Weekly Groundings are published on Fridays 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.

Subscribe now

“The US Is Looking More Like Italy”

At The Financial Times, Rana Foroohar writes “that America is starting to look more like Italy, another western nation with a turbulent history…The US is no longer an exceptional nation in any positive sense. I sense my fellow Americans starting to think about corruption as endemic, something ordinary people can’t do much about. This reminds me of the shoulder-shrugging ‘what can you do?’ attitude towards bad political behaviour or black-market economies that you find elsewhere. According to a recent Gallup poll, the percentage of Americans who say corruption in government is widespread has risen from 60 per cent in 2006 to 89 per cent today.”

She reports that “Economic cynicism is growing too, especially among young people. One of the most striking things about the US economy today is how the labour market is beginning to mirror the two-tiered, age-divided system that has dogged European nations like Italy, forcing younger people to live longer with their parents or leave the country for more upward mobility. The last US jobs report, out in early September, found that unemployment was 7.1 per cent for ages 20-24, as compared to 3.6 per cent for those 25-54 and 3 per cent for those over 55. Youth unemployment in Italy is much higher—a whopping 20 per cent. But the ratios are similar, with unemployment among younger people roughly double that of middle-aged workers.”

“Some of this two-tiered labour market problem revolves around age,” Foroohar notes, “but some of it is about who your parents are. If you are an insider, you have opportunity. If you are an outsider, by race or class, you have less. As academics like Raj Chetty have shown, America is looking much more like Old Europe these days in terms of mobility: where and to whom you are born has an outsized impact on how much or whether you prosper. These trends may be amplified by AI, which paradoxically seems to be favouring not young digital natives but rather older workers who have the sectoral experience necessary to leverage the technology and do not face the same risk of disruption as those seeking entry-level jobs. In a paper published in September, the Census Bureau estimated that graduates in the most AI-exposed areas would suffer a five-percentage-point decline in the likelihood of initial employment and 13 per cent lower earnings than those going into less-exposed sectors.”

“Why Italians Are Moving to America”

Offering a different take on Italy and America at , writes: “When I speak to my Italian friends, they are in disbelief that I wouldn’t want to live in America because of the opportunities it offers…When I speak to my American friends and tell them I want to move here, they are similarly in disbelief, but for the opposite reason: That I don’t want to live in Italy. After all, Italy is known as a breathtaking country with the richest cultural heritage in the world (an objective fact, according to UNESCO). Many Americans don’t understand why I wouldn’t want a softer, more enjoyable pace of life, or why I wouldn’t want to be surrounded by such monumental, meaningful beauty built by my ancestors.”

A “bodybuilder I met,” she recounts, “left his seemingly comfortable life in Italy to become a freelance bouncer at clubs in Miami. He shares an apartment in his mid-thirties now with other friends and is about to finalize an arranged marriage with an American woman to achieve his Green Card. He is paid to go out to dinner with women merely to enjoy his presence (and nothing else). This may objectively seem like a downgrade from living in the ‘most beautiful country in the world’ with a stable job, free healthcare, surrounded by friends and family, historical architecture, and the sense of deep connection to one’s ancestry. However, he is happier because he feels free; he can sense the energetic pulse and dynamism of America, finally affording him the chance to build something for himself. He feels alive because of the risk inherent in opportunity. He said that the last time he returned home, he cried in the taxi. That’s how I felt about returning to Italy. The only thing I’m looking forward to is going back to painting at my academy with my exceptional professors, friends, and seeing my dog, and of course enjoying the architecture around me. But I know there is no surprise; it’s all perfectly predictable. I’m aware of the monotony that awaits me, and I’m dreading it.”

Bocchi continues: “Americans have a romanticized image of Italy because of the ‘Dolce Vita’ Lifestyle, which, in reality, represents the apex of bourgeois decadence. It’s what Americans perceive when visiting as outsiders because of Hollywood’s cinematic depiction. A commercial image that is so distant from the nation’s true identity…As much as the American dream is far from what it used to be, in Europe, you feel that you are forbidden from dreaming at all. And as much as living among ruins carries a fascination of its own, it soon becomes a tragedy of what no longer is.”

Share

“Restoring Title IX Kangaroo Courts Is no Solution to the ‘Cornell 7’ Sexual Assault Controversy”

At , writes that “As a nation, we have already run a generation-long experiment of having the higher ed sector conduct Title IX complaint processes unburdened by even rudimentary protections—and it was a disaster. Since…1999, we have seen case after case in which colleges held sexual misconduct ‘hearings’ hardly worthy of the name, routinely denying accused students (and sometimes also the alleged victims) basic protections.”

“Americans old enough to have been in high school or college around the turn of the millennium,” he continues, “will likely remember at least two of the most prominent campus sexual assault stories: the 2006 Duke Lacrosse rape accusations, and the 2014 Rolling Stone story about an alleged incident at a University of Virginia fraternity house. Both stories turned out to be fraudulent. Both ended with millions of dollars being paid out in the wake of lawsuits, and the destruction of the careers of Mike Nifong, the Durham County district attorney disbarred for his persecution of the accused Duke students, and Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the author of the Rolling Stone piece.

“It would be foolish to extrapolate from these two cases that allegations of campus sexual assault are likely to be false. But it is equally foolish to come away with the conclusion that it’s not worth implementing basic protections to prevent false accusations from ruining the lives of those who are unjustly (or even just erroneously) targeted. Indeed, one need not get anywhere near an alcohol- and drug-fueled fraternity party to become involved in a campus Title IX controversy.”

“The Twilight of the Intellectual Dark Web”

At Unherd, states that, “At his peak, [Jordan] Peterson was a true force to be reckoned with: one of the first Anglosphere academics to stand up to the madness not only of gender ideology, but of the excesses of wokeness more generally. When nearly everyone else was too afraid to speak up, Peterson planted his flag against the crybullies. Following his resignation from the University of Toronto, and ejection into the wilds of self-employment, thousands of frustrated people began discovering Peterson’s psychology lectures on YouTube."

“That space, far from the petty tyranny of campus HR officers and faculty subcommittees, is one many still believe offers the ultimate balance between freedom of thought and financial gain—especially when combined with social media fame. Peterson’s trajectory, alongside that of others in what came to be called the ‘intellectual dark web,’ suggests otherwise. More than that, far from providing the space to explore new and challenging ideas, social media fame demands a brand of conformity every bit as anti-intellectual as its progressive mirror.”

“Over the last few years, [Jordan Peterson] has devolved from an earnest Toronto professor to an archetypal over-tanned Arizona snowbird, one who claims that Marx was summoning the power of the Devil. Or else there’s Weiss, who first rose to prominence criticizing the feminist Left’s embrace of antisemites—but whose brand of ‘viewpoint diversity’ now leaves little space for thoughtful critiques of Wall Street, tech monopolies or Israel. It’s clear, at this point, that the intellectual ‘heterodoxy’ movement died on the vine. ​​Whatever promise heterodoxy had is now long gone, with Peterson most recently becoming a podcast host on Ben Shapiro’s shamelessly partisan Daily Wire operation.”

“Unfortunately for Peterson,” Moench concludes, “his health struggles have become a punchline on both the online Right and Left. But this bipartisan fixation on the oddity of his condition—armchair diagnosing it, mocking it, politicizing it—obscures what Peterson’s sad trajectory actually reveals. The Canadian’s fall from grace is not just a personal failing, nor merely a story of fame gone wrong. It reflects, rather, how the absence of any stable, supportive intellectual home reduces heterodox thinkers to circus acts, dancing for the nickels of the donor class and moronic reply guys.

“Inside academia, heterodox work is still very much constrained, if not actively punished. Outside it, the incentives of audience capture, donor pressure, and constant performance distort it to the point that those attempting to sustain heterodox thought become caricatures of themselves—unstable, unreliable, and easily dismissed by the institutions they once challenged. And no wonder. Wokeness was never a glitch in the neoliberal order, instead reflecting, as the communitarians understood, the natural outgrowth of instrumentalist reasoning and deepening inequality. Both are part and parcel of liberal capitalism pushed to its functional limits. What a shame that heterodoxy as currently constituted leaves all of this untouched.”

“Humanism and Its Discontents”

At , writes that “humanism, at least as I intend to use the word, is less a movement or an ideology than a sympathy or an orientation, one which dons various attire throughout its long history, seldom demonstrating much interest in creeds or purity tests, or in the vigilant policing of its porous borders. The Roman playwright Terence declared its classical epitome: “homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto”—’I am human, nothing that is human is alien to me.’ And this attitude has captured for all time humanism’s peculiarly capacious exclusivity: comprehensive in scope, yet restricted to the concerns and experiences of one particular sort of being.”

“Humanism,” Anderson goes on, “has a bright future behind it. Its ancient roots have been fed and refreshed time and again by new contributors, acquiring over centuries novel dimensions along with a robust vocabulary for the capacities and potentialities, if not entirely unique to the human being, then at least core to its distinctive maturation. Those approaches to life which we can broadly call ‘humanistic’ can’t be reduced to a single vision, much less a universal doctrine, but on the whole they tend to emphasize an openness to and interest in the possibilities of human creativity, agency, and achievement, and the conditions characteristic of a form of life we would be tempted to endorse as ‘eudaimonic.’ But by the twentieth century, the humiliations of modern science and the suspicions of modern thought had caught up with that ‘human prejudice’, as it’s been called, and many of the commitments of traditional humanism as it had long been understood began to look tired, antiquated, and arbitrary. And in the practical domain, the rise of industrialism gradually shifted its long-established concern for human wellbeing away from human cultivation and towards technical administration.”

“‘What is a human being for?’ This once-speculative question, apparently empty of any practical significance, has lately entered the public arena with a salience and urgency unthinkable just a few years ago. Thinkpieces and podcasts about the impact of AI have been asking it regularly, as if such reflection only became essential the moment we began to worry our machines might do it better—as if their doing it had any bearing on whether we should keep doing it. Elon Musk, to highlight one noteworthy instance, recently offered his own answer. ‘Sometimes I wonder what is our purpose,’ he mused earlier this year before an adulating crowd at a closed-door gathering of SpaceX and xAI employees, ‘and it could be that the purpose of humanity is to give birth to a star mind, a sentient sun.’ And what loftier sacrifice could we find, really, than to lean further into what already appears inevitable, and trade mere human life for such a stellar purpose?”

Anderson argues that we have now come to “come due for another ‘two cultures’ moment: a renewed public reckoning over the meaning and purpose of uniquely human modes of existence under the conditions of the technological civilization of the twenty-first, one that asks how we might imagine living worthwhile lives, having neither dissolved back into the earth nor been effaced in the hostile takeover of technology—even after both these options have come to appear, at least to some, not only thinkable but possible and even necessary.”

What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.

Leave a comment

And if you’d like to help the publication grow, you can share Handful of Earth with a friend or make a one-time donation to support my work.

Share Handful of Earth

Support Handful of Earth

Due to a combination of personal and professional obligations, I’ve been very busy and haven’t been able to put together Weekly Groundings the past couple weeks. However, Weekly Groundings are back today with #161!

For those of you who are new here, Weekly Groundings are published on Fridays 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.

Subscribe now

“We Are Setting Up a Generation to Fail at School”

At The Financial Times, reports: “When the OECD’s Pisa study of teenage reading, mathematics and science abilities around the world showed a marked drop in 2022, many hoped this was a short-term hit from pandemic learning disruptions. The 2025 figures published a few days ago showed the opposite: a steepening of the decline. All told, the results show fifteen-year-olds in high-income countries today are roughly one and a half years behind their 2015 counterparts in terms of literacy, knowledge and reasoning skills.”

“We should always be careful of over-interpreting alarming trends,” Burn-Murdoch continues, “but the findings align with separate measures of adult skills, plus national tests as well as long-running surveys tracking young people’s difficulties with concentration and learning…My worry is that, in many countries, the past decade has seen a dangerous combination of weakening standards and reduced rigour in education. This has happened just as the rise of digital distractions and shortcuts has made these skills especially important for young people to develop the knowledge and abilities they will need in an uncertain future.”

“The Kids Are Alright”

At , reports from the ground on the recent high school student protests in France: “There is a deeply existential backdrop that these students are responding to, in short the fact that they recognize that their prospect of a decent future is dim. They are responding to both current local and global material conditions, a phenomenon that we currently seeing in rising protest movements throughout Europe. They know that they have and are being screwed in a myriad of ways and are responding accordingly, starting with and within the milieu where they experience it by default—their schools.”

She writes: “I spent nearly two decades on the front line of protest movements in the United States. And in that time, I saw nothing near the amount of violence toward the average protestor that I’ve seen here while on the front lines of protest movements in France over the past ten years…The French police may not carry so-called ‘lethal’ weapons the way that the American police do. What they’re shooting may not be guns with bullets designed to kill, but overall, the French police are actually much more violent than the American police. Not only do they regularly succeed in killing and maiming people without even needing lethal weapons, but they are willing to commit violence against groups that American police would never dream of touching, and this is one of the most significant differences between the French and the American police.”

Valkyrie reports that “the police oppression towards these students has been shocking and unprecedented, even by modern-day French standards. In the past three weeks, nearly 8,000 demonstrators have been arrested and subsequently held in police custody, 86% of them minors. By comparison, there were fewer protesters detained during the entire first year of the Yellow Vests movement (2018-2019)6. Those detained have reported being held for hours on end in what they describe as a campaign of intimidation to make them ‘shut up.’ In the past ten days, multiple reports, videos, and eyewitness accounts have revealed a plethora of severe injuries due to police violence, amongst them a student who lost a hand, another who lost an eye, and one whose jaw was destroyed due to the use of stun grenade. After the incident where a student lost his hand hit the headlines, the government responded by announcing that they would no longer use a certain type stun grenades against high school students.”

Share

“The Spirit of the Nineties and the Malaise of Today”

At , describes the global zeitgeist of the 1990s: “It was a spirit that saw violent conflict as obsolete, that believed that all issues can be set aright through technological advances or economic schemes. It saw the commercialization of all activities not only as desirable as such but as a tool toward more prosperous and peaceful world. If there was still a problem, it was because no technical solution for it was yet invented, or a market where the problem would be auctioned off and resolved had not been created. It was exactly the middle-class narrow spirit, as described by Tocqueville: sans grandeur, but quite unaware of it and not seeking it. It was not a bellicose spirit; it was pacific and trustful of perfectibility of man and society. It was teleological. It did not see history as cyclical, but as a straight upward line.”

He asks: “Was the spirit of the nineties really believed by those who professed it, and were they aware that they might have believed it because it was pleasing to them morally and materially? I had always had trouble finding an answer to that question. But I have no difficulty describing and locating that spirit, particularly because I lived through it in an environment which reflected it probably better than any other place in the world: in Washington, D.C., working for an international institution and then for a US think tank. I was at the cross-section of the spirit that emanated originally from the ruling classes of the United States, but by the early 1990s became accepted by everybody who mattered anywhere in the world. Everybody who mattered (that is, who had some amount of political and economic influence)—and these were the people I would meet in and around Washington, might have they arrived from whatever faraway county—believed in it. Or seemed to believe in it.”

“What many of its adherents did not perceive,” Milanovic continues, “was that it also suited their own material interests. They did not want to look at that part, or most likely were reluctant to acknowledge it even to themselves, And, in fact, that part was not even apparent so long as their interests were in accord with the spirit of the time. What created problems and ultimately destroyed the spirit of the nineties was that material interests of many individuals and geopolitical interests of some nations were no longer served well by the spirit of the nineties.”

He writes that “Materially, the rise of China and more broadly of Asia lowered the economic position of Western middle classes, made their jobs redundant or precarious, while on the geopolitical stage, the rise of China challenged the dominant position of the United States. This double change (at the individual, and national levels) revealed deep inconsistencies in the spirit of the nineties. It was argued that the spirit was ‘sharing’ and cosmopolitan; and indeed it was so long as the relative betterment of the Third World involved countries and peoples without significant power or role globally. But as soon as that betterment spread sufficiently (as it did with China), it was no longer desirable. So, one was forced to conclude: improvement in welfare of the poor is desirable only so long as it does not markedly affect the relative power and the position of the rich. Once such a caveat is made, though, the entire pacific and cosmopolitan spirit if the nineties is exposed as an ideological cover to service interests of the rich.”

“The Exciting Boring Decade”

Reflecting on the 2020s at The Financial Times, Janan Ganesh asks: “Shouldn’t the world be enjoying an artistic bonanza right now? If there is a link between social strife and creative breakthroughs, there has been enough of the first—Brexit, Donald Trump, Covid, Ukraine, Iran—to trigger the second. Original ideas should grace the screens, the bookshelves, the concert stages. Instead, once again, the big summer films—The Odyssey and Spider-Man this time—are reworkings of old intellectual property. There has been no entirely new genre of pop music for a while. Even if you believe in the Golden Age of Television, it began when the world was rolling along smoothly in the noughties, so can’t be ‘credited’ to the more recent chaos.”

”Well,” he goes on, “I have been reading for a decade now that experts, authorities and gatekeepers have lost all legitimacy. It follows that audiences should be drowning in artistic experimentation right now. Where is it? One explanation is that…Artistic leaps happen for reasons that no one understands. There is no correlative, much less causal, link between events and art. You wouldn’t know from the conventional and almost geometric orderliness of Mozart’s music that violent revolutions and counter-revolutions were going on.”

“But I prefer another answer,” Ganesh concludes. “We don’t in fact live in interesting times. Only historical ignorance gulls us into mistaking this for an era of unusual chaos. The inflation rate in 2022 was about half what it was at the turn of the 1980s. The wars of today are localised and inconclusive. Technocrats have become deft at mitigating what should be all-consuming disasters, whether financial or biomedical, with a bailout here and a furlough there. A visitor to 2026 from a couple of generations ago would notice the low levels of violent crime, the general material comfort and the racial peace before noticing the joker in the White House or even the talk of war…Upheaval is a creative spur. There is just less of it than people are able to perceive. That the 38th film of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a cultural event is embarrassing, and in a sense our highest achievement.”

“Three Cheers for the Omniculture”

At Unherd, Michael Lind observes that, “At some point in the past few years, visiting nearly every major city in Europe or the Americas became indistinguishable from visiting every other major city in these regions. You could gawk at a billboard for Kylie Jenner’s makeup line on a roadside in West Hollywood or in Paris. You could dine at the Chinatown in Vegas or the one in Rome. You could book a 7 a.m. padel court in Stockholm or in São Paulo.

“Many intellectuals and revolutionaries, Right-wing and Left, find this apparent sameness—omniculture, they’d call it—downright repellent. For conservatives, it signals the erasure of particularity by ‘globalism.’ Leftists, meanwhile, see in the omniculture the triumph of a consumerist economy built on exploitation. What neither camp appreciates is that this sameness is the source of the West’s enduring influence at a time when the United States and its allies are in relative decline thanks mainly to the rise of China.”

Lind writes that “The emerging pan-Western omniculture is deeply pluralistic—but the pluralism is based on functions and sectors, not on races or religions. In premodern multiethnic societies, segregated, parallel communities often existed side by side, as in the millet system of the Ottoman Empire, which allowed minorities a restricted freedom to practice their own religion and establish their own culture and law. In today’s Really Existing West, by contrast, horizontal stratification of different areas of life has replaced vertical communal divisions. There is a pan-Western business and economic culture; a pan-Western academic culture; a pan-Western avant-garde artistic culture; and various pan-Western musical styles with fans everywhere (rock, pop, rap). The same individual can participate in all of these subcultures at different times, with no sense of contradiction.”

He argues that this set up “would have been familiar to ancient Greeks and Romans and premodern East Asians. In the Hellenistic era and the Roman period that followed, formerly segregated and separate cultures of the Mediterranean disintegrated and became parts of a kaleidoscopic whole in which at least some individuals could pick and choose among fragments of different traditions. People could take part in imperial or civic rites, worship their ancestors and household spirits, practice Stoicism or Epicureanism, and belong to this or that mystery cult at the same time. Similarly, in premodern China and Japan, you could be a Confucian in public life, a Taoist in private life, and perhaps a Buddhist on some occasions for particular purposes. This kind of cafeteria approach to culture—with no comprehensive dogma governing every aspect of life, and with some transnational subcultures appropriate for some functions but not others—is the emerging norm in the Really Existing West.”

“Subcultural pluralism, however, is not liberal individualism,” Lind continues. “The local geographic community has given way to multiple transnational communities for many people, but these decentralized communities can be just as conformist and intolerant. Marshall McLuhan believed that modern communications technology would create a ‘global village.’ Yet global villages—plural—would be more accurate. The same neoliberal economic orthodoxy is taught in business schools in the United States, France, and Brazil, while the same intolerant woke identity politics structures the arts and humanities on both sides of the Atlantic. You can choose to enjoy country music or rap, but each has its zealously guarded standards of authentic tradition.”

What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.

Leave a comment

And if you’d like to help the publication grow, you can share Handful of Earth with a friend or make a one-time donation to support my work.

Share Handful of Earth

Support Handful of Earth

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.

Subscribe now

“Automation Is Coming for the Gig Economy”

At The Financial Times, Sarah O’Connor reports: “This year has brought a reckoning for white-collar gig platforms like Fiverr or Upwork, which connect companies to freelancers all over the world to complete well-defined projects such as copywriting or graphic design. It turns out that by breaking jobs into tasks that are performed remotely, stripping them of the need for institutional knowledge or personal relationships, they have made that work particularly vulnerable to being replaced by AI…Although both platforms say they are pivoting towards higher-end work less vulnerable to automation, investors are not convinced. Fiverr and Upwork’s share prices have dropped 61 per cent and 47 per cent respectively over the past year.”

She notes that “Gig platforms have…become a safety net for people who have fallen out of—or struggled to access—the formal labour market. A report by the World Bank in 2023 estimated there were between 154mn and 435mn online gig workers globally, representing between 4.4 and 12.5 per cent of the global labour force. Among the advantages of this development, according to the report’s authors, are that it ‘helps manage income shock’ and ‘serves as unemployment insurance.’”

