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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“Zuckerberg’s Grand Vision: Most of Your Friends Will Be AI”
The Wall Street Journal reports that, in Mark “Zuckerberg’s vision for a new digital future, artificial-intelligence friends outnumber human companions and chatbot experiences supplant therapists, ad agencies and coders. AI will play a central role in the human experience, the Facebook co-founder and CEO of Meta Platforms has said in a series of recent podcasts, interviews and public appearances.”
“Zuckerberg has had mixed success predicting how people will interact with each other in the future. He struck gold with Facebook in the 2000s and made lucrative acquisitions with Instagram and WhatsApp a few years later. More than a decade later, in 2022, he declared that vast numbers of people in the future would interact in virtual worlds and with augmented reality. That bet has yet to come to fruition. The Meta CEO is now throwing resources at AI chatbots—both in its social media apps and in its hardware devices. Meta AI, as it is called, is accessible via Instagram and Facebook, as a stand-alone app and on Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses. Zuckerberg said Tuesday that nearly a billion people are using the feature now monthly.”
“Can the Apple Be Unbitten?”
On the topic of AI and the transformation of daily life,
discusses the far-reaching impacts of ChatGPT at : “I often hear people say, ‘ChatGPT is just a tool, and tools can’t be good or bad.’ This reflects an underlying belief that tools are somehow neutral. But I fundamentally disagree. The nature of a tool—and how it is used—shapes the person using it. As a good personalist, I’m especially concerned with what a tool does to the person, particularly in how it shapes, strengthens, or diminishes human capabilities. In this way, I’m interested in tools in the subjective sense—recognizing that people are always changed by the tools they use, especially as tool use profoundly impacts our capabilities.”Martsolf continues: “It seems obvious to me that whenever we pick up a tool, we run the risk of becoming more dependent on someone or something else. But I want to be clear—dependence is not a bad thing as such. In my understanding of what it means to be human, I remind students that we are, by nature, social creatures. We rely on others both instrumentally and constitutionally. We are not—and should not aspire to be—the fictive autonomous individuals imagined by liberal ideology. The concern, then, is not so much that I am becoming increasingly dependent on others, but rather who I am dependent on—and what I am to them.”
He argues that, “in our increasingly globalized and digital society, the loss of capabilities often makes us more dependent on multinational surveillance corporations that see us not as persons to be loved, but as instruments to be used. We are cash registers. Meta does not love me—it uses me. This dynamic only intensifies as more tools are built with planned obsolescence, designed to be unrepairable by the average person. Every time one of these tools breaks, I find myself once again dependent on the corporation that made it. This is particularly true with ChatGPT. As I lose the ability to read, write, and think critically, I become increasingly dependent on a distant corporation to handle these tasks for me.”
“The Creeping Dubai-ification of London”
Angus Colwell reflects on the “Dubai-ification” of London for The Spectator: “The cliché has it that when America sneezes, Britain catches a cold. London wanted to be New York, Canary Wharf tried to ape Wall Street, and Sloane Rangers started wearing Ralph Lauren. But what if the cold is now travelling east to west, from Dubai to Britain? Scores of young Brits are moving to Dubai. But, more unexpectedly, Dubai’s culture is coming back to us…Dubai is no Eden. But it certainly seems pleasant if you get the Instagram feed of Dubai-based influencers like @Huda (4.7 million followers), or the Crown Prince’s account @Faz3 (17 million followers). The images they post exercise an enormous influence over their young western followers.”
Colwell continues: “If there is some anxiety about the Dubaiification of London, this anxiety is not about Arabic culture in the city; it is not a rejection of the existence of the Edgeware Road. London’s Middle Eastern population goes back a long way. Specifically, this is about the quasi-western, quasi-Arab consumerist culture of Dubai that has taken over areas of the capital in the past decade.”
“A report in the Times found that London was the biggest overseas city for Gulf property investment last year, with a third of ultra-rich individuals having invested here in 2024. A knock-on effect is that developers seem to be treating London as if it were Dubai, a city constructed 70 years ago from nothingness in a desert. But that curated glitzy aesthetic jars with this most pleasingly chaotic city.”
