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.
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“Podcasts, Politics and the Craving for Imperfection”
Jemima Kelly reflects on the draw of podcasting at The Financial Times: “[P]eople have tired of being presented with an artificial, scripted, carefully stage-managed version of reality. They just don’t buy it any more. Social media has made it much easier to, as the meme goes, ‘DYOR’ (do your own research). Whether or not what you find is wrong or fake or lacking in context is, unfortunately, beside the point. Self-directed discovery can be more persuasive and compelling than a carefully edited TV news segment or newspaper article.”
“This craving for authenticity — even if it has been carefully constructed — is manifesting itself in the way people are voting, too. It is part of the reason Nigel Farage is so popular (a recent poll by Ipsos gave the Reform UK leader the highest favourability ratings of any British politician). And it was a crucial factor in the rambling, freewheeling, ‘turn-that-music-up’ Donald Trump beating the slick, celebrity-endorsed Kamala Harris in the US presidential election.”
Kelly continues: “Yet this is still not well understood. ‘Nothing that was true yesterday about how flawlessly this campaign was run is not true now,’ MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid said of Harris during a televised discussion of the election results on November 6. ‘This really was a historic, flawlessly run campaign.’ Reid also pointed out that Harris had ‘every prominent celebrity voice . . . the Swifties, she had the Bee Hive’ — a reference to Taylor Swift and Beyoncé’s respective fan bases. The failure to understand that endorsement from a slew of celebrities might not have worked in Harris’s favour was striking. But Reid was far from the only one to push the peculiar idea that the woman who lost the presidential election by almost 2.5mn votes ran a ‘flawless’ campaign. If her campaign had been flawless, she would have won. Funnily enough, that might have required doing something that charismatic politicians and podcast hosts alike understand instinctively: letting your guard down a little, and showing people that you are a flawed human being, just like them.”
“A Rift in Trump World Over How to Make America Healthier”
At The New York Times, Gina Kolata reports on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Elon Musk’s divergent approaches to the obesity epidemic in the United States: “Those with views like Mr. Kennedy’s believe it is wrong to use pharmaceuticals to manage obesity and related issues that are tied to unhealthy lifestyle and to a ruinous food environment. The makers of obesity drugs, Mr. Kennedy told Greg Gutfeld on Fox News before the election, are ‘counting on selling it to Americans because we’re so stupid and so addicted to drugs.’ But there are many like Mr. Musk, who says he has used Wegovy, applauding the power of the new drugs to improve health and treat the seeming intractability of obesity.”
This divide is indicative of a broader cleavage in contemporary political perspectives on the place of technology in our lives. I have written on this topic at length with regard to the political left, but it is increasingly salient with respect to the political right, as well. Though Kennedy has his own technocratic connections (such as his vice presidential running mate, Nicole Shanahan), his views on health, on the whole, represent a stark contrast with Musk’s predictable techno-optimist views. As I stated in my “Election Reflections” last month, “MAGA worship of Musk will likely increase due to his massive monetary and social media contribution to Trump’s electoral victory. This does not bode well for those of us who would like to see the MAHA and anti-neocon elements of MAGA win out over Musk’s technocratic ‘dark MAGA’ dystopia. The critique of technocracy (including its left- and right-wing varieties) has never been more important. This critique will continue to ground the writing on Handful of Earth as the roller coaster ride of American politics careens into the future.”
“Gen Z Is Super Weird”
Amber A’Lee Frost analyzes the consequences of extremely online Gen Z “e-deological” formations for Jacobin: “It would be a crude oversimplification to say their so-called ‘e-deologies’ range far and wide across ‘the political spectrum,’ as the real hallmark of an e-deology is not so much how right or left it is as its tendency to collect respective baroque idiosyncrasies and qualifications. These are not merely Republicans and Democrats, or conservatives and liberals, or even socialists and libertarians. These are self-identified ‘pan-constitutional monarchists,’ ‘antidemocratic transhumanists,’ ‘anarcho-primitivist electoralists,’ ‘Islamo-nationalists,’ ‘agrarian voluntarists,’ ‘eco-fascists,’ and many more seemingly infinite permutations of boutique ideas.”
Frost continues: “It’s just not very likely what you believe at sixteen will last into adulthood. Young people are pretty flighty, and there’s no way to predict where their impetuous passions will land them. Not only do they change their minds a lot, they change them drastically, which isn’t anything remarkable to anyone who remembers being a teen, caprice being a hallmark of youth. Take ‘J,’ a twenty-two-year-old self-described ‘reactionary.’ He was a Bernie Sanders supporter back in 2016. Or ‘R,’ who identifies as an anarcho-communist, but was an eco-fascist in 2019 — when she was eleven.” This capriciousness can move toward increasing political maturity with age and experience, which is one of the reasons I wrote “In Defense of Woke Zoomers” (something similar could be said of their “anti-woke” counterparts).
