Weekly Grounding #37
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.
“For Valentine’s Day, 5 Facts About Single Americans”
Weekly Grounding #35 featured a Financial Times story on the global ideological gender divide among Gen Zs and younger Millennials. This recent Pew Research survey is an important follow-up. It notes a massive discrepancy in the percentage of single American men and women under 30: “When looking at age and gender together, 63% of men under 30 describe themselves as single, compared with 34% of women in the same age group. Younger men are also far more likely than older men to be single – a pattern that is not as straightforward among women. Women ages 18 to 29, for example, are just as likely as women 65 and older to report being single.” With a pivotal election coming up later this year, expect to see increasing efforts to politically exploit the ideological and practical gender divide among young voters.
“The Cruelty of Crypto”
The roots of the gender divide in the United States can be traced back to (among other things) the disintegration of the country’s industrial base and the end of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s. In this excellent essay for Aeon, Rachel O’Dwyer discusses the cultural impact of these and subsequent transformations with a particular focus on the rise of high-risk investing among Millennials and Gen Zs. She writes that “These generations are also a product of the speculative environment they were raised in. Most of the day-traders were teenagers or children in the financial crash, or just graduating college. Fledgling adults in the COVID-19 pandemic. Born between the mid-1980s and early 2000s, their identity is shaped by the vacuum of post-communist politics (I, personally, was sent, age five, to a fancy-dress party styled as the Berlin Wall) or shaped by the speculation and excess of the dotcom era, or racked by the uncertainty of the 2008 financial crash. They’ve encountered the death of the American dream (or in Ireland, where I’m from, the optimism of the Celtic Tiger) and felt the withdrawal of the state’s contract in everything from mounting student debt to inferior healthcare to the rising cost of living. The postwar security and investment in public goods like education and housing their grandparents and parents enjoyed has been replaced by volatility and risk. Retail trading forums like WallStreetBets and NFT Discords are spaces where people trade crazy investment advice, but it’s also where they articulate their loss of hope in those same dreams.”
O’Dwyer continues: “Financial markets are no longer a space where investors allocate capital to businesses to grow a profit. It’s all about gambling on vibes in the gulf left by financial and social and political systems in total freefall. Nihilistic vibes, desperate vibes, hopeless vibes. The market is a giant lottery in search of the prize of security, gambling for a spot in the lifeboats. Of course, financial markets have been divorced from the so-called ‘real’ economy since the 1970s. But, maybe, in the era of post-truth and political apathy, what is new is an acceleration of these sensations, a total sense that nothing matters anymore. Hard work doesn’t matter. Good sense doesn’t matter, and neither do good bets or doing all the right things.”
For more of O’Dwyer’s writings on crypto and the cashless economy, see Weekly Grounding #24.
“Biohack Feminism Won't Save Women”
While the crypto craze has been a predominantly male obsession, the “speculative environment” of recent decades and the quick-fix technocratic mentality that it has helped foster have also heavily impacted women and the feminist movement. In this column for Unherd,
subjects new frontiers in “biohack feminism” to scrutiny. These frontiers include “growing a near-identical breast milk substitute from human mammary cells”; efforts to enhance female ““reproductive longevity” through a range of experimental pharmacological interventions; and, last but not least, Sophie Lewis’ “mostly absurd book,” Full Surrogacy Now.Stock writes that “This flight from the perceived contingency of biology is obviously behind much of the appeal of so-called technological advances in fertility and reproduction: from the construction of artificial wombs to laser-assisted egg-hatching to AI’s predictive role in embryo selection and beyond…But of course, you can’t get rid of radical contingency in this life, no matter what you do — all you can do is choose your preferred rollercoaster. Apple Vision Pro glasses will eventually malfunction. Selecting a surrogate still means you are at the mercy of what happens to her body, to the eventual baby, and to the human relationships involved afterwards. You can try to mitigate the unreliability of your breast milk by buying a substitute, but you can’t control the supply chain or the price point. And drugs can only help you play reproductive roulette for that bit longer. The problem is not technical, it’s existential — and there’s nothing a biotech start-up could ever produce that would solve it.”
“Vision Con”
Speaking of Apple Vision Pro,
offers some provocative philosophical commentary on the meaning of the new “mixed reality” headset. The piece should be read in full, but one particularly interesting part was his meditation on Wendell Berry’s 2000 statement that “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” Sacasas writes that “When sociologist James Hunter popularized the term ‘culture wars’ in a 1991 book by the same title, he noted that the culture wars were longstanding, but that the traditional battle lines were being redrawn with older coalitions breaking up and giving way to new ones. In 2000, Berry was predicting a similar realignment. As I survey the terrain today—in a decidedly un-scientific fashion, of course—I think we can see a new front opening up in the culture war precisely along the lines Berry foresaw and scrambling existing alignments and coalitions. And how somebody feels about a dad holding an infant while wearing Vision Pro might be a good indicator of what side of that emerging conflict they’re likely to find themselves on.”Over two years ago, I argued here on Handful of Earth that “many of the so-called ‘culture wars’ in post-pandemic America can be more accurately described as ‘technology wars.’ While culture and technology are inextricably linked, to reduce these debates to mere differences in ‘culture’ obscures the fact that one of the greatest divisions among Americans pertains to the role and purpose of technology in our lives.” It is heartening to see other Substacks feature writing on the pivotal role of technology in the contemporary culture wars.
“The Palestinian Human Rights Cause Must Mature Beyond the Extreme Left”
In this guest post for
’s eponymous Substack, critiques the ultra-leftism dominant in the American Palestine solidarity movement: “[I]t must be said that too much of the movement is captured by maximalist sloganeering and fringe ideology that is ultimately undermining the cause of Palestinian freedom. Like many other movements that find their home on the left, it often argues in an echo chamber.” Jilani continues: “Many supporters of the Palestinian cause…have no idea how to appeal to middle America, in some cases even choosing to reinforce the rhetorical framework of the other side… Maximalist sloganeering might be fun. It can get you likes and shares on social media and thumbs up from your like-minded friends and colleagues. But when millions of lives are in the balance, it’s no longer a time for fun and games. It’s time for the movement to grow up.”“A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld”
Patrick Radden Keefe presents some truly incredible long-form reporting at The New Yorker. The piece is long indeed (audio version recommended), but the journey is well worth it. It’s hard to pick something to excerpt, but perhaps one of the concluding paragraphs will pique your interest: “One reason that it’s so difficult to know what happened at Riverwalk is that Zac was by no means the only impostor in the apartment that night. Dave Sharma was a leg-breaker posing as a benevolent mentor. Akbar Shamji was a dilettante posing as an accomplished entrepreneur. And Zac was just a London kid, posing as the son of an oligarch. Each was pretending to be something he wasn’t, and each was caught up in the glitzy, mercenary aspirational culture of modern London.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.