Weekly Grounding #107
News, links, writing
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
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“Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle.”
The New York Times reports on rapid changes in the tech job market as a result of AI: “Since the early 2010s, a parade of billionaires, tech executives and even U.S. presidents has urged young people to learn coding, arguing that the tech skills would help bolster students’ job prospects as well as the economy. Tech companies promised computer science graduates high salaries and all manner of perks…But now, the spread of A.I. programming tools, which can quickly generate thousands of lines of computer code—combined with layoffs at companies like Amazon, Intel, Meta and Microsoft—is dimming prospects in a field that tech leaders promoted for years as a golden career ticket. The turnabout is derailing the employment dreams of many new computing grads and sending them scrambling for other work.”
The article reports that “Among college graduates ages 22 to 27, computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates, 6.1 percent and 7.5 percent respectively, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That is more than double the unemployment rate among recent biology and art history graduates, which is just 3 percent.”
The story profiles a number of recent computer science graduates including “Zach Taylor, 25, who enrolled as a computer science major at Oregon State University in 2019 partly because he had loved programming video games in high school. Tech industry jobs seemed plentiful at the time. Since graduating in 2023, however, Mr. Taylor said, he has applied for 5,762 tech jobs. His diligence has resulted in 13 job interviews but no full-time job offers. The job search has been one of ‘the most demoralizing experiences I have ever had to go through,’ he added. The electronics firm where he had a software engineering internship last year was not able to hire him, he said. This year, he applied for a job at McDonald’s to help cover expenses, but he was rejected ‘for lack of experience,’ he said. He has since moved back home to Sherwood, Ore., and is receiving unemployment benefits.”
One of the ironies of all of this is that many of these same applicants were highly enthusiastic about AI and continue to use it as a part of their job search: “Some graduates described feeling caught in an A.I. ‘doom loop.’ Many job seekers now use specialized A.I. tools like Simplify to tailor their résumés to specific jobs and autofill application forms, enabling them to quickly apply to many jobs. At the same time, companies inundated with applicants are using A.I. systems to automatically scan résumés and reject candidates.”
“Why Being a Soldier Is Cool Again in the West”
At Asia Times (via The Conversation), Rob Hoffmann reports on the recent uptick in military recruits across the West: “This year, the United States Army met its target of recruiting 61,000 troops annually several months early. The German Bundeswehr reported a year-on-year recruitment uptick of 28% in late July. In the United Kingdom, there was a 19% rise in people joining the regular armed forces. And Canada’s defence forces have just seen a ten-year high in recruitment, up by a staggering 55%.”
In Australia, recent analysis of successful recruitment efforts suggests that “the biggest driver was embedding ADF [Australian Defence Force] recruitment adverts into the media frequented by the target group of 16–25 year olds: TikTok and video games.” The ADF also “ lowered medical requirements in 2024…With fewer soldiers on the front line, there’s less need for high-level mental and physical stamina…”In addition, the ADF has focused on “better pay, study, housing and health support are all part of a A$600 million (US$390.6 million) government package. These measures also explain why, as more new soldiers were recruited, fewer existing ones quit: attrition fell from about 10% down to 7.9%.”
“Abolishing the First Amendment”
At
, writes: “I testified at the New Jersey state capital in Trenton last week against Bill A3558, which would adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism…Committee chairman Robert Karabinchak, a Democrat, muted my microphone, banged his hammer for me to stop and allowed gaggles of Zionists, who openly harassed and insulted Muslims in the room, to jeer and shout me down. There I was arguing that this bill would curtail my free speech, at the same time I was being denied free speech.”Hedges continues: “Zionists, who painted lurid pictures of Jews living under harassment and in fear for their lives, and of Nazism supposedly running amok on the streets of New Jersey, were not muted, although their statements were hyperbolic to the extreme and often a product of over-active imaginations. They openly salivated at the adoption of the bill, which they said would give law enforcement the tools to criminalize those who engage in hate speech, which, if you read the ‘contemporary examples of antisemitism,’ that accompany the IHRA, include speech that criticizes Israeli policies.”
“Our corporate-indentured ruling class has no genuine political ideology,” he writes. “Political parties are a farce, a species of entertainment to beguile the population in our pretend democracy. Liberalism, and the values it claims to represent, is a spent and bankrupt force. The burlesque in the committee room in Trenton was another depressing reminder that there is little now that will halt our path towards an authoritarian state, not the press, not the universities, not the courts, which cannot enforce the few rulings made by courageous judges, not the political class, including the Democratic Party, and not the electoral process.”
“Antisemitism Training Designed by Pro-Israel Groups Is Becoming Compulsory at US Colleges. What’s in It?”
