Weekly Grounding #134
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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“Palantir Turns Poisonous on the Midterms Campaign Trail”
The Financial Times reports that “Once a niche Silicon Valley contractor, Palantir has become a flashpoint in campaigns across the US—in New York, Illinois and Florida—as candidates face scrutiny over investments, donations and other ties to the company…The company, which has won federal contracts under Republican- and Democrat-led administrations, has vigorously defended its work with ICE, as with foreign governments such as Ukraine and Israel.”
A group called “Purge Palantir…is urging candidates to commit to rejecting donations from the company,” the article continues. “Their tactics mirror those used by campaigners targeting financial links to Israel during the war in Gaza, and by groups seeking to expose the influence of the tobacco and oil lobbies. The group has already convinced five sitting members of Congress and one senator—who have received tens of thousands of dollars from people linked to Palantir in the past—to publicly refuse any further funds.”
“Republicans have also been pulled into the fight. When Palantir announced it was moving its headquarters from Colorado to Florida last month, GOP gubernatorial candidate James Fishback responded by pledging that if he were elected, he would ‘ban Palantir from doing business with state and local government,’ citing concerns over surveillance. Republican members of Congress raised similar concerns in Washington last year, following an executive order signed by Trump that directed the US government to remove ‘unnecessary barriers’ to data consolidation, ostensibly to help root out waste and fraud.”
“Palantir’s AI Is Already Playing a Major Role in Tracking Gaza Aid Deliveries”
Jonathan Whittall writes at Drop Site News that “Palantir Technologies has a permanent desk at the U.S.-led Civil Military Coordination Center (CMCC) headquarters in southern Israel, three sources from the diplomatic community inside the CMCC told Drop Site News. According to the sources, the artificial intelligence data analytics giant is providing the technological architecture for tracking the delivery and distribution of aid to Gaza.”
The article reports that, “In January 2024, three months into Israel’s war on Gaza, Palantir announced it had entered into a ‘strategic partnership’ with the Israeli military for ‘war-related missions.’ The company’s board meeting that month in Tel Aviv was held ‘in solidarity’ with Israel, Bloomberg reported. Palantir did not disclose what technologies would be provided to Israel but a year earlier the company introduced its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) to help militaries rapidly analyze and identify bombing targets. The company’s technology has been described by a Palantir executive as a way of ‘optimizing the kill chain.’”
“The use of Palantir to track aid deliveries to Gaza is of particular concern to observers,” Whittall notes. “‘The distinction between death by drone and delivery of aid is being evaporated while we all sit around the same table,’ a source from the diplomatic community who attends CMCC sessions told Drop Site.”
The article continues: “In an interview with Drop Site on the role of Palantir in Gaza, the economist Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek Finance Minister and a former member of Greece’s parliament, described an encounter he had with a Palantir representative who had explained to him the benefit the company gained from Gaza. ‘He was saying that “as the bombs fell we were having a party,”’ Varoufakis said. According to Varoufakis, the Palantir representative explained how the chaos of intense violence in a high-density urban area like Gaza generates substantial data for training their AI models on how humans respond under stress. ‘The more bombardment and havoc, the better the training,’ Varoufakis said.”
“Molecules Are Taking Their Revenge on Services”
Reflecting on the early economic impacts of the Iran War in an important article for The Financial Times, Gillian Tett writes that '“we are in an age when…‘hard industries’ matter. Yes, Big Tech stocks have soared in recent years amid excitement about AI. But the Iran war shows that countries are very vulnerable if they lack industrial processes, however old-fashioned. ‘The old economy begins to take its revenge,’ Jeff Currie, analyst at the US private capital group Carlyle, recently noted. ‘You can’t print molecules,’ even with AI.”
“Iran understands this,” she observes. “Indeed, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the Iranian parliamentary speaker, has even borrowed Carlyle’s meme to troll Trump. ‘Let’s see if they can turn [US jawboning] into “actual fuel” at the pump—or maybe even print gas molecules!’ he said in a social media post…[T]he Iran war has shown politicians why industrial self-sufficiency matters…‘The landscape is reshaping the balance between physical assets and human or digital capital models,’ says one Goldman Sachs note, pointing out that capital-intensive stocks have produced 35 per cent higher returns than capital-light ones since 2025. ‘Physical asset businesses have outperformed sharply, while software and other capital-light models have lagged.’”
