Stella Aster via nettime-l on Fri, 22 May 2026 12:07:51 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> The Sprawling Disconnect of Mirror Worlds

Thanks Brian. As it's an ecological collapse we are facing, I feel an ecological approach to resistance is appropriate. I came across the idea of "full spectrum resistance" a while ago, I think in a video essay on YouTube, and I liked this idea. We need to resist in every way we can. Everyone has a niche, a location among others where their desires and capacities fit best. So I don't think it's a case of either/or, I think it's a case of both/and. In particular, above-ground groups which put out the right vibes provide opportunities for more militantly minded activists to find each other and form underground networks to execute different tactics.
I've not read If We Burn, but I think the link Patrice shared recently, "Tymyrddin: Building an Exit from Capitalism", addresses some of this. I've read Parable of the Sower and I never took the Paints as anarchists in any true sense of the word. Re-reading the relevant section, I can see how you could read them as having been bougie lifestyle anarchists. But I think the work that Lauren and her family and neighbours are doing, to care for each other, to live with the land, and to hold their community against outside forces, is very anarchist. I suppose if you want to be adjectival about it you could say I am a "social anarchist" rather than an "individualist anarchist".
I am motivated by Donna Haraway's situated knowledges, and the primality of the non-humans around me, the land I live on and with and that I wish to allow to live through me. Those two ideas are guiding my action and direction more than anything else right now. If you want to know more about this then you may find my latest writing on reindigenising interesting: https://asterisms.bearblog.dev/reindigenising/
So in short I think we need everything. We need people like yourself working to reroute the existing molar flows from within. We need people working to build alternative networks of material provision, mutual aid. We need people blockading and blowing up the arms factories. We need those big crowds demonstrating in the cities. We need the silent private time when we cry and rage. Everything is on the line, we are fighting for everything, and it will take everything to win. 

Stella ✨

On 15/05/2026 06:02, Brian Holmes via nettime-l wrote:

On Thu, May 14, 2026 at 3:38 AM Stella Aster via nettime-l <
nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:


If your mirror world isn't enabling you to achieve change through legal
means, perhaps you should consider extralegal means? How many people are
in your environmental justice group? How many people, hypothetically,
would be needed to monkeywrench the shredder one night and take it out
of commission?


Thanks for writing, Stella. I've appreciated your posts before. I like the
spirit - and even in the oppressive US, massive resistance like you talk
about recently did emerge and it did succeed, when people stood up to ICE
on the streets.

But this is a case-by-case kind of thing. ICE and the Border Patrol were
extremely visible, ugly as hell and soon perceived by a majority as totally
illegitimate. In the case of the metal shredder, we are talking about
invisible particles, measured in micro- or nanograms, and what's more,
emitted by a facility that does offer some jobs in a poor area. People do
not spontaneously stand up to this kind of invisible ecological abuse, not
where I live, unfortunately. But they will stand up when empathic
neighborhood-based organizations develop leadership and strategy. I have
gotten a lot more interested in such organizations.

Also, I've now got some reservations about just attacking stuff, due to
experience over the last decade. Did you ever read that book, If We Burn,
about social movement struggles across the world in 2010s? The upshot of it
is pretty simple: If we burn, they burn back. It's a real issue. How to
deal with the backlash against insurrectionalist revolts? (and ha ha, some
of my best friends are insurrectionalists, so I try to have this
conversation).

In the US, the polarization of extremes translates into a serious risk: the
risk of sparking, not just authoritarian backlash, but a civil war. I
reckon our side does not have the guns to win. I'm not convinced we need
them.

Another good book is Parables of the Sower. In the early chapters, before
LA gets destroyed to the point where she has to flee, the narrator talks
about the Paints. They're pyromaniacs. They love to burn shit and dance
around. I get it. But when you read what's basically a depiction of white
anarchists, written by a black woman like Octavia Butler, well, it gave my
old self an uncomfortable feeling. The last thing I want to be part of is a
bunch of unfocused violence with no sense of tomorrow.

Confronting climate change, and getting to know the oppositional science of
invisible things, gave me that sense of tomorrow. The sense of an
incredible challenge and an incredible responsibility. If I write about the
limitations of the Environmental Protection Agency, it's not because I want
to throw it out the window. The fascists are doing exactly that. I want to
make the protection of collective well-being into something that works,
something that can stand up to the neoliberal technocrats and solve
problems they don't solve. Part of that is a numbers game, meaning it takes
place in the abstract field of representation. But only part of it. Choose
your mirror-world carefully. Break glass when needed.

Basically like a lot of people I'm a recovering anarchist, or better, an
up-to-date communist. I definitely think the system is fucked, and we
should overthrow it. But for that, you not only need to bring a very large
number of people along, more than a few thousands on the streets for a
night. You also have to think about what's the future. Planning for what to
do in the face of the backlash is the least of it. Planning to reroute
industrial society so it can still fulfill people's needs under conditions
of ecological collapse is the big one.

In between the two, that's where I'm at. Trying to shut down a metal
shredder that poisons me and my neighbors. Trying to figure out what
communism looks like in the twenty-first century.

best, Brian








Or organise a rolling blockade, so the facility can't
operate? How much effort would such approaches take, and how does that
compare to the effort you've put in to research and campaigning so far?
A big part of the civilising project is the internalisation that
disruption and destruction are bad, but there is nothing wrong with
destroying something that is destroying you! There's an asymmetry of
material power when a company can build a poison smoke machine next to
your house, and your only recourse is to ask them politely to stop.
Things will continue to get worse until liberal urban masses accept the
necessity of forceful resistance, and develop community-based ways to
legitimise and apply that force.

