nothing here but us pre-criminals

issue 031, 25th August, 2019

Aug 25, 2019

Welcome to another issue of nothing here. We’ve got a great selection of articles, a smattering of pop culture commentary and recommendations, and plenty more besides.

Alternating weekly with these main newsletter issues, we also put out bonus letters containing something longer and more involved from one of the members of the team. You can get access to these bonus letters by signing up to become a paid subscriber.

Now, on with the show.

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

AA: The Future is Fascist (via Jevon Clement)

The dominant view of fascism—that these explosions of nationalist and racist acts and political wins are mere “reactions”—relies on a highly-selective conception of the recent histories of Liberal Democracies such as the United States. This conception filters out the actual material conditions of our societies (that is, it does not look at access to wealth, stagnation of wages, accessibility of housing and other resources, nor the conditions of the environment itself) and instead narrates our lives according to what social rights we perceive ourselves to have.

This essay by Ryhd Wildermuth explains the rise of “fascist, ultranationalist, racial separatist, and authoritarian movements”, not as a reaction to the expansion of Liberal Democratic Rights, but rather as a direct result of the dominant order trying to maintain its hegemony of power in the face of existential threats to “business as usual”. This is a convincing class-based diagnosis of our current condition, and interesting points are made with great clarity:

No one should be surprised that the modern-nation state and the birth of surveillance and policing technologies also occurred at the exact same time. Such an explosion of economic and population growth required new strategies for maintaining power against the poor, especially since they were promised liberation through the illusions of democracy.
But here we are now, having reached the limits of earth’s resiliency and the resources used to build our civilizations—especially oil. There are no other easily-available energy sources to maintain—let alone expand—modern society, and anyways the time to have transitioned to more sustainable methods was several decades ago. So now every people group in the world sees the certainty of impending scarcity and in some cases genocide through starvation, flooding, drought, or war.

CJW: I have to admit, I previously bought into the reassuring fiction that the rise of fascism was purely reactionary, but I can't argue with this essay at all. It’s this issue's Must Read™. I could have grabbed a dozen different pull quotes, but here's one:

The situation we are in can perhaps best be seen with Trump’s proposed border-wall between the United States and Mexico. As awful as Trump is and as racist as the wall will be, it’s too easy to forget the actual logic behind the thing. The point of the wall isn’t to keep people out now, it’s to keep out the millions of people fleeing drought and starvation due to catastrophic climate change later. It is not about a racist present, but about a fascist future.

MKY: This. Fucking. Essay. YES.

CJW: Progress and its discontents (via Sentiers)

And yet, despite their insistence on ‘reason’, the New Optimists are often strikingly uninterested in the nuances of the historical evidence they invoke. In their hands, the story of human progress has been distorted into a cartoonishly simple narrative wherein capitalism is responsible for virtually everything good that has happened in modern history and nothing bad. The fact that the most important gains in human welfare have been won by labour unions and social movements, enabled by publicly funded research and secured by public healthcare and education systems, almost always in the face of determined and even violent resistance from the capitalist class, is never acknowledged.

This is a long and detailed takedown of the New Optimists (Neo Optimists? To go along with Neoliberal?). I could have picked a few different quotes, but it all builds on a foundation of history and figures that you're best to read through yourself if you're interested.

In short though, anyone claiming that neoliberal capitalism is good for the poor is either ignorant, blinded by ideology, or simply talking out of their arse.

MKY: Reading this back2back with the ‘the future is fascist’ was super clarifying.

MKY: 'Be water:' Hong Kong protest mantra influences how art is designed and distributed

In Hong Kong, political art has taken on a distinct style, from design to distribution. Banners are not just plastered onto main roads -- they are sent directly to residents via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi almost immediately after they are created.
The graphics serve multiple purposes; some advertise upcoming protest marches, others contain subversive criticism of the authorities and many encourage unity and stamina.
A key theme of protesters' posters is the ability to "be water," a phrase inspired by martial arts icon Bruce Lee that encourages fluidity and adaptability to any situation.

just one of the things I hope Extinction Rebellion and their like are taking note of in HK rn.

MJW: Is it possible to stop a mass shooting before it happens?

AA: This woman is doing brave, necessary work, but is anyone else a bit concerned by the apparent way intelligence agents purposefully intensify the radicalisation of some of these people in order to catch them before they commit a crime? Does anything about this process sound to you like it could be abused or weaponised to suit political narratives?

