I can't help it, the road just rolls out behind me
Be kind to me, or treat me mean
I'll make the most of it, I'm an extraordinary machine

Fiona Apple, “Extraordinary Machine”

Recently, The Economist has put out an article titled “The world’s most influential economist is oddly unconvincing” about the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics winner Daron Acemoglu. He’s a frequent source of discussion on this blog, so I thought that I’d give my two cents on the topic. What is the core of The Economist’s attack on Daron Acemoglu? There’s, roughly speaking, two avenues: his work on insitutions, and his work on AI. The Economist piece on Acemoglu takes two major avenues of attack: that his work on institutions is empirically shoddy, and that it’s theoretically imprecise.

Mostly Harmful Econometrics

The methodological critique is the same one I’ve made a bunch of times: that the data on the 2001 Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson paper that made his name as an economist has low quality and is very dependent on hard to defend decisions around how to impute data.

In particular, the “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development” (2001) has a simple strategy to prove institutions, not geography, cause development: because better institutions and better GDP are also correlated to variables that aren’t measurable, you need a middleman between the two. This “middleman”, called an instrument, is correlated only to the cause variable (institutions) and not to either the consequence directly (GDP) or to other unobservables that might be mucking up the correlation (culture, for instance). The instrument is then used as a proxy for the cause, so it has to be very tightly correlated to the variable it’s a proxy for, and that it cannot be correlated to any other variable under consideration.

The instrument they use is the mortality of European settlers: different places had different geographic conditions, which are half-convincingly shown to be uncorrelated to the other variables, and those conditions made it so that settling in some places was pleasant, and unpleasant in others. Unpleasant locations needed more slaves, which led to worse institutions; meanwhile, nicer locations attracted more European workers, who were able to eventually defend their legal and property rights. The empirical work shows, unsurprisingly because the paper got published, that this relationship holds. The Economist says:

His Nobel rests heavily on a paper released in 2001 with Messrs Johnson and Robinson, which researchers have cited more than 23,000 times. It seeks to explain why some countries are rich and others poor (…) The paper encouraged wonks to think more deeply about institutions, but they have also picked it apart. The Nobel committee’s report in 2024 conceded that the mortality data are “sometimes sketchy”.

Why is the data sketchy? Well, it’s one of the most famous topics of academic debate in recent years. In 2012, David Albouy verified whether the 2001 paper was too dependent on imputed mortality rates - that is, if Guatemala doesn’t have mortality, then you can use Nicaragua’s. Harmless enough, but the paper also extrapolates the mortality of say, bishops, or traders, or soldiers, to the mortality of all settlers: which, you could argue, is a relationship itself, but this leads to conflicting evidence in some cases. Albouy, thus, notes that if you control for these issues, the relationship stops holding; however, The Economist quotes Acemoglu: Albouy had to drop half his sample to make the controls work, which means that the most developed countries (the USA, Australia, and Canada) weren’t included. A recent blog post by Joe Francis looks at the claims by both Albouy and Acemoglu & co. (they, unsurprisingly, wrote a rebuttal to the rebuttal that, also unsurprisingly, wasn’t very convincing), and finds that Albouy just makes the stronger case: the results collapse when you don’t include the three or four countries (the ones mentioned above) that were colonized by Europeans for an extensive period of time and actually became rich, and hold when you drop Africa, the continent with the worst data and also, not very coincidentally, the worst outcomes.

Econometrically speaking, there appears to be a massive problem with the instrument: the estimate for the institutions to GDP correlation is smaller than the one for the mortality to GDP one; this means that, rather than taking out the problematic unobservables, the instrument is adding more of them, because mortality is linked to geography and geography is linked to other variables: for example, if oil-rich places were also likelier to have higher rates of malaria, you’d have a bunch of very rich, very extractive countries with very high settler mortality. And similarly, the history behind the colonial mortality is a bit of a problem: different places were colonized at different times; for instance, nearly as much time passed between the conquest of Mexico and the Scramble for Africa as between the Age of “Discovery” and the Norman Conquest. When Europe conquered Latin America, capitalism simply did not exist yet, and developed during the time period where the Americas were colonies. During this time, also, Latin American economic institutions impacted African institutions because that’s where Europe took the slaves from: importantly, one of the crucial conditions for statistical inference is the Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption or SUTVA. According to SUTVA, the two core condiitons to assess impact are that all units receive the same “treatment” (e.g. if you’re evaluating vaccinations then it has to always be the same vaccine) and, most importantly, there are no externalities between treated and untreated units. This means that, before country X was colonized, it cannot have the impacts of colonial institutions; instead, what we see based on the slave trade is that there are spillovers. To quote Francis on the topic of SUTVA in AJR (2001), “The low levels of settler mortality meant that the European offshoots received the “good institutions” of the metropole. This was their treatment, while the other colonies act as the counterfactual. The problem is that the other colonies were themselves affected by those “good institutions.” Both the European offshoots and the other colonies were embedded in the same network of world trade.”

But this shows the major problem here: the quality, and quantitative facts, of the data is correlated with institutional quality. For example, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, Stephen Pinker at some point cites the An Lushan Rebellion as the deadliest conflict in human history. The An Lushan Rebellion took place in China during the middle of the eight century and killed 36 million people, which, given that China’s total population at the time was 52 million, meant that two thirds of the population perished in the conflict. This immediately stank to high heaven to basically all experts on the subject, because contemporary accounts of the fighting don’t have anywhere near that intensity of violence described, and instead note that what’s actually likely to have happened is that the census got substantially less accurate after the rebellion: the figures come from the imperial census, which was conducted in 755 (before the rebellion) and 764 (after); the imperial state was also far weaker and much less capable of counting population. The idea that state capacity and institutional quality aren’t related is very weak: a 2009 paper by Timothy Besley and Torsten Persson concludes that policy choices are constrained by investment in legal and fiscal capacity, which are themselves determined by oolitical stability and good institutions - that is, they show that the quality of governance is not independent of the quality of institutions, which also trickles down to data quality: autocratic or backsliding governments, to take an obvious example, very frequently tampered with official data. And a 2021 study by Jonathan Hanson and Rachel Sigman develops a more in-depth relationship between extractive and coercive government capacity, and administrative capacity, that is, a relationship between the ability to keep the peace, raise taxes, and implement policy with a competent bureaucracy and a proper information infrastructure. The three dimensions are positively correlated, and administrative capacity is the dimension most closely related to conventional measures of institutional quality, even if they’re not necessarily a cause-and-effect thing.

