March 19, 2023, 1:06 p.m.
nothing here but whale song psy-ops - issue 213 - 19th March, 2023
Nothing Here
nothing here but whale song psy-ops
issue 213 - 19th March, 2023
CJW: Welcome to another NH dispatch. As usual, we've got plenty to share from all across the internet. Let's begin, shall we?
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The Team
Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Writer, apocalypse witch, goth aunt.
Corey J. White (CJW) - Author, sin-eater, future sweetie-pie.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Journalist, MA in semiotics, and PhD in Arts. Sci-fi writer, futurology researcher and essayist. @lidiazuin
Climate Change & The Environment
CJW: Listening To The Creatures Of The World - Karen Bakker at Noema
These digitally enabled ocean conservation schemes benefit humans as well as the whales. When ships slow down, they not only reduce whale strikes but also release fewer pollutants and emit less carbon dioxide. Moreover, whales’ nutrient-rich waste acts like a fertilizer for phytoplankton, which sequester enormous amounts of carbon. IMF economists have estimated the value of the ecosystem services provided by each individual whale (of the largest species) at over $2 million and called for a new global program of economic incentives to return whale populations to pre-industrial whaling levels as a “nature-based solution” to climate change.
Perhaps the most novel aspect of these digital ocean governance schemes is their inclusion of nonhumans into decision-making. Simply by singing, a whale can turn aside a container ship: a digitally mediated decentering of the human.
Marine navigation becomes a matter of interspecies cooperation, as whales influence and constrain human action by controlling the decisions and movements of ship captains and fishers. Nonhumans, enabled by digital computation, are being enrolled in ocean governance, in stark contrast to the way that humans treated these species only a few decades ago, a grounded example of what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls the extension of “ideas of politics and justice to the nonhuman”: multispecies environmental regulation.
I will always hate seeing economists putting a dollar value on non-human animals and other elements of the "natural" world, but at the same time it's the only language the wealthy speak. Anyway, this piece is on some really interesting tech-mediated attempts at sharing shipping lanes (and the ocean generally) with our cetacean cousins. It also touches on other systems for monitoring animals, forests, the atmosphere, etc, and the language of animals.
It ends with something to speculate over:
Think of planetary computation as one means of eavesdropping on multispecies conversations, in which nonhumans can use digital technologies to convey information, influence human action and thus express a grounded form of voice. How might nonhuman preferences be incorporated into our decision-making frameworks, into new forms of Earthly politics? To begin formulating an answer, we’ll have to listen more closely to our nonhuman kin.
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CJW: The Climate Activists Who Dismiss Meat Consumption Are Wrong - Jan Dutkiewicz at The New Republic
So what might this more holistic version of climate politics look like? There’s a strong ethical and environmental case for eating entirely plant-based diets, where possible. At a policy level, eliminating factory farming—which could be paired with better food assistance and affordability programs and planned transitions for meat workers to less hazardous jobs—would reduce meat production, and therefore consumption, in the U.S. by over 90 percent. Not only would this help animals and reduce toxic runoff, but a plant-forward diet would increase our capacity for total food production and significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, particularly in the high-income countries most responsible for global warming.
Meat doesn’t have to disappear entirely. Cellular agriculture and plant-based protein will eventually offer an affordable mass-market solution if people insist on having cheap burgers. And in specific local contexts at small scale, we might still have animals in our food system without reducing them to mass-produced math equations: So-called agro-ecological farming, for instance, integrates animals mostly as providers of manure into diversified cropping systems. Indigenous land-management approaches, like efforts to reintroduce the buffalo in Montana, which combine cultural meaning with conservation and rewilding but include limited hunting, offer another path.
Jan is always worth sharing, even if people refuse to listen when it comes to shifting global food and agriculture systems/practices for ethical and climatological reasons. Sure, every private jet should be melted down for scrap first, and their owners (and leasers) bankrupted to help fund our climate transitions, but sooner or later we have to address meat consumption.
Besides, I still think that one day humans will look back in horror at factory farming (and possibly meat consumption more generally), especially as we continue to learn about animal intelligence and sentience.
Related: Insect Farming Is Booming. But Is It Cruel? - Matt Reynolds at Wired
Also, George Monbiot just posted this: Meatwashing
Sadly, scientific findings have not prevented some of the world’s biggest meat companies from using false claims about the alleged benefits of pasture-fed beef in their advertising. Worse still, a new market has developed, in which companies such as Microsoft buy carbon credits from ranches practising holistic grazing, on the mistaken grounds that this offsets their emissions. By making ranching more economically viable, this money is likely to accelerate climate breakdown, as land that might otherwise be rewilded continues to be grazed. In other words, the companies investing in these schemes ignore the opportunity costs of livestock farming. You might as well buy carbon credits from a coal mine.
