nothing here but solastalgia & supernovae
issue 021 - April 7th, 2019
AA: Welcome to another instalment of the Nothing.Here newsletter. Corey and Marlee are at Supanova Melbourne this weekend (if you’re quick and local you might still be able to catch them, which is why this is going out a bit early - just look for the "Literary Legends" section). I guess m1k3y was busy wing-suiting into the Amazon to rescue a famous tree (or something), so you’re stuck with my sleep-deprived and rambling intro instead. Sorry. Hi.
There’s a lot of fascinating reading ahead of you - AI and the nature of “intelligence”, the villainous associations of classical music, extended discussion of The OA, the gamification of civic participation, and much more besides - so I won’t take up too much space here. Your time is valuable, and we’re glad you saw fit to spend some of it with us.
Let’s get into it.
Corey J. White (CJW) - The VoidWitch Saga. Newsletter facilitator. Naarm/Melbourne.
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - Writer, reader, weirdo. Author of ‘Welcome To Orphancorp’ and ‘Psynode’. Host of Catastropod. ADHD, spec fic, feminism, cats. On Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, Australia. @marleejaneward
Austin Armatys (AA) - Writer/Teacher/Wretched Creature // Oh Nothing // @0hnothing //
m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / #salvagepunk / future ecopoet / @m1k3y
CJW: Pattern and Forecast Volume 5 (via Jane Rawson)
Fifteen years ago, Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term “Solastalgia” to convey “the homesickness you have when you are still at home”—a melancholia and longing felt for an environment that has been dramatically altered, desolated.
Solastalgia has since come to be widely adopted as a watchword in the global lexicon of existential crises brought about by environmental crises.
Less-quoted is Albrecht’s more recent neologism “soliphilia,” meaning the love and responsibility to place, interconnectedness and accountability necessary to maintaining its vitality.
The more famous term is elegiac; it offers precise language to an ever more prevalent form of existential anguish.
The latter—soliphilia—implies not only agency, but onus; the ongoing imperative for guardianship. It denotes symbiosis, and through that, culpability.
Australia's increasingly extreme climate, Nevil Shute's On The Beach, and Australian nuclear weapons testing combine in this essay from Josephine Rowe.
Interestingly enough, I was in a writers group with Rowe possibly a decade ago, though I doubt she'd remember me. She wrote beautiful prose then, and this essay is a contemplative and harrowing warning of the days to come, and perhaps a requiem for days recently passed.
MKY: as someone for whom Solastalgia basically generated an entire short story, I’m delighted to add this to my lexicon as well. Can we file the longing for AreaX under this?
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CJW: Life Rewired #1 (via Sentiers)
Because of course, we’ve shared the universe with other intelligences for a long time, and we’ve handled the situation pretty badly. We have consistently downgraded or reclassified forms of intelligence that do not resemble our own narrow definition, and as a result felt free to treat their possessors as lesser creatures, lower orders of beings, or not really as things at all. To ignore, consume, despoil and poison them, both to their detriment and in the final, devastating, analysis, to our own.
And yet the last few decades have also seen the slow murmurings of recognition of other ways of thinking and being in the world, which appears to us as a sudden flowering of forms of intelligence which differ radically from our own. More and more species are being admitted, grudgingly, to the community of those that really think, from orangutans to elephants, both of which have recently been granted legal personhood in court cases. As we recognise the differing forms of intelligence present in both AI and other species, the business of assigning rankings to other creatures begins to seem as stupid and violent as assigning them to different races.
A great piece from James Bridle (I swear I'll get to New Dark Age soon) on “AI” chess and go, and broader questions of intelligence. It ends with a question about our place in the hierarchy of a world that might not support us, once we acknowledge that our fate may not be up to us, but rather to the broader community of intelligent persons (both non-human and non-biological).
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CJW: The Sound of Evil
That we imagine secret cabals planning world domination at Tosca rather than Davos exposes something about our unspoken apprehensions, tells us that the public does not fear perversity or power so much as deception.
Fellow fans of Fargo Season 3* will likely enjoy this - a sort of history of classical music in film and TV as a signifier for evil.
*Varga possibly has the best monologues we've seen since True Detective Season 1, though here they're about the politics of wealth in the modern day, rather than nihilism and metaphysics.
