Hello again from the nothing here team. How are you? How have the past two weeks treated you? Pretty horrifying out there, huh? Well don’t worry, there’s nothing too heavy in this issue - in fact, we’re a little light on articles in general this time around (your browsers will thank us). Join us this issue for space cops, AI, cyborgs vs tryborgs, pop-culture for the end of the world, and plenty more...
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
John English (JE)
Photographer - Solvent Image. Writer of upcoming comic CEL. Based in Brisbane, Australia @Herts_Solvent
m1k3y (MKY)
Wallfacer / Apocalyptic Futurist / #salvagepunk / @m1k3y
CJW: https://anatomyof.ai/ (via Chris [our first crowd-sourced piece - thanks, Chris!])
A brief command and a response is the most common form of engagement with this consumer voice-enabled AI device. But in this fleeting moment of interaction, a vast matrix of capacities is invoked: interlaced chains of resource extraction, human labor and algorithmic processing across networks of mining, logistics, distribution, prediction and optimization. The scale of this system is almost beyond human imagining. How can we begin to see it, to grasp its immensity and complexity as a connected form?
This essay in 21 parts is at the crossroads of a bunch of things we like to talk about in this newsletter - surveillance capitalism, resource depletion, and the unseen systems underlying so much of our Western lifestyle (and the atrocities to people and the planet being done in our names).
//
CJW: Bubble Economy (by and via Andrew Macrae)
This process literally generated money out of thin air. Most of the people borrowing money to buy their loss-making investments believed that banks were just intermediaries, and that the money the banks lent them came from other people’s savings deposits that the banks held. In fact, the opposite was true. The banks held very little cash. Instead, they added new money to the system every time someone took out a loan for a loss-making investment property they had successfully bid too much for. Each new loan was a new deposit somewhere else, and the bubble expanded.
Money Creation in the Modern Economy
This article explains how the majority of money in the modern economy is created by commercial banks making loans. Money creation in practice differs from some popular misconceptions — banks do not act simply as intermediaries, lending out deposits that savers place with them, and nor do they ‘multiply up’ central bank money to create new loans and deposits.
I’ve got a line in an unpublished novel about how the economy is just fiction (or mass hallucination, I can’t remember), but I honestly always thought that if I just studied a little economics, I’d understand it and my earlier facile beliefs would prove unfounded. Instead, I just learned that the money banks loan people is entirely made from thin air, and our entire economy is not built on money, but rather debt, or that which is money’s opposite. I’m frankly still processing the new facts presented by Andrew Macrae (or very, very old facts which are new to me). Not only was there no truth to learn about economics, the fiction of it is even more ludicrous than I’d been lead to believe.
//
CJW: Why Growth Can’t Be Green
New evidence suggests that green growth isn’t the panacea everyone has been hoping for. In fact, it isn’t even possible.
I am absolutely shocked! No, wait; the other one.
This article is kind of related, detailing the ways in which common statistics that are used to measure the economy and unemployment do not reflect the lived reality of most people. A (very) basic summary: the Dow Jones is doing well, but most people don’t own shares, so they aren’t doing well. It’s the same old story: the rich get richer while the rest of us keep struggling.
AA: Okay, seriously: does anyone find these articles super demoralising? It’s such a bleak experience to repeatedly read this sort of thing, and engaging on this level sometimes seems so unmoored from the opportunities and practical action available to us in the real world.
I keep thinking there’s got to be a point when we can stop saying “look how right and doomed we are” via research and thinkpieces and academic theorising and fictional exploration and online discussion (and I’m “guilty” of literally all of these, BTW) and actually get something done, right?
But is that even possible?
I mean, look at the last part of that foreignpolicy.com article:
Maybe this means better public services. Maybe it means basic income. Maybe it means a shorter working week that allows us to scale down production while still delivering full employment.
So… we need more (very basic, very sensible IMO) socialist policy to “save the world”, right? And yet it just seems so unlikely that there is the democratic will (here in Australia or in most other countries) to make ANY of that happen on a big enough scale.