There’s also a series of other problems, which mostly lie in the tension between AJR 2001 and the other landmark papers on institutions they published: a 2005 paper finds that Western Europe also had its development be related to the colonial Americas; a 2002 paper concludes that the richer a country was before colonization, the worse off it was after. The problem is that these two and AJR 2001 can’t all be true at the same time: if Europe only developed good institutions as a result of the interplay of its pre-existing institutions and American colonization, then how could it export them in a causally well-identified manner to its colonies? Again, there is a pretty vast literature on the subject of European institutions and colonial economic performance that complicates the picture significantly. And if pre-existing pre-colonial institutions are important, then how could they actually be explained by geography in the way the 2001 paper claims? A posterior study, by Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou, concludes that in the African example institutional quality was just straightforwardly caused by precolonial institutions only.

Economist John Holbein, in a sign of the times, used AI to do a quick fact check of Acemoglu’s work: what he finds is that it’s generally theoretically robust and empirically suffers from the critiques everyone points out, but it still stands after considering them. I do think it’s correct to raise questions about Acemoglu’s work and his methodological decisionmaking and to scrutinize the fact that one of the more famous people in the field is just doing shockingly shoddy stuff to prop up his theoretical conjectures. But everyone else’s papers are like that too. Nathan Nunn, the extremely well respected author of the paper I quoted about how the slave trade impacted Africa, has received an avalanche of criticism over the statistics of his paper (and the rest of his work on slavery) - in particular, the impact of the slave trade is only really present from 1970 to the year 2000, the one coincidentally discussed in the study. Another prominent paper by Oded Galor and Omer Ozak claims that time use preferences come from ancient agricultural practices; their evidence uses weights for land area that are inversed so the smallest countries have more impact, even though the paper states they don’t use those weights. Another two by Nico Voigtlander and Hans-Joachim Voth make serious econometrical errors of correcting certain geographical data sources in ways that, theoretically, they explicitly state can’t be don; all in a way that just so coincidentally strengthens their conclusions. Yet another extremely famous and well-cited paper by Melissa Dell, on the impact of Peruvian mining practices on economic development, also faced extensive criticism for its use of data and its also oh-so-convenient methodological choices.

Economist Andrew Gelman calls this the “Garden of Forking Paths”, in reference to a 1941 Jorge Luis Borges story of the same title. In the story, a man named Stephen Albert explains that a will left behind by the Chinese politician and scholar Tsui Pen saying he left behind “a novel, and a labyrinth” didn’t refer to two things, one of them an extremely confusing and chaotic book manuscript, but to one: the novel was the labyrinth, and it was so confusing because it showed every possible outcome of the same story. Tsui Pen calls this “the garden of forking paths”. For Gelman, the major problem in academia wasn’t “p-hacking” or “fishing”, where a researcher tests many theories and purposefully designs the final paper only in ways that heighten positive, easily published conclusions, but rather may inadvertently end up in the “Oh so convenient” stage because of constant choices around how to interpret the data, which data to include or exclude, how to transform that data into code, which transformations to apply, which controls to include, which model specifications to use, and how to handle data anomalies. In an extremely famous 1983 paper titled “Let's Take the Con out of Econometrics”, Edward Leamer showed that just by changing a handful of parameters in a model, you could get empirically robust results that the death penalty decreased, didn’t affect, or even increased the crime rate. Let’s face it, at the end of the day, we only care about tenure.

Theory or praxis

The perfect summary of the debate over Acemoglu’s work on institutions comes from a survey by the Institute for Replication conducted last year: among professional economists, they find that basically all of them agree with the theoretical case Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson make, but don’t agree with the empirical work.

But what is Acemoglu’s theoretical contribution? Basically, that institutions (the “rules of the game” of the economy) are important, and that there’s inclusive institutions, which are good, and extractive institutions, which are bad. In actual detail, inclusive institutions protect private property, uphold the rule of law, encourage innovation, and allow broad participation in economic and political life, whereas extractive institutions are designed by a small elite to extract wealth and power from the rest of society. Inclusive institutions suppress innovation and block long term development, while inclusive institutions permit sustainable prosperity. Let’s turn to The Economist:

…his grand thesis of institutions may not reveal very much. Nations prosper when institutions are good, and stagnate when they are bad. True. But what, exactly, is an institution? Rules, norms, enforcement, culture—everything, really. Where do institutions come from? From “critical junctures” and “institutional drift”, whatever that means. (…) Tyler Cowen of George Mason University noted that the institutional changes it describes only seem to come from other institutional changes, making the core argument regress for ever—turtles all the way down. Duncan Green of the London School of Economics has argued that the framework works mainly in hindsight. Francis Fukuyama of Stanford University has argued that the book waves away the example of China, which has seen blistering economic growth alongside institutions that can quite plausibly be described as extractive.

