Best of Weekly Groundings: 2023
My favorite items from Weekly Groundings published this year
Since I revamped Handful of Earth and started posting regular content in May 2023, I have published 32 Weekly Groundings. For those of you who are brand new here, Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week.
These 32 Weekly Groundings published in 2023 featured a wide range of content, from interviews and long-form journalism to polling and political analysis to charts and essays. In lieu of a regular Weekly Grounding this Friday, I have compiled 20 of what I believe to be the most interesting or important items (organized from older to newer Groundings, featuring my original commentary) shared over the course of 32 Fridays in 2023.
If you find this compilation useful, please consider sharing it with a friend so the audience for future Weekly Groundings and other content at Handful of Earth can grow.
“A Century of Censorship”
This detailed timeline of censorship in America from 1917 to 2022 is an excellent resource to keep on hand. The author, Matt Farwell from The Hunt for Tom Clancy here on Substack, notes that “the methods of censorship had changed over time, matching changes in the communication technology.” However, “one thing has been remarkably consistent. Government targeted for special attention journalists who reported accurately on the ugly truth of American foreign policy…” The continued efforts of the Biden administration to extradite Julian Assange are a sad reminder of the lengths to which the U.S. government will go to punish journalists who tell the truth about American wars.
“Ukraine is Already Looking to a Postwar Digital Future”
This must-read article in The Financial Times describes the role of new digital technologies in shaping the political future of Ukraine. The focus is on an app called DIIA (short for “state and I”), which came online in 2020 and has since been lauded by none other than Samantha Power. Why might that be? The FT reports: “During the Covid-19 pandemic, for instance, the app let Ukrainians verify their vaccination status” and notes that DIIA gave Ukrainian “citizens the world’s first digital passport.” The article continues: “The country’s prewar economy was dominated by agriculture and heavy industry. But government officials now see tech’s potential as a key pillar, and dream of modelling themselves on Israel.” No wonder the Biden administration keeps the aid flowing.
“Seeing Like Google”
This is a powerful meditation (and polemic) on the rise of “existential politics” in the West by
at Archedelia. The proliferation of GPS technologies in London serves as a case study: “The incursion of Street View and GPS opened London up for easier inspection, making it more legible to outsiders. These include the Esperanto meritocrats who come from all corners of the globe to throng the city’s financial center in smartly tailored suits, and representatives of various trans-European administrative bodies who needed to visit the island, like a Roman proconsul, to keep it abreast of pronouncements by the European Parliament. The flood of GPS-guided cars trolling for fares, piloted by ill-paid drivers as lost in London as you or I, has increased congestion but also made London more cheaply available to tourists who come for a few days. What’s not to like, for the cockney East Ender who took four years out of his life to master his own city from the cobbles up, on two wheels, in all manner of weather? To complain about your own economic and political dispossession is to be a Luddite.”“Two Men Down”
Beautiful writing on Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk by
at Black Music and Black Muses. I was especially moved by this passage: “Most people will never know what it means to be so visible that the only way to disappear is by digging deeper into the self. Sometimes that digging is like digging one’s own grave and settling in while alive, falling into it from time to time and knowing you can revive yourself. It makes sense these players would scream dig! to one another during jam sessions and rehearsals, as if to demand: go deeper, become invisible, come into me.”“There Is No Utility”
This is an important critique of the concept of utility by
at The Presence of Everything. He makes a cogent argument against the utilitarian assumption that “there is this number you can assign to any experience, presumably a negative one to negative experience and positive for positive experience. It posits that there is a continuum between these, and that when you add up enough negative utility, you get something that could fairly be called ‘suffering.’” This essay pairs nicely with ’s “Why I Am Not an Effective Altruist” from last year on The Intrinsic Perspective.“Conservatives Go to Red States and Liberals Go to Blue as the Country Grows More Polarized”
The Associated Press reports that “Americans are segregating by their politics at a rapid clip, helping fuel the greatest divide between the states in modern history.” Online polarization gets a lot of media attention, but the increasing geographical political divides in America are just as (if not more) significant: “The split has sent states careening to the political left or right, adopting diametrically opposed laws on some of the hottest issues of the day. In Idaho, abortion is illegal once a heartbeat can be detected in a fetus — as early as five or six weeks — and a new law passed this year makes it a crime to help a minor travel out of state to obtain one. In Colorado, state law prevents any restrictions on abortion. In Idaho, a new law prevents minors from accessing gender-affirming care, while Colorado allows youths to come from other states to access the procedures.”