Look at the state of the world today - almost fully in the thrall of capital & all its weird psycho-cultural voodoo - how could this sort of popular socialist project conceivably gain the cache to start unfettered operation before the natural world is irreversibly damaged and life as we know it heads towards a logistically grim conclusion?
SO THEN: Why (Expend The Effort To) Care?
I can feel myself increasingly shying away from global/big picture style stuff (including politics/environmental issues/social justice) to more insular, personal stuff. And every time I (say, for example) read an article that should maybe galvanise my sense of injustice or whatever (and logically addressing environmental apocalypse seems like it should be our primary task as a species, right now) I increasingly find myself dismissing “it” as pointless yelling into the void or, at best, choir-preaching, and I feel compelled to turn away and spend my time (and its attendant thought-cycles, so limited in availability and unlimited in potential application) elsewhere.
CJW: You’re not wrong. I thought the articles above were interesting because they’re countering the sort of bullshit we can expect politicians to peddle in the next few years as climate change becomes impossible to ignore - I’m expecting “Green Growth” to be the buzzword politicians use to continue pushing Business As Usual while pretending that they care about climate change and want to do something about it.
I guess the only point to these articles is to convince politicians and the majority of the voting population that the time for mealy-mouthed promises and half-arsed fixes is past, so that the people who can actually do something about this shit are forced to do something about this shit. (Assuming of course that the corporations and lobbyists stop interfering. Which seems unlikely.)
JE: This is exactly what I was referring to a few issues ago. I believe it is impossible for the average person to quantify these problems and echoing Corey here it’s why we have governments. At least in theory.
//
CJW: Common Cyborg
I went looking for a word to name the Donna Haraways of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a word inclusive of cyberfeminists and transhumanists, a word that captures the theft of cyborg identity, and mocks the thieves a bit. I call them tryborgs. They have tried to be cyborgs, but they are stuck on the attempt, like a record skipping, forever trying to borg, and forever consigned to their regular un-tech bodies. They are fake cyborgs. They can be recognized because, while they preach cyborg nature, they do not actually depend on machines to breathe, stay alive, talk, walk, hear or hold a magazine. They are terribly clumsy in their understanding of cyborgs because they lack experiential knowledge. And yet the tryborgs - for reasons that I do not understand - are protective of cyborg identity. I often find my bio re-written by a tryborg: ‘She claims to be a cyborg’ or ‘she calls herself a cyborg’. Imagine if they said this about my other identities: ‘She claims to be a woman. She calls herself white.’
It’s difficult to sum up this essay, precisely because while it is about the failures of tech in recognising people with disabilities, it’s first and foremost a personal essay about the ways the humanity of disabled people is overlooked. I found it moving.
//
CJW: Mars PD
For Cockell, politically motivated depressurization should be made literally, physically impossible—that is, prisons in space should be designed so that air-pressure abuse simply cannot occur. This is another reason why imagining a Mars P.D. ahead of time is so important: Without forethought, we have little hope of protecting against these sorts of scenarios.
When I described Cockell’s plans for an off-world prison to Lucianne Walkowicz, she seemed repulsed. “We haven’t figured out the law,” she said, “and we’re already designing prisons.”
There are so many parallels/connections between this piece and a project I’ll (probably) be working on soon, that I’m kind of annoyed.
Also worth noting that some people took issue with the article and its assumptions that exporting the current US policing, judicial, and prison system to other worlds is a) necessary and b) not a fucking terrible idea. (Twitter threads at those links)
Remember: All Space Cops Are Space Bastards.
//
FAKE FRIENDS: PARASOCIAL HELL
AA: This video essay by Shannon Strucci aka StrucciMovies explores parasocial relationships. Strucci deconstructs the powerful but inherently one-sided nature of fan’s connections with our modern breed of celebrity by exploring legacy examples like Bob Ross and Mr. Rogers, as well as YouTube celebrities (including Bo Burnham, who I’d heard of but never really paid attention to) and videogame streamers. There are some serious ethical and philosophical issues at play here, and these essays combine a thoughtful approach to the subject matter with “internet-style” editing and humour to good effect. The video essay seems an underutilised way to communicate complex ideas and perspectives, and Strucci has a great approach to the format.
