nothing here but us dark prophets

Welcome to Issue 11 of the nothing here newsletter. I’ll keep this brief because I’m quickly running out of time before I need to run out the door to a very important meeting (trivia at the pub) with some very important clients (beer, also friends).

Corey J. White (CJW)
The VoidWitch Saga. Newsletter facilitator. Naarm/Melbourne. Tweets @cjwhite.

Marlee Jane Ward (MJW)
Writer, reader, weirdo. Author of ‘Welcome To Orphancorp’ and ‘Psynode’. Host of Catastropod. ADHD, spec fic, feminism, cats. Melbourne, Australia. @marleejaneward

Austin Armatys (AA)
Oh Nothing Press // @ohnothingpress on Instagram // ONP’s first release MechaDeath Magazine available for free right here

John English (JE)
Photographer - Solvent Image. Writer of upcoming comic CEL. Based in Brisbane, Australia @Herts_Solvent

m1k3y (MKY)
Wallfacer / Apocalyptic Futurist / #salvagepunk / @m1k3y

AA: I’ve seen a lot of chatter about this New York Times profile of futurist, philosopher and author Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens, Homo Deus). The article is primarily focused on the relationship between Harari and Silicon Valley elites, who the philosopher predicts are building (refining, really) the systems that will render the rest of us into a “useless class”.

… Silicon Valley, at a certain level, is not optimistic on the future of democracy. The more of a mess Washington becomes, the more interested the tech world is in creating something else, and it might not look like elected representation. Rank-and-file coders have long been wary of regulation and curious about alternative forms of government. A separatist streak runs through the place: Venture capitalists periodically call for California to secede or shatter, or for the creation of corporate nation-states. And this summer, Mark Zuckerberg, who has recommended Mr. Harari to his book club, acknowledged a fixation with the autocrat Caesar Augustus. “Basically,” Mr. Zuckerberg told The New Yorker, “through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace.

To make a connection to comic book culture, Harari comes off somewhat like Dr. Manhattan from DC’s Watchmen or Marvel’s The Watcher - an aloof sage removed from his own humanity, but happy to prognosticate about what the future holds for the rest of us. It’s hard not to feel like Silicon Valley’s welcoming of Harari and his (to me) grim prophecy is all part of a hubris-fuelled circlejerk that ends with complete subjugation of the “useless class” by technocapital. Maybe I’m being optimistic, but I’d like to think that the “useless class” may not so bloodlessly accept their divined fate…

This article might pair well with the above? https://reallifemag.com/personal-panopticons/

This all suggests the broader possibility that the pervasive presence of surveillance helps produce people who are more at ease with it — people who no longer know what privacy is for, or what socio-moral milieu could give it value. We may retain some memory of how the word is used, but we don’t know what it names. This development is, in part, an effect of habitually experiencing the self as mediated through the apparatus of surveillance. The subjective experience of operating within the field of surveillance has more bearing on our attitudes than detached theorizing about the capacities of the surveillance apparatus or the abstract ideal of privacy.

CJW: Damn, I stopped reading Real Life Mag once they stopped sending their pieces out via newsletter. They’re consistently great though.

AA; I’ve got the site’s feed in my RSS reader. That’s right, I still have one of those! I’ve been coming across quite a few interesting blogs recently, so it has become increasingly useful. And this makes me very happy.

MKY: Desert

The spectre that many try not to see is a simple realisation — the world will not be ‘saved’. Global anarchist revolution is not going to happen. Global climate change is now unstoppable. We are not going to see the worldwide end to civilisation/capitalism/patriarchy/authority. It’s not going to happen any time soon. It’s unlikely to happen ever. The world will not be ‘saved’. Not by activists, not by mass movements, not by charities and not by an insurgent global proletariat. The world will not be ‘saved’. This realisation hurts people. They don’t want it to be true! But it probably is.

This was written after the second IPCC report and holy shit was this guy ahead of the curve.

CJW: This book touches on so many things that I’ve only come across in the past year, so the fact that it was released in 2011 means the anonymous author was at least seven years ahead of the curve. When they mention an IPCC report, this isn’t the most recent one that everyone has been (rightly) concerned about, but rather they read an earlier one and (rightly) realised that the governments and corporations of the world would refuse to act. What horrifying prescience. This is a dose of the dark shit, assuming that everything will go exactly as badly as it could. The worst part is, it’s seven years out and we haven’t done anything to disprove this dark prophet’s vision.

This was actually mentioned by Nyx Land in their interview with Justin Murphy at the Other Life podcast. If you’ve had that Gender Acceleration article from last issue open in a tab, but you haven’t felt brave enough to tackle it, start with this (admittedly very long) podcast interview, as Land covers a lot of the same ideas in a more conversational tone (for obvious reasons).