Hedges notes that many universities have already adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism. More and more now also require “antisemitism trainings” for students. The Guardian reports that “At least 60 universities so far have been investigated by the US Department of Education for potential violations of Title VI, a law that prohibits schools from discrimination based on race, ethnicity and religion. Columbia University, City University of New York, Harvard University and Barnard University are among those implementing antisemitism trainings, which were generally developed after the Trump crackdown, and may aim to appease the Trump administration.”
Taking a page out of the covid mandate playbook, universities have begun to stipulate that “Students who do not complete the training cannot register for classes, while graduate students can lose stipends.” One Northwestern graduate student, Micol Bez, “said she had viewed the training, but had so far refused to officially complete it and the university had put a hold on her registration.” Despite these draconian measures, “Introducing the training has not helped Northwestern’s relationship with the Trump administration. Even after implementing it, the administration cut $790m in research funding. Trump is now trying to extract further concessions.”
“The Guardian reviewed training materials developed by the JUF [Jewish United Federation] and the Anti-Defamation League, which both push pro-Israel agendas in the US, and found the overarching message is that criticism of Israel or Zionism is antisemitic. The materials advise students on how to respond to antisemitic or anti-Israel speech, and spread a pro-Israel message. That includes tips on effective online debating, media strategies and how to pressure administrators into cracking down on anti-Israel campus speech…The trainings’ opponents, many of them Jewish, say the material does little to protect Jews. They accuse the Trump administration of wielding often false claims of antisemitism for two ends—to cut funding for universities as the president wages a culture war on higher education, and to help rightwing pro-Israel groups silence legitimate criticism of Israel.”
“Decolonizing the Degrowth Movement's Imaginary of Technology”
At
, argues that “There has been a striking transformation that has taken place within the degrowth movement over the last 15 years. What was once a revolutionary movement primarily oriented at building power outside existing power structures, Dismantling [sic] these oppressive institutions and simplifying the way we live has morphed into a bureaucratic top-down approach in which academic output is valued over all else, and critical attitudes towards technology have largely been abandoned.”Wilbert writes that this shift from “from empirically and intellectually robust techno-criticism and towards populist techo-agnosticism” stands in stark contrast with traditional approaches to technology: “The writer Martín Prechtel often talks of the Tzutujil Mayan culture he was adopted into, and that community’s relationship with technology. He describes that, in their traditional ways, the production of a tool such as a knife was a grave and serious matter. Throughout the physical effort of creating the knife, mounting a handle, and sharpening the blade, and extending throughout its use, many prayers and lengthy and exhausting ceremonies were required. The power of the knife, Prechtel says, requires a spiritual expense, a lengthy reflection and meditation on the origins of the materials, the intended use, the ramifications of the technology, and the proper mindset with which it is to be used. The Tzutujil Maya, Prechtel says, didn’t invent bulldozers or aircraft carriers—not from any stupidity, but out of a cultural recognition of the costs (ecological, material, and spiritual) of such technologies.”
Wilbert concludes: “As AI powers the deportation state, genocide, and enhanced oil recovery, technological escalation has our world on the brink, and new supposedly ‘benign’ technologies like solar photovoltaics, electric cars, and wind energy turbines are spawning a new generation of billionaires and leaving new swathes of ecological destruction. What Langdon Winner called ‘technological somnambulism,’ the zombie-like shamble into a techno-dystopian future, defines the popular approach to these issues. In the face of this, the degrowth movement, and our society, has much to learn from communities like the traditional Tzutujil Maya.”
“Truth Is Deeper than Mathematics”
In an essay for The Institute of Arts and Ideas, Joanna Kavenna writes: “Math is fundamental to the quantitative assessment of reality. However, when we turn to the qualitative assessment of reality, things change. At least, they should. As above, this article is concerned with cyber-Pythagoreanism, a contemporary version of mathematical idealism in which the quantitative is mistaken for, or assumed to be synonymous with, the qualitative. The result of this taxonomical mismatch is that the real is mistaken for the unreal, and vice versa.”
“Each one of us deals every day with a vast cyber-architecture founded on mathematical algorithms,” she continues. “This can be useful, for example: if we get lost and want to consult a cyber-map, or if we want curated searches, information, or suggestions. The trouble arises with the ‘All is Number’ cyber-Pythagorean mission creep. For example, binary digits, 0 or 1, transmute into a surreal architecture of binary oppositions: Yes/No, Like/Dislike, Thumb up/Thumb down, Good/Bad. Or, the associated protocol of star-rating, which converts mutable experiences into fixed numerical values. Thousands or millions of these fixed correlates for inchoate experiences are then distilled into a single mathematical value for any given book, film, play, experience, or entity. A three-point-four-star film. A two-point-eight-star book. But is my idea of a two-star book precisely the same as yours? Or, the same as that of every single person in the world? How do we know? How do we agree on a universal objective standard for the mathematical calibration of inchoate feelings, across time and space? It's impossible. And yet, it is a fundamental claim of cyber-Pythagoreanism.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.
Thanks for sharing, Vincent!