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System Magazine by Juergen Teller

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François Villon, trans. Galway Kimmel

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Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference.

Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false:

If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false.

Doing that turns off the AI chatbot features in Firefox, but also the stupid new LLM tab-naming feature that's rolling out.

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You there! Federal museum professional educator or FEMA climatologist or NOAA metereologist or CISA cybersecurity specialist or Army civilian logistics employee. How would you like to work for ICE? No? Not interesting? You’re working for ICE now. You’re working for ICE or you’re quitting. You don’t get a choice. You’re an ICE brown shirt or you’re out of a job.

This is not hyperbole. This is happening across the entire United States government.

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If you’re looking for ways to help at-risk communities in the DC area during this crackdown please look into supporting some of the following orgs:

Remora House

Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid

HIPS

CASA (Virginia)

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June Afternoon

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Palestinian journalist أنس الشريف Anas Al-Sharif has been martyred.

@AnasAlSharif0

This is my will and my final message. If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice. First, peace be upon you and Allah’s mercy and blessings.

Allah knows I gave every effort and all my strength to be a support and a voice for my people, ever since I opened my eyes to life in the alleys and streets of the Jabalia refugee camp. My hope was that Allah would extend my life so I could return with my family and loved ones to our original town of occupied Asqalan (Al-Majdal). But Allah’s will came first, and His decree is final. I have lived through pain in all its details, tasted suffering and loss many times, yet I never once hesitated to convey the truth as it is, without distortion or falsification—so that Allah may bear witness against those who stayed silent, those who accepted our killing, those who choked our breath, and whose hearts were unmoved by the scattered remains of our children and women, doing nothing to stop the massacre that our people have faced for more than a year and a half.

I entrust you with Palestine—the jewel in the crown of the Muslim world, the heartbeat of every free person in this world. I entrust you with its people, with its wronged and innocent children who never had the time to dream or live in safety and peace. Their pure bodies were crushed under thousands of tons of Israeli bombs and missiles, torn apart and scattered across the walls.

I urge you not to let chains silence you, nor borders restrain you. Be bridges toward the liberation of the land and its people, until the sun of dignity and freedom rises over our stolen homeland. I entrust you to take care of my family. I entrust you with my beloved daughter Sham, the light of my eyes, whom I never got the chance to watch grow up as I had dreamed.

I entrust you with my dear son Salah, whom I had wished to support and accompany through life until he grew strong enough to carry my burden and continue the mission.

I entrust you with my beloved mother, whose blessed prayers brought me to where I am, whose supplications were my fortress and whose light guided my path. I pray that Allah grants her strength and rewards her on my behalf with the best of rewards.

I also entrust you with my lifelong companion, my beloved wife, Umm Salah (Bayan), from whom the war separated me for many long days and months. Yet she remained faithful to our bond, steadfast as the trunk of an olive tree that does not bend—patient, trusting in Allah, and carrying the responsibility in my absence with all her strength and faith.

I urge you to stand by them, to be their support after Allah Almighty. If I die, I die steadfast upon my principles. I testify before Allah that I am content with His decree, certain of meeting Him, and assured that what is with Allah is better and everlasting.

O Allah, accept me among the martyrs, forgive my past and future sins, and make my blood a light that illuminates the path of freedom for my people and my family. Forgive me if I have fallen short, and pray for me with mercy, for I kept my promise and never changed or betrayed it.

Do not forget Gaza… And do not forget me in your sincere prayers for forgiveness and acceptance.

Anas Jamal Al-Sharif

06.04.2025

This is what our beloved Anas requested to be published upon his martyrdom.

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lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it.

Herman Melville | Moby-Dick

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Your post about homeless shelters calls their issues "uniquely liberal". Can I ask what you mean by that? /Gen

To me, there's nothing more liberal than a finely tuned system of bureaucracy that is hand-crafted to seem politically neutral despite still negatively impacting our most vulnerable populations en-masse.

When you enter the shelter system, you lose status as a person and instead become a measurable outcome. The nonprofit complex (which most shelters fall under) is a massive industry with billions of dollars flowing in and out. Their continued existence & expansion- which could include hundreds of people's jobs- live and die on 2 things: 1) they must constantly prove that they are socially necessary, or that there is a high/growing need for them to exist, but also simultaneously 2) proving "positive outcomes" and making it look like they are helping people transition out of homelessness with a program that works.

