Weekly Grounding #135
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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“Elise Stefanik Goes Woke”
Alex Bronzini-Vender reviews Elise Stafanik’s book, Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities, for The Chronicle of Higher Education: “In Stefanik’s telling, the woke academy has poisoned itself with the conflation of discomfort with harm, arbitrary line-drawing between legitimate ideas and hateful ones, and the fetishizing of subjective experience. And Stefanik’s antidote, it turns out, is more conflation of discomfort with harm, arbitrary line-drawing between legitimate ideas and hateful ones, and the fetishizing of subjective experience—administered toward different ends. If the Ivies truly are poisoned, Stefanik is selling the same compound, just differently labeled.”
He argues that “Stefanik, scourge of woke academics, has quietly adopted one of their most cherished epistemological commitments: Someone claiming to have been harmed need offer no more evidence than their ‘lived experience.’ She faults Northwestern University’s newly instituted antidiscrimination training for failing to include ‘anti-Zionist’ prejudice, approvingly quoting a Northwestern alumnus—the head of a group focused on antisemitism at the university—who complains that it ‘neglects the lived experiences of Jewish, Israeli, and Zionist students.’ There are victims, and there are perpetrators, and the rules apply differently depending on which side of that line you occupy.”
Bronzini-Vender continues: “In 2022, the scholar Oliver Traldi sparked a debate, which raged for roughly three years, about whether ‘peak woke’ had passed. Notable contributions include those of the political scientist Ruy Texeira, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, and the philosopher Slavoj Žižek. These were substantive, important articles, but read alongside Poisoned Ivies, they come to feel rather quaint. Wokeness, it turns out, is not the kind of thing that peaks. Much like Hofstadter’s paranoid style, it is porous, adaptive, and available to anyone who needs it. Conservative wokeness does not enjoy the popular buy-in that liberal wokeness once held within the academy. But it has the backing of an administration intervening in higher education more aggressively than any in American history.”
“It’s hard to imagine a better proof of concept for the woke style in American politics than Poisoned Ivies,” he concludes. “Its author has left a deep and historic mark on the politics of higher education—and done so by adopting the rhetorical grammar of the progressive left. She demonstrated its portability, proving that it is not the property of any particular political camp. This is Stefanik’s legacy as she exits Congress: She has made wokeness immortal.”
“Are There Green Shoots of a ‘Post-Woke’ Left?”
At The Liberal Patriot, Justin Vassallo notes that “the left has even less of a presence than formal Democratic branches do in the regions that Democrats desperately need to win to stay competitive in the Electoral College and the Senate. Ultimately, that obstacle comes down to the lifestyle choices and preferences shared across the left. In practice it is hard to fully distinguish the populist left from the culturalist left and thus identify a politically consequential difference between the two, as a majority of left-wing progressives cluster in big metros, have at least some college education, and share an outlook, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that combines both of these key tendencies (see New York City’s ‘commie corridor’)…In short, the left comprises a regionally concentrated, quarrelsome minority whose influence over the Democratic Party has indisputably deepened but is also in keeping with the demographic sorting between the two major parties that has occurred over the last thirty years.”
Nevertheless, Vassallo believes that there “is a good case to be made that the bleak prognosis for the American left is overstated. Public trust in political institutions is in free fall in America and across the West, to the presumed benefit of MAGA and ‘anti-establishment’ right-wing populists elsewhere. Yet nearly forty percent of Americans hold a favorable view of socialism—a number that was, ironically, hardly conceivable sixty years ago when Cold War America, though in the birth pangs of its ‘Second Reconstruction,’ was otherwise much more social democratic than it is today. Evidently, more than festering consumer angst over high prices for groceries, concerts, and sporting events is at play here.”
He argues that “there are indications that the green shoots of a ‘post-woke’ left are already emerging, sometimes far from where the left typically predominates. How this left is construed in the public mind, and whether we can truly deem it as properly of the left in a macro-historical sense, will depend in large part on the ability of insurgents to draw on America’s egalitarian political traditions, in speech and gestures unimpeded by a progressive intelligentsia consumed with America’s sins. Indeed, its ability to flourish will require a studied independence from the repertoire and sectarianism that has characterized the left in the last decade. The central problem for the left as it is presently constituted—or at least the one recognized by friend and foe alike as defining the alternative to right-populism and ‘zombie neoliberalism’—is that it has heretofore fettered the growth of a flexible oppositional politics, predicated on restoring positive government and the associative power of common people, in the regions the Democrats have abandoned, thus precluding the very realignment in the party system the left professes to seek.”
