Weekly Grounding #24
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:
“Is There a New Left Stirring Within The New Right?”
- analyzes the “segment of recent politics that is sometimes identified with the ‘new right’ but in reality offers a much more heterodox—and interesting—approach to politics and policy, one that’s well worth considering by liberals and left-wingers alike” at . Judis argues that “What distinguishes these thinkers from others is their engagement with what used to be called ‘the labor question:’ namely, how America can fulfill its original promise of political and economic equality in a society where the owners and managers of capital have inordinate power over labor and politics.” He reviews the recent writings of Michael Lind, Sohrab Ahmari, and Oren Cass to argue that “What liberals and the left need to recognize is that amidst the blather of the new right, Lind, Ahmari, and Cass's work and the institutions they direct could represent the first stage of an eventual realignment—one that could benefit American workers and citizens the way that Roosevelt's New Deal did.” While I question how feasible a return to anything resembling New Deal economics would be, Judis’ article gives a lot of food for thought.
“Welcome to the Cashless Dystopia”
At Unherd, Rachel O'Dwyer provides a crystal clear summary of the “token” economy being promoted by Big Tech and governments the world over. She writes that “nearly every major digital platform will now trade your digital identity for ‘tokens.’ And by tokens, I mean money-like things ranging from airtime credit and loyalty points to game tokens, customer data and gift balances. Tokens have always ghosted the economy of publicly mandated currency, but now they are coming to the fore, threatening to replace money itself.” O'Dwyer continues: “Digital tokens are often framed as a panacea for the financially vulnerable, providing ready access to safe, affordable remittances and credit. And yet, many of these programmable tokens have already inversely harmed the most vulnerable in our society, producing one kind of money for the affluent, the middle classes, and the banked West — and another for the poor, the underbanked, and the undocumented. A token with values, a token with strings attached.”
“Big Tech Cannot Be Regulated”
In case we believe that stopping the takeover of something like the token economy is simply a matter of smart regulatory policy, Yanis Varoufakis argues at Project Syndicate that “Big Tech is so profoundly different that it cannot be regulated like any of the trusts, cartels, or conglomerates we have hitherto encountered.” He continues: “What made Big Tech different from IBM was a stupendous singularity. No, its machines did not become sentient, Terminator-style. They did something more interesting: they transformed themselves, with the help of snazzy algorithms, from produced means of computation to produced means of behavioral modification. In our capacity as consumers, Big Tech’s cloud capital (such as Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant) trains us to train it to offer us good recommendations of what to buy. Once cloud capital has our trust, it sells the stuff it selects for us directly to us, bypassing all markets.” For more on Varoufakis’ theory of “techno-feudalism,” see Weekly Grounding #22.
“Hard Lessons from Israel’s High-Tech Border Failure”
Bridging the gap between technology and war in the Middle East,
chronicles the technologically-driven failures of Israel’s “smart fence” around the open-air prison (David Cameron’s term, not Lyons’) of Gaza at : “Israel’s smart-border defenses should be understood as the adoption of a needlessly complex system. Complexity here must not be mistaken to just mean ‘complicated.’ Rather, a complex system is a technical term defining a system composed of such a great quantity of component parts, in such intricate relationships of dependency and interaction with each other, that its composite behavior in response to entropy cannot be predictively modeled. Such systems are characterized by their nonlinearity, feedback loops, and unpredictable emergent properties. When things go wrong in a complex system it can’t be easily solved, because each sub-system relies on many other sub-systems, and pulling any one lever to try to solve one problem will produce totally unexpected effects, potentially only creating more problems. This means complex systems are vulnerable to failure cascades, in which the failure of even a single part can set off an unpredictable domino effect of further failures, which spread exponentially as more and more dependencies fail. Even if the original failure is fixed this cannot reverse the cascade, and the whole system may soon face catastrophic collapse.” The fragility built into the control mechanisms of global technocracy—for which Israel stands as a paradigmatic example—is one reason for hope that the further entrenchment of technocratic rule is not inevitable.
“Germany Bans Public Grieving and Solidarity with Palestine”
In my article last week on Handful of Earth, “The ‘Free Speech’ Right Embraces Cancel Culture,” I documented the American “new right’s” rapid about-face on free speech in the name of defending Israel. Peoples Dispatch reports on the broader crackdown on free speech in the West, with a focus on Germany: “In Berlin specifically, which is home to one of the largest Palestinian diaspora communities outside the Arab world, the authorities have been particularly hostile towards any signs of solidarity with Palestine. Since October 7, every demonstration explicitly or implicitly referring to Palestine has been banned, leaving the roughly 30,000 Palestinians living in Berlin with no means of expressing their anguish at the siege and bombardment of Gaza.” The article continues: “Solidarity groups have been trying to bypass this censorship by avoiding political statements and focusing on humanitarian campaigning, yet even demonstrations and slogans such as ‘Children in Gaza need help’ and ‘Solidarity with the civilian population in the Gaza Strip’ were banned. On October 13, the police went so far as to ban a demonstration registered by the group ‘Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East’ entitled ‘Jewish Berliners against violence in the Middle East.’”
This reporting by
at System Update addresses the increasingly bellicose rhetoric coming from American politicians and talking heads. During the second part of the video, he chronicles the concerted cancellation campaign directed at critics of Israel’s war in Gaza. Both parts of the show are truly chilling.
“Poetry in the Time of War: Faiz’ Poems on Palestine”
- features two poems by the great Urdu poet, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, on Palestine. While the media often frames Palestine simply as an “emotional” issue for “the Arab world,” the rich tradition of Urdu poetry in India and Pakistan in solidarity with Palestine speaks to the global resonance of the Palestinian freedom struggle. Below is my alternate translation of the conclusion to Faiz’s poem, “Falastini Shohda Jo Pardes Mein Kaam Aae” (Palestinian Martyrs Who Died Abroad):
Wherever I unfurled my banner of blood
There flies the flag of Palestine
You enemies have destroyed but one Palestine
How many Palestines have my wounds occupied!
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.