Re: <nettime> The Sprawling Disconnect of Mirror Worlds

[Brian Holmes via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

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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