nothing here but untimely futures

issue 159 - 28th November, 2021

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CJW: Welcome to another edition of the nothing here newsletter. Thanks to our new premium subscribers - great to have you on board (and thanks to Cennydd for helping me realise there was no easy link to sign up before).

If you would want to join up too, you’ve got two options:

• $5 monthly subscription.
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Both options will give you access to the full bonus archive, as well as new bonuses as they are posted. We appreciate any and all support.

Our latest bonus was from MJW - Your Body is Perfect, and Other Lies, an excerpt from her current memoir project. I’m excited to see it come together after reading Money For Something.

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The Team

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

• m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / ecopoet // Dark Extropian Musings / pryvt.rsrch / @eattrainrevolt [twit/insta]

• Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Writes sometimes, weeps more often.

• 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: A Coal Mine for Every Wildfire: Where are the ecoterrorists? - James Butler at LRB (via Andrew Dana Hudson)

A Chatham House report, published in September, projects a global temperature increase of 2.7°C by the end of the century if countries meet their current targets; it does not rule out rises of 3.5 or 5°C. Even the best-case scenario is catastrophic: 3.9 billion people exposed to major heatwaves by 2040, with 10 million a year exposed to heat exceeding the survivability threshold. Droughts will be three times worse than they are now; food insecurity as a result of failed crops will risk, if not guarantee, political turbulence and economic collapse, migration for survival, international security crises. The Paris targets adopted in 2015 are dead, or so officials brief in private. The Chatham House report gives a less than 1 per cent chance of meeting them, a less than 5 per cent chance of limiting warming to 2°C.

This review by James Bridle of Andreas Malm’s recent books, How To Blow Up a Pipeline, and White Skin, Black Fuel, is unsurprisingly great. It’s hard to tell exactly what Bridle has pulled out of the books and what parts are his additions to the conversation, but there’s a lot in here of interest.

Cattle capitalists, like other pillagers of the green desert, are part of a vast sphere of secondary industries that are dependent on fossil capital, and share its rapacity and drive to expand. How far these industries can be divorced from their fossil predicate is one of the more awkward questions for mainstream climate politics; it’s hard to see how the destruction of rainforests, vast rare-earth mines or accelerating soil depletion could be justified even if powered purely by wind or sun.

Friend of the newsletter, ADH, mentioned the term ‘fossil fascism’ from this piece, and that is indeed one of the most interesting threads herein:

For any given individual in a fossil capitalist society, it is rational to take cut-price flights for holidays, travel by car for even the shortest journey, avail oneself of cheap imported meat, use disposable plastics or buy each new iteration of a consumer commodity. These ways of life are produced, supported and virtually required by fossil capitalism itself; it is only from a planetary perspective that they are irrational, even suicidal. A life among absurdities, as Adorno once suggested, requires a careful tending of ignorance, a meticulous aversion to following problems to their cause. Awareness of this terrible disjuncture produces denialism of many kinds, and through that gap the far right may find an entry point. The old fascist formula, ‘we say what you’re really thinking,’ authorises an escape from hypocrisy: ‘we think what your behaviour really implies.’

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CJW: Fertiliser prices boom as Incitec Pivot plans closure of Gibson Island plant - Matt Brann at ABC News (via Jane Rawson)

On its own this is a small story - natural gas prices affecting fertiliser production, which is likely to impact crop growth and food production - but the question is, how many small stories just like this one are happening all over the world? As Jane pointed out when she sent this in (just hit reply to the email if you want to share something with us), climate change reporting focuses on carbon emissions, rising sea levels, extreme weather events - big picture issues - but the transition away from fossil fuels is going to have massive impacts on logistics and production in countless ways both big and small.

Not to mention that global logistics infrastructure is barely coping with the disruptions caused by COVID-19 (that episode of TrueAnon also covers the human cost of these disruptions, something which I’ve not seen touched on elsewhere, likely because people care more about their treats than about exploited workers from the global south). We’re coming into an age of disruptions and shortages and delays - and that’s if we’re lucky to avoid famine, deaths from natural disasters and extreme weather, deaths and human suffering due to mass migration, and on and on.