“Sinified Marxism and Its Future”
At Global Inequality and More 3.0, Branko Milanovic puts “Sinified Marxism” into world-historical context: “[W]hen we look at big historical events like Visigothic invasion of Western Europe, Arab conquest of North Africa and the Iberian peninsula, the fall of Constantinople, or European colonization of Africa and Asia, we do not see only the political and economic side of such world-transforming events. We see their ideological importance too. The Visigothic conquest created a Latin-Germanic mixture and unified Christianity in the West. The Arab conquest allowed the West to get back in touch with Greek learning that has been forgotten and destroyed. The decline of Byzantium was the precursor, or the enabler, of the Renaissance as many artists and intellectuals left Constantinople for the safety of Italy. The European conquest of the world brought western ideology, including Marxism…to the rest of the world. Even if one does not agree with these simplistic summaries of the ideological effects of big geopolitical changes, it cannot be denied that such ‘re-orderings’ of the world, had, in addition to their obvious political effects, big ideological implications.”
He suggests that “the most remarkable ideological result of China’s success will be seen to be a movement toward the ideological, or perhaps even cultural, fusion in the large Eurasian space…China’s economic and civilizational success was achieved on an undoubted basis of a European ideology, namely Marxism, which itself was the product of European enlightenment, German philosophy and English political economy. (The triad skillfully summarized by Lenin.) But this was not enough to produce China’s success. Anyone who would try to explain it by these ‘imported’ elements alone would be wrong. They created the basis for success. They might have been necessary, but they do not provide a full explanation of success. Indeed without a Communist Party, China would not have become a rich nation. And the Party came to power thanks to a Western ideology which it skillfully adapted to Chinese circumstances. Yet to be successful and to transform China as it did in the past forty years, it had to fuse these essentially foreign elements with domestic ideologies, first, those largely derived from Legalism, and then from Confucianism. It blended eminently European and Chinese ideological traditions into one that produced economic growth and improved lives of millions.”
The “Sinification of Marxism,” Milanovic suggests, has “brought closer the European or Western, and Chinese ideological ‘space.’ In the same way as the European success has brought Western ideologies to China, a sinified Marxism, built on the back of China’s economic and technological success, will exert its influence over the West and other parts of the world. Through reverse causality, it may influence Western thinking (incorporating there elements of Chinese philosophy), and the new Sino-Western amalgam may be copied by others and become more common in the rest of the world.”
“When Humanoid Robots Come to a Small-Town Factory”
John Keilman writes at The Wall Street Journal that “Factories have used stationary robots since the 1960s for tasks such as welding frames and attaching windshields. But advances in batteries, motors and artificial intelligence have spawned a new generation: general-purpose robots that can walk around a plant and perform multiple jobs.”
“In Cheraw, a town of 5,000 about 75 miles southeast of Charlotte, N.C.,” humanoid robots are now commonplace. The town “has seen plenty of economic upheaval in recent decades. Locals blame the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement for the flight of the textile industry. Factories have closed, and the timber industry has struggled.” In the past year, jobs that used to be done by humans at Cheraw’s Schaeffler auto-parts factory now belong “to a humanoid robot called Digit that was built for grunt work. Its legs angle backward like an ostrich’s, increasing its stability and lifting power. Its LED eyes blink to signal to human co-workers where it is directing its attention. Schaeffler, a global manufacturer that makes parts for cars and airplanes, said it plans to deploy more of the robots in the coming months.”
“At Schaeffler, Digit labors alone inside a Plexiglas cage, moving baskets for four hours, recharging over lunch, then going again for another four hours,” the article reports. “An Agility contractor is posted nearby to monitor the humanoid’s work, but the company said that supervision should end soon. Digit has also worked in facilities belonging to Amazon and GXO, but in every setting, it must be separated from its flesh-and-blood colleagues. The robot can’t detect humans when they are nearby, something required by federal safety standards. Agility said a new model coming at the end of the year will have that capability. Daniel Diez, the company’s chief business officer, said that means Digit will be able to work without barriers, allowing factories to deploy more robots.”
