MJW: Welcome to another edition of nothing here. I’m writing the intro today, because I offered without thinking it through and am now typing with great difficulty on CJW’s portable keyboard with inch-long acrylic talons. Hi! Like always, the newsletter is bursting with stuff we find interesting, amusing, educational, transformative, enlightening… I do go on. TL;DR here’s the shit we dig, crammed in your inbox and face, read it read it read it.
If you want, and are able to, you can support us by becoming a paid subscriber and receive bonus letters as well as these ones.
Corey J. White (CJW) - Sci-fi author. Newsletter facilitator. Naarm/Melbourne.
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - Author & podcaster. Your fabulous goth aunt. On Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, Australia. @marleejaneward
Austin Armatys (AA) - Writer/Teacher/Wretched Creeper // Oh Nothing Press // @0hnothing
m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / salvagepunk / ecopoet // Dark Extropian Musings
MKY: Meet IRpair & Phantom; powerful anti-facial recognition glasses
GHOST PROTOCOL ENABLED! Take my money for this kickstarter (whoops, I don’t have any sorry, I’m a writer). The only augmented reality I’m interested in right now is where I’m nothing but a glitch the all-seeing eyes of the global surveillance marketing state. Now to turn the page on Tim Maughan’s Infinite Detail, and see which, if any, of the characters in there are rocking a version of these in the near future smart city nightmare.
CJW: Can’t mention this without also mentioning SVK by Warren Ellis and D’Israeli, a comic partially printed in UV ink, that could only be fully read with a blacklight (which came with the comic). The video on the IRpair Kickstarter page of the person’s face blurred out by the brightly glowing glasses frames is straight out of SVK.
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MKY: What Happens to ‘Smart Cities’ When the Internet Dies?
Speaking of Tim’s book, he just did a great QnA with CityLab and I’ll be thinking about this exchange in particular for some time:
One of the interesting things about the post-crash part of your story is that, gradually, a new system arises to run things in the place of the old system—even if the person who runs things, the character Grids, is somewhat grudging about doing so.
As I was about two-thirds of the way through the book and trying to work out exactly how to end stuff, I came across a great essay by Astra Taylor about the term “activism” versus the term “organizer.” The argument she’s making is there’s a lot of talk about activism these days, but … activism is seen as something that’s kind of sexy and short-term, something you can say you did by liking a post on Facebook. Actual political change is done through organizing, and that’s a much longer process, and often a much smaller process. It starts at a community level and involves a lot of planning and dedicating, if not all your life maybe a certain chunk of your life, towards a political cause.
Grids has inherited running a part of the city. And he might not be very good at it, but at least he’s doing it. His argument he has towards the end of the book with Anika is that you started this revolution but you didn’t know where it went. You didn’t have any plans for what happened afterwards. That’s an incredibly legit and incredibly important thing to consider when we’re talking about radical politics or activism or revolutions. It’s not just about protest. It’s about longer-term solutions and working with communities to try and work out what happens next. After you’ve broken something, how do you fix it? Or what you replace it with?
CJW: That essay on activism vs organising that Tim mentions is fantastic, covering the history of the term “activist”, and the ways activism falls short compared to organising.
As Jonathan Matthew Smucker argues, the term activist is suspiciously devoid of content. “Labels are certainly not new to collective political action,” Smucker writes, pointing to classifications like abolitionist, populist, suffragette, unionist, and socialist, which all convey a clear position on an issue. But activist is a generic category associated with oddly specific stereotypes: today, the term signals not so much a certain set of political opinions or behaviors as a certain temperament. In our increasingly sorted and labeled society, activists are analogous to skateboarders or foodies or dead heads, each inhabiting a particular niche in America’s grand and heterogeneous cultural ecosystem.
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CJW: Extinction Rebellion: Not the Struggle we Need, Pt. 1 (via Ospare)
Astonishingly, XR’s publicly available information contains no reference to ongoing support for those charged or convicted, and an internal XR bulletin has revealed that XR’s leaders have, to consternation from local groups, decided not to spend any of XR’s (considerable) funds on providing legal support. This is an astounding dereliction of duty, and […] raises serious questions about XR’s decision-making processes and structures of power, which allow central figures to leverage power on a national scale through the risks undertaken and costs incurred by grassroots members.
This is part 1 of what I’m sure will be a detailed and thorough critique of some of XR’s tactics, organisational structure, etc. I for one didn’t realise how dangerous, naive, and steeped in white privilege their UK protest techniques are in the way they choose to relate to police. Hopefully XR branches elsewhere don’t use the same tactics.
MJW:
An advert for their ‘Non-Violent Direct Action Training’ notes that it covers ‘how much fun it can be being locked up’.
I mean, if the above doesn’t smack of privilege, then what does? I’ve just bought a copy of This is Not a Drill, and this article isn’t making me excited to read it.
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AA: Squaring The Spheroid by Edward Guimont
Cartography, history and flat-earth conspiracy collide in this essay from Edward Guimont, a scholar of “British Empire, nationalism, Great Zimbabwe, mythic history, cryptids, (and) Lovecraft”. Academic without being dry and packed with interesting details (for example: did you know about the Great Moon Hoax of 1835?), this was good stuff.