“The Dawn of the Bohemian Peasants”
Louis Elton offers a rich (if somewhat self-indulgent) sociological profile of what he calls the “Bohemian Peasants,” or “Bopeas,” over at Unherd. The explanation for the rise of this new counterculture within the global petite bourgeois is incisive: “The Bopeas are a new paradigm in culture and consumption. They are the descendants of other post-war consumer groups: the Hippies, the Yuppies, and the Bobos of Soho House. However, unlike their predecessors, who grew from the boom of generational upward mobility and urbanisation in the 80 years after the Second World War, the Bopeas are responding to something else: a crisis of what Peter Turchin calls ‘elite overproduction’ — and a diminishing need for everyone to be an urban creative.”
“Global Nuclear Renaissance Under Guise of ‘Net Zero’”
This interview, translated from the original French at Wrong Kind of Green, chronicles the history of pro- and anti-nuclear advocacy in France. I found this commentary particularly insightful: “As we supply the whole of society with nuclear power, we must maintain a scientific clergy of nucleocrats because it is a very complicated and dangerous technology, and on the other hand we must protect these nuclear power plants, mineral mines, transport, and waste with a dedicated militia because we do not want it to fall into the wrong hands. With the civilian atom, there is therefore an entire electro-totalitarian society that is being set up with a state apparatus, a police, and a particular political organization…Nuclear waste cannot be managed by just anyone. There is a ratchet effect in it where there is no turning back.” Unfortunately, the massive propaganda effort in recent years to promote nuclear power as a “clean” and “green” alternative to fossil fuels seems to be breaking down the healthy skepticism of the technology among Americans. According to a recent Pew Research poll, “A majority of Americans (57%) say they favor more nuclear power plants to generate electricity in the country, up from 43% who said this in 2020.” See Weekly Grounding #12 for an article on the devastating impacts of nuclear waste in the United States.
“Blue-Collar Workers Are Our Only Hope”
At Unherd, Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky forecast changing class relations in response to the industrial application of artificial intelligence. They observe that AI threatens the continued growth of white-collar “knowledge economy” jobs. This “once-rising class that often embraced the oligarchy’s ideas now faces the same kind of marginalisation experienced by less-educated workers for generations. And it is not unreasonable to conclude this could eventually divide the current political alliance between progressively minded professionals and the AI-enhanced elite. Perhaps the most visible example of this is the writers and actors strike — drawn from a class traditionally aligned with the oligarchs — currently underway in America, where AI threatens to make the manufacturing of entertainment largely redundant.” What this will mean for the character and development of the professional-managerial class seems quite significant. Kotkin and Toplansky go on to argue that “there is one class of worker who remains capable of opposing this neo-feudal structure: those with hands-on yet skilled jobs, such as the engineers refusing to work at Intel’s new semiconductor facility in Ohio. After all, even the infrastructure for AI requires tactile skills, and, as a result, technically capable blue-collar workers still have leverage and can shut down the whole infrastructure. This same class of skilled artisans were at the vanguard of the rise of democratic capitalism. Two centuries later, they may be our best hope for resisting a very different revolution.”
“The Lives Politics Doesn’t Touch”
In this strikingly candid opinion piece for The Financial Times, Janan Ganesh addresses an important yet often overlooked topic: the nearly complete sheltering of certain demographic groups from the consequences of politics. The subtitle says it all:
Ganesh elaborates: “Friends, I seem to have exited History. Outside of the obvious and eternal themes of taxation and law and order, the issues of the day impinge little on me. I find it stimulating to observe politics, as a zoologist does a wombat colony, and I certainly have preferences. But something about the atomisation of the modern world has spared me personal exposure to political decisions.”