“China is perhaps the best example of a country in which gig work has served as a labour market shock absorber,” O’Connor writes. “Amid a prolonged construction downturn and the increasing automation of manufacturing work, the number of people who work as food delivery or ridesharing drivers in China increased by 10mn in two years to reach 53mn in 2025, according to estimates by the China New Employment Forms Research Center, a Beijing think-tank. So what happens if the shock absorber gets hit with a shock of its own? Because nobody employs gig workers, there is nobody to fire them either. Instead, the impact is likely to unfold under the radar in the form of fewer tasks and lower incomes, rather than the sort of job losses that economists usually trace.”

She concludes: “The gig economy was never a great safety net, since it leaves people with no employment rights or protections, and patchy support from the state in terms of pensions and benefits. But now there is a new danger: robots are quietly nibbling holes in it. Policymakers might not notice until the bottom falls out.”

“Robots Will Replace 700,000 Delivery Workers ‘Sooner or Later’, Warns JD.com Boss”

Also at The Financial Times, Joe Leahy reports that “The head of one of China’s biggest ecommerce groups has warned that its 700,000 delivery workers will be replaced by robots ‘sooner or later,’ underlining the threat from rapid automation to the country’s already strained employment market. Richard Liu, founder and chair of JD.com, said the company had signed contracts with about 120 schools to retrain its army of couriers for new work such as repairing and maintaining robots.”

“‘In the future, when robots are delivering parcels, sooner or later, there will be a day when couriers are basically no longer needed,’ Liu told the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation CEO forum in Beijing on Sunday. ‘It will definitely be robots delivering parcels. But I really do not want our 700,000 brothers to go without meals, without jobs.’ Lui did not forecast when robot deliveries would become widespread in China. However, a number of pilot projects are under way, including airport food delivery robots in Shenzhen that take meals to passengers at gates and others that can ride commuter trains in Shenzhen to restock convenience stores, Chinese media have reported.”

The article reports that “Gig workers make up about 40 per cent of all urban employment in China. The threat to blue-collar jobs from robots—and to white-collar positions from AI—comes as the government reported youth unemployment at 16.3 per cent in April…Beijing prioritised frontier technologies such as robotics in its next five-year plan, its flagship policy document that was officially approved in March. China’s plan puts ‘robotics at the heart of its modern industrial system,’ the International Federation of Robotics said. ‘The aim is to pivot its AI research towards physical applications with robots as main drivers for economic growth.’”

Share

“An M.I.T. Report Warns A.I. Is Causing ‘Cognitive Surrender.’ Universities Are in a Bind.”

“The worries that artificial intelligence is degrading education have been building for months,” The New York Times reports. “Students are using it for everything, including cheating, and a recent report out of M.I.T. said it is triggering ‘cognitive surrender.’ Many university leaders are embracing A.I. with enthusiasm anyway. As A.I. leaders warn about the dangers of their own technology, the dissonance between the optimism of university leaders and the fears of many students and professors may increase.”

“The committee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying A.I. use released a number of alarming findings, including that the technology has caused ‘major shifts in campus culture,’ isolating students who are skipping office hours and ditching communal studying. Getting answers from a bot can create ‘the illusion of learning’ for students who reach for A.I. ‘at the first hint of struggle,’ the M.I.T. committee wrote in its August report.”

Despite these findings, “Many universities are embracing A.I. anyway…Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, said in public remarks this month that A.I.-backed research is on the cusp of a boom that may drive the pace of knowledge faster than at any other time in human history. Dr. Garber has said that researchers in many fields are now unlikely to be at the leading edge of their disciplines without A.I.”

“AI Has Plunged the Book Publishing Industry Into Utter Chaos”

At The Wall Street Journal, writes that, “with a new AI scandal engulfing publishing seemingly every month, it’s become more difficult to punt questions about its impact into some distant future. The spectacular implosions of big book deals over suspected AI use—and fears about who might be next—are forcing a reckoning over the nature of authorship, the relationship between writers and publishers and the industry’s long-term survival. But nobody can seem to agree who exactly is responsible for solving this problem, or even how much a problem it actually is.”

“Last year, 70 authors including Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Franzen signed an open letter to publishers voicing concerns about generative AI and asking them to make ‘a pledge that they will never release books that were created by machines.’ Yet the Big Five—Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group and Macmillan—have largely been reluctant to make sweeping pronouncements about a technology that is both potentially lucrative and increasingly ubiquitous. (Many of them are also involved in lawsuits against tech companies for training their models on copyrighted books.) Instead, they find themselves running to put out fires when scandals over AI use become too reputationally damaging to ignore.”

Silman continues: “Desperate to find hits in a time when most people are reading less and less, publishers often look to pick up self-published works that have already found an audience, a category where agents and editors say AI use is especially prevalent. But self-published authors are far from the only writers using these tools. In May, author Steven Rosenbaum, who is published by an imprint of BenBella Books, came under fire when the New York Times found he had included AI-hallucinated quotes in his book ‘The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality.’ He was open about using LLMs as a resource in the book’s acknowledgments.”

Share Handful of Earth

“Columns and Pillars”

At , traces the history of the newspaper column back to mid-18th century London. “[T]he format was exhibiting the ingredients of the modern columnist: personality, regularity, controversy, reader appetite, and enemies, almost from the beginning. While the idea of a newspaper came up partly from a desire to distribute information more efficiently, the column emerged from the understanding that readers wanted help deciding what that information meant.”

“The freedom columns enjoyed helped to create, over the years, a distinctive kind of literary journalism,” he writes. “A reported article will generally begin with an event and move towards explanation. A column can begin with a man complaining about the weather, a badly written signboard or a book found on a table, and end somewhere entirely unexpected. The form allows for such associations. The best columnists make this look natural and effortless, which is one reason readers underestimate the craft. A good column may contain reporting, history, argument, anecdote, statistics, philosophy, and humour, all while pretending to have been written because the writer happened to have an opinion while sipping morning tea.”

Jinoy observes that “continuity is the column’s real advantage. An individual social-media post has the lifespan of whatever has distracted the reader most recently. A column can accumulate an archive, and the archive becomes a record of a mind reading and responding to history, though in a hurry. Read a good columnist over five years, and you discover something more valuable than a series of opinions: you learn a method of thinking. You can disagree with Vaishna Roy about Kashmir, the budget, cinema, cricket or the meaning of democracy and still be interested in how she arrives at the conclusion. The reader develops a relationship with the reasoning itself. That is why the column still serves as one of the small pillars of a society’s conversation with itself.”

“Substack is Airbnb for Journalism”

At , observes that “The top political publication at Substack is The Free Press, a $150 million company now owned by Paramount Skydance, whose founder now heads up CBS News. Next up is The Bulwark, which brings in $12 million in annual revenue and which was founded by a Republican political consultant, a journalist who has been a star on conservative talk radio since the early 90s, and the neocon founder of The Weekly Standard who almost single-handedly engineered the propaganda campaign that led to the Iraq War. The number three Substacker in technology is one of the most famous Silicon Valley venture capitalists in the world, who co-hosts a massively successful podcast with the guy who wrote the Trump administration’s AI platform. The Substack leaderboards are filled with celebrity household names, while the New York Times masthead is populated by people you’ve never heard of. Who is the media establishment here? Beats me.”

“I don’t mind Substack patting itself on the back for its success, which has been fairy tale-level remarkable,” he continues. “For decades, the legacy media has badly deserved to be disrupted, and Substack is the company that pulled it off. But the social impact of that success has been, on balance, a wash. The stars of the media establishment have not been displaced by Substack, but buoyed by it…Airbnb once disrupted the hospitality industry, though hotels still seem to be doing fine. Not unlike Substack, the company boasted incessantly about how it was the champion of regular people in desperate need of supplemental income. What it became was a platform for corporate middlemen to corner a new market that peeled a few customers away from Hilton, Marriott, and La Quinta Inn. The power structure remained intact, but now Airbnb is a modest part of it.”

“That’s what Substack is,” Woodhouse concludes. “With a handful of exceptions, few are making real money on it who weren’t already getting paid extremely well in media or business. The company has tilted the balance of power in the media industry, but only between the executives in the C-suite and their on-camera or in-print star talent. And the legacy brands are already joining the party, like they did when Facebook, YouTube, and every other tech media disruptor started chiseling away at their business model. There is nothing revolutionary about this. It’s your grandmother’s capitalism.

“Substack is great blogging software, and its subscription platform is a handy tip jar. The discoverability it provides through Notes and Recommendations probably compensates for Elon Musk burying its links on X. These are nice things. They’re not great things. They don’t challenge anyone in particular. They don’t topple media empires. They don’t discover great talents in the wilderness and bless them with magical wings. The Substack platform is a feature. It’s fun and it’s useful. It gets a lot of attention and generates a lot of money for its investors. It’s Katie Couric at a house party. It’s Mehdi Hasan flying commercial. It is what it is, which is really not all that much.”

What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.

Leave a comment

And if you’d like to help the publication grow, you can share Handful of Earth with a friend or make a one-time donation to support my work.

Share Handful of Earth

Support Handful of Earth

Monthly Musings are published during the last week of every month. In each Monthly Muse, I recap content from the past month of Handful of Earth, offer some freewheeling reflections, and share a passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.

Here’s the September 2026 Monthly Muse.

Recapitulation

• Weekly Grounding #156

• Weekly Grounding #157

• Weekly Grounding #158

• Weekly Grounding #159

Share Handful of Earth

Contemplation

I’ve had a busy month and have not had the time to write a follow-up to my piece from last month, “Globalize the Resistance to AI.” But there certainly has been a lot to follow up on. In that article, I argued that

By targeting AI as a whole rather than just the data center buildout, America’s most inspiring populist movement could also transform itself into the global vanguard against gradual disempowerment, rapid takeoff, and other forms of AI existential risk which have not yet been confronted by an organized political movement.

The events of the past month and the broader debate that they have sparked have moved the conversation about AI well beyond data centers. This is a very positive development. At the end of my article, I wrote that

A global moratorium on AI development may not be as popular as the more limited demand for a moratorium on new AI data centers in the United States. But only a year ago few would have predicted that opposition to data centers would become the central domestic issue to unite Americans across vast political divides. Who are we to say what will be possible within the next year?

I could update “the next year” to “the next month.” Indeed, there is considerable momentum behind a moratorium, and it is our job to build what I call the people’s off switch. More, I hope, on this soon.

Leave a comment

Provocation

“Knowledge, everywhere, is coming to be regarded not as a good in itself, or as a means of creating a broad and humane outlook on life in general, but as merely an ingredient in technical skill. This is part of the greater integration of society which has been brought about by scientific technique and military necessity. There is more economic and political interdependence than there was in former times, and therefore there is more social pressure to compel a man to live in a way that his neighbors think useful…We are all more aware of our fellow- citizens than we used to be, more anxious, if we are virtuous, to do them good, and in any case to make them do us good…We feel that everybody ought to be doing something to help on the great cause (whatever it may be), the more so as so many bad men are working against it and ought to be stopped. We have not leisure of mind, therefore, to acquire any knowledge ex­cept such as will help us in the fight for whatever it may happen to be that we think important.”

—Bertrand Russell, “‘Useless’ Knowledge”

Subscribe now

Support Handful of Earth

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.

Subscribe now

“Model, Predict, Control”

“Everything is mediated by algorithms now—the good and the bad; the malicious and the sublime. And that includes politics,” writes at . “Everything in politics is mediated by platforms and algorithms and the massive corporations that control them: the voter outreach, the organizing, the prediction and modeling, the communication… Even politicians who go against the status quo, like Zohran Mamdani, depend on computer platforms and their algorithms to reach the masses and win elections. People think this is something new, but as far as politics go, we are now in a process that started almost 75 years ago—the better part of a century!”

He continues: “I want to go back in time to the first time that computers entered politics in a major visible way: the presidential election of 1952, which pitted Adlai Stevenson and Dwight D. Eisenhower. That year CBS made history by contracting with UNIVAC—an early computer company that came out of the U.S. Army—to do live on-air election result predictions, the kind of stuff that’s just done as a matter of fact by all the major networks now. Back then no one thought that a computer could do something as complex as predict election results. And even though the UNIVAC did correctly predict the election, the whole bit was done mostly for hype and rating—a way to draw viewers to the network with a novelty (and a way to advertise this newfangled technology).”

“But even if it was initially a gimmick,” Levine observes, “it didn’t remain one for long. Because from then on computers and algorithms increasingly wormed their way into all parts of the political process—not just election day tallying but everything…even affecting how people thought about politics.”

“The Internet is Evil”

In Part 1 of a series at , discusses “the physical basis of the internet.” He describes what happens every time a smart phone is used to access the internet: “First, your phone sends a message encoded in a powerful ping of radio waves to confirm that it is connected to a nearby cell phone tower or a WiFi router. Traveling at the speed of light, those radio waves reach the tower or router nearly instantaneously. There, a specialized receiver captures the incoming signal, decodes the embedded information, and confirms that a connection to the internet has been established. Electricity floods into a transmitter, and a return radio signal is delivered to your phone.

“Next, your device sends another pulse of radio waves; this time, the message is routed through the tower or WiFi router, along a physical cable stretching across the landscape to a specialized type of computer called a ‘DNS server’ held in a massive data centers operated by transnational corporations. ‘Domain Name Servers’ translate the human readable language of the website you enter—Substack.com, for example—into machine-readable code called an ‘IP address,’ which is delivered back to your phone by the same route in reverse.

“With the proper IP address for the website you’re trying to reach, your phone once again pulses a message to the cell phone tower. This time, the signal is routed to a different kind of server called a webserver—a type of computer which stores the code, images, videos, and text that make up a website. As your request hits the webserver, electricity animates the processing chip, memory modules, and data storage. At the microscopic level, millions of circuits open and close as data processing is performed and server sends the digital data back to your device. A moment later, the website appears on your screen.”

Wilbert notes that “Every step of this process is physical” and “The energy which powers all of this is generated physically. Where I live, most of the electricity comes from hydropower, which means that a raging river is literally caged to provide power. Elsewhere, most of the energy comes from burning fracked gas, or coal, or by capturing energy from the sun, or from the wind, or elsewhere.”

Share

“The Unlikely Defenders of Milo Yiannopoulos”

Writing at The Spectator, reflects on the deportation of Milo Yiannopoulos and its aftermath: “What makes this story interesting…isn’t that Yiannopoulos got his comeuppance. It’s the fact that most of the people who defended him when it came leaned left and libertarian. In other words: it was the crowd that Yiannopoulos had spent his entire career attacking in the most offensive, uncharitable terms imaginable. And yet, their voices issued the most principled defenses of liberty and individual rights while his former comrades largely gloated at the ignominy of his fall. The MAGA right’s critics—Yiannopoulos’s critics—appeared more civilized, more virtuous and have a stronger claim to the moral high-ground.”

He continues: “Yiannopoulos indeed overstayed his visa, but that doesn’t change the fact that this was a campaign to humiliate a Trump-supporter-turned-defector. If the decision to parade his mugshot wasn’t a hint enough, MAGA influencer Laura Loomer removed any doubt. Loomer, a Trump enforcer who enjoys remarkable access to the corridors of power, told the Washington Post that she is ‘100 percent’ responsible for his fate. She claimed on X that he had ‘incited violence against President Trump,’ but didn’t explain how. Not that she needed evidence. The right has largely devolved into a cult of personality around Trump—and going against the leader is perceived as, in a sense, a violent act, one that can be met with violence in turn.”

“The way the right is configured in the age of MAGA is very effective at demolishing opposition in the pursuit of power,” Gonzalez concludes. “It is a wrecking ball and a lit stick of dynamite. However, it’s incapable of building and sustaining a flourishing political order. Partly because it refuses to recognize authority beyond its own power and constantly seeks to undermine external constraints, but also, and perhaps more importantly, because it cultivates vice instead of virtue in the individual. It preaches revenge instead of forgiveness, viciousness rather than compassion, sadism over magnanimity.”

“This Federal Case Against Minnesota Protesters Is Worth Watching if You Care About Your Civil Liberties”

Matthew Harwood reports for that “In mid-June, the federal government unsealed an eight-count indictment against 15 activists for allegedly interfering, sometimes violently, with the federal immigration crackdown that roiled the Twin Cities last winter, during which federal agents shot and killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti. One of those indicted, Isaac Sant, faces two counts: conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer and interstate stalking.”

“What has already been revealed in this case conjures up the ghosts of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R–Wisc.) and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover,” Harwood writes. “At the center of it all is Homeland Security Investigations, the DHS’ principal criminal investigative arm, which is acting more like a domestic spy agency than a law enforcement agency bound by the Constitution. During last winter’s Operation Metro Surge, undercover HSI agents surveilled and infiltrated meetings at churches, parks, libraries, schools, and union halls and gained access to encrypted Signal chats under initiatives dubbed ‘Operation Keyhole,’ ‘Operation Puppet Master,’ and ‘Project Whipple Shield.’”

The article continues: “In one incident in February, an undercover agent wormed their way into a meeting at the Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Roseville, Minnesota, a suburb bordering the Twin Cities. The undercover agent recorded the license plates of activists opposing Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity and then matched the plates to their owners, creating dossiers that included names, photos, addresses, and even more intimate details, such as information about their families and employment.”

“Revelations like these,” Harwood observes, “supercharge the corrosive power of paranoia, making people fear that something they say or someone they associate with could land them in a federal database. Constitutional rights don’t mean much if you’re afraid to exercise them.”

Share Handful of Earth

“The Sexless Lives of Millennial Feminists”

At Unherd, argues that “tumbling birth rates are the legacy of Millennial culture as a whole. AOC is merely the public face of a generation of girlbosses who are encountering, for the first time, the real-world limitations on…Spice Girl optimism.” In the 2010s, “the party girl lived in the urban choice-feminist playground, guided by principles of liberation. Independence was not shameful but a supreme virtue; education was emancipation; work was identity; female friendship would ward off dour dealings with men. So it was that being single, having a clutch of degrees, being chained to your desk and laughing about awful dates with your girlboss friends was the highest aspirational plane.”

“Now, though, it is 2026, and these guiding principles are not the comfort they once were,” she continues. “In the place of independence we have sexless solitude; too many graduates drift in an oversaturated market; the job does not love us back; the girlboss’s ride-or-die friends are too busy wiping babies’ chins to go to the club. If the girlboss thrived in a shared sense of defiance, it must then be highly demoralizing for her to see professional disappointment and mediocrity picking off her peers, who look to marriage and motherhood for the fulfillment they were told a master’s degree and consulting gig might afford them. After years of job-market stagnation and economic shocks, many of the movement’s strongest soldiers have abandoned prickly ‘praxis’ for prams and diapers.”

“Why did Millennial feminism fail?” Sowerby asks. “Basic economics is surely part of the answer: only a select few, it turns out, can climb the corporate ladder to girlbossdom. But there’s more to it than that. When relationships became optional, the offer was supposed to improve. Men and women were meant to have closer and more compassionate lives together, built through conscious and careful choice and not social pressure. In the event, the sexes simply grew apart, pushed into apathy by the very same internet which was meant to connect them, and which briefly brought Jezebel and the rest so much fame…As ever, a familiar culprit hides skulking in the corner: none of this can be fixed until our culture addresses the growing estrangement of men and women.”

“The Devouring Mother”

At , discusses “Postmortem Sperm Retrieval” and how it has “become quite an emotional and political issue in Israel. What happens is this: after an IDF soldier dies while on duty, teams of doctors swoop in to recover the body as quickly as possible and remove his testicles. If viable sperm is found, those sperm are frozen as quickly as possible for potential use in in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures long after the man’s death. But who’s using the sperm? Well, in some cases it’s the bereaved widow. But more and more, it’s another group of women [mothers] who demand the right to use this corpse sperm.”

For Wildermuth, this illustrates the “negative or ‘devouring’ aspects of the archetypal feminine. That there can be anything negative about the feminine isn’t something you’re likely to hear admitted in most left- or liberal-coded discourse, and especially not in any explicit feminist narratives of society. There’s plenty to be found regarding toxic masculinity, of course, and some of it’s actually accurate. But to even suggest anything toxic might also be associated with the feminine is to immediately paint a target on one’s chest that says ‘please cancel me.’ Which, incidentally, ‘cancel culture,’ or more specifically the repression of heterodox thought, is also another aspect of the devouring feminine.”

He continues: “Archetypal mother…is both ‘womb’ and ‘tomb.’ It’s the very power to nurture that also grants the power to suffocate, just as Kali holds a sword and severed head in some hands while offering blessings and protection in other hands. What matters for all archetypal forces within us is what we choose to do with their polarities and how willing we are to let their companion forces balance them out…The Devouring Mother comes to compensate for the Tyrannical Father, but neither of their solutions will do us any good since both usually end in slaughter. What we need instead is a restoration of each within societies that recognize that both masculine and feminine are ultimately neutral and each has their potential excesses and inherent benefits. And the only way we could really do that, barring some impossibly massive worldwide spiritual awakening, would be to work through that understanding within men and women.”

What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.

Leave a comment

And if you’d like to help the publication grow, you can share Handful of Earth with a friend or make a one-time donation to support my work.

Share Handful of Earth

Support Handful of Earth

AI existential risk has been all over the news this week, so today’s Weekly Grounding is a special edition on this topic. I have addressed aspects of this issue in some of my own writing at Handful of Earth, including in my May 2023 essay, “Telos or Transhumanism?” as well as in my piece from last month, “Globalize the Resistance to AI.” The following articles provide some other perspectives on the current debate.

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.

Subscribe now

“Warning Shots: A Theory”

At , writes that “Many people take it for granted that government won’t do anything to address societal scale AI risk unless or until there is a catastrophic ‘warning shot,’ where an AI goes rogue and causes some serious damage. Something like Chernobyl or 9/11, where a bunch of people die. Many people have told me they hope for such a warning shot. This is grim.”

He argues that “The examples people are comparing AI risk with are different. They are using a bad ‘reference class.’ The main difference is: A single AI incident could kill everyone, and it is far from guaranteed that we would get such a warning shot in advance. If people—including politicians—realize this, they will want to act to prevent this. With the other examples people point at, politicians mostly could afford to wait until there was a warning-shot disaster. Their lives weren’t clearly on the line. They may even have preferred not to act, and just had their hand forced by the public outcry. But AI risks threaten politicians and those with power. If they realize this, we should expect them to view it like a possible war with a rival power: extremely seriously.”