Stella ✨


On 13/05/2026 17:50, Brian Holmes via nettime-l wrote:

Not so long ago, an academic called David Gelernter published an
influential book called Mirror Worlds (1991). The core idea was simple:
computers would create miniaturized images of real-world institutions,
allowing individuals to navigate sprawling and otherwise inaccessible
systems. The intricacies of complex societal functions would be revealed

in

interactive diagrams; stultifying bureaucracies would become transparent
and democratically governable.

In the mid-Nineties, without any knowledge of things digital, I traveled
from France to California in a bid to convince my profs at Berkeley that

I

was still alive, still writing and about to turn in my almost-completed

PhD

thesis. Only one of them, I knew, gave a damn about it, yet I could

barely

catch his attention during the half-hour visit that had motivated me to

fly

halfway around the world. "I need to download special software to fulfill
the university requirements," he grumbled. "But damn, I can't download

the

software until I fulfill the university requirements."

Flash forward to 2026. In order to grasp what is being pumped out into

the

air every day by a metal shredder smack dab in the middle of a Chicago
neighborhood, I find myself confronted by dozens of categories and
thousands of numbers coming from the Illinois Environmental Protection
Agency and from a private company. Most of the numbers are in a

bare-bones

spreadsheet with no explanation whatsoever, and the really critical ones
(from the private company as you would expect) are buried somewhere in a
photocopied pdf 380 pages long. I turn to AI for assistance. I feel
compelled to make a simple online R Shiny app that will at least allow

the

other members of the local environmental justice group to consult these
numbers, which are about to serve the shredder as a justification for
continuing to spew lead, manganese, benzene, chloroform, trichlorethelyne
and an entire alphabet of toxic substances directly into our lungs. To
build the app I have to understand, not only the metal-shredding

operation,

but also the highly politicized and often obfuscatory science of the
Illinois and US EPAs. If I could get it right - if I could correctly

apply,

for example, a THQ=1.0 risk screening value to a toxic substance profile

-

then maybe our group could talk coherently about the numbers game that is
about to determine the health of some thirty thousand fellow residents.

The app started to take form. It grew in complexity as I explored the
issues. Soon it embraced all the information available to us. "This," I
thought to myself, "is definitely a mirror world."

But what exactly does it mirror?

The incredible thing about the US EPA is the profusion of science-based
public health analysis. It turns out that even when you split hairs into
microscopic pieces, they are still likely to be covered in
nanograms-per-cubic-meter or parts-per-billion-by-volume of toxic
substances. What's more, the toxicity of those substances is anything but
clear. It depends on whether the exposure is subchronic, chronic or

acute.

What's more, it depends on how many other substances you may be exposed

to.

If you live in what they call an "EJ neighborhood" - which means a place
where poor and largely non-white residents are bathed in industrial
cocktails by industries whose owners would never dream of living there -
well, then, gee, maybe you had better apply a THQ-0.1 coefficient to

obtain

your risk-screening values. Fortunately you can do that in R, just add
another toggle, presto. However there is one caveat, and it is

underscored

at every turn of the EPA webpages. The result of your calculation will

say

nothing, that is, nothing legally binding, about the health outcomes of
whatever you may be breathing, at whatever level of subchronic, chronic

or

acute exposure and in whatever concentration of nanograms-per-cubic-meter
or parts-per-billion-by-volume. Because in the great majority of cases

the

EPA, both state and federal, has only been empowered to suggest what your
risk might be under certain circumstances - not to set enforceable
standards that could mitigate that risk.

The amazing thing is the contrast between the EPA numbers and the private
company numbers. The EPA measured emissions at the fence line for years,
marshaling an extraordinary scientific effort. They showed clearly
unacceptable levels of many different toxins. Then after the metal

shredder

installed some new containment hoods in the spring of 2025, the same
Illinois EPA declared they didn't have to monitor anymore - even though

the

levels of emissions barely changed during the half year that followed the
equipment installation. Now it's time to grant a permit to the shredder

so

that it can go on spewing for another decade or two. For that, it's

enough

to do three tests inside the smokestack, for a short list of metals
excluding the worst one (magnesium), plus a single category covering all
the volatile organic compounds (your benzenes, chloroforms,
trichlorethelynes and the like). The foregone conclusion - which we don't
accept - is that this permit will go through. We will contest it to the
best of our abilities, with numbers, testimonies, people power etc. The
next few weeks will tell the story on that one.

In the meantime I am wondering about all the mirror worlds that have been
created since the 1990s. All the climate models, all the big data on

hidden

biases, all the toxicology and endocrinology and oceanography and
everything that claims to make a big bad dangerous world small enough to
fit in your cellphone and simple enough to understand at a glance. I

myself

seem to spend half my time creating such mirror worlds. With the help of
AI, they have started to sprawl uncontrollably, occupying ever more
reticular and psychic space. Such that now, things have been anything but
simplified. Instead, there are on the one hand massive, complex,
consequential and thoroughly opaque bureaucracies that determine

real-world

outcomes, often at the behest of oligarchs who can easily put their
minions' fingers on the scales. And on the other hand, inside computer
networks completely disconnected from this real world, there are
increasingly complex, sprawling and exhausting mirror worlds of idealized
bureaucracies that are only empowered to produce unenforceable

measurements

and representations that look great on a screen.

"If only I could download this stuff into reality and change the world,"

I

find myself grumbling. "But damn, I would have to change the world in

order

to download it."

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# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: https://www.nettime.org
# contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org