After last week’s Special Edition Weekly Grounding on Trump 2.0, this week’s Grounding takes a break (more or less) from politics and turns to art, technology, economics, and culture.
For those of you who are new here, 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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“brAIn drAIn”
reports on the “growing subfield of psychology research pointing to cognitive atrophy from too much AI usage” at : “[R]esearchers surveyed a group of 319 knowledge workers who had incorporated AI into their workflow. What makes this survey noteworthy is how in-depth it is. They didn’t just ask for opinions; instead they compiled ~1,000 real-world examples of tasks the workers complete with AI assistance, and then surveyed them specifically about those in all sorts of ways, including qualitative and quantitative judgements. In general, they found that AI decreased the amount of effort spent on critical thinking when performing a task.”Hoel continues: “The study isn’t alone. There’s increasing evidence for the detrimental effects of cognitive offloading, like that creativity gets hindered when there’s reliance on AI usage, and that over-reliance on AI is greatest when outputs are difficult to evaluate. Humans are even willing to offload to AI the decision to kill, at least in mock studies on simulated drone warfare decisions. And again, it was participants less confident in their own judgments, and more trusting of the AI when it disagreed with them, who got brain drained the most.”
“The New Aesthetics of Slop”
critiques AI aesthetics at : “We have come a long way from the days of Impressionism and Naturalism and all the rest. Those were serious movements. They happened because of dedicated artists committed to their craft. Slop is the opposite. It’s the perfect aesthetic theory for 12 year olds with no artistic sensitivity—but possessing a crude sense of humor and lots of pop culture detritus in their heads. Tech companies embrace this—and even brag about the sloppiness of their Slop. Each generation of AI aspires to new levels of whackness. Gioia goes on: “AI does not possess a self. It lacks personhood. It has no experience of subjectivity. So any art it creates will inevitably feel empty and hollow. Any human quality it possesses will be based on imitation, pretense, and deception. None of it is real. AI doesn’t even have a direct sense of objectivity—its knowledge of objects is all secondhand, assimilated through data. This results in a lack of depth or felt significance in any artistic work it creates. That why Slop is inevitable in an Age of AI.”
“The Rise of the New Romanticism”
At
, reflects on a nascent “new romanticism” in the United States: “The new romantics wonder: what good has any of this done for us? Were hyper-sophisticated GPS devices, cameras, and pocket supercomputers worth it? Is it fun to be surrounded by QR codes? It is too soon to predict a revival of the Luddites, but there are small pockets of young people ditching smartphones entirely; anti-tech activism seems, suddenly, to have some momentum. There are indications, too, of a political convergence. On the right, Steve Bannon rails against the ‘technofeudalism’ promulgated by the likes of Musk and Altman. Robert F. Kennedy’s ascension to Health and Human Services Secretary marks the apotheosis of a heterodox wellness movement that casts deep suspicion on pharmaceutical companies and official health science—a movement now right-coded, but one that attracted traditional counterculture thinkers who might have more easily slotted into the Democratic coalition a decade ago. Since Musk is helming DOGE and doing his best to destabilize the federal government, liberals are becoming more polarized against his companies. Mark Zuckerberg lost the left after 2016, when Facebook was erroneously blamed for Trump’s rise, but his new, ham-fisted rebrand as a manosphere autist will probably cement the left’s disdain of Meta. Zuckerberg’s poll numbers can’t be very good.”Barkan writes that “Not all of the old romantics were opposed to Judeo-Christian religion, but they were drawn, like the youth of today, to spiritual realms that operated far beyond any biblical teachings or rationalist precepts. They were deeply wary of technology’s encroachment on the human spirit. They feared, ultimately, an inhuman future. Today’s nascent romantics sense something similar. Why else, in such an algorithmic and data-clogged age— with so much of existence quantifiable and knowable—would magic suddenly hold such sway? In Technopoly, [Neil] Postman cast a wary eye at what he called ‘scientism,’ the drive toward making a religion out of data, and there is evidence of a sharp turn against the optimism that greeted the great rise in quantifiable metrics over the last decade. There is logic to the anti-logic. The new Romantics aren’t stupid.”
