horrendous prisons and conditions for refugees, but this is an important read for a look at the European context.

Related: The “First World” can Fuck Off Playing Victim: Colonial Roots of the Modern Refugee Crises - It’s Going Down

MKY: Yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuup.

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MKY: For those who haven’t been watching endless clips of recent events in Kazakhstan, here’s an overview from our friends at CrimethInc The Uprising in Kazakhstan : An Interview and Appraisal.

Related: Bitcoin miners caught in internet blackout amid bloodshed in Kazakhstan NOT THE CRYPTOoooooo000000oooooooooooo……….

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DCH: Why Biden Refused to Pay Restitution to Families Separated at the Border - Jonathan Blitzer at The New Yorker

This is the unanswerable question at the core of the settlement discussions: if no form of recompense can ever, fully, make these families whole, is it true that a certain sum can be too high? Biden has decided that there are limits to the political costs he’s willing to incur, in any case. But without a collective settlement, lawyers at the Department of Justice will have to figure out, on an individual basis, who deserves compensation and who doesn’t. Only about nine hundred cases have been filed, to date. As Ann Garcia told me, “Trauma runs the gamut. Some kids are depressed, some have P.T.S.D., some have been hospitalized. Many parents still have not been able to regain their children’s trust. They’ve told me that their children aren’t the same anymore. It’s the fact of their having been separated that defines the harm. Period. There’s a whole penumbra of horrible things that happen after. But the settlement hinges on the separation itself. That’s what the figure is for.”

Because Joe Biden is a sanctimonious coward.

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• U.S. Military Hid Fuel Pipeline Flaws From Public in Okinawa (MKY: this is my surprised face)
• Saudi Arabia Is the Middle East’s Drug Capital (MKY: I heard this described on a podcast as being ‘weaker than diet pills’ but sure…)

• In Europe, the Far Right Is Uniting Its Forces - Michael Hudson at Jacobin \

• How Britain Falls Apart - Tom McTague at The Atlantic \

• The Termite Coup - Stephen Buckley at The Atlantic

• Chile’s Socialist Resurgence Is a Century in the Making - Nicolas Allen at Jacobin

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Science & Space

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• Parker Solar Probe Touches the Sun for the First Time, Bringing New Discoveries
• At least 70 free-floating planets found in the Milky Way

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Tech & Design

LZ: In VR, You Can Become Your Own Psychologist, by Joakim Vindenes at Medium

One of my favourite topics when it comes to technology is virtual reality. My dream is to live in a time when you have a completely immersive VR and I hope I’ll be alive until then. Here is an article that talks about a proposal of using VR for self-assessment in psychology. While it looks weird, the text uses many interesting resources about virtual embodiment and subjectivity in immersive technologies, which are subjects that I love.

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DCH: A data snapshot from Bitcoin Historic Sustainability Performance by digiconomist.net. The planet-incinerating ponzi schemers are going to be the death of us all.

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• The rise of the geopolitical hack - Erica Hellerstein at Coda

• Chinese scientists develop AI ‘prosecutor’ that can press its own charges - Stephen Chen South China Morning Post

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Society & The Culture

LZ: Margaret Atwood made her name through dystopias. Now she wants to build a brighter future - Oscar Holland, Christiane Amanpour and Henry Hullah at CNN

Interesting to say the least. Good luck with that?

MKY: for her and her TERF frenz? Lol… LOL! I SAY. (Never reads articles, never elaborates).

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CJW: Building Communities for a Fascist-Free Future - Shane Burley at Roar Mag

We are now entering a period when antifascism has to remain ever present, not just to force back the encroaching far-right, but also to protect the left-wing social movements that are under constant threat of state violence, redirection and infiltration. At the same time, there is always the risk of revolutionary content being channeled into upholding electoralism or other reformist aspirations. The question, then, is what will it take to build an antifascist movement that can actually meet this challenge rather than collapse with the ebb and flow of the opposition?

If you ever wondered why the state and media were so quick to demonise antifa, this piece might provide some answers. About antifa’s role as the militant backbone of broader leftist movements, as well as challenges and opportunities for antifascists in the coming years.