I’m not trying to be a downer (I don’t need to try, it just comes naturally), but after the void of progress that was COP26 (and is most governments across the world just generally), it feels like these things are worth mentioning.

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CJW: Elites Won’t Save the Planet — We Need a Mass Movement - Jeff Sparrow at Jacobin

If the tendency of capitalism to respond to a crisis with more capitalism gives the system its disastrous momentum, it also provides the capitalists themselves with insulation from the consequences of their actions. The intensified commodification resulting from each fresh calamity creates opportunities for those with disposable wealth to ensure that they and their loved ones remain more or less unaffected.

The planet might be growing unbearably hot, but if you have the money, you can still live in air-conditioned comfort in a pleasant location. In the midst of mass extinctions, luxury eco-resorts and private zoos allow the well-to-do to gaze on tigers, orangutans, and elephants. That’s why, even a looming apocalypse will not, in and of itself, motivate them to change course.

Related to my comments above.

MKY:

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• ‘Watered-down hope’: Experts wanted more from climate pact - Seth Borenstein at AP News (via Foreign Exchanges)

• The US Is Blocking Climate Reparations - Rishika Pardikar at Jacobin

• The COP26 Deal Was Another Betrayal of Climate Justice - Sam Knights at Jacobin

• Bill Gates-backed experimental nuclear power plant heads to tiny Wyoming city - The Guardian

• ‘Outlaw’ loggers VicForests and a regulator’s ‘charade’ put drinking water at risk, data reveals - Michael Slezak and Mark Doman at ABC News (the good one)

• VicForests accused of ‘spying’ on protesters and environmentalists - Michael Slezak and Laura Kewley at ABC News

• The jailing of a young climate protester is a prime example of Australia’s authoritarian drift | Isabelle Reinecke - MKY: like you’d think they’d running out of room, but now there’s always mein fuhrer to the right to drift… like we can have that fuckwit former cop (as opposed to all the other fucktwits in power) being touted to replace Scumo innit [Morrison works hard to make the case for a Dutton prime ministership etc]

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Geopolitics

DCH: ‘A Shocking Disregard for Human Life’: The UK Contributes to the Polish-Belarus Crisis - Sian Norris at Byline Times

Poland has rejected help from the EU’s Frontex in part, analysts argue, because Europe’s often brutal border force is still governed by laws and regulations. Instead, the Government has declared a state of emergency – forbidding Polish citizens from providing material aid to the arriving migrants, arresting journalists, and ordering illegal pushbacks. […] Human rights groups have criticised the decision to send UK troops to the border. Steve Valdez-Symonds, Amnesty International UK’s Refugee and Migrant Rights Director, said in a statement: “sending British soldiers to erect more border fences rather than address the needs of people dying at those borders shows a shocking disregard for both human life and the right of people to seek asylum.”

As with anything in Pritti Patel’s agenda, the cruelty is the point. This time aided and abetted by more hybrid war bullshit from Russia. And with as many as 20,000 refugee lives on the line too.

CJW: We were a bit late getting this into the newsletter, partly because as horrible as the story was, it wasn’t widespread, and partly because we rarely cover new-news because the commentary that comes later is often more interesting, nuanced, and important.

Long story short, Syrian refugees were being used as pawns in a conflict between Belarus/Lukashenko and the EU, with the politicians and authorities on both sides seemingly unperturbed by the deaths of refugees at the border. It’s unsurprising given how little most states seem to care about refugees and the extent to which nations all over the world are going in order to further militarise their borders, but take it as another reminder of the anti-human nature of the capitalist/liberal state.