Again, nothing new, you’ve seen it here first. Let’s start with Fukuyama: for Acemoglu and Robinson (the authors of Why Nations Fail, the book in question), China is extractive, because their political system is highly centralized, unaccountable, and opaque. But, at the same time, its economic institutions are highly inclusive, because they focus on innovation and widespread wealth creation: for instance, between 2021 and 2025, Chinese retailers were forced to adopt a “refund-without-returns” model where a customer could request a refund and keep the item they purchased. They draw a historical parallel to the Republic of Venice, which had highly inclusive economic institutions that allowed for upward mobility through trade, while also being increasingly politically extractive via the Serrata del Maggior Consiglio starting in the 13th century, which banned new money families from participating in key government decisions; over time, this led to economic stagnation. Another parallel, for them, is the USSR, which also achieved extremely rapid economic growth under Stalin by shifting resources out of agriculture into industry; the soviets, according to Acemoglu and company, started stagnating once they needed to innovate on new technologies and new sectors. And that’s the objection Fukuyama raises: that China has managed to new technologies, like artificial intelligence, green energy, and electronics, even while also becoming increasingly authoritarian. Fukuyama’s claim is correct, though, while at the same time being kind of silly: the Soviet Union did stagnate and collapse just twenty years after beating the United States in all but one milestone of the space race. The idea that China being bound to decline over the long term is contradicted by China not declining over the short term is, well, to be blunt, stupid. Fukuyama is the one who oversimplifies the ideas in question. This applies to Green’s objection as well: basically anything can be explained in hindsight and not in foresight. American economists were predicting the USSR would overtake the United States in the late eighties. Are we all stupid now? Do we not understand how the social sciences work anymore? As Georg W.F. Hegel once wrote, “The Owl of Minerva takes flight only as the dusk begins to fall”. We’re still in broad fucking daylight.

I think Cowen has the most interesting objection: what isn’t explained by political institutions? Acemoglu is quoted as saying “…to understand institutional change from an institutional perspective you must consider the specific institutions in the past and the historical events…that influence them (…) I don’t think this is tautological at all.” Funny ending aside, he’s giving us a pretty insightful look into his thought process: in particular, he’s defending his institutionalist leanings from the perspective of the historicity of political life. Historicity is “the idea or fact that something has a historical origin and developed through history” (source: Wikipedia), and is one of the most important topics in continental philosophy, since it’s sort of the starting point for historicism, the “school of thought” (a school in the same sense Trump University was one) holding that all thought is conditioned by its historical situation, and that the historical situation itself is the variable of interest. The obvious problem here, one so glaring even Karl Slopper could point it out in The Poverty of Historicism, is that it’s impossible to justify historicism by its own standards. In the first chapter of History and Natural Right, Leo Strauss deals with the topic of historicism and the social sciences; in particular, he says, to be able to understand all of history through the vantage point of one particular moment, you need to assume that history has ended, in one way or another, at your specific worldview. Strauss emphasized that classical political philosophy (and the political philosophy that he believed ought to be done) focused on what the best regime (understood in more or less similar terms as Acemoglu understands institutions) ought to be, not on a value-free, incentive-based political “science” that described institutions without describing their purpose. The question of “inclusive” and “extractive” institutions is answered on purely instrumental grounds, through their attainment of economic prosperity. Whether liberal capitalist democracy itself is good is left completely unanswered. Well, sort of.

Political meh-ology

Acemoglu and some of his coauthors have two other books, which I, to be honest, haven’t read because they’re a thousand pages each. In The Narrow Corridor, Acemoglu attempts to give some sort of nuance to his rah-rah liberal institutionalism. In particular, he images two forces, state capacity and social mobilization, that leave a very narrow corridor for a country to end up prosperous and free. For state capacity, he uses the familiar image of the Leviathan, the biblical beast Thomas Hobbes used to describe the state; for social mobilization, an adjective. If the state is too weak, you get a deadbeat Leviathan that doesn’t enforce the law; if it’s too strong, you get a Nazi Leviathan that kills everyone; liberalism is the gorilla grip corridor where state capacity expands to meet new problems while civil society mobilizes to keep it in check. They call this the shackled leviathan (kinky) and state that it’s a stable equilibrium because of game theory mumbo jumbo.

Of course, aping the concept of the Leviathan is a bold move: Thomas Hobbes’s book is one of the most famous in all of Western thought and the foundation of political philosophy. Hobbes’s diagnosis starts in the English Civil War, a conflict so brutal it made him rethink the basis of human nature: for him, humanity started in a “state of nature” with no government, which, to him, was a war of all against all, where man was the wolf of man, and life was nasty, brutish, and short. Hobbes's argument is that only an effectively absolute sovereign can keep humanity out of the state of nature, because any division of power reintroduces the possibility of contested judgment about who has final authority, which itself produces civil war and violence. To go back to Strauss, this is the foundational act of modern political thought because it inverts the relationship between rights and duties: classical natural right starts from the duties owed toward realizing civic virtue and the common good. In contrast, Hobbes starts from a right, the right of self-preservation, which is absolute and equal for each individual because it’s the only right in the state of nature, and duties are derived from this primary right to sustain it. While most people think Hobbes and John Locke were at odds with each other, Locke is merely a successor of Hobbes: he believes the state of nature is a “good” one, where man is virtuous and rational, and merely voluntarily builds the state for his own self interest; in Locke, the right to self preservation expands to the right of comfortable self preservation, of owning property and increasing one’s wealth (which Strauss, banger factory that he was, calls the “joyless quest for joy”). Strauss thought Hobbes lowered the bar from virtue to survival; Locke lowered it even further, to comfort; Acemoglu, it seems, would lower it further still, to growth in GDP per capita and corruption in the Chart Crime Foundation for Lower Cigarrette Taxes rankings.

The other problem is the practical aspect: is it actually true that liberal democratic capitalism is self-sustaining? Take a look at a newspaper: no. Besides Strauss, there is one other major thinker working on the subject of Thomas Hobbes that, like a senile grandparent that keeps telling the same two anecdotes, this blog keeps trotting out: Carl Schmitt. Schmitt, for some relevant context, was a member of the Nazi party, served as kind of the consigliere of the early Third Reich, had some sort of fallout with Hitler during the early forties, and was spared from going to the big boy no shit you might get the death penalty section of the Nuremberg trials and was instead merely banned from teaching at a lesser hearing.