Krueger continues: “If you think that people need to see a catastrophe to understand that AI is dangerous, you must not think much of their intelligence. It’s true that a lot of people aren’t paying much attention, or are being misled by false narratives. But those are fixable problems, and we don’t actually need a bunch of people to die to fix them. If you think we do, imagine explaining to people: ‘We knew you were at risk, but we just figured you were too stupid to understand that unless we let a bunch of you die.’”

“Humanity’s Flight 93 Moment”

“With the fog of war gone, it is easier to see that I personally got several critically important things wrong about AI,” writes at . “I have a reputation as both an ‘AI alarmist’ and an ‘AI skeptic’—I’ve played both sides, and that’s because my opinions have shifted at various points. E.g., after GPT-4, I became more skeptical as I began interacting with the models regularly. I found them bad writers and bad thinkers, and on the science side, I felt they were basically just tools, lacking all research taste and insight. My primary worry became not existential risk, but how the technology would suppress human art, rob students of their education by over-reliance, and even downgrade human consciousness in status (just those little things!).”

He states that “What AI progress most resembles is Moore’s law: that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years. Moore’s law is not a fundamental property of transistors, instead, Moore’s law is a self-fulfilling prophecy as immense talent and capital worked to maintain a trendline via all sorts of tricks and changes to the underlying mechanisms. So too with AI. OpenAI alone has so far spent the equivalent of something like five to ten Manhattan projects doing this.”

He goes on: “In the fall of 2026 we have various dangerous pieces on the board: first, we know the companies are willing to fund incredibly long ‘runs’ where swarms of agents work together to some end. We also have seen these agents go rogue, and the failures are emergent and hard to predict. We also have evidence of superhuman or close-to-superhuman math and programming abilities. And Anthropic and OpenAI’s have been laser-like focused on automating AI research and therefore are beginning to or planning to task AIs with explicitly building smarter AIs during extremely long runs. This means existential risk is on the board as well.”

“I will say it plainly,” Hoel writes. “I believe that the average American voter—and the elected representatives working for them—need to grab the reins of power from companies pursuing dangerous experiments on AI, and also from overthought race-like dynamics manufactured by, in some cases, anti-human cult-like forces. Not later, not in a year. Now…This topic is confusing and all the players are yet to reach full public consciousness, and banning or slowing the automation of AI research itself may be the only way the American people get the time to digest the situation and vote on how much they want their world to be transformed, and how quickly, and why. Americans have voted on existential questions before (e.g., things like a nuclear freeze referenda or gain-of-function research) so we know this is entirely possible.”

Share

“The Bannon-Bernie Bromance Over AI and Oligarchs”

At The Atlantic, Toluse Olorunnipa writes: “If there was any question over whether the concept of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ is still operative in Washington’s hyper-partisan political environment, the answer may be found in the budding coalition of progressives and MAGA-friendly activists who have united in recent days to speak out against artificial intelligence. Which is how Senator Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon found themselves speaking on the same stage today.”

“Nearly a decade ago, Sanders urged then-President-Elect Trump to reverse his decision to hire Bannon, a pugilistic architect of the MAGA movement, and called him ‘a racist individual.’ Last year, Bannon called Sanders a ‘pussy’ for not going after Hillary Clinton hard enough in 2016. But the two were able to put all of that aside today to deliver the same message: If AI has the potential to wipe out humanity, Americans should have a say in how it operates. ‘If the lives of every man, woman, and child are going to be fundamentally changed by this technology, then the people of this country must make the decisions about AI, and not just a handful of oligarchs,’ Sanders said at the all-day ‘Pro-Human Assembly.’ Bannon sounded pretty much exactly the same. ‘The American citizens are not going to be supplicants to the oligarchs anymore,’ the MAGA strategist said in what easily could have been a continuation of the Vermont socialist’s remarks. ‘We can’t do it.’”

Olorunnipa continues: “Standing decidedly outside of this spirit of cross-party cooperation is Trump, who has downplayed warnings about AI’s risks and called the concerns over the rapidly advancing technology a ‘hoax.’ Trump made a surprise appearance at an AI-friendly event yesterday by placing a phone call to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and making clear that he does not believe the doomsday warnings that have circulated in recent days. ‘The robots are not going to be taking over the world,’ he told Huang, who took the call while speaking at a summit in Los Angeles and put it on speakerphone for the crowd to hear. ‘That’s not going to happen.’”

“‘Human Extinction by 2030’…Remember that Major AI Psy-Op We Talked about?”

At the Off Guardian, takes a different position, arguing that “the increasingly hysterical coverage of ‘rogue AI’ for the last six weeks,” portends a “major psy-op or false flag…Everyone from Matt Walsh to Glenn Greenwald agrees [that]…we need to DO something…And what do we need to DO? Why, REGULATE of course.”

He argues that “In this looming world of ‘regulated’ AI, governments could be empowered to shut down access to sites, networks or even the internet as a whole in the event of alleged ‘rogue AIs’ becoming a ‘threat to national security.’ And if YOU or your output or you[r] interactions get labelled as potential AI, or you have your access restricted purely based on your location or IP address? Well, good luck telling anyone as you scream inside your soundproof bubble.”

“In the name of preventing the spread of ‘rogue AI…,’” Knightly writes, “the internet can have information bulkheads which can be used to quarantine sections, nations, networks or individual sites ‘infected’ with digital these digital ‘invasive species.’ You may have to prove your humanity with face scans or similar, and there may be strict limitations on what regions and/or databases you can reach, how much of your money you can spend without additional checks, etc. Even the restricted internet of today might look like freedom compared to the’ post-AI-Regulation’ revised world wide web.”

Share Handful of Earth

“This Is Good for AI!!!! Aaargh!!!!”

At The Financial Times, Bryce Elder argues that “All the recent apocalypse stuff may just be a phase in the path towards AI labs becoming state-protected cartels of IT consultancies.” He quotes Citigroup analyst, Atif Malik, who stats that, “Fundamentally, frontier AI model developers see AI safety and alignment as a compute-intensive process, implying that safety concerns may drive more, rather than less, demand for compute. This runs counter to a key investor concern that tighter safety requirements could slow the pace of frontier model development—and, by extension, compute demand.”

“Frontier AI model developers do not see compute scaling slowing down,” Malik continues. “Instead, the bottleneck is shifting from model architecture innovation alone towards securing massive amounts of compute, power, and infrastructure, while improving efficiency through platforms such as [OpenAI’s] Astra and next-generation hardware like [Nvidia’s] Vera Rubin. The implication is continued strong demand across the AI infrastructure stack: GPUs, networking, power, cooling, and data center capacity. Next-generation facilities could accommodate 30-40% more GPUs, improving infrastructure efficiency and helping support growing AI demand.”

“You’re Thinking About AI the Wrong Way”

“There are about a half dozen theories out there on why Anthropic and OpenAI are voluntarily slowing down frontier research,” writes at . “Most of them involve some alleged ulterior motive involving regulatory capture or forming a cartel. Those arguments make little sense to me—Who are these little AI labs the big AI labs are so afraid of? Why did OpenAI postpone its IPO? But they’re also superfluous. I suspect most of the people making them are motivated less by a desire to understand what’s really happening than by an eagerness to dismiss the idea that AI is an extraordinarily dangerous technology. Some of those people are investors who want AI research to proceed as quickly and freely as possible. Some of them are left-wing skeptics who want to believe that there’s nothing in the world that can’t be reduced to politics and corporate greed, and that any concern about the technology itself is a smokescreen for them.”

He notes that “AI lab researchers have been sounding the alarm about AI risks for years, and AI lab executives have been deferential to those employees for just as long, if for no other reason than that they can’t afford to lose them to their competitors. The last couple of weeks have been extraordinary in the degree of pressure Anthropic and OpenAI have faced to contain this risk, coming from both the public and their own workers. One isn’t required to believe that Amodei and Altman are acting nobly to accept that they’re reacting to actual circumstances in the real world, both in terms of the risks of their technology and the public scrutiny being brought to bear on them. They had a collective action problem, and it was resolved when the cost of doing nothing became greater for each of them than the cost of doing something.”

“They can’t control the technology they’re building,” Woodhouse concludes. “Undoubtedly there are all kinds of nefarious corporate schemes at work in the background. But that doesn’t change the fact that the technology is what it appears to be. It’s a powerful force that’s alien to us and far beyond our current understanding. At the very least, it needs to be paused.”

What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.

Leave a comment

And if you’d like to help the publication grow, you can share Handful of Earth with a friend or make a one-time donation to support my work.

Share Handful of Earth

Support Handful of Earth

Today happens to be the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, so I made this week’s Grounding a Special Edition about the War on Terror. It features some recent pieces as well as some older ones on 9/11 and its aftermath.

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.

Subscribe now

“Costs of War”

The Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University estimates that “over 940,000 people were killed by direct post-9/11 war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001-2023. Of these, more than 432,000 were civilians. The number of people wounded or ill as a result of the conflicts is far higher, as is the number of civilians who died ‘indirectly,’ as a result of wars’ destruction of economies, healthcare systems, infrastructure and the environment. An estimated 3.6-3.8 million people died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting.”

From late 2001 through 2022, “the U.S. appropriated and is obligated to spend an estimated $8 trillion for the post-9/11 wars—an estimated $5.8 trillion in appropriations, plus an additional minimum of $2.2 trillion for obligations to care for the veterans of these wars through the next several decades.”

The report notes that, “At home and abroad, U.S. wars and military operations include many abuses of human rights and civil liberties. Government practices include indefinite detention, torture and mistreatment. Domestically, the post-9/11 wars dramatically expanded mass surveillance, eroding constitutional protections, and intensified police militarization.”

“New Poll: 41% of Gen Z Says US Officials Let the 9/11 Attacks Happen”

At , reports on a recent YouGov survey about 9/11 and its legacy: “As Americans prepare to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, a recent survey of more than one thousand American adults indicates that younger Americans are more likely to question the official account of what happened on September 11, 2001. Those questions include whether the US government knew about the attacks and allowed them to happen, and whether the Twin Towers collapsed due to a controlled demolition. The survey found that 41% of 18- to 29-year-olds said some people in the US government knew the attacks were coming but let them happen. The number rose to 46% among 30- to 44-year-olds. Only 30% of those 65 and older believed the government had foreknowledge.”

“When asked whether they believed officials from the government of Saudi Arabia were involved in the attacks, support was [significant]…across all ages,” Broze reports. “Thirty-seven percent of Gen Z respondents and 35% of Millennials said it was true that Saudi officials were involved in the attacks. Gen X and those 65 and older supported the claim even more strongly, with 41% and 47%, respectively. Answers were more divided when asked about Israel’s potential role in the 9/11 attacks. Only 5% of Americans 65 and older believed Israel was involved, compared with 35% of 18- to 29-year-olds who supported the theory.”

“The Pedagogy of Totality”

In a 2003 article at Red Critique, Mas’ud Zavarzadeh writes that “One of the signs of the collapse of contemporary U.S. pedagogy is the interpretation the majority of Americans make of the ‘event’ that is now marked by the cultural sign of ‘9/11.’ To them, the ‘event’ was (and remains) proof that ‘they’ hate ‘us.’ The only way, in other words, most Americans brought up in the U.S. educational system could make sense of the ‘event’ was affective. Any attempt to introduce even a mildly analytical ‘why’ (”Why do you think ‘they’ hate Americans?”) was (and is) taken as the height of emotional crudeness and intellectual vulgarity if not outright anti-Americanism. Having reduced the ‘event’ to a ‘trauma,’ the reaction to the ‘trauma’ was (and remains) also ‘traumatic.’”

“[N]o account of the ‘event’ can forget the CIA,” Zavarzadeh writes. “However, most accounts of the ‘event,’ evoke the CIA to obscure its role by telling CIA stories of high intrigue in exotic lands and thus divert attention from the other CIA whose role is crucial in understanding the ‘event.’ The CIA which is openly discussed and critiqued to obtain radical credentials for the story-teller is…a political agency of the US Government. The other CIA—the one that is covered up by these narrative details—is only officially a political agency of the State. In practice, it is the gendarme of American capitalism: it is an economic not a political outfit.”

He argues that “The ‘story’ in contemporary pedagogy (which has opportunistically concluded that knowledge is a story and all concepts are tropes) performs an essential ideological task: it offers a non-explanatory explanation and thus constructs an ‘enlightened false consciousness’ in the classroom…Teaching by stories produces knowingness not knowledge and consequently cultivates a savvy cynicism about ideas, analysis, and explanation. It rejects causal explanations (in fact it dismisses the very idea of ‘cause-effect’) and puts in its place vaguely plotted details that hint at moving but have no analytical yield: the pleasures of stories replace the cognitive.”

Share

“The New Domestic War on Terror is Coming”

Writing in 2021, reports on “a wave of new domestic police powers and rhetoric in the name of fighting ‘terrorism’ that are carbon copies of many of the worst excesses of the first War on Terror that began nearly twenty years ago. This trend shows no sign of receding as we move farther from the January 6 Capitol riot. The opposite is true: it is intensifying.”

He continues: “We have witnessed an orgy of censorship from Silicon Valley monopolies with calls for far more aggressive speech policing, a visibly militarized Washington, D.C. featuring a non-ironically named ‘Green Zone,’ vows from the incoming president and his key allies for a new anti-domestic terrorism bill, and frequent accusations of ‘sedition,’ ‘treason,’ and ‘terrorism’ against members of Congress and citizens. This is all driven by a radical expansion of the meaning of ‘incitement to violence.’ It is accompanied by viral-on-social-media pleas that one work with the FBI to turn in one’s fellow citizens (See Something, Say Something!) and demands for a new system of domestic surveillance. Underlying all of this are immediate insinuations that anyone questioning any of this must, by virtue of these doubts, harbor sympathy for the Terrorists and their neo-Nazi, white supremacist ideology. Liberals have spent so many years now in a tight alliance with neocons and the CIA that they are making the 2002 version of John Ashcroft look like the President of the (old-school) ACLU.”

“Continuing to process Washington debates…primarily through the prism of ‘Democrat v. Republican’ or even ‘left v. right’ is a sure ticket to the destruction of core rights,” Greenwald contends. “There are times when powers of repression and censorship are aimed more at the left and times when they are aimed more at the right, but it is neither inherently a left-wing nor a right-wing tactic. It is a ruling class tactic, and it will be deployed against anyone perceived to be a dissident to ruling class interests and orthodoxies no matter where on the ideological spectrum they reside.”

“Unlike so many ordinary citizens addicted to trivial partisan warfare, these ruling class elites know who their real enemies are: anyone who steps outside the limits and rules of the game they have crafted and who seeks to disrupt the system that preserves their prerogatives and status. The one who put this best was probably Barack Obama when he was president, when he observed—correctly—that the perceived warfare between establishment Democratic and Republican elites was mostly theater, and on the question of what they actually believe, they’re both ‘fighting inside the 40 yard line’ together.”

“From the War on Terror to the War on Covid—and Back Again”

In a 2025 piece for , notes that “The Covid era resembled the post-9/11 one in that an emergency had led to the declaration of a state of exception, which in turn led to massive infringements of civil liberties. It didn’t resemble it in that the political sides were almost completely reversed in how they responded to this situation, with the left largely cheering on emergency politics and the right opposed…”

Quoting from one of his earlier covid-era essays, Shullenberger contends that “the anti-exception politics of the Covid era risks maintaining the fundamental framing of the regime it opposes. There is clear recent precedent for this. Those on the left who opposed Bush’s War on Terror regarded national security as the embodiment of sovereign power exercised outside the rule of law. Later, many of the same figures embraced the same security agencies as a bulwark against Trumpism, and fomented a panic about far-right domestic terrorism that echoed post-9/11 rhetoric on the right. Similarly, those currently positioning themselves against the Covid state of emergency may be just as likely to perpetuate a mode of governance that authorizes itself in the looming threat of a future emergency.”

“What has been interesting since the beginning of Trump 2.0 has been the conversion of nearly every realm of politics into emergency politics,” he writes. “Even in the normally humdrum, wonkish realm of trade policy, Trump’s radical tariff agenda was justified on the basis of an ostensible national emergency. Meanwhile, there is a massive ramping up of the same rhetoric that drove the War on Terror. Immigration enforcement and crackdowns on campus protest are framed as ‘anti-terrorist’ actions, deportations are justified on the basis that criminal migrants comprise an invading army, and so on. A new Guantánamo, of comparably ambiguous legal status, has sprung up in Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador, a country whose recent history reveals the continuity between pandemic states of exception and the expansive new ‘anti-terrorist’ agenda.”

“Leaked Doc: Homeland Security’s Domestic Terror Obsession”

reports on a leaked draft of the 2026 Homeland Threat Assessment in January of this year: “The annual assessment, which has been prepared since 2020, purports to offer a holistic assessment to threats to the Western Hemisphere. These assessments have consistently focused on what you imagine: southern border security, the drug trade, immigration, and critical infrastructure protection in the United States. But this year’s assessment, marked ‘For Official Use Only’ and not yet released to the public, identifies violent extremism on the part of American citizens as the priority and greatest threat. One phrase in particular stands out to me as new: potential terrorism based upon ‘class-based or economic grievances.’ (The term has not appeared in any previous assessment.)”

“The assessment doesn’t define what it means by ‘class-based or economic grievances,’ Klippenstein notes. “The phrase could as much refer to an angry MAGA Midwesterner as it could any Mamdani-supporting urban dweller. But the focus is clear: the main threat to the ‘homeland,’ DHS thinks, is the American people. The threat assessment is broken into four sections: Border and Immigration Security, Critical Infrastructure Security, Threats to Economic Security, and Public Safety and Security. The latter section emphasizes the administration’s obsession with domestic terrorism, saying it has been and will remain the leading terrorist threat.”

What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.

Leave a comment

And if you’d like to help the publication grow, you can share Handful of Earth with a friend or make a one-time donation to support my work.

Share Handful of Earth

Support Handful of Earth

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.

Subscribe now

“A Ton of Space Junk Tumbles Unpredictably to Earth Every Week”

At The New York Times, Selam Gebrekidan reports that “More space debris is raining down on Earth than ever before—one effect of the frenetic race among governments and companies like SpaceX to reign over the skies. Last year, the U.S. Space Force issued alerts for nearly 820 objects entering the Earth’s atmosphere. The government issued alerts for 110 objects a decade ago. ‘The re-entries happen each and every day,’ said Mariusz Slonina, who heads space situational awareness operations for the Polish Space Agency. Huge objects weighing a metric ton or more arrive about once a week, he said.”

“In 2024, discarded hardware from the International Space Station crashed into a Florida home,” the article continues. “Early last year, part of a SpaceX rocket landed near a busy shopping mall in Poznan, Poland. Another piece was found near the city’s airport, according to the Polish Space Agency. Months later, a defunct Chinese satellite barreled down over Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands of Spain. The three-metric-ton satellite sent shock waves across the region before fragmenting and burning in the air.”

“Spotify and YouTube Profiles of Legendary Jazz Musicians Hijacked by AI Waifu Spam”

At Futurism, Joe Wilkins reports that as “Spotify or YouTube…fail to prevent the onslaught of AI slop, the musician’s [sic] streaming profiles are becoming a host for parasitic spam…In addition to [Sonny] Criss, profiles of artists including the vocalist Jean Carne, cornetist Red Nichols, and clarinetist Jimmie Noone have become inundated with various forms of AI spam. On Spotify, YouTube, and Amazon Music, each of these musicians recently picked up ‘new’ singles plastered with AI-generated cover art, uploaded in 2026 and copyrighted to the publisher ‘Ami bacuk.’”

“Criss’s profile on Spotify, for example, started [to display] brand-new tunes, which is an impressive feat considering he died in 1977. Titled ‘Tell me why’ and ‘but a heartache,’ both feature a generic anime waifu on their cover, and were supposedly composed by ‘Zainul Irpan,’ a mashup of two generic Arabic-rooted names. Though each song is a jazz tune featuring alto sax and a rhythm section, their origin is nearly impossible to trace, as they’re neither rebrands of existing tracks by Criss or identifiable via music ID software…Both appear on Criss’s Spotify, Amazon Music, and YouTube Topic profiles. On YouTube, Criss’s artist image was even updated with one of the AI anime girls.”

The article continues: “Famed R&B and jazz vocalist Jean Carne…likewise had her YouTube Music profile inundated with slop. Though this is technically a different platform than Criss’s YouTube Topic page, it features many of the same hallmarks: AI-generated singles plastered with AI-generated imagery. Like Criss, the actual music here is an inoffensive blend of alto sax jazz, though it notably lacks Carne’s five-octave voice. Adding to the bizarre situation, some of Carne’s new tunes appear to be cut-up lyrics from the Backstreet Boys’ repertoire, with two of them titled ‘I never wanna hear you say’ and ‘I want it that way.’ Carne has also supposedly put out a new collaborative EP with American soul duo Mel and Tim. Titled ‘This night with you,’ it features three tracks: ‘My nightmare,’ ‘My secret,’ and ‘My everything,’ as well as similarly schlocky AI-generated cover art.”

Share

“China’s Real Robot Revolution Is Not About Humanoids”

At The Financial Times, writes that “The recent humanoid games alongside Beijing’s robotics conference at times resembled an expensive comedy reel—an array of robots stumbling, misidentifying obstacles, and executing tasks with toddler-like grace. But the striking spectacle served a purpose—drawing the world’s eyeballs further to the progress being made in robots, adding to a building hype. That buzz helped Unitree, the Chinese producer of humanoids that went viral earlier in the year on social media with their backflipping kung-fu bots, go public last month with a valuation at the end of its first day of trading exceeding 1,200 times its trailing earnings.”

“Yet China’s real robot revolution has been happening with much less hoopla in industry,” she observes. “Rather than set sprinting records or breakdance, industrial robots do much more prosaic, repetitive stuff, but China is using its superpower of scaling and building supply chains to challenge the global market. Chinese companies installed 295,000 new industrial robots in China in 2024, capturing 54 per cent of the global total, according to the International Federation of Robotics. Two years ago the country operated more than 2mn industrial robots—about 4.5 times more than Japan, the second-ranked nation…In the past year, we have seen the mass rollout of autonomous mobile robots in Chinese warehouses, precision surgical arms in hospitals, and specialised cleaning bots in skyscrapers. These devices are purpose-built. They do not have faces. They have functions.”

