Welcome to another issue of nothing here. We’re still experimenting a little, and this time around we’re trying to do a better job of keeping the newsletter (and the articles section in particular) a little shorter. One of the ways we’ve done this is by trimming some article links right down to just the links and a line for context, and putting this under the “Cutting Room Floor” at the bottom of the articles section.
Along with all the articles, we’ve got experiments with AI text generation, AR experiments, book and film reviews, and more.
Here in Australia we just had our Federal Election. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, Australians just voted for another 3 years of climate change denial, austerity measures damaging the lives of people with disabilities and poorer folk in general, continued racism and marginalisation against Indigenous people, cuts to health care, a continuation of our abhorrent immigration policy, and a mainstream right-wing party that is not afraid of racist dogwhistling and getting into bed with actual fascists. Basically, Australians in general, and rich boomers in particular, just voted for the economy over the actual lives of other Australians living today, as well as future generations. So we’re feeling a deep sense of dread here this morning.
As ever, if you want (and are in a position to) you can support us by becoming a paid subscriber and receive bonus letters (on top of these ones), the ability to comment on the posts (though anyone can hit reply if they have something to share with us). So far the bonuses to date include a recipessay on weed & fascism, essays on 4th-Generation Warfare, the multiplicity of places, and religion in video games, a live music review, and some short fiction. You’ll get access to all these (via the website) and all the rest we come up with over the coming months.
Corey J. White (CJW) - The VoidWitch Saga. Newsletter facilitator. Naarm/Melbourne.
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - Author of The Oprhancorp Trilogy. Host of Catastropod. Your fabulous goth aunt. On Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, Australia. @marleejaneward
Austin Armatys (AA) - Writer/Teacher/Wretched Creature // Oh Nothing Press // excerpts from the upcoming Creeper Magazine here // @0hnothing
m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / salvagepunk / ecopoet // Dark Extropian Musings
MKY: Permafrost collapse is accelerating carbon release
Collapse of the Earth System (aka nightmare fuel) update #3843:
“Current models of greenhouse-gas release and climate assume that permafrost thaws gradually from the surface downwards. Deeper layers of organic matter are exposed over decades or even centuries, and some models are beginning to track these slow changes.
But models are ignoring an even more troubling problem. Frozen soil doesn’t just lock up carbon — it physically holds the landscape together. Across the Arctic and Boreal regions, permafrost is collapsing suddenly as pockets of ice within it melt. Instead of a few centimetres of soil thawing each year, several metres of soil can become destabilized within days or weeks. The land can sink and be inundated by swelling lakes and wetlands.
Abrupt thawing of permafrost is dramatic to watch. Returning to field sites in Alaska, for example, we often find that lands that were forested a year ago are now covered with lakes2. Rivers that once ran clear are thick with sediment. Hillsides can liquefy, sometimes taking sensitive scientific equipment with them.”
Watching scientists discover the mechanisms of the Earth system as it breaks down is definitely a thing. Luckily, they’ve got a solid list there of what we could do collectively as a species to fix our fouled nest. Eg
Fund monitoring sites. River chemistry can be a sensitive indicator of abrupt thawing, but many monitoring stations are being abandoned13. Instead, there should be increased national and international investment in long-term sites that link land-based observations with aquatic and marine measurements. Better recordings of organic matter and nutrients in rivers would shed light on how permafrost plant and microbial communities respond to abrupt and gradual thawing.
We need monitoring stations set up asap, and that calls to mind something on the scale of The Maginot Line, but to fight climate breakdown… ‘cause it’s not a war, it’s a planetary rescue mission.
Thankfully, the Arctic Council are meeting rn, and… well, fuck… they’re way more into positioning themselves for the future war over dwindling resources and taking advantage of the thawing ice for the exciting new shipping routes it’ll allow:
Countries have been scrambling to claim territory or, like China, boost their presence in the region as thawing ice raises the possibility of exploiting much of the world’s remaining undiscovered reserves of oil and gas, plus huge deposits of minerals such as zinc, iron and rare earth metals.