On the topic of the Zoomer e-right, Frost observes that “The problem with being a fascist in America is that we’ve never had a very project-oriented state. Essentially, they face the same obstacle that socialists do: capital. We don’t really build political institutions or vehicles for ambitious planned economies, much less something as ordered as an ethnic state. Modern America has always preferred exploitation to genocide and outright authoritarianism. And we tend to be passive actors in the genocides committed by other countries. Sure, we outsource it to proxy states by sabotaging their left-wing movements — for example, by arming Cold War Latin America and Israel, or doing business with the Nazis, as Prescott Bush did — but the truth remains that anyone claiming to be a fascist in America is a weird Europhile, mentally ill, or fifteen years old.”
“Mass Hysteria Was the Inevitable Outcome of the UFO Craze”
addresses the psychological dimensions of the latest UFO reports at the : “So the only noteworthy thing about this is what it represents at a cultural level: the ‘I Saw a Mysterious Drone’ craze is really the disguised evolution of the UFO craze that began seven years ago with a garbage New York Times article…All mass delusions and hysterias have a cause. In the summer of 1518, the year of the Dancing Plague, it was a French woman, Frau Troffea, who began to dance without music on the cobbled streets of Strasbourg in some sort of modern-esque fanatical fashion. Frau must have been very good, maybe the best improvisational dancer to ever live, because hundreds of others joined and danced until they collapsed (some claimed ~15 people died a day, although accounts are unreliable). Humans don’t change. In the 80s and 90s we had the Satanic abuse panic which broke apart thousands of households based on false confabulations. Such cases require an initial cause which prompts mimicry…[I]t was psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder who created the satanic panic with his discredited book Michelle Remembers in 1980, and now this entire phenomenon of ‘drones are attacking!’ and blurry iPhone videos is a result of a 2017 New York Times article announcing that the government spent years secretly hunting unexplainable UFOs which buzz military bases and dance like Tinkerbell away from pilots.”Hoel ends on the following note: “A disturbing reminder that, despite all our technology and education and literacy, we are still just dancing in Strasbourg. Only the location changes. Under the light-polluted New Jersey night sky our movements become erratic and there is sweat on our brow once again, as, iPhone in hand, we thumb record.”
I would add that it’s noteworthy how much the mainstream media makes of UFO speculations and how little it has to say about the very much identifiable “remote-controlled quadrocopters,” Israel’s “hi-tech weapon menacing Palestinian civilians” for years:
“A Walk is Not a Lesson”"
offers a thought-provoking reflection on a walk with third graders at : “Out on the trail, though, we got through the loss a-walkin’. You find a happy tired that’s not tired at all. I taught in universities for years. At certain checkpoints you sat down and wrote a Teaching Philosophy, two or three single-spaced pages naming your values sought and plans to get there. Little sermons, they were, and I believed every word. But I have walked away now. Some days it seems the world has too. A walk is not a lesson. A body moves through mountains. A mind goes silent in the trees.”“The Last Glimpses of California's Vanishing Hippie Utopias”
At GQ, David Jacob Kramer travels to “Mendocino County, about a three-hour drive north of San Francisco, looking for what remains of perhaps the most famous of the hundreds of rural communes established across Northern California in the late '60s and '70s: Table Mountain Ranch.” This period was the “greatest urban exodus in American history…From the late '60s to the mid '70s, nearly a million young people went back to the land. Nowhere was the urge to reconnect with nature more keenly felt than in San Francisco, where droves of young people were suddenly fleeing a city overrun by heroin, speed, and bad vibes. Cops were shooting down Black Panthers in Oakland and the military was tear-gassing students in People's Park in Berkeley. Vietnam veterans were looking for a salve for their PTSD. Faithful Marxists aimed to put their ideals to the test. Some just wanted to get high in the woods.”
Kramer continues: “It was a grand social experiment, but the promise was often rosier than the reality. Most found the grind too hard going and the poverty too bleak, and within a few years returned to the city and more conventional lives. But a small number stuck it out for decades, long after the Summer of Love had dissipated, and a handful of them still live in communities scattered across Northern California. These flinty souls remain a study in principled self-reliance and human ingenuity, having supported themselves and their families for years through subsistence farming and sundry side hustles: ceramics, teaching, salmon fishing, instrument making, firewood hawking, and weed growing.”
The entire piece is well worth a read, with photography by Michael Schmelling, including some fascinating images of abandoned commune living quarters such as the following cabin:
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.
Hey Vincent! Glad you enjoyed the piece, and thanks for the shout out! This is some mighty company, indeed. I'm going straight to read this GQ piece. Sounds like Denis Johnson's Already Dead, a mess of a novel set in those same woods I have great fondness for. The mess, not the the woods :) A happy holidays to you, sir!