As a general thing, Schmitt believed that the way we understand “politics” (about taxes, regulations, transgender sports, etc) is pretty stupid and instead we should focus on Politics, which are about which people are enemies of the nation that have to die and which are its friends that are worth killing for. For Schmitt, this means the nation can come to a time of crisis, where the existing rules binding the state can't actually account for its capacity to resolve this unprecedented; comparing it to a biblical miracle, for Schmitt there has to be a sovereign underneath the norms who can decide, unilaterally and unencumbered, which of them to suspend. Hence, the famous opening to Political Theology, "Sovereign is he who decides the state of exception”. This means that the state has a value irreducible to the sum of individual interests, and that instead there is some sort of organic whole the Nation as a unit represents; and this faith has to be backed by some sort of real-world alignment of people and values. Liberal parliamentary government, in particular, was originally legitimated by a specific Enlightenment faith: that open, public discussion would arrive at the truth via the general will. By the 1920s, in contrast, mass democracy meant that parties represent fixed class and economic interests and decisions get made by political operatives in private arguments, meaning that liberalism had lost the social foundations that gave it its authority and legitimacy. And, in particular, the fact that liberalism gives a voice to all factional interest renders it completely incapable of decisive action in times of crisis; liberalism, rather than accepting that there is a possibility of genuine, irreconcilable conflict between these groups and the good of the whole, tries to dissolve their differences into other categories such as ethics and technocratic expertise.

There’s also, though, a second part. During his own time, Carl Schmitt had his own arch nemesis: the (non-Nazi) jurist Hans Kelsen, author of The Pure Theory of Law. In contrast to Schmitt, who argued that the survival of the body politic during national emergencies ought to be preserved by a single sovereign ratified by a plescbicite of sorts, Kelsen argued for a constitutional court: an impersonal judicial body applying written, deliberated norms. For Kelsen, the state simply consisted of the legal order, without any sociological or “spiritual” components. Even emergency powers had to emanate from written, formalized, interpretable norms - which even Schmitt new, since his early work for the Nazis consisted of justifying Hitler’s authority via Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which gave the Chancellor and President enormous autocratic power in case of a vaguely defined national emergency. But even then, Schmitt had a rejoinder: the exception of the titular state is definitionally the case the existing norms didn’t anticipate, and, even then, someone still has to decide whether this situation is the one the provisions cover. The process for determining and deciding the situations that count as emergencies, and the states of exception those emergencies permit, basically smuggled in the key decision of politics - a fact that ended up benefitting the Nazis, as the Weimar constitution was applied in an enormously lopsided manner to benefit the political right.

So the question, if we want to borrow Acemoglu’s terms, is how thin is the line between the shackled Leviathan and the absent Leviathan; his whole point is how liberalism cannot sustain human existence through any Leviathan. Instead, he turns to Hobbes’s final book, which details the “bad case” for government, titled Behemoth. In the Bible, the Leviathan is a beast of the sea; the Behemoth, in contrast, is the beast of the land. The Leviathan, according to Hobbes, describes the political commonwealth as an “artificial man” (Hobbes designed the book’s famous cover image), in which sovereignty is an “artificial soul”, government officials and laws are joints and nerves, peace is “health”, tumult is sickness, and civil war is, of course, death. To Schmitt, this was precisely the point: Hobbes created a “mortal god, to which we owe under the immortal God, our peace and defence”, who was some sort of Evangelion type robot.

In particular, this robot came with its own weak spot: Hobbes gave every man the right of self preservation, which included a right to an “inner life” (the right to refuse to act against one’s own preservation and thus freedom of conscience) which, in turn, opened a gap in the power of the absolute sovereign through which 19th and 20th century liberal constitutionalism crawled through and replaced the absolute power of the sovereign with neutral procedures, checks and balances, and legislative discussion. Much like Strauss, Schmitt would see Acemoglu’s worldview as a derivative of Hobbes’s, rather than as opposed to it; the shackled Leviathan is, when push comes to shove, no Leviathan at all.

Instead, Schmitt saw a superior alternative: the Behemoth. Schmitt defines the Behemoth as an irrational, chaotic, anarchic form of power, that embodies the “national spirit” and destroys the artificial, technocratic state through the power of myth and culture. To him, its victory over the Leviathan was inevitable: no man had any rights he was bound to respect; he could play as dirty as he wanted, and, thus, fight as hard as necessary to achieve victory. Of course, Schmitt’s prediction that this meant a victory for Nazi Germany over England and America did not come to pass, since this blog is written in English and not German. But why? I’m no history buff, but I assume the greater productive powers of the English and American states have a role to play; much like China and Russia, the advantage of the despotic Leviathan at dawn started to wane by noon.

Massachussetts: Institute or Technology

In their final book, Power and Progress, Acemoglu and Johnson (the Mike Wazowski of the three) put together a theory of technology and, well, power. This is their “Marxist” book. Noah Smith has a (negative) review, and Henry Farrell has a (negative) review of his review. It’s Emily Wilson versus Joyce Carol Oates for people with STATA licenses. Says the anti-Acemoglu article:

“Power and Progress” (…) treats a thousand years of innovation largely as a story of elite capture and unintended consequences. The cotton gin was the handmaiden of slavery, while the Haber-Bosch process created chemical weapons. Ordinary people apparently gained only when they could steer capitalists to consider their interests. The book plays down a much more compelling claim: that technological progress in and of itself has made the average person many times richer than in pre-industrial times.

The general thesis statement of the book is “Do not be fooled by the monumental technological achievements of humankind” Acemoglu and Johnson put together a 1,000 year history of the relationship between technology and “shared prosperity”, whatever that means because I guarantee it’s not really well defined, organized around the highly unoriginal thesis that technology can be good or bad depending on how it’s used. In their Nobel-winning academic work, the two (and Robinson and a few other guys who occasionally get invited to join the polycule) point out that the key difference between inclusive and extractive institutions is whether technological innovations can be blocked by a politically entrenched elites. I’ve used this in the past to explain how, well, Machiavellian the early political theory of AJR was. In the Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli argues that good institutions in Rome arose from the conflict between the masses and the elites over multiple centuries of (frequently violent) contestation and negotiation. Rome's liberty and its democratic institutions were a direct outcome of the efforts that plebeians made to express their discontent, a discontent that, to be fair, is never resolved: the plebeians want to be left alone and live freely, and the elites want to amass more and more wealth and power. Aristocracy always degenerates into oligarchy, which is then overthrown into democracy, which can then degenerate into anarchy; only by combining some democratic institutions with some aristocratic ones and some monarchic ones can democracy stabilize itself. Which is more or less basically the case the Narrow Corridor makes, with one exception: Machiavelli thinks political conflict is never solved, rather than being self-resolving through institutional channels over the long term.

