Weekly Grounding #50
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.
“China’s Online ‘Kim Kardashian’ Banned for Being Too Ostentatious”
The Financial Times reports on China’s “Clear and Bright” campaign against “extravagance and waste” and “ostentation and materialism.” As a part of this push, Wang Hongquanxing, a prominent luxury lifestyle influencer, was recently banned from Chinese social media: “Wang and the other influencers, known for their short videos, were banned by multiple Chinese social media platforms, including Weibo, Douyin and Xiaohongshu after the internet regulator announced a drive against ‘creating ostentatious personas.’ Profile pages for Wang, whose real name is Wang Hongquan, were declared inaccessible due to ‘violation of self-discipline’ rules.”
This article is interesting for the contradictions that it illustrates in both China and the West. On the one hand, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) efforts to reign in the luxury consumerism promoted by the likes of Wang while simultaneously fostering the conditions for capitalism is an incredibly difficult task. If the trajectory in other parts of the world is any indication, once it is out, the capitalist genie is very hard to put back in the bottle. For more on China’s embrace of capitalism in the 1970s and 80s, this recent analysis at
is worth a read.On the other hand, the Financial Times article also demonstrates the absurdity of the Western media’s response to CCP cultural policy. One Hong Kong Baptist University professor is favorably quoted as stating that the CCP’s “focus has shifted to grassroots internet celebrities . . . to strengthen control of the internet due to the concern about losing the ability to control public opinion and the behaviour of the people.” The CCP may very well want to control public opinion and behavior (as it modeled for the West during the pandemic), but the idea that “internet celebrities” like Wang are “grassroots” is ridiculous. This is yet one more example of how geopolitics-first analysis often clouds clear thinking about social reality on the ground.
“Are We Winning On Trans?”
Hannah Berrelli and Shay Woulahan take stock of the shifting cultural landscape surrounding gender identity on the RedFem podcast. They argue that the dominant strand of gender identity politics codified by Millennials in the 2010s is now increasingly viewed as “cringe” by the younger Zoomers and Gen Alphas setting cultural trends. Barrelli and Woulahan predict that the trans phenomenon among girls will begin to resemble anorexia in the near future, coming and going as a marginal trend, but no longer occupying a significant cultural space.
Barrelli and Woulahan also reflect more broadly on the contemporary cultural landscape in the Anglophone world, including the revival of 1980s tropes in the 2020s and the broader implications of the shift from Millennials to Zoomers as the curators of youth culture. Regardless of your views on “gender critical” ideology, this podcast episode is well worth a listen for its perceptive observations of real-time transformations in contemporary culture.
“The End of Never-Ending Progress?”
On the topic of feminism,
discusses progress, limits, and motherhood at : “From washing machines to the contraceptive pill and every domestic labour-saving device, I can think of a great many more examples of women’s modern liberation seeming bound up in technology. But if this is so, taking decarbonisation and sustainability seriously would imply undoing many of the changes that have freed modern women from domestic drudgery. Even so, most mainstream liberal feminists would say they care about fossil fuels, capitalism, resource extraction and so on – even as liberation in practice continues to rely on technologies that depend on these things…Over time, though, I came to think that the argument wasn’t just about feminism but about progress, in our modern sense, in general. And this points in turn to a paradox that none of us really wants to think about. So that’s what I’m here to talk about today: progress, which is to say technology. Or rather: progress, versus the survival of our species. Because I think we’re going to have to pick one.”She continues: “[T]he technological mindset is at odds with any kind of interdependent relationship - because it is at odds with resonance, which is to say encountering the world and other beings in relationship rather than as resources... And mothering also offers a metaphor for some ways we might embrace the calls placed upon us by the nature of the living world around us. Living ‘sustainably’ would mean being more like the mother, who journeys from modernity toward resonating with her baby…In my most utopian mood, I imagine a world where we could extend this mindset beyond immediate human relationships. I imagine topsoil once again renewed by attentive care and willingness to be bounded by the nature of the thing. A similarly bounded and interdependent relation with wild and domesticated animal and plant species; even with our weather patterns.”