Speaking of streamers: Justin Murphy ( @jmprhy on Twitter) is an academic, writer and streamer/interviewer who has provided me with a bounty of fascinating material recently - he has outlined an interesting perspective of a “neo feudal techno-communist patch” based on radical honesty through mass surveillance, has been accused of being a micro-fascist, and has interviewed some members of (often very strange and/or problematic) Twitter subcultures, including infamous Twitter user KantBot.
Justin is very honest about trying to establish a supporter network and foster the sorts of parasocial relationships detailed above, and I think many people reading the newsletter might find what he’s doing fascinating. He’s got a blog, podcast and YouTube channel which may be worth a look.
COMBINED AND UNEVEN APOCALYPSE - Evan Calder Williams
MKY: Or how I started identifying as a salvagepunk.
I picked this book up by mistake (I actually wanted to start The Shock of the Anthropocene, but we’ll come back to that in time I’m sure) and kept reading based on the dedication alone:
This is, apparently, a work of Luciferian Marxism wherein Williams elaborates his idea of salvagepunk - getting there via an excellent critical analysis of cyberpunk and steampunk - in three long chapters that are basically interlinked essays, elaborating his take on how we can all become ‘THE POST-APOCALYPTIC AGENTS OF THIS SYSTEM’S ONGOING APOCALYPSE’.
He adds to the grammar of the Anthropocene (and I’m very much thinking of Thacker’s various ideas of the ‘world’ here), differentiating between Apocalypse and Catastrophe as the former providing a ‘revelation of the hidden’… or not (the latter). And, just look at the state of Western Civilisation rn to see it is truly Apocalyptic - and that is actually good news!
The notion that a brighter future lies in what we can fashion out of the salvageable pieces of the world as everything falls apart and things are seen as they truly are (like, idk… rampant white nationalism and the patriarchal death grip on the systems of control… also learning how the planet works by breaking it) legit gives me hope for navigating a path through the chaos of the present.
Post-Apocalyptic agents… assemble!!!
//
MJW: SEVERANCE - Ling Ma
This is another example of a literary apocalypse in the vein of Station Eleven and Gold, Fame, Citrus and I don’t know - I’m way into it, because I just love good apocalyptic fiction. Ma’s quiet novel winds through two timelines, the apocalypse itself and the after. The descriptions of a slowly fading New York as viewed by our millennial narrator through her eyes and her camera, are terrifying and beautiful. The after is filled with the usual desperate survivors and controlling men, with the looming threat of potential infection hanging over them all and a tiny thread of hope that all apocalyptic fiction needs to keep us reading.
MKY: Thanks Marlee, I need to read all of these now…
MANIAC
MKY: Finally something as good as Legion… and I’m struggling to say much more beyond this.
My absolute favourite thing about it was the ending (which I can’t really talk about without spoiling the whole damn thing). Justin Theroux was superb (once I recognized him - see also: Mute), Emma Stone fantastic as ever and, um, I didn’t hate Jonah Hill - especially when he started ranting about the gnostics. Real curious as to what everyone else’s take on this is….
CJW: Cary Fukunaga Doesn’t Mind Taking Notes from Netflix’s Algorithm
Like Beasts, Maniac will stream on Netflix, which has its own surreal development process. “Because Netflix is a data company, they know exactly how their viewers watch things,” Fukunaga says. “So they can look at something you’re writing and say, We know based on our data that if you do this, we will lose this many viewers. So it’s a different kind of note-giving. It’s not like, Let’s discuss this and maybe I’m gonna win. The algorithm’s argument is gonna win at the end of the day. So the question is do we want to make a creative decision at the risk of losing people.”
