Horrific-Terrific - 👎 Green Capitalism
If someone forwarded this email to you, consider subscribing! Also if you’re already subscribed… consider paying? Thanks! 👎 Green CapitalismThe transition to renewables is really fucking us | US government departments use a special Facebook portal to fight disinfoHello online friends. Just a starting note: a woman on Hinge — e.g. someone I’ve exchanged messages with for like two days at the most — said to me yesterday ‘I saw a news article about Elon Musk the other day and thought of you’. I never in a million years want a potential sexual partner to be reminded of me upon seeing Elon Musk’s name. This is getting out of hand. I have to stop writing about him, starting NOW. This week was something I could have done without 👎. Jeez, things aren’t looking great:
🤡 The truth is what I tell you it isThis week in dystopia: the department of homeland security in the US have a disinformation governance board to fight online dis/misinformation — and they are using a special Facebook portal to achieve this. It’s time to get VAGUE → What even is disinformation, according to the DHS? They say it’s “false information that is deliberately spread with the intent to deceive or mislead”, which is a sentence that, for me, has a lot of problems. What do they mean by ‘false information’? Do they just decide that? How can they tell if something has been spread deliberately? Anyway, their reason for setting up this stupid board is also vague, and very popular among authoritarians: it’s to “safeguard the United States” — a classic! What a shame that you can’t build a wall around the internet (oh wait you can). ✨ Why and how Facebook are involved (the broad strokes):
So, this is essentially a great way for the DHS to decide what the truth is, and there has been a huge bipartisan backlash against the disinformation governance board. Someone important had to resign over it, actually. Tbh I just find it hilarious that even right wingers, who usually love obliterating free speech in the name of protecting, hate this initiative, and have been the loudest in criticising it. My summation is that the DHS and other government departments simply have their comms all wrong. Don’t call this a ‘fight against disinformation’ — call it a ‘fight against complex information’, where the initiative is designed to simplify all information that flows in and out of Facebook, so that it’s more palatable a Middle-American generalist audience. Duh. ⛏️ Extract your way to a greener futureThis week I came across this article on Rest Of The World. It talks of how, in Latin America, VC investment in climate change projects is on the rise, and that all these new initiatives are going to solve all our climate problems and allow us to relax into a VC-funded collective cuddle. To this I say: please shut up. I am honestly sick to death of green capitalism and all of the exploitative, extractive practices that it hides. I’m just going to unpack a few things and leave them here for you to look at so you can roughly see what I mean. ☝️ Firstly, the transition to renewable energy systems needs to be rapid. This is because we are playing catch-up. Adoption of these technologies probably could have been happening over the last couple of decades if only the oil industry wasn’t so good at lobbying. Now what we’re looking at is a scramble for natural resources, which need to be extracted very quickly — which is kind of the opposite thing you’re going for in a climate crisis tbh. 🔋 Those resources are things like copper, lithium, and cobalt — and Latin America are rich in these things. Right now all the conversations seem to be about how we need to transition to electric vehicles and solar power and so on — but nothing about how that’s going to happen. You need a lot of copper for circuit boards, and also for use in wind turbines and solar panels. You need lithium to produce powerful batteries for electric vehicles. 💥 Surprise: extracting these resources is dangerous, exploitative, and leads to further environmental degradation. But we NEED those batteries so we can all feel better about expressing our individuality in our respective electric cars! So what we have is the Global North squeezing as much as they can out of countries like Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, and Argentina. Here a few things:
Conclusion: the so called ‘green transition’ is fueled by the stuff that everything else is fueled by: colonialism and corporate greed. I’m tired of this, please help me. 🍨 And now for dessertFree and openly available knowledge should just get in the bin, don’t you think? The US Department of Justice has just seized Z-library, a massive online repo providing free access to books and other publication. The world is a meme so let’s all laugh about it: Binance was all set to acquire FTX on Tuesday, but walked away from the deal on Wednesday. Binance and FTX are both very large, unregulated, ‘pretend banks’ used mostly by sad soon to be divorced men. They are rivals. One cannot absorb the other — the rivalry must continue otherwise what’s the point? Binance will not acquire FTX, and FTX will remain riddled with government agency investigations. This decision has of course made various coins plummet in value. I hope they’re all happy — I certainly am. That’s all for this week. I hope you have a great weekend full of lovely autumn outfits, day drinking, and sex. Enjoy! 💌 Thank you for subscribing to Horrific/Terrific. If you need more reasons to distract yourself try looking at my website or maybe this ridiculous zine that I write or how about these silly games that I’ve made. Enjoy! |
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👎 Sinking In
Friday, November 4, 2022
This has been a weird week for social media | The Digital Markets Act will soon manifest | Apple are really taking the piss now
👎 Scale 🆙
Friday, October 28, 2022
We only 'need AI' because of our addiction to scale — and it's not even AI anyway??
🤷 Fickle Billionaires
Friday, October 21, 2022
Meta ordered to sell Giphy | European governments to ease Elon Musk's suffering | Kanye West is going to buy Parler?
👎 ‘Private’ Interactions
Friday, October 14, 2022
WhatsApp spam out of control in India | Starlink internet failing in Ukraine | Remember Xcheck?
🤷🏻♀️ Billionaire groupchat
Friday, October 7, 2022
Antitrust fines are being SLASHED; fines are at an all time LOW; get fined while you can! | Elon Musk's text messages are something to behold
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