Monthly Muse: 10/2024

Recapitulation, contemplation, provocation

Monthly Musings are published during the last week of every month. In each Monthly Muse, I recap content from the past month of Handful of Earth, offer some freewheeling reflections, and share a quote or passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.

Here’s the October 2024 Monthly Muse.

Recapitulation: Published this month on Handful of Earth

• Weekly Grounding #66

• Weekly Grounding #67

• Weekly Grounding #68

• The Left's Love Affair with Tech

• Weekly Grounding #69

Contemplation

I appeared on a What’s Left? podcast episode this month entitled, “The Left’s Love Affair with Tech.” We discussed a number of issues, which I summarize here.

The left’s relationship with technology may seem like an odd topic to discuss during the home stretch of the American presidential election. After all, neither campaign seems particularly interested in raising any serious criticisms of the tech industry. While attacks on Big Tech were commonplace on the MAGA-oriented right not long ago, Donald Trump’s embrace of Elon Musk and other tech giants has all but stifled Republican skepticism toward the tech industry and its attendant ideology. And though recent years have ushered in a wave of left-liberal tech criticism, this has not stopped Kamala Harris from assembling her own army of Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

Just as both candidates compete for Zionist donors, the Trump and Harris campaigns can’t seem to get enough of Big Tech. It’s easy to focus on the issues that the parties like to highlight to try and distinguish themselves from one another (immigration and abortion are chief among them). However, the issues that neither wishes to discuss are often just as (if not more) important. Allegiance to the Israel lobby and Big Tech have come to characterize both campaigns. As a result, the media directs our attention away from these forces despite the massive impact that they have on our lives.

I have written extensively on the intellectual and political origins and development of Silicon Valley here at Handful of Earth (see, for example, “The Left’s Problem with Technology,” “Ted Kaczynski and the Paradox of the Postwar Predicament,” and “Why Criticize Big Tech?”). While this in-depth analysis of technology may not fit the mold of election season clickbait, I believe that there’s no time like the present to return to issues of real importance (especially in the midst of manufactured electoral hysteria on both sides). Often the greatest political education comes when we bring our attention to the topics that neither candidate wants to talk about. Technology—and the way it is weaponized against us—is, in my view, the most important of these topics today.

Provocation

“The more dangerous leftists, that is, those who are most power-hungry, are often characterized by arrogance or by a dogmatic approach to ideology. However, the most dangerous leftists of all may be certain oversocialized types who avoid irritating displays of aggressiveness and refrain from advertising their leftism, but work quietly and unobtrusively to promote collectivist values, ‘enlightened’ psychological techniques for socializing children, dependence of the individual on the system, and so forth. These crypto-leftists (as we may call them) approximate certain bourgeois types as far as practical action is concerned, but differ from them in psychology, ideology and motivation. The ordinary bourgeois tries to bring people under control of the system in order to protect his way of life, or he does so simply because his attitudes are conventional. The crypto-leftist tries to bring people under control of the system because he is a True Believer in a collectivist ideology. The crypto-leftist is differentiated from the average leftist of the oversocialized type by the fact that his rebellious impulse is weaker and he is more securely socialized. He is differentiated from the ordinary well-socialized bourgeois by the fact that there is some deep lack within him that makes it necessary for him to devote himself to a cause and immerse himself in a collectivity. And maybe his (well-sublimated) drive for power is stronger than that of the average bourgeois.”

—Theodore Kaczynski, “Industrial Society and Its Future”