MKY: Srsly https://m1k3y.tumblr.com/post/160900584464 << Varga’s speech on using the accumulation of wealth to become invisible.
AA: Ah, Fargo. Ah, Varga:
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CJW: The Genderless Digital Voice the World Needs Now
I also came across the gender-neutral Q voice project on a recent episode of The Allusionist, which, honestly, just makes me think there’s a marketing firm behind all this media (advertorial in Wired?! Never!). But, the Allusionist episode touches on a few interesting ideas/angles, and is well-worth your time, even if that Wired link above maybe isn’t.
The single most-interesting thing to consider (that the Wired puff piece doesn’t even touch on) is the sexism inherent in making all of these voice assistants sound female. At a time when we are slowly (slowly) coming to grips with the many and varied forms of misogyny embedded into so much of our culture, the last thing we need to be doing is raising a new generation who think that to hear their favourite song, watch their favourite video, etc etc, all they need to do is demand a digital woman go and fetch it for them. (Is there a politeness setting on voice assistants? If there isn’t, there should be, if only to help teach kids the importance of ‘please’ and ‘thank you’.)
So, come for the NB representation, stay for the consideration given to dismantling unconscious sexism in (one aspect of) tech.
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CJW: Tribally-Owned Solar Power Plant Beats Skeptics (via Ospare)
MKY: OMG YUS! The post-industrial rescue mission in effect. Tribal solarpunks. This is everything. You pushed us onto the worst lands, and now we’ll export power to you from them as the grid collapses, hydroelectric schemes fail, cause the rivers have stopped flowing and…
This ties into my excitement over this video game We are the Caretakers.
Another way is possible, and it will come from the edges (as it always has).
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CJW: Can We Reinvent Democracy for the Long-Term (via Sentiers)
The time has come to face an inconvenient reality: that modern democracy – especially in wealthy countries – has enabled us to colonise the future. We treat the future like a distant colonial outpost devoid of people, where we can freely dump ecological degradation, technological risk, nuclear waste and public debt, and that we feel at liberty to plunder as we please. When Britain colonised Australia in the 18th and 19th Century, it drew on the legal doctrine now known as terra nullius – nobody’s land – to justify its conquest and treat the indigenous population as if they didn’t exist or have any claims on the land. Today our attitude is one of tempus nullius. The future is an “empty time”, an unclaimed territory that is similarly devoid of inhabitants. Like the distant realms of empire, it is ours for the taking.
This is a fantastic way to frame the short-sightedness of modern politics (unless, of course, you're talking to one of the willfully ignorant who claim colonisation only did good things for indigenous populations). And in general this piece covers a range of topics familiar to our pages.
Civic discourse connection: How a Card Game Can Help City Residents Suggest New Ideas
The game is aimed at making it easy to come up with and submit ideas for funding — less like a civic duty and more like a fun thing you do with friends and neighbors. That, too, comes from the discipline of design, where there’s an emphasis on finding creative ways to solve problems in new ways.
“The game is a tool to make it approachable,” Verkka said. “Not something that feels complex or bureaucratic, but something where you can sit down with people, have a good time, and do something for your community.”
A few years ago now, I read Reality is Broken, which is a book about using principles of game design when designing… well, just about everything. Jane McGonigal’s argument was that gamification could be used to improve our lives by, for instance, making education and employment more compelling. I think her argument works quite well for education because kids react well to the sorts of feedback loops that gamification can lead to, and if they’re going to be playing games anyway, why not integrate those games with their formal education. BUT, the whole time I was reading the book all I could see was a How-To Guide for Dark Wizards. I’m sure McGonigal meant well, but to a cynic like me, the book read like an instruction manual on how to make your apps/systems/cults/whatever so compelling that they could be called “addicting”. And I don’t just mean games, I mean all the apps that seek to monopolise as much of your time as possible.
Chapter after chapter of McGonigal’s breathless enthusiasm for a bold new way of structuring various aspects of society, but when I looked around, it seemed like the only people who had paid attention were app developers who co-opted her ideas in order to churn out preternaturally compelling dreck like Farmville. (Considering I read it a couple of years after publication, it literally could have been that her lessons were co-opted.)
So - as Max Anton Brewer might say - when you develop a tool, or even a powerful idea, be careful who you give it to.
