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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“The Rich, the Ultra-rich and America’s Shifting Political Landscape”
At The Financial Times, Rana Foroohar reviews two books on class in America: “The psychology of class is at the heart of both [Evan] Osnos’s The Haves and Have-Yachts, which updates and builds on a collection of New Yorker essays about America’s new oligarchy, as well as inequity scholar Joan C Williams’s book Outclassed. Both tell us much about how wealth creation, wealth inequality and the growing economic and emotional gap between elites, super-elites and the precariat in America are shifting the political and cultural landscape.”
“While liberal elites tend to congratulate themselves on their ‘enlightened’ political views and hyper-individualism, working people often see them as selfish, entitled and overprotective of their children. As a former rural Midwesterner constantly dodging helicopter parents and SUV-sized strollers in my overly progressive Brooklyn neighbourhood, I tend to agree.”
Foroohar writes: “Many elites who wouldn’t dream of putting down an immigrant or an LGBT+ person are happy to speak about these people [non-elites] in punitive ways (which says something about the psychology of entitlement). But their condescension has come at a great electoral cost. Much of the latter half of Williams’s book is about helping Democrats—now the party of rich liberals—to understand that privilege isn’t necessarily merit, and condescension is the enemy of successful coalition building.”
“Does the Working Class Vote Against Its Interests?”
At
, analyzes the Democratic Party’s continued failures to reach working class voters. He argues that “Democrats…evade…fundamental questions about the future of economic development, particularly for rural and micropolitan regions. This gradual departure from what political scientists call pre-distribution, or measures to actively foster economic well-being and intergenerational improvements in key outcomes, has been detrimental to how left behind Americans interpret Democratic rhetoric and campaign promises.”Vassallo writes: “Consider what today’s Democrats prioritize when distinguishing their economic record and philosophy from the right. They habitually insist they will ‘defend’ Obamacare, SNAP, and other parts of the safety net from dogmatic, small-government Republicans. Under the circumstances, this appears to be the politically responsible and humane thing to do; cutting funds for such programs and making them harder to access won’t do anything but punish left behind Americans.
“Democrats, however, are less open about what they would do to restore economic opportunity in distressed regions and strengthen Americans’ pride in where they live. They seem equally reluctant to acknowledge that the enrollment surge in means-tested programs such as SNAP since the Great Recession is not necessarily an unqualified testament to government’s ability to help the less fortunate. Indeed, rather than a tribute to Democrats’ good intentions and the effectiveness of the safety net, this trend could be seen as an indictment of America’s labor market policy and the deprivation that offshoring, anemic growth, lousy jobs, and chronic underemployment have created. Moreover, the explosion in food bank usage, crowd-funding to pay for medical procedures, and other forms of charity and nongovernment aid underscore the frequent inadequacy of these programs.”
He argues that the Democrats’ “recurrent emphasis on the social safety net, meanwhile, bespoke a guilty conscience more than a determination to prevent bad outcomes. Mainstream economics, even of the most liberal variety, dictated that the jobs which had provided the foundation for postwar prosperity were obsolete, leaving many well-meaning Democrats at a loss over how to talk about a crisis of development in the world’s most advanced economy…Above all, Democrats must uniformly move beyond treating the symptoms of industrial decline and reimagine the possibilities for those who have been deprived of a dignified livelihood through no fault of their own. Only then will Democrats recall what it meant to build a nation that lifts up those without privilege.”
“Fake LA Riots Video Tricks Internet With AI”
In an interview with Breaking Points, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman discusses the increasing capacity of artificial intelligence-generated videos to fool people. One such example is a widely circulated AI video of protestors in Los Angeles. She states that AI videos “have gotten much more realistic in the last year and they’re going to keep getting much more realistic. I would assume that a year from now, I won’t be able to tell easily whether something like that is real or not based on the actual images and audio.”
Stinebrickner-Kauffman also observes that “there’s a set of people out there who make their money and their fame off of dismissing AI.” This is despite the fact that, once AI-generated videos are indistinguishable from real videos (as they already are for some people) this will make people “discredit true evidence as well.”
“Welcome to Campus. Here’s Your ChatGPT.”