Related:

• ‘Please save us’: Refugees face death at Poland-Belarus border - Nidal Ibrahim in Al Jazeera

• Death of Syrian migrant highlights tragedy unfolding on Belarus border (via Foreign Exchanges)

• EU readies sanctions for migrant trafficking over Belarus border crisis (via Foreign Exchanges)

• Lukashenko’s migrant warfare, The Foreign Desk - Radio (7min overview… from the heart of the dying anglosphere)

• How Fake News on Facebook Helped Fuel a Border Crisis in Europe - Andrew Higgins, Adam Satariano and Jane Arraf at NY Times

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• The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War? - MKY: (better than teh clickbait headline might suggest akshoeally)

• How Iran Tried to Undermine the 2020 US Presidential Election - Lily Hay Newman WIRED

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Science & Space

DCH: Space Is Becoming Both a Battlefield and a Garbage Dump - Seth Stevenson Slate

Last week, the International Space Station had a “conjunction event,” meaning it was in danger of getting hit by space debris. As it turns out, that debris was traceable to the breakup of an old Russian satellite, which Russia had destroyed on purpose in a test of a destructive weapon. In the 2013 film Gravity, nearly the exact same event occurs, leading to the destruction of George Clooney and Sandra Bullock’s spaceship. While the real-world ISS astronauts are currently safe, the recent space drama has illuminated how lacking current space policy is and what a (literal) mess space is becoming.

It’s not just about billionaire dick rockets anymore. Putin’s finally decided to fuck around in space too. Fun.

Related:

• Visualizations show the extensive cloud of debris Russia’s anti-satellite test created - Loren Grush The Verge

MKY: why has the US Airforce had its openly secret shuttle space program for yonks now? Why is China boasting about hypersonic weapons and then the US being like, well actually we’ve had that for years too? What was that Stars Wars program Reagan had in teh (skunk)works decades ago? Why does everything feel like a prelude to James Cameron’s Dark Angel tv show starring Jessica Alba… what’s the worst that could happen?

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• Kim Stanley Robinson on Science Fiction and Reclaiming Science for the Left - Daniel Aldana Cohen at Jacobin

• ‘This is urgent’: Bipartisan proposal for UFO office pushes new boundaries - Bryan Bender at Politico - DCH: This is the exact opposite of urgent. Whole swaths of the US are regularly on fire but sure let’s distract from that with this bullshit. Anything to line military budgets I guess.

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Tech & Design

CJW: Facebook’s “Metaverse” Must Be Stopped - Paris Marx at Jacobin

In the context of Silicon Valley’s reliance on contract workers and outsourcing, that’s not a good thing to hear. Gig workers have warned that lowering their working standards was the first step in an effort to do so in the wider economy, and the workplace technologies heralded by the metaverse’s champions could be key to enabling the next big assault on workers’ rights.

You only need to look at a screenshot to know how completely shit and aesthetically cringe the corporate metaverse will be, but it still has the potential to be dangerous. Trash Future recently did an episode on it (a bonus one, but preview here) that’s also worth a listen.

I don’t want to be Old Man Yells At Clouds about this, but the corporate aspects of the internet are some of the worst parts, so I don’t have much faith in a metaverse that is founded by one of the tech giants to be a net positive for anyone but shareholders of the company. It’s a horrible future designed by and for the professional managerial class, and the rest of us need to fuck it right off.

(Speaking of OMYAC, I also don’t trust the rhetoric around Web3 when it’s mostly coming from the crypto grift sphere of the internet, but Robin Sloan recently made some interesting points that piqued my curiosity at least…)

MKY: When in doubt post Cronenberg:

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DCH: The Real Reason Facebook Changed Its Name - Brian Merchant The Atlantic

The industry is in need of a new framework, a new apparatus, not just a product or a service or a new sector to mine for enterprise contracts. It needs a new idea, and the metaverse fits the bill. Artificial intelligence gets it part of the way, with the gold rush for neural net-based software, but even that is somewhat niche. NFTs and the cryptomarket are too opaque and volatile for most. That promise, as tech companies see it, is easy to intuit. We may always feel like we’re on our phones too much, that we’re already devoting a surfeit of time to our screens, but the truth is we have much more time to give our platforms. If we had screens over our eyes, we could be captive consumers of content and advertising quite literally all the time. Not only that, but if the metaverse went mainstream, it would necessitate a whole swath of new hardware and profit-generating apps too.

Emphasis mine. Silicon Valley got fat and complacent in the smartphone era. Now the bottom is falling out and they’re hungry for new revenue streams.

