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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“How the Liberal Cathedral Cracked Up”
reflects on the seemingly rapid cultural shift away from the “liberal cathedral” at The New York Times: “Imagine showing the scenes inside the Capitol at Monday’s inauguration to a visitor from the distant, misty past of 2021. Imagine them watching as the leaders of the same American tech industry that just four years ago united to de-platform Donald Trump now crowded close around him, competing for his favor. Then think about how one might explain the larger change behind these scenes — the rapid movement from the era of ‘woke capital,’ from a seeming alignment of all major American institutions on the side of progressive ideology to a Trumpian restoration in which the right’s cultural gains seem much larger than Trump’s electoral majority.”Douthat notes that “The vibes have shifted against liberals and progressives in the past without fundamentally undermining their cultural advantage. No existing version of conservatism seems ready for its own form of hegemony, populism is a blunt-force weapon that lacks the requisite seductive power, and the A.I. models that may catechize the future still lean distinctly left.” However, he concludes with the observation that “in the suddenness of the shift, in the tergiversation of the tech barons and the rise of the Gen Z Trumpists, you can see a case study in how a seemingly hegemonic worldview can pass very rapidly from consolidating power to squandering it, from riding roughshod over its enemies to galloping off a cliff.”
“Brezhnev-era Liberalism”
On the topic of liberalism,
paints a picture of liberalism’s ossification in the United Kingdom at : “In mid-century Britain, liberalism’s basic claims were highly persuasive. The evident dissatisfactions of unhappy marriages, racial bigotry, and petty brutality were well-known, experienced, current, and concrete. By contrast, the negative consequences of liberal reforms which some conservatives predicted were entirely abstract and located in an unknown future.”He expands on this point: “When watching debates from the 1960s, a conservative will find themselves naturally agreeing with the person arguing for the conservative position—but may typically find that the liberal is the more convincing debater. By the mid-century, liberals were usually more informed, had facts more readily to hand, and could present the counter-arguments more intelligently. This is because conservatism at this time was the ossified doctrine, and was sometimes adhered to more out of prejudice than through reason. By contrast, in the twenty first century it is the conservatives who are more informed about the issues of the day, whether it be assisted suicide, the impacts of immigration, the reality of fatherlessness, or the patterns of criminality. Brezhnev-era liberals are not merely ignorant of the debate, but are frequently ignorant of their own ignorance.”
“How Silicon Valley Turned China Into Its Lifeline”
Edward Luce and Henry Farrell exchange thoughts on the United States, China, and artificial intelligence at The Financial Times. Luce writes that “2017 was the year that Washington reimagined Silicon Valley’s bad boys as shields against China. Far from regulating big tech, Washington resolved to treat the west coast titans as weapons in democracy’s arsenal. That has been one of the propellants behind the outsized market growth of the Magnificent Seven big tech companies in recent years. The view was that China and the US are in a race to see which could attain artificial general intelligence (AGI) first. The country that prevailed in AI would also triumph in the geopolitical battle.”
Farrell responds: “People used to talk a lot about the so-called ‘Washington Consensus’—the rules of economic neoliberalism that guided the thinking of the World Bank, IMF and other DC based institutions. Now that economic neoliberalism is moribund, I think that there is a New Washington Consensus…Instead of multilateral institutions, you should now look to the assumptions of the emerging mind-meld between Silicon Valley and national security policymakers, to see how America wants to shape the world. These assumptions can be boiled down to four claims: that competition between the US and China is everything, that AGI is right around the corner, that whoever gets to AGI first is likely to win, and that America’s big advantage is its chokehold over the chips that you need to train powerful AI.”
In the vast majority of discourse on AI, there is seldom any effort to question whether we should even be developing AI in the first place. Both China and the United States seem to agree that more and better LLMs leading toward AGI is obviously a good thing. For more on why the United States, China, and most scholarly and popular analysts of the AI industry are united in their underlying assumptions, see “The Left’s Problem with Technology” and “Telos or Transhumanism” here at Handful of Earth.
“Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism”
The New York Times interviews Steve Bannon about the genesis of contemporary American populism and the “broligarch” effort to take over the MAGA movement. Bannon notes that “Public intellectuals have done a horrible job because you haven’t had the interest in really understanding what populism is. It’s this thing like Trump. It’s always going to fade. It’s just about Trump. And it’s never about the core, where this springs from. Think about it: Trump came down in June of 2015, and for 10 years there’s been no real work done to even begin to understand populism, except that the deplorables are an exotic species like at the San Diego Zoo. It’s only now that anybody has got any interest in really getting behind it?”