And as spring turned to summer, Finton’s posts got even darker. That’s when she called the FBI … Federal authorities set up a sting operation that resulted in Finton getting into a van he thought was rigged with nearly one ton of explosives. He told his accomplice, in reality an undercover FBI informant, that the blast would be a “historic occasion.” He parked the van outside a federal office building in Springfield, Illinois, where hundreds of people worked. And then, from a few blocks away, he made a call that he thought would trigger the explosion. When nothing happened, he called again.
It could have been one more mass-casualty event on our grim, ever-lengthening list. Columbine. Orlando. Charleston. Gilroy. El Paso. Dayton. But it wasn’t. Because Finton was immediately swarmed by FBI agents and members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force. He was shackled, locked up, and indicted, eventually pleading guilty to one count of attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction against property owned by the United States. He’s now serving 28 years in federal prison.

There’s an element of pre-crime (or maybe, like, “hyperstitional crime”) here that gives me pause. What would a system that tries to de-radicalise and support these individuals through de-escalation look like? Could that sort of approach work to stop mass shootings in a way that was more humane and less reliant on the murky world of Spook Theatre?

CJW: I had exactly the same thought reading this piece (even the pre-crime link). All evidence seems to suggest that the only terrorist plots the FBI has managed to foil recently have been the ones they themselves orchestrated. How is that even legal?

CJW: Toward a Theory of the New Weird (via Ospare)

Human is a useful category, in that it has historically been able to confer equality among humans (or at least tried to do so), and in that it allows us to take responsibility for what we’ve done to the planet. But zoom in through the microscope: you’re made up of trillions of other creatures. And zoom out: you’re one part of vast ecosystems. The category doesn’t hold. And without that category, the central importance of the human to the story of the planet is no longer self-evident. Further, given the current knowledge of the extreme permeability and ecological codependency of all bodies, there’s no reason any body should be excluded from having to learn how to become plant.

This essay covers a lot of ground - Atwood, Fisher, Lovecraft, Vandermeer, tracing the history of the Weird and the New Weird, and (perhaps) providing a roadmap for where it might go in the future. But it’s not just literary - it also ties the genre into questions concerning climate change and our uncertain future(s). Well worth the read.

CJW: Common ground: Holly Herndon in conversation with James Bridle (via Ahmet A. Sabancı)

JB: I’m particularly interested in this relationship you have with a technology and intelligence you constructed yourselves because everyone’s obsessed with the idea of AI just at the moment we’re starting to acknowledge the intelligence of other things more generally. We’re more willing to grant intelligence to things that we’ve built ourselves than to non-human species, even though it’s increasingly obvious that primates, cephalopods and trees have forms of intelligence that we should maybe be listening to. So how do we take this sudden decentring of the human with regard to AI? [...]
HH: That’s actually one of the reasons why we chose the child metaphor [for Spawn]. We were looking at Donna Haraway’s writing about the kind of kinship she feels for her inhuman pet relationships. I think using this metaphor of the child confused a lot of people because they thought we were saying Spawn was a human baby. We’re like, “No, this is an inhuman child. It’s a nascent intelligence that we’re trying to raise as a community and impact at the foundational level.” [...] But I think you’re right. It makes total sense that we would be coming to that conclusion while we’re coming to this new obsession as well. It’s like part of the public consciousness has opened up to accept those ideas now.

A great interview between two fascinating people, largely about Herndon's new album that was produced in conjunction with an "AI".

CJW: How Metal Gear Eschewed Realism to Convey the Horror of Imperial Violence (via Dan Hill)

The Department of Homeland Security was established November 25th, 2002. Immigration and Custom Enforcement was established March 1st, 2003. The War on Terror is harder to formally establish a starting time on — do you start at September 11th, 2001, as many people do, or do you fold the conflict into the Gulf War (August 2nd, 1990)? Either way, the Metal Gear series is older than all of them. It’s also the only piece of art I know that makes the scale and sensation of the escalating American imperialism and violence they represent comprehensible.

I haven’t played all of the MGS games, just 1, 5, and Ground Zeroes (and Revengeance, if that counts), but last year I decided to plug the missing holes in my Snake knowledge by watching the KefkaProduction cuts of the game. For those of you who want to play along at home, they’re named Metal Gear Solid X - The Movie [HD] Full Story.

I was absolutely stunned when I got to the end of Metal Gear Solid 2 (I think it’s around the five hour mark), to see how thoroughly Kojima had predicted the current state of social media, and the way it has inundated our lives. MGS2 came out in 2001 - two years before even fucking Myspace was founded, and years before Facebook went international. He extrapolated everything about our social media lives from looking at LiveJournal and similarly small blogging sites.

AA: If you want some further analysis of the MGS series, may I also recommend this episode of the No Cartridge podcast featuring Chapo’s Felix Biederman? It’s about “the aestheticization of war, the melancholy of the deep state, and the prescience of Hideo Kojima”.

++++

Cutting Room Floor:

MKY: Wu Assassins

This is everything that Marvel Netflix’s Iron Fist should’ve been. Solid asian american cast. Great action lead in The Raid’s Iko Uwais. Solid supporting cast, featuring Katheryn Winnick aka motherfucking Lagertha from Vikings and Tommy Flannagan (Sons of Anarchy) playing, srsly, a Highlander by way of Korra. World class fight scenes. Cool mythology. More like this please.