Tett notes that “Today’s AI sector cannot function without physical, capex-heavy businesses backing it. Just think of those data centres. That means that ‘hard’ industries are now blending with services…Even AI obsessives know that molecules matter. So the big question that now hangs over the west is this: will the cultural attitudes towards ‘hard’ industries also shift? Will elite students now fight for manufacturing jobs? Might industrial engineering command higher status than banking? It is hard to imagine today. But if global wars continue, don’t rule anything out. Molecules—and engineers—matter.”
“From One Failed Industrial Utopia to Another”
For a different take on industrialism and its future, Yasha Levine discusses “failed industrial utopias” as “the story of [his] life” at NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS: “The thing about the internet is that it promised utopia. If you go back three decades to when it just emerged as a commercial product, it was a lot like the AI boom today. It was supposed to deliver on everything that the Soviet Union had promised but through a capitalist information economy: true egalitarianism, an end to economic inequality, a materialist cornucopia that finally would be shared by everyone around the world. The internet promised to deliver all these things right at the moment that the United States won, as everyone believed, its ideological war against the Soviet Union. The communist dream was dead. And the internet, as promoted by its boosters in the 1990s, was supposed to be the final hammer in that fight. It was going to prove that the American Way could deliver The Promise—the promise that industrialism had offered up to the world from the beginning when weaving mill entrepreneurs in England herded orphans into factories and treated them as slaves. This was just a step to a brighter future—a future of where everyone would live like a king.”
“My family left the Soviet Union in 1989, and we landed in San Francisco just in time for this new epoch to arrive,” writes Levine. “I was supposed to take an active part in it—I even studied computer science and even a bit of AI at UC Berkeley as part of my Cognitive Science degree. Well…the utopia never came. The internet didn’t make everyone equal…it didn’t bring democracy. It did the opposite: It created a massive militarized system of surveillance and social control and it underpinned the biggest economic and political centralization humanity has ever seen—an information technology that allowed one corporation, like Amazon, to dominate so many spheres of modern life: films, books, medicine, all commerce, the backbone of the internet itself…The internet, through its massive and always expanding use of energy, is helping hasten the collapse of life on Earth, too. Utopia? Nah. The growth of the internet also tracked along with America’s own internal crack-up. The collapse of liberal Enlightenment idealism is at hand.”
He concludes: “As I’m getting older and a little bit wiser, I’ve come to realize that these failures are connected on a deeper level. They are not two but one failure. They are the inescapable failures that have been built into industrialism itself. It’s often said that every system contains the seeds of its own destruction. And it’s true for industrialism, too. Its quest for total power and control over all global processes—whether human, biological, chemical, geological, and even astrological. This drive to domination…to control and remake…has taken on its own internal logic. It doesn’t matter if a society is capitalist or socialist, the industrial values they embody are fundamentally the same. And so there is no place to run. Industrialism—or the Machine, as someone like Paul Kingsnorth would call it—has taken over the world. You have to make a stand wherever you are.”
“Late Soviet Spiritualism”
At The London Review of Books, Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews Joseph Kellner’s recent book, The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse. She writes that the “years between 1989 and 1991 were an apocalyptic time in which old rules, values and habits were overturned, and flux became the new norm. For many, spiritualism of various kinds seemed to be the answer. In pre-Soviet times, before spiritualism was put into the same ‘false consciousness’ box as religion, the Russian popular world had been full of spirits, benevolent and malign, which had to be placated or otherwise dealt with in everyday life. These became largely invisible after the revolution, and the authorities hoped they would disappear under the impact of Soviet enlightenment and science-based education. There was more official concern about the periodic rumours of apocalypse and the coming of the Antichrist, historically linked with popular resistance to rulers like Peter the Great and Stalin whose reforms threatened the old ways. But it was sixty years since Stalin’s collectivisation had sparked the last big alarm.”