Whether it DOES work doesn't really matter, and in fact, if it worked that might actually be worse for their business. I mean, if there's no homeless people, what happens to the shelter? Our jobs? Our funding? But it especially does not matter to the people at the top of these orgs; a board of directors who likely will never interact directly with the staff, clientele, or even site locations at any time. All they interact with are numbers, and every decision is based on what those numbers say. It doesn't need to work, it just needs to look like it works.

I'll give you a personal anecdote to highlight what I mean.

I recently briefly worked for a very large system that runs several HUGE shelters in one of the most homeless metropolitan areas in the country. It's a very liberal company that mostly employs people of color and trans folk (which I now recognize as a massive red flag lol they want our labor for cheap). They are focused on things like *equity* and *accountability* blah blah

Success in these shelters is measured in a very prototypical way; how many beds are we filling daily, and how many people are "leaving shelter of their own accord" (i.e. not being kicked out for violating rules, and presumably leaving because they have found housing)? Essentially: how many beds are we turning over each day? And the higher that number = positive outcomes.

But here's the thing. If someone "forfeits" their bed, they can be counted as a tally under that "left shelter of their own accord" category, even if they immediately just get back on the waitlist (and oh yes, there are wait lists) to return to the shelter. So what these shelters do is they maintain a VERY strict, convoluted set of rules around what it means to forfeit your bed.

Back 5 minutes past curfew because you're visibly transgender and had 3 Uber drivers decline your ride when they saw you? Forfeit. Late for curfew because the bus' wheelchair lift didn't work and you use a power chair? Forfeit. You ARE back on time, but your partner is seemingly AWOL (because, as we discovered later, he was picked up by immigration and disappeared for several days)? Forfeit for the both of you, because this is a couples-only shelter. Sorry. You can jump back in the list as a single, and return to shelter after sleeping outside for a few days, though.

(all of these are real situations I really encountered, and you can very clearly see the type of people impacted)

Any bending of these rules requires documentation (like for clients that work late, for example, giving proof of schedule) but that documentation needed to be renewed WEEKLY. Beyond being impossible for clients to keep track of, it was impossible for US to keep track of. We were so understaffed and on top of everything, we have to keep track of 200 people's work schedules? No. Of course stuff slips through the cracks- and that's a function of the bureaucracy too- making it such a fucking chore to maintain legitimately, that people are encouraged to fudge shit and lie.

And as a result of all these policies, you get a constantly turning conveyor belt of people "exiting" shelter and then re-entering it, both of which count positively for outcome numbers. Why WOULDN'T they make that cycle part of the routine? And they did- almost every client I worked with had accidentally forfeit their bed at least once. Some clients had done it dozens of times.

When it comes to nonprofits I always keep this saying in the back of my head; if you're not paying for a product, you are the product. Assume that bureaucracy will always bend in favor of the industrial complex, because you're just the product. You're just a number. You're just an outcome. And if that outcome doesn't look pretty for their bottom line, they'll force it to. All while smiling and preaching equity. Really, what's more liberal than that?

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Saturday Morning (2025.08.09)

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genuine question — how is donating money going to help Palestinians if no food is going in? What is the money for?

Medicine, water, supplies, food, fuel (much of it black market being upsold at egregious prices) — these all cost money and pretty much all Palestinians in Gaza have no source of income now. It’s drops in the bucket compared to ending the siege and occupation but it’s one way to do at least something small to help. Others are in need of money to evacuate when the border opens again (which hopefully is asap…), tuition and supplies for school to continue studies despite it all. Another fund is focused on trying to rebuild farmlands in Gaza to get food again that way.

I can’t tell anyone what to do with their money but I don’t think this mindset of “well nothings going in so we can’t help” is helpful for people on the ground who are the ones saying that donations can and do help them survive.