I didn’t realise that Maniac was (loosely) based on a Norwegian TV show, described as a black comedy. I imagine it’d have to be more straightforward than the American iteration, but I always enjoy blackly comic shows and films, so I’ll have to try and track it down.
MJW: Maniac is rad and weird and I’m trying to find the time to finish it after my initial binge with CJW last weekend. Like he said above, Maniac is blacker than black, and I’m not surprised to hear it’s based on something Nordic, it’s got that distinctly non-American feel to it.
JE: I don’t think a show could be more focused in on what I like more than MANIAC; the retro-futuristic aesthetic, the pop psychology and the multiverse stuff - all perfect. Apart from one episode (not a huge fan of any speak-easy time period stuff) I loved it. Great ending too. Can we get some love for the on-screen chemistry of Theroux and Mizuno?
MKY: sliding in here just to mention that a) I didn’t know it was based on a Norwegian show but b) my fave show of last year, Valkyrien, was Norwegian and is currently getting remade in the UK as Temple… and hopefully I won’t hate that as much as the remake of Swedish show Real Humans, the UK’s Humans, which is to say: fuckyes scandi-noir/dramas.
//
I THINK WE’RE ALONE NOW (2018)
MKY: It’s entirely possible I related way too hard to this film (with one notable exception). It’s the end of the world and Del (Peter Dinklage, The Station Agent and some dragon-based show that is very popular with the children) just wants to be left the fuck alone. Enter Grace (Elle Fanning) and her threat of companionship… -shudder-
OK, so listen - rn I’m a lil bit obsessed with PKD’s short, The Defenders. Without giving everything away, in that very Cold War story humanity has retreated underground, leaving robots above to fight WWIII on their behalf. One of the things we learn the robots have been doing is taking care of the world in humanity’s absence; maintaining its cities and infrastructure etc, so everything will be in its right place for their creators return. Which is what Del is doing, albeit in a far more scaled-down version.
He’s declared war on entropy and is methodically cleaning up his town; clearing the corpses, house-by-house, and salvaging batteries and returning library books on their behalf. In fact, he seems to be adding to the town’s library with any other books he finds in there as well. He was a librarian, pre-apoc, and is keeping civilisation’s lights on in his hometown… basically a caretaker at the end of the world, keeping everything tidy, waiting for someone else to ‘carry the fire’.
Of course, that’s not what happens in the film - though I had my fingers crossed for a ending similar to The Girl With All The Gifts. The direction the film ends up going - again, without giving too much away - shows us that maybe the real horror isn’t that the world ends, but that in some manufactured desert oasis, it’s kept going on in the worst way. Z Nation did something similar in its mid seasons, having the rich survive on an island (ZONA)… basically this is the future Conservatives want: a Patriarchal colony at the end of time. [Pretty sure AHS: Apoc is literally this.]
Lastly, its ending helped tease out the other thing I liked about Maniac - which is the theme of treating trauma at <choose your stage of pre/mid/post apoc>. We’re in the grip of solistalgia rn and we’ve only just begun to think about how to effectively cope with that.
CJW: Even just the way you said Del has “declared war on entropy” reminds me of another of PKD’s works - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and J.R. Isadore’s battle against kipple (the random detritus of modern life that is not quite trash but is without real use or value, and slowly builds up around you).
MKY: Nice catch dude!
//
LEAVE NO TRACE
MKY: Much like the amazing Captain Fantastic, this is a film to watch alongside reading James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed. These are two tales of families living on their own terms in the forests of the Pacific Northwest who want nothing to do with society, civilisation or the state. But where the former is also about grief, this is a super low-key tale about PTSD; it saturates the entire film, largely due to Ben Foster’s performance as the father and Thomasin McKenzie as Tom, his daughter.
Leave No Trace hits the primitivist vibe pretty heavily in its opening, and could be mistaken for a post-apoc film… which I think is the point.
