Weekly Grounding #56
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.
“JD Vance Proclaims ‘America First’ as Republicans Embrace Economic Populism”
The Financial Times reports on vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s speech at the Republican National Convention: “The 39-year-old Ohio senator leaned heavily on his impoverished upbringing to slam Wall Street and the elites, depicting Trump’s Maga movement as a champion of the American worker, in an appeal to voters in the swing states of the industrial Midwest.”
“‘We are done, ladies and gentlemen, catering to Wall Street. We’ll commit to the working man,’ he said. ‘We’re done importing foreign labour, we are going to fight for American citizens and their good jobs and their good wages.’ He added: ‘We need a leader who is not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man, union and non-union alike, a leader who won’t sell out to multinational corporations, but will stand up for American corporations and American industry.’”
The article continues: “Vance, who would be among the youngest vice-presidents in US history, drew loud cheers from the crowd as he laid bare the scale of the Republican party’s Trump-era shift away from free trade and interventionist foreign policy towards protectionism and isolationism.”
“The Labor Right”
analyzes the significance of Vance’s VP nomination at. He argues that “For the towering heights of the GOP, it’s hard to overstate what a radical rupture this is from the past. For decades, free market dogma found its hardcore base in the Republican Party. The Democrats stood for a slightly sanded down, mildly lubricated version of the same ideology. The bipartisan middle ground became known as ‘the Washington Consensus,’ and it’s what created NAFTA, paved the way for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, facilitated the offshoring of American industry, and instigated the financial deregulation that fueled the subprime mortgage crisis. American workers had long resisted this top-down state religion, especially through their unions, but it took the trauma of the Great Recession to drain it of its last drop of popular legitimacy. Its vanquishment opened the door to the populist conquest of the Republican Party that Trump walked through.” Woodhouse continues: “Skeptics on the left will accuse populists on the right of faking their enthusiasm for workers as a political stunt for short term electoral gain. But when I worked in the labor movement many years ago, we said the same about many of our Democratic allies. It may be true in both instances, but who cares? Such cynicism is cheap and beside the point. Labor activists understand that what matters is not whether politicians are sincere in their pandering to workers, but whether the leverage unions have over them is meaningful enough to deliver results. Politics are transactional, and right now, the Republican Party believes it must cater to the American working class. Workers should go right ahead and let them.”
I discuss similar themes in my article this week, “We Are All Trumpians Now,” in which I argue that the anti-globalization movement’s ideology has trickled up in American politics to exert considerable influence on both Trumpism and Bidenomics.
“A Nuclear Accident Made Three Mile Island Infamous. AI’s Needs May Revive It.”
The Washington Post reports that “The dormant power plant renowned as the site of the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history — Three Mile Island — may be switched back on, driven in part by the ravenous energy appetites of artificial-intelligence developers.”
The article continues: “Three Mile Island’s history is impossible to ignore, say critics. Equipment malfunctions and operator errors put 2 million people in danger of radiation exposure when a coolant loss caused the partial meltdown in the plant’s Unit 2. Since then, fuel from that reactor and debris from its damaged core has been moved to the Idaho National Laboratory. Despite assurances by the Energy Department that ‘no injuries, deaths or direct health effects were caused by the accident,’ the finding is contested by many in the area who believe they were exposed to more radiation than the government acknowledges.”
Government and industry are willing to overlook the miserable safety record of the plant in order to fuel the AI revolution being imposed on the American people: “The data centers that fuel artificial-intelligence innovation and other tech are forecast to eat up as much as 9 percent of the U.S. power supply by 2030, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, a tripling of their share of electricity demand today. A boom in manufacturing and interest in electric vehicles are driving additional demand. It has touched off a frenzied search for zero emissions power by tech companies.”
