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.
If you’re already subscribed and want to help the publication grow, consider sharing Handful of Earth with a friend.
“Rich Economies Will Need Foreign Workers to Fuel Growth, Policymakers Warn”
The Financial Times reports on the latest efforts of the global finance elite to push a mass immigration agenda: “The world’s largest economies will lack the workers they need to power growth and keep prices stable in the coming decades unless they attract more foreigners, top central bankers have warned. Speaking at an annual gathering of leading policymakers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the heads of the Bank of Japan, European Central Bank and Bank of England all sought to highlight the challenge to economic growth posed by ageing populations.”
Elite fears of increasing worker bargaining power and populist politics underlie much of this agenda: “Attracting workers to fill labour shortages will be essential in keeping growth on track in the coming decades, economists believe—despite the rising pressures of populism and public sentiment souring on immigration. Central bankers predict population ageing will not only lower output but also risks pushing up inflation, as workers would be able to demand higher wages in an environment where labour shortages were widespread.”
“What Are H-1B Visas and How Might the Trump Administration Change Them?”
Al Jazeera reports on proposed changes to the H-1B visa regime: “President Donald Trump’s administration wants to overhaul the nation’s visa programme for highly skilled foreign workers. If the administration does what one official described, it would change H-1B visa rules to favour employers that pay higher wages…A White House office proposed the change on August 8, Bloomberg Law reported. Once the proposal appears in the Federal Register—the daily public report containing notices of proposed federal rule changes—the plan will become subject to a formal public comment period. It could be finalised within months, although it is likely to face legal challenges.”
The details of the proposed reforms are not yet clear, but there are some indications of the potential consequence: “Malcolm Goeschl, a San Francisco-based lawyer, said the rule will likely benefit tech companies, including many specialising in artificial intelligence. Such companies pay high salaries, including for entry-level positions. He said it will harm traditional tech companies’ programmes for new graduates.”
For more on the debates surrounding the H-1B visa program and elite migration, see my articles, “Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy's Assault on the American People” and “I’m One of You Now.”
“The Real Winner of the AI Boom So Far? Big Cloud”
At Blood in the Machine,
writes on tech power consolidation in the “age of AI”: “Back in July, Nvidia became the first public company to reach a $4 trillion valuation. Despite this being, as the New York Times pointed out, one of the fastest ascents in Wall Street history, the milestone was curiously unremarked upon in wider culture. There are probably a number of reasons for this. One is that it’s a straightforward, yet unsatisfying, or even troubling narrative: Nvidia became a $4 trillion company because it sells chips to the tech companies building AI products, and those products are at the center of a boom (and very probably a bubble) that has utterly consumed Silicon Valley (and also much of the US economy).”“It’s all about the cloud,” Merchant writes. “New research from scholars David Widder and Nathan Kim helps make clear that there’s another major beneficiary of the AI boom that’s going largely unremarked upon; what the researchers call Big Cloud. I haven’t seen nearly as much attention paid specifically to the fortunes of the tech giants who sell cloud compute—primarily Amazon, Google, and Microsoft—as I have paid to Nvidia. And yet, Big Cloud is selling shovels hand over fist, too. See, you really need two basic ingredients, infrastructure-wise, to train, develop, and run AI models: Chips and compute. And these days, most companies’ compute is handled on the cloud. Most of the cloud compute, in turn, is owned by Amazon’s Web Services, Google’s Cloud, or Microsoft’s Azure. Those companies control two thirds of the cloud compute market worldwide, a position that’s only improved as companies around the world have rushed to join the AI race. After all, they’ve largely turned to—or been actively courted by—Big Cloud.”
The article goes on to quote from Kim: “Concentrating so much power and commerce in the cloud means that other nations’ highly-publicized efforts for ‘digital sovereignty’ and ‘AI sovereignty’ are under threat…You can't have ‘sovereign’ AI if it’s, at the end of the day, funded by or built on the infrastructure of Big Cloud.”
“Follow the Scientism”
Reflecting on the authoritarianism of the covid regime,
draws a distinction between “science” and “scientism” at the Humanum Review: “Science is a method, or more accurately, a collection of various methods, aimed at systematically investigating observable phenomena in the natural world. Rigorous science is characterized by hypothesis, experiment, testing, interpretation, and ongoing deliberation and debate. Put a group of real scientists in a room together and they will argue endlessly about the salience, significance, and interpretation of data, about the limitations and strengths of various research methodologies, and about the big picture questions. This is because, contrary to how it is often presented to the lay public, science is not an irrefutable body of knowledge. It is always provisional, always fallible, always open to revision.“Scientism is the philosophical claim—which cannot be proven scientifically—that science is the only valid form of knowledge. Anyone who begins a sentence with the phrase, ‘Science says…’ is likely in the grip of scientism. Genuine scientists don’t talk like this; they begin sentences with phrases like, ‘The findings of this study suggest,’ or ‘This meta-analysis concluded…’. Scientism, by contrast, is a political, or even a religious, ideology. ‘It has been evident for quite a while that science has become our time’s religion,’ Georgio Agamben observed, ‘the thing which people believe that they believe in.’ When science becomes an ersatz religion—a closed and exclusionary belief system—we are dealing with scientism. The characteristic feature of science is warranted uncertainty, which leads to intellectual humility. The characteristic feature of scientism is unwarranted certainty, which leads to intellectual hubris.”