//
STRANGE NATURE
MKY: My initial reaction to watching this lil eco-horror movie was, sigh - if only the team behind this could’ve been the ones to adapt Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation. I finally got my The Girl With All The Gifts ending, which is to say this another movie that leans into the weird post-human future; or as my shorthand for this goes “a posthuman vice for the alien earth”. It brings me hope that we might be getting another round of entertainment that is ‘mutant and proud’ - I’m talking about that batch of films circa 2012, like X-Men: First Class (obvz), Limitless, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and uh… Lucy? Except I look back on those now and just see a yearning for a slightly better, reformed neoliberal future (Limitless especially does this - we just need a better politician to fix things), and we’re well past that now.
(Talk about the movie, m1k3y!) In Strange Nature we get both a return to the simpler era of environmentalism - ya know, when the whole earth system wasn’t being shattered into pieces and all problems were largely local and solvable - and a leaning into a remade world. (The plot, m1k3y, the plot!). A mother reluctantly returns to her hometown - a place she’d dramatically burnt all bridges with - with her kid in tow, to look after her cancer-stricken - or, at min., tumor-ridden - father and, working with a local science teacher, finds a bunch of disturbingly mutated, extra-limbed frogs… As the eco-horror ramps, working its way up the food chain (did you know mosquito larvae are now bringing microplastics from the sea into the food chain?), the question revolves around the nature of pollution and the role a supposedly safe ‘organic pesticide’, central to the town’s economy, could be playing in it. Like, what exactly is safe and what is ‘natural’? As the town increasingly learns to their detriment, just because something naturally biodegrades doesn’t mean it won’t radically disrupt the local ecology… giving us this key bit of dialog:
“But since this kind of thing only happens to animals that live near the water, we’re good.”
“Kim, we are animals that live near the water.”
Without giving too much more away, and to close the loop, I’ll just say I’m sooooooooo happy to see a film championing the weird as inheritors of a changed planet… vs both Ex Machina and Annihilation; riddled with fear of the posthuman and the desire for the status quo to continue forever.
AA: This week sees the release of MechaDeath, a 44 page narrative magazine written by our very own Corey J. White and illustrated by the truly world-class crew of Septian Fajrianto, 6VCR, Daniel Comerci and Megan Mushi (whose image of series supervillain Karnak is featured directly below). It’s cosmic action-horror at its finest and you can download a free pdf right here right now. The MechaDeath release also includes a range of four accompanying t-shirts which you can see here.
MechaDeath was inspired by gritty cyberpunk/mecha manga and anime, Heavy Metal (the music), Metal Hurlant (the anthology comic) & the sort of “cosmic nihilism” you might associate with the likes of Eugene Thacker. I had a bunch of notes and ideas for the story, discussed it with Corey, and then he worked his magic and actually wrote the fucking thing! And it’s excellent.
CJW: Seeing my words laid out with such a unique eye and style (Trash.Been’s work is fucking phenomenal) just elevates the story to a whole other level that I couldn’t imagine when it was just words in a document. And I was the one who wasn’t sure if we needed such extreme design on the zine. I’m eating my words now though.
AA: The design is like the story in that it crams so many ideas into such a small space - really condensed design and storytelling.
CJW: I like to think that the best of my writing already leans toward being full of ideas and told with interesting prose (I hate talking myself up, but I’m also actively trying not to shit on myself, so here we are), so deliberately and unapologetically dialling up those aspects was a lot of fun. A bit of hard work too though - on a normal day I can easily crank out 1,000 words of prose on whatever project I’m working on, but the dense nature of this beast meant I was lucky to hit 400 words (which, to be fair, was one or two entire scenes).
AA: I think I asked you for “word-jazz” right?
(MJW: For a second I read that as ‘word-jizz’ which is a different thing…)
CJW: “Idea-dense word-jazz” I think, and fuck me if that isn’t a blank cheque to just go crazy. And the final product reads like a BLACK METAL MECHA cartoon series distilled into text form. Actually, speaking of, this article “Atlanta, Westworld, and the episode-description revolution” has me hankering to either write a bunch of episode descriptions for the MechaDeath animated series that exists only in my head, or otherwise use the format as the sole storytelling device for a future ONP project.
