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… read about art, exclusion, and AI.

AI is having a quirky, fun moment. Powered by DALL-E 2, a popular AI image generation software tool available online, people across the internet are imagining twee reconstructions of indie rock albums or cursed renditions of popular authors inspired by their works. The Continent, a WhatsApp-first newspaper covering Africa, used DALL-E 2 to generate the cover [[link removed]] of its latest issue, asking the machine for “A female African superhero saves the world from Big Tech, in the style of Afrofuturism” and picking the best of five viable options [[link removed]]. These images, as well as others generated by DALL-E 2, support a cover story on AI capabilities and ethics, centered around fired former Google researcher Timnit Gebru. AI “is used to consolidate power for the powerful. A lot of people talk about AI for the social good. But to me, when you think of the current way it is developed, it is always used for warfare,” Gebru told Simon Allison [[link removed]] of The Continent. An inability or unwillingness of Facebook to suppress hate speech on its platform in Ethiopia, paired with the use of AI-powered drones in the war against Tigray, only underscores Gebru’s point. No amount of artistic gloss can cover up the tangible real-world impact of algorithm-enabled war.

Nullifying Terra Nullius

When the British Empire claimed and colonized Australia, it did so under a legal doctrine that the land belonged to no one. This was a claim made despite the obvious fact that people were already living on the continent and surrounding islands, just as their ancestors had done for centuries. On June 3, 1992, after a decade-long legal case, the High Court of Australia held that the doctrine of “terra nullius” was not valid at the time of European settlement of Australia.

“Mabo Day,” named after Eddie Koiki Mabo, the first named plaintiff, marked 30 years of celebrating the ruling.

Australia followed the ruling by establishing a system for Native Titles to land in 1993. This year, with a new government in power openly committed to indigenous rights, the possibility exists to more permanently guarantee indigenous rights, voice in parliament, and more [[link removed]].

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Fillers of Salt

Estuaries are a vital boundary zone, unique habitats that mediate the boundary between the fresh water of oceans and irrigated land and the salt water of the sea. The Mekong River Delta, vital to agriculture in Vietnam for centuries, is facing increased salinization as rising sea levels push salt further upstream and greater salty outflows carry salt from upstream to the delta.

A new study modeling climate data suggests that rising sea levels will make it impossible to continue to grow rice in many places in the delta.

This pattern, from rising seas to human activity dumping more salt into flows upstream, is happening to rivers across the globe. Writes Fred Pearce in Hakai Magazine [[link removed]], “As climate change gathers pace, salt will be a growing threat to the world’s food supplies, particularly where farmers rely on artificial irrigation.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Troubled geography: Part I

When a political crisis gets bad enough that it erupts into violence, an armed and radicalized force can appear seemingly from nowhere. The creation of this force poses two equally important questions: What makes people decide to take up arms against a government? And, just as crucially, what makes people in similar circumstances decide not to?

Or, as authors Emma Ylitalo-James and Andrew Silke put it, the answer to these two questions “depends not just on developing a better understanding of terrorists, but equally on developing a fuller understanding of compatriots who share many of the same traits, characteristics and contexts, but who did not progress to involvement in terrorism.”

Their work, “ How Proximity and Space Matter: Exploring Geographical & Social Contexts of Radicalization in Northern Ireland [[link removed]],” involved interviewing 17 former paramilitary members and 12 paramilitary sympathizers who, despite their inclinations, did not join in the violence. It’s a study of the dynamics and forces that lead some to radicalization, but not all.

By focusing on people in Northern Ireland, the researchers were able to draw on both a long history of paramilitary violence complete with cohorts of supporters who did not participate in the violence. At the same time, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 marked a formal end to the conflict if not all the tensions, and meant that people could speak more openly of the violence as past tense.

One of the findings from the study, when talking to people who join a paramilitary force, is that they did so because the specific geography of their home encouraged it. In some cases, this was because the particular block they lived on was on the direct boundary line between a Protestant and Catholic area.

In other circumstances, the British government’s policy of homogenizing neighborhoods to mitigate conflict meant relocating families. One former member of the Ulster Freedom Fighters noted that “there were an awful lot of protestants were living in them houses but them protestants were pushed out to make way for nationalists to move in - they were saying well that will happen to us. They’ll push us out.”

As much as close proximity to a real or perceived front line drove radicalization, being even a block or two away from the front line meant thinking about the conflict differently, or at a minimum not acting as though always under imminent threat.

This was reflected, too, in the way that the physical and personal geography of life for the paramilitary members became confined to the areas they felt safe. Going out meant only going to bars and clubs vetted and frequented by the same faction, and often doing so among members of one’s own specific paramilitary unit, where trust and cohesion could offer a sense of security. This was often compounded by direct experience of loss, either friends or family, which, for many, cemented a path into seeking justice through armed violence.

For those who did not radicalize into paramilitary participation, one participant said regular contact through soccer created community beyond that focused on sectarian violence. Others pointed to distance from conflict flashpoints, overriding work and university obligations, and even already being in mixed communities.

The authors ultimately focused on geography, personal experience of violence, and social isolation as the significant factors determining if people primed for radicalization end up following through. A geography that prevents neighborhoods from becoming enclaves or front lines can reduce spaces for conflict, personal distance from the tragedy of violence can lessen proclivity to take part in it, and a community across sectarian lines (or at least one forged outside sectarian identity) can all steer people away from violent radicalization.

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS

Nicole Cochran and Brian Harding examined [[link removed]] Indigenous foreign policy in light of the promise by Australia's newly elected labor government to “deliver a First Nations foreign policy.” Cochran and Harding emphasized that for this to truly work, it must start from the settler-state, like Australia, crafting policy as part of a shared political community with indigenous constitutional order, noting “a state cannot have an Indigenous foreign policy unless it has established a means for constituting a shared political community with its Indigenous peoples within the territory of the state.” Australia needs to start there, or else the term is just a hollow rebranding of existing Australian policy.

Yasmine Mosimann reported [[link removed]] on how people in Iraq are struggling with the drought, heat, and wind all exacerbated by climate change. Mosimann talked to a Yazidi refugee, who has lived in a tent city with other refugees for the better part of eight years, where the wind and grime makes life hard, but the risk of a flood sweeping everything away is a true looming catastrophe. The story, evocatively photographed, highlights how the hardships of a worsening climate fall on those least able to afford it, with delivery workers using surgical masks to keep the dust out of their mouths as they struggle to get by.

Andrew Connelly examined [[link removed]] abortion care access in Northern Ireland three years into decriminalization. Both the reactionary forces of restricting abortion care and the life-affirming ones providing it are looking to the US Supreme Court’s looming ruling on abortion as protected by a right to privacy for precedent. “We are always going to have to be vigilant. Always. We never take the justice, the rights, the access for granted,” Naomi Connor, who works for Alliance for Choice, cautioned. “The moment you start taking it for granted is the moment that it can slip away.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL PLAYED

Discourse apocalypse memes are the synthesis of shitposting and climate anxiety, a dialectical meme-aterialism [[link removed]].

Unarmored panels [[link removed]] suffer in wartime.

The description says Stafford Road Man but the facial reconstruction points to the existence of history’s first roadie [[link removed]].

AI is art [[link removed]] not artifice, which doesn’t stop it from being a labor issue [[link removed]].

Happy Pride [[link removed]]!

Happy platty juubz to all the homies [[link removed]].

Ceci n’est pas un twete [[link removed]].

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Critical State is written by Kelsey D. Atherton with Inkstick Media.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.

With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”

Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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