Don't believe the greenwashing bullshit coming from the meat industry.
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The Mining Industry’s Next Frontier Is Deep, Deep Under the Sea - A long read on deep-sea mining of polymetallic nodules, by Vince Beiser at Wired
What the dogs of Chernobyl can teach us about life at the edge
The Hunger Gap - "A gulf in public understanding prevents us from seeing how and why our food supply is at risk."
Geopolitics & Empire
CJW: U.S. Special Forces Want to Use Deepfakes for Psy-Ops - Sam Biddle at The Intercept
While the U.S. government routinely warns against the risk of deepfakes and is openly working to build tools to counter them, the document from Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, represents a nearly unprecedented instance of the American government — or any government — openly signaling its desire to use the highly controversial technology offensively.
[...]
As with foreign governmental “disinformation” campaigns, the U.S. has spent the past several years warning against the potent national security threat represented by deepfakes. The use of deepfakes to deliberately deceive, government authorities warn regularly, could have a deeply destabilizing effect on civilian populations exposed to them.
At the federal level, however, the conversation has revolved exclusively around the menace foreign-made deepfakes might pose to the U.S., not the other way around. Previously reported contracting documents show SOCOM has sought technologies to detect deepfake-augmented internet campaigns, a tactic it now wants to unleash on its own.
[...]
“When it comes to disinformation, the Pentagon should not be fighting fire with fire,” Chris Meserole, head of the Brookings Institution’s Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative, told The Intercept. “At a time when digital propaganda is on the rise globally, the U.S. should be doing everything it can to strengthen democracy by building support for shared notions of truth and reality. Deepfakes do the opposite. By casting doubt on the credibility of all content and information, whether real or synthetic, they ultimately erode the foundation of democracy itself.”
He's right, but why does he think the US has any interest in strengthening democracy? Unrest will help them continue to steal oil and grains, sell weapons, and maintain their place at the top of the heap.
MJW: The technology should not be used… except by us when we need it, as our motivations are right.
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This Is Exactly What Israeli Apartheid Looks Like - Seraj Assi at Jacobin
On the recent, and frankly clumsy, US attempts at propaganda. By Branko Marcetic at Jacobin.
Geopolitical game changer: China-sponsored Iran-Saudi peace deal is big blow to petrodollar and US economic hegemony - Ben Norton at Geopolitical Economy Report - A great piece covering the China-brokered deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Science & Space
Human brain cells used as living AIs to solve mathematical equations - CJW: This is a very cool idea, some Cronenbergian sci-fi shit, but "brainoware" is the worst possible name they could have come up with. Wetware, greyware, squishware, any of these are better.
Tech & Design
CJW: Doom loopism - Rob Horning
This piece from Rob Horning on the discourse around current "AI" ends with an interesting thought:
I am tempted here to make an accelerationist argument and claim that generated text could potentially expose those circulatory vulnerabilities and require that they be addressed. It will heighten the contradictions in our current media environment, reveal the incompatibilities between for-profit media companies and the ideals of free speech and open dialogue and so forth. That seems more plausible to me than the possibility that generative text will obliterate the difference between truth and lies and will make all intentionality inscrutable.
I like the idea that independent media and actual journalism might again gain prominence in our media landscape simply by being different to the big outlets which will embrace LLMs for the sake of profit (and to discipline labour). There's already so much lazy bullshit in journalism, like articles that are simply rewritten press releases or obvious state propaganda, so if the additional flood of bullshit coming from LLMs helps emphasise the importance of quality journalism, that would be a very good thing.
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DCH: The Imminent Danger of A.I. Is One We’re Not Talking About by Ezra Klein, nytimes
“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism,” Chiang told me. “And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.”
We are talking so much about the technology of A.I. that we are largely ignoring the business models that will power it. That’s been helped along by the fact that the splashy A.I. demos aren’t serving any particular business model, save the hype cycle that leads to gargantuan investments and acquisition offers. But these systems are expensive and shareholders get antsy. The age of free, fun demos will end, as it always does. Then, this technology will become what it needs to become to make money for the companies behind it, perhaps at the expense of its users. It already is.
That time when the neoliberal scales fell from Ezra Klein’s eyes.
CJW: "We're not talking about it," he says, except left-leaning writers, philosophers, and podcasters (and newsletterers ;) ) have been talking about exactly this in relation to "AI" since the very start of this age of neural network discourse.
