Best of Weekly Groundings: 2024
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 76 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.
44 of these Weekly Groundings were published in 2024. They 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 today, I have compiled 25 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 44 Fridays in 2024.
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.
“The Rise of the Right-Wing Progressives”
of of argues that “the rising influence in America of a wider group of what should properly be called Right-Wing Progressives, provides a great example of how our whole left-right conception of politics has degenerated into a state of deep confusion and uselessness – and how this is leading to some very muddled thinking about who is what and what should be done about the raging dumpster fire of our present modernity.” Lyons makes this argument through a reading of tech venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” which attempts to “weld together the techno-progress cult of Silicon Valley, the boundless liberationism of free-market individualist liberalism, the Nietzschean vitalism of the neo-pagan and ‘neo-reactionary’ corners of the online right, and the anti-Woke, anti-communist, anti-bureaucratic bonafides of American conservativism.” Lyons demonstrates that this ideological mishmash is philosophically incoherent but that Andreessen and his ilk can be coherently understood as “Right-Wing Progressives” (RWPs), a concept which Lyons devotes the remainder of the essay to exploring.
“The Cruelty of Crypto”
In this excellent essay for Aeon, Rachel O’Dwyer discusses the cultural impact of economic transformations with a particular focus on the rise of high-risk investing among Millennials and Gen Zs. She writes that “These generations are also a product of the speculative environment they were raised in. Most of the day-traders were teenagers or children in the financial crash, or just graduating college. Fledgling adults in the COVID-19 pandemic. Born between the mid-1980s and early 2000s, their identity is shaped by the vacuum of post-communist politics (I, personally, was sent, age five, to a fancy-dress party styled as the Berlin Wall) or shaped by the speculation and excess of the dotcom era, or racked by the uncertainty of the 2008 financial crash. They’ve encountered the death of the American dream (or in Ireland, where I’m from, the optimism of the Celtic Tiger) and felt the withdrawal of the state’s contract in everything from mounting student debt to inferior healthcare to the rising cost of living. The postwar security and investment in public goods like education and housing their grandparents and parents enjoyed has been replaced by volatility and risk. Retail trading forums like WallStreetBets and NFT Discords are spaces where people trade crazy investment advice, but it’s also where they articulate their loss of hope in those same dreams.”
O’Dwyer continues: “Financial markets are no longer a space where investors allocate capital to businesses to grow a profit. It’s all about gambling on vibes in the gulf left by financial and social and political systems in total freefall. Nihilistic vibes, desperate vibes, hopeless vibes. The market is a giant lottery in search of the prize of security, gambling for a spot in the lifeboats. Of course, financial markets have been divorced from the so-called ‘real’ economy since the 1970s. But, maybe, in the era of post-truth and political apathy, what is new is an acceleration of these sensations, a total sense that nothing matters anymore. Hard work doesn’t matter. Good sense doesn’t matter, and neither do good bets or doing all the right things.”
“How Feminism Ends”
This spectacular essay by Ginevra Davis at American Affairs is, on its face, a review of anthropologist Emmanuel Todd’s 2023 book, Lineages of the Feminine: An Outline of the History of Women. But it is much more than that: Davis reappraises the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler, offers personal reflections on growing up as a girl in the age of Tumblr, and ponders what the end of feminism looks like. She argues that “The female body is the unsolvable problem of feminist theory” and writes that if “the goal of feminism is to improve the lot of females, then there are dozens of changes, social and scientific, that could help alleviate their condition. But if the goal of feminism is perfect sexual equality—that no mind should ever have to make sacrifices, in productivity or love, because of its body—then the end of feminism must, necessarily, mean the end of females. There is no other way.”
Davis continues: “Females…are still haunted by a lack of female ‘greatness’—the same problem posed, seventy-five years ago, by Beauvoir. They work under male bosses. Their countries are run by mostly male leaders. Males continue to define the cutting edge in technology and industry, while females play catch-up in remedial programs (‘Women in tech!’ ‘Women in business!’). And even the most liberated female must still take her pills, and count her cycle, and watch her fertility ‘window’ while pretending that she doesn’t care. The female condition, one of constant self-monitoring and self-suppression, is now oddly similar to that of the gender-dysphoric, which is perhaps why we females are so obsessed with them (I never felt quite so understood as a female until I read the work of Andrea Long Chu, whom Todd cites as a leading chronicler of the transgender experience). It also seems designed to create a degree of self-loathing: females are constantly set up to compete at tasks at which they are slightly disadvantaged, and are promised a life which, any rational mind will quickly discover, they will never achieve. Social media aside, it is unsurprising that a growing number of women now report that they hate themselves.”