AA: What I like about MechaDeath is that it’s so overblown, super-serious and dark that it becomes funny. It’s really over-the-top, but there’s self-awareness about that in there too. It’s not parody, it’s not homage and it’s not just nostalgia. Which is really important to both of us. We tried to make something NEW and a BIT FUCKING MENTAL
CJW: For sure. If it’s nostalgia, it’s nostalgia for an alternate reality, for a version of the 80s that never existed - one where instead of a Satanic Panic, everyone realised how fucking cool all that black metal shit was and made a kid’s cartoon about undead behemoths battling over enslaved worlds.
AA: It’s also worth mentioning again that MechaDeath is the first official release from Oh Nothing Press, which Corey and I have talked about in these pages a bit before.
CJW: ONP is a weird mutant baby of a thing, which we love very much. We could have found some artists to help us churn out novelty tees, or designs based on classic horror movies (and probably made bank), but we wanted to do something a little weirder than that. We trust that there’s an audience out there who want something more than a t-shirt with a cool design on it, who want to delve into a whole weird world.
AA: ONP makes strange little books and sells t-shirts, but our real, secret plan is to create dense, self-contained narrative universes.
I’ve always been fascinated with the by-products of narrative media, supposed ephemera like source books, packaging, manuals, etc. It seemed like these things - which most of the time are considered a bit redundant or tacky - actually contain the potential to do a lot of storytelling in their own right.
I think I first realised this as a kid, particularly regarding the packaging, copy and aesthetic for classic 80s toys like He-Man and The Masters of The Universe - you’d get your action figure, sure, but you’d also get a little booklet with a story and you’d get character profiles on the back of the packaging and maybe trading cards etc. It was always fun looking at all of that information and imagining the ways it all fit together - usually more fun than watching the cheaply animated shows themselves.
CJW: I think we’re exactly the right age to have been caught up in the whirlwind of narratively-dense merchandising of the late 80s and early 90s. I’m thinking particularly of the GI Joe file cards, all the over-the-top copy that appeared on packaging for TMNT figures, and even something like Ring Raiders with the mini comics that came in each pack.
AA: Video game guides, roleplaying sourcebooks and things like The Guide To The Marvel Universe… they were all supposed to be accompaniments to something else, but a lot of the time you’d read them as texts in their own right. I’d read that sort of thing religiously, zealously.
CJW: And whilst a lot of people might sneer at such obvious marketing/merchandising ploys, you can’t deny that it’s a great way to get people involved in a story. Why buy a toy, or a shirt, or whatever when instead you can buy into a portal to a whole other universe?
AA: I like the idea that ONP can make narrative “springboards” - to celebrate the potential of ephemera, to create stripped down but conceptually dense packages of ideas. And if you end up with some crazy looking shirts with monsters on them or whatever, then all the better! Because that shit is cool.
Once again, download MECHADEATH right heeerrreeeee and check out www.ohnothingpress.com - drop us a note and let’s us know what you think!
//
CJW: I have a story in the upcoming A Punk Rock Future anthology from Zsenon Publishing. They’re running a kickstarter for the anthology right here, with rewards including ebooks and paperbacks (obviously), as well as music from some of the authors in the anthology, a story critique from Erica L. Satifka, and a bunch more. (NB: I’m not involved in the kickstarter at all, I just love the whole vibe of the anthology and want the campaign to be a success.)
//
MJW: My story The Walking Thing has been reprinted in Black Inc’s Anthology Best Summer Stories. It’s about a small town, a different kind of plague, but also about familial relationships, and caring too much about people who don’t care about you. You can find it, and heaps of other great Australian stories here.
\
CJW: That’s us for another fortnight. Keep looking after yourself and those closest to you. Have love and empathy for the people you care about, and nothing but white-hot rage for the people who stand in the way of a better world.