This is very much not fine.
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MKY: First fossil jaw of Denisovans finally puts a face on elusive human relatives
“Forget the textbooks,” says archaeologist Robin Dennell of the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. “Human evolution in Asia is far more complex than we currently understand, and probably does involve multiple lineages, some of which probably engaged with our species.”
CJW: Does this mean we can discard ideas that humans became the dominant species by murdering our cousins? I mean, if there’s proof that our species engaged across time and space, then maybe there was a time when all sorts of human-ish species were sharing this planet. Which is far more interesting to consider than the ‘survival of the fittest’, ‘might makes right’ story that we’ve been told until now.
And maybe (because this is what I’ve spent a great deal of my time thinking about the past year or so), this is proof that we don’t need to fear AI as a potentially more advanced species that will try and wipe us out. Maybe we can live alongside non-biological intelligences and non-human animals.
MKY: to quote from memory an actual academic, ‘our hominid line isn’t a family tree, it’s a bush’ and I would guess they were fight/fucking behind said bush. (jfc m1k3y, what kinda novel are you writing in the background? Why does ur mind keep going straight to these places) Also, -makes vague allusions to a recent ep of Doom Patrol-
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AA: The Amazing Dinosaur Found (Accidentally) by Miners in Canada
More fossil talk!
Look, I’m not feeling particularly eloquent right now, so let me just say: Dinosaurs are (still!) cool and this specimen is one of the coolest - a miraculously-preserved armoured beast known as the Nodosaur.
There’s some fun details in here (the guy that stumbled upon the fossil is named Shawn Funk, for example) and writer Michael Greshko describes the investigation of this ultra-rare fossil in an entertaining way:
Nearly six years later, I’m visiting the fossil prep lab at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in the windswept badlands of Alberta. The cavernous warehouse swells with the hum of ventilation and the buzz of technicians scraping rock from bone with needle-tipped tools resembling miniature jackhammers. But my focus rests on a 2,500-pound mass of stone in the corner.
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CJW: A couple shot a porn film in a Tesla on Autopilot (SFW, at Insider.com)
I look forward to seeing massive pile-ups and traffic jams around Las Vegas and Los Angeles because autopilot pornmobiles keep crashing into each other (cars trying to mash their bodies together to imitate the humans within?).
Alternate Caption: Crash 2. Crash 2000. Crash 2020.
MKY: yesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss! someone reboot and crossover Death Race 2000 w/ Crash and Crank 2 and reteam Jason Statham with Neveldine/Taylor, and bring back Nic Cage circa Drive Angry as well, and have them alternately quote Freud and Jung as they each fight/fuck/drive. Death Drive 2020?
AA: I’d watch that. But only if it was half an hour long. Can movies be half an hour long, please? Also give it a Mike Patton soundtrack, because his Crank 2 OST remains an underrated banger.
MJW: Aside from The Fuck and the Furious (The Fast and the Fornicating?) I second AA’s suggestion that movies be half an hour long because that’s about as long as I have the capacity to sit still.
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CJW: Agnotology and Epistemological Fragmentation (via Sentiers)
Epistemology is the term that describes how we know what we know. Most people who think about knowledge think about the processes of obtaining it. Ignorance is often assumed to be not-yet-knowledgeable. But what if ignorance is strategically manufactured? What if the tools of knowledge production are perverted to enable ignorance? In 1995, Robert Proctor and Iain Boal coined the term “agnotology” to describe the strategic and purposeful production of ignorance. […] Whether we’re talking about the erasure of history or the undoing of scientific knowledge, agnotology is a tool of oppression by the powerful.
An interesting talk about social media and media manipulation, looking specifically at alt-right and far-right manipulation of YouToob, and the way the Christchurch arsehole deliberately and cleverly manipulated the media into spreading his message through ‘data voids’. If you get your information online (and you do, that’s why you’re here), then you’ll find this relevant.