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DCH: ‘Carol’s Journey’: What Facebook knew about how it radicalized users - Brandy Zadrozny NBC News

The body of research consistently found Facebook pushed some users into “rabbit holes,” increasingly narrow echo chambers where violent conspiracy theories thrived. People radicalized through these rabbit holes make up a small slice of total users, but at Facebook’s scale, that can mean millions of individuals.

Facebook consistently fails to act on concerns raised by their own researchers and moderators. That there aren’t hundreds of Frances Haugen’s out there is beyond me. And yes the scale is the problem. Nothing is meant to be used by billions. We just don’t have the right frame of reference to comprehend the severity and reach of that kind of damage.

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DCH: CAN DATA DIE? - Jennifer Ding at pudding.cool

To me, the crux of the Lenna story is how little power we have over our data and how it is used and abused. This threat seems disproportionately higher for women who are often overrepresented in internet content, but underrepresented in internet company leadership and decision making. Given this reality, engineering and product decisions will continue to consciously (and unconsciously) exclude our needs and concerns.

Great read on the misogyny at the heart of engineering culture and how data control and privacy are often out of reach for women.

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DCH: How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation - Karen Hao MIT Technology Review

Many clickbait farms today now monetize with both Instant Articles and AdSense, receiving payouts from both companies. And because Facebook’s and YouTube’s algorithms boost whatever is engaging to users, they’ve created an information ecosystem where content that goes viral on one platform will often be recycled on the other to maximize distribution and revenue.

It’s not just that Facebook and Google amplify misinformation, it’s that they actively pay for its creation. This is a great read on the basics of clickbait farms from Myanmar to Macedonia and everywhere in between. Targeted ads are the original sin of the Internet and until the big platforms find a new business model we are good and fucked.

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CJW: Don’t Kick the Robot: a conversation with Kate Darling on our future with robots - at The Prepared (via Sentiers)

[I]n the book I talk about how there’s a lot of fear that robots will replace our social relationships as they get more advanced - fears people will replace their partners with sex robots, and all these scenarios of human replacement. That seems absurd when instead of comparing robots to humans, you compare them to pets. As dogs became more a part of the American family back in the 60s and 70s there might have been some psychologists who had concerns about pets but no one today believes that pets are a problem or that they replace human relationships. In fact, we view them as a very healthy and good supplement to our human relationships.

If you’ve read REPO VIRTUAL then you know I’m interested in considering non-biological intelligences as possibly belonging to the extended human tribe. This piece is about robots, rather than NBI, but it still makes me wonder about what it means to accept robots as pets (or similar), especially when modern research into animal intelligence and cognition suggests we deliberately underestimate animals - perhaps to assuage our guilt or would-be guilt about the ways we treat them, both in factory farms and in their dwindling habitats. If we abandoned notions of human supremacy (but dismantle white supremacy first), how could that change the way humanity lives, how could it change our relationship to animals and NBIs, and how could it change the makeup of our extended tribe?

Marlee introduced me to Bunny, which is a very internet/unofficial project that seems pretty amazing at first glance (but I’d want to see some independent research before I was sure that dogs are sentient).

MJW: Bunny is a Sheepadoodle being taught AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) with a soundboard. She’s a sweet muppet and seems to have a growing handle on a number of words. Sometimes she babbles, sometimes voices her desire to eat birds, sometimes has existential crises. If she is communicating (and I think she is) her inner world is rich and she takes the words she knows and combines them to try to explain it. PLUS watching her little dog brain gears turning is soooo sweet.

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• A handmade UGV of Vietnam People’s Army undergoing testing

• TikTok Has an Incel Problem - Sophia Smith Galer VICE

• The Amazon lobbyists who kill US consumer privacy protections - Jeffrey Dastin, Chris Kirkham and Aditya Kalra at Reuters - CJW: This is a huge surprise! I am being facetious!