“Is AI a House of Cards?”
“People are often asking if (or confidently claiming that…) AI is a bubble,” writes David Krueger at The Real AI. “I strongly suspect the answer is ‘No, AI is not a bubble.’ I think of a bubble as a case where the fundamentals aren’t sound. But I believe in the power of AI… not necessarily today’s AI, but Real AI. And I think it’s about even odds that we will get to Real AI this decade, at which point it could take everyone’s jobs, in which case owners of AI companies would get fabulously rich, while everyone else would… something or another… that part’s still a bit unclear… Die? Live off handouts? Serve as status symbols for feudal overlords? But anyways: Investing in AI is clearly a good bet if it might be your only ticket to having any money in a few years after making money from working stops being a thing. So the fundamentals seem really strong.”
“A bubble keeps inflating until it’s so large that the walls become too thin and it pops,” Krueger continues. “A house of cards can just keep growing without limit if the people building it are skillful enough. A gust of wind could take it down, but really all it takes is finding the right card—one low on the stack—and pushing hard. If AI really is a house of cards, and investments are dependent on things going to plan, then any major disruption to the plan could cause it to collapse, significantly slowing down the race to develop superintelligence. An investor gets cold feet. Datacenter projects get cancelled due to local resistance. A strike delays the shipment of critical components or resources. Regulations or legal challenges block an expected entry into a new market.”
He concludes: “This wouldn’t stop the race, but it could help buy time and move resources away from the destructive and dangerous activities of frontier AI development and deployment and into more productive pursuits. I continue to believe in the fundamental power of Real AI, and sadly, I think AI companies have a good chance of delivering on it soon. But buying time could be really valuable. Every day, more people become more aware of the flaw in the fundamentals that makes AI a bad investment for humanity: all the money in the world won’t matter if we’re all dead.”
“A Portrait of the Artist as an LLM”
Patrick Jordan Anderson meditates on LLMs and “the death of the author” at Ever Not Quite. He discusses “the basic rupture introduced by the technology of writing itself, a rupture which becomes a kind of abolition with the appearance of algorithmically-generated text. The death of the author does little more than dramatize and extend the decisive feature of textuality as such: the estrangement of the reader from the writer. The alienation of the text from its author sentences the author to ‘death’ the moment readers decide to treat the text as the solitary locus of hermeneutic ‘life.’ If nothing else, writing is the technology which facilitates the construction of meaning in its maker’s absence. As long as we could say we knew a text had been produced by a human writer, the author remained, as it were, on life support—largely irrelevant for the purposes of interpretation, but still the source of agency which initiated its composition. Only to the extent that we could assume human authorship were we justified in borrowing the norms of oral communication and applying them to the written word: namely, our sense that the text, like speech, is a creative gesture of a particular person acting upon the world, even long after it had parted ways with its author. This is precisely the assumption that LLMs overturn.”
“To hear speech or to read text is also to ask ‘who is speaking?,’ or, ‘who is writing?,’” Anderson continues. “The fact that a text is churned out by an LLM doesn’t release us from the question of its author’s identity; it just means that the ‘author’ is no longer a person, a ‘who’ in the traditional sense, but a corporate entity, both in the collective and in the capitalistic meaning of the word. LLMs don’t signal the death of the author so much as the author’s substitution by machines which by themselves cannot be the source of any initiatory action; this is why LLMs don’t invalidate the necessity of tracing a text back to its origins, but they do obscure its origins behind the composite automaticity of algorithmic processes: readers are not, as Roland Barthes had suggested, liberated to hear the voice of ‘language itself’: they are exposed to a textual confection, a novel sort of synthetic industrial product calibrated by interests that are much murkier than the more straightforward partnership between a writer and their publisher.”
He concludes: “The reason I plan to keep writing is not that I believe no machine could ever produce a convincing imitation of my work, but because the labor of articulation is too important to a dedicated encounter with reality to ever condone its outsourcing. After the death of the author, Roland Barthes had wanted readers to become producers of meaning; the irony is that a world rich in texts yet poor in the human capacity to write is impoverished precisely by the fact that it has transformed the written word into yet another opportunity for consumption.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.
"Sinified Marxism"? Is that a "Marxism" which considers China "socialist" or something else besides totalitarian late industrial capitalism? :-)