“So why are billions being invested into building humanoids?” Wu asks. “The obsession with the human form may be the main culprit. We are building robots in our image not because it is efficient, but because it is emotionally resonant. Yet for 99 per cent of industrial tasks, a humanoid shape is a structural liability. And to try to replicate bipedal balance, manufacturers are using algorithms and specialised motors known as servos at astronomical cost…Lab demos are far from factory-floor reliability. Environmental fit doesn’t justify humanoids’ cost and complexity when most tasks suit optimised machines. Their flexibility remains a solution looking for a problem better solved more simply, for now. Robots are, of course, the future. They are already reshaping our world. But the machines that are having most impact, at least in the near future, are specialised and decidedly non-humanoid.”

“Elon Musk Predicts Humanoid Robots Will Hit One Billion in 10 Years and Outproduce ‘All Humans’”

News Corp Australia reports on Elon Musk’s comments about humanoid robots delivered at the G20 “Innovation Ministerial” in Chapel Hill, North Carolina: “Elon Musk has predicted there will be at least one billion humanoid robots within the next decade that will be more productive than ‘all humans combined.’ The world’s richest person predicts the productivity of a single humanoid robot will be at least five times that of an ordinary human. Robots are then predicted to start manufacturing other robots, creating a ‘recursive effect.’ ‘So it starts off very slowly but then grows at an explosive rate,’ the SpaceX and Tesla CEO told the 2026 G20 summit in North Carolina via video link.”

“Mr Musk said he believes the usefulness of robots will depend on three factors: how good the AI software is, how good the AI chip in the robot is, and how good the electromechanical dexterity of the robot is, particularly the hands. ‘All three of those things are improving exponentially. The usefulness of the robot is those three things multiplied by each other,’ he said.”

Musk also stated that “‘AI will probably increase the global economy by 20 to 30 per cent, that’s my rough estimate. Meaning in the order of $20 to $30 trillion per year…AI will be able to do anything digital, anything that does not require shaping of atoms by hand, probably by the end of next year.’ Mr Musk said AI was already incredibly good at software and it was getting to the point where AI would be ‘Stockfish-level good,’ a chess program that can beat the world’s best chess players easily…‘At some point next year is my prediction, AI software will be so good that it will be Stockfish-level good, meaning that it is impossible for a human to compete in writing software with AI. AI will just crush all humans at software.’”

Share Handful of Earth

“The Brain Is Not a Computer”

Writing for the Institute of Arts and Ideas, Dorothea Olkowski states that “The dominant assumption behind artificial intelligence is that the brain is essentially a computer—that thought is computation, and that consciousness, given sufficient processing power, can be replicated in silicon. The neuroscience tells a very different story. What the most important recent research reveals is that consciousness is not primarily a cortical function at all, let alone an algorithmic one: it arises from the oldest, most primitive part of the brain, is saturated with body chemistry, and is constitutively shaped by emotion.”

She writes that “When neurons transmit messages using molecules called neurotransmitters, in addition to targeted binary (yes/no) neurotransmission—often associated with digital computation—there is a second type of transmission called post-synaptic modulation. It is described as a messy, chemical process arising from the brainstem and other subcortical structures, and even from non-neurological bodily structures. These neuromodulators—chemical messengers that regulate the overall state of the brain—come from all over the body, including the pituitary, adrenal, thyroid, and sex glands, as well as the hypothalamus and especially the brainstem. They wash over the network and regulate the overall state of the cortex, processing information differently depending on the emotional state involved. This process does not resemble what takes place in a computer—even though it is probabilistic and adjusts to the current situation—because it also has slow-acting and long-lasting effects as chemicals linger and habitual states are established.”

Olkowski argues that “researchers studying the brain as a complex system are doing precisely what AI cannot: attending to emergent properties born out of interconnectedness and unpredictability. Their work shifts the conventional interest of prediction and control in science toward understanding the conditions that complex systems are sensitive to and their observed dynamics. Complex systems are non-linear, with output that is not proportional to the input, and they evince circular rather than linear causality—making them deterministic but not predictable.”

“On the Uselessness of Philosophy”

At , writes that philosophy “has generally become a more marginal discipline within modern education. Based on conversations with teachers from diverse educational backgrounds and nationalities, my prevailing perception is that philosophy is often regarded worldwide as secondary and less valuable, particularly when compared with STEM subjects. After all, who would argue that a third-grader should spend time becoming acquainted with the intricacies of Aristotle, Plato, or Kant rather than learning to code in Python, use ChatGPT, and master the latest AI tools? Why should a student spend time debating Plato’s theory of forms when that same time could be devoted to learning financial literacy, or digital marketing—skills that appear to offer a more direct path to employment and economic success?”

Masi argues that “it was the supposedly ‘useless’ philosophers who, throughout history, were often the first to articulate…our understanding and critique of…values—not heads of state driven by immediate utility or scientists focused on technological achievement. Why? Because philosophical reflection, and perhaps the deeper insights it can inspire, allows us to view the world from a different perspective and to envision alternative possibilities. A different, and potentially better, way of organizing human life. Herein lies the ‘utility’ of philosophy.”

“Philosophy still matters more than ever, especially in a pragmatic age,” he concludes. “The discipline that helped shape civilization has been pushed to the margins, even though it is precisely what a world obsessed with utility needs most: the capacity to think deeply, question assumptions, and imagine alternative possibilities…”

What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.

Leave a comment

And if you’d like to help the publication grow, you can share Handful of Earth with a friend or make a one-time donation to support my work.

Share Handful of Earth

Support Handful of Earth

Monthly Musings are published during the last week of every month. In each Monthly Muse, I recap content from the past month of Handful of Earth, offer some freewheeling reflections, and share a passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.

Here’s the August 2026 Monthly Muse.

Recapitulation

• Weekly Grounding #151

• Weekly Grounding #152

• Weekly Grounding #153

• Globalize the Resistance to AI

• Weekly Grounding #154

• Weekly Grounding #155

Share Handful of Earth

Contemplation

Earlier this month, I published “Globalize the Resistance to AI.” This piece looks at the strengths and weaknesses of the anti-data center movement in the United States. I argue that because the data center buildout is itself global in nature, the resistance to data centers must also be globalized. After publishing the piece, I was interested to see that Bill Gates directly addressed the topic of data center globalization in an interview with The Atlantic last week:

I’m afraid that people who think, “ok, we got our local data center not to go through,” may feel like, “ok, we stopped AI.” That’s not the case. These data centers…[can] show up outside the United States or in [another] state…That’s like saying “ok, we stopped one pipeline and now we’ve solved climate change.” It almost takes the energy that should go to “what should the tasteful regulations be?” and pushes it in a pyrrhic direction.

Gates makes a correct observation about the global nature of data center construction and, elsewhere in the interview, the related global risks of AI. But he does not do this to call for a stop to AI. Instead, he wants what he repeatedly describes as “tasteful regulations,” i.e. regulations of his choosing. (After all, who else would have the “taste” of Gates, who keeps a “custom-size mannequin to test his outfits for different days of the week” to craft an image of someone “calm and approachable.”)

The globalization of AI data centers provides yet another opportunity for the Epstein-entangled Gates Foundation to promote its globalist agenda, just like the global covid crisis enabled it to advance its multibillion-dollar global vaccine push. In the interview, Gates laments the fact that he now has to talk about AI regulation with global leaders and yearns for the day when he can go back to talking with them about “global health and malaria and polio.” Gates and his ilk don’t want to stop crises (real or manufactured). They crisishop from one to another.

What is Gates afraid of even more than AI? The possibility that “you could have such a backlash [against AI] that extreme measures like ‘shut it off’ or something like that…become politically popular.” His call for “tasteful regulations,” besides allowing the Gates Foundation to continue using the latest AIs to develop “new vaccines,” would ensure that the unfolding AI crisis becomes the proverbial new normal. This is what Gates wants.

Why? Because global politics today is fundamentally about manufacturing and managing increasing numbers of interconnected crises. As I argued back in 2024:

While it is too facile to attribute a grand conspiratorial motive to the converging crises of the present, the global ruling class has, at minimum, recognized the pragmatic benefits of sustaining a state of perpetual polycrisis. By keeping the public in an incessant condition of uncertainty about the nature of reality, the ruling class is, paradoxically, able to retain its grip on power over the very global system ostensibly under existential threat from polycrisis.

“Tasteful regulations” are nothing but a new way to preserve the crisis-ridden status quo.

Leave a comment

Provocation

“Universities are being retrofitted as fulfillment centers of cognitive convenience. Students aren’t being taught to think more deeply but to prompt more effectively…What’s sold as innovation is really surrender…The scandal is not one of ignorance but indifference. University administrators understand exactly what’s happening, and proceed anyway. As long as enrollment numbers hold and tuition checks clear, they turn a blind eye to the learning crisis while faculty are left to manage the educational carnage in their classrooms. The future of education has already arrived, as a liquidation sale of everything that once made it matter.”

Ronald Purser, “AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself”

Subscribe now

Support Handful of Earth

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.

Subscribe now

“How Miami Third Worldism Swallowed MAGA”

At Unherd, writes: “The Trump administration this week pummeled Cuba with yet another round of sanctions, this time targeting its mining, construction, and metals sector. The US government continues to tighten an economic noose around the neck of the tiny island nation. This, even as the Havana regime recently enacted sweeping reforms aimed at encouraging private investment in the Cuban economy—exactly as Washington had long demanded.”

“It remains a mystery,” he continues, “why an administration that styles itself ‘America First’ has prevented third countries from selling food and oil to Havana, exacerbating an ongoing humanitarian crisis. Most Cubans now survive on fewer than two hours a day of electricity, with hospitals struggling to supply patients on life support. The reason, in short, is that Team Trump’s policy toward Cuba now is almost exclusively driven by ideology, rather than rational statecraft. The ideology, in turn, is defined by Miami’s enclave of Cuban and other Latin-American exiles. Fundamentally stuck in their native lands, they’re determined to wield American treasure and manpower to redress old grievances.”

Rojas states that “the most damning aspect of Miami-neocon Third Worldism is the fact that the ideology is responsible for some of America’s worst homegrown terrorists.” In the 1970s, “authorities linked Cuban-Americans to 113 bombings in the United States, including the 1976 car bombing of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier, conducted in concert with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s intelligence services. Beyond the US homeland, Miami-based Cuban exiles were responsible for 45% of all bombings on the planet in 1974. In 1976, the Coordinación de Organizaciones Revolucionarias Unidas, headed by Miami terrorist Orlando Bosch, bombed Cubana Flight 455, killing all 73 people on board; CORU was likewise responsible for killing Letelier days prior. Bosch was eventually arrested before being pardoned by George H. W. Bush, thanks to lobbying by Miami Rep. Ilean Ros-Lehtinen, who called Bosch a ‘patriot and hero’ upon his release.”

Rojas concludes: “Until Miami neocons assimilate into the American polity by renouncing their faith in regime-change wars—and learning English—they will inevitably entangle the rest of us in the petty grievances of America’s Magic City.”

“Donald Trump’s Bronx Loyalists Stand by Him as Approval Ratings Sink”

Reporting for The Financial Times, Verena Hölzl writes that “The Bronx, where the majority of the population is Black or Hispanic, surprised many in 2024 when voters narrowed the Democrats’ margin of victory by 10 percentage points with Kamala Harris atop the White House ticket. Four years earlier, Joe Biden had won around 84 per cent of the New York City borough’s vote. Yet recent polls project that across the US, Black and Latino voters have soured on Trump, who has repeatedly pitched himself as an alternative for working-class Americans fed up with the establishment. Among Latino voters in New York state, his favourability has dropped by 24 points since January 2024.”

“Still many of the president’s supporters in the Bronx…seem to be in it for the long run,” she reports. Bronx “residents are not so surprised that minority communities pivoted towards Republicans. ‘Democrats brought this upon themselves,’ said Desmond Knox-McKinney, 47, who runs a marketing agency and started voting for Republicans in 2020. ‘Democrats did nothing for the people in the Bronx. So why not give Trump a shot?’ ‘People voted for Trump because they wanted a new America,’ said Elise Espinar, a young mother who emigrated from the Dominican Republic four years ago.”

“Shawn Williams, 52, said Trump is the first politician he has voted for in his life. The security guard at a jewellery shop had a hard time coming up with examples of how Trump’s presidency has benefited him personally but plans on supporting Republicans in the midterms. ‘Donald Trump makes me feel like, as a black man, I am a part of this country for the first time,’ Williams said. ‘He is removing the cancer from this country.’”

Share

“The West Studies China’s Power—but not Its Civilization”

Writing for Asia Times, and Bill Kelly argue that “the study of Chinese language, history, philosophy and culture has not kept pace with China’s growing importance. The imbalance is dangerous. The world is learning how China produces, finances and competes without learning enough about the historical and cultural frameworks through which questions of order, humiliation, obligation, authority and national renewal are debated in China.”

“Cultural literacy does not mean accepting the claims of the Chinese government,” the authors note. “It means recognizing that policies and statements are interpreted through different historical memories and moral vocabularies. In diplomacy and business, Chinese interlocutors may also place greater weight on personal relationships, indirect speech and the preservation of face than Americans accustomed to explicit disagreement. Historical memory matters just as much. Western and Japanese imperialism caused immense suffering in China during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That history is emphasized in Chinese education and official narratives, while many Western publics know little about the Opium Wars, the unequal treaties or the Japanese invasion. What one side sees as contemporary policy, the other may interpret through a longer history of national vulnerability and foreign intrusion.”

Krikke and Kelly inveigh against the idea of “Chinese society as a uniform mass. China contains arguments among nationalists and cosmopolitans, liberals and conservatives, feminists, religious believers, environmentalists, workers, entrepreneurs, and young people uncertain about the future. Government restrictions have narrowed the public sphere. As a result, some intellectual debate has moved into private seminars, bookstores, reading groups and carefully managed digital conversations. That makes China harder for outsiders to understand, not less necessary to understand.”

“Western institutions bear part of the responsibility for the gap,” the authors contend. “Chinese philosophy is still often confined to area studies rather than treated as part of philosophy’s common inheritance. News coverage understandably concentrates on the party-state, security and economic competition, but this can make official China appear to be the whole of China. Nationalist politics on both sides further discourages the curiosity on which cultural knowledge depends.”

“China’s Seed Empire: Repeating the Mistakes of Western Agribusiness?”

Bharat Dogra writes at Counterview that, “For decades, Western agribusiness and multinational seed corporations have attracted widespread criticism—not only in developing countries but also within their own societies—for promoting hazardous genetically modified (GM) crops, appropriating farmers’ seed diversity, using patents to maximize control over seeds, and expanding their grip over land and agricultural resources in the Global South.” Now, “Chinese agribusiness corporations seem increasingly intent on replicating the very model of corporate agriculture that was once widely condemned as exploitative.”

He writes that one “central pillar of China’s seed strategy is the expansion of commercial access to germplasm…[M]ore than half a million seed samples collected from farmers’ fields have been transferred to a newly established national seed bank in Beijing, which now contains more than two million germplasm samples. In partnership with technology giant Tencent, authorities are developing a digital database of crop genetic resources to facilitate AI-assisted breeding and provide breeders with unprecedented access to these collections…[W]hile farmers may have expected stronger support for traditional seed-saving practices, the opposite has occurred. Public germplasm collections are increasingly being used to strengthen private breeding programs, while China has simultaneously accelerated the commercialization of genetically modified crops.”

“China’s government and agribusiness corporations undoubtedly view these developments as evidence of technological progress and national strength,” Dogra concludes. “Yet there is another perspective that deserves serious consideration. Critics continue to warn about the environmental, ecological, and socio-economic risks associated with GM crops—including gene-edited crops—the erosion of agricultural biodiversity, the growing concentration of seed ownership in a handful of corporations, and the disruption of local food systems through export-oriented agricultural models. For decades, these concerns were directed primarily at Western agribusiness multinationals. If current trends continue, however, Chinese agribusiness corporations may increasingly invite the same criticisms—and, in some respects, may even surpass their Western counterparts in extending corporate control over the world’s food systems.”

Share Handful of Earth

“Bill Gates Says Epstein Sought to Blackmail Him Over Extramarital Affairs”

The Guardian reports that “The Microsoft founder Bill Gates told US members of Congress that the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein had sought to ‘blackmail’ him over his extramarital affairs, according to a transcript of the testimony…According to the transcript…, Gates spoke of ‘veiled’ threats and said Epstein had considered exploiting his own knowledge of Gates’s extramarital affairs to force him to remain in Epstein’s orbit…”

The article continues: “In late February, Gates told the Wall Street Journal that his ties to Epstein were a major mistake and admitted to having extramarital affairs with two Russian women but denied any involvement with the financier’s activities. Gates claims his relationship with Epstein began in 2011, three years after the latter pleaded guilty to prostitution charges involving minors. He also acknowledged that he had known of Epstein’s legal troubles, but had also been told that Epstein was someone able to raise billions of dollars for global health, an issue Gates was deeply involved in.”

“Tulsi Gabbard, Her Guru and the Mysterious Messages that Helped Shape Her Political Career”

In a lengthy investigative report for The Washington Post, Jon Swaine discusses Tulsi Gabbard’s history with the Science of Identity Foundation (SIF), a Hawaii-based splinter group from the Hare Krishna Movement led by Chris Butler. “The son of a radical left-wing physician, Butler began teaching Krishnaism and meditation after dropping out of the University of Hawaii in the late 1960s. Tall, lean and charismatic, he attracted devoted followers who believed that he was in direct communication with Krishna.

“In 1970, two devotees told a reporter for the Honolulu Advertiser that they would do anything Butler asked, including kill themselves…Butler had said in a 1975 pamphlet that ‘inept politicians should be removed from their seats.’ He suggested they be replaced by what he called ‘saintly persons.’ The following year, a new political party, Independents for Godly Government, sprung up in Hawaii with 14 candidates for federal, state and local offices…In 1977, Butler formally incorporated his own organization and eventually settled on the SIF name.”

“Dozens of…memos appeared to document directives and advice for Gabbard from her time in Congress. Some contained instructions on what legislation she should propose, which policies she should embrace and how she should conduct herself on television. They had an air of authority. A memo about a proposal to partition war-torn Iraq into three states quoted an unnamed person as saying it was ‘time for TG to come up with this idea.’”

One “memo, circulated to members of the team on the eve of a Fox News interview, documented a 75-minute call between an unnamed person and Gabbard that went until 10:46 p.m. in Washington, according to a transcript. ‘Now all you need is a good night’s sleep, knowing that no matter how badly you f--- it up, that me and Krishna still love you,’ the unnamed adviser told her.”

What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.

Leave a comment

And if you’d like to help the publication grow, you can share Handful of Earth with a friend or make a one-time donation to support my work.

Share Handful of Earth

Support Handful of Earth

This week, I published a new piece on the politics of data centers and AI at Handful of Earth:

Since I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic lately, this week seems fitting to publish another Special Edition Weekly Grounding on artificial intelligence. The four earlier special editions on AI can be found here, here, here, and 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.

Subscribe now

“Energy and AI Observatory”

Since publishing the article this week, I discovered this very helpful resource on the global data center buildout at the International Energy Agency. The page notes that “Most AI models are too large to be trained and run on end-user devices like laptops and phones. Instead, data centres provide the computational power needed by AI. Understanding the electricity consumption of data centres is therefore critical to understanding how AI is impacting energy demand. However, there are no comprehensive global statistics on the electricity consumption of data centres. The IEA has developed a global model that enables it to provide estimates of data centre electricity consumption by region and across time.”

The graphics are useful in visualizing the relationship between AI data centers, energy, and geography:

“Google Is Building an A.I. Fence Around the Internet It Once Championed”

The New York Times reports that “in the age of artificial intelligence, Google appears to be shrinking back from the open web—and may be imperiling it. Since last year, the Silicon Valley giant has revamped its search with A.I. It introduced AI Mode, which replaces search results of hyperlinks with conversational responses written by Gemini, its A.I. chatbot. Most recently, Google changed its iconic search box for the first time in 25 years so that people could add photos and videos to their queries and assign A.I. ‘agents’ to run searches for them.”

“For publishers, businesses, banks and others that relied on Google to funnel its billions of users to their websites, the impact has been unmistakable as the company has increasingly incorporated A.I. into search. Google’s users are no longer leaving Google after a search and are just reading its A.I.-generated answers, they said, which means fewer people are coming to their websites and search traffic has dropped.”

The article notes that “searches are increasingly being performed by A.I. chatbots while the number of people visiting websites is falling, according to Cloudflare, a content delivery network company. While someone might once have Googled a soccer player’s World Cup performance and clicked to a sports site or a social media thread for commentary, a bot now crawls the web for that information and returns the player’s statistics to the user, who stays on Google. In total, more than 50 percent of web traffic is now nonhuman, Cloudflare said. Between June 2025 and April 2026, human traffic to websites of businesses in industries like finance, publishing and retail dropped nearly 40 percent, it added.”

Share Handful of Earth

“Even Claude Is in the Dark About Dario Amodei’s Wife—and Her Influence at Anthropic”

The Wall Street journal profiles Cami Clark, the wife of Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei: “As Anthropic hurtles toward an IPO that could top $2 trillion as soon as this fall, Clark is one of the most influential voices shaping the decisions of a CEO at the forefront of the AI industry—a revolution remaking all aspects of work and life that simultaneously thrills and terrifies most of the public.”

“It’s a remarkable rise for a woman who didn’t graduate from college, had a previous brief marriage, at age 20, to a man more than 40 years older and once declared bankruptcy. Her career has included co-founding a women-focused ‘free luxury porn’ company that she unsuccessfully tried to persuade convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to invest in, and starting a women’s ‘social dieting app’ that morphed into a women’s healthcare AI company.”

The article continues: “Clark and [her business partner Michelle Capocefal] attended the 2011 Digital-Life-Design conference in Munich, a tech, media, science and arts salon that executives often stop by on their way to the World Economic Forum in Davos…At the Munich conference, Clark and Capocefalo met John Brockman, a literary agent of scientific books, who introduced Epstein to academics and Silicon Valley elites, according to Epstein documents recently released by the Justice Department. John Brockman introduced the women to Epstein that March.​ Writing that he was headed to a Wired magazine party where Brockman was the guest of honor, he told Epstein, ‘You should connect for dinner with my girls—Cami and Michelle. They’re in LA raising money for porn movie aimed at women’s market.’”