Fitzpatrick discusses Kellner’s account of the Soviet Hare Kreshnas: “Fifteen years of Soviet state persecution left surprisingly little impression on the Russian devotees of the Hare Krishna movement whom Kellner interviewed. Escape from a tumultuous world was what they had sought as converts in the early 1990s. That meant abandoning worldly concerns: ‘plain living and high thinking’ was the message one woman remembered hearing, principles that tapped into the familiar values of Soviet dukhovnost, anti-materialism and anti-consumerism, at a time when Western-style materialism and consumerism seemed to have flooded in. Krishna consciousness in Russia under perestroika was a movement ‘with social nostalgia at its heart,’ as Kellner puts it. Explicitly, the nostalgia was for the ancient Vedic way of life in India, free of conflict and material striving; implicitly, it was for the old Soviet Union, construed in a similar manner. ‘In the former Soviet Union, it was easy to realise that goal [of renunciation of material things],’ one woman remembered, ‘because we didn’t have so many ways to gratify the senses—supermarkets, restaurants, casinos, the advertising industry, the glorification of sex, violence, alcohol and narcotics.’ Now everything had changed: the perestroika period was seen by Kellner’s interviewees as a cycle of ‘degradation.’ The lens of Krishna consciousness provided assurance that this cycle, too, would pass.”
“The movement that formed around the charismatic Vissarion in the early 1990s also involved a retreat from the world, but in this case with apocalyptic overtones,” she writes. “Clothed in scarlet robes cinched around the waist, with Christ-like (or hippie-like) long hair and beard, Vissarion taught that ‘Mother Earth ... would soon react against cities like these, whose impositions were driving her to the brink.’ He encouraged the faithful to take refuge at a safe distance from the ‘toxic and irradiated post-Soviet world’, more precisely in a series of remote villages without electricity or other modern conveniences in south-central Siberia en route to a sacred Mountain.”
“Vissarion offered no dogmas and seemed to be accepting of all religions and belief systems. Kellner beavers away to see if Vissarionism can be made intellectually coherent, and concludes that what Vissarion was offering was just ‘a beautiful and empty vessel’ for his admirers to fill. They did so by building new lives in the remote villages leading to the Mountain, lives based on very hard collective physical labour (building a road in icy conditions with no power tools), mastery of trades such as carpentry, and the construction of homes and a temple (very attractive, judging by the illustrations) in Russian fairy-tale style. Their daily lives, once this was all built, were filled with artistic activities such as decorative carving, writing poetry and performing music and drama. What they didn’t fill their lives with, at least according to Kellner’s report, were the bitter sectarian fights over doctrine that generally bedevil such communities, so perhaps Vissarion’s insistence on intellectual incoherence was strategic. Apocalypse forgotten, the members seem to have realised their dream of a quiet collective life, close to nature. Their biggest reported problem lay in convincing the Russian Ministry of Education that their schools were not in violation of the national syllabus for history, which the Vissarionites preferred ‘cleansed of all mention of war, retribution and similar manifestations of cruelty.’”
“Rugged Spirituality”
Andrew Taggart discusses “two forms” of contemporary “[s]entimental therapeutic spirituality” at Pathways To The Tao, which he describes, respectively, as “dark and light”: “On the darker side, you get Neo-gnosticism: having fallen into corporeality and without hope of exit, you find a planet dying, fluctuating post-1960s group identities not fully recognized, empires ruling with soft and hard power, wars breaking out, capitalism cutting folks down...You get purgatory. And all you’re left with is navigating collective grief over death, destruction, entropy. The sentimentality, here, is expressed in contingent solidarity forged through emotional intensity. Collapse is coming: let’s cry together.”
“The lighter side is bhoga yoga, a thinly disguised noble nihilism,” he continues. “It’s the way of enjoyment for neoliberal, wealthy elites and digital nomads who hear that everything, idly, is ‘presence,’ ‘peace,’ or ‘the gift-dispensing universe.’ You’re buoyed up by sound baths, cacao ceremonies, ecstatic dancing. Here’s the barely concealed hedonic life. Imagine: no metaphysics, no practices, no paths, no selves here, just presence or vague benevolence. Pretense, actually. Be sentimental: get high, feel elated, and make believe that it’s something deep, possibly unique.”
Taggart argues that “What both versions share is an anti-soteriological, anti-metaphysical commitment to group therapy. Nix the vigorously laid out doctrine of salvation, and call off the relentless metaphysical probing into—what’s the world? the mind? the self? the infinite mind? the ultimate aim? Instead, contemporary spiritualists, defaulting to ‘experientialism,’ talk in terms of felt or lived experiences: dark solidarity or light jouissance.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.