The first day, I showed my students a map of something called Alkebu-Lan; a mysterious land with no recognisable European place names or borders, with the Arab orientation of south at the top and the Islamic calendar date of 1260 AH (=1844 CE). No student was able to identify it though, to be fair, it belonged to an alternate-history scenario where the Black Death killed almost all Europeans, resulting in an Africa bereft of their colonial presence (and a world in which Islam and Buddhism are the dominant religions).Such a progressive purview is rare for the alternate-history genre, steeped as it is in what-ifs (“what if the Confederacy had won the American Civil War?”) that feel increasingly less counterfactual.
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MKY: House orders Pentagon to review if it exposed Americans to weaponised ticks (thx Emily Dare!)
Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons, cites the Swiss-born discoverer of the Lyme pathogen, Willy Burgdorfer, as saying that the Lyme epidemic was a military experiment that had gone wrong.
Burgdorfer, who died in 2014, worked as a bioweapons researcher for the US military and said he was tasked with breeding fleas, ticks, mosquitoes and other blood-sucking insects, and infecting them with pathogens that cause human diseases.
According to the book, there were programs to drop “weaponised” ticks and other bugs from the air, and that uninfected bugs were released in residential areas in the US to trace how they spread. It suggests that such a scheme could have gone awry and led to the eruption of Lyme disease in the US in the 1960s.
Hmmmm and which neighbourhoods were that exactly, I wonder. Cue more paranoia about Zika and those genetically engineered mosquitoes. The other other insect apoc?
MJW: The way I always felt about conspiracy theories was that surely the government couldn’t be bothered cooking up all these nefarious plans, but since I’ve watched Wormwood, I’ve wondered…
I thought this article, linked from the one above, is talking some real facts about insect issues where already facing and will continue to face what with climate change: What’s Really Behind the Spread of Lyme Disease? Clue: It’s Not the Pentagon.
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CJW: Failing to Distinguish between a Tractor Trailer and the Bright White Sky (via Dan Hill)
[…] at the beginning of 2017 I spent several weeks driving around the mountains of central Greece in a car I had fitted out with several cheap webcams, and a homemade accelerometer fixed to the steering wheel. As I drove, a laptop on the passenger seat recorded my location, speed, steering angle, and the view from the windshield. This information was subsequently fed into an open-source machine learning system […]. By watching my driving, the software learned to drive itself—and not on the freeways of Southern California, or the test tracks of Bavaria, but among the towns and villages of Greece, a place with a very different material, economic, and mythological history and present.
[…] My car was designed to get lost. Rather than entering a desired destination and sitting back, surrendering decisions over routing to the machine, in return for a guaranteed arrival my self-driving car plots a random course, taking every available exit, off-ramp, and side road in order to prioritize the journey over the destination. The end of the journey cannot be predicted, nor can the sights encountered along the way. The cognitive effects of such a journey are produced in collaboration between human and machine imaginations.
Great read from James Bridle on the history and future of self-driving cars, and of the necessity to be able to take back control - not just from the cars themselves, but from the systems behind them.
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CJW: On the Language of the Deep Blue
Echolocation is a vibrantly reciprocal conversation between the animal and the wild world, of the sort that nature writers can only fantasize and metaphorize about. It is not like other sensations—all of which convey information from an essentially passive outside world. If I put my hand on a cold stone, the cold stone isn’t an active party to any relationship. It’s just there, being cold and stony, and my sensory receptors merely record those facts. But echolocating clicks induce a response from another.
The rocks spat back an answer to the whale: “Here I am: I’ve got a knobble here and a groove there, and I’m made from early Eocene basalt with a bit of mugearite.” And the whale responded respectfully by steering to the left.
A fascinating essay on language and the communication of killer whales. Sadly, it also links with the piece we shared last time on endlings…
MJW: This was a fascinating and beautifully written piece that actually captured my errant attention the whole way through.
There are no monologues in the sea. There is so much more going on down there.
So much, indeed, that it is nonsense to talk about the “language” of killer whales. Not because it might be an insult to language (and to the pride of those hubristic language users, the humans), but because it is an insult to killer whales to imply that their means of communication are as limited as ours. Language as we understand it is a small part of any organism’s negotiation with otherness.
There is no way to NOT anthropomorphize these animals and their language, it’s the only framework we have to relate to them. This piece does it too, but uses it to try to explain just how vast the chasm is, and what it could be like.
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MJW: I was a fast-food worker. Let me tell you about burnout.
Free market capitalism doesn’t assign a negative value to “how much stress workers are under.” It just assumes that unhappy workers will leave their job for a better one, and things will find a natural balance. But when the technologies that make life miserable spread everywhere at the speed of globalization, finding something better isn’t really an option anymore. And a system that runs by marinating a third or more of the workforce in chronic stress isn’t sustainable.