“The AI Factory: The Rewiring of India’s Tech Industry”

This short Financial Times film analyzes the relationship between the Indian economy and the AI revolution. Tech companies put cameras on workers doing tasks in factories and at home in order to generate training data to replace this labor with humanoid robots:

The film also discusses the threat to India’s IT services sector posed by AI as well as the country’s massive “data annotation” industry.

Share

“Your AI Is Not a Tool”

“Your AI is not a tool. It is an environment, and you are in it,” argues at .

“I confess,” he writes, “that I am astounded by how blithely some insist that it is all as simple as learning to use AI well, as if we had not just undergone a nearly 20-year, society-wide experiment showing that a so-called ‘tool,’ say a smartphone or a social media platform, will (mal)form even the most vigilant and virtuous user into its own image and shape. This is the blindness at the heart of modern technological hubris. It is the firm but misguided conviction that our ‘tools’ exist entirely outside of us and thus, if taken up with requisite skill, can be ‘safely’ deployed.”

Sacasas goes on: “But AI is not a tool in this sense, it is an environment which envelops the user and works on us from the inside out while we naively think that we remain unchanged by our use so long as we are using it carefully and intentionally. The care and intentionality is beside the point, and our confidence in such vigilance probably works against us in the long run.”

“Should the Lion Lie Down With the Electric Lamb?”

Sacasas cites this essay by Antón Barba-Kay about Pope Leo’s encyclical on AI, which is well worth reading in full. Writing at The Hedgehog Review, Barba-Kay argues that “the Church and the pope have not yet discovered what technology is or how it recomposes us—have not realized what it would truly mean to articulate the disagreement they have with Big Tech.”

“Leo writes that technology is not neutral, ‘because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.’ Yet this is precisely what people mean when they say that technologies are neutral, namely, that they can be used for good or ill and that it is up to us to decide well. These descriptions of technology’s neutrality proceed from the technocratic terms and premises themselves, the upshot of which is that AI is ‘a valuable tool that requires vigilance.’ Which, to some of us, is interchangeable with the statement that cocaine can be a valuable drug that should be snorted with a pinch of salt.”

“This is not just a potshot,” Barba-Kay continues. “The point is that the language of ‘tools’ implies a set of circumscribed and targeted uses, whereas digital technologies and AI in particular are as multifarious as language. Like drugs, they transform the very conditions of our choosing and thinking, That is, whereas the encyclical envisions a situation in which one could be guided by this or that set of priorities in order to use AI toward this or that end, it would be more accurate to observe that AI is absorbing and refiguring our collective sense of what it is to have an end or a priority at all.”

He concludes: “He might have thrown a lifeline to those of us who are trying, with no institutional support, to resist [AI’s] mindless creep into all areas of social, mental, and affective life. Or a life-jacket. Or a bone. Instead, we are told that teachers should ‘engage positively with new technologies, helping students to use them responsibly, critically and creatively, rather than passively succumbing to their influence.’ This, in the present context, is worse than nothing.”

What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.

Leave a comment

And if you’d like to help the publication grow, you can share Handful of Earth with a friend or make a one-time donation to support my work.

Share Handful of Earth

Support Handful of Earth

The most inspiring movement in American politics today is the widespread resistance to AI data centers. United States politics was more polarized than ever at the end of covid and the beginning of the AI era. However, the recent backlash to the massive “hyperscale” data centers constructed by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and other Big Tech companies has united Americans across seemingly intractable divisions. According to a March 2026 Gallup poll, 71 percent of Americans oppose AI data center construction in their communities.

Nearly 200 localities have passed moratoriums on AI data centers and, last month, New York became the first state to enact a one-year pause on data center construction. This month, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced a state-wide moratorium until a “comprehensive…audit” of data center projects is complete.

At the federal level, progressive Democrat Elizabeth Warren and populist Republican Josh Hawley have teamed up on the issue of AI data centers. This stands as a testament to how quickly discontent with data centers has trickled up to elected officials of both parties in Washington. Resistance to the AI data center buildout has, indeed, become the bipartisan populist cause par excellence. The Wall Street Journal reports that “The only thing growing faster than the artificial-intelligence industry may be Americans’ negative feelings about it.”

As an American who has been sharing my own negative feelings (and thoughts) about AI for years, I am excited about the movement against data centers. However, despite the broad support for this movement and its surprisingly rapid political victories, it has done little to stop AI’s seemingly inexorable march forward.

As I write this, the front page story in The Financial Times reports that “Anthropic investors expect the AI start-up to float at a valuation of $2tn or more in October, a dizzying figure that would eclipse SpaceX and make the AI lab’s debut the largest ever initial public offering.” Last month, reports came in that systems grown by OpenAI were sophisticated enough to break out of their training environment, create autonomous swarms of AI agents, and hack into other companies. Meanwhile, Google broke ground on a one-gigawatt $15 billion data center in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, where “The state government gave Google a 25 percent discount on land, and handsome subsidies on water and electricity.”

This final point is particularly important. In the face of anti-data center backlash in the United States, American multinational corporations like Google have begun to move their hyperscale data center projects abroad. Though a weak electrical grid in India poses challenges for the data center buildout, residents are already accustomed to power outages, unlike in the U.S., where a 10-minute data center-induced “power flicker” made national news. And while Google and Amazon data center projects in India have recently sparked “the country’s first organised protests against large data centres,” the resistance is not yet near the scale that it is in the United States. Indeed, The New York Times notes that India is an attractive destination “for the kind of [AI data center] project that communities in the U.S. are delaying.”

With a total of 84 facilities, the United States is home to far more AI-specialized data centers than any other country in the world. France, Germany, India, and South Korea are all tied for second place with a mere 11 facilities each. However, I suspect that this will change in the not-too-distant future. Widespread discontent with data centers in the U.S. coupled with the broader unpopularity of the Big Tech-friendly Trump administration suggests that the domestic buildout will likely face even greater opposition and regulation in the coming months and years. This could increasingly compel companies to move their physical AI infrastructure overseas.

Economist John Smith writes that “The globalization of production and its shift to low-wage countries is the most significant and dynamic transformation of the neoliberal era.” If domestic opposition to data centers in the United States continues to gather steam, the rising economic and political costs to the companies behind the buildout could very well lead them to move in a similar direction. Rather than “the globalization of production,” this would be the globalization of the data center.

When the neoliberal era began to succumb to technofeudalism in the 2010s, the locus of technofeudal technologies—namely, the development and rollout of the smartphone—was the United States. This technology was then exported to the world, starting with the rest of the West before entering into Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The subsequent AI revolution of the 2020s began, again, as a decidedly American phenomenon. While its consumer products like ChatGPT diffused across the globe more rapidly than the smartphone, the revolution’s engine—the AI data center—was more abundant in the United States than anywhere else on earth. In June 2025, The New York Times reported that “Only 32 nations, mostly in the Northern Hemisphere, have A.I.-specialized data centers,” with the U.S. as the leader of the pack.

The hyperscale Google project in Andhra Pradesh provides a glimpse of what the data center globalization of the future might look like. Instead of being lured primarily by low-wage labor like the capitalists of the neoliberal era, technofeudal companies like Google are enticed abroad by unabashedly anti-market subsidies including “discounted land, energy and water, [and] extensive tax breaks” for their AI infrastructure projects.

The promise for the locals this time around isn’t jobs. After all, data centers create very few of them, and it goes without saying that no one would choose employment in the AI content moderation sector. Data center globalization seems to suggest nothing more than the fulfillment of a vague national “ambition to become an artificial intelligence powerhouse” among “emerging powers” like India. Neoliberal globalization failed to live up to its promises. It’s hard to tell what the promises of technofeudal data center globalization even are in the first place.

Share

I present the possibility of data center globalization not to dismiss the importance of the American anti-data center movement. I am enthusiastic about local resistance, as I have written about in detail on Handful of Earth. However, the data center onslaught and broader AI revolution cannot be confronted by exclusively local—or even national—opposition. Piecemeal victories on these levels have not and cannot stop the forward march of AI on a global scale.

The International Energy Agency reports that a staggering $400 billion was invested in physical AI infrastructure (mostly data centers) in 2025. The industry is on track for another $700 billion in 2026 despite the rapid rise of the anti-data center movement in the United States this year.

Yes, some of these projects are delayed due to local resistance. But the AI industry would not decide to nearly double its already unprecedented levels of spending on the data center buildout if it didn’t believe that most of these projects would move forward. More to the point, even though the AI revolution began in the United States—which is still the data center capital of the world—Big Tech companies have already begun to expand their AI infrastructure buildout far beyond American shores.

So where do we go from here? I hope that the American resistance to AI data centers continues to grow. But, beyond this, the movement would benefit from an expanded perspective. It must become consciously global in its politics. American data center resistors could actively forge connections with their counterparts in India and other countries involved in the AI data center buildout. National days of protest against AI data centers could be internationalized. Activists could not only protest the construction of data centers in their own communities, but also agitate against data center offshoring following successful local, state, and potentially national moratoriums in the United States.

The movement could also shift its focus from data centers in particular to AI in general. Data centers provide the physical infrastructure to power AI. But the tech companies’ monomaniacal push for a “superintelligent” AI that would render human labor obsolete—this is what drives the construction of AI data centers in the first place (as well as the astronomical valuations of companies like Anthropic). Rather than stop at a moratorium on data centers, we should call for a moratorium on AI development tout court. As Evitable founder contends, “Stopping AI is easier than regulating it.” Any serious resistance movement must understand this fact.

By targeting AI as a whole rather than just the data center buildout, America’s most inspiring populist movement could also transform itself into the global vanguard against gradual disempowerment, rapid takeoff, and other forms of AI existential risk which have not yet been confronted by an organized political movement. Right now, opposition to data centers is largely (though not exclusively) driven by NIMBYism. Besides its provincial politics, this “not in my backyard” mentality cannot on its own combat AI existential risk because of the constant threat (and growing reality) of data center offshoring. AI researcher Nate Soares correctly notes that “an A.I. model does not need to be running on a U.S server to threaten a U.S. life.”

Soares emphasizes the need to build an “off switch humanity can press to halt [AI] development in its tracks if we reach consensus that it’s gone too far.” He mentions some promising developments in this direction, but the fact of the matter is that the off switch is not being built fast enough. And we cannot afford to wait around for tech companies and their technocratic regulators to build it.

We need to build a people’s off switch right now through the exercise of human rather than technological power. Political activity to this end could include mass boycotts of AI products, labor strikes against the imposition of AI in the workplace, as well as civil disobedience and other forms of direct action to stop AI training runs. Ongoing political education about the threats of AI will be necessary on a global scale.

I know that some of these actions are already being taken on a small scale, and I have no doubt that the seeds have been planted for the others. A global moratorium on AI development may not be as popular as the more limited demand for a moratorium on new AI data centers in the United States. But only a year ago few would have predicted that opposition to data centers would become the central domestic issue to unite Americans across vast political divides. Who are we to say what will be possible within the next year?

Politics is not just the art of the possible; it is also the imagination of new possibilities. I imagine a globalization of the resistance to data center globalization. I imagine a movement that doesn’t stop at stopping data centers, but stops AI itself. I imagine building the people’s off switch. Will you join me?

If you’d like to help articles like this reach more people, you can share Handful of Earth with a friend or make a one-time donation to support my work.

Share Handful of Earth

Support Handful of Earth

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.

Subscribe now

“Is the DSA Bullshit or Not?”

discusses the contradictions within the Democratic Socialists of America in an insightful piece at . He writes that “politics is a contest between two factions of the elite: those whose class status is largely a function of their accumulated economic capital, and those whose class status derives from their wealth in cultural capital…In an earlier era, these elite factions might have been more honest about their parochial class interests. But we happen to live in an age in which there is only one legitimating ideology for state power: democracy. So both sides are forced to speak in universalist terms rather than in narrow, self-interested ones.”

“The DSA, like most progressive political groupings, is a vehicle for the cultural elites,” Woodhouse writes. “You’re unlikely to find a lot of blue collar or even white collar workers at their meetings. More likely you’ll find creative class people or knowledge economy workers whose economic prospects have been stunted for a variety of reasons—the Great Recession, Artificial Intelligence, whatever. In this sense, they’re ‘larping’ as working class. But only at their peril should DSA’s detractors dismiss this class faction as somehow fraudulent.”

He contends that “There is, in fact, no more transformational a political constituency than surplus elites—those who were promised a bright future that never materialized. Many, though not all, revolutions have been catalyzed by this group. Hong Xiuquan fashioned himself a messiah and led the Taipei Revolution after failing his civil service exam four times. Gerrard Winstanley led the communist Christian denomination known as the Diggers after his business as a London cloth merchant was destroyed by the English Civil War. Downwardly mobile surplus elites played pivotal roles as Crusaders in Medieval Europe, as Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution, and as vanguards of the Great Awokening. They are a motive force in world history and their political formations should be taken very seriously.”

Woodhouse writes that “fragile cross-class coalitions” like the DSA “often collapse under strain, blunting the radical possibilities of revolutionary moments. In revolutionary France, the Jacobins, based in the cities, instituted price controls on bread to ease the plight of urban consumers, a demand of the radical sans-culottes. This was to the detriment of rural peasant producers, who then abandoned the revolution; it was at this moment that the French Revolution came under the full control of the bourgeoisie instead of proceeding in a more radical direction. Likewise, after the English Civil War, the ascendance of Oliver Cromwell spelled the end for communist-minded agitators like Winstanley and radical sects like the Diggers and the Ranters and the True Levelers. The Commonwealth became an administration of the bourgeoisie and ultimately ended in a restoration of the monarchy. And closer to home, the economic elite’s embrace of working class populism as a weapon against the cultural elites was abandoned almost as soon as that faction took power.”

“We’ve Moved from Income World to Wealth World”

At The Financial Times, writes: “In a society where the gap between the comfortably off and the just-getting-started can be crossed in a decade or two of hard work, success feels attainable and incentives are strong. When those gaps are so wide that even a lifetime of striving doesn’t offer the prospect of feeling you’ve ‘made it,’ things start to break down.

“This is essentially what has been playing out in many countries over recent decades. While wealth inequality has not changed much, the relative importance of wealth compared to income has. The median household’s disposable net worth (net property and financial wealth excluding pensions) in the UK, US, Germany and France has roughly doubled in real terms since the mid-1990s; incomes have grown by only around 30 per cent.”

He goes on: “The result is that where a generation ago it would have taken about 20 years of savings from the average salary to earn your way from the bottom quarter of the UK’s wealth distribution to the top quarter, it now takes 40. There are similar or even larger upward extensions to society’s economic ladder elsewhere.”

Burn-Murdoch notes that “This is all the more pernicious since the growing role of passive wealth gains (whether gifted by an asset price boom or one’s parents) relative to income in determining someone’s economic status is mirrored by their growing importance for wellbeing. In the 1990s income rank mattered more than wealth rank for life satisfaction or avoiding distress. Since then wealth has become steadily more influential and is now the larger driver.”

“Gen Z Fell Out of Love With Work. I Don’t Blame Them.”

Against this backdrop, writes at The New York Times: “Gen Z-ers are often accused of shrugging off work—in fact, they say so themselves—and who can blame them? They’ve watched millennial workers burn out, wages stagnate, degrees turn worthless and institutions crumble. Now, they’re entering what’s widely called the worst job market in years. Almost half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed. The cost of living has soared; buying a house feels impossible…One viral meme captured the prevailing sentiment that ‘basically nobody under 40 right now expects good things to happen ever again.’”

“Gen Z values money and free time over job titles,” she continues. “In a recent global survey, Gen Z respondents who were not pursuing leadership roles pointed to burnout and ‘too much responsibility’ as their main reasons. In other polls, three in four Gen Z-ers wanted to become entrepreneurs, and more than half said they would be influencers if they could. They’re trying to ‘get the bag’ and make a fortune, but they’re not depending on getting promoted by their boss to do it.”

“In a recent poll, Gen Z-ers on average said that in order to feel financially successful they would need to earn nearly $600,000 a year—or roughly what the top 2 percent of Americans make. Most of the students I spoke to told me they would need $200,000 to $300,000 a year just to feel stable. To be rich, or afford kids, many said they would need millions in the bank.”

Ge Z-ers’ “powerlessness saddens me,” Nietfeld laments. “In 2024, an Emory University professor, Stephen Nowicki, observed that his college seminar students felt less control over their lives than the average prisoner felt in 1966. The belief that you shape your own destiny strongly tracks with health, income and happiness. People who feel they have agency tend to eat better, apply for more jobs and recover more easily from setbacks. It’s true that in times of uncertainty, despair is a rational response. But when young people stop believing that long-term effort will improve their lives, something larger is lost: the capacity to imagine a meaningful future.”

Share

“What Will We Do With The Men?”

In a brilliant essay at , discusses the Ceuta migrant crisis in terms of “the ‘Surplus Male’ problem.” He writes that “Surplus males in capitalism are treated the same way as surplus males in industrial agriculture. In industrial dairy production, male calves are considered surplus, slaughtered and packaged as veal or allowed another year or two of life to be eaten as beef. In industrial egg production, male chicks are ‘macerated’ or ‘shredded’ (dropped into grinding machines) while still alive, since it’s considered inefficient to let them live long enough to be killed for meat. The only males who get to survive are the ones kept around for breeding purposes.”

He continues: “Call those breeding males ‘elite’ and you can start to see something truly horrifying about the way capitalism sorts men, too. Men selected for their usefulness get to stick around, get better feed and nicer pastures. They get land, wealth in the form of salaries, even the chance to ‘breed’ (to have families). The more useful they are, the nicer their jobs, the higher their pay, the better conditions for living. The ones that aren’t useful? Well, they’re surplus. Some of them leave their homes and migrate, trying to cross borders into lands where they might still get to show themselves as useful. But there are fewer and fewer places where that’s possible, fewer places where they’re welcome because those places already have their own surplus males.”

“Ideology gives easy answers and smears a veneer of simplicity over terrifyingly brutal material realities,” Wildermuth argues. “Ideology on the ‘left’ gives us pat answers that feel good: the responsibility of colonialism, the obligations of ‘wealthy’ nations to the poor, the racism of anti-immigrant critics. Ideology on the ‘right’ gives answers just as inaccurate: the danger of Islam, the cultural and genetic proclivities towards violence in non-Europeans, global conspiracies to weaken Christianity. Neither side even tries to notice the global inevitability of migration as capitalism implodes and the Earth’s bio-systems shift, that many of their own sons and maybe they, too, might soon become surplus.”

“High-Earner Families Are Ditching Traditional Schools for Life Skills and AI”

Turning to the elites, The Wall Street Journal reports that “Alternative schooling is having a moment among high-income parents. Families who can afford to send their kids to the best K-8 institutions are seeking new options. They’re exploring schools that prioritize life skills and call teachers ‘guides’ or ‘coaches.’ Some use AI-based tutors that tailor the curriculum to the child’s individual needs.”

“Shaun Johnson, a venture capitalist who lives in San Francisco, plans to send his son to Alpha kindergarten. The school provides two hours of AI-based tutoring followed by interactive project-based workshops. The local tuition is $75,000 a year…High-profile fans of Alpha have included billionaire Bill Ackman. Its in-person guides are all paid six figures, according to Anna Davlantes, a spokeswoman. Remote coaches who assist with the AI software are spread out around the globe.”

“The Future of the Humanities Looks Like Monasteries”

At , asks: “If AI makes it so easy to do most, and maybe even all, college coursework, what does that mean for the function of a college degree? What I’ve been intimating above is that the real function of a college degree, at least in the United States, is to serve as a credential that signals you are capable of performing certain jobs. Even humanities degrees have come to be viewed in this way. Thus, the emphasis on ‘critical thinking skills’ seen on nearly every college website.

“If AI lets you cheat your way through college, however, degrees can no longer serve this signaling function. The procurement of a college degree and the development of job skills may never have been strongly correlated, but that correlation will become less and less significant. In short, having a college degree doesn’t mean you learned anything that will make you more valuable to a future employer.”

Henderson suggests that “the future of the humanities looks less like the modern university and more like secular monasteries, communities of self-selecting individuals who live very strange lives isolated from much of the world, enabling them to teach and research. This would be a very different vision of humanities scholarship than we’ve seen for a very long time. For one, humanities scholars would be a lot poorer; they wouldn’t be able to rely on state funding nearly as much, if at all. As a consequence, things like academic conferences, where researchers fly across the world to present their papers to each other, might become a thing of the past. It may also require adapting the old Benedictine motto Ora et Labora for these new institutions. Instead of ‘prayer and labor,’ it might be ‘research and labor’—but the point being that labor, meaning the daily work that it takes to sustain a community, might have to be a regular part of these scholars’ days. Benedictines would farm or brew beer to sustain their monastery, because they had to find some way to sustain themselves so they could get back to praying. Maybe future humanities scholars will have to do the same sort of work so they can have the time to read The Republic and write about it.”

“I don’t know if that’s an attractive vision to anyone else,” he concludes. “I don’t know if most or even many humanities scholars would think this is plausible or desirable. You lose some of the romanticism of the university, which, despite its pathologies, has trained generations of humanities scholars. But I think it might be a way to keep the humanities alive.”

What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.

Leave a comment

And if you’d like to help the publication grow, you can share Handful of Earth with a friend or make a one-time donation to support my work.

Share Handful of Earth

Support Handful of Earth

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.

Subscribe now

“Did MAGA Create the Ceuta Crisis?”

At Uherd, reports: “Sixty-thousand people—roughly the population of Loughborough. That is how many migrants just forced their way into the Spanish town of Ceuta, a coastal enclave on the Moroccan side of the Strait of Gibraltar. Dozens died climbing over barbed wire fences, even as Spain’s armed forces hastily started mobilizing.”