Meanwhile, at American colleges and universities, “OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has a plan to overhaul college education—by embedding its artificial intelligence tools in every facet of campus life.” The New York Times reports that, “If the company’s strategy succeeds, universities would give students A.I. assistants to help guide and tutor them from orientation day through graduation. Professors would provide customized A.I. study bots for each class. Career services would offer recruiter chatbots for students to practice job interviews. And undergrads could turn on a chatbot’s voice mode to be quizzed aloud ahead of a test.”
“OpenAI dubs its sales pitch ‘A.I.-native universities.’ ‘Our vision is that, over time, A.I. would become part of the core infrastructure of higher education,’ Leah Belsky, OpenAI’s vice president of education, said in an interview. In the same way that colleges give students school email accounts, she said, soon ‘every student who comes to campus would have access to their personalized A.I. account.’”
The article continues: “Last fall, OpenAI hired Ms. Belsky to oversee its education efforts. An ed tech start-up veteran, she previously worked at Coursera, which offers college and professional training courses. She is pursuing a two-pronged strategy: marketing OpenAI’s premium services to universities for a fee while advertising free ChatGPT directly to students. OpenAI also convened a panel of college students recently to help get their peers to start using the tech…OpenAI’s push to A.I.-ify college education amounts to a national experiment on millions of students.”
“Love in the Age of TikTok”
In a guest post at
’s Substack, reflects on the pernicious and pervasive effects of contemporary social media forms on relationships: “[W]e rarely consider how the brevity and relentless form of social media itself might be warping our ability to love. Regardless of political or religious affiliation, a generation of twenty- and thirty-year-olds devotes hours to scrolling through Reels every day and is unaware of their psychological effects. What once seemed the exclusive domain of TikTok and Instagram has also colonised Facebook and YouTube, transforming them into sprawling archives of bite-sized distractions…[T]hese platforms overwhelm us with relentless immediacy, eroding the space required for thoughtful interaction. This torrent of reels may seem trivial at first glance, but its broader implications for how we connect—with ideas and with each other—strike a deep terror.”Cortez notes that, in response to modern dating and its discontents, conservatives “often lay the blame at the feet of the sexual revolution. But if young conservatives are consciously and sometimes even loudly critical of the legacy of the long ’60s, and yet are still affected by the shifting sands of modern love, could there be something more amiss? We may be overlooking even stronger forces that have conspired to destroy romantic relationships, the sanctity of marriage, and the role of family as a pillar of stability as they were upheld before modern disruptions. The invisible forces governing our era insidiously influence young minds—regardless of their convictions.”
She concludes: “As my fingers graze the screen, I lie to myself. If only we returned to tradition, we could escape the disarray of modern love. But neither nostalgia nor ideology will reverse what has already been set in motion. We are all trapped in the same current, and the truth is laid bare—unlike the intimacy I’ve learned to fear. No, we did not abandon love; we have been rewired to be incapable of attaining it, let alone holding onto it. All that remains is the question of whether we are still human enough to resist forces never meant to be resisted—or if we have already surrendered, no longer sentient minds, but mere circuits in the vast network we once thought we controlled.”
“Rivers in Deep Time”
At It’s Wild Out Here, Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman writes on the concept of deep time and rivers: “While climate change headlines fill our timelines, a more permanent shift is taking place. Right now, the Brahmaputra river is being cut apart. In Tibet, China is building a series of massive dams at the headwaters, where the river is called the Yarlung Tsangpo. One of them, the Medog mega dam, will be one of the biggest in the world. It's being built at the Great Bend, a site sacred to local communities who believe it is the home of a goddess—Goddess Dorje Phagmo. Further downstream, in Arunachal Pradesh and Assam, India is preparing its own line-up of dams. The Siang, a major tributary of the Brahmaputra, is set to be divided into 36 separate projects. This is no longer about control, regulation or development. This is dismemberment.”
“We often think of time in terms of our own lives: school years, careers, deadlines, five-year plans. But rivers do not think in five-year plans. They think in centuries, thousands of years, millennia. Deep time is the time of riverbeds shifting, of monsoon patterns forming, of mountain ranges rising. It’s the time a river takes to shape a valley. To become home for somebody. Or to become a God for somebody living along it.”
Rahman concludes: “A river cannot be managed in fragments. It must be understood in flow. Through flood songs. Through migration patterns. Through rituals that mark its changes. And to do that, we must listen to those who have lived with the river. The river doesn’t care about borders. But it will respond to what we do. And if we continue to treat it like a resource instead of an ancestor, it may stop giving life, and start taking it.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.