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MKY: Why Amazon Is Gobbling Up Failed Malls
As the decline of brick and mortar retail rolls on, commercial real estate developers are left with massive abandoned properties. Who will fill that underutilized space? A series of recent acquisitions by associates of Amazon in Northeastern Ohio provides some clues.
To quote the great space opera franchise that almost was - Riiiiiiiiiiidick! - “you keep what you kill.” I once had a brief debate over drinks with a sci-fi writer about whether or not ‘the future’ would involve people mostly working from home and having all their goods etc delivered to them. This hints that maybe I won after all? That abandoned malls will be repurposed into Fulfilment Centres, which seem be embracing post-grid, clean energy wherever possible - but also are happy to drop SimCity like into places with pre-existing infrastructure, plug’n’play style. That the skies will fill with drones being launched from them. And autonomous vehicles will be race out onto nearby highways. And… its human workforce will still be camping nearby in post-apocalyptic housing conditions. That, worse than Walmart’s staff surviving on food stamps - unable to even shop there - Sorry To Bother You will prove itself prophetic af, with it co-locating its workforce on site in conditions close to jail. That, as the Collapse continues to unfold, the Fulfilment Centres will be so fortified that anyone passing by might mistake it for a scene from that Terminator movie with Christian Bale playing JC. That… UGH
Apropos of nothing at all (and by request)
CJW: The final part of the puzzle will be Amazon delivery drones working out how to deliver goods to the contracted workers who live in sprawling caravan cities - perhaps marking caravan roofs with bokode stickers for machine vision. Who needs street names or numbers when you’ve been tagged by the robots?
MJW: There is actually a scene in Psynode where Mirii gets something delivered to herself by drone at the fulfilment centre where she works, a small and circuitous little bite of next-stage consumerism.
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MKY: Hack the Planet: Middle East edition
Israeli TV Eurovision webcast hacked with fake missile alert
The online stream of the Eurovision semi-finals in Israel was hacked to show warnings of a missile strike and images of blasts in the host city, Tel Aviv.
The website for KAN’s television stations was interrupted on Tuesday evening – just as the competition’s first round was beginning – with a fake alert from Israel’s army telling of an impending attack.
Messages such as: “Risk of Missile Attack, Please Take Shelter” and: “Israel is NOT Safe. You Will See!” appeared on the screen. Animated satellite footage showed explosions in the coastal city.
They blamed Hamas, but it’s not like there’s an increasingly high tech cyber/hybrid war underway in the region rn, all as factions within the US set their sights once more on Tehran and… oh wait
How Pro-Iran Hackers Spoofed FP and the News Media
“If you put this operation together with all the other Iranian operations we’ve already seen, Iran emerges as at least as significant a disinformation player as Russia, and it doesn’t look like they’re going away,” said Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab who studies disinformation…
The pro-Iran campaign breaks new ground by using a tactic that Citizen Lab’s researchers are calling “ephemeral disinformation.” Its operators would create fake news pages and sites, post fake articles, and then delete the pages once the articles began to get pickup on social media. The tactic appears aimed at injecting false narratives into the information ecosystem and then deleting the underlying evidence of the fake news infrastructure behind the claim.
-insert yet another rant about leaning into a partially online, hyperglocal way of life-
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CJW: This is the biggest climate change news of the fortnight (along with a bunch of related links), but I’ve shunted it down here to not overload/depress you too much. Skip down to the Cutting Room Floor if you’ve already read enough on the topic.
Humanity Is About to Kill 1 Million Species in a Globe-Spanning Murder-Suicide (via James Bradley)
Human beings are more prosperous and numerous than we’ve ever been, while the Earth’s other species are dying off faster than at any time in human history.
These two conditions are related. But if the second one persists long enough, we will be following our fellow organisms into the dustbin of geological history.
Human society under urgent threat from loss of Earth’s natural life
“We tried to document how far in trouble we are to focus people’s minds, but also to say it is not too late if we put a huge amount into transformational behavioural change. This is fundamental to humanity. We are not just talking about nice species out there; this is our life-support system.”
And, Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an ‘Unprecedented’ Pace
MKY: On topic link dump! The U.N. says 1 million species could disappear. Pacific islands have a solution.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature estimates that we’ll need to protect at least 30 percent of every coastal and marine habitat by 2030 if we’re serious about conserving the natural systems that underpin our quality of life…
The Pacific Ocean is the largest habitat on the planet, greater in size than the combined landmass of every single continent. Along the edges of this far-reaching marine ecosystem lie some of the largest cities on Earth — and dotted across its great expanse are thousands of islands, small and large. These islands are populated by the descendants of the great voyagers who traversed these waters in wooden canoes, powered by nothing more than the wind in their woven sails and the knowledge passed down through chants and songs.
Pacific Islanders have known for centuries that protecting parts of the ocean brings benefits to people and nature. For generations, we have set aside areas where fishing is not allowed, resulting in more fish, bigger fish, and greater biodiversity. It is considered the world’s oldest form of fisheries management…
The greatest biological outcomes come from fully protected areas where all forms of fishing are restricted, like in the Palau National Marine Sanctuary, which comprises 80 percent of Palau’s national waters. There are also benefits to restricting the most damaging forms of fishing, like on the other side of the ocean in Chile, where the Rapa Nui people recently agreed to restrict industrial fishing in the entirety of their biologically unique waters, and only allow traditional artisanal fishing.
Related: Torres Strait Islanders take climate change complaint to the United Nations
The non-profit coordinating the complaint by the Torres Strait Islanders says this will be the first climate change litigation brought against the Australian government based on a human rights complaint, and also the first legal action worldwide brought by inhabitants of low-lying islands against a nation state.
Also related? U.N. Secretary-General warns world ‘not on track’ to limiting temperature rise to 1.5 percent
Guterres arrived in New Zealand on Sunday and will later also travel to Tuvalu, Vanuatu and Fiji as part of a Pacific tour focused on climate change.
And whilst the peoples of the Pacific Ocean might just have a plan, there’s a lotta work to be done for Team Planetary Park, like you can’t even go to the great outdoors in the US of A anymore for a breath of fresh air:
“The poor air quality in our national parks is both disturbing and unacceptable,” said Theresa Pierno, president and CEO for National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), in a statement. “Nearly every single one of our more than 400 national parks is plagued by air pollution. If we don’t take immediate action to combat this, the results will be devastating and irreversible.”
The culprits? Extracting and burning fossil fuels (specifically coal — surprising, we know), car exhaust, and side effects of climate change like wildfire smoke. The report notes that the large majority of polluted air doesn’t originate in the parks, but gets blown in from elsewhere.
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Cutting Room Floor:
Airpods are cheap, shit, designed to fail, and impossible to recycle: AirPods Are a Tragedy
A trans woman looking at feminism in the modern American political atmosphere: The Pink
XR#1: If Politicians Can’t Face Climate Change, Extinction Rebellion Will
XR#2: Notes from a Remarkable Political Moment for Climate Change
Satellites + AI = Fossil Fuel Accountability?: We’ll soon know the exact air pollution from every power plant in the world
Interesting stuff about neuron response to stimulus on top of everything it says on the tin: AI Evolved These Creepy Images to Please a Monkey’s Brain (by and via Ed Yong)
Police departments across the nation are generating leads and making arrests by feeding celebrity photos, CGI renderings, and manipulated images into facial recognition software. Because of fucking course they are.
Does This Dress Make Me Look Guilty? On conwoman courtroom fashion.
CJW: American War by Omar El Akkad
I cut this review from the last issue because we ran long, but I’ve posted it to my blog if anyone is interested. tldr: American War is a really interesting literary/sci-fi look at the War on Terror transported into the American context, and it is well worth your time.
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AA: Der Trepanomikönen by Lucas Korte aka Shoggoth Kinetics
I’m currently rather obsessed with the work of Lucas Korte aka Shoggoth Kinetics. He’s a fucking genius. Not only does he do insane body-horror art and logos for metal bands (examples of which can be found on his instagram), but he has also released a book, Der Trepanomikönen, which is available through Are Not Books. It’s a very funny and fascinating thing, utterly unlike anything I’ve read before.