Normally, Acemoglu and the gang assumed technology would be “good” and problems arose from good technologies being snuffed out by greedy aristocrats. Instead in Power and Progress they ask: what if the technology itself was the problem? A recent paper by Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, for instance, wonders whether automation benefits workers or not by (not) dissipating the wage premium certain jobs have. There’s nothing making it a law of nature that technological progress has to automatically translate into broadly shared prosperity, and whether it depends entirely on who controls the development of technology. During the Middle Ages, for instance, agricultural innovations enriched lords and immiserated peasants, while 20th century innovations matched with a specific institutional context (unions, government, and schooling) to result in rising standards of living. The new idea, it seems, is that institutions ought to be designed so that gains from new technologies like AI are captured by all of society instead of capital owners, who would benefit from mass displacement via automation and widespread worker surveillance. Ironically, Machiavelli might actually have something to say here: in The Prince, when talking about governent introducing new orders, he says “the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old order, and lukewarm defenders in all those who might do well under the new”, which, first of all, sounds exactly like something Elon Musk would tweet, but second, is the entire problem of institutional capture: concentrated costs and diffused benefits. The people who introduce the new order are always a minority with clear interests, and the people the new order might serve are structurally at a disadvantage in resisting or redirecting it. One such example comes from a more obscure piece of Machiavelli’s writing: the Florentine Histories features an account of the Ciompi Revolt, a 1378 uprising by textile workers against guild masters who had monopolized control over the sector and were pocketing the political and economic profits from it. The workers took over the Florentine government briefly, and were then viciously crushed by the government; Machiavelli features one of the leaders of the Ciompi say, more or less explicitly, that power grows from the barrel of a gun.

You might notice that it’s not that hard to draw a line from Machiavelli to Carl Schmitt: once you open the door to the idea that the preservation of order requires force, then you need a strong government capable of enforcing said order, which then implies in certain cases the stakes are so high a completely despotic government is justifiable. Power and Progress is a deeply Schmittian book: technology’s trajectory is set by whoever holds enough power to impose their “vision” on everyone else, and their bet is that “the people” as a whole should hold that power in unity - but what happens, obviously, when different parts of a society have different opinions? Last year, for instance, the funniest economics paper since the one that examined whether trans people have a gender wage gap with themselves came out: after vapes are banned, queer teenagers are less likely to quit vaping. How can “the people” choose to steer the technology of vapes - to ease the mental suffering of closeted gay teens, or to protect their lungs from the ravages of cancer? The sovereign is he who decides the app of exception. The entire point of History and Natural Right was that, by closing the door on classical natural right, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke had opened the door to Nazism; it is, for this reason, that Strauss described the Italian as akin to Columbus, discovering the continent where Hobbes “erected his structure”. If Strauss looked at the structure Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson put up further down the same stream, he’d have found three little piggies constructing a house made of straw.

And, of course, there comes another problem, and the one mentioned above: Acemoglu’s liberalism is predicated on a kind of materialism it cannot defend. Again, going back to Strauss, there is no clear argument why material gain, rather than some other conception of human flourishing, is the metric against which sixteen centuries of technological history should be judged - Acemoglu is, if anything too friendly to the idea technology-driven growth has been good for humanity. Ironically enough, the big villain of History and Natural Right, Martin Heidegger, has the perfect complement: Heidegger’s critique of technology (in The Question Concerning Technology) was that modern technology isn't a neutral tool we direct toward chosen ends, but rather a specific way of organizing human activities towards exploitation, optimization, and domination of “standing resources” rather than some conception of human flourishing. The danger, to Heidegger, wasn’t that any particular technology was bad, but rather that technological thinking had warped our relationship to the world so much that the furthest we can go is to ask “how can we use this technology to maximize material wellbeing”, which presupposes technological thinking.

A recent blog post by Nicholas Decker, recurrent Twitter main character, makes the eye-catching claim that “Daron Acemoglu is a Crypto-Marxist”: comparing his work, such as the paper coauthored with Restrepo, to old Marxist dogma around capital. The example is the Cambridge Capital Controversy, a debate between British Keynesians and American Keynesians over how to measure the stock of capital. The British side argued, persistently, that their model had to be more accurate because it was more realistic, and it also just so happened to have far more politically radical implications than the American model. Decker’s account is that the dispute was ideologically motivated (probably) and ideologically resolved (no); in fact, the main problem was that the American Keynesians couldn’t criticize the most obvious factor of the British models, that they did not describe reality with any semblance of accuracy, for the very simple reason that baseline Keynesian epistemology they both shared put an emphasis on the realism of the assumptions the model was based on over the realism of the conclusions it reached. Similarly, I think Acemoglu is reaching these “Marxist” conclusions (that technology exists to serve the class interests of capital owners regardless of the profitability of their endeavors) for a series of epistemological decisions that aren’t sustained anywhere: in particular, you cannot open the door to that kind of suspicion on technology without opening it on everythign else too. The philosopher Paul Ricoeur coined the term “the hermeneutics of suspicion” to described something common to Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud: reject the manifest presentation of a phenomenon and instead treat it as a symptom of a deeper, more real force producting it - class relationships, the will to power, or the unconscious. In particular, for Marx, pieces of “ideology” served not as themselves political maneuvers but as cover for the actual politics, which was class politics; behind anything, such as, for instance, “this technology is inevitable and you have to embrace it to not be left behind”, there is a class interest lurking, in this case, the interest of a narrow set of capitalist elites and their professional advocates in the economics profession. Rather than believing the participants’ account of their motives, Acemoglu says, look for what their speech is doing on behalf of whose power. But that’s where the buck stops - there’s never a concern over whether GDP or institutions or democracy or anything else is equally vitiated by capitalist interest. The people who take this furthest are the Frankfurt School, whose whole thing is that the moment The Odyssey started the world was doomed to suffer the horrors of the Third Reich. But Acemoglu has the good sense to not take himself there - which poses a problem: how can he say that a technology that seeks to optimize overall wellbeing (Larry Summers’s critique of his position on AI) is warped by capitalist ideology without actually unpacking whether his own life’s work is also just capitalist propaganda? GDP is fascist, AI is fascist, econometrics are fascist, manufacturing is fascist, and haven’t you read The Dialectic of Enlightenment, even going to the toilet is technically fascist.