Kheriaty continues: “The assertion that science is the only valid form of knowledge is itself a metaphysical claim, smuggled in quietly through the backdoor. Scientism needs to hide this self-refuting fact from itself, so it is necessarily mendacious: dishonesty is baked into the system, and various forms of irrationalism follow. Because scientism cannot establish itself through rational argument, it relies instead on three tools to advance: brute force, defamation of critics, and the promise of future happiness.”
For more on this topic, see my article “Jeffrey Epstein and the Cult of Scientism.”
“The Hidden Victims of OnlyFans”
reflects on the consequences of OnlyFans at Unherd. Focusing on high-profile OnlyFans “content creators,” Bonnie Blue and Lil Tay, she writes: “[T]he fact is both Bonnie Blue and Lil Tay are middle-class young women who have chosen to imperil those more vulnerable than themselves by glamorising pornography and prostitution—global scourges driven by the worst kind of men, who beat, traffick, drug, rape and hate women and children. Many women, beneath the gleaming entrepreneurial tip of the iceberg, prostitute themselves to survive, to keep warm or high or escape a beating.”Sowerby continues: “The stakes for Bonnie Blue and Lil Tay may seem high but in reality, these women are rich and protected by fame, managers, wealth—more than can be said for the average ‘sex worker.’ I consider their videos degrading in themselves; they might not, and that’s alright. But they are famous, and so are responsible for more than their own degradation. They are responsible for cultural shifts which encourage men to think of women as buyable, disposable and exploitable. They are responsible for normalising slinging women banknotes in exchange for their bodies. They toy with the frontiers of tolerance, pushing the envelope on what men can expect women and children to do for them.”
“From a Nefarious Russian to a Cam Girl”
On the topic of OnlyFans,
explores the career trajectory of Nadya Tolokonnikova at : “She is maybe the most famous cultural export from Russia to the West in the last 20 years. She was an international celebrity at one point, and she is still probably one of the most recognizable Russians alive—behind Putin. It’s a bit weird to write it out like that. But it’s true.”“Nadya formed Pussy Riot with a few other women. It was vaguely inspired by Riot Grrrl, and after doing a few performances like singing in Red Square in balaclavas, they struck it big by doing a mock punk performance at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. This caused a huge scandal among people in Russia—not just the government but regular people—who saw it as sacrilegious. Eventually, two of the participants—Nadya and Masha—were sentenced to two years in prison for it. That made Nadya internationally famous. To people around the world, she became the face of a different Russia…a Russia that was opposed to Putin and which was western and young and relatable. And on top of that, she possessed an effortless beauty and cool. She exchanged letters with Žižek, Madonna wore a balaclava and expressed support during her concert in Moscow, other Western celebrities would bring up Pussy Riot during their concerts all over the world.”
“With no real base of support in Russia, it made sense that Nadya eventually made a full move to LA,” Evgenia writes. “But despite her having a label deal and periodic art shows, her financial stability only started with OnlyFans. OnlyFans is natural for a famous, beautiful woman. And celebrities, especially the second tier and over-the-hill types, are increasingly on OnlyFans. So Nadya didn’t really stand out. She had a strong brand and she was cashing in. At the same time, she could still be a Russia expert that would be invited to comment on politics on CNN, MSNBC, write op-eds for the establishment, and do talks at art museums…She has a 17-year-old daughter who in a year could maybe join family business? She wouldn’t be the first. Denise Richard’s daughter did it. Nepo OnlyFans creators is a thing. But it’s not ballsy if you are a rich and famous media woman. Sex work is not work in this case. It’s just another area of turning your looks into a commodity…and a quickly devalued commodity. And it’s not clear how ‘empowering’ and ‘anti-patriarchy’ it all is when 20% of your earnings go to a shady Ukrainian-Jewish pimp billionaire. Rumor on the street that he’s in talks to sell his e-pimp business for $8 billion.”
Analyzing the significance of Tolokonnikova’s trajectory, she writes: “The reason I’m retelling Nadya’s story is not because I’m critical of her personally. She seems like a nice and genuine person. She’s pure in a way, not cynical. No, her trajectory captures something bigger about our age. Her story is very Black Mirror to me. In fact, you could easily imagine an episode inspired by her in the series. She also reminds me of the pretty girl in an early BM episode called 15 Million Merits, who got out of the drudgery of life and joined the stars on TV but is made to do porn instead of singing, as she initially wanted, because her singing is too average. That episode also shows what commodification of dissent looks like in the modern world. The main character of that episode, Bing, even reminds me a bit of Yasha’s moral struggle within the influencer world. A genuine desire to resist the system brings you attention and fame and just incorporates you into it. Isn’t it what being successful with a radical podcast, YouTube show, or Substack is nowadays? You say or write your ‘radical message’ and then log off to go live the nice life that is possible only to a few. But it’s a life you built thanks to your success in the market of ideas as a radical journalist/activist… It’s all virtual in the end. The fights happen inside a VR game, like in Black Mirror. And we don’t even notice that there is something fishy about it all. We are too merged with the system.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.
Thank you for such thoughtful analysis