But that’s a tangent. I just thought of it because this project in Helsinki seems like exactly the sort of thing McGonigal envisioned when she wrote her book, and the idea of using a card game to help brainstorm ways you can use free money from the council to improve your local area is utterly brilliant.
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CJW: White Terrorists Give Political Cover to Other Americans’ Prejudices (via Omar Sakr)
When liberals and conservatives alike see me as danger embodied, they allow the white terrorist to imagine himself as a protector.
In the NH backchannel chat (Signal, of course, we're too paranoid for anything unencrypted), we often lament the Amerocentric focus of so much cultural and political discussion. That said, this is still an important follow-up to last issue's section on Christchurch. Also ties into the White Fragility links I've shared before.
And just to balance things out a little - here is Australian Senator and Yuwuru man Pat Dodson making explicit the links between white supremacist violence today and the violence perpetrated against Australia’s Aboriginal population.
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AA: The Dreams Of A Man Asleep For Three Weeks (via Craig “Puzahki” Parry)
On March 22, 2018, I was rushed to the hospital for life-saving surgery. Due to complications with the procedure, I didn’t regain full, coherent consciousness until the second week in April. For three weeks I was stuck inside my own mind, subject to a seemingly unending series of dreams.
This article details the ultra-vivid dreams journalist Mike Fahey’s experienced while in a coma, processing his trauma (physical and emotional) through a lens of modern pop-culture: the subconscious as screen-ready wasteland, dotted with superhero iconography and imaginary cities. A striking demonstration of pop culture as internalised myth, mapping the interior.
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CJW: Rescued migrants hijack merchant ship off Libya
“These are not migrants in distress, they are pirates, they will only see Italy through a telescope,” said Italy’s far-right deputy PM, Matteo Salvini, who has cracked down on migrants, including closing Italy’s ports to NGO rescue boats, since he took office in June last year.
Pirates? Nah, they're just pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.
MKY: “we’re hijacking this ship and taking it to its scheduled destination,” to paraphrase Bill Hicks. The saddest thing about this is that there isn’t a better destination for them to head to it. I am totes team pirate, and long for the return of its self-governed golden age utopia. These refugees just two choices rn: stay in the broken parts of the world, or flee to the parts of the world that broke them, and kept all the spoils.
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MKY: India destroys its own satellite with a test missile, still says space is for peace
Ngl, lil bit mad at myself for only catching this story when NASA started ‘plaining about their boondoogle in space being threatened. I mean, sure, who doesn’t fear the Kessler effect , but you just know so many of them are jelly af at how much India is getting done on basically nothing. I need to be paying more attention to what they’re building in there - esp since its under Modi’s regime - but also, for reasons...
Speaking of which, we’ve briefly touched on the idea of Breakaway Civs before - and that’s also come up on the backchannel - and, reader, would you believe that before QAnon folx got obsessed with Trump’s space force and all that bs I filter out as best I can, the idea of the Secret Space Program was legit interesting?
Also, it’s very real known unknown thing that ties directly into what India’s doing (bootstrapping itself to be a geopolitical power… in spaaaaaaace) - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-military-has-been-space-beginning-180969403/
In 1982, the Air Force Space Command was officially established, and today employs 35,000 people. The agency works on cybersecurity, launches satellites and other payloads for the military and other government agencies, monitors ballistic missile launches and orbiting satellites and runs a military GPS system. And of course there’s plenty of things they do that we don't know about. For instance, it’s well documented that the Air Force has two X-37B space planes, including one that returned to Earth last year after two years in orbit, though what it was doing is unknown.
Space is the place… for war? If ‘someone’ knocked out the GPS sats, I think it’s effects would be more serious than not-being able to automagically geotag that selfie you took on Instagram at the latest (i can’t even).
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CJW: Give the Nobel Prize in Literature to Dril
Dril is the infantile subjectivity of the internet: the internet as it eats, shits, jerks off to porn, gets into fights, and posts a link to its Soundcloud in response to a viral tweet. Perhaps the sole argument against the idea that Dril's work moves in any “ideal direction” would be that, in a way, he can be considered the internet's ultimate realist: he holds up a mirror, albeit grotesque one, to how we — the internet's first (and, one can only hope, worst) children — really are.