Carl Schmitt called his book Political Theology because of his use of religious concepts to explain political events, particularly the idea of the state of exception as some sort of (evil) miracle. The problem with Acemoglu is he doesn’t have a political theology: he doesn’t take the leap of faith and say “this is what human life should be like”, which would, of course, consume his entire book; he dresses it up in some sort of technocratic patter and smuggles in the substantive concepts of that ideology via parliamentary and procedural rules, and through the very concept of institutions employed. For the longest time, the critiques of Acemoglu were primarily left wing: here you have an economist who thinks democracy can only justify itself via its preservation of property rights. Ironically his cleverest move was to try to beat Schmitt at his own game, by saying liberal democratic capitalism was a more stable arrangement than despotism; the problem is everything else is a bunch of legalese about the importance of the constitution. The post liberals are bringing fire and brimstone and you’re hitting back with the political implications of when the Talmud forbids selling donkeys after dusk. Without a substantive claim of what a good life is, Acemoglu cannot justify his skepticism of technologist ideology without also applying the same skepticism to everything else; if he tries to sidestep it with some sort of instrumentalism, he has no defense left over against totalitarianism.

Conclusion

Acemogly is frequently described as “Wikipedia with regressions”; a recent piece of commentary about him is that “unlike almost everyone else with those (technical) skills, he could also read encyclopedias and historiography handbooks, so to an ordinary economist c. 2008 he appeared almost impossibly erudite”. One of his recent papers, that I’ve discussed last week, is about the Marxist historian E.P. Thompson; if you find superficial readings of political philosophy plus shoddy econometrics unappealing, then why did you make it this far down this post.

But why did he get a Nobel Prize? Obviously because he’s famous and important and his papers drive a lot of debate. The intellectual history of development economics as a field is relevant. Originally development economists were mostly people who thought that investment in the right industries produced prosperity, which turned out not to be true and to not work. This followed a generalized reckoning issues in Keynesian economics that emphasized micro-level rationalization because government action could have unintended consequences. As a result, the new consensus was that free markets, free trade, and the free flow of capital was the right way to go. The problem here is that this approach did not work either: the nineties saw basically all “growth miracles” of the early decade collapse due to horrendous financial crashes in a globalized, interconnected world market. So if government intervention doesn’t work, and free markets don’t work, how can governments prevent catastrophic economic meltdowns?

This coincides with three very loosely related shifts in economics. The first is economic history becoming an actually rigorous discipline with solid empirical foundations that permitted credible work to advance really quickly. The second is economic history re-centering the notion of “institutions” through the work of Douglass North (and frequent coauthor Barry Weingast), which sought to answer the question of how contemporary government could provide both a stable, predictable climate for private investment, and also a credible and trustworthy government capable of providing social services by going back to the English Civil War, which, they conclude, created a system of government where the monarchy was bounded by clear rules - in particular, respecting private property. The leading practitioners of these two approaches received a joint Nobel Prize in Economics in 1993. At the same time, economists began coming up with new ways to prove causal relationships with slick and cool exploits that show “cleaner” relationships, which meant that, with then-cutting edge computer software, it became easy to prove how one thing caused another at the same time as troves of historical data was revealed. So, Acemoglu’s work came during a time with an intellectual climate hungry for answers about how to create a good government, troves of credible historical data, and a very refined understanding of how to use economic data. If someone with a Big Brain came along, he (or she, but almost always a he) put all the pieces together and answer, once and for all, why nations fail. Daron Acemoglu was that he.

The real question isn’t why he won the Nobel Prize: the research agenda of the last quarter century has been his research agenda. Isaac Newton once said he was “standing on the shoulders of giants” - shouldn’t the top awards in any field go to those giants, whether they eventually get slain by David or not? The real question is why anyone believed him, and the answer is that they needed to. To quote the great, perhaps even legendary, pseudoerasmus, who is among the people most genuinely knowledgeable about economic development and economic history, “AJR had such an influence, partly because there had been a perception circa 2000 that both state-led and market-led development had been disappointing. AJR’s use of history & colonialism rationalised this fatalism”. After the 2022 World Cup final, British football commentator Peter Drury said “Argentina, champions of the world. Again. At last. (…) 36 years ago since Maradona and Mexico, here finally is a nation’s new throng of immortals. Scaloni will be feted, Messi will be sainted. (…) He climbs into a galaxy of his own. He has his crowning moment…”. Economists, after three decades in the harshest wilderness, finally found their own Moses who could unite them and lead them home and resolve, at long last, the inquiry on the nature and causes of the wealth of nations.

If Strauss could compare Machiavelli to Columbus, and we can compare Acemoglu to Moses, then why not go even further and ask if he’s Odysseus: what if, like they ask in the movie, the moment he led his people home he realized the place he led them to no longer existed? That’s the merit he has over his critics: both of them have precisely the wrong answers to the major questions. But Acemoglu is the only one asking the right questions. He’s, alongside Fukuyama at times, the only one of the people involved who seems to realize how serious the situation is. Economist Luigi Zingales (who used to be a heterodox libertarian of sorts a few years back, but of course, who even is an orthodox libertarian anyways) compares Acemoglu’s opposition to technology to that of the Luddites; Zingales also, nonetheless, compares The Economist to Thomas Maitland, the man hired by industrialists to kill the workers.