“Russia’s Demonization Undermines Western Universalism”
In this extended geopolitical analysis for Asia Times, Henry Hopwood-Phillips offers wide-ranging commentary on Russia and Ukraine after two years of war: “Russia’s threat perceptions may have been exaggerated yet what matters in diplomacy is how a protagonist sees the world and not how the West would like them to see it. Key Western players knew that Ukrainian entry into NATO – articulated as a goal in the 2019 constitutional amendment – would be the thickest of red lines for Moscow, a direct challenge to its interests, yet it has remained willing to flex down to the very last Ukrainian…In hindsight, the Cold War drummed an epistemic humility into the West that has long since evaporated.”
Hopwood-Phillips’ broader commentary on the roots of the Ukraine War is some of the most insightful I’ve read: “At the heart of the Ukrainian conflict is a tension over how politics is conceived. The Russians subscribe to an ancient order in which the res publica is born through a people’s readiness to kill or die on its behalf. The act of taking lives or giving them – hence the importance of sacrifice in most early-stage states – identifies a community: the people and its myths are to an extent the chicken and egg of sovereignty. At root, it openly relies on violence as a coercive tool. The West switched from this order towards a more peaceful one – which depends on far less violent forms of coercion – in the postwar period, eccentrically arguing that conventional conceptions of power were obsolete after devastation in two world wars and being partitioned in the subsequent conflict. It did so by exchanging the explicit strictures of the Christian faith for its soft patterning in the likes of Kant’s ‘Weltburgerbund’ and Habermas’ call for a cosmopolitan order which established a regime of ‘global governance without a world government’ – switches in register that made Western norms easier to export without inviting charges of imperialism. Rather than indulge in judgment on which framework is more true or morally laudable, it is worth highlighting that the West loses the moral high ground if it proves more willing to risk nuclear war than establish a framework that acknowledges the validity of concerns that stem from different political systems.”
“‘Lavender’: The AI Machine Directing Israel’s Bombing Spree in Gaza”
In this chilling report for +972 Magazine, Yuval Abraham meticulously documents Israel’s implementation of the “Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy” AI systems in its ongoing bombing campaign in Gaza: “During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a ‘rubber stamp’ for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about ‘20 seconds’ to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male.”
The article continues: “[T]he Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called ‘Where’s Daddy’ also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.”
The disturbing details of “Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy” are revealed in Abraham’s extended piece of investigative journalism, which, alongside his reporting from last year at +972, serves as crucial documentation of Israel’s AI-assisted genocide in Gaza.
“Woke-Speak of Bosses at NPR and Academia Irks the Masses”
Crispin Sartwell declares that “woke is over now” at Sublation Magazine: “[T]his way of talking is a style. It’s a style that has grown incredibly irritating. It’s a style that attributes to itself the supernatural ability to change reality by changing vocabulary. So, by its own standards it must be condemned as a miserable failure, insofar as it does not help people achieve justice, but primarily alienates and divides them. It functioned fairly effectively as long as it was restricted to the academic hothouse, but as it’s emerged, the futile absurdity of its layers of euphemisms has been exposed.”
Sartwell perceptively observes that “There will be vestiges for decades, and many young people, having been thoroughly trained in woke academic style, will be confused and disabled politically for a bit as the echoes fade. They’ll need to adjust and maybe find a new way to be progressives. But the people who are really going to struggle are the college professors and administrators who came of age during this period, the squads of DEI officers and humanities professors who have already written hundreds of memos, or whole tenure books, in the approved vocabulary.”