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Your films seem particularly concerned with privacy, intimacy. Is that in your view what makes it still possible for us to differentiate ourselves from each other? Something like a kernel of resistance to a generalised socio-historical uniformity? Tsai Ming-liang: I think your reading of my films and myself through this notion of privacy is right. Your stress on the pared-down aspect of my work with these dancers [choreographing a production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Woman of Sezuan], the intimate side that you have seen in my films, in the end, that’s all me. We come back to what I said to you earlier: when I was making those films, or doing the choreography, it was always in order to engage in a dialogue with myself, to show things or ask questions, or in response to private things which I wasn’t able to describe, things I didn’t understand. It’s always a way of studying myself. And so this idea about privacy is absolutely right, because making films is a way of studying myself. But all these things are so difficult to understand that it will take me years and years of investigation to sort them out! Actually, I think we all have a so-called incomprehensible side to us. For me, in many cases, that side is the private part of people, a very particular type of privacy. That’s why you often find the characters in my films in a situation where they are unhappy. As I see it, their unhappiness derives precisely from this private side, from their feelings which are perhaps too special, too different from those of the collectivity, of society at large. It’s precisely because they are so different that they are afraid of letting other people see their unhappiness. In fact, I’d say that all my characters are doing more or less the same thing, which is, if I can put it like this, seeking themselves. This search truly involves laying yourself bare, casting off your identity… Of course, in each film they do different things. That’s bound up with my changing convictions, my age, and different life experiences. But there’s always this quest for self, an attempt to get back into oneself and understand that private space which is so hard to reveal to other people, and grasp its different levels. As I said earlier, every time I make a film it’s an attempt at dialogue with myself. For instance, I’d say that at every stage of my life there’s something in particular that I’m afraid of. Take The Rebels… What I showed in that film was what I was feeling at the time. I was unhappy but I didn’t know why. In Vive l’Amour, what I wanted to show was what I was thinking: ‘I want love!’—but I couldn’t find it. Now I still don’t have that love I was looking for… (laughter). Anyway, apparently that’s not the end of the world, I’m still here. So, each time I make a film, it’s in order to move a bit closer to the centre of that private self which I still haven’t managed to master.

Danièle Rivière, “Scouting” from Tsai Ming-Liang (DisVoir, 1999)

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chinese guqin by 东韵Dongyun

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Despite the hint of epic in the title of his first full-length feature, Rebels of a Neon God, Tsai Ming-liang decided early on not to try his hand at smuggling, even in television contraband, any of the merchandise commonly sold under the name of scripts. And yet, to all intents and purposes, he does have the intention of repeating Blanchot’s famous conclusive verdict in The Madness of the Day “A story? No, no stories, never again.” While Tsai Ming-liang surely shares this pious wish to exorcise the demons of investigation, the will to control and of an all-knowing Aristotelian unfolding, and is no doubt drawn to analogous problems, his concern lies with a different project. Which project? To translate in contemporary terms Benjamin’s somewhat dated word of order to his times, which are apparently still ours: “Cinema in place of narration.” Still, it remains to be seen what it could mean to avoid falling prey to the naive modernist insistence on the hermetic separation between artistic genres and to a heady belief in the technical capabilities of cinema. This programmatic question has the merit and timeliness of maintaining a certain level of confusion. For if its goal, as Benjamin writes, is “to lay waste to the previous precision of description, of time, of inner life” in order to “obtain a new objectivity”, then its true ambition is focused “above all on a new imprecision powerful enough to destroy the traditional precision.” With one vigorous stroke, Benjamin adds a statement that can easily be applied to what is uncommonly demanding in Tsai Ming-liang’s films: “What we want: a new precision and a new imprecision joined together in a single narrative jargon.” Tsai Ming-liang is engaged in the patient work of developing this scientific, highly clandestine, precise and vague language, free from any backward or provincial claims. It entails the construction of a fluid dialect, so indeterminate that its use and place must always be invented anew.