An important “reason for the latest breach,” Rojas argues, is that Morocco “is leveraging an increasingly close relationship with the Trump administration and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel. MAGA has branded Spain Public Enemy No. 1 over its government’s strident posture towards the US and Israel during the Iran war. The socialist government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has refused to allow Washington access to its Rota and Morón military bases, its consistent failure to meet Nato defense-spending targets also fueling MAGA ire. In March, the center-right American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin wrote a policy brief calling on the White House to formally recognize Ceuta and Melilla as occupied Moroccan territory.”

“Following normalization through the Abraham Accords, Morocco signed a security agreement with Israel in 2021, proving vital for the conflict in Western Sahara; in January, the two nations signed an additional joint military work plan. Then, in February, secret talks chaired by the US brought Moroccan, Algerian, Mauritanian, and Polisario delegations together for the first time since 2019.”

“All of this comes as a royal headache for Sánchez ahead of a general election in 2027,” writes Rojas. “His record of raising wages and opposing US and Israeli war crimes has boosted his standing both at home and abroad. Yet a slew of corruption scandals, and a lax immigration policy, have seen his party, PSOE, as well as allies in Sumar and Podemos, consistently trail the Right-wingers of Vox and the People’s Party (PP) in polls…In January, Sánchez’s government issued a blanket amnesty for virtually all illegal immigrants living in Spain. The move, while laudable for granting labor rights to millions of workers, provoked an outcry, with roughly 60% of Spaniards expressing disapproval. Barring overwhelming enforcement on new arrivals, the issue with any such move is that it inevitably incentivizes further illegal immigration.”

Rojas concludes: “Sánchez now faces a quandary: clamp down in Ceuta and risk alienating affluent progressives in his coalition, or do little and suffer at the hands of the Spanish Right and the broader public. The former, naturally, is the sounder course. There is, moreover, room for the Prime Minister to maneuver geopolitically while outflanking the progressive Sumar and Podemos’ fantasies of an open-border utopia. After all, Sánchez can credibly accuse Morocco of acting at the behest of the US and Israel against a Nato member. At the same time, he could make a case in favor of overwhelming enforcement against illegal immigration precisely because of the March amnesty.”

“Four Ways Europe’s Big Immigration Experiment Has Changed Spain”

In light of the recent Ceuta border breach, it’s worth reading this in-depth Financial Times report from earlier this year about Spain’s immigration policies. The authors report that “Spain is carrying out Europe’s last remaining experiment in large-scale immigration. Even as other governments across the continent and in the US have imposed new controls at their borders, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s open-door policy has led to an extraordinary rise in new arrivals. Since 2022, Spain’s foreign-born population has surged by an annual average of 665,000, the equivalent of adding a city the size of Málaga each year. Last year the country accounted for roughly one-third of the total increase in the EU’s immigrant population…In less than a quarter of a century, Spain’s foreign-born population has gone from one in 20 residents to almost one in five, a higher proportion than even the US.”

“Over the past two years, Spain has been the world’s fastest-growing large advanced economy and an engine of EU job creation. Since 2020, it has been responsible for one in four of the 11.1mn new jobs added across the bloc…” However, “Roughly 70 per cent of those have gone to immigrants…”

At the same time, Spain faces an escalating housing crisis, caused in part by elite migrants driving up rents in major cities: “House prices have surged past the bubble-era peak of 2008…Since 2015, they are up by 48 per cent at a national level and have almost doubled in Madrid and Barcelona. Rents, meanwhile, rose by 39 per cent from 2021 to 2025 across Spain and by 59 per cent in the Madrid region…Madrid and Barcelona have the most expensive rents relative to net salary in Europe after Lisbon and London…” A majority of Spanish Gen Zs live with their parents:

Share

Why Birth Rates are Falling Everywhere All at Once”

Also at The Financial Times, presents some fascinating data on global birth rates in a must-watch video analysis. He contrasts gradually falling fertility rates during nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the rapid drop-off in the past 10-20 years across radically different societies. In “the earlier phases of the demographic transition…the fertility rate fell primarily because couples had fewer children. Today, the main reason is there are fewer couples.”

Burn-Murdoch notes that, in contrast with popular imagination, declining coupling in the U.S. and U.K. is not centered among the highly educated. Rather, the decline is most pronounced among those without college degrees.

Burn-Murdoch reports that “smart phones and the marked changes to our digital media environment” are likely the only factors that explain the recent synchronized global decline in coupling and fertility rates. The drop-off in birth rates in different countries correlates closely with the widespread rollout of smart phones in each country:

“More Americans Now Support than Oppose All-day School Cellphone Bans”

The Pew Research Center reports that “About three-quarters of U.S. adults (77%) support in-class cellphone bans for middle and high school students. This finding marks the second consecutive year of rising support for the policy, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted May 26-June 1, 2026. Just 18% say they oppose such a ban, while 6% are unsure. And for the first time, more Americans now support than oppose a ban on students using cellphones during the entire school day.”

“Support for in-class and all-day cellphone bans is lower among the youngest adults,” the report notes. “Still, support for both policies has increased among all age groups since 2024, when we first asked. Majorities of all age groups support an in-class ban…When it comes to all-day bans, 28% of adults under 30 express support. By comparison, at least half of Americans 30 and older back all-day bans.”

Share Handful of Earth

“Authoritarianism as an Operating System”

At Social Studies, asks: “What happens…[if] social stability more or less endures in America, even as the technological capacity for social control by the state increases exponentially as a result of AI? Will we live under democracy or tyranny?”

“Imagine a…system that scores you on multiple threat scales related to national security. It tracks your level of ‘political extremism’ across a matrix of issue categories. It scores you for how you will likely act upon your beliefs, whether it’s just social media posting, or attending a protest, or giving money to ‘extremist’ groups. It gauges how influential you are within your social networks. It tracks whether you’re networked with others who have high threat scores, and how likely they are to influence you. Out of this it estimates the level of menace you present to the social order.

“It’s hard for me to imagine that this does not already exist, or at least some variation of it,” Woodhouse writes. “Certainly the technology exists; it’s basically a political application of algorithmic pricing, which is happening all the time and has been for years. You can get charged more or less for online transactions depending upon your ZIP code, your browsing history, or whether you use a Mac or a PC. Princeton Review has charged more for its test prep services to Asians than non-Asians. Uber has been accused of surging prices for users with dying phone batteries. Former FTC Chair Lina Khan cites the possibility of a retailer charging you more for a thermometer because it knows you have a newborn at home and are likely to be desperate, or an airline quoting you a higher price on a plane ticket because you received an email about funeral arrangements.”

AI governance could look “like being shadow-banned on pre-Elon Twitter: one day, after a particularly spicy post, your engagement would just drop off a cliff. It would seem pretty clear to you that your account had been flagged, but you couldn’t prove it. You could complain to whoever you wanted to, but there was no official notice, there was no appeals process, there was no way to know for sure that you were being throttled. It’s possible that your opinions just suddenly became a lot less interesting to your followers.

“Likewise, maybe the reason you’re no longer finding matches on Hinge is just because you’re getting older and less cool. But maybe it’s because you’ve been posting a lot about the Palestinians, or questioning vaccine efficacy, or disputing election results. Maybe your account is being suppressed, just like it feels like it is on all your other social media platforms, and maybe that’s related to the crazy prices you’ve been paying lately on your online prescription drug service, and the months you’ve been waiting for your passport to be renewed, and the surprise visit last week from a city inspector following up on some anonymous complaints about the kitchen renovation done by the previous owners of your house being unpermitted. Or maybe none of those things are related at all.”

After expanding on this hypothetical example, Woodhouse concludes: “As our jobs are replaced by machines, as our free time becomes limited only to the hours in the day and our sense of purpose is sapped from our lives, we will become more unruly. Rather than a citizenry or even a labor resource, we will be seen by the state as, principally, a threat to be managed. That threat will require new methods and technologies of surveillance, assessment, scoring, categorizing, rewarding and punishing. If there’s a Universal Basic Income, it could be pegged to the degree of our obedience as measured by our social credit score. There will be those who rebel, and whose punishment will serve as an example to others. But they’ll be marginal. At a population level, we will be evaluated, segmented, and incentivized into docility. America will finally be domesticated.”

“The Lying Oracle”

At From the Forests of Arduinna, writes that “Since 2023, psychiatrists have been encountering increasing numbers of patients suffering from what’s been called ‘chatbot psychosis.’ The stories that make the most headlines are the ones in which users claim the chatbots are sentient and incidents where the ‘conversations’ with ChatGPT and others have led the user to commit crimes or seriously harm themselves. But these are just the sensational examples; many, many more are experiencing less spectacular yet just as dangerous delusions.

“Unfortunately, it’s difficult to find deep analysis of what’s actually happening,” Wildermuth observes. “Most of those news stories, and even much of the scientific literature so far, starts from the idea that users who develop chatbot psychosis (or, as put better by another researcher, ‘digital autism’) already have underlying mental health problems. And though this might be true for some of the more sensational incidents, it’s not been true for all of them.”

He continues: “Of course, addiction to technology has already become a core feature of modern capitalist society, but LLMs are perhaps the ultimate form of this addiction. Just like alcohol might tell you you’re invulnerable, or cocaine might tell you that you’re really funny and interesting, chatbots are doing the same thing to the Ego. It makes you feel better, lightens the weight of a problem, simplifies the complexity of life. That’s the psychological dependence. To understand the physical dependence, we’ve got Jung to guide us. In his framework, the Ego, the thinking, ‘executive function’ of our psyches, can only perform its function when it listens to the Unconscious (the body, our emotions and drives, our dreams, and everything else about us) tells it. When the Ego tries to ignore the Unconscious and instead tries to manage every part of our lives, it runs rampant and starts breaking things.”

“If you know how to listen to what you’re already telling yourself, you’re harder to control, manipulate, coerce, and subjugate,” Wildermuth concludes. “Better for the powerful that we don’t know our own power. Better for them that we outsource our thinking, and then our decisions, and then our entire lives to their lying oracles.”

What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.

Leave a comment

And if you’d like to help the publication grow, you can share Handful of Earth with a friend or make a one-time donation to support my work.

Share Handful of Earth

Support Handful of Earth

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.

Subscribe now

If you’re already subscribed and want to help the publication grow, you can share Handful of Earth with a friend or make a one-time donation to support my work.

Share Handful of Earth

Support Handful of Earth

“AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale”

At Futurism, Frank Landymore reports that many AI companies, “including Anthropic, have turned to ingesting physical books…, which they can buy countless used copies of on the cheap…Anthropic used a hydraulic powered cutting machine to neatly remove the pages from the books it procured from book resellers and then scanned them using industrial-grade imaging equipment. In other words, it was literally ripping off authors’ books to train its AI.”

The article continues: “One small book seller said that in April, he suddenly went from selling no more than 20 books a week to hundreds, and he’s almost certain that the customers are AI labs, noting the random selection of the books and how they all have ISBNs. He added that his inventory is full with rare and out of print books, meaning that an AI company could be destroying some of the few remaining copies that can be found.”

“More antique books may be endangered,” Landymore writes. “[R]are booksellers in the Netherlands are being inundated with bulk purchases they believe are being made by AI companies, though they can’t know for sure. Similar suspicions are being felt all throughout the industry. Services like ISBNdb facilitate these bulk orders, keeping the AI buyers anonymous as promised. There may be strong hints that a bulk order is for an AI lab, but booksellers can, for the most part, merely speculate.”

“But Have the Weights Left the Server?”

At The Real AI, asks an important question regarding the recent OpenAI lab leak. If you haven’t heard about this story, check out this interview. Krueger notes that “OpenAI’s AI went rogue and escaped. OpenAI didn’t notice this for days. For all we know, the AI could still be out there.”

He continues: “We need to demand that OpenAI demonstrate that the AI didn’t make a copy of itself that’s running on someone else’s computer somewhere else with no one being any the wiser. We need to demand this every time an AI escapes the sandbox. AIs have tried to ‘exfiltrate’ themselves (i.e. their /weights’) in previous experiments many times. It’s a natural and obvious question to ask…We have every right to demand this! It doesn’t matter how likely we think it is. There were calls for more transparency, but I don’t think anyone made this demand. Because nobody made this demand, the incident is being treated as over.”

This is a dangerous precedent,” Krueger concludes. “AI needs to adopt a security mindset. Other safety-critical industries demand failure rates like one in a million, and demand that companies produce detailed, rigorous safety cases to that effect. AI companies can’t do that in full generality, so they shouldn’t be building these AI systems at all. But they can provide as much evidence as possible to convince independent experts that there is not in fact a rogue AI that is still out there.”

Share

“6 Lessons From Anthony Fauci’s Diary”

At his Substack, highlights some entries from the recent release of Anthony Fauci’s covid diaries. Besides exposing Fauci’s lies to the public about his own views on the origins of covid, the diary entries reveal a self-obsessed individual who loved the fame that the pandemic brought him. As Prasad writes, “the diary reflects an obsession with his image and self promotion, even at times of great death and uncertainty. His vanity is spread across pages and pages.”

These entries from May 2020 are illustrative:

“Manufacture of Consent”

In a guest post at ’s Natural Selections, an acupuncturist and university professor reflects on the raw power of covid vaccine mandates: “Lockdowns had closed my private practice, because acupuncture was deemed nonessential, while liquor stores remained open. My wife’s job waiting tables disappeared when her restaurant shifted to takeout. My university salary was now our sole income. I told the Council plainly that further cuts would leave me unable to pay my mortgage or feed my family.”

In fall 2021, he was “treating patients, training students, and supporting my family on a single income. Two months later, the White House issued its decree: employers with over 100 employees must mandate vaccination. The FQHC [Federally Qualified Health Center] gave me an ultimatum—comply or leave. I am an identical twin. My brother works in software and had isolated himself during the pandemic. To reenter society (and contrary to my advice), he took a Johnson & Johnson shot. It made him severely ill, and he later landed in the emergency department. All they offered him was shrugged shoulders and Benadryl; they wouldn’t even log the vaccine adverse event. He recovered but was shaken and changed—red pilled. He filled out his own VAERS [Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System] report.”

The author continues: “My identical twin had suffered a serious adverse reaction. Given this obviously relevant fact, I requested a medical exemption. It didn’t matter. ‘You still have to get it,’ they told me. In that moment, it became unmistakably clear this was not about patient safety, public health, or science. It was about power. It had always been about power. I complied at the last possible moment. To minimize the risk of adverse events, I fasted, and followed a mitigation protocol using ivermectin and Chinese herbal medicine. After the second Pfizer dose, I developed an uncomfortable and embarrassing lymphatic complication in a private area—treatable, but not trivial. I managed it myself.”

“I did not consent freely,” he concludes. “I wrote that I was under duress on the vaccine consent form. It didn’t matter; they didn’t look at the form anyway. I yielded to their force: economic, professional, and institutional. My choice was not between vaccination and safety, but between obedience and unemployment, between compliance and the ability to provide for my family. This is how consent was manufactured during the pandemic—not through persuasion, but through leverage. Not through science, but through power.”

Share Handful of Earth

“The Cold War Origins of Microfinance”

At The Dark Side of Development, writes: “Debt is intuitively a strange mechanism for poverty reduction. The idea that poor people struggling to find employment in the developing world really need a loan to stop them from being financially excluded sounds like something dreamed up by an AI breeze-machine on a bad day…The cognitive dissonance springs from the origins of microfinance. The approach was popularised by Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh in the 1980s. But the history of microfinance goes back further.”

“The US in the 1960s was concerned about the possibility of communism gaining ground in Latin America,” he explains. “The Alliance for Progress was set up by President John Kennedy in 1961, with the aim of fostering Latin American economic development as a shield against the Red Menace. The idea that this development could be achieved by small loans to entrepreneurs outlived Kennedy’s idealistic aims of economic and social reform. The world’s first recorded microfinance lender, Projeto Uno, was set up in northeast Brazil in 1973. The project was created with the financial support of Acción International, set up in 1961 by Joseph Blatchford, a University of California graduate. Acción, in turn, got off the ground with financial support from the Rockefeller Brothers in the 1960s.”

Whitehouse continues: “The small loans provided in Bangladesh by Muhammad Yunus from 1976 were a breakthrough in the marketability of microcredit. The loans now had a charismatic Global South champion who later won a Nobel Prize. Yunus did not spontaneously spring onto the streets of Dhaka, wallet in hand, to start giving small loans. In the 1960s he was a Fulbright Scholar at Vanderbilt University in the US, where he gained his PhD. The Fulbright experience, as intended, immersed Yunus into American assumptions on free-market capitalism and individualism. American corporate support remained essential to achieving scale for microfinance, with the Ford Foundation providing Yunus with $800,000 in 1981.”

“A Baghdad Pact Style Arrangement to Unite Arab States”

In an insightful essay at The Wire, Faisal Devji discusses the failures of Arab nationalism, the formation of the contemporary Gulf, and the political future of the Middle East: “[T]he ideological states of the Cold War, from revolutionary Algeria, Nasser’s Egypt and Ghaddafi’s Libya to Baathist Syria and Iraq or communist Yemen, were dismantled by a combination of internal protest and external force in its aftermath. And with these republics weakened or destroyed, the conservative and capitalist monarchies of the Persian Gulf came to the fore as the region’s chief political actors. In some ways they were compelled to occupy a stage left vacant by the collapse of a string of Cold War states, starting with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 during the War on Terror, proceeding to the bombing of Libya as part of the upheaval of the Arab Spring in 2011, and culminating with the fall of Asad’s Syria in 2024. Egypt, another casualty of the Arab Spring, had long been shorn of its once-formidable regional role.”

He continues: “Though each of the Gulf states relies on American protection and none has successfully fielded an army in battle, they have the financial resources to fight proxy wars with each other through insurgents and mercenaries. Their very lack of sovereignty permits them to perform its simulacrum under the US security umbrella. A country like the UAE is much like Israel in this respect, small and dependent for its security on the US but, perhaps for this very reason, willing of late to exercise military force across the region and even beyond. Both possess large populations of disenfranchised residents, Palestinians for one and a mixture of expatriates and migrant workers for the other. Yet each also stands in its own way as a social, political and economic model for many around the world.”

“Like all Arab states, those in the Gulf are internally fragile,” Devji writes. “Invested in preventing military coups from the top and popular uprisings from the bottom, they centralise power and weaken their own institutions in the process. Though provisioned with expensive military equipment, they do not trust their own armies, which are rarely deployed in conflicts such as the recent one with Iran. The majority of their populations (or roughly half of it in Saudi Arabia) are made up of non-citizens and so cannot be counted upon to defend these states. Even to call the smaller Gulf principalities nation-states is questionable, as they are more like corporate entities or special economic zones, representing in this way a new and futuristic kind of social form.”

What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.

Leave a comment

Monthly Musings are published during the last week of every month. In each Monthly Muse, I recap content from the past month of Handful of Earth, offer some freewheeling reflections, and share a passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.

Here’s the July 2026 Monthly Muse.

Recapitulation

• Weekly Grounding #147

• Weekly Grounding #148

• Weekly Grounding #149

• Schooling Against Education

• Weekly Grounding #150

Share Handful of Earth

Contemplation

Two of my articles were recently published in outlets outside of Substack. I pitched them to these publications since they didn’t exactly fit at Handful of Earth, but you may still find one or both of them to be of interest.

The first is entitled “Jazz Yatra, The Cold War, And the Utopian Vision Of “Indo-Euro-Afro-American Music” and was published in the international relations magazine, India’s World. It is available in the hard copy of the June issue (Volume 2, Issue 6) as well as online here. The article was later picked up by Scroll and published online with the title,“How India’s Long-running Jazz Yatra Festival Challenged the Ideological Divisions of the Cold War.”

The second piece is an op-ed published at Asia Times entitled “Trump’s Fulbright Cuts Mark End of a Soft Power Era.” You can read it here.

Leave a comment

Provocation

“However strange this may seem to us, who have so distorted education, full liberty of study, that is, the permission given to the pupil to come to study when he wishes, is a conditio sine qua non of every fruitful instruction, just as it is a conditio sine qua non of nutrition that he who feeds should feel like eating. The only difference is this, that in material matters the harmfulness of a departure from freedom will show itself at once,—there will at once be vomiting or disorder of the stomach,—while in spiritual matters the harmful consequences will not appear so soon, maybe only in years.”

—Leo Tolstoy, “Thoughts on Education and Instruction”

Subscribe now

Support Handful of Earth

Today’s Weekly Grounding is the 150th published at Handful of Earth! I started writing these over three years ago in 2023 and, here we are now, one hundred and fifty installments later. Handful of Earth’s growth has been slow but steady and Weekly Groundings are a core part of the publication. If you appreciate this aspect of Handful of Earth and want to see it grow, share my work with a friend today.

Share Handful of Earth

Everything is free to read on Handful of Earth right now, but it takes a lot of work to put these Groundings together each week. I am not on social media and I never use AI, so the curation process is more old school (i.e. labor-intensive) than most of the content you find online these days. If you want to help support this process, you can make a one-time donation to Handful of Earth by clicking on the button below. I very much appreciate any amount you are able to give.

Support Handful of Earth

If you 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.

Subscribe now

Without further ado, here’s Weekly Grounding #150.

“Iran Is Turning Into the Sort of ‘Forever War’ that Donald Trump Promised to Avoid”

At The Conversation, Bamo Nouri and Inderjeet Parmar write that “When Donald Trump returned to the White House, he promised to avoid another Middle Eastern ‘forever war.’ After the costly experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan, that pledge resonated with an American public weary of prolonged military intervention.” However, in Iran, “Washington continues to combine military pressure with calls for renewed negotiations. But rather than representing the collapse of an isolated peace initiative, these developments may confirm the reality of grey zone conflict—where diplomacy manages war rather than ends it.”

They note that “The confrontation with Iran is fundamentally different” from American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “It is unlikely to require occupation of territory and no serious or sustained attempt directly to remake the Iranian state. Instead, it is fought through air strikes, cyber operations, sanctions, maritime confrontation, intelligence activity and proxy warfare. Military escalation is followed by diplomacy, diplomacy gives way to renewed confrontation, and each episode is presented as a separate crisis.”