“Internet Archetypes and the ‘Ideological Aesthetic’”
Udith Dematagoda offers a fascinating analysis of male political livestreamers and their audiences at
. Of various livestreamers, he writes: “Though putatively belonging to two different ideological persuasions, I was struck by the many similarities in their affect - their lexicon, their mannerisms, speech, and, dare I say physiognomy. As their origins should suggest, they’re united by a certain spiritual adolescence, and they are by no means alone in this. I’ve stumbled across many of these ‘Internet Guy’ archetypes over the past few years, and have been struck by a certain consistency. By and large, they are not people whom large numbers of their audience only aspire to be, rather than people who they already are.”Dematagoda continues: “They speak not to a state of being which one would like to attain, of self-improvement, but rather an admission of defeat, of consolation and solace at who one is. Yet they do live lives of material comfort that their audiences covet, nonetheless - despite being exactly the same as them….It’s clear that the followers of these ‘Internet Guys’ love them and hate them in equal measure, as they love and hate themselves…Aspiration is a hope for the future, consolation is something else entirely, and something which speaks to the uniquely dystopian character of present-day technological anomie.”
“From Misogyny to No Man's Land”
Ross Barkan reflects on transformations in the American literary world at
: “The contemporary American literary scene is constricted by class—too many of the affluent writing and editing, too few of the working and poor doing the same—and a wearying ideological homogeny, but it has largely slayed the demon of misogyny. If men still sit at the top of the publishing conglomerates, it’s college-educated women writing, editing, and agenting most of the novels of note.”He continues: “None of this might be of pressing national import. The people who read will read, and those who won’t read won’t. The shrinking male in modern literary fiction matters more, rather, for what is getting left out: the interiority of men, nearly half the population, and particularly those who are failing. What I wonder about is what has replaced literature for most men. I wanted to be a Major League baseball player and when I could not do that—when my talent was evidently in short supply—I decided I would be a writer. One, it seemed, could bleed well enough into the other, one arena of achievement swapped for another. A career in letters was, implicitly, masculine enough. What was missing, in my late adolescence, were the seductions that rob the time of most younger men today, and I am not referring to online pornography, mostly because I am not convinced men can’t lust alone and then attempt to write literature. Rather, it’s video gaming and online sports gambling, the two great 2020s addictions, that probably keep men most thoroughly away from books. To become a reader and writer, one must take solace in empty time. The mind must have moments for wandering and imaginative growth. Gaming, which still remains a mostly male pastime, absorbs whatever idle hours the twentieth century male might have had at home, when instead of plugging away for hours on Call of Duty he thumbed through a Vonnegut paperback or a back issue of Esquire. We have undoubtedly left the golden era of male readership, when a generation of World War II vets, propped up by the GI bill, enrolled in college, read men’s magazines, and turned to literary fiction to make sense of their own world. Military veterans still publish novels, but they tend to be the Ivy League-educated, like Phil Klay and Elliot Ackerman; if men arrive at all to literature today, they are not working class, not poor, not the sort who’ve known humiliation and deprivation.”
Barkan concludes: “What is ticking inside the American male of the mid-2020s and what can novelists tell us about that?… And what of those far below, fully denied wealth and status, the men barely working or not working at all? The incels, the volcels, the MGTOWs? The gambling addicts and the gamers? Those who, instead of Hemingway, wish to be Rogan? The Latino and Black men drawn to Trump? The Asian men who do not, in fact, want to master the SAT? There’s a strange, teeming world out there. Literature can’t—and shouldn’t—be blind to it. If it’s going to be complete and speak to this era of tumult, it must find a way to those who aren’t near books at all. It must expand.”
“The End of Never-Ending Progress?”
discusses progress, limits, and motherhood at the Reactionary Feminist: “From washing machines to the contraceptive pill and every domestic labour-saving device, I can think of a great many more examples of women’s modern liberation seeming bound up in technology. But if this is so, taking decarbonisation and sustainability seriously would imply undoing many of the changes that have freed modern women from domestic drudgery. Even so, most mainstream liberal feminists would say they care about fossil fuels, capitalism, resource extraction and so on – even as liberation in practice continues to rely on technologies that depend on these things…Over time, though, I came to think that the argument wasn’t just about feminism but about progress, in our modern sense, in general. And this points in turn to a paradox that none of us really wants to think about. So that’s what I’m here to talk about today: progress, which is to say technology. Or rather: progress, versus the survival of our species. Because I think we’re going to have to pick one.”She continues: “[T]he technological mindset is at odds with any kind of interdependent relationship - because it is at odds with resonance, which is to say encountering the world and other beings in relationship rather than as resources... And mothering also offers a metaphor for some ways we might embrace the calls placed upon us by the nature of the living world around us. Living ‘sustainably’ would mean being more like the mother, who journeys from modernity toward resonating with her baby…In my most utopian mood, I imagine a world where we could extend this mindset beyond immediate human relationships. I imagine topsoil once again renewed by attentive care and willingness to be bounded by the nature of the thing. A similarly bounded and interdependent relation with wild and domesticated animal and plant species; even with our weather patterns.”