I was talking to the photographer Benoit Debuisser about Korte’s art in this book, and Benoit said the design elements reminded him of the covers to the Morrison/Weston’s The Filth. I can certainly see that. If you want to order the book you get it from LuLu here or you can read it online for free at Issu here.
Here’s Korte on some of the theoretical underpinnings of his work:
Central to my work is a recognition of the hyper-intimacy we have with the nonhumans all around us. Our bodies, our technology and science, and our very cultures and identities are co-constituted out of countless nonhuman agents and relations. Climate mutation is forcing a confrontation with this reality, one that is proving not only to be materially devastating for many populations of humans and nonhumans, but intellectually uncomfortable for many Westerners. We’re learning that humans can have no separate existence from the nonhumans that surround us (and that essentially are the world). In fact, human beings can have no existence at all without nonhumans, separate or otherwise.
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CJW: Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)
A definitive history of Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), a 1992 art project which included a poem by William Gibson on a disk packaged with a virus that deleted the text upon reading.
CJW: Capeshit’s Endgame
On the rare occasions they critique the series, Marvel fans are seemingly only capable of having vacuous conversations about representation; how we needs to “do better” by casting more women and making more characters gay. But when it comes to interrogating the implications of having, say, a billionaire playboy arms dealer be the character that pulls back the world from the brink of doom, their lips are sealed. These are films that violently reinforce the status quo, where dissent is always squashed in favor of liberal hegemony. What is last year’s Black Panther if not the story of a global revolution triumphantly squashed by nationalists?
Make sure to stick around until the final paragraph, because Oof.
I was really happy to find this piece by Maggie Siebert, because the only other place I’ve come across a leftist critique of THE BIGGEST FILM FRANCHISE OF ALL TIME from THE ONE FILM STUDIO TO RULE THEM ALL is on the Struggle Session podcast (which is well worth your time).
I’m not saying you can’t enjoy these films or any others (I’m sure I love some politically problematic movies), but be aware of the layers of meaning hidden beneath the shiny shell of punches’n’laffs.
And please don’t forget that Marvel was on the cusp of releasing a comic in conjunction with a literal, real-life arms manufacturing company before they were shamed into changing their minds. This whole cultural moment is war-loving, neo/liberal, American-imperialist bullshit.
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MKY: The Iron Sky: The Coming Race
So, I’ll admit it, I fucking loved seeing The Iron Sky on the big screen. At the time it was a lot of fun. But, like, a lot’s changed in the world since then. And whilst I was for years eagerly anticipating the sequel - with its teaser of Sarah Palin shapeshifting her hand back to default lizard person mode to enter the Hollow Earth, and Hitler riding in on a T-Rex - in the years I assume it took them to generate all those kray VFX, it’s a rather uncomfortable watch now, when like… literal Nazis are on the march now. This film explores literal Nazi mythology, and offers zero critique. (GOTTERDAM IT, WHERE ARE MY ANTI-FA SUPERSOLDIERS FIGHTING BACK?!). That the film is of the late-night watch trash variety, that would have it sit right next to Battlefield Earth speaks volumes. One person’s trashy watch, is another person’s sacred text brought to life. And I srly can’t help but feel that somewhere, large groups of people are cheering at having their belief system being represented. And on some podcast, David Icke is prolly raving about it. So.. future shout-out to whatever militant liberal has to the time to do a deep dive on the production of this and the people behind it. That said, unlike Shazam, I watched the entire thing - because, like Marissa in The Good Fight, my mind is fortified, and I can go places online and off that others fear to tread, and bring back reports for y’all -, and dug the set-up for the next film in the series, should actual Nazis not succeed in burning down the world in the interim. This has been a review.