CJW: Future Shock in the Countryside

In the opening scene of Blade Runner 2049, a flying craft navigates California over an endless expanse of solar farms and tessellated plastic fields on its way to a desolate farmstead. Watching it, I was struck by the dazzling futuristic spectacle, but also surprised to see the countryside at all in a science-fiction film.
Often in speculative fiction, the future belongs to the city alone. Rural areas are conspicuously ignored, as if urbanization will expand inexorably. When the countryside does appear, it mostly offers stark contrast to the technologically advanced metropolis. A lost arcadia, rural life falls into desolate ruin, populated only by scavengers and exiles.

Really interesting tour around the world, focused on agriculture and the future outside of “the city”.

The next 3 books I’m planning all take place outside of “the city”, so I found this piece by Darran Anderson really interesting. A (researched but speculative?) look at landscape and agriculture in the coming years.

CJW: A self-driving car can choose who dies in a fatal crash. These are the ethical considerations.

This is interesting in that it’s a wide-ranging survey of people from all over the world, trying to reach an ethical consensus of how a self-driving car should decide who lives and who dies (assuming that every time the car is on the road it’s moments away from its own version of the Trolley Problem). Have a look, and see how widely you diverge from the consensus! Personally my responses would be vastly different, but I am a weird, broken thing in human skin.

CJW: Artificial Intelligence Hits the Barrier of Meaning

Anyone who works with A.I. systems knows that behind the facade of humanlike visual abilities, linguistic fluency and game-playing prowess, these programs do not — in any humanlike way — understand the inputs they process or the outputs they produce. The lack of such understanding renders these programs susceptible to unexpected errors and undetectable attacks.
[…]
As the A.I. researcher Pedro Domingos noted in his book “The Master Algorithm,” “People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they’re too stupid and they’ve already taken over the world.”

I guess you would file this under the Black Box Problem that has been discussed in a number of articles this year. The developers themselves not knowing how a neural network comes to a conclusion is a huge issue when these algorithms make decisions that affect people’s lives directly (policing, judicial, and medical applications all come to mind), but it seems like making the neural network/AI/AGI understand itself is possibly one of the steps necessary if we ever hope to get real/true/strong AI. #RepoVirtual

CJW: We don’t deserve this planet, the robots of Nier: Automata do

This piece about the intelligent machines of Nier: Automata (Near Old Tomato) touches on some of the same questions/issues that I’m directly engaging with in Repo Virtual. Oddly though, the game itself never resonated with me when I played it - very possibly because it’s the first and only game I’ve played in the series.

MKY: Sons of the Pre-Apocalypse

My sons are going to live in cities on fire, in nations led by men who don’t care, and they are going to have to learn to help tackle the problem, as we are. If I can in any way help them tap into that capacity that I felt last night, if they can help me, and if others can—and if that relation can help topple power in denial—then maybe we can sustain this pre-apocalypse, whether it takes another blue wave or nine, a political revolution, mass psilocybin hallucinations, or something else. If we can relate that goodness where applicable and confront power whenever possible, my sons may not have to live their adult lives in omnipresent fear of fires.

Powerful reflections from Brian Merchant of Motherboard on being a father as the world burns.

MJW: The main reason I don’t want to have kids is because I don’t really care for children, but this notion - that the world we are leaving for the next generation is gonna be fucked - is another strong support to my ‘kids: no’ structure.

CJW: http://nhz123.lofter.com/post/1d7b3012_f56c7fb (via Gareth/MANYOYO)

Hit the link for some great photo manipulations turning Beijing into a set of post-apocalyptic ruins. I could imagine any one of these making a great book cover. According to Gareth’s post at Restricted.Academy, the artist’s name is ????a, which means ‘Wounded Finger’, which a) is a pretty cool moniker, and b) reminds me of that photo of James Stokoe and his mutant hand.

MKY: HELLO I AM HERE FOR THISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS POST HOOOOOOMAN WELT.

AA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSvUqhZcbVg

CJW: I’ve been hearing about Hauntology for years in email newsletters, podcasts, tweets, blog posts, etc, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen an explanation of the origin/etymology of the term. As a bonus, it opens with a section about one of my favourite games of all time, Fallout, and shreds the notions of retro-futurism that seem to prop up so much sci-fi, and particularly so much cyberpunk. (I know this is the third time I’ll mention Repo Virtual, but one of the specific aims for that book is to do a thoroughly 21st Century/thoroughly now take on cyberpunk, completely devoid of any retro-future nostalgia, so that’s another reason why I found this video interesting.)

CJW: Sam Mendes’s Directorial Discoveries (via Julian Simpson)

Much to his union’s chagrin, Mendes refuses to benefit from the hard-fought battle for “possessory credit”—you won’t find “A film by Sam Mendes” in the credits for any of his movies. A film, he said, “is written by someone else, shot by someone else. It’s not all me. It’s because of me.”

This was an utterly fascinating look at Sam Mendes’ life, and his career across film and stage directing. (This came via Julian Simpson, whose newsletter INFODUMP is great for fans of process chatter.)