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That's just like, your opinion about AI - Max Anton Brewer
ChatGPT Is Nothing Like a Human, Says Linguist Emily Bender - Elizabeth Weil (via APH)
Deepfake porn is the new Moore’s Law with output doubling every six months. The outcome
Tech’s very bad year, in numbers - "Reduced investment and large-scale layoffs have created dark times for tech globally."
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Just the headlines:
Society & The Culture
MJW: Influencer Parents and The Kids Who Had Their Childhood Made Into Content by Fortesa Latifi at Teen Vogue
Claire, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy, has never known a life that doesn’t include a camera being pointed in her direction. The first time she went viral, she was a toddler. When the family’s channel started to rake in the views, Claire says both her parents left their jobs because the revenue from the YouTube channel was enough to support the family and to land them a nicer house and new car. “That’s not fair that I have to support everyone,” she said. “I try not to be resentful but I kind of [am].” Once, she told her dad she didn’t want to do YouTube videos anymore and he told her they would have to move out of their house and her parents would have to go back to work, leaving no money for “nice things.” When the family is together, the YouTube channel is what they talk about. Claire says her father has told her he may be her father, but he’s also her boss. “It’s a lot of pressure,” she said. When Claire turns 18 and can move out on her own, she’s considering going no-contact with her parents.
Your life on display without your consent? Horrifying.
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CJW: Inside America’s escalating war on drag - James Greig at Dazed
The historian Robert Paxton argued that ‘stage 2’ of fascism, the point at which it becomes rooted and influential, would arrive if “important elements of the conservative elite begin to cultivate or even tolerate [far-right extremists] as weapons against some internal enemy”. Written in 2003, this reads like an eerily accurate description of the current attacks on LGBTQ+ people. It’s true that extremist groups represent a tiny minority of the population, but they’re not an insignificant one: if they’re willing to commit political violence, then a small number of people can exert a profound impact on public life.
On the legislative, media, and cultural attacks on queer communities in the US.
DCH: Related: The Real, Sinister Political Threat of Tennessee’s New Anti-Drag Law by Natasha Lennard, The Intercept
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Andrew Tate Wants Everyone to Get in on the Grift - Benjamin Fogel at Jacobin
The Marquis de Sade’s Filthy, Pricey 40-Foot Scroll of Depravity
There’s a Psychological ‘Vaccine’ against Misinformation - "A social psychologist found that showing people how manipulative techniques work can create resilience against misinformation."
Health, Cooking, and Related
The lawsuit alleges that assisting a self-managed abortion qualifies as murder under state law, which would allow Silva to sue under the wrongful death statute. The women have not been criminally charged. Texas’ abortion laws specifically exempt the pregnant person from prosecution; the ex-wife is not named as a defendant. The legality of abortion in Texas in July 2022 is murky. The state’s trigger law, which makes performing abortion a crime punishable by up to life in prison, did not go into effect until August. But conservative state leaders, including Cain and Attorney General Ken Paxton, have claimed that the state’s pre-Roe abortion bans, which punish anyone who performs or “furnishes the means” for an abortion by up to five years in prison, went back into effect the day Roe v. Wade was overturned in June.
It fucking begins. Don't think for one second that abusive men won't use these laws to punish women who choose to abort so they aren't tied to a violent, coercive asshole.
CJW: Related: “Sick and Twisted”: Women Sue Texas Over Harrowing Medical Episodes Caused by Abortion Bans - Jordan Smith at The Intercept
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A Trump-appointed judge in Texas is about to deny every woman in the US access to the abortion pill. Stockpile them while you can I guess.
Covid isn’t trending all that great over here in Plague Island. 1 in 40 people in England have Covid. That’s data from 7 March and the penultimate tranche of readily available and timely data we’ll have and surveillance of it all is pretty much going out the window. Fun.
Labour & Economics
DCH: Why Poverty Persists in America by Matthew Desmond, nytimes
There are, it would seem, deeper structural forces at play, ones that have to do with the way the American poor are routinely taken advantage of. The primary reason for our stalled progress on poverty reduction has to do with the fact that we have not confronted the unrelenting exploitation of the poor in the labor, housing and financial markets.
A long read that touches on LBJ, the rise and fall of unions, the many failures of Bill Clinton (NAFTA, Welfare Reform/TANF), the new promise of sectoral bargaining and more. Well worth a read if you give a damn about the staggering stage of income inequality in America.