“Four Years After COVID, Cancel Culture Returns”
In a guest opinion column at
’s Substack, and demonstrate the incredible similarities in the cancel culture strategy deployed by the left during the pandemic and by the right during Israel’s war on Gaza: During the pandemic, “a quasi-priestly, self-appointed expert class suddenly dictated the boundaries of acceptable discourse on COVID-19 in a mostly successful effort to control our thoughts on the subject. We weren’t allowed to openly question whether school closures would lead to learning loss, especially among less economically privileged students; whether firing people for declining a rushed and, as it turned out, less-than-entirely-efficacious vaccine was an abrogation of workers’ rights; or whether shutting down the economy would hurt working people most of all. To even raise these concerns in polite company, as we both did, led to accusations of selfishness, support for former President Donald Trump, and eventual exile from the circles in which we ran. We watched the activist left descend into a mindless, totalitarian cult, in which the punishment for wrongspeech and wrongthink was the social equivalent of the death penalty.”Woodhouse and Younes continue: “History repeats itself, a harsh lesson we both learned firsthand not four years later. Since October 7, we have found ourselves once again watching people we befriended and came to admire during the Covid era embrace a blind dogma that replaces evidence, civil discourse, and logic with censorship, bullying, and accusations of antisemitism designed to chill dissent. This time, though, those engaging in these rhetorical tactics have clustered on the political right, as well as in the ‘heterodox’ space that purports to transcend the tribalism of the left-right divide and with which we both briefly identified.”
For more on this topic, see my articles, “The ‘Free Speech’ Right Embraces Cancel Culture” and “In Defense of Woke Zoomers.”
“The Internet’s Final Frontier: Remote Amazon Tribes”
The New York Times reports on the introduction of the internet to the Marubo tribe in the Amazon: “The 2,000-member tribe is one of hundreds across Brazil that are suddenly logging on with Starlink, the satellite-internet service from Space X, [Elon] Musk’s private space company. Since its entry into Brazil in 2022, Starlink has swept across the world’s largest rainforest, bringing the web to one of the last offline places on Earth.”
The internet was brought to the Marubo by an American woman named Allison Reneau, who describes herself as “a space consultant, keynote speaker, author, pilot, equestrian, humanitarian, chief executive, board director and mother of 11 biological children…[who] makes most of her money coaching gymnastics and renting houses…” Assisting her is a Brazilian “activist,” Flora Dutra, who“now has a goal to bring Starlink to hundreds more Indigenous groups across the Amazon, including Brazil’s largest remote tribe, the Yanomami.”
The original reporting is well worth reading in full. The greatest benefit the internet-pushers can point to is the ease of receiving emergency support in instances of snake bites. Beyond that, the Marubo now have to deal with “teenagers glued to phones; group chats full of gossip; addictive social networks; online strangers; violent video games; scams; misinformation; and minors watching pornography.” One tribal leader reports that “young men were sharing explicit videos in group chats, a stunning development for a culture that frowns on kissing in public. ‘We’re worried young people are going to want to try it,’ he said of the graphic sex depicted in the videos. He said some leaders had told him they had already observed more aggressive sexual behavior from young men.”
“The End of India’s Politics of Necessity”
At the Institute of Art and Ideas, Faisal Devji draws on Hannah Arendt’s concept of “animal politics,” or “any politics dedicated only to securing access to food, shelter, employment or other bodily needs,” to help interpret the results of India’s recent elections. He argues that the Indian coalition governments of the 1990s and early 2000s were defined by animal politics, at the expense of the countervailing approach “driven by the disinterested vision of the good society” that had been present in earlier eras of post-Independence Indian politics.
While Nadrendra Modi’s decisive electoral victories in 2014 and 2019 seemed like a potential departure from this tradition of coalitional animal politics, Devji argues that “Hindu nationalism’s vision of collective identity turned out to be about self-interest. The liberties it promoted were those of impunity in attacking minorities or amassing wealth. And having achieved most of what he had promised in the endeavour to recover Hindu pride, Mr. Modi had nothing left to offer apart from an animal politics. It was the very thing that had brought down the Congress-led government in 2014.”