MJW: If you use drugs recreationally, you can participate in the Global Drug Survey here. It helps researchers learn about drug use patterns and formulate new harm-reduction methods.
And because I’m easily amused, here’s a woman who takes edibles and then does makeup tutorials on youtube: https://youtu.be/JKj57JzZD2g

MJW: California by Edan Lepucki

Another in the series of lit apocalypse books I’ve been reading lately. A pretty adept and well-written example, it features another pregnant protagonist (like Ling Ma’s Severance, which I talk about in a past issue), and a utopia that’s not what it seems. I dunno, I liked it well enough, but nothing whizz-banged about it for me. Am I experiencing apocalypse-fatigue? Maybs.

No, never.

But I wanna see something new from the genre, something that I haven’t seen before (which is why I was so excited by Michelle Tea’s Black Wave.) If you’ve got recs for unique apocalypse fiction, chuck ‘em my way.

MJW: The Barrow Will Send What It May by Margaret Killjoy

Second in the anarchist-punk/demon-hunter series, this Tor novella is a tight little bite of magic and mayhem. I enjoy Killjoy’s novellas (The Lamb Will Slaughter The Lion is the first in the series) and find them a cool little glimpse into myth and this particular brand of punk (as much as I’d love to be punk, I’m really more of a ‘hipster fucking cunt’, like that guy on the street called me last week.) Plus, I just love novellas, y’all.

MKY: What Happened to Monday?

A solid lil SF-themed near future action drama, this is basically #cloneclub vs the depopulation/overpopulation agenda; v. curious to see how #climatebreakdown soaks into our ‘entertainment’ (oh hai Thanos), how nothing can made now w/out it being part of the background, be it realism or escapism, as the tide rises on what was merely SF’nal speculation increasingly becomes everyday life.

Side Note: I loved how they had FitSpice Clone (Noomi is in shape for this movie), then almost every other clone…err, sister is dressed in baggy clothes that hid her physique.

MKY: 2036: Origin Unknown

Sometimes it’s nice to watch something purely science-fictional, rather than it being the dressing for an action/comedy etc. It’s also nice to see that Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck in BSG) is still getting roles after that rather unfortunate casting she got in the RIDDICK movie.

2036: Origin Unknown is a great minimalist scifi movie. There’s only three main (human) cast, and a whole lotta CGI. It alternates its setting between an super scifi office building (mission control) and the vast expanses of Mars. It’s a great exploration of our posthuman future… and without giving any more away than that, you could be forgiven for seeing it as high budget Asimov fan-fic, mixed in with that rather weird Mars movie De Palma made; Mission to Mars.

MKY: Presenting a mix bag of podcasts and audiobooks resources for ‘staying with the trouble’ of #climatebreakdown.

With bonus futures podcast, a look at China’s Belts and Bridges program - their big push to a great Sino world order (and America’s future as ‘an island’) and the likelihood they’ll be a unipolar power on a dying world.

MJW: I’ve got a couple of new short stories that I’m submitting at the moment, so that means I’m waking up to a new rejection every few days/weeks. On rejection: my base paranoia is ‘are my stories not right for your magazine, or are they not good?’

CJW: I should have mentioned this last issue, but I got distracted by audio books. Static Ruin, the third and final book in the VoidWitch Saga is out now. Over at my website, I talked a little about what the book means to me, why I wrote it, and why I dedicated it to my sisters.

Warren Ellis was kind enough to review the book in the latest issue of Orbital Operations.

He’s actually been kind enough to review all three of the novellas, and I know a lot of people have sat up and paid attention to me and these three little books thanks to him. I’ve read Warren’s newsletters for years now, and have discovered some amazing comics and books thanks to his recommendations (Casanova, Gnomon, Sleepless, probably American Flagg!, to name just a few), so it’s still kinda surreal to find myself in that same company. You’ve read Desolation Jones, Transmetropolitan, Global Frequency, Trees, and Injection, right? But have you read Normal? It’s phenomenal (though I wonder if the seeming-acceleration of politics and media means we’re all at imminent threat of burning out, not just the futurists). Or, for a really deep cut, Lich House might just be one of my absolute favourite pieces of short fiction.

MJW: I was up for the Melbourne Prize Readings Residency this year, which I sadly did not get (the winner was Jamie Marina Lau), but you can still vote for me to win the Civic Choice Award here.

CJW: It’s a short one this week. Whilst in the northern hemisphere you’re probably watching the leaves fall off the trees and preparing yourselves for hibernation, down here in the south the weather is getting warmer, the social calendar starts to fill up, and we’re desperately scrambling to get things (jobs, projects, assignments, exams, marking, novel edits, etc) done before the holidays so we can actually relax.

As the temperature climbs, we have cold beer as our only protection against the heat. Pray for us and our cold ones.

Stay safe, be well, and please get in touch if there’s anything we can do for you.

Nov. 18, 2018, 7:21 p.m.

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