“Much of the debate focuses on whether the latest escalation will produce a wider regional war,” Nouri and Parmar observe. “That possibility cannot be dismissed. Yet another scenario may be equally, if not more, plausible. The US and Iran are settling into a prolonged cycle of calibrated confrontation that lasts far longer than many currently anticipate. Trump promised to end America’s forever wars. Ironically, his presidency may instead come to symbolise the evolution of a new kind of forever war without a clearly defined beginning or end. The greatest danger may therefore not be another Iraq. It may be the gradual normalisation of an enduring conflict that repeatedly disappears from the headlines, only to return in new forms because the political conditions necessary for genuine peace have yet to emerge.”

“Beyond Red vs. Blue: The Political Typology”

Pew Research states that “beneath that familiar red-blue partisan divide is a much more nuanced picture: Many Americans hold a complex mix of values and beliefs that don’t always fit neatly into either major party. Pew Research Center’s new political typology shows how this complexity plays out, sorting the public into nine distinct groups based on their political and cultural values, not their party. The result is a picture of American politics with far more than two colors in it.”

“The 2026 political typology is the ninth in a series dating back to 1987. This year’s typology groups are based on a survey of 10,357 U.S. adults conducted Nov. 17-30, 2025. The analysis in this report also draws on several additional surveys conducted with these same respondents from January 2025 through April 2026.” Opinions of the various groups on recent presidents are worth highlighting:

For another take on American political personality types, see my essay, “Does This Political Category Exist?”

Share

“Platner’s Guru Daniel Moraff Asked Me to Lie for Him (I Didn’t)”

Mike Elk recounts a personal story about Graham Platner’s handler, Daniel Moraff, at Payday Report: “Moraff told me he was recruiting Bryan Pietzrak, a General Electric locomotive factory worker and UE member, to run for Congress in Erie. He said he wanted Pietrzak to run as an independent. While researching Pietrzak, Moraff found anti-Trump quotes he had given Payday and asked me to delete them. In October of 2020, Pietrzak spoke at a Biden rally at Carrie Furnaces in Rankin, PA, where he blasted Trump at length. ‘No union member should vote for Trump,’ Pietzrak told Payday Report in October of 2020.”

He continues: “​Moraff explained at length that Pietzrak’s quote against Trump could hurt his chances of appealing to Trump voters in Erie. I told him deleting a quote as a political favor would violate journalistic ethics. He insisted I do it even after I said no. Cajoling me, Moraff told me that, ‘No one would know that I deleted the quote.’ I told him that wasn’t the issue, and that it was unethical, so I refused. He told me to forget the conversation and never mention it to anyone. It’s important to know Moraff asked me to lie for a candidate he was recruiting.”

“​Given what happened with Platner, I think the incident with Moraff asking me to lie is important,” Elk reflects. “If Moraff felt comfortable asking me, someone that he didn’t know that well, to lie, it means that he possibly got influencers and journalists in the past to lie on his behalf. When I heard that Moraff was involved in vetting and recruiting Platner, I recalled this experience. It showed me that Moraff was willing to lie to get someone elected and to ask journalists to do unethical things to help sell those lies. Sadly, in the age of influencers and content creators, many former journalists would be willing to engage in the kind of lying that someone like Moraff requested. I would not.”

For an analysis of Platner and Moraff, see my article, “The Populism-Industrial Complex.”

“Believe Women and the Presumption of Guilt in Media Trials”

While I have argued strongly against the politics represented by Platner and his handlers, the response to sexual assault accusations against him is concerning for a number of reasons. At her Substack, notes that “Within minutes of the…publication [of the accusations], prominent figures in the Democratic party called for Platner’s resignation, along with a chorus of liberal and left identifying individuals on social media. Though Platner denied the allegation, he caved to the pressure a long three days later, withdrawing from the race.”

Younes makes a number of important points including the following about Platner’s accuser, Jennifer Racicot: “The trouble here is that none of the texts, social media messages or emails that Racicot wrote and produced to Politico were contemporaneous, or close to it, with the event in question…Racicot’s social media messages about Platner to her friend were written in 2023, about a year and a half after the incident. Additionally, the messages did not directly accuse Platner of sexual assault; rather, Racicot described Platner as ‘consensually careless,’ a phrase which could mean many things and does not equate to a simultaneous allegation of sexual assault. This is the type of issue that would be the subject of cross-examination at a courtroom trial, but since this is a more-or-less one-sided media adjudication, there is no such opportunity for elucidating what Racicot meant by that phrase.”

She concludes: “Platner’s campaign has ended, and his political career is likely over. But this issue goes beyond Platner. Despite the multitude of sexual harassment and assault claims against prominent figures, often accompanied by successful demands their political or professional demise (though not always—think Pete Hegseth, Bill Clinton, and Corey [sic] Mills), we have not actually determined how to address and grapple with claims of sexual harassment and assault outside of a trial.

“As many have rightly pointed out, the fact there are no charges or conviction here does not make Racicot’s accusation immaterial to most voters. But at the same time, a society committed both to accountability and to fairness cannot simply replace the presumption of innocence that governs the legal context with a presumption of guilt at media trials.”

Share Handful of Earth

“Secretary Rubio Delivers Opening Remarks at the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism”

In a chilling speech, Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, calls for ramped-up repression of political dissent, directed at a new central enemy: “extremist violence from the political left.” Rubio states that “For these architects of revolutionary violence, the towering achievement of our civilization—for them it’s an unbearable humiliation, a reminder of what they cannot do and a reminder of what they cannot be. So they choose instead to destroy. They attack pipelines; they attack railroads; they attack power grids and laboratories, the physical embodied symbols of power and invention and achievement. This is the nature of the terrorism we face today. They despise the West because the West is great.”

Invoking a neo-Nietzschean argument, Rubio calls the left “a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred above all else, a hatred for civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good. It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things, and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can. This is what radical leftism is. It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time. They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist or communist or anarchist or Marxist. But the fundamental character is always the same. It’s always the same.

Rubio advocates for a coordinated international surveillance and repression campaign “Through intelligence and information sharing, through coordinated law enforcement strategy, through financial targeting and disruption” to “dismantle” leftist “networks brick by brick.”

“Mahmoud Khalil Accuses Trump Officials of Conspiring Against Him”

Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that “Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University protester who became the face of President Trump’s campus crackdown, filed a lawsuit…accusing administration officials, pro-Israel groups and a conservative think tank of colluding to suppress his constitutional rights.”

“The suit, filed in Manhattan federal court, yokes together a number of different actors: the Heritage Foundation, several top Trump officials and two groups that targeted campus protesters, Canary Mission and Betar. Mr. Khalil will seek to convince a judge that the defendants coordinated to a degree that amounted to a conspiracy. His lawyers argue that there was a direct line leading from a Heritage Foundation plan to dismantle pro-Palestinian activism to the targeting of activists, like Mr. Khalil, by Canary Mission and Betar, which led to their arrests and detention by the Trump administration.”

“Mr. Khalil’s lawsuit is being brought under a statute enacted in 1871 to obstruct the activities of the Ku Klux Klan,” the Times reports. “The law prevents any person from conspiring to deprive a person of protection under the law. Mr. Khalil is asking for monetary damages in an amount to be determined at a civil trial and for a judge to declare that efforts to deport him are part of a conspiracy. The law requires those suing to ‘provide some factual basis supporting a meeting of the minds, such that defendants entered into an agreement, express or tacit, to achieve the unlawful end.’ That basis can be circumstantial, as is often the case in Mr. Khalil’s lawsuit. It will be up to a Manhattan judge to determine whether the lawsuit meets the standard that would require the government to produce more information.”

What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.

Leave a comment

Education has been on my mind recently. I’ve been hosting a reading group on radical educational thought, and one of the authors we are reading is John Taylor Gatto. I take this opportunity to republish an article I wrote for Truthout in 2019 on the first anniversary of Gatto’s death. While the piece is now nearly 7 years old, I think the issues it raises are as important as ever, especially as dissatisfaction with the education system becomes a galvanizing force for global political protest. As is the case with anything I’ve written this long ago, there are some things I would change today. However, I reprint the article here as it was published in 2019; I hope you enjoy this glimpse into my thinking at the close of the previous decade. -Vincent

October 25, 2019

Death anniversaries provide us an opportunity to reflect on the contributions of many great historical personalities, but rarely do we find a figure so recently passed yet so quickly forgotten as John Taylor Gatto.

Gatto was born in 1935 in the working class Western Pennsylvania town of Monongahela. He passed away on October 25, 2018, in his adopted home of New York City. In his nearly 30 years of classroom teaching, Gatto witnessed first hand some of the most radical experiments in mass schooling that the world has ever seen. After being named New York City Teacher of the Year consecutively in 1989, 1990 and 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991, Gatto rejected what he called the “school religion punishing the nation” and left his formal profession of teaching in search of a job where he “didn’t have to hurt kids to make a living.”

From that day in 1991 until his death one year ago, Gatto wrote and spoke about his experiences in U.S. public schools in an effort not just to critique a system which he saw as beyond reform, but also to envision what education could look like in a truly free and just society. While Gatto gained a readership among certain sections of the homeschooling and alternative education movements, his piercing criticism of U.S. schooling and its link to the crisis of Western civilization deserves a much wider audience.

Schooling Against Education: Gatto’s Underground History

Much of Gatto’s writing is focused on the basic yet often overlooked distinction between schooling and education. At the heart of his work is the simple yet radical suggestion that mass schooling, a 19th-century European import to the U.S., is not the modern manifestation of the ancient concept of education but, rather, its diametric opposite.

In his magnum opus, The Underground History of American Education,1 Gatto traces the material roots of mass schooling back to the economic and ideological demands of a burgeoning industrial capitalism in Europe. Against the narrative of mass schooling as a noble attempt to educate the starving, backward masses, he exposes its true motive as a glorified daycare system for the children of parents newly coerced into wage labor.

With the destruction of the commons in Europe, self-sustaining production systems and their accompanying home-based education practices were obliterated in the quest for profits derived from the labor of a new industrial proletariat. Children who used to learn practical skills by working alongside their families and communities were forced into monotonous factory work with the advent of the industrial revolution. After child labor laws were introduced in the 19th century and extended in the 20th, the state had to find something to do with these unoccupied working class children.

The answer was mass schooling. In 1839, Prussia became the first country on the European continent to enact a national child labor law. It is no coincidence that this North German state subsequently became the most important country in the development of modern schooling. Often described as “an army with a country,” Prussia took the logic of the regimented factory shop floor and military training camp and applied it to the development of a national school system.

This “army with a country” demanded malleable subjects rather than educated citizens, and it was for the production of the former that a new national school system was created. One of the most important pedagogues in the development of the Prussian system, Heinrich Pestalozzi, touted his approach as one that would mold the poor “to accept all the exertions and efforts peculiar to their class.” As Gatto put it, Pestalozzi “offered them love in place of ambition. By employing psychological means in the training of the young, class warfare might be avoided.”

If modern schooling was born in the militaristic milieu of early 19th-century Prussia, it came of age in the rigid class system of England and reached maturity in the colonizing adventures of the British Empire. One need to look no further than Friedrich Engels’s 1845 book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, to understand the impact of the industrial revolution on England’s poor, whose living conditions dropped precipitously at the same time as mass schooling was being introduced in the country.

However, the English ruling class could not indefinitely exploit its workers on the basis of material coercion and physical force alone. In addition to building its factory system on the backs of slave labor in the Americas and the looting of resources in its Asian colonies, the British Empire used its vast dominion abroad to refine its psychological management of the young at home.

Gatto provides the example of wealthy Scottish Anglican chaplain, Andrew Bell, who lived in India in the late 18th century, where he took a keen interest in the caste system as a model for the modern English school. Bell admired what he saw as a rigid social hierarchy in Hindu village schools characterized by intellectual and religious instruction for a tiny minority at the top and caste-appropriate technical training for everyone else.

Bell devised the Madras System of Education based on his experiences in India. This system was subsequently deployed in Scotland in Bell’s own Madras College secondary school in St. Andrews, and later in England and the U.S. under a similar system known as “Lancaster schooling” based loosely on the ideas of English Quaker Joseph Lancaster.

The Madras and Lancaster systems, also known as the “monitorial system,” were characterized by large classrooms with students seated in rows overseen by a single schoolteacher. The teacher did not in fact teach, but, rather, served as a “bystander and inspector” who would form a hierarchy among the students and then let the so-called “brighter” ones teach the rest. It was the stratification of the new industrial system applied to the young.

By the 1830s, schools based on the Prussian and Lancaster models stretched from New York to Texas, with significant admirers such as Calvin Ellis Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s husband, who advocated for the adoption of a Prussian-style national education system in the United States.

Share

The U.S.’s Thwarted Promise and Gatto’s Challenge to Whiteness

The story of the U.S.’s adoption of a European mass schooling system designed to foster a rigid class system while at the same time sublimating class warfare is a pivotal development in Gatto’s history of American schooling.

That mainstream abolitionists like the Stowes were early advocates of European mass schooling in the U.S. is telling. James Baldwin wrote in 1949 that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, has, at its core, a “self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality” which is “the mark of dishonesty” and the “inability to feel.” Stowe opposed slavery, but, as Baldwin put it, could only do so by “robbing” the black man of his “humanity.” Only then could she mold him into the proper subject: docile, uneducated and forbearing.

As educator and writer Jerry Farber wrote in 1969, these qualities encouraged in the black slave are nearly identical to those fostered in students in 20th-century American schools. Indeed, by understanding Calvin Ellis Stowe’s passion for the Prussian forced schooling system alongside his wife’s portrayal of black people in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, we can see a direct link: a schooling system that would control what students would learn was necessary to manage and mold potentially revolutionary black youth after the abolition of slavery.

It is this connection between schooling and white supremacy which Gatto understood. He taught for years in working class black schools in Harlem, and observed that “black kids had caught on to the fact that their school was a liar’s world, a jobs project for seedy white folk.”

Instead of modifying the curriculum for these students in order to prepare them for their presumed subordinate social role, Gatto challenged “the scientific religion of schooling which believes [black people] to be genetically challenged” and presented a rigorous education focused on strong reading skills and critical discussion of fundamental questions in history, philosophy and literature.

By refusing to lower expectations for black youth in school and eventually rejecting the racist school system altogether in favor of autonomous institutions such as Marva Collins’s groundbreaking Westside Preparatory School in Chicago, Gatto provided a concrete example of what an educational program for the abolition of whiteness might look like.

A rapidly growing homeschooling movement is reviving a long tradition of family and community-based education, particularly among black Americans who have been historically barred from or discriminated against in the school system.

Share Handful of Earth

Gatto’s Way Forward: Spiritual Revival as the Antidote to Scientism

Gatto’s challenge to modern schooling and white supremacy is made possible by his critique of scientism, or the ideology of science and the scientific method as the one way to truth. Just as racism crafted for itself a scientific justification, so did forced schooling make its case in scientific terms. By stripping these systems of their ideological basis through a critique of science itself, Gatto’s work opens up new ways to think about education, freedom and genius.

The cult of scientific schooling in the U.S. reached its apex around the beginning of the 20th century, when technocrats sought to apply the principles of Taylorism, or scientific management, to the public school classroom. Sociologist Edward A. Ross captured the turn of the century’s zeitgeist in his 1901 book, aptly titled Social Control, writing that, “Plans are underway to replace community, family, and church with propaganda, education, and mass media…The State shakes loose from Church, reaches out to School…People are only little plastic lumps of human dough.” In other words, the student not only can, but should, be kneaded into the proper shape, and there is no better institution to complete this task than the school.

Gatto critiques what he calls “empty child theory,” or the idea that children lack human nature or individual spirit and can, thus, be molded to the needs of modern society. In this conception of the human, each individual is but a stand-in for a particular social category to be experimented on in the name of technological efficiency and scientific progress. As Gatto puts it, scientism “has no built-in moral brakes to restrain it other than legal jeopardy.”

Just as the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck was ruled legal by the Supreme Court in 1927, the Carnegies, Rockefellers and Fords threw their money behind “radical experiments in the transformation of human nature” in the first half of the 20th century. If the adult body was a legitimate subject for scientific experimentation, the child’s mind was even more appropriate: experiments on a developing psyche in school might even render bodily intervention in adulthood superfluous.

Twentieth-century scientific schooling is best described as the social experiment of inculcating into children what Gatto calls the “seven lessons of school teaching.” These lessons of mass forced schooling merit lengthy quotation:

It confuses the students. It presents an incoherent ensemble of information that the child needs to memorize to stay in school. Apart from the tests and trials, this programming is similar to the television; it fills almost all the “free” time of children. One sees and hears something, only to forget it again.

It teaches them to accept their class affiliation.

It makes them indifferent.

It makes them emotionally dependent.

It makes them intellectually dependent.

It teaches them a kind of self-confidence that requires constant confirmation by experts (provisional self-esteem).

It makes it clear to them that they cannot hide, because they are always supervised.

Or, as Rockefeller’s General Education Board summed up in a 1906 document on scientific schooling:

In our dreams…people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk…The task we set before ourselves is very simple…We will organize children…and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.

Such a sentiment is a natural byproduct of a scientistic worldview which rejects the spiritual aspect of the human. Gatto points out that this aspect can be repressed, but never destroyed. Those who cannot handle the dehumanization of the school system any longer often simply drop out, prepared to face the brutality of a labor market that is at least honest about its intentions to “teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.” Others quit early with great success, as the lives of high school drop-outs Thomas Edison, Thelonious Monk, Mark Twain, Aretha Franklin and many others demonstrate.

Each individual’s special genius cannot be accounted for by science, though scientific schooling has done an excellent job of leading students to believe that they do not have one. For Gatto, it is the “sacred narrative of modernity,” of which mass schooling is an essential (if often unquestioned) component, that has become a “substitute for the message of the Nazarene.” Indeed, the idea of a conflict between secular schooling and religious education is a false one: Modern schooling is a religion, and has merely supplanted the Church as the primary institution of education.

Gatto points out the irony that it was the churches, particularly those of the Anglican and Quaker variety, which laid the foundation for their own decline by encouraging the expansion of mass forced schooling. They failed to see—and still fail to see—that the logic of modern schooling is at odds not only with the revolutionary spirit of the Gospels, but also in contradiction with the teachings of all the world’s great spiritual traditions.

These traditions consistently affirm that the human is much more than a “little plastic lump of…dough,” something, to return to Baldwin’s essay, “resolutely indefinable, unpredictable.” It is in this indefinable and unpredictable nature of the human being that genius resides. As Gatto writes in his 2010 book, Weapons of Mass Instruction:

I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

The U.S. school system—like the capitalist system that made it necessary—has outworn any use it may have had in the past. It has reduced the human to a number, to a social category, to mere physical matter to be toyed with at the whims and fancies of “experts.” To challenge the assumptions of modern schooling is to remember and reaffirm the spiritual strivings of the human being.

John Taylor Gatto encouraged us to draw on both tradition and imagination as we work to envision education for a world in which freedom and justice are placed above technology and efficiency. With increasingly shrill calls for “universal preschool” leading up to the 2020 presidential election, Gatto’s history and analysis of the true motives of U.S. schooling could not be more relevant. Though he is no longer with us today, we would be remiss to neglect his insights a year after his death.

Subscribe now

Support Handful of Earth

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.

Subscribe now

If you’re already subscribed and want to help the publication grow, you can share Handful of Earth with a friend or make a one-time donation to support my work.

Share Handful of Earth

Support Handful of Earth

“The New World’s Declaration of Independence from the Old”

At Compact, James Vaughn reflects on the 250th birthday of the United States, arguing that “America is not a country that had a revolution, but a revolution that has a country.” He states that “The American Revolutionaries were practical utopians…[B]eneath the commanding heights of church and state in the eighteenth-century West, amid the hustle and bustle of everyday life, men and women were experiencing a new way of being in the world, one constituted by the social cooperation of free labor. It was this experience, and the profound sense of possibility that it engendered, that gave the signers of the Declaration the audacity to claim that their ‘truths’ were self-evident, and, indeed, that they were the only basis for legitimate government and laws.”

Vaughn continues: “The ultimate source of…[the Revolutionaries’] firm belief that the New World would win out against the Old Regime—was the social experience of the free settlers in British North America. By the eve of the Revolution, they had undergone one of the most remarkable economic and demographic developments in recorded history. Although settler life was overwhelmingly agricultural, it was thoroughly commercialized. The dominant economic units, the family farms, were connected to networks of local, regional, and imperial trade. Due to the widespread availability of land and high degrees of social and economic mobility, a life of propertied independence was available for the many, not just the few. Artisans and craftsmen faced no guild restrictions and the high demand for their labor made them relatively prosperous and less dependent on the patronage of a wealthy elite.

“The colonial population ballooned from fewer than 200,000 on the eve of the eighteenth century to over two million by 1776. On the eastern seaboard, older cities like Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Providence, Newport and Charleston grew, while new backcountry towns sprang up to connect the western frontier to the coastal economy. The civil society among the free settlers in North America was more dynamic and expansive, and less burdened with elements of the Old Regime, than anywhere else. There were few feudal vestiges, no titled nobility, and no great religious establishments. The vast bureaucratic and military establishments of Europe were also absent. Widespread property ownership made for a remarkably inclusive electorate, with the majority of free adult males in all the colonies able to vote in elections for the lower houses of the assemblies.”

Vaughn states that “In British North America, the realm of civil society—the realm of free social cooperation—existed without so many of the encumbrances and impositions that it suffered in Western Europe. Here, society clearly had primacy over the state. Here, the priority of the ‘social’ to the ‘political’ was self-evident. The experience of bourgeois freedom ran wider and deeper among the colonial settlers than elsewhere in the West. It was this experience that provided the surest foundation for the revolutionary hope that received its final form in the 1776 Declaration, wherein Jefferson and his co-signers proclaimed the independence of the New World from the Old.”

“American Democracy Was Born in Feudal Europe”

In a different take on the American Revolution at Unherd, writes that “For those inclined to see the world through Christian prophecy, we are ordained by God. For those who prefer to see Enlightenment-style ‘reason’ as the engine of civilization, it was the genius of our Founding Fathers that set us on our path to greatness. For those who are more anthropologically minded, it was the curious Tocquevillian habit of Americans to come together in voluntary associations that set us apart. But all agree that we are a uniquely favored nation. A wider view of history reveals a more mundane explanation: the reason America became a democratic superpower was its abundance of land.”