“What Was Woke Art: Elite Interiority”
At
, investigates “one aspect of woke culture, which was asking the audience to invest themselves imaginatively, emotionally, and financially in the elites.” “Fan culture is less about being entertained these days, it’s about identifying with someone. Pop culture figures act as avatars that are animated by their fans’ projections…In America, a lot of cancel culture was about weeding out figures who could act as aspirational stand-ins. While some of the behavior was criminal…a lot of it was about having the wrong opinions about Israel, using the wrong language for gender and sexuality, or being associated with people already deemed inappropriate. There was no statute of limitations—things said or done in college were fair game. If you were considered irredeemable in mass liberal culture, then you could essentially serve the same role in antiwoke culture, which was also undergoing this transformation from entertainer to stand-in.”Crispin continues: “Believing that the liberal/leftist lifestyle (I know they pretend to be at war with one another, but other than having slightly different opinions on political matters they are of the same class, same schools, same mindsets, same lifestyles) is the peak of American existence requires a fundamental belief that the educational system is a meritocracy, that ideology reflects character, and that the people handpicked to be experts by the institutions of American society have your best interests at heart. None of these things are true, and it’s easy to demonstrate how wrong all these things are, and yet the American woke artist refuses to engage with the possibility of being wrong. The works that come out of this woke urge help to reinforce these delusions and create the idea that nothing else is possible.”
“Detachment Theory”
At
, uses psychological attachment theory to think about various forms of economic (de)tachment: “Attachment theory started by looking at kids’ relationships to their parents or primary care-givers. The theory was then extended to romantic relationships, friendships, and even to more formal associates like work colleagues. It can, however, also be extended even further to our most diffuse relationships, like those we have with the strangers that surround us, those people who we call ‘the public’ or ‘the economy.’ ‘No man is an island’ is certainly true at an interpersonal level, but nowadays it’s even more true at a global economic level. How much stuff that your life depends on is created by you? Almost nothing.”Scott writes that “A market society is a system of fluid, modular, re-combinable large-scale interdependence, and this characteristic applies both to people who are trying to get the outputs of the chains—a person trying to consume something—or a person trying to be an input to them—a person trying to get a job. Unlike a tribal teenager, though, a young person in our economy has no ‘rite of passage’ that gets them a secure place in the structure. Nobody is obliged to attach to them, but if they don’t the young person is screwed, because they have no land to return to (well, they have their parents to return to, but their parents in turn must have a job). This means a young person entering an economy will become incredibly clingy, prostrating themselves before bosses (people who own concentrations of assets) begging for a chance, promising fawning allegiance. That’s a highly anxious pattern.”
“Social Thought from the Ruins”
shares a draft of the introduction to his forthcoming book at : “The Global Financial Crisis, in 2008, caused the rich and powerful (especially rich) to question their ways of knowing. It was a great time to be doing political economy, to say the emperor has no clothes. I flew so much! Most of that came to an end in 2020, roughly speaking, when disease, a worsening migrant situation, and rising nationalisms literally and figuratively locked things down. But movement, especially transborder movement, had been central to globalization. The bien pensant had thought that borders were outmoded, but borders came back with a vengeance. Today, we in the social sciences don’t fly so much, and settle for Zoom, or just less contact, indeed less publishing.“The time in between the crash and the pandemic, however, was vivid, fragile, global. The colors seemed brighter, even at night. Academics might come to remember, meaning imagine, this time like a little Jazz Age, a time of myth and glamor, with undertones of utter violence. Certainly not the whole truth, but a truth, and maybe the most important truth, for now. The era had its ugliness, of course and as always, but maybe never before had such varied beauties been available to so many. This may have been the highwater mark of not just academic, but indeed haute bourgeois existence. For a certain kind of intellectual, anyway, there was much to love, even while grumbling about the Forever War and neoliberalism and general alienation. Those were years of wealth, movement and an inchoate sense of vulnerability, even dread of dangers unforeseen until articulated by the event. Everything was connected, everything was at risk. It was exciting. Yet there was also a pervasive sense that it couldn’t last, which proved to be true.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.
This is one newsletter I always read. Thanks!
I loved that Brett Scott piece too