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CJW: Chile’s Feminists Are the Memory of the Future - Bree Busk at Roar Mag

When speaking of their relationship to the past, Chilean feminists often call on the metaphor of a “red thread” that weaves its way through history, uniting the struggles of all who have stood up to patriarchal oppression in an unbroken narrative of resistance. In the words of members of CF8M’s Memory and Human Rights Committee, “Feminist memory is a construction made in the streets, in the community, not only taken from books, not only found in libraries.” The red thread binds all of us active in the struggle and we know that the history we are making today will one day be turned to by future generations looking to understand their own place in this feminist memory we are building.

On feminist protest in Chile.

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• Accessibility and Post-Punk: Thoughts on the Difficulty of Pop Philosophy - Xenogothic - CJW: This is ostensibly about the Repeater-Zer0 “takeover,” but with lots of interesting thoughts on contrarianism and accessibility in theory circles and culture more broadly.

• Fauci on What COVID Could Look Like One Year From Now - Peter Nicholas at The Atlantic

• This Is the Year of the Shadow Pandemic - Kersti Kaljulaid at WIRED UK

• How conspiracies work in Russia - Caitlin Thompson at Coda

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Labor & Economics

DCH: The Case Against Crypto by Stephen Diehl

Crypto coins are simply speculative gambling products that only create a massive set of negative externalities on the world. It is introducing artificial volatility into markets untethered to any economic activity and creates an enormous opportunity cost where the only investment opportunity is as an economically corrosive synthetic hedge against all productive assets. This is not innovation, this is technical regression and flirtation with ecological disaster in a time when we cannot afford to gamble our planet’s fate on pyramid schemes and dog memes.

As always, Stephen Diehl cuts to the heart of all this dangerous crypto nonsense.

CJW: A great summary. These bits in particular grabbed me (emphases mine):

There are fundamental limitations to the scalability of blockchain-based technologies, and every use case is better served by another simpler technology except for crime, ransomware, extralegal gambling, and sanctions evasion; all of which are a drain on society not a benefit.

[…]

Even playing devil’s advocate and assuming cryptocurrency could function as money—which they can’t—we come up against the hard limitation that everytime private money has been tried in history it creates a form of corporate feudalism coupled to a toxic environment that encourages fraud and discourages commerce.

Related: Original NHer Austin shared this Twitter link with me - all about the historical and ideological threads that connect crypto to white supremacy.

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CJW: The Ticking Bomb of Crypto Fascism - Hamilton Nolan at In These Times (via Real Life Mag’s Newsletter)

The foundation of everything happening now is a sort of late capitalist nihilistic politics fueled purely by culture wars — an almost primitive flight from rationality driven by a half century of rising inequality and crumbling faith in ineffective public institutions. […] The rich are unimaginably richer, and everyone else is spinning their wheels. The Republican response has been the culture wars, in lieu of actually redistributing wealth. This has been effective, ironically, because the sort of healthy institutions that would prevent culture war politics from being so powerful are the very institutions that are withering away.

[…]

Crypto is now worth trillions of dollars. All of that value is premised not on some fundamental utility, but rather on the idea that there will always be someone else who will come along and pay you more than you spent on your crypto. This is going to end badly.

Related to the above. A really great piece, and it’s easy to imagine these predictions coming true.

Here is what will happen when hundreds of thousands of younger investors are smashed by the crypto crash: They will be radicalized […] because crypto represents much more than a simple investment to its most fervent adherents — it represents a way out of the American trap. It represents the existence of opportunity, the possibility of economic mobility, the validation of the idea that you, a regular, hard working person without connections, can go from the bottom to the top, thanks to nothing but your own savvy choices. When that myth is shattered, disillusionment with the American system will follow. Unfortunately, given the realities of the moment, these newly disillusioned and radicalized and angry and broke people are far more likely to turn to fascism than to socialism.

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DCH: Money in the Metaverse by Anna Wiener The New Yorker

Alexander Bernevega and Alex Gekker, researchers in Amsterdam, have described this transition as the “assetization” of top-tier video games—a shift toward what Jathan Sadowski has called “new rentier capitalism.” The future of the industry, Bernevega and Gekker write, will be one of “fully assetized gaming,” in which “gamers will own neither the games nor the consoles” but pay for seasonal “battle passes” or owe subscription fees. At the same time, the logic of ownership will live on inside the games themselves, in the form of customizable skins for avatars, character attire weapons, tools, and so on, acquired through microtransactions. “This is what makes the modern blockbuster game a highly productive asset,” the authors write. “By combining the rent-based and commodity-based models,” the games “are able to continually draw income.”

