Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. I hope they help ground your thinking in the midst of media overload. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
Without further ado, here’s this week’s Weekly Grounding:
“The Political Economy of Technology”
- ’s extended book review at Project Syndicate is well worth a read. He reviews Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, a new book by MIT economists Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson on the central role of technology in shaping relationships between labor and capital: “Acemoglu and Johnson worry that the vision of today’s Big Tech entrepreneurs will dominate how today’s new technologies are applied. With good reason, they fear that Big Tech’s use of machine learning to create a business model based on micro-tagged advertising will morph into even more socially destructive applications of emergent generative artificial intelligence. They also emphasize the potential for automation to eliminate tasks and jobs, further shifting the balance of power against workers and increasing inequalities of income and wealth. The long, painful history of the first 50 years of the Industrial Revolution looms large.” The following commentary on the Industrial Revolution relates closely to some of the themes I’ve discussed in my essay, “The Left’s Problem with Technology” here at Handful of Earth: “Acemoglu and Johnson then move to the Industrial Revolution, focusing on its distributional consequences to illustrate the non-neutrality of technology. Its first effect, they show, was the immiseration of the English working class for a long generation. From the point of view of the handloom weaver, the technology of the textile mill was unequivocally bad. But the authors might also have noted that the exploitation of labor was reinforced by the ‘Bloody Code,’ which made machine breaking and more than 100 other acts felonies punishable by death or transportation to Australia.”
“Behind the AI Boom, an Army of Overseas Workers in ‘Digital Sweatshops’”
Speaking of technology and political economy, this reporting at The Washington Post illustrates how the current revolution in AI depends on “digital sweatshops” in countries like the Philippines: “The workers differentiate pedestrians from palm trees in videos used to develop the algorithms for automated driving; they label images so AI can generate representations of politicians and celebrities; they edit chunks of text to ensure language models like ChatGPT don’t churn out gibberish. More than 2 million people in the Philippines perform this type of ‘crowdwork,’ according to informal government estimates, as part of AI’s vast underbelly. While AI is often thought of as human-free machine learning, the technology actually relies on the labor-intensive efforts of a workforce spread across much of the Global South and often subject to exploitation.”
“Black Lung Resurgence Prompts New Mining Rules”
Lest we believe exploitation is relegated to the “Global South,” this Wall Street Journal report on the resurgence of black lung among Appalachian miners in the past twenty years tells a different story: “Roughly one in five miners in the Central Appalachia coalfields of West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia now have black lung disease, or coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.” Despite new proposed regulations on miners’ exposure to silica dust, “a longstanding problem is that miners often face pressure from managers to skirt safety rules, including hanging monitors in less dusty parts of mines, and that MSHA has failed to ensure safe dust levels.”
“The New Contest to Land on the Moon”
Despite the labor exploitation in the high-tech and mining industries alike, most countries would rather push for space exploration than address these harsh human realities. I have touched on this issue in relation to China in Weekly Grounding #3. In this article at Financial Times, the focus is on India, one of China’s geopolitical adversaries. Despite their diplomatic and military tensions, both countries are united in a shared infatuation with space exploration, and others also want to get in on the party: “This weekend, Japan’s space agency is due to attempt its own uncrewed lunar landing, while South Korea is planning the same this year. Others such as Canada, Mexico and Israel are planning to send rovers to explore the lunar surface. Six international space agencies are partnering with Nasa’s Artemis programme, which aims to return humans to the Moon by 2025. Meanwhile, China is planning to send its taikonauts to the lunar surface by 2030.” This globally renewed technocratic enthusiasm for space exploration—in the midst of deteriorating conditions on Earth—cannot be separated from the current race to weaponize space, a theme which I have addressed in Weekly Grounding #12.
“Vivek Ramaswamy and the Rise of Indian America”
- provides a fascinating account of Indian Americans in United States politics at Unherd. Of presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, he writes: “With an undergraduate degree in molecular biology from Harvard and a law degree from Yale, he perfectly captures the balance between technical and verbal fluency that is the marker of many South Asian elites. His brash, assertive and pugilistic debating style would not be out of place at an Indian American social gathering. And, crucially, he has accrued a vast fortune, a symbol of an opportunism that is entirely all-American, where getting rich is seen as glorious and a sign that one has ‘made it.’” Khan continues: “America is truly a land of opportunity, a nation where immigrants can ascend to positions of power and accrue great wealth through dint of hard work and application of human capital. Yes, racism may exist, but it is no bar to advancement.” The key word here, I think, is “immigrants,” since this proverbial “land of opportunity” is historically illusive for Black Americans and, increasingly, downwardly mobile whites. For more on this topic, see Yvette Carnell’s video, “Vivek Ramaswamy's Caste Bias & Revisionist History,” which was featured back in Weekly Grounding #1.
“1980 to 1988: A Musical Culture in Transition”
- offers an insightful account of musical transformations in 1980s America at . He writes: “I’ve been fascinated with how cultural movements rise and fall in popular culture. Most movements don’t disappear completely, though the scenes that give them rise (situated around night clubs, bars, coffee shops, galleries, recordings and dance studios, museums) are often victims of time. As long as the memory of a cultural movement resides in the souls of the people who loved it, I believe it still lives.” Of the musical transition in the 1980s, George observes: “Synthesizers and drum machines were about to change music making from an ensemble process to one that one or two players could create. Stevie Wonder was the poster boy for this and Prince his inheritor, but soon everyone was replacing horns with keyboard patches, eliminating Latin percussion, and cutting payroll. Even before the hip hop takeover…big bands were already heading for obsolescence.” The result? “Today we have very few black bands of any stature (the Roots and who else?). We have no young vocal groups, the closest being New Edition, who debuted in the ‘80s and Boyz II Men, who debuted in the ‘90s. We don’t even have rap groups like Run-DMC or EPMD or collectives like the Terror Squad or Native Tongues. From very expansive large ensembles in the ‘80s, black musical culture has…become about singular stars who don’t share the stage and certainly not the spotlight.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.