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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“Young Americans Lose Trust in the State”
The Financial Times reports that “Young Americans’ confidence in the apparatus of government has dropped dramatically to one of the lowest levels in any prosperous country, a Financial Times analysis of Gallup data shows. The Gallup polls, conducted by surveying 70,000 people globally over the course of 2023 and 2024, found that less than a third of under-30s in the US trust the government. The proportion of US young people who said they lack freedom to choose what to do with their lives also hit a record high at 31 per cent in 2024—a level worse than all other rich economies, bar Greece and Italy.”
“US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show US emergency department visits for self-harm reached 384 people per 100,000 population among those aged 10 to 29 in 2022, up from 260 a decade earlier and four times the rate for those aged 30 and over. The collapse in young people’s happiness in the US and elsewhere has been pinned on factors ranging from political polarisation and stagnating quality of life to difficulties in getting on the property ladder.”
“How Biden Enabled Trump’s Censorship”
At Compact,
analyzes the connections between the Biden administration’s censorship of covid dissidents and the Trump administration’s crackdown on campus protestors in support of Palestinian freedom: “Over the past several years, I defended the right to free expression against the Biden administration’s sprawling online censorship regime. In the name of public safety, the administration threatened, pressured, and coordinated with social-media companies to limit constitutionally protected speech, including so-called dis- and misinformation about vaccines and the 2020 election. Eventually, the question reached the Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri, in which I represented four of the five individual plaintiffs (I continue to represent them on remand in the district court). Last June, the Court found the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring their claims, in the context of an emergency motion for relief, because they had failed to prove the government caused their censorship.”Younes continues: “In the coming months and years, students may try to sue on First Amendment grounds if universities discipline them for speech to avoid loss of federal funding or other adverse consequences threatened by the current administration. However, the Murthy doctrine is likely to be an obstacle to such suits…It is possible that courts will have an easier time finding causation in these cases than they did in Murthy. The behind-the-scenes nature of the Biden administration’s censorship operations may have allowed it to escape accountability in a way that the Trump administration will not, given its blunt and very public approach. Nevertheless, the lesson of the past five years is clear: Civil-liberties violations that you countenance will be turned against you sooner than you expect. That is why we need a renewed commitment to civil liberties from both the left and the right, not the sort we have seen in which each side uses the concept as a cudgel when convenient.”
“Mahmoud Khalil’s Letter From an ICE Detention Center”
Columbia University student activist Mahmoud Khalil dictated this letter to the public from his ICE detention facility in Louisiana: “My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night. With January’s cease-fire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom.”
Khalil continues: “The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent. Visa holders, green card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs. In the weeks ahead, students, advocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all. Knowing fully that this moment transcends my individual circumstances, I hope nonetheless to be free to witness the birth of my firstborn child.”
“Why Maids Keep Dying in Saudi Arabia”
The New York Times publishes a chilling investigative report on the brutal treatment of East African domestic workers in Saudi Arabia: “Hollow-cheeked women return, often ground down by unpaid wages, beatings, starvation and sexual assault. Some are broke. Others are in coffins. At least 274 Kenyan workers, mostly women, have died in Saudi Arabia in the past five years—an extraordinary figure for a young work force doing jobs that, in most countries, are considered extremely safe. At least 55 Kenyan workers died last year, twice as many as the previous year…In Kenya, Uganda and Saudi Arabia, a New York Times investigation found, powerful people have incentives to keep the flow of workers moving, despite widespread abuse. Members of the Saudi royal family are major investors in agencies that place domestic workers. Politicians and their relatives in Uganda and Kenya own staffing agencies, too.”
“Roughly half a million Kenyan and Ugandan workers are in Saudi Arabia today, the Saudi government says. Most of them are women who cook, clean or care for children. Journalists and rights groups, who have long publicized worker abuse in the kingdom, have often blamed its persistence on archaic Saudi labor laws. The Times interviewed more than 90 workers and family members of those who died, and uncovered another reason that things do not change. Using employment contracts, medical files and autopsies, reporters linked deaths and injuries to staffing agencies and the people who run them. What became clear was that powerful people profit off the system as it exists. The interviews and documents reveal a system that treats women like household goods—bought, sold and discarded. Some company websites have an ‘add to cart’ button next to photos of workers. One advertises ‘Kenyan maids for sale.’”
For more on the global epidemic of domestic worker abuse—often carried out inside “liberal democracies” and allied countries like Saudi Arabia—see Weekly Grounding #54.