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Society & The Culture

MJW: Untimely Futures - Black homelessness in Oakland

(Olalekan Jeyifous, The Ark, 2020)

The Ark (2020) is a photomontage by the artist Olalekan Jeyifous, part of the series “The Apocryphal Gospel of Oakland,” which visually constructs the improbable ongoing story of Oakland’s unhousing crisis through speculative digital collages. The scene depicted in The Ark seems improbable, an allegorical fantasy. Recall, however, that in December 2019, several months before COVID-19 took hold, Oakland’s then-city council president Rebecca Kaplan introduced a plan to dock a decommissioned cruise ship at the Port of Oakland, adjacent to the West Oakland neighborhood. The idea was to provide emergency shelter for nearly 1,000 unhoused individuals.

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Across the 20th century and into the 21st, Black people throughout the United States have been targeted by spatial exclusions and dispossessions rooted in racial capitalism. Yet racial disparities in Oakland’s rates of homelessness remain particularly stark, with African Americans comprising an astonishing 70 percent of those experiencing homelessness, while making up just 20 percent of the overall population.

CJW: On the history and present of Black homelessness in Oakland, racial capitalism, Afrosurrealism and speculative futures.

The below quote comes from an earlier piece by D. Scott Miller, and echoes a sentiment from Claire G. Coleman about indigenous people already living post-apocalypse because their old ways of life have been largely destroyed by colonisation.

There is no need for tomorrow’s-tongue speculation about the future. Concentration camps, bombed-out cities, famines, and enforced sterilization have already happened. To the Afrosurrealist, the Tasers are here. The Four Horsemen rode through too long ago to recall. What is the future? The future has been around so long it is now the past.

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CJW: How Indigenous Peoples Are Fighting the Apocalypse - Julian Brave NoiseCat at Emergence Magazine

I’m thinking through the convergence of these apocalypses: the genocide of colonization and the ecocide of climate change. I’m trying to understand how Indigenous Peoples have persisted in the face of existential threats, because I believe that our survival ought to matter to more people than just ourselves. That it ought to matter to you.

I chose to begin in my language because I want to show you that in our words, and in our very being, Indigenous Peoples are refusing to be annihilated.

I’m sharing this because it resonates with the above, but there’s more to this piece than a consideration of Indigenous apocalypses - a lot of it personal to the author, but also bigger history and context through the author’s familial relations to the children killed in Canadian missions.

Well worth the read.

The United Nations says that climate change is nothing less than “code red for humanity.” It is already brutalizing many of the places we come from and rely upon. It is driving us apart, making us forget that we are not just interconnected but interrelated. We are all kin. And if we’re not careful, climate change is going to make us forget who we are—animals of remarkable intellect, capable of immense care and compassion, even when grave injustice has laid us low.

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DCH: How conspiracy theories bypass people’s rationality - Jan Willem at Psyche

It makes sense, then, that many people would find conspiracy theories entertaining: that is, interesting and exciting. The key to their entertaining qualities is probably not negative emotions, per se, but rather intense emotional experiences. Indeed, the common assumption that people always experience emotions such as anxiety as negative might be somewhat simplistic. Let’s again draw a comparison with scary movies. People often feel anxious when watching a scary movie, but that does not mean that watching it is an aversive experience. In fact, people pay money to see scary movies, and might leave the cinema disappointed if the movie does not frighten them enough. A plausible reason why people find such movies entertaining is because they elicit intense emotions. These emotions can distract from boredom and make people feel more alive. Likewise, conspiracy theories might elicit intense emotional experiences that involve anxiety, but also fascination and the sense that one is discovering something unique and truly important.

We tend to think conspiracism takes root because of anxiety and an overwhelming sense of lack of control. Those sorts of negative emotions are just one vector though. QAnon, for example, is exploding, in part at least, out of sheer boredom.

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DCH: Covid-19 is likely to fade away in 2022 - Edward Carr at The Economist

The combination of infection and vaccination explains why in, say, Britain in the autumn, you could detect antibodies to covid in 93% of adults. People are liable to re-infection, as Britain shows, but with each exposure to the virus the immune system becomes better trained to repel it. Along with new treatments and the fact that more young people are being infected, that explains why the fatality rate in Britain is now only a tenth of what it was at the start of 2021. Other countries will also follow that trajectory on the road to endemicity.

So much needless death to get there though. Excess mortality directly contributable to Covid is largely under-reported: 16.5m deaths globally. Such a staggering failure.