“Why Has Trump Stopped Attacking Big Business?”
At
, compares the populist vocabulary and policies of 2010s Donald Trump with his significantly more pro-corporate 2020s persona. After a 2016 campaign in which “he feuded incessantly with corporate America, telling a story about big business as part of the corrupt establishment trying to outsource jobs and replace American workers with cheap labor,” Trump followed through on many aspects of his campaign rhetoric. He “withdrew the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, renegotiated NAFTA, and raised tariffs on Chinese imports. The press pretended that this stuff was mostly fake, but it wasn’t. For instance, the Trump administration blocked imports of lumber from a Peruvian exporter based on concerns over illegal harvesting, the first use of environmental standards in trade law ever by the U.S. government. As another example, there’s now a wave of Mexican labor organizing spurred by the labor provision in the new NAFTA.”In contrast, post-presidential “Trump sounds like he is the coalition leader of the Republican establishment. He’s still funny, and he’s still weird, and still iconoclastic in terms of his personality. But in terms of what he promises, he’s mostly stopped challenging big corporations, except in cultural terms acceptable to Wall Street. At the Business Roundtable and elsewhere, for instance, Trump offered a cut to corporate income taxes and a rollback of rules on corporations, especially the oil industry.”
While Trump’s pivot away from economic populism does not seem to be hurting him in the polls so far, Stoller highlights the following Financial Times poll which indicates that Americans no longer view the former president as an economic populist:
“A Peek Inside San Francisco’s AI Boom”
Freelance photographer Laura Morton documents the culture surrounding the generative AI boom in Silicon Valley for The Washington Post: “In the past year and a half, entrepreneurs from around the world have flocked to San Francisco to be part of this AI revolution. Many start-up founders and their teams live and work together so they can focus intently on building their companies. And evenings like the AI hackathon I visited in March 2023 have become Silicon Valley’s idea of fun.”
The photo-essay is well worth reading in full, but here are a couple highlights that capture the character of the cosmopolitan and technotopian AI bonanza in the Bay Area. The caption for the following photo reads: “Kelly Peng, the CEO and co-chief technology officer of Kura Technologies, and Yosun Chang, right, use Apple Vision Pros while they prepare to present at a robot hackathon at the Hillsborough AGI House in February 2024. That night, Peng, who lives at the house, showed off a telepresence robot, shown bottom left, that she and her team built. When paired with augmented-reality glasses, the robot can allow someone to visit a place virtually”:
This photo’s caption states: “Apoorva Mahajan, center, and Mo Mahmood, right, take a break for a lightsaber battle in the hardware lab at Founders Inc., a start-up incubator in San Francisco in March 2023. At the time, Mahajan was working on a brain-computer interface device and Mahmood was working at a robotics company”:
For more on the origins and development of Silicon Valley, see my piece, “Why Criticize Big Tech?”
“The Two Parties Fail to Understand Place-Based Inequality”
John Halpin discusses the relationship between geography and class in America for
. He argues that “Democrats and Republicans both have immutable narratives about who is left behind in American life and who deserves the most assistance and political attention. For Democrats, it’s ‘black and brown people’ and for Republicans it’s the ‘white working class’—a sectarian racial battle tailor-made to produce deep schisms and mutual animosity between Americans.”Drawing on a recent study by economist Raj Chetty, Halpin argues that “both party narratives fail miserably at representing the reality of economic mobility in America today and both miss the critical importance of communities and place-based approaches to helping lower-income people of all races get ahead in life.” A place-based approach would demand “a real focus on local communities and divergent social contexts rather than one-size fits all approaches favored by the national parties.”
Although not highlighted in Halpin’s article, Chetty’s study also makes the noteworthy observation that “in 1978, white children born to low-income families on the coasts (along with the Midwest and other parts of the country) had relatively good prospects of upward mobility. By 1992, upward mobility for low-income white children in the coasts and in the Southwest fell markedly to rates on par with those observed in Appalachia and other areas that historically offered the lowest chances of upward mobility:”:
“Conversely, for Black children, upward mobility increased the most in the Southeast and the Midwest — areas where outcomes had historically been poorest for Black Americans (Figure 3). However, even with these improvements, Black children born in 1992 still had poorer prospects of rising up than white children in virtually every county in America because initial Black-white disparities were so large.”