The ‘chronic, mild stress’ the author speaks of is utterly familiar to most of us who have worked in the late capitalist system. I had a boss who punished me punitively for months after I showed up ten minutes late for work one day (because my shifts were constantly changing and I wrote the start time down wrong - I thought I was 20 minutes early.) It’s a way of life we’re going to either have to get used to, or smash. I know which one I’d prefer, but I know which one will likely happen.
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Cutting Room Floor:
The Primal Wound: An Anti-Oedipal Consideration by Matt Colquhoun
The (Christian and conservative) American Dark Money Behind Europe’s Far Right (via Dan Hill)
AA: Ichneutae Redux by Elytron Frass
Elytron Frass (author of the excellent Liber Exuvia and contributor to Creeper Magazine #1) recently released his short story “Ichneutae Redux” on the Tragickai Books site. Frass writes what I guess you could call “experimental fiction”, but unlike most attempts at pushing the limits of written form and content, his stuff is actually enjoyable to read.
This is a wildly psychedelic story about a group of Satyr tasked with locating a mysterious sound. It’s dense with allusion, rife with new ideas, and quite funny in places, too.
The satyrs reenacted the creation of the universe. They pantomimed its simple non-organic shapes, either vaginal or phallic, before evolving their charades into organismic complexes. They moved on from the Platonic solid model proceeding to imitate Kouros’ furnishings as well as art pieces—mimicking the scenes and postures found on figure plates, bas-reliefs, sardonyx intaglios, and mosaics; they mirrored the athleticisms and eroticisms depicted by his gallery of sculpted stone. Priceless plates, house wares, and papyri scrolls were damaged in the process. These pests amassed in hypersexual contortions to commemorate the heyday of the Hellenistic orgia. And before a day could come to pass, they’d spawn miniatures of themselves—sexually matured and eager to turn out facsimiles of their own.
If you’re looking for a weird little literary palette cleanser (or something to fill in some time before the next 30 Marvel movies arrive), give this a go.
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CJW: Conspiracy Against the Human Race, by Thomas Ligotti
I recently finished reading Ligotti’s Conspiracy Against the Human Race, largely as research for my next novel, but also because I knew that, as someone whose mind tends towards pessimism and depression, I’d get something out of it. The book mostly concerns itself with the history of pessimism in philosophy, but also weaves in plenty of horror fiction and some recent neuroscience studies into the text. It starts off quite dense (I found the 70-page first chapter to be something of a slog), but either it, or I as the reader, quickly fell into a rhythm after that. It’s fascinating, dark, and depressing, but I guarantee you’ve not read anything else like it (though some of the ideas may seem familiar as they were borrowed wholesale for True Detective Season 1).
In our bonus letters recently we’ve been talking about futurism, so I thought I might share this quote from the book on transhumanism:
[…] transhumanists believe we can make ourselves. But this is impossible. Because of evolution, we got made. We did not bring ourselves out of the primeval ooze. And everything we have done since we became a species has been a consequence of being made. No matter what we do, it will be what we were made to do—and nothing else. We may try to make something of ourselves, but we cannot take over our own evolution.
CJW: Parasite, directed by Bong Joon-ho
If, after Snowpiercer, there was any doubt that Comrade Bong Joon-ho is a leftist ally then Parasite will put those doubts to rest. It’s a film about class, and about wealth - wealth disparity, the insulation that wealth provides, and the desperation that goes hand-in-hand with poverty. But more than that, it is funny. It is a very dark, and at times dry, sort of humour, but it still had me laughing out loud in the middle of the cinema. It is dark, funny, surprising, well-written, beautifully shot, and with fantastic performances from its entire cast.
And it’s not just me saying that - it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year, but is also without the air of prestigious wank that such an award might have you expecting.
I was lucky enough to see it in the cinema in Melbourne, and while it’s not the sort of movie that needs a big screen, you should try and see it as soon as possible.
Also, I will pay a 50USD bounty to the first person who can get me a postal address for Bong’s office or production company. I have a sci-fi book set in Korea that I know he could adapt brilliantly.
CJW: Final cut: films condensed into a single frame – in pictures
Jason Shulman creates these images by photographing entire movies using long exposure techniques. The above image is Blue Velvet. Considering how many frames there are in a film, I’m amazed that there are any visible images within the gestalt - for instance, hit the link and look at the branches in the image of The Mirror.
AA: The last handful of Creeper Magazine Issue One physical copies are now for sale at the Oh Nothing Press store. You can also pick up a PDF of this inaugural issue for 4usd. Thanks to everyone who backed the Kickstarter and otherwise supported this project, we can’t wait to make another issue.
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CJW: And that’s it for another issue. Currently I’m going through copyedits on Repo Virtual (up for preorder now! I can hardly believe it), which is the last stage that requires my input. Is anyone interested in the nitty-gritty of copyedits? I might talk about it a little next time around. It’s been a long journey (who would have thought a novel would take so much longer than a novella), but I’m really proud of this book, and I’m excited to see it out in the world next April.
Alright. It’s a big, weird world out there, and it’s a hard one to traverse on your own. Find a family, build a community, be good to those you care about, and maybe you’ll get through this safe and sound. Until next time, look after yourself.