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• A Critique of the Colonial Cleanliness Crusade - Annalee (Annie) Ring

• Melbourne Queer Film Festival: Palestinians And Allies Protest MQFF - Jeanine Hourani at Junkee

• Yesterday Once More - Grafton Tanner at Real Life Mag

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Labor & Economics

DCH: Why NFTs are bad: the short version - Antsstyle antsstyle.medium.com

In a nutshell, NFTs are bad for two reasons: 1. They are bad for the environment, as they rely on cryptocurrencies that cause huge amounts of carbon emissions. They will continue to rely on these systems for security reasons (despite claims to the contrary about moving to other systems). 2. They are only valuable as tools for money laundering, tax evasion, and greater fool investment fraud.

Amen. Longer form available here.

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DCH: Singapore’s tech-utopia dream is turning into a surveillance state nightmare - Peter Guest restofworld.org

Singapore’s migrant workers are used to having technology imposed on them. In December 2019, TWC2 submitted a report to the U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights detailing how Singapore’s employment-related technology, which can manage anything from work permits to employment disputes, often disadvantaged the workers and gave power to their employers. Workers were also already subject to more intrusive data collection, and forced to opt in to various management technologies and systems. With the pandemic, that now includes private, health-related data.

Singapore’s “irreconcilable blend of Thatcherite capitalism and state control” is at the heart of a vast sprawling surveillance system that targets migrant workers first and foremost before metastasizing across the rest of the populace.

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• With Reformers Victorious, It’s a New Day for the Teamsters - Indigo Olivier at Jacobin

• China’s Growth Model Is in Crisis - Ho-fung Hung at Jacobin

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Books

LZ: 3 Brazilian Authors Explain Why Afrofuturism Matters - Raphael Tsavkko at Remezcla

Afrofuturism is big in Brazil, and here is an article written by a friend featuring three authors who are known for their work in the genre.

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Movies + TV

LZ: Lamb

What the actual f*** some might say while watching this movie… but… I love it? It’s based on Icelandic folklore, and the film basically tells the story of a couple of farmers who have sheep and then all of a sudden this lamb is born with more than half of its body being human. The scenery is just something else, and I swear to god I want to live like this someday in my life. Yes, I want to be a farmer, own sheep, have a cat and a dog and grow pumpkins.

MKY: is this cottagecore horrorz?

LZ: I would say so lol

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Games

LZ: Little Kitty, Big City

Any cat ladies or lords (?) around here? Besides being super excited to play Stray, this cyberpunk game headed by a cat, there’s this new title coming up and it’s just too cute to ignore.

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CJW: Inscryption

A deckbuilding card game (with roguelike elements) nested inside an escape room puzzle game, which itself is nested in layers of metanarrative (the less said, the better), all supported by ARG elements. If that sounds like a lot, that’s because it is, but it’s deftly handled, and Inscryption is one of the most compelling games (indie or otherwise) that I’ve played in years.

Watch the trailer and tell me you’re not interested… For me it came in at around 16 hours, which is perfect for when you’ve got too much shit on your plate for another 60+ hour bloated open-world chore disguised as a game.

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Music

LZ: LILITH, by ZAH

When I was a teenager, I liked to find the darkest, indiest, obscurest Japanese bands that were possible to find on Soulseek. Well, back then it was a time when visual kei and j-indies were in vogue, but then not only have I grown old, but it seems that rock is not their cup of tea anymore. However, there’s a new rave scene that sounds very promising. ZAH is one of the characters in the scene, though they are now living in the US apparently. Their music sounds like Eartheater but even crazier; like Arca, but darker.

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Art

LZ: BUILDING BLACK CIVILIZATIONS: SCULPTURES INSPIRED BY THE MEDIEVAL KINGDOMS OF WEST AFRICA, by JEPCHUMBA at ADA

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The Self-Promotion

LZ: The ecological message of Dune, a classic sci-fi that is back in the movies

New translation! This was an article that I published at CNN Brasil, but now it’s available in English for those who want to learn more about the ecological messages found in Dune – both in Herbert’s book and Villeneuve’s adaptation.

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The Memes