“Commodified Incuriosity”
Rob Horning explores the limits of AI and large language models in a fascinating piece at
: “If you don’t know how to navigate a discipline’s canon — if you can’t map it, situate different resources ideologically, recognize disputes and contested points, recapitulate the logic of different arguments from different points of view — then you probably don’t know what you are talking about, regardless of how much information you can regurgitate. LLMs can give you information but not the reasons why it was produced or why it has been organized in certain ways. And it certainly can’t identify what’s missing…What to consult, how to interpret, how to cope with polyphony and contradictions, how to combine sources, how to sequence words and thoughts, how to cut and omit, etc. etc. — anything worth engaging with conveys a sense of these deliberate subjective considerations and demands more of them, an infinite series of choices in how to respond.”Horning concludes: “Generative AI, [Ben] Recht argues, ‘always seems to provide the minimal effort path to a passing but shitty solution,’ which actually seems like a fairly charitable assessment. But it is obviously something that worker-users would employ when they don’t care about what they are asking for or how it is presented, for optimized producers who see research as an obstacle to understanding rather than the essence of it, for people conditioned to be absent at any presumed moment of communion. Generative AI is the quintessence of incuriosity, perfect for those who hate the idea of having to be interested in anything.”
“If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You're Not Paying Attention”
L. M. Sacasas discusses the theme of “attention and its moral dimensions” at
. He suggests that “Enchantment is just the measure of the quality of our attention. In other words, what if we experience the world as disenchanted because, in part, enchantment is an effect of a certain kind of attention we bring to bear on the world and we are now generally habituated against this requisite quality of attention?”Sacasas continues: “To speak of attention…as a patient waiting on the world to disclose itself, recalls how Simone Weil insisted that attention is a form of active passivity. ‘We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them,’ she insisted, ‘but by waiting for them.’ This form of attention and the knowledge it yields not only elicits more of the world, it elicits more of us. In waiting on the world in this way, applying time and strategic patience in the spirit of invitation, we draw out and are drawn out in turn. As the Latin root of attention suggests, as we extend ourselves into the world by attending to it, we may also find that we ourselves are also extended, that is to say that our consciousness is stretched and deepened. And this form of knowledge is ultimately relational. It yields a more richly personal rather than clinical or transactional relation with the object known, particularly insofar as affection may be one of its consequences.”
“Also Waiting for Godot.”
offers an incredible photo essay on daily wage laborers in Mumbai, India. By way of introduction, he writes: “The largest employer in India is not Bharatbhai Sarkar, the Railways, or any of our current oligarchs. It’s the streets of India, where people help each other through time-tested informal networks. Every major crossroads, naka, chowk, mukku, or X road in our cities and small towns is home to one such network that provides daily employment to millions of Indians, one or two generations away from caste-enforced agricultural labour or trade in the hinterland, now building our cities or offering cheap labour to factories. In the last century, which ended with the death of labour, they would’ve had a little or some voice. In the current century, they are invisible, like cycles and pedestrians. And once you notice them, you cannot unsee the thousands you will find at major squares, railway stations, gates of industrial estates, and almost everywhere, waiting for work every morning. If they do not find work that day, they return home hungry.”Here are a few of the photos—check out the link to see them all.
“Young Women Are Starting to Leave Men Behind”
At The Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch excavates the socioeconomic roots of increasing political and cultural divides between Gen Z men and women: “Across the developed world, the portion of young men who are neither in education, in work nor looking for a job has been climbing steadily for decades. In countries including the UK, France, Spain and Canada there are now more young men than women in effect outside the economy for the first time in history. Unlike young women, these men are generally not occupied by caring for other family members either. They are adrift and likely to be the ones in need of care themselves. More than 80 per cent of this group in the UK report long-term health problems.”
The report continues: “Perhaps most striking of all, 2022 was the first time the average young woman in the UK had a higher income than her male counterpart. This is due in large part to women becoming so much more likely to have a degree and the graduate salary that comes with it, but also to the deteriorating fortunes of non-graduate men, who have gone from earning 57 per cent more than non-graduate women in 1991, to 10 per cent less in 2022.”
