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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“Israeli Soldiers Torched Food, Homes, and a Critical Sewage Treatment Plant in the Wake of Ceasefire Announcement”
and chronicle IDF arson in the wake of the Gaza ceasefire announcement. Reporting for , they write: “In the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s announcement on Thursday that both Hamas and Israel had signed off on an agreement to stop the fighting, the Israeli military launched an arson spree, setting fire to civilian infrastructure, including the destruction of an essential sanitation plant in Gaza City. After publication, the Israel Defense Forces told Drop Site it ‘is aware of the incident and it is being reviewed.’”“The scope of the arson perpetrated in Gaza City on the night of October 9th and early morning of October 10—Thursday night into Friday, just after the ceasefire was agreed to but before Israel’s cabinet approved it—was broader than at any other time Drop Site has tracked during the assault on the strip. Its perpetrators were not confined to a single unit, nor was the burning confined to a specific neighborhood. Drop Site News identified members of the Israeli army originating from several different brigades, including the Golani, Givati, Nahal Brigades, and the newly formed ultra-orthodox Hashmonaim Brigade who posted dozens of photos and videos of buildings engulfed in flames during their withdrawal from Gaza City to the ‘yellow line’ defined in the Trump agreement, still deep within Gaza’s territory.”
The report continues: “Among the structures Drop Site discovered had been set on fire by the departing soldiers was the Sheikh Ajlin Sewage Treatment Station, a central component of Gaza City’s sanitation network. Monther Shoblaq, Director General of the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility (CMWU) in Gaza, said the attack is a blow that could push Gaza City’s wastewater system ‘to point zero.’ He added the plant is ‘one of Gaza’s oldest’ and warned that its destruction will set back planned reconstruction efforts by years. ‘I mean, they signed a ceasefire,’ Shoblaq said. ‘Why set it on fire?’
Besides infrastructure and markets, homes were targeted in Gaza City: “The houses of Palestinians going up in flames also became the canvas on top of which soldiers shared their views on the future of Israeli presence in Gaza, with some expressing relief about leaving: ‘Goodbye and never to be seen again to [what was] my home recently.’ Others vowed to return, even mimicking a review of a hotel or Airbnb. ‘It was brief but high quality [stay], we shall come back,’ wrote one Israeli arsonist.”
“Tony Blair’s Strava Governance: Will He Make Gaza a Technocracy?”
At Unherd,
discusses the rise of personalized fitness apps (like the running app, Strava) and how they may provide clues to the governance of (post)war zones: “What does it say about us, then, that amateur rugby, football, and cricket appear to be in decline, even as endurance sports boom in popularity? For those who value the idea of national ‘teams,’ the answer is an unnerving one: we appear to be re-imagining both sports, and also politics, as a relationship less among a defined community than between an individual and a centralised, de-materialised digital mediator.”“And the Strava model, applied to governance, in turn also looks considerably more borderless, more individualistic, and more data-driven. We already see wonks hailing the reconstruction efforts in former warzones as exciting test-beds for this sort of networked governance. Tory grandee Sir Ed Vaizey, for example, recently addressed an international digital cooperation summit on the benefits of digital ID in rebuilding war-torn polities such as Syria and Ukraine. The Centre for International Governance Innovation also hailed Ukraine’s innovations in digital governance. It’s hard to avoid the sense that for some, at least, warzones figure less as human catastrophes than exciting technological frontiers, spurring developments from drone tech to surveillance and digital services.”
Of Gaza, Harrington writes: “Should Tony Blair secure the role Donald Trump has allocated him, as chief colonial administrator in the Gaza demilitarised zone, will he join the push for such innovative measures to be rolled out as part of its reconstruction? A longstanding supporter of digital ID, Blair’s own Institute recently extolled the benefits of these tools for Britain, especially combined with AI and facial recognition. It would be surprising if he didn’t view the reconstruction of Gaza as an opportunity to push the envelope in digital-first governance.”
“Whether you think this good or bad surely depends where you’re standing, and how much you trust your leadership class,” she continues. “At scale, digital governance shades potentially into alarming levels of power: it’s one thing to be kicked off Strava for going running in North Korea, another altogether to be frozen out of your bank account for protesting a government policy. In theory, for example, the Palestinian inhabitants of a hypothetical, reconstructed, shiny digital Blairtopia would be free to go anywhere. In practice, the more transnationally monitored they were, the more easily terrorist suspects could be contained—or anyone else, for that matter.”
“Inside the Tony Blair Institute”
Speaking of Tony Blair,
and report on the increasingly close relationship between Blair and tech billionaire, Larry Ellison, for The New Statesman: “Since 2021, Ellison’s personal foundation—the Larry Ellison Foundation—has donated or pledged at least £257m to the Tony Blair Institute, making it a think tank like no other in the UK. Ellison donations have helped it grow to more than 900 staff, working in at least 45 countries.”At a Dubai conference, Ellison warned “the audience that artificial super-intelligence was coming sooner than expected. What, Blair asked him, should governments be doing about it? ‘The first thing a country needs to do is unify all of their data so that it can be consumed and used by the AI model,’ Ellison responded. Ellison was also specific about which data needed unifying—and he had an example in mind: ‘The NHS in the UK has an incredible amount of population data,’ he declared, but it was too ‘fragmented’ at present. Below him, the former prime minister nodded, clutching his Tony Blair Institute (TBI) notebook. Two weeks later, the TBI published a report entitled ‘Governing in the Age of AI: Building Britain’s National Data Library.’ In it, Blair’s organisation echoed Ellison on the UK’s data infrastructure, calling it ‘fragmented and unfit for purpose.’”