“AI Is Not ‘Democratizing Creativity.’ It's Doing the Opposite”
At
, rebuts Silicon Valley’s claim that artificial intelligence will “democratize creativity”: “The AI companies, of course, do not much care if they take a wrecking ball to the already fragile creative economy. Creatives are already losing work, seeing pay rates decline, and are being asked to use AI to improve their productivity. In another of her defenses of AI art,…[Justine] Moore argues that AI helps artists produce more output—which, hooray! Artists get to crank out more work for the same or, soon, lower price, spending less time on craft and more on jamming the generate button, and so the value of art on the market tumbles down. People often say they wish the tech set would take more humanities classes—I wish they’d study some political economy.”Merchant concludes: “No, AI is not going to democratize a whole lot, I’m afraid, aside from things like ‘access to second-rate customer service bots for midsized business owners.’ It is, by and large, a profoundly anti-democratic force, in fact, given that who decides to adopt it in a workplace is almost always management, that rank and file workers are almost never given any input into whether or how they might want to use it, and freelancers must simply deal with the economic fallout of declining wages and fewer opportunities. Again, this doesn’t mean there are not specific utilities for which AI might be useful; but describing the act of generating automated output as ‘democratizing’ is nonsensical at best, and insulting at worst.”
“AI Mass Surveillance at Paris Olympics – A Legal Scholar on the Security Boon and Privacy Nightmare”
Meanwhile, in preparation for the Paris Olympics, France changed its laws in order to enable sweeping AI surveillance in the city, which has already begun. Anne Toomey McKenna writes at The Conversation: “The French government, hand in hand with the private tech sector, has harnessed that legitimate need for increased security as grounds to deploy technologically advanced surveillance and data gathering tools. Its surveillance plans to meet those risks, including controversial use of experimental AI video surveillance, are so extensive that the country had to change its laws to make the planned surveillance legal.”
McKenna elaborates: “Preparing for the Olympics, France in 2023 enacted Law No. 2023-380, a package of laws to provide a legal framework for the 2024 Olympics. It includes the controversial Article 7, a provision that allows French law enforcement and its tech contractors to experiment with intelligent video surveillance before, during and after the 2024 Olympics, and Article 10, which specifically permits the use of AI software to review video and camera feeds. These laws make France the first EU country to legalize such a wide-reaching AI-powered surveillance system…European civil rights organizations have pointed out that if the purpose and function of the algorithms and AI-driven cameras are to detect specific suspicious events in public spaces, these systems will necessarily ‘capture and analyse physiological features and behaviours’ of people in these spaces. These include body positions, gait, movements, gestures and appearance.”
“How the iPhone Stole Our Free Time”
At
, describes the radically different texture of daily life before the proliferation of the smartphone: “During the day, you were generally unreachable, and therefore uninterruptible. Outside of work or school, people didn’t always know where you were. You went about your business, hung out with friends, read a book or simply did nothing. Downtime, or idle time, was built into everyday life. Even during the early years of the internet, there was no attention economy as we know it today. Nobody was vying for your attention or your money online. The internet was just a tool you used for a specific task, like online searching or email. You found a computer (at home, in a library or in an internet café) and logged on via a modem. And when you were done, you left and got on with your life.”Gentle concludes: “There used to be a time and a place for everything. Now, we have everything, everywhere, all at once. As Bruno Patino says in his book, La Civilisation du Poisson Rouge (The Goldfish Civilisation), ‘Spiritual retreats in monasteries have changed: it used to be that we escaped the real world in order to find God, whereas today we escape electronic stimuli in order to simply find ourselves.’”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.
J.D. Vance is a protege of Peter Thiel, founder/head of Palantir, which is at the heart of the AI/4IR/Blockchain-based surveillance society program.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/how-jd-vances-silicon-valley-connections-helped-launch-him-into-trumps-vp-slot-193009180.html
How J.D. Vance’s Silicon Valley connections helped launch him into Trump's VP slot, Ben Werschkul, 7/15/24.
Donald Trump’s selection Monday of Senator J.D. Vance to be his running mate elevates a figure with long-standing financial connections that are sure to play a role in the rest of the 2024 campaign.
And if Trump wins in November, Vance will instantly become a key conduit to wide swathes of the business world — from powerful corners of Silicon Valley to manufacturers he championed both as a venture capitalist and as a senator.