An argument for awarding the internet's favourite and best shitposter the Nobel Prize in Literature. The fact that I enjoyed this is likely proof that I am Too Online, but I still think Tom Whyman makes a lot of valid points here.
AA: Dril is indoubtably an genious, and one of the best things about him is how he was doxxed and everyone pretended it never happened.
CJW: The OA, Season 2
The OA is an odd show. It’s an odd mix of science fiction, horror, fabulism, realism, and fringe science/conspiracy, with a heavy dose of New Age terminology thrown in for good measure. It asks a lot of the viewer, asking you to follow it down some very strange rabbit holes, but it also respects your intelligence enough to trust that you’ll keep up, even as it moves across dimensions, and as the cast expands, and as the ideas behind the show grow and shift. It is possibly the most wildly imaginative piece of SF television we’ve had this century... if you count Twin Peaks: The Return as belonging to last century, which I think is fair. And indeed, in Season Two I think The OA earns a Twin Peaks comparison, but it would be difficult to define precisely why/where (though we do get a few brief minutes of Riz Ahmed as a 21stC Dale Cooper). Twin Peaks is always ephemeral, coming together subconsciously, and The OA is similar. But where Twin Peaks touches on some dark, hidden (and often nightmarish) recess of the subconscious, The OA is instead tapping into that open vulnerable part of ourselves that we often feel the need to guard.
It’s an odd show that maybe shouldn’t work, but it does because it is so earnest. It wears its heart on its sleeve. There is no irony here, no sarcasm. I appreciate ironic detachment as much as the next person (particularly in my political commentary, because without irony there, you’d just want to end it all), but it’s refreshing to watch a show completely devoid of it. But I imagine that’s why it doesn’t work for a lot of people; they find it difficult to let go and be swept up in the weird and weirdly heartfelt world that Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij have made. But if you can let these people into your heart, it’s worth it. After the end of Season 1 I can’t even think of the Five Movements without tearing up. And, god, I should hate that weird little piece of interpretive dance, but I fucking love it. The show gets beneath my guard every time, and I’m happy to let it.
When the first Season of The OA dropped onto Netflix, I remember seeing someone on twitter complain about the Steve character, more or less saying “No thanks, I don’t want to watch another white toxic male character”, and I get that. Too often in fiction we’re asked to follow and be empathetic towards (white) arsehole men, who are either given redemption or shown to not need it, but if you stick with The OA, I think Steve’s arc works. He’s only worthy of redemption because he comes to accept and love the (partly queer) group of misfits he finds himself caught up in. He realises he’s not the hero of the story, and though he isn’t always happy about it, he accepts it, and he accepts these new friends – and they accept him. Even when he’s still a bit of a dick. (And, honestly, as much as I love the kids, even in a group of vulnerable, hurting teenagers, the lost and middle-aged BBA is the beating heart of their story, played to perfection by Phyllis Smith, who you probably last saw in the US version of The Office.) Steve’s redemption feels earned because the love he has for his friends feels real.
Because love is the heart of the show. It’s about connection and love, but not sappy Hollywood romantic love (though, I guess there’s a bit of that with Prairie and Homer). It’s the love you have for the friends you make along the way. It’s the love that one broken person has for another, and it’s beautiful and perfect and rare.
At the start of this year I said the word to define the newsletter going forward was “community”, and that’s The OA in a nutshell. It’s about community, found family, it’s about life and death and grief, and fucking everything.
MKY: This. Fucking. Show. OMFG BBQ. This is what speculative fiction television looks like, I thought over and over again. Once I got into the show again. ‘Cause tbh, it didn’t really grip me til the end of ep4. I watched the first season at the tail end of my Cali trip, and was mostly just enjoying how much of San Francisco I recognised, how much felt familiar, as the characters wandered around what felt like a better version of a Gibson story, circa the Blue Ant books. I was instantly there for Karim.
And then the show sunk its hooks into me, and I was a sucker for it. There is so much goodness here. And yeah, without getting hung up on the white guy, Steve is SO WELL WRITTEN… so nuanced, so non-toxic (his scene with French - also, butch gays being represented? So rarely seen. That moment on the bus. Just… FEELS), that him being released into the world feels important, and I hope other tv writers are paying attention. But the details [like the books in the background above], the use of dead naming as a plot point, that didn’t feel awful? The movements and their evolution - and, I’m pretty sure she’s drawing on Gurdjieff there, though I haven’t had the chance to ask her yet (I can dream, ok). This show is so powerful in so many places, in so many different ways. [Also, sidenote: the actor who plays Homer was the villain, Varg, in Lords of Chaos - and damn, does that guy have range.] And the ending, holy shit.