“The Three-Faced Interface”
explores the definition and evolution of “the interface” at : “6000 bank branches have been shut down in the last 9 years in the UK, creating much angst. In the 1800s, bank branches were the face of corporate centralization, but nowadays they supposedly represent localization, because the new normal is for the corporate to get rid of its branch network and replace it with standardized apps that directly tether tens of millions of individuals into their centrally-controlled datacentres. The real breakthrough for the corporates was the smartphone, a device that not only allows a store-front to be ported into someone’s world from a distance, but which follows them everywhere they go. The corporate interfaces now literally stick to us now like an inescapable coating.”He continues: “For the first time in history, then, the entire planet is almost fully covered in a thick layer of intermediary interfaces-of-interfaces. These do vary across regions - China has a different set - but they’re beginning to blend into a collective collage as one ports into another - a Maps location is shared via WhatsApp, or an Instagram image links to Amazon.com. This collage is becoming a meta-interface that covers the world like a membrane between us and everything. The membrane functions like contact lenses, rendering every city layout or image in the same format. It affects other senses too. Every song is subject to same algorithmic curation, while ideas for what food you will taste are constructed in your mind via Instagram and YouTube interfaces.”
Scott concludes with reflections on the role of AI in further transforming the meaning of the interface: “The collective meta-interface is subject to unaccountable changes that affect the very colour and texture of the everyday, but this sense that we’re no longer in control of own view on the world gets even more edgy with AI. Our fear at this new technology goes beyond our jobs being at risk. AI is a way to make corporate interfaces ever more invasive and dominating. That’s why every tech company is pushing us to use it, like digital meth dealers. Here, we’ve integrated your new AI assistant into every interface box that your career depends on. There’s no opt-out.”
“Quantum Dialectics”
In last week’s Weekly Grounding, I featured a piece in Nature by science writer Jim Baggott on the sidelining of philosophical questions in post-war American physics. This fascinating essay, also written by Baggott this time for Aeon magazine, turns to debates in the Soviet Union and the broader world communist movement to analyze how Marxist physicists sought to reconcile dialectical materialist methods with the new science of quantum mechanics. The Nature essay featured last week is also helpful in understanding some of the major players in these debates.
Baggott writes that “Marxism powered many objections to Bohr’s complementarity, and so helped to shape the development of postwar quantum mechanics. Soviet physicist-philosophers lent their support by finding positivist tendencies in Bohr’s teaching in conflict with dialectical materialism. Some sought an alternative materialistic interpretation. Podolsky and Rosen both admired the Soviet Union and in different ways sought to contribute to its mission. Bohm laboured at a time when there was little appetite for what many physicists judged to be philosophical, and therefore irrelevant, foundational questions. It says much about Bohm’s commitment that he resisted the temptation to leave such questions to play out in the theatre of the mind. The Marxist in Bohm sought not only to show that a materialistic alternative was possible, but also to find a way to bring the arguments into the real world of the laboratory.”
“Where Does Anti-Aestheticist Feeling Come From?”
offers a thought-provoking historical discussion of “anti-aestheticism” with reference to Leo Tolstoy, among other thinkers: Tolstoy “argues that from the time of the Renaissance, the elites of Europe were alienated from true Christianity, embodied in the ascetic egalitarian Christianity of Francis of Assisi, because its values were incompatible with their selfish, idle, amoral, and luxurious lifestyles. True Christianity would have undermined the basis for their wealth and privilege, he says, so they became more interested in Greco-Roman paganism, which revered strength and beauty. They wanted art to please themselves, and they declared this to be the best art.”She concludes on a contemporary note, which illuminates the differences between elites in Tolstoy’s time and ours: “We live in a time of anti-aestheticism, in which the anxious and tense zeitgeist is more conducive to icon-smashing than indulgence in art for art’s sake. Our elites are focused on technological competition, not beauty. There is no reason for an age of beauty to necessarily come again. In her book [The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World], Catherine Nixey notes that ponderous and stoic values were weak compared to the moral power of the early Christian fanatics. The Hellenes had the values to create beauty but not to defend it against a moral revolution from below. We may say we want to return to a golden age of beauty, but we have yet to figure out how to resolve this moral war, even in our own minds.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.
This individual’s de-transition story is instructive. https://youtu.be/JxLAxhhZwGo?si=NjAE5-N5QuzUhaSO
I like the Mary Harrington critique of "progress." Shades of late 19th Century analysis by William Morris, one of the most underrated writers in the entire Marxian tradition.