As in-game economies grew, they generated robust black markets for virtual items, with players buying and selling everything from ordinary game elements (armor, weapons, gold) to the equivalent of collectibles (a limited-edition party hat). Because players were accustomed to spending real money on virtual goods—or, in some cases, real money on digital currency, which could be spent on virtual goods—these black markets could be lucrative. Real-money trading, or R.M.T., began with one-to-one exchanges on sites like eBay, but was quickly scaled up and professionalized. Some players, usually in places with limited economic opportunity, took up gaming full-time in order to rack up in-game loot, treasure, and bonuses, selling those assets for profit, outside the game, to other players—a practice known as “gold-farming.”

The new end game: we are all of us gold farmers. Meanwhile Zuckerberg will have bought up all of Hawaii by then.

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DCH: The Year in Labor Strife - Lizzie Widdicombe at The New Yorker

But will these labor successes continue into 2022? Luce, the labor scholar, said that it was hard to know. “I do think we’re at this turning point,” she added. “We’re in an economic crisis, a political crisis, and an environmental crisis, and we’re facing different trajectories.” The taxi-drivers’ movement could represent some kind of watershed moment, as could the COVID-era strikes, and the wave of interest that they generated in labor movements around the country. Perhaps we’re on the verge of a more humane economic era, when workers of all stripes band together to push back against both the indignities of the last thirty years and the techno-monopolists. Or it could all just be a blip. Luce noted that, so far, attempts to organize at Amazon have not been successful. And the company is currently moving into the grocery business—traditionally a highly unionized industry—where it is creating panic and driving down wages. “Most unions know that you have to crack the Amazon puzzle to figure out how to raise standards for workers,” Luce said. Sadly, there’s not a vaccine in development for that.

The Forever Recession and Covid pandemic caused American workers to organize, strike, and unionize in greater numbers than any other year in my lifetime. Let’s hope they can keep the pressure on. #solidarity

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• When Amazon Expands, These Communities Pay the Price - Kaveh Waddell at Consumer Reports

• Hundreds Of El Salvador Citizens Report Their Bitcoins Are disappearing From State Owned Chivo Wallet - Ammara at thecryptobasic.com

• ‘All My Apes Gone’: NFT Theft Victims Beg for Centralized Saviors - Edward Ongweso at Vice

• What a Socialist Response to Inflation Should Look Like - Hadas Thier at Jacobin

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Movies + TV

MKY: Hellbound (Netflix SOUTH Korea)

Things I liked about the show:

A) It knew exactly what it was doing from the opening. Aka I’m so sick of drawn-out plots where a whole season is basically the pilot/setup. Here, the stakes are established quickly and the awesomeness of the ideas too. (Oh yeah, what if some kinda extradimensional herald told you the exact time you’d die? What if ‘the whole world’ bore witness to the fulfilment of that prophecy? (What if the show threw in an extra WTF in its final seconds?))

B) It’s a show of two parts (3eps per). In part1, there’s a cop protag, but the show ain’t copaganda (and a diff protag takes the stage and kicks ass in part2 tf). The Arrowhead - basically some kinda extra kray South Korean ver of INFO WARS - are the stochastic terrorist org in part 1, our masked, ranting host acting as the figure head for far more nefarious, coldly calculating figures… and the pay-off for that in part2 rocked. Be ware teh weapon systems you wield just might end up pointed at you… etc

C) The whole idea of an idiosyncratic Christian sect that, at least for a moment, effectively becomes a theocratic dictatorship in an Asian country is just a great reminder of how complicated the histories are on the edge of the anglosphere empire. (That is a sentence, and I stand by it.)

CJW: I liked but didn’t love the show. Plenty of great stuff in it though, so if the premise takes your fancy, it’s worth a look (and MKY’s right - the final seconds mean I’m going to have to watch season 2).

One thing that I did love though, was that Hell Bound easily gives us the best fictional representation of QAnon and similar groups/movements with The Arrowhead. I doubt it’s even intentional, but they’ve done a great job of representing that sort of sickness and hinting at its causes (disaffection with modern life and social atomisation, a search for answers or a way to make the world make sense, etc).

