Monthly Muse: 5/2023
Recapitulation, contemplation, provocation
Monthly Musings are published during the last week of the 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 May 2023 Monthly Muse.
Recapitulation: Published this month on Handful of Earth
Contemplation
I’ve been thinking a lot about AI this month, as you can probably tell from the essay I published here on Monday. Beyond the argument I make in “Telos or Transhumanism,” I think it’s important that we reflect more generally on just how fast the world is changing due to rapid advancements in artificial intelligence. Even if we set the question of existential risk aside, the impact of AI on the labor process cannot be underestimated. Automation is nothing new, and thinkers like James Boggs presciently foretold the impacts it would have have on American society back in the 1960s. Still, the industrial implementation of AI portends a truly monumental shift in the relationship between the human being and the labor process.
It is interesting that the media frenzy surrounding AI is happening at the same time as discussions of industrial policy and reshoring have taken root in American political discourse. I argued for the economic and political primacy of industrial labor back in 2015 in an essay for Counterpunch, so, in many ways, I see reshoring as a welcome development in the United States. However, AI could make this a reindustrialization without workers and, therefore, without the collective class consciousness that comes with the industrial proletariat, a class consciousness that often entails a skepticism of novel technologies.
If AI drastically limits the number of industrial workers necessary to reshore industry in the United States, it will be just as easy as it is now for the majority of Americans to separate ourselves from the production process—out of sight, out of mind. And the ruling class can continue to use the bloated service sector, prison system, and what Marx called the “reserve army of labor” in order to keep the people economically and politically disempowered. To me, this bodes poorly for our political future, unless voices emerge that can articulate a cogent and compelling critique of technologies like AI.
What do you think?
Provocation
Fifteen years ago, even 10 years ago, when I took a long walk, either in the city or in the natural world, it was a kind of meditation that happened without my trying. I became wholly absorbed in what was around me, in textures and shapes, in the human imprint of buildings, sidewalks, backyards, grasses, trees, fungus, worn roads, crushed leaves. It was a profoundly calming and rejuvenating reminder of the greater world and my own animal connection with it. When I go for a walk now, it is different: Even if I only look at my phone once or twice, the experience, while still soothing, is not as deep. My consciousness is kept from full absorption in the physical world by its neurological attunement to the electronic portal in my pocket — or back in my house, even if I didn’t bring the thing with me. My bodily connection to the environment is thus weakened. And I cannot believe I am the only one being affected in this way.
—
, “The Despair of the Young”