“On General Futility of Political Discussions with People”
Drawing on his experience of political discussions with “Stalinists, nationalists, and liberals,”
observes how all three camps engage in similar argumentative tactics: “To any strong argument from the interlocutor they would produce either a denial (such and such event never occurred; there is no evidence; it was somebody else’s propaganda etc.), or they would accept that the uncomfortable fact occurred, but will justify it by an even greater perfidy of the other side.” He concludes that “if one believes in a certain point of view and yet has a limited amount of mental energy, it is entirely wasteful to use it in trying to convince others in direct discussions. It is much more effective to write and read and listen than to have Socratic or any other dialogues.” This is one of the reasons, I believe, that platforms like Substack (where reading, writing, and listening reign supreme) are indispensable in contemporary politics.“An Epidemic of Chronic Illness Is Killing Americans in Their Prime”
The Washington Post offers an in-depth report on just how severe the crisis of chronic disease has become in the United States, especially among the poor and working class: “The best barometer of rising inequality in America is no longer income. It is life itself. Wealth inequality in America is growing, but The Post found that the death gap — the difference in life expectancy between affluent and impoverished communities — has been widening many times faster. In the early 1980s, people in the poorest communities were 9 percent more likely to die each year, but the gap grew to 49 percent in the past decade and widened to 61 percent when covid struck.” The following graph helps visualize this data:
The remainder of this extended report—which focuses on anecdotes from the Louisville area—makes for a harrowing but incredibly important read.
“Tech Doesn’t Make Our Lives Easier. It Makes Them Faster”
explores why “the stories we hear about tech are so rife with cognitive dissonance” at Altered States of Monetary Consciousness: “Marketers and futurists first place themselves in the position of our proverbial villager - hyping the convenience of AI - but if you say you don’t need it they fast-forward their minds into the future and issue dire warnings that if don’t adopt it you’ll be left behind. What they’re trying to say, in their convoluted and euphemistic way, is this: the global capitalist system doesn’t care whether or not you want to use the technology, or whether you believe it should be used to save your time. You will have to use it, and you’re not in charge of how it will be used systemically. In fact, nobody is really in charge. Our personal desires will always play second fiddle to the systemic logic of a large-scale economy that is blind to anything except the profit motive. In the absence of us being able to get together and demand something different, our system will always just default towards increasingly speed and growth. It only has one gear.”“The 3Rs of Unmachining: Guideposts for an Age of Technological Upheaval”
from Pilgrims in the Machine and from School of the Unconformed ask the question: “What is the turn in the road that—if we make it—could spare us from the negative impact of technology, keep us rooted in reality, and deepen what it means to be human?” They ambitiously argue that “this turn should be so fundamental that it can be followed by anyone, irrespective of whether they live in a condo tower in Toronto, or deep in the northern forests, and span the ‘ecumenical trenches’ of religious belief, or even non-belief.” If the following figure interests you, please do take the time to read this magisterial essay:
“Cops Shut Down Jewish Journalist Book Tour Critical Of Israel”
I’ve focused some of my recent writing (most notably “The ‘Free Speech’ Right Embraces Cancel Culture”) on the new wave of censorship in the West justified as a response to conflict in the Middle East. This Breaking Points interview of Jerusalem-based writer Nathan Thrall on the coordinated effort to stop events for his new book—A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy—demonstrates just how repressive the Western cancellation and censorship regime has become. The whole interview is well worth a watch, but I found Thrall’s following observation especially revealing: “When I was interviewed about the book prior to October 7th...[an] interviewer asked me a series of questions about whether I had portrayed the Jewish settlers, and therefore the settler movement, too sympathetically…I was very happy to be asked that question—that was a victory—because I wanted this book to be real, to really put you in the shoes of everybody there and understand how they see the world. So the fact that a book that got asked that kind of question before October 7th is being targeted for cancellation…it is just a time of total intolerance, and every Palestinian in the U.S. that I know says it feels like the days after 9/11 or the lead up to the Iraq War.”