When Acemoglu says The Economist wrote “a hit piece”, and accuses them of doing the bidding of Big AI in his (otherwise unconvincing and uninteresting response), he’s not entirely wrong. He’s also not entirely right. One of the major attacks on Acemoglu from the right is that his work “brings credit to bad political positions”, which is kind of implied by the original The Economist piece. Very recently, the president of the American Anthropological Association said she cancelled a panel on “whether biological sex still matters” because of its effect on political outcomes. How is that any different? Is this just yet another example of free speech hypocrisy by conservatives? Maybe. A better explanation, like most if not all academic disputes, is that this insufferable neurosis over who is allowed to speak at which places and/or collect which personal honors is that they’re all extremely full of themselves. Academics think academia is the single most important thing anywhere, which is why they treat us with endless blather about all their internecine office drama: they seem to be under the delusion that whoever gets the prestigious talks and awards gets to tell politicians and journalists and the public what to believe. They don’t. How many other times have you heard of the philosophy journal Hypatia? Zero.

What academics don’t know is that the garden of forking paths is the perfect metaphor for academic pursuits, because it’s a dark, bitter joke at the expense of the academics. In the story, Albert explains the garden to Yu Tsun, a descendant of Tsui Pen, and much more importantly, a Chinese spy for the German army who is fleeing British military police. After being found out, Yu Tsun escapes and takes the train to a random place he found in the phone book as a way to get his message out. Immediately after they’re done with the garden of forking paths, he shoots Stephen Albert in the head; his death makes the Germans know their target, a site with British troops and ammunition, is the village of Albert, in France. Whatever Tsui Pen intended for his garden to be, it didn’t matter, and there were bigger forces at play. Much like Stephen Albert, the critics of Acemoglu, and his defenders too, mistake how important their prattling about lacquer and ivory versus the man aiming a loaded gun at their heads. In Ancient Greece, there was a term used for someone who ignored the political context of their existence: an idiot. I will let the readers decide whether the shoe fits for any person involved in this discussion to wear it.

I'm cranking up
Old technology, fuck your critique (Yeah)
Bitch, what do you want from me?
I need some peace of mind

Slayyyter, OLD TECHNOLOGY

The big story this week, besides “The Atlantic publishes article about how wokeness went too far” (must be a week ending on Sunday), is a data center in the United Kingdom: in particular, it was sued and derailed because the energy cables for the project would, in part, result in the destruction of a major historical site: the grave of Dobby from the last Harry Potter movie. Besides placing the people of good sense in a bind over how to destroy the grave without building the data center, and endless jokes about the UK’s doomed economy, the incident does pose something of a question: why do people not like data centers and artificial intelligence?

Data center? I’d rather date a person

The data center backlash is the story in US politics these days, and is a major global story. Let’s focus on the US. One of the major factors in the rise of the leftist faction of the Democrat party is the growing backlash to data centers; a month ago, the longtime president of the Utah State Senate, Stuart Adams, lost a primary by 8 points to another Republican following his support for the Stratos Data Center, which is three times the size of Manhattan and is owned by Marty Supreme’s very own Kevin O’Leary. A Reuters poll from June found that two thirds of American voters oppose building new data centers in their community, a sentiment that has grown remarkably quickly: between two surveys conducted by HeatMap (a news site focused on climate issues, that I really like), opposition to data centers has grown from 42% of Americans a year ago (versus 44% in favor) to 70% or so this May. This led to at least 75 data center projects worth 130 billion dollars to be cancelled so far, more than 300 bills limiting or regulating AI data centers were introduced in the first few months of the year, as well as the number of anti data center political groups growing to over 800 in 2026.

A poll by Gallup in March found that 71% of Americans oppose building an AI data center in their area, with 48% strongly opposed, while only about a quarter are in favor. In contrast, the peak of anti-nuclear power sentiment was at roughly 60% fifteen years after multiple major nuclear accidents. According to Gallup, the most commonly mentioned reasons are the use of local resources, particularly water and electricity (at 18% o total respondents each), followed by broad environmental impact (14%), followed by job losses to AI (12%), followed by general negative sentiment about AI (10%). So roughly 50% of people who oppose building data centers do so because of environmental issues, and another 39% because they don’t like artificial intelligence or are in some way concerned about it. In contrast, of the quarter or so that do support data centers, two thirds cite economic reasons, and only 27% (total answers add to over 100%) mention they support AI in some form. The backlash is also concentrated among the left, the right, and women, with very little meaningful differences in opposition by age, race, or education. In government meetings, the arguments are mostly procedural: as noted below, the most commonly cited complaint by far is the process and the rules in question, followed by “local character”, followed by environmental issues.

In the aggregate, you have four distinct lines of argument: that data centers are bad because they’re AI; that data centers are bad because of their environmental impact; that data centers are good because they bring jobs, and that data centers are good because they bring tax revenue. The last factor is true; the jobs impact is wildly overstated; the environmental impact is wildly overstated (except for the general energy implications, as well as specific cases like xAI data center in Tennessee). One theory going around is that this is all the result of Chinese misinformation to gain the upper hand in the AI race, which is as politically convenient as it is implausible as an explanation. So that leaves you with two main drivers to the backlash: the first is garden variety greenwashed NIMBYism, which is not an especially new thing or even unique in targeting a specific technology. From this interview between Ezra Klein and Jasmine Sun (a fellow blogger who covers this topic):

I’ve talked to city officials who are confused by this question of: We had a chip fabrication here, we had an auto plant here, we had a fulfillment center here, and nobody cared as much. Why are data centers so much more unpopular than, say, solar farms, which also faced local opposition in places like Michigan?

So I think that while the quality of life concerns around these things — that they are loud and annoying and ugly and consume resources — are very similar to other industrial projects, there must be some reason that opposition is so much more severe and widespread, even beyond the communities where the data centers are being built.

So what do you have left? Well, AI specific explanations - to quote Sun, “… fundamentally [anti data center organizers] were like: This thing is not that useful. I don’t really see in my personal life how this could justify these gigantic valuations”. Anti AI activist Joe Allen summarizes his pitch as follows “To the greenies in the room, I say, Earth first! (…) To the patriots in the room, I say, America first! And for anyone in the room with blood pulsing in their veins, anyone in the room with fire in their minds and hearts, you have to remember, in a machine age, humans first.” Allen, of course, is a conservative culture warrior who believes the Unabomber made some good points; for instance, he thinks data centers are kind of like the fetal tissue of the Antichrist (direct quote here). So the guy is nuts. Then why is he influential?

