Weekly Grounding #63
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.
“Donald Trump’s Identity Crisis”
analyzes the roots of the Trump campaign’s recent struggles for The New Statesman: “Expecting to trounce an unpopular and semi-senile 81-year-old, Team Trump has struggled to define the new opponent as either a ‘communist’ threat to mum and apple pie, or a hollow representative of a failed elite that must be overthrown. The trouble with defining Harris reflects the Trump campaign’s own identity crisis: is Trumpism still an uprising against elites and the American status quo in the opening decades of the 21st century? Or is the movement settling into familiar conservative patterns, battling ‘communist’ phantoms, allying with powerful segments of American capital and abandoning a post-neoliberal trend first heralded by Trump himself in 2016?” He argues that “Evidence is mounting in favour of the second proposition: that Trumpism 2.0 is more conservative than radical or populist.”Ahmari observes that the post-Trump Democrats have effectively appropriated key elements of what made “Trumpism 1.0” so popular, i.e. an opposition to unfettered economic globalization (for more on this, see my article “We Are All Trumpians Now”). This move by the Democrats, coupled with “Trump’s dependence in this election cycle on a coterie of tech billionaires, especially Elon Musk” has severely blunted his populist messaging. As Ahmari writes, these tech billionaires “seek to re-channel Trumpism’s economic energies into strictly culture-war grooves.”
For a more in-depth discussion of this article, see Glenn Greenwald’s interview of Ahmari on System Update.
“Who’s Afraid of Sahra Wagenknecht?”
At Unherd,
reflects on the rise of left-wing conservatism in Germany via the phenomenon of Sahra Wagenknecht: “The Wagenknecht phenomenon is fascinating — and unique — for several reasons. Not only has she managed to establish the BSW [Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance] as one of the country’s major political forces in a matter of months, but she’s also running on a platform that is unique in the Western political panorama, at least among electorally relevant parties. Though Wagenknecht tends to avoid framing her party in tired Left-Right terms, its platform can best be described as left-conservative. In short, this means it mixes demands that would once have been associated with the socialist-labour Left — interventionist and redistributive government policies to regulate capitalist market forces, higher pensions and minimum wages, generous welfare and social security policies, taxes on wealth — with positions that today would be characterised as culturally conservative: first and foremost, a recognition of the importance of preserving and fostering traditions, stability, security and a sense of community.”Fazi elaborates on Wagenknecht’s left-conservatism: “[T]aken together, Wagenknecht’s old-school leftist economics, pro-peace and anti-Nato foreign policy, and conservative cultural outlook is resonating with voters. And as a result, she now finds herself in the crosshairs of both the establishment and her populist competitors [on the right]….Wagenknecht’s left-conservative agenda is filling a political space that was previously vacant, hoovering up German voters who are disillusioned with mainstream politics, and even very critical of immigration, but nonetheless feel uncomfortable voting for a party that has undeniably xenophobic or racist traits. The BSW, by contrast, represents a much more palatable ‘non-extremist’ option for these would-be populist voters. This is further confirmed by the fact that, despite its tough stance on immigration, the BSW appears to be winning over an above-average number of voters from migrant backgrounds, a demographic that has traditionally voted for centre-left parties. In short, the evidence suggests that Wagenknecht is actually broadening the populist front rather than simply crowding out the existing populist pool.”
“This Labor Day, Let's Consider How We Want Technology to Work For Us”
ponders the relationship between labor and technology at : [T]his Labor Day, I wanted to reflect on a different question, and perhaps open up some room for dialogue: Now that a growing number of people have got the Luddites right, well, what next? We know that AI, automation, and tech platforms are being used to squeeze workers and to profit Silicon Valley. The resistance to AI—we’re seeing everyone from artists to nurses to truck drivers to voice actors pushing back—is lively, full-throated, and popular. So where do we go from here? We’ve seen plenty posts and pundits exhorting us to get with it or technology will leave us behind; I say this Labor Day is an occasion to consider what *we* want technology to do for *us*.”Merchant continues: “What is the future we want, with regards to ensuring artists are fairly paid for their work? Probably not a Spotify-like system that pays out pennies, that risks taking shape now. In many ways, freelance and independent artists and workers are the most vulnerable to AI and automation; I hope this drives many to organize, but the options for precarious workers in the here and now are few. We desperately need good mechanisms for helping writers and artists and creators earn the compensation they’re due for their work, and to sustain a good living, protected from plagiarism and precarity.”
“Commodified Incuriosity”
explores the limits of AI and large language models in a fascinating piece at : “If you don’t know how to navigate a discipline’s canon — if you can’t map it, situate different resources ideologically, recognize disputes and contested points, recapitulate the logic of different arguments from different points of view — then you probably don’t know what you are talking about, regardless of how much information you can regurgitate. LLMs can give you information but not the reasons why it was produced or why it has been organized in certain ways. And it certainly can’t identify what’s missing…What to consult, how to interpret, how to cope with polyphony and contradictions, how to combine sources, how to sequence words and thoughts, how to cut and omit, etc. etc. — anything worth engaging with conveys a sense of these deliberate subjective considerations and demands more of them, an infinite series of choices in how to respond.”Horning concludes: “Generative AI, [Ben] Recht argues, ‘always seems to provide the minimal effort path to a passing but shitty solution,’ which actually seems like a fairly charitable assessment. But it is obviously something that worker-users would employ when they don’t care about what they are asking for or how it is presented, for optimized producers who see research as an obstacle to understanding rather than the essence of it, for people conditioned to be absent at any presumed moment of communion. Generative AI is the quintessence of incuriosity, perfect for those who hate the idea of having to be interested in anything.”
“If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You're Not Paying Attention”
discusses the theme of “attention and its moral dimensions” at . He suggests that “Enchantment is just the measure of the quality of our attention. In other words, what if we experience the world as disenchanted because, in part, enchantment is an effect of a certain kind of attention we bring to bear on the world and we are now generally habituated against this requisite quality of attention?”Sacasas continues: “To speak of attention…as a patient waiting on the world to disclose itself, recalls how Simone Weil insisted that attention is a form of active passivity. ‘We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them,’ she insisted, ‘but by waiting for them.’ This form of attention and the knowledge it yields not only elicits more of the world, it elicits more of us. In waiting on the world in this way, applying time and strategic patience in the spirit of invitation, we draw out and are drawn out in turn. As the Latin root of attention suggests, as we extend ourselves into the world by attending to it, we may also find that we ourselves are also extended, that is to say that our consciousness is stretched and deepened. And this form of knowledge is ultimately relational. It yields a more richly personal rather than clinical or transactional relation with the object known, particularly insofar as affection may be one of its consequences.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.
Good take on AI. You may like this and welcome to publish. Its much worse than we think.
https://worldyturnings.com/2023/02/08/why-are-they-killing-us-2/