“Female Celebrities Are Making Millions on OnlyFans. Will They Regret It?”
writes on the celebrity-to-OnlyFans pipeline for The Wall Street Journal: “The Australian rapper and model Iggy Azalea, for example, charges $24.99 a month for her OnlyFans content and regularly tops industry analysis of the highest-earning OnlyFans accounts. She told the Los Angeles Times that she made so much money in her first month she ‘couldn’t even say how much it is.’ The Grammy-winning rapper Cardi B succeeded in persuading so many of her 71 million Instagram fans to follow her to a $4.99 OnlyFans subscription that she reportedly earned over $9 million a month. The actress Bella Thorne, a former Disney Channel star, made history in 2020 when she was the first person to make $1 million in a single day after joining OnlyFans, the company announced at the time.”“Fandom pre-dates the digital revolution. Its essence is a feeling of intense, one-sided connection to the famous person: think of the fainting teens at mid-century Elvis concerts. But social media has intensified its immediacy, via platforms that enable influencers to share intimate details of their lives, and also has created a compelling sense of dialogue. The digital fandom relationship feels far more like a conversation—even when, in fact, it is nothing of the sort—because there is always the possibility of a reply from its object. This kind of pseudo-interactive relationship is now described as ‘parasocial,’ and it is at the heart of influencers’ success, whether the content is family-friendly on YouTube or pornographic on OnlyFans. The influencer economy runs on a potent feedback loop between fame, notoriety, voyeurism and parasocial engagement. OnlyFans is built to monetize this loop, rather than just adult images as such. Its user base first exploded during 2020, as mandatory lockdowns forcibly constrained real-world social interaction. What it offers isn’t just sexual release but something that feels a bit like a relationship—a subscription girlfriend, if you will, without any of the inconveniences that come with a real one.”
“The Winter of Civilisation”
Josh Cohen meditates on the insights and limits of philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s work for Aeon: “Han’s critique of contemporary life centres on its fetish of transparency; the compulsion to self-exposure driven by social media and fleeting celebrity culture; the reduction of selfhood to a series of positive data-points; and the accompanying hostility to the opacity and strangeness of the human being.”
For Han, “The accelerated time of digital capitalism effectively abolishes the practice of ‘contemplative lingering’. Life is felt not as a temporal continuum but as a discontinuous pile-up of sensations crowding in on each other. One of the more egregious consequences of this new temporal regime is the atomisation of social relations, as other people are reduced to interchangeable specks in the same sensory pile-up. Trust between people, grounded in both the assumption of mutual continuity and reliability, and in a sense of knowing the other as singular and distinct, is inexorably corroded: ‘Social practices such as promising, fidelity or commitment, which are temporal practices in the sense that they commit to a future and thus limit the horizon of the future, thus founding duration, are losing all their importance.’”
While dwelling on the insights of Han’s thought, Cohen also notes that “Han’s prose can read at times as though impelled by…a pure negativity that crowds out the possibility of otherness with a determination that mirrors uncannily the compulsory positivity he decries. In other words, it is liable to merge into the very malaise it’s lamenting.”
“Trickle-Down Culture”
At The Point, Emily Jashinsky argues that “[Hillary] Clinton likely still sees economic success as synonymous with cultural dynamism. She’s not the only one. But by now, Americans aren’t merely exasperated with trickle-down economics, they’re exasperated with trickle-down culture.” Of the 2016 election, she observes that “Trump didn’t try to convince people they needed shoes they’d never heard of, he just sold them the shoes they wanted. Part of that battle is knowing what voters and consumers want. The other part, maybe the harder part, is being willing to degrade yourself in the eyes of your elite peers by making the pitch.”
Jashinsky continues: “In the summer of 2016, I was on a trip back home from D.C., and assuring anyone who asked that Donald Trump would not be able to win. I wasn’t militant about it, just convinced his norm-breaking made for an insurmountable juxtaposition with the former secretary of state. One moment that gave me pause was a rollerblading trip through a rural lakeside neighborhood mostly comprised of trailers. There, I saw something I’d never seen before: homemade signs for a presidential candidate. These Trump supporters weren’t going to the county Republican Party office and picking up lawn signs. They were spray-painting scrap wood. It didn’t matter if I didn’t know which fork to use at fancy dinners; I’d lived in D.C. so long that I totally missed what we all know now. Enough people saw Trump as an answer to our collective alienation that he became the first Republican president to win Wisconsin in decades, even if it was by the slightest of margins.”
Of the present moment, she writes that “a democratized digital landscape that may be fomenting—dare I say—a class consciousness poised to upend the battle lines of our culture war. In the age of new media, people outside the tiny community of Rivian owners and Nissan Leaf enthusiasts are able to make themselves heard at a volume that’s threatening to rival the political class.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.