“Home Schooling’s Rise from Fringe to Fastest-Growing Form of Education”
The Washington Post provides “the most detailed look to date at an unprecedented period of growth in American home schooling.” The whole article is worth a read, but one of the most interesting findings was that “Home schooling’s surging popularity crosses every measurable line of politics, geography and demographics. The number of home-schooled kids has increased 373 percent over the past six years in the small city of Anderson, S.C.; it also increased 358 percent in a school district in the Bronx.” The following state-level data demonstrates how far-reaching the increase in homeschooling has been across the country:
For more on this topic, see my 2019 article, “John Taylor Gatto Challenged the Ideas Inherent in US Mass Schooling.”
“Class Conflict and the Democratic Party”
This analysis by
for The Liberal Patriot argues that the “key schism that lies at the heart of dysfunction within the Democratic Party and the U.S. political system more broadly is between professionals associated with ‘knowledge economy’ industries and those who feel themselves to be the ‘losers’ in the knowledge economy—including growing numbers of working-class and non-white voters.” Al-Gharbi provides a rigorous history of the “increasing dominance of knowledge economy professionals over the Democratic Party” that is well worth reading leading up to the 2024 election. He notes that “professionals tend to be far more supportive of immigration, globalization, automation, and artificial intelligence than most Americans because they make professionals’ lives more convenient and significantly lower the costs of the premium goods and services they are inclined towards. Those in knowledge professions primarily see upsides with respect to these issues because their lifestyles and livelihoods are much less at risk—indeed, they instead capture a disproportionate share of any resultant GDP increases—and their culture and values are largely affirmed rather than threatened by these phenomena. Others may and often do experience these developments quite differently.”“The Case for Left Conservatism”
At Unherd,
argues for a “Left Conservatism,” which she describes as “something like the conservatism of Christopher Lasch combined with the environmentalism of Wendell Berry…In practice, this nascent ideology looks to revive civil society, cares about ecology and culture of place, desires robust local and regional economies, is broadly anti-war, and rejects the ongoing bureaucratisation and commodification of all the most sacred aspects of life. This milieu of thinking doesn’t belong to a set political tradition — hence the contradiction in terms — but, above all, Left Conservatism centres the local, the particular and the human-scaled.” Regardless of what you call it, “the local, the particular, and the human-scaled” have been central themes here on Handful of Earth.“The Pseudo-Religion of Psychedelics”
In a fascinating essay at Compact Magazine,
argues that “As orthodox religion recedes in America, all manner of alternative histories rush in to fill the God-shaped hole. Among the stranger stories are the ones that seek not only to propose new spiritual modes of living, but try to reformulate existing histories on new and sometimes bizarre bases. Enter the high priests of techno-psychedelia, who are turning our obsession with ‘creative destruction’ toward the sacred mytho-psychological underpinnings of Western civilization.” Kitchens reviews psychedelic pharmacology activist Brian Muraresku’s book, The Immortality Key, “which seems to assume that simply giving everyone psychedelics will fix everything. Nor is there any critique of technology and capitalism. And that is fitting. An experience of transcendence instantly occasioned by a drug but leading to no systemic change isn’t revolutionary. It is instead a powerful tool for the captains of industry who need a never-ending supply of laborers just happy enough to show up and clock in.” For further historical background on the precursors to Muraresku’s “techno-psychedelia,” see my essay, “Ted Kaczynski and the Paradox of the Postwar Predicament.”“The War on Informality”
offers an enthralling glimpse into the “techno-feudal” lifeworld of contemporary London. Part autobiography, part ethnography, and part economics, it’s a long essay, but well worth the read. It’s hard to pick an excerpt, but this was one of my favorite paragraphs: “Trying to be a 1970s punk in a 2023 London is like trying to be a wild ferment in pasteurised milk. What makes a place feel ‘commercial’ is when the values of efficiency, ‘convenience’ and accumulation take over from all others, and the holistic spirit is slowly evicted. Commercial culture sterilises - or pasteurises - the environment of any parts of the human spirit that don’t act to support its aims.”Well, that does it for my 20 favorite items from Weekly Groundings in 2023. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive future Weekly Groundings in 2024!