Bannon goes on to argue that “the capitalists are always trying to drive down wages. Now they do it two ways. They either allow illegal immigration at the border, which drives down wages of lower-skilled workers, particularly African American and Hispanic. But they also scammed the system with a whole set of visa programs, and they call it kind of fancy names—the H-1B visas. All they’re trying to do is bring in indentured servants into the country at a third less or 50 percent less and are very compliant about what they have to do, to make sure they don’t have to pay American graduates. And this is why Silicon Valley is an apartheid state. It’s the reason you have no Hispanics or Blacks. There’s no shot to get into Silicon Valley. It’s not because Americans are dumber. It’s not because Americans are lazy. It’s because...you have a globalist system. And the capitalists, because remember we’re in a capitalist system, are always looking to drive labor costs down. And the Democratic Party could have done this, but Bernie Sanders and all the guys who supported labor, all became open borders on immigration, and they made it some sort of racial, xenophobic thing.”
For more on the H1-B visa debate, see my article “Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy's Assault on the American People.”
“Building in the Ruins”
meditates on contemporary debates about “progress” at . Of Marc Andreeseen’s much-discussed “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” Anderson writes: “What is perhaps most striking about Andreessen’s writings, all of which are preoccupied with the future, is their common premise that the future may be built only if we recommit unequivocally to a narrow set of ideas first formulated centuries ago, and whose ascendancy is almost synonymous with modernity itself: economic growth and technological innovation working together to master nature for the satisfaction of human desires. The world of the future, Andreessen insists, must be built as a consequence of the renewal of old ideas.”Anderson continues: “If we find that we have been deprived of the capacity to build a world fit for future inheritance, this is not because we have lost the will to take the long view; it is because we struggle to believe with the necessary conviction in the narratives which once animated the collective action which we had imagined could be entrusted to shepherd us safely into the future. Indeed, contrary to Andreessen’s reading of our situation, it is precisely our previous over-commitment to these narratives which is responsible for bringing us to this impasse in which the two extremes of a confident, ‘just-build’ progressivism and a diffident, ‘drop-out’ primitivism appear to be the only living alternatives. The reason it seems that the only solutions anyone is willing to defend are either to lean into the assumptions of modern civilization or to disavow them altogether is that our zealous devotion to the creed of progress, which has for better or worse built so much of what we have, has suppressed or even erased our memory and imagination for its alternatives. The dial seems only to have two registers—an up and a down—because the future now appears illegible, our questions about what, how, or even why we should build appear without clear answers, because we have become disinherited of many of the less totalizing and more localized answers these questions once elicited.”
“Then Were the Horsehoofs Broken by the Means of Their Pransings”
explores the fraught territory of online reviews at : “[T]he space provided for reviews is not some version of a public sphere, a neutral space for the free exchange of ideas, but a part of a retail site’s marketing strategy. The review section [is] not to help prospective customers but to help legitimate the platform, make it seem like a normal and trustable venue for commerce. Every review is a sales pitch for the site itself, regardless of what it says about a specific product. Just as every piece of information encountered on a social media platform is ‘misinformation’ by virtue of its context, so is every review on a retail site a ‘fake review.’ ‘Truth’ is not part of the procedure for its production. Setting up a standard for ‘truth’ for this kind of discourse misapprehends what sort of discourse it is.” He continues: “It’s sort of comforting to imagine that LLM-generated ‘fake’ reviews can pollute review sections, as though that discourse space is currently full of people being their real selves, conversing with each other in the spirit of civility. But it reminds me of how Only Fans models use chatbots to simulate one-on-one conversations with their customers, as this Vice report by Luis Prada details. The idea that the chatbot is a step away from some sort of ‘more real’ conversation serves to re-enchant an exchange that was already fully mechanized and transactional.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.
Vincent, I thought this was a particularly good overview/synopsis. Thanks.
Hi Vincent, thanks for sharing my piece here! I should mention that the Ever Not Quite you've linked to here is not my publication but a different account with a similar title. In my experience the @ function is one of the most buggy features on Substack, sometimes refusing to turn up the expected results.