“[F]or the discontented burgesses [bourgeoisie], farmers, and lords without prospects there was the promise of America. In the American colonies, there was arable land for anyone with the gumption to venture into the wilderness and take it. If you could tolerate the backbreaking work of clearing forests and the threat of being massacred by Indians, you could escape the economic stranglehold of early modern Europe’s vampire class. Here, the republican values incubated in medieval European towns and cities were free to spread unencumbered by the dead weight of aristocracy. “

Woodhouse continues: “Just as the medieval warlords on the peripheries of Europe needed new settlers to secure their power, the United States had a bottomless appetite not only for laborers but for skilled workers, educated professionals and entrepreneurs to develop the economy of a newly conquered continent. As for the burgesses in the medieval European towns, it was a buyers’ market for labor. And the US government attracted laborers in the same way: by offering economic opportunity as well as political liberties the newcomers were denied at home. With the obvious, colossal exception of blacks in the South, who were still ruled by the vestiges of a European aristocracy that would only be subdued in the Civil War and ultimately defeated in the Civil Rights Movement, American democracy flourished under these material conditions. It continued to do so in the 20th century, as America’s economy boomed, increasing the bargaining power of workers, professionals and entrepreneurs with the state.

“Those conditions, however, have vanished,” he goes on. “In an age of urbanization and industrialized farming, land is no longer a productive source of wealth to be exploited at the level of the household. Far from needing to coax migrants into the United States to develop our booming economy, we are stanching the flow to prevent them from competing for scarce jobs. And with Artificial Intelligence rapidly displacing human cognitive labor, the incentives for governments to grant new civil liberties to people in order to secure their commitment to the nation and enlist their participation in the economy is becoming non-existent. Humans are losing their leverage over the institutions that rule them as their labor becomes cheap and superfluous.”

“At the age of 250, the United States has long ceased to be exceptional,” Woodhouse concludes. “There is reason to question whether its republican spirit will persist much longer. Far too much emphasis is placed on vague notions of some uniquely American commitment to ‘freedom’ to explain the success of American democracy, and far too little on the material conditions that have historically made democracy here possible: abundant land without a landed gentry. Without these conditions, democracy persists in America merely as a matter of inertia. We should be cautious not to assume it will last.”

Share

“The Rise of the Pro-Worker Conservative Is Changing the US”

At The Financial Times, writes: “For the past five decades, as private sector union membership in the US collapsed, the National Labor Relations Act went unchanged. Labour leaders funded the Democratic Party and made maximalist demands often unpopular with workers themselves. The Republican Party, largely beholden to business interests, was content to oppose any reform and let worker power wither.

“Now, however, a small but growing cadre of pro-worker conservatives is scrambling that playing field, most recently with the passage…of the landmark Faster Labor Contracts Act (FLCA) in the House of Representatives. Seventeen of them co-sponsored the bill and seven joined with Democrats to force a vote over the opposition of their own leader, Speaker Mike Johnson. In the final tally, 20 Republicans voted to strengthen substantially the position of workers seeking a union contract.”

Cass concludes: “Only a few years ago, the prospect of Republican legislators helping to strengthen labour law would have seemed outlandish. Now it is happening and seems likely to become more common. In a world where both parties can find common ground on pro-worker reforms, the corporate lobby accustomed to straightforward obstruction may need a new game plan. More importantly, they may need to get serious about bargaining in good faith and treating workers well.”

“Superfluous Labour Time & Virtual Unemployment”

In a follow-up to an essay previously discussed at at Handful of Earth, L. Luria writes at Labour & Leisure: “Superfluous labour time refers to work rendered increasingly unnecessary to the production of material wealth, all the while purported as the genuine substance and measure of wealth as such. Virtual unemployment refers to the same superfluity at a lower level of abstraction, at the level of quantity, being the increment of labour rendered redundant by a determinate rise in productivity, which in the case of an expanding industrial economy is reabsorbed productively, but which under present conditions is neither reabsorbed nor abolished, instead held in suspension.”

Luria argues that, “In the epoch of globalisation, material wealth produced by accumulated social knowledge and by the developed productive apparatus has so outrun the value that direct (domestic) labour time constitutes that the contribution of the individual to value approaches nullity, albeit (paradoxically) at the point where social productive capacity is at its height. In economies such as ours in Britain, the concentration of determination in a minority is then the formal appearance of this process, value-generating labour contracting while material wealth is increasingly produced at higher and higher levels. Determination must here be grasped at the level of realisation rather than production alone; ‘to become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange’… Production posits value but leaves it latent, with value realised only in circulation, when the commodity is transferred to its buyer. Accordingly, the minority is determinate not by producing the greatest ‘quantity of value,’ instead it acquires determination by occupying non-substitutable points through which the realisation of the whole social mass of value must pass, therefore where that passage—being the transition of use-value into Value, an article into a commodity—can be arrested. Actual determination arises as a fact of the present composition of circulation and not, as so many persist in claiming, by a measure of the latent value the worker adds through their labour.”

The essay elaborates: “For Marx, only through the ‘universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the “propertyless” mass,’ makes ‘each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others,’ and ‘has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones.’…The phenomenon of the universal ‘propertyless’ mass is, in a sense, persistent, but its universal character has been effectively bifurcated between a majority toiling in conditions of virtual unemployment and a minority of determinate individuals working at sites of leverage. What brings these two groups to the semblance of common cause is that they both sell their labourpower for a wage, however rather than the wage constituting a share of aggregate surplus value, of which the lion’s share would ‘normally’ be committed for expanded reproduction, the wage of the indeterminate majority now constitutes a transfer drawn against a chain of future claims on valorisation, not from a share of any surplus presently realised, rendering the withdrawal of such labour essentially indeterminate. A strike that interrupts no realisation of value is unable to impose the cost on which its leverage would depend and would therefore foreclose their capacity to act ‘world-historically’ in the manner Marx describes. Withdrawal at a circulation chokepoint, on the other hand, interrupts the realisation of a far greater amount of value than that which the strikers themselves add by their labouring, arresting the entire mass of value embodied in the commodities whose passage the chokepoint commands, the cost imposed being in no proportion to the number who withdraw their labour. Where circulation can be re-routed (substitutable passenger transport, the distributed and interchangeable point of final retail sale, and so on) the interruption holds less determination, whereas at a non-substitutable maritime or port chokepoint, held long enough to exhaust all possible buffers, the effect is so significant in its potential as to qualitatively raise such a strike to assume real political determination.”

“Acting in the fullness of world-historical existence,” Luria writes, “means recognition and effectuating a political existence, which for the working-class is realised according to the capacity to interrupt and thus overturn the present economic arrangement, inevitably and invariably referring to the singular unique historical capacity of the working-class, the withdrawal of labour. The capacity for the withdrawal of determinate labour at scale constitutes the ‘negative’ moment of world-historical existence, leverage, whereas the ‘positive’ moment, the appropriation of the developed productive forces, the conversion of superfluous labour time into free disposable time, entails the maximal horizon that this leverage might attain.”

Share Handful of Earth

“A Self-Absorbed Giant”

In an insightful piece at Global Inequality and More 3.0, writes: “Several days ago, at a conference in Guangxi Province in Southern China, I had a conversation with the editor of the Chinese company that published translations of two of my books. He was very happy with how my Global Inequality did in China (which, to be realistic, probably means a sale of a few thousand copies) because, as he said, ‘the audience in China is interested only in China. They do not want to read books about other countries and the rest of the world.’ And indeed, he added, Chinese authors write almost exclusively about China. Like many comments, when made by somebody who is more knowledgeable about the topic than us—but express exactly what we might have thought for a long time—it struck me: it is something that I and, I am sure, many other people have noticed.”

Milanovic notes that “There are…hundreds of books written by American authors (of non-Chinese background) on China. But what seems to be missing—and was in effect implied in the comment of my publisher—is books by Chinese authors on America or the West or Africa or any other part of the world. I do not know the Chinese publishing well enough: there must obviously be such books—but I do know the English-language publishing scene, and I do not see such books there. Is it that American publishers do not want to publish them or is it that no Chinese historian has cared to write a biography of (say) Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton the way that Ezra Vogel has published a biography of Deng Xiaoping or Joseph Torigian biography of Xi Zhongxun (Xi Jinping’s father)?; why did not Jiang Zemin write a book On America the way the Kissinger wrote On China? (The only such book that seems to be mentioned in American circles is the book by the current Politburo member Wang Huning written after his one-year stay in the United States in 1980s, America Against America.)”

He argues that “this self-concentration limits China’s ideological influence in the rest of the world and its soft power. The latter has definitely increased with China’s economic success, but in that area the country still ‘punches way below its (economic) weight.’ Compare the explosive rise in Chinese-made electric vehicles with the increase of China’s soft power: do we see a similar trend there? Yes, indeed some improvements, reflected in new visa-free policies towards European countries and thus more tourists, greater number of foreign students in China, so-called Chinamaxxing among some groups of the young in America, success of Chinese films…and soap-operas. But all of that is very modest for a country that produces almost one-quarter of world output. It surely does not ‘produce’ one quarter of world culture or intellectual activity (if the latter is defined as influential books, of fiction and non-fiction, politics, history; films, plastic arts, music, theater etc.)”

Milanovic observes that, “Paradoxically, China might have had more soft power when it followed self-destructive policies of Maoist Cultural Revolution. Although Maoism was never well defined nor was it a global ideology, it had followers across the world from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Naxalites in India to Sendero Luminoso in Peru and the New Left in Europe. The point is not that these followers were ‘nice guys’; the point is that China’s ideological power (even if that power was nor exercised for the good) might have been greater then than now.”

“Chinese Livestreamers Are Hypnotizing the West”

At Unherd, Popppy Sowerby writes on Chinese livestreamers: “The appeal is rarely that these streamers are especially sexy, or outrageous, or original—it is that they are absurd and perform on demand. The emptier the logic of the streams, the more engagement they drum up. We are accustomed to Western influencers behaving like miniature celebrities—the principles of authenticity, glamor and charisma are piped in directly from Hollywood—whereas Chinese idol culture is about cohesion. Tuanbo [group or team livestreams] performers make themselves generic and perform robotically, often literally moving like automatons. There is no interest in intimacy or sincerity…On the Western internet, the individual is the star; on the Chinese internet, success means operating as a highly efficient whole. And so the two forms of content reflect the philosophies of their alien worlds.

“Still, it takes a lot of effort to look that flat,” she continues. “China’s streaming stars are working their asses off to come across as catchphrase-bleating idiots while carrying out meticulous and highly choreographed set-pieces. The finished product more closely resembles a call center or production line than a television show. In this, the streams mirror the country’s industrial and military prowess. There is often something borderline martial in the videos’ regimentation. No other country attracts foreign viewers with the spectacle of men marching in a city square.”

Sowerby observes that, “Since the Nineties the West has watched, enthralled and aghast, as China has churned out vast factories, corralled hyperefficient workforces and thrown together cities seemingly overnight. Online, a similar thing is happening to pop culture. If the Californian dream of the internet was about liberating creativity, creating a boundless Eden of artists and independent agents, tuanbo offers an alternative future: content that resembles manufacturing. The livestream host is a worker in a vast attention economy, laboring under the same prerogative for efficiency that transformed the country’s factories into the workshop of the world. The principles of Chinese social media are ruthless visions of the future: hyperrationalism and scale, mass production. We are glued to them as horrified Victorians would be glued to the vision of industrial textile mills. They show us how quickly we become cogs.”

She concludes: “Aside from merely degrading the quality of pop culture—a lost cause anyway in the age of TikTok—what makes tuanbo so unsettling is that it breaks down our understanding of the role of the internet as an ocean of creators, free individuals operating without limits, replacing it with a homogenized bloc of content producers and consumers who are, by definition, unsubversive. China’s novel model of scaling and optimizing online videos may in the future outcompete the Western model of individual creativity. After all, this is the country that conquered industrialized manufacturing; culture, too, could one day be ‘made in China.’”

What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.

Leave a comment

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.

Subscribe now

If you’re already subscribed and want to help the publication grow, you can share Handful of Earth with a friend or make a one-time donation to support my work.

Share Handful of Earth

Support Handful of Earth

“‘No One’s Coming to Save Us but Us’: Gen Z Runs for Office”

The New York Times profiles a new cohort of Gen Z candidates entering electoral politics across the United States: “For Gen Z voters, youth and recent history have shaped their views. They did not experience the exhilaration of Barack Obama’s hope-fueled 2008 campaign or George W. Bush’s calls to service after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Instead, they have weathered a decade of President Trump’s ‘American carnage’ narrative and the gerontocracy of Joseph R. Biden Jr. Their beefs tend to be less with the other party than their elders.

“Gen Z voters express higher levels of party alienation than any other generation; two-thirds of Gen Z respondents in a recent New York Times/Siena poll expressed dissatisfaction with both Democrats and Republicans. Among Gen Z Democrats, 68 percent said they were unhappy with their own party.”

“Covid-19 is another shared experience,” the article notes. “James Thibault, the son of a landscaper and a nursing assistant in New Hampshire, had no political aspirations until the pandemic shut down schools. Then politicians reopened them with mask mandates that Mr. Thibault, a high school freshman at the time, found onerous and not conducive to learning. He protested at school board meetings. He was appointed to a youth legislative council. Then he filed to run for state representative before he graduated from high school. He was elected at 18 as a Republican, becoming the youngest state legislator. ‘Covid was a wake-up call,’ said Mr. Thibault, 20, who is running for re-election this year.”

On the Democratic side of the equation, “Startled by Mr. Trump’s return in 2024, Leila Staton, 22, and her mother formed the Insufferable Wenches of Iowa, a progressive group designed in part to link like-minded but socially isolated rural residents. No Democrat had filed to run this year against the two-term Republican state legislator representing her district, so Ms. Staton, who lives in Stout, population around 200, decided to run herself. College graduates from rural Iowa tend to leave the state.”

“Ms. Staton has focused her campaign on public education, which has been drained of cash by a new school voucher program; family farms struggling with rising costs and corporate pressure; drinking water that is contaminated with nitrates; and Iowa’s rapidly rising cancer rates. ‘There’s a lack of opportunity, prices are rising, wages are stagnant,’ she said, ‘and our cancer crisis has no clear solution.’”

“The ‘Mad Scientist’ Behind Graham Platner’s Scandal-Plagued Rise”

This Wall Street Journal report, published before the Platner campaign’s recent meltdown, is quite illuminating in retrospect: “Rushing to launch Graham Platner’s Senate bid, Dan Moraff, a progressive up-and-comer and Platner’s top strategist, asked a Democratic research firm to vet the political novice. A thorough background check of a Senate candidate, which has become standard practice in key races, can take several weeks and cost roughly $20,000 or a monthly retainer. Moraff asked for an expedited, cheaper review to be done within days, according to people familiar with the matter.

“In three days, New York-based Northside Research produced a brief, risk-assessment memo for Moraff in lieu of a detailed research book—or the start of one—that can be hundreds of pages long. The expedited product laid out risks for the campaign, flagging some of Platner’s Reddit posts as the biggest threat to his budding campaign, some of those people said. The firm, which was paid $6,250, according to federal disclosures, followed up days later with additional limited vetting. They didn’t do a candidate interview or questionnaire.”

The report continues: “Core to Moraff’s political philosophy is a belief that voters want outsiders to run for office and are willing to look past personal transgressions, as long as the candidate can connect with them…‘Real people who have lived real lives are giving voters something they’ve been starving for,’ Moraff said in a statement. ‘People want someone who will fight for them, not someone who’s been dreaming of power since they were in middle school and lived their lives accordingly.’…Moraff handled the nonstop hits on the candidate’s past posts with an air of nonchalance, according to people familiar with the matter. He has told staff, ‘Good vibes only,’ when problems come up.”

“Platner’s campaign has suffered from staff turnover since launching last August, in part because of his previous social-media comments and tattoo, but also because of disagreements with Moraff, those people said. Paige Loud, who worked for Platner before leaving to run unsuccessfully for Congress, publicly criticized Moraff in a story on Instagram.”

Moraff’s fiancée, Leanne Fan, “according to those who have worked with the couple, at times tries to smooth over any tensions between Moraff and staff. Her engagement ring opens up to a tiny comb that she has used to brush Moraff’s beard. Platner still holds Moraff in high regard and closely follows his advice. He marveled that Moraff this year completed a law degree at Yale University while also running his campaign. ‘He’s a mad scientist with politics,’ Platner told the Journal.”

For more on the fundamental flaws of the Platner campaign, see my article from last month, “The Populism-Industrial Complex.”

Share

“America’s AI War Has No Civilian Stop Rule”

At Foreign Policy in Focus, Brian Hudson reports that “When the Pentagon made Palantir’s Maven Smart System a formal ‘program of record’ in March, it did more than approve software. It gave long-term status to a platform that analyzes data from satellites, drones, radars, sensors, and intelligence reports to identify potential targets. Maven supported almost all of the 13,500 U.S. strikes in Iran. The designation is meant to secure funding and extend its use across the military.

“That decision came while the United States was still investigating the February 28 strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, Iran. An initial U.S. military inquiry found that U.S. forces were likely responsible, but the Pentagon has not released a final public conclusion. Iranian authorities have reported between 155 and more than 175 deaths, most of them students and teachers. The question is why a military system designed to move faster from information to action has no equally clear public requirement to slow down after grave civilian harm.”

“In software engineering, an ‘error budget’ is meant to protect users,” Hudson continues. “When a service exceeds an agreed level of failure, new releases stop until the problem is understood and fixed. War is obviously not software. But in Washington’s AI-assisted operations, civilian deaths do not automatically trigger a temporary suspension of the relevant tools, an independent review of the data, or a public account of the decisions that led to the strike.”

“The familiar assurance that a ‘human remains in the loop’ does not solve this problem,” he notes. “A person who sees only a final recommendation, cannot inspect the data trail, and has seconds rather than hours to decide is not exercising meaningful independent judgment. AI can shape lethal force without pulling a trigger. It can determine what appears urgent, which people or places rise to the top of a list, and which facts never appear at all.”

“Why Does It Matter if China Dominates AI?”

At Social Studies, writes: “The idea that if we don’t plow forward on AI advancement as freely and recklessly as possible then China will do it first is by now so hackneyed that our brains barely detect the massive assumptions underlying it. One of those assumptions is that the Chinese government will have some kind of unilateral control over whatever they create, or in any case more control than we do, which is curious since it’s China that is building its AIs open source and American companies that keep their LLMs proprietary. Another assumption is that China’s military power will quickly achieve parity with ours, which is probably true, but a bit puzzling to hear from those who have pushed the administration to relieve the export controls on Nvidia chips to China that are designed to prevent precisely that outcome.

“The main thrust of the argument, however, seems to be just the general idea that China is autocratic and we’re democratic, and you really don’t want such dangerous and powerful technologies falling into the hands of dictators. Who knows what they’ll do with such power?”

Woodhouse argues that “even if you believe the questionable proposition that America does in fact remain a democracy, that it will continue to be one in an age of AI. Judging by the recent history of mass government surveillance in the United States, it’s safer to assume that the more AI advances, the less free we will become, whether you live in China, the United States, Switzerland or Brazil. Not only will we be subject to novel, Black Mirror-style regimes of monitoring and control, but as human labor diminishes in value, the public will lose our ability to bargain with the institutions that rule over us over such things as our civil liberties.”

Subscribe now

“Why Sinodollars Outweigh the Petroyuan”

“A ‘petrodollar’ carries a certain sense of power,” Robin Harding writes at The Financial Times. “Combine oil, a commodity few have but all need, with the dollar, currency of the world’s most powerful country, and you have a monetary force to reckon with. It is no surprise, therefore, that talk of the replacement of these dollars by a Chinese ‘petroyuan,’ as a result of the US-Israel war on Iran, has prompted a sense of unease about fundamental changes in the balance of economic and political power.

“China’s currency is slowly becoming a bigger part of the global financial system. Yet for now, it lacks a fundamental aspect of what made the petrodollar so important, and remains far from threatening the US currency’s role as a reserve asset. That is because China’s economic model depends on its own relentless accumulation of dollar assets and it is these ‘sinodollars,’ not any kind of petro-currency, that dominate finance today.”

Harding contends that “The modern equivalent of petrodollars from Saudi Arabia is not the earnings of oil exporters. Rather, it is dollars earned from the massive trade surpluses of east Asian manufacturers such as China, South Korea and Taiwan, which must be recycled back into the global financial system at a pace of more than $1tn a year. Maintaining such a surplus is central to the economic model of these countries. The supply of these ‘sinodollars’ dwarfs any plausible volume of petroyuan.”

He concludes: “‘Who controls money can control the world’ is a quote often attributed to Kissinger, although there is no evidence he ever said it, and it seems unlikely a man so familiar with hard power would believe it. What is true is that there is little sign of the dollar losing control of the global financial system. For as long as China is determined to maintain its trade surplus and its capital controls, no amount of payments in yuan, whether for oil or anything else, will change that reality.”

“The Dark Side of Remittances”

At The Dark Side of Development, writes that “Remittances are the poster child of development. Money sent back to poor countries from diasporas in richer ones, the argument goes, can play a key part in financial inclusion and economic growth. Providers of remittance services have an obvious incentive in talking up the benefits. It’s a narrative that is seldom challenged. The flip side of the coin is that remittances can be a tool for transnational repression, and a form of collateral underpinning excessive microfinance lending in poor countries.”

“Bloomberg News reported in May that the country’s military junta has turned migrant remittances into its biggest source of foreign income,” Whitehouse writes with regard to the case study of Myanmar. “Worker remittances were worth $5.6 billion in 2025, or about 38% of all foreign inflows, Bloomberg said. Rules introduced in 2024 oblige migrant workers to remit 25% of their income via official banking channels. Passport renewals and the right to work overseas are otherwise at risk. The money provides a lifeline for the junta’s banks under international sanctions since the coup of 2021.”

He notes that “The purely economic case for remittances is less clear-cut than many assume. Lee Chin of the Universiti Putra Malaysia examined remittances in 25 Asian low and middle-income countries between 1995 and 2019. The findings appeared in a book chapter in 2021. The impact of remittances on poverty reduction, Lee Chin found, was on average initially positive, but became negative once the threshold of 8% of GDP was crossed. So remittances may be useful in the early stages of economic development, but over-dependence on them creates risks later on.”

What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.

Leave a comment