Weekly Grounding #20
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 mission. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
Without further ado, here’s this week’s Weekly Grounding:
“Blue-Collar Workers Are Our Only Hope”
At Unherd, Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky forecast changing class relations in response to the industrial application of artificial intelligence. They observe that AI threatens the continued growth of white-collar “knowledge economy” jobs. This “once-rising class that often embraced the oligarchy’s ideas now faces the same kind of marginalisation experienced by less-educated workers for generations. And it is not unreasonable to conclude this could eventually divide the current political alliance between progressively minded professionals and the AI-enhanced elite. Perhaps the most visible example of this is the writers and actors strike — drawn from a class traditionally aligned with the oligarchs — currently underway in America, where AI threatens to make the manufacturing of entertainment largely redundant.” What this will mean for the character and development of the professional-managerial class seems quite significant. Kotkin and Toplansky go on to argue that “there is one class of worker who remains capable of opposing this neo-feudal structure: those with hands-on yet skilled jobs, such as the engineers refusing to work at Intel’s new semiconductor facility in Ohio. After all, even the infrastructure for AI requires tactile skills, and, as a result, technically capable blue-collar workers still have leverage and can shut down the whole infrastructure. This same class of skilled artisans were at the vanguard of the rise of democratic capitalism. Two centuries later, they may be our best hope for resisting a very different revolution.”
“Canada, a Giant Oil Producer, Urges Others to End Fossil Fuel Subsidies”
The Washington Post reports on Canada’s desire to have its cake and eat it too: “Adnan Amin, chief executive of COP28, and previously of the International Renewable Energy Agency, noted that Canada’s oil has long been considered some of the most carbon intense. Many countries will want to make distinctions between subsidies that benefit consumers and those that benefit producers, he said. And he suggested the nations in the Group of Seven have a credibility gap…Canada’s plan has already received criticism. Oil and mining account for about 8 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, and analysts are forecasting Canada’s oil output could grow for years to come.”
In another documentation of Canadian hypocrisy,
provides context for the open glorification of Nazism during Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to the Canadian Parliament: “Rota introduced Hunka as a war hero who fought for the First Ukrainian Division. In reality, the First Ukrainian Division was also known as the Waffen-SS Galicia Division or the SS 14th Waffen Division, a voluntary unit that was under the command of the Nazis and committed known atrocities against innocent unarmed civilians…That the first open celebration of Nazism to occur in a post WW2 Western Parliament occurred in Trudeau’s ‘progressive’ Canada, is no surprise. After all this is the very same Trudeau who cannot recall how many times he has dressed up in blackface…Yes, this Trudeau who - back when they were still trying to subjugate us all to their insane Covid mandates - had the gall to label the Covid-era Canadian Truckers’ Freedom Convoy as racists merely for opposing vaccine mandates.”
“Nothing Good Comes of France”
At Africa Is a Country, Mbaye Bashir Lo provides a devastating account of French (neo)colonial incursions in Africa in order to make sense of the contemporary coups and conflicts in the Sahel region: “Nowadays, neoliberal media pundits would bemoan the state of democracy in Niger while at the same time attempting to rationalize the pervasive poverty endured by its 27 million citizens. Nelson Mandela once astutely observed the banal nature of oppression: it normalizes African suffering and desensitizes us to the plights of Black people. While we read about the prevalence of decomposed bodies of African immigrants scattered across the Libyan desert, Tunisia, and across the Mediterranean Sea, decrying the plight of deposed President Mohamed Bazoum is but one aspect of more significant, overlooked tragedies in Africa. In many public appearances, this leader appears to belittle his national army, defend French neocolonial interests, and decline to negotiate a fair deal with French companies that exploit Niger’s resources. For those of us who have traveled through the Republic of Niger and witnessed the dire condition of the country’s population, liberal democracy appears hollow and civilian rule remains a mirage unless it brings dignity to its people. Neocolonialism assumes many forms and unfolds through different stages, and I am afraid that liberal democracy is increasingly merging into one of these neocolonial forms.”
- offers some fascinating reflections on class relations in twentieth century Eastern Europe for . He theorizes “the red bourgeoisie”: “The red bourgeoisie itself was the product of huge inequities of underdeveloped capitalist societies. From my mother, who got the story from my father (who came from an impoverished merchant family), I learned that on the last day of his high-school, when he managed to save enough money by giving private math classes to the rich parents’ kids, and proudly came to school in his new coat, one of the rich kids took the inkpot and poured it on my father’s jacket: ‘you will never wear what we wear.’ Many years later when I told the story to my North European friend, he said to me: ‘this is the European class system in a nutshell.’” One comment on the piece was also very interesting: “However, it is important to highlight that, although there was a differentiation of material well-being, and that this differentiation was, to a good extent, hereditary, it was never nowhere near the chasm that separates the capitalist societies. For example, the members of the original Soviet elite ate frugally, and, although their children had access to the best universities and the like, they don't seem to have inherited their power, that is, being a son of a member of the Politburo didn't entitle him to be a member of the Politburo -- that kind of heredity definitely didn't exist in the USSR (that's why we don't see Stalins, Krushchevs, Brezhnevs or even Gorbachevs as oligarch families in modern Russia or Ukraine).”
“The Intrinsic Perspective's Subscriber Writing: Part 1”
My essay “Telos or Transhumanism” was featured in this post by
at along with a wide range of other writing. It’s a lot to wade through, but many of the pieces look quite interesting.
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.