Brit Marling & co are the type of creators we need rn. The East is very much an influence on ‘that novel I’m writing’. Another Earth is the movie Melancholia wishes it was. I’m told they pitched 5 seasons, and I hope the world holds together long enough for them to realise that. And frankly, they can take all the time they need in between seasons, but I also can’t wait to see where this goes.
CJW: I completely disagree about Melancholia, but that’s a whole other discussion. (I loved it and thought it was the best depiction of depression I’ve seen in film, not to mention it was visually stunning.)
CJW: Kelly Sue DeConnick and Matt Fraction talk comics, careers, and working with your spouse
A great interview with two of the best writers working in comics today. Definitely worth a look as they touch on their process, similarities, differences, and inspirations, among other things.
MKY: BLACKOUT (thx @debcha)
Speaking of GPS going off-line and the perils of the Grid… this post-apoc radio drama sits somewhere between:
The excellent minimalist not-zombie movie broadcast live by a small town radio show host, Pontypool
The backstory/premise of Dark Angel [funny how we’re back to Russia as the go-to big bad, vs China EMPing Amerika in the Dark Ages in that, iirc]
The small town enduring the Collapse of the tv show Jericho
The anarcho anti-civ philosophy of Tyler Durden in Fight Club [something I wish now had been made more prominent, but…]
The tactics and rage of Uwe Boll’s Rampage movies.
Starring Rami Malek. Jarring, cause its full of ads for surviving the neoliberal condition. (That fucking Calm app breaking into the post-apoc world… almost like it's intentional?)
We start in 2019 and travel exponentially through time, witnessing the future of Earth, the death of the sun, the end of all stars, proton decay, zombie galaxies, possible future civilizations, exploding black holes, the effects of dark energy, alternate universes, the final fate of the cosmos - to name a few.
MKY: I need a ten hour cut of this to play on my external monitor as I write (like I increasingly have ten hour ‘galactic white noise’ clips playing, as I attempt to sleep). I feel like this is def. one of the Dark Forest fans too. Can my desired ten hour cut feature solar systems being flattened into lower dimensions and other such brain breaking goodness?
AA: There’s stuff I’ve never seen before in this video, and I’ve seen a lot of stuff.
For instance, this video features:
The Colonisation of Mars
City-smashing mega storms
Earth’s magnetic pole flipping
A supervolcano
and that’s all just in the first TWO MINUTES.
Engage with the Cold Outside, dear reader - embrace the soothing bleakness of Dread Cosmic Thought. The sound design and visuals are very good, too.
Key Inspirational Quotes:
“The Sun Is Now Dead”
“A Dark and Empty Void littered with Dead Stars and Black Holes”
“In Some Ways It’s A Ghost Universe”
CJW: It’s been a while since I got into any Process chatter, but as I’ve been outlining a new novel, my process of/for outlining has been on my mind, and I thought it might be interesting or useful for other people.
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AA: And… there. You bloody made it. You clicked all the links, read all the articles, watched every second of the videos/TV shows, and then you carefully followed our discussion, nodding in rapt agreement the whole time. But now - Oh no! - your brain is too full. It hurts, it hurts bad doc, and you’re scared and confused. “There’s too much information!” you squeal. “My mind! My squishy human mind!”
Yeah. Sorry about that.
Thanks again for taking the time to read this edition of Nothing.Here. Everyone is so busy these days... but just make sure you’re not too busy, okay? You gotta relax. You gotta unwind. You gotta make sure to take some “you time” and do something horrible for someone you hate. It can be a very grim scene out here, but we can’t let the swine grind us down.
Oh, and if you have any comments on this issue, do feel free to hit reply and share away. Last issue someone replied with just the word “Hunter”, so if you want to see that and raise it, all you need to do is send us a two word reply. Or more than that - we’d love to hear your rants, raves and ramblings. We’re in this together, after all.
Until next time.