AA: Talk To Transformer by Adam King & Open AI
If you’re reading this newsletter you’re probably Extremely Online, so you’ve no doubt seen https://talktotransformer.com/ - a front end by Adam King for Open AI’s text generation/language protocol GPT-2. You might remember that the “full” (1.5 billion parameter) version of GPT-2 is still under wraps because Open AI fears that it could be misused (though the usual malevolent actors will no doubt have access), but this limited, 345 million parameter version will give you a good idea of the potential applications for this system. What sort of potential applications, you ask? Well, sorry Corey, but TalktoTransformer.com will write the newsletter introductions from now on!
Yep, nothing wrong with those, they’re pretty much perfect! (Also: RIP Zane. We hardly knew ye.)
If you come up with any interesting/funny uses for TalktoTransformer, let us know - personally I’ve been generating some silly alternate reality David Lynch movies.
CJW: Max Anton Brewer did a bit of a deep dive on this tech in the latest issue of his (excellent) SCIOPS Newsletter - particularly detailing the ways the neural network can quickly degenerate into hate speech because it’s been trained on thousand of pages sourced from Reddit. And he uses PKD as an example (having built a PKD twitter bot in the past), so of course I’m all ears.
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CJW: Biophillic Vision - Experiment 1
You probably saw this already - a prototype piece of AR software that removes cars from the streaming image - but I had to share it because it is so very REPO VIRTUAL. The author talks about it as a way to envision a city without cars, but my dystopia-brain sees a great way to trick people into walking into traffic.
AA: Chief Rocka
If you’re a fan of comics like Johnny The Homicidal Maniac or Jim Mahfood’s work (particularly Zombie Boy), may I suggest the upcoming Chief Rocka? It’s written by Tom Syverson with art by Ben Marlowe, and they describe it as “A horror-noir tale of magic, money, and mistakes!” Here’s their more detailed plot summary:
Welcome to Tunicate City, where magic functions like high finance! In this harried world of money, magic, and mistakes, a two-bit hustler named Chief Rocka pounds the pavement as a freelance occultist. His motto: Fake it ‘till you break it!
Leveraging his street smarts, connections, and innate savvy, Chief Rocka cooks up scheme after scheme but never seems to get things right. And when it comes to living up to the expectations of his wonderful girlfriend Kia, he’s still learning on the job.
Tom was kind enough to share the first issue with me and I was entertained. The humour is outrageous and there’s plenty of deep-cut occult references for those of you into that sort of thing (like me). The indiegogo only has a few days left, so chuck Tom and Ben a couple of bucks and check it out. If you want to know more you can watch the Issue One launch trailer here.
MJW: I’m about to retreat to the country, petsitting in a vineyard and using the isolation to write my heart out. Or at least I fucking hope so. I have two WIP’s to work on. I bought a pair of gumboots. That’s all I need, right?
I’m not sure of the hashtag I should use to document my two weeks of rural existence: #farmgoth, maybe? Anyway, wish me luck and many words. I’m not sure if isolation is conclusive to epic wordcounts for me, but I guess I’m going to find out.
MJW: The latest episode of Catastropod is an interview with Meg Elison, author of the post-apocalyptic Road to Nowhere series, the first of which is The Book of the Unnamed Midwife. We talk about feminism and gender, and of course the end of the world. I was lucky enough to attend Worldcon 2018 in San Jose last year, where I met Meg in the flesh and conducted this interview while I was rabidly hungover. Still, I think it’s rather good - thanks to Meg who is a wonderful speaker, and sharp as hell.
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CJW: And that’s it for another issue! Today I’m heading out to the pub for trivia pour one out for this fucking country, and to celebrate the end of (round one) of my (line) edits on REPO VIRTUAL. (All the parentheses are because I still have another, much shorter, round of line edits, and then copyedits before it’s locked away.) I’ve also just seen the cover art, and let me tell you, it is damn fine indeed. Can’t wait to share it with you all.
And then tomorrow I start writing the next novel. Berserker mode activate. Keep grinding, etc, etc.
Remember to look after yourself, look out for those around you, and fight for what you care about.