Geoghegan and Bulman report that “Blair’s critics—including many former employees at the TBI who spoke on condition of anonymity for this investigation—are concerned about the influence that he and, by extension, Ellison, are able to wield on some of the most contentious questions relating to the regulation of this emerging and potentially revolutionary technology. Irrespective of the sincerity of Blair’s convictions over the benefits of AI, it is also the case that Ellison’s Oracle has major commercial interests at stake in the question of which companies get access to Britain’s most valuable data.”
“This Is Normal”
In a brilliant essay at
, reflects on how the routine event of hearing gunshots near his Seattle house led to the following realization: “Without even noticing it happening, I’d concluded that someone shooting someone else not far from my home wasn’t strange, unusual, or even very remarkable. It’s funny how we can do that, to experience violence as just a normal part of any day, yet to not admit it has become normal. We separate such things out from the mental constructions of our world, preferring not to adjust to our current reality. Sure, that I wouldn’t have ever said, ‘this is normal,’ despite knowing full well it was the normal in which I was living. In fact, I wouldn’t have even thought about it as something that was happening at all. The process that occurs here, for which I have no good name and really don’t fully understand, is exactly the same process by which societies come to normalize degradation of the social order. That’s how they become things to manage and accommodate, rather than things to do anything about.”Cities with massive homeless populations, for example, get to this point quite quickly,” Wildermuth elaborates. “After the fifth or sixth large homeless camp springs up, the city managers start to build their own, so at least they can be better mitigated. What started as a symptom of the breakdown of the social order (people without homes) becomes just background noise, just like those gunshots I heard. You just get used to degradation and collapse while telling yourself it’s just temporary, like a rising sea slowly flooding homes built along its shores. Eventually, of course, things will get so bad that the background becomes foreground, and we’ll maybe act surprised when that happens. But the time to have prepared for it will have been long gone by then.”
“[I]t’s something everyone’s going to get used to,” he writes of the Charlie Kirk assassination and its fallout. “It’s happened enough already to be just another political murder, and the next one will be just another one, too. No doubt, there will be more assassinations, and those will escalate from individuals to groups, and it will all just be rather everyday for people. We’ll just get used to this, like we get used to higher prices in grocery stores, or everyone carrying around a smartphone, or hearing gunshots while drinking your tea. Things will just stop working and will continue to stop working.”
“The Use of the Useless”
In a breathtaking philosophical essay,
explores the relationship between usefulness and uselessness at . Drawing on the discussion of this relationship in the Daoist text, the Zhuangzi, he writes: “A hammer is useful because it has been designed and constructed for the purpose of driving nails. But why is it necessary to drive nails at all? Well, for reasons having nothing to do with the hammer, like, say, building houses. Should those reasons disappear—if, say, we decide that all houses from now on should be made out of brick—the hammer would suddenly become useless: it would be a tool designed for a purpose nobody needs. The hammer acquires its utility from its place within the wider set of possibilities and purposes which supply it with its own, narrower purpose. To know only of utility, of ends and the means required to achieve them, is to be trapped, isolated from the larger reality which makes it useful to begin with. Different versions of this idea are found throughout the Zhuangzi.”Anderson continues: “Zhuangzi is defending the manner in which words are taken up in what today we might call the arts and the humanities: fields of creative enlargement and open inquiry which are ‘useless’ in the sense that they do not aim to bring about a particular, pre-selected outcome. Rather, these endeavors involve the imaginative investigation of reality and serve the larger ‘purpose’ of revealing possibilities that might warrant a utilitarian calculation in the first place. That is, their uselessness can be said to be useful in orienting us towards aspects of the real which we hadn’t previously recognized.
“True, art is supposed to create things of beauty, and the humanities are supposed to shape the intellect and the moral imagination; each, it can be said, is useful in achieving those outcomes. But to do any of this first requires a posture of openness to the world as it discloses itself to the mind which approaches without design or intention. Art is not useful in the same way that technology is useful; the humanities are not useful in the same way that vocational training is useful: but both are ‘useful’ in the sense that they expose us to the wider reality within which any of these more straightforwardly useful pursuits has its place.”
Anderson concludes: “It has been said before by opponents of utilitarianism that utility reaches its limit where morality begins: the moment that the chain of means and ends breaks down is the moment that you have to identify what it is, exactly, that you really value. In much the same way, we might conclude with Zhuangzi that usefulness reaches its limit where a more authentic relationship to the world begins: the moment at which you discover the dependency of the ‘useful’ on the ‘useless’ is also the moment that you are liberated from its blinkered and insulating assumptions.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.
I'd seen the article on Tony Blair's institute and find his technocratic vision rather chilling, especially given his links with tech billionaires.
I also saw a retrospective film by Ken Loach about the steelworkers' strike in 1980, a year into Thatcher's experiment with market based decision making. It was interesting how the rank and file saw taking redundancy payment as selling jobs and extracting from community security, a vision of the common good that was directly attacked by Thatcher/capital. Also, I listened to a lecture by Mariana Mazzucato who is going to publish a book on Common Good Economics.