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MKY: The Silent Sea (Netflix South Korea)

I love space shows. But they’ve all been leaving me cold lately. (Void jokes go here.) I can’t bring myself to hatewatch the new season of StarTrek: Discovery [it’s called self-care], and even my beloved The Expanse is doing very little for me in its final season (except every frame with Camina Drummer in or near it). Once more we exclaim: thank fuck for South Korea!

The Silent Sea is a proper near future, post collapse, space genre show, that - unlike, say Another Life - doesn’t feel like trying to fill up on Dark Forest AF-flavoured cotton candy. Did you like Moon? Did you like Aliens? Did you have your smart money on the skinny bitch in Sense 8? Did you remember that the lawyer dude slapping people in Squid Game was also the lead in Train to Busan? Because you’re not racist. Me neither. Me too? Whatever man. Just enjoy a rare piece of decent space-fi…

We are all alien hybrid vat clones exploring Nakatomi Space in spaaaace. Probably.

If you liked this, you may also enjoy this ‘sentient ooze on an oilrig’ sci fi drama: Sector 7.

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LZ: Arabian Alien

I love it. Just found out about this project after reading about Arab science fiction in this article that I strongly recommend you all to check. But it seems that Arabian Alien is more than a short film, it’s a whole transmedia project.

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MJW: Don’t Look Up

It’s on the nose, and it’s pretty basic, but Don’t Look Up is bringing the utterly fucking obvious to the masses, and we have to start somewhere, don’t we?

As a film it’s enjoyable - a comet is coming towards the earth and the reaction fits with a more modern sensibility. PLUS, Meryl Streep’s horny president with a tramp stamp is A+. It’s funny, it’s cute satire, it has Timothée Chalamet in it.

The scene where Dicaprio melts down, yelling right to the camera on a talk show, is audacious in a really basic bitch way. He’s doing what a whole lot of us are doing: yelling at the world to fucking listen, literally screaming that we’re all going to die if we don’t act now. We’re all doing it, in life, on social media, in this here newsletter. Unfortunately none of that hits number one on Netflix on the regular.

You could argue that popular media doesn’t change anything on a mass scale, and I’d beg to differ. Pop gets right into a lot of heads, fucks around in there. This movie won’t save us, but it’s not trying to. It’s just trying to make sense of the world as it is.

CJW: The main complaint I’ve seen about the movie is that it doesn’t offer any answers, but I think that was the point - it’s saying that there are no answers to climate change under our current Western economic and political systems. It’s saying that we can’t trust the Bidens and Musks of the world to save us because that simply isn’t in their best interests.

(Also, I’d argue that the movie does offer us a solution - an uprising of the people against the elite/current status quo, as demonstrated by the brief riot scene.)

As a reader of this newsletter, the movie isn’t going to tell you anything you don’t already know, but the fact that it’s been controversial at all suggests that it’s fairly hollow message is still (fucking sadly) necessary.

Related: Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up Captures the Stupidity of Our Political Era - Branko Marcetic at Jacobin

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Music

LZ: Tamtam

She was featured in the short film I linked above, with Arabian Alien. But she’s sooooo good you should check her own work.

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Jonathan Fraser - Heaven is at a Distance

What a multifaceted band, especially considering this is black metal or something like that.

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Art

LZ: Kim Jakobsson

Do you like Nicola Samori? Then you’ll probably enjoy Kim Jakobsson as well, although she is more visceral in my opinion – a quality that actually makes her work even better.

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The Self-Promotion

LZ: Inside The Matrix: philosophers discuss the possibility that we are living in a simulation

New translation! Here is an article that I wrote for CNN Brazil about the new Matrix and its relationship with Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument.

Are we ready for the next steps of artificial intelligence?

And here’s another article that I wrote in December, an interview with a specialist in AI about generative AIs.

Martin Hägglund: Death is what gives life a meaning, but capitalism makes fruition impossible

A brief analysis of the book “This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free” and its proposal of a democratic socialism

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MJW: I released my latest short story for free on my Patreon. It’s about housing, community and cam-babes. How could it get even better? It’s very short! It’s the only piece of fiction I’ve written in the past two years and it was fun to write and fun to make an illustration for it, something I’d love to do more of. Read Acacia Crescent here.

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The Memes