MKY: The Wild Goose Lake

The one film I saw at the Melbourne International Film Festival this year did not disappoint. This is a hella atmospheric Chinese neon noir, set in China’s ‘second-tier’ cities, with Tarantino-esque levels of sudden ultraviolence.

CJW: I thought Wild Goose Lake had a bit of a Shane Black vibe, but without the slapstick that Black works into his films. A few years ago I saw Black Coal, Thin Ice by the same director, which was a darker, more serious Chinese crime film. But where individual scenes were amazing, I never quite felt like the film came together as a whole. Wild Goose Lake doesn’t suffer from that same issue, and manages to create a lighter, more entertaining film that still has shades of the same darkness, the slower pace, and the beautiful cinematography of the earlier film.

AA: Kanopy (movie streaming service)

If you have a public library card, or you’re a student/faculty member at a university, you most likely have access to the excellent movie streaming service Kanopy. Their content skews towards independent, non-Hollywood films and documentaries, so I was pleased to find some odd and obscure stuff in the mix. My current watchlist includes documentaries about Oscar Zeta Acosta, Japanese Architect Tadao Ando and Francis Bacon. You can also find a ton of high-profile recent releases like Shin Godzilla, Hunt for the Wilderpeople and Killing of a Sacred Deer. I’m sure the content available varies depending on your location, but it’s worth a look for sure.

CJW: Emergent Resilience (via Ospare)

At Restricted.Academy, Ospare (who often shares great stuff I feel the need to share here) is starting a thread on emergent resilience - “to collect and share methods, strategies, plans for alternative living, not as escapes from our current predicament but as lifelines in anticipation of collapse”. I’m excited, and no doubt I’ll be sharing some great stuff from the thread here.

First off, here’s a guide on how to build cheap and effective tools to assist you in illegal border crossings. Fantastic stuff.

AA: Jenny Odell - How to do Nothing

This illuminating talk is the basis of Odell’s book “How to do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy”. You can also read Odell’s Medium article, which is a transcription of this talk, along with plenty of visual references and links:

I’m suggesting that we protect our spaces and our time for non-instrumental, non-commercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for conviviality. And I’m suggesting that we fiercely protect our human animality against all technologies that actively ignore and disdain the body, the bodies of others, and the body of the landscape that we inhabit.

Well worth the investment of your time in any one of these formats, Odell’s thinking around attention, space and the ways in which we interact with our everyday environments is so counter to the “always-on” commodification of our time that it feels quite revolutionary.

MJW: Black Dresses - LOVE AND AFFECTION FOR STUPID LITTLE BITCHES

I honestly was drawn to this because of the name of both the band and the album. Sad girl music extraordinaire. It’s hard, weird listening, but I’m reading that it’s the most accessible of their albums, so…. It’s part pop, part dissociation fuel, all noise, with a lo-fi, homemade feel.

CJW: dottie - part

Dreamy, bleary, ambient dreampop that’s artfully layered, shimmering with reverb but precise where it needs to be.

AA: Visible Cloaks Explain Their Elemental Album With Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano

If you’ve been listening to the brilliant recent FRKWYS release serenitatem you might be interested in this track-by-track breakdown of the album. I found the group’s use of the generative music app Wotja particularly fascinating.

Here’s some discussion of the track YOU:

When we were initially tinkering with stuff in the studio, Ryan brought up the idea of using the “text-to-music” (TTM) function in the generative music program Wotja to create the starting point for a piece. It’s an extension of a creative process I have come to call “imprinting” — using text or musical fragments to generate a digital representation of it in MIDI, then using it as a building block in the construction of a more complex arrangement.

Some of the ideas here have got me thinking about the potential applications of generative creativity (say with GPT-2) or “imprinting” (using fragments of old, unused work to seed new pieces) to the writing process...

MKY: Fighting for the Future in a New Dark Age: An Interview with Corey J. White

Last year I published a profile of one Mr Corey J. White in our local Australian SF&F mag, Aurealis (#111). Now, it’s online on my blog for the entire post public to read. Enjoy!

CJW: And that’s it for now. Plenty of weird and horrifying stuff without even touching on the fires in Brazil (though a recent episode of Chapo Traphouse features Glenn Greenwald explaining how Bolsonaro’s election was actually a judicial coup d'état). There are plenty of horrors out there, while good news can be rare and fleeting. That’s why you need to take care of yourself, take care of those closest to you, and find/build a community. Personally I know I don’t do enough. I’m an insular person, with most of my friends and family situated far away. But I’m trying, and sometimes that’s all we can do.

nothing here

nothing here but us pre-criminals

issue 031, 25th August, 2019

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