Burn-Murdoch concludes: “With socio-economic trajectories heading in different directions, a growing minority of young men and women do not see eye to eye. Young male support for populist rightwing parties is on the rise, particularly among those without jobs and degrees. Violent unrest is more likely with a growing pool of young men with little stake in society or their future. And relationship formation itself is being affected, as growing numbers of female graduates discover a shortage of male socio-economic counterparts, and simultaneously have less need than ever to pair up with a man for financial support. Reversing the slide among non-graduate men will not be easy, nor must it become a zero-sum game with young women, but it is an essential challenge for the decades ahead and will have positive spillovers well beyond those directly affected.”
“In Deep-Blue Philly, Working Class Voters Are Shifting Toward Republicans”
The Philadelphia Inquirer offers a fascinating report on the recent shift of poor and working class voters in Philadelphia toward the Republican Party: These voters, “once reliable voting bloc for the party, have drifted right in recent years…It’s one of the biggest potential areas of concern for Harris, whose quest for the White House may hinge on Pennsylvania, where President Joe Biden four years ago defeated Trump by just 80,000 votes. Harris’ best opportunity to run up her vote total is in Philly, where 20% of the state’s Democrats live, but where Democrats bled more votes in 2020 than in any other county. Biden performed worse than Clinton in 41 of the city’s 66 political wards.”
The Inquirer’s analysis confirms that “class and voting patterns are closely tied in Philadelphia. Between 2016 and 2020, the Philadelphia precincts with the highest proportion of residents in poverty shifted furthest to the right, according to the Inquirer’s analysis. At the same time, voting divisions with least poverty [sic] shifted most to the left”:
“Automatic Against the People: Reading, Writing, and AI”
As the rapid proliferation of Chat-GPT has demonstrated, it is not only blue-collar occupations that are under threat from automation and artificial intelligence. At Unemployed Negativity, Jason Read ponders “what is lost when we automate the acts of reading and writing.” In response to the question of “why learn how to write?,” Read reflects: “Isn’t writing just one technology among others when it comes to the retention and communication of thoughts. I could just as easily make an audio or visual recording of my ideas as something to share with others or even as notes to myself. The difference between these different ways of recording is how each relates to time. Videos and audios have their own time span, a film is ninety or a hundred and twenty minutes, a podcast an hour or more, and so on. That cannot change without distorting it…When I read, however, the timing of the reading is more undetermined and less hardwired into the technology, if it does not sound too weird to call writing technology…Reading has a unique relationship to the time of thinking. In some sense reading is thinking.”
Read concludes: “I have heard people say that LLMs like ChatGPT can do the work of jotting down some ideas, or summarizing the secondary readings, and then they can take it from there in order to create something interesting. This creates a division between a part of thinking that is rote, repetitive, and mechanical and a part of writing that is creative and intentional. This seems to me to be an utterly specious and false division. For me writing is much more akin to playing an instrument, or sport, or learning an art or martial art in which the most mechanical basics and drills are foundational and must be returned to again and again in order to get inspiration to do the interesting stuff. Personally, I get my best ideas when I am doing something like transferring my notes for class from handwritten pages to something typed up, or copying down passages into a slide for presentation, in doing exactly the kind of work that could be automated. Reading and writing are thinking. Can technology such as ChatGPT give us a better product? Perhaps. What it cannot do, however, is replace the process of reading and writing, and that process is education.”
“Remastering Capitalism”
At
, deploys the metaphors of mixing, mastering, EQ, and effects in music production to think about capitalism: “Mixing and mastering are art-forms dedicated to bringing separate things into a whole, and this provides us with a new metaphor for thinking about how our economic system brings together different parts of our being. When listening to a song, we experience it as a whole, and we seldom think about the many alternative ways it could have been mixed. Similarly, each of us experiences ourselves as a whole as we navigate corporate capitalism, but we seldom think about the many alternative ways we could have turned out if we were living under a different system. The system we’re in will amplify certain values, beliefs or ‘natures’ within us, while filtering others out.”“Representing ‘commercial vibes’ in EQ format is an interesting metaphorical challenge, and I’m not sure I’ve yet fully worked out how to do it. Capitalism often promotes a seemingly contradictory mix of militaristic discipline in the workplace alongside undisciplined consumption in the marketplace, so as those values start to be overlaid over all our tracks, my intuition is that it boosts the aggressive mids of competition, and the tinny analytical treble of data-driven optimisation, all while cutting soulful bass….[A]ll of us will also attempt to alter this by adding in our own external effects units. For example, some might turn to religion, radical politics, underground grime music or meditation to provide some counterbalance to the dominant setup, while the dominant setup will try to re-route those very same impulses back through the capitalist mixing desk.”