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DCH: France’s ‘Robin Hood’ Energy Workers Are Sending Cheap Electricity to Schools and Hospitals
Fabrice Coudour, Federal Secretary in charge of protest action in the CGT Federation for Mines and Energy, told Novara Media that electricians and gas engineers “can perform technical actions that render electricity free or very cheap to public buildings like hospitals, creches and schools.” They can cut the power to “those that we judge to be non-essential, like the offices of officials who do not want to hear what is being said in the streets”. In February, Cyrille Isaac-Sibille, an MP aligned to the presidential majority, who supports the unpopular pension reform, found the power to his offices had been cut, by workers in the local CGT branch in Lyon.
It’s no guillotine but it's a start.
MJW: Hit 'em where it hurts: the juice.
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How Consultants Mangle Government - Interview with Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington about their new big The Big Con.
The IMF Trap - "Debt, austerity, and inequality in Sri Lanka’s historic crisis"
Just the headlines:
Starbucks Workers Attempting to Unionize May Have Just Had Their Best Week Ever
Every Libertarian Becomes a Socialist The Moment The Free Market Screws Them
Books
LZ: Bram Stoker - Dracula
After many years, I finally managed to finish this book. I must confess that I didn’t know much about the actual story, but I was expecting that it was something close to Coppola’s movie adaptation. Sadly, it’s not. You won’t have a sexy Gary Oldman as Dracula here, but rather something more like Nosferatu. And there’s much more of a vibe of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen here too. It’s an interesting read as the story is told through journal entries and letters exchanged between the characters, but the ending is really disappointing since the resolution is presented very quickly compared to all the preparation.
What’s most interesting is that when Dracula was first translated to Swedish, the translator told a completely different story (Powers of Darkness), even changing the names of the characters and making a much longer version. In Iceland, a shortened version of this “translation” has also been published as if it was Stoker’s original work. Some readers say this sort of fanfic is better than the original, but I still need to read it (probably the Icelandic version, as the Swedish has over one thousand pages).
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LZ: Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
Currently reading this one, so I’ll come back with a better commentary after I finish it. Still, it might be a book that you’ll be interested in if you enjoyed The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg. Or even if you didn’t like it, as this romance is quite different but no less trippy. It retells the story of Pontus Pilate and Goethe’s Faust with very Russian tones from the beginning of the last century. Despite being a fictional story, there’s quite a few footnotes to contextualise the reader, which is cool as the book is pretty meta.
Podcasts
MJW: City of The Rails
Danelle Morton’s daughter left home to hop trains right after graduation, and this podcast looks into that lifestyle, from an outsider-with-an-in kinda way.
I've listened to every episode except the last one. I was enjoying it in the way that I always find learning about people who choose the margins of society and why to be super interesting. But in grabbing the link for this I came across some commenters on reddit talking about how deceived they felt by the funky timeline stuff and revelations in the last episode that Morton sent her daughter to one of those abusive teenage behaviour modification facilities. While Morton peppers the series with pondering why her daughter took off, this revelation, not mentioned in a single episode except the final, kind of explains a lot?
Music
LZ: Advent Sorrow - Pestilence shall come
I can’t remember if I already recommended this band here, but this is an official music video for one of their songs. From what I’ve seen in the comments, this track has been special to the fanbase during the pandemic and since the recent conflicts between Russia and Ukraine started. Apparently, the band is on a hold after the members entered into a dispute, but it’s definitely one to catch up. The vocals are very emotional, you can almost feel it on your skin, and this video conveys a lot of their message which is summarised in their slogan as “Torturous black metal”. Ah, and it’s an Australian band. :)
Art
DCH; Hardly Working: Are we the NPCs (non-playable characters) of our own system? by Regine, we-make-money-not-art.com
Hardly Working - Total Refusal (2022) - Teaser - YouTube
Concorso Internazionale - Filmmaker Festival 2022
The artwork is by Total Refusal, a collective of artists (Michael Stumpf, Leonhard Müller, Robin Klengel, Jona Kleinlein, Adrian Haim and Susanna Flock) who define themselves as “a pseudo-Marxist media guerilla.” That certainly got my attention. Their practice consists in appropriating mainstream video game material. They scrutinise it, look behind its sleek, realistic aesthetic and uncover its covert political apparatus.
The work, Total Refusal explains, probes some of the issues posed by labour in late-stage capitalism. Are our bullshit jobs any more glorious? Are we the NPCs of our own system? How absurd does human labour have to be in order to ensure social order? Can we start glitching, individually and collectively?
I’m always keen on art/essays or whatnot that explore how the protestant work ethic is embodied in modern gaming.
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MJW: From Eloise Grills' instagram, a cute little comic about travelling tits.