“Thoughts on Sinofuturism”
analyzes the rise of “Sinofuturism” at . He attributes the recent boom in Sinofuturism in the West to four primary factors: “China’s new high-tech industrial model”; “the legacy of China’s real estate boom”; “a charm offensive by China”; and “the election of Donald Trump.” Smith writes: “In turbulent and troubling times, people instinctively grasp for some sort of future to believe in—some positive vision to hold on to. The U.S. and Europe right now don’t have much of a futuristic vision to offer; America continues to inflict wound after wound on itself due to its intractable cultural and partisan divides, while Europe is mired in economic stagnation and is struggling to defend itself against a much smaller, poorer Russia. Sinofuturism might not have been Western intellectuals’ first choice for an alternative, but if it’s a choice between Sinofuturism and bleak nihilism/pessimism, some will choose the former.”
“The Old Global Economic Order is Dead”
At The Financial Times, Martin Wolf asks “who will win the trade war between the US and China? I argued that China would do so, partly because the US has made itself so untrustworthy and partly because China has the option of expanding domestic demand and so offsetting lost US demand. Matthew Klein responds, in his excellent Substack
, that China has long had this option but has failed to use it. My answer is that China must now do so and thus will indeed choose to expand demand rather than accept a huge domestic slump. We shall see.”Among other contrasts, Wolf notes the large discrepancies in investment and consumption between the American and Chinese economies:
Wolf continues: “The outcome of the US-China trade war and the possible evolution of Trump’s tariffs are the immediate questions. But the broader issues considered must not be ignored. Trade policy should not be judged in isolation. As those who founded the postwar trading system, notably Keynes himself, knew, its success also depends on global macroeconomic adjustment and so on how the international monetary system works.In the first act of the postwar period, the US ran huge current account surpluses, but recycled them into lending. In the second act, up to 1971, the US surpluses eroded. This led to the end of the dollar peg and generalised floating cum inflation targeting, at least among high-income countries. That system worked well enough before China’s rapid rise. With that, the era during which the US could act as borrower and spender of last resort, tested in the 1980s by Japan and Germany, became politically and economically unworkable.”
“Trump’s unpredictability and focus for bilateral deals are indeed foolish. But the old US-led economic order is now unsustainable. The US will no longer serve as balancer of last resort. The world—especially China and Europe—has to think afresh.”
“The Post-Neoliberal Imperative”
With the old economic order dead, Jennifer M. Harris forecasts what might come next for Foreign Affairs. She argues, as I have, that both Donald Trump and Joe Biden broke with the neoliberal script with some of their economic policies at the federal level, opening the door for a “post-neoliberal” future: “Post-neoliberalism’s proponents argue that markets tend to concentrate wealth and create power asymmetries. These imbalances create problems for individuals and for an economy as a whole, so it is government’s job to correct them. Otherwise, these imbalances can thwart competition, and before long, capitalism slides into corporatism, the domination of the economy by a handful of powerful groups. States have to manage the economy and ensure that imbalances don’t affect its proper functioning. Moreover, markets are not ends unto themselves, post-neoliberals say, but tools for societies to pursue worthy national aims.”
She continues: “Perhaps the most important question about what should follow neoliberalism is one that societies have largely forgotten how to ask. Four decades of neoliberalism have so thoroughly taught policymakers that the role of government should be limited that public debates about the economy are now constricted to discussions about growth and distribution—the overall size and proportionate slicing of the pie. But what of its contents? Governments should also concern themselves with encouraging the economic arrangements that best enable democratic self-governance and serve to buttress civic life.
“In this sense, Biden’s brand of post-neoliberalism fed the body but not the soul. It focused on material economic questions. It also warned of the dangers to democracy. But for the most part, these were separate endeavors. It never posed the question of what the good life is or sought to guarantee the economic necessities of shared self-rule—the collective participation of citizens in shaping their economic and political institutions rather than having those structures determined by markets or technocratic elites.”
Harris concludes: “[T]here is no going back, not to the heyday of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s or to some sepia-tinted vision of Roosevelt’s Keynesianism. The best outcomes for the United States presume that Americans focus not on denying the coming economic dispensation but on shaping it.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.