“The Walking Rebellion: Restoring the Mind at Three Miles an Hour”
and discuss walking as an act of rebellion at : “Walking is one of the simplest and most universal actions imaginable for human beings, and one of the ultimate acts of unmachining. Walking redirects our muddled thoughts outward toward the scenery we are passing. It helps us to connect with each other in shared conversation and rhythmic pace. It echoes history and tradition through a most simple movement that has remained ‘essentially unimproved since the dawn of time.’ Importantly, the act of walking not only restores our minds, but helps to build up internal resilience and resistance against algorithmic mental slavery.”Gaskovski and Peco weave in anecdotes from their readers on the topic of walking and conclude that “Walking is calming, head-clearing, and social and even spiritual when we do it together. If walking were a food, it would be a celebrated superfood packed with nutrients that feed our mind, body, relationships, and contact with nature—and it would cost nothing. The beauty of walking is that it does so many things at once, in a single, simple act. Walking creates a wholeness in us in a way that few other activities can. And it can’t be monetized. We all walk a bit differently. Some people walk with canes, some ‘walk’ with wheelchairs or ambulate with prosthetic limbs. Whatever way you walk, we’re going to suggest that walking long distances regularly, preferably in nature, might be one of the easiest yet most powerful antidotes to the Machine.”
“Liberals Speak a Different Language”
Janan Ganesh argues that “Style and substance are linked” in his column for The Financial Times: “Liberals have evolved a language of their own. Or at least a dialect. Those who speak it tend to have no earthly idea how odd it sounds to others, and therefore what a competitive disadvantage it is versus the plain-speaking right. While conservatives have their own argot — ‘red pill,’ ‘blue pill’ — you have to delve quite far into the weirdo fringe to encounter it. Among the megastars such as Joe Rogan, not to mention Donald Trump, what stands out is an Orwellian directness. ‘Bros’ or not, their speech is far closer to the American or Anglosphere median.”
Ganesh goes on to addresses “the matter of cadence,” in American “Liberalese”: “I have given up my brave war against Upspeak, which is the habit of lifting one’s vocal pitch towards the end of non-interrogative sentences. The world has won. Except it is not the world, is it? It is progressives and centrists. You hear far fewer conservatives talk like this. Theories vary as to why they so dominate the podcast charts in a 50-50-ish nation. Here’s mine: they are easier on the ear. People who think him a dangerous fool on vaccines will nevertheless take three hours of Rogan over 30 minutes of someone? Who speaks? Like this?”
“Bereave the Hype”
At
, reflects on how the “sense of trust and collaboration that had made hip-hop what it was, was dismantled so gradually that it’s not difficult to forget it ever existed or minimize its eminence then and how it might have been so easily dismantled…”She continues: “Here’s where Kendrick Lamar’s just-released GNX enters the hip-hop epic for me, from a lonely dark alley between the dressing room the studio and the stage, longing for accompaniment, a peer he can trust and settle down with to discuss praxis, but shrouded in hubris and resentment of those peers for valid, sentimental, and inflated reasons, and forcing himself to court tension over alliance. I am bored with the aromantic courtship between amorous enemy-emcees. I’m hyper aware of its desperation, how it indicates their need for real muses, and renewal of the passion that has long been dampened by the duties of fame and self-agrandisement…I’m left with the feeling that I’m witnessing a great artist and a great form, submerged and undone by the weighty residue of his ego. And I’m no longer even rooting for him to outrun it; I’m praying the genre outruns him and his enemy-cronies and reminds them they are grown men writing one another poems, in love with one another and the form so intensely that they are forgetting what love is, how it requires more strength than cruelty to uphold.”
Holiday concludes: “I think, at fifty, this genre, bent on youthful arrogance and real street philosphizing, needs some of the incoherence of free jazz for its finale-ing. It’s been literal for so long, (there was a moment of mumbling but about the same 5 things it’s literal about), now maybe it’s time to stop telling stories and start burdening language with the unsayable utterance.”
That does it for my 25 favorite items from Weekly Groundings in 2024. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive future Weekly Groundings in 2025!
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Thank you for including me and for all your recs