Jean-Pierre Rehm, “Bringing in the Rain”

A passage can now be opened to a possible form of narrative for this director of secret connections. His refusal to tell stories has already been mentioned. It appears not only in his anti-novelistic films, but also in his characters who are denied any contact with reality beyond the present moment (future and past are unreachable limits). Tsai, as we have just remarked, sends them on a sort of “sign journey” towards the surprise that will set their fragile apprenticeship underway, just as Deleuze speaks of apprenticeship in relation to Proust: “the Search [for Lost Time] is not merely an attempt to remember, an exploration of memory: search must be taken in its strongest sense, as in “the search for truth”… It is… the story of an apprenticeship… Learning principally deals with signs. Signs are the objects of temporal learning, not abstract knowledge. To learn is to consider a substance, an object, a person as emitting signs to be decoded. There is no apprentice who is not the ‘Egyptologist’ of something.” (Proust and Signs) If Tsai’s heroes are lost in a vast and “malevolent” world, they never disappear from it, never become anything other than a body, and never fade into the background. On the contrary, they grasp on to it or push it away; in other words, they actively observe its signs. The apparent abstraction in these films does not so much involve the structure of each shot or the geometric patterns that punctuate them as the sometimes mysterious feelings represented. These feelings are only expressed in extreme situations: Lee Kang-sheng’s outbursts of raging anger against his parents in The River; the rivers of tears streaming down Yang Kuei-mei’s face during the final scenes of Vive l’amour. The spectator is both embarrassed and eager to continue watching when such moments arise. These scenes breathe new life into the idea of an absence of narrative.

Olivier Joyard, “Corporal Interference”

from Tsai Ming-Liang (DisVoir, 1999)

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But while one kind of despair steers blindly in the infinite and loses itself, another kind of despair allows itself to be, so to speak, cheated of itself by ‘the others’. By seeing the multitude of people around it, by being busied with all sorts of worldly affairs, by being wise to the ways of the world, such a person forgets himself, in a divine sense forgets his own name, dares not to believe in himself, finds being himself too risky, finds it much easier and safer to be like the others, to become a copy, a number, along with the crowd.

Now this form of despair goes practically unnoticed in the world. Precisely by losing himself in this way, such a person gains all that is required for a flawless performance of everyday life, yes, for making a great success out of life. Here there is no dragging of feet, no difficulty with his self and its infinitizing, he is ground as smooth as a pebble, as exchangeable as a coin of the realm. Far from thinking him to be in despair, he is just what a human being ought to be. Naturally the world has no understanding of what is truly horrifying.

søren kierkegaard, the sickness unto death, translated by alastair hannay

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D. H. Lawrence, from Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays

Text ID: When we have become very still, when there is an inner silence as complete as death, then, as in the grave, we hear the rare, superfine whispering of the new direction; the intelligence comes. After the pain of being destroyed in all our old securities that we used to call peace, after the pain and death of our destruction in the old life comes the inward suggestion of fulfilment in the new.

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Since the nakba, Zionist angst has been the soundtrack of Palestinian life. 

House demolition.  Land theft.  Travel restrictions.  I have family in Israel.  Ecocide.  Expulsion.  Imprisonment.  This space is becoming unsafe for Jews.  Air raids.  Ground incursions.  The massacre of children.  But what would happen to Israelis?  Always the fantastical as a substitute for reality.  Always a void of empathy we are asked to replenish.  Always everything for all others without anything of our own.  And we tried.  Whether it was from decorum or guilt or fatigue, we tried.  We wanted to be accepted.  We wanted to become Good People.  We tried the sympathy, the indulgence, the dialogue.  The only thing these efforts got us was a genocide.  

We remember.  We have no choice, because the settler is needier than ever, demanding our validation as we agonize and mourn.  Not many are willing to offer it anymore.  Your crisis of faith is not my concern.  Those who do indulge the settler come across as weak or untrustworthy.  What the hell are you doing?  There’s a genocide going on. 

There’s been too much blood.  If you don’t share in our spirit, whether it cycles through pain or longing or fury or despair, then you’re a Zionist.  It doesn’t matter how you self-identify.  We suffer the oppression and so we get to name the oppressor.  It’s the only real benefit to being oppressed. 

(Besides, any half-serious person has surely noticed that Zionists can’t be trusted to define anything— “colonization”; “democracy”; “self-defense”; “antisemitism”—because those definitions exist only to project the settler’s barbarity onto the native.) 

Steve Salaita, Your Crisis of Faith is not my Concern