The main argument is that AI companies themselves are very unpopular and that their actions are extremely controversial. Their most common marketing strategy, until extremely recently, was to go all in on the “we are evil and hate you” track: multiple tech CEOs said in highly publicized interviews to that humans were essentially going to be made obsolete by AI. Artificial intelligence tools have been repeatedly dogged by enormous controversies, like Elon Musk’s Grok openly declaring itself a Nazi, multiple cases of people using AI for advice on how to commit suicide, AI generated deepfake porn, very public concern from top AI experts on the technology including multiple recent autonomous AI hacks, rampant AI-enabled cheating at educational institutions, including the most prestigious in the world; extensive usage of artificial intelligence in the US and Israel’s ongoing illegal war against Iran; the highest profile faith leader in the world taking a public stance against AI; a Starbucks campaign in South Korea that the company claims (very unconvincingly) was created by AI where a discounted mug made fun of a 1980 massacre of pro-democracy protestors. Here’s just a small “postcard” from the large backlash to artificial intelligence in culture: in 2023, of the ten most common words used to describe AI- generated art (books, news, stories, movies, animation), five were positive and five negative - the first three spots were held by positive terms, and the most common negative ones were controversial and not real art; by 2026, it had shifted to six to four, and the first four slots were held by negative words. In just three short years, people have gone from thinking AI is innovative to thinking it’s soulless and derivative.

Is AI popular? Kinda. Americans are split 51-49 on whether they use AI, and are split 49-41 on whether they trust AI. However, Americans are not optimistic about artificial intelligence: 40% think AI will have mostly negative impacts on society, compared to 16% who think it will be positive, and the impact to them personally is also 31% negative against 23% positive. Almost two thirds of Americans think AI is advancing too fast; 71% are concerned it will make their personal data less safe; two thirds think the US is incapable of regulating AI, and 59% that American companies cannot develop and use it responsibly, primarily because public opinion of tech companies is overwhelmingly negative. Between 60% and 70% of of Americans think AI should be regulated more tightly. As seen below, 71% of Americans believe that the government will use AI to strip their rights away from them, 70% think that AI will cause large-scale job losses, 64% that it will worsen environmental issues, and 57% that it will increase inequality, while only a quarter of people are concerned with Silicon Valley’s primary worry, that humanity will go extinct as a result of AI (in fact, 60% of people don’t believe it’s going to happen). A survey by Ipsos finds something similar, that most people support regulating AI, that AI will increase inequality, and also express skepticism that AI benefits (which 67% of people say exist) outweigh the losses - only 41% think the benefits, on aggregate, will exceed the losses, and only 35% that it will create more jobs than the ones lost.

On a more global scale, while most countries use AI, not all find themselves excited: 52% of people say they are nervous about AI, about the same as the ones who say they are excited, and the same as the people who think that AI has more benefits than drawbacks. In all 31 countries surveyed, Ipsos finds that a majority of people thinks their daily life will be impacted, with 57% thinking it will change their job and 36% that it will eliminate it. Trust that AI will improve the economy is at 34%, and that it will improve the job market it as 32% - as opposed to 36% who think it will make it harder to find a job, and the 23% who assume it will worsen the economy.

According to Pew, in contrast (this survey is a little bit older, which is important to note for a fast-advancing topic), 34% are more concerned than excited for AI, more than double the amount of people who are “bearish”, across 25 countries. The only countries where a majority of people are concerned are the United States and Italy, followed by Australia, Brazil, Canada, and Greece with more than 45% of people concerned; Argentina, the UK, Spain, Poland, and Mexico have concern just under 40% and tripling excitement. The only countries where people are more excited than concerned are Israel (29% to 21%) and South Korea (22% to 16%). Americans don’t trust their own government to regulate AI (47% against), and most countries trust the United States government less than the EU to regulate AI - the US is at -11, compared to +19 for Europe, but still better than China’s -33. People who support the US are more conservative, people who support Europe are more educated, and people who support China are younger. Young adults in most countries are more likely to have heard about AI: people under 35 are around 20 points likelier than people over 50 to know about the technology, with differentials near or under 10% in only three countries (Nigeria, India, and Kenya).

Usually, younger people tend to be more enthusiastic about AI than older people, women more concerned than men, and more educated people less concerned than less educated ones. The interesting thing here is that the US has, of all countries polled, the smallest age gap: 54% of people over 50 are concerned with AI, as opposed to 47% of people under 35. In a bit more detail, Americans ages 18 to 29 think AI will have a negative effect on society by a 48% to 14% margin, compared to margins of 37% to 16% on people over 50; on themselves personally, young people who think it will harm them outnumber the ones who think it will benefit them by 17 points. Young Americans are also the ones likeliest to use AI (66%, compared to 42% for people 50 to 64 and 23% for people older than 65), and 31% use it at least daily, as opposed to 24% for the Average American. 95% of Americans under 30 consider themselves well informed on AI, the highest of any age groups, and 58% are confident with using AI. Women are also more pessimistic than men about AI, with women thinking it will have a negative impact on them by a 33% to 17% margin, compared with men thinking it will benefit them by +2 on net; however, both men and women think AI will be net negative for society by a wide margin.

Human stupidity versus artificial intelligence

Generally speaking, there’s a number of interesting trends: women trust AI less than men in most countries and are more pessimistic than men in most countries. Young people know more about AI than older people and are more confident in AI than older people, except for one country, the United States. High-income countries and high income individuals view AI more positively than their low income peers. And people who are concerned or pessimistic frame those concerns around unemployment and income distribution. So what gives?

The gender gap in AI is something I’ve written about before: studies on the topic cite lower self-confidence among women, less awareness of how to apply AI, and higher risk-aversion. In particular, I have to note that women are just less likely to use any new technologies and seem to wait until it’s socially acceptable first: men tend to be influenced to use a technology if it seems useful, while women balance ease of use with perceptions of social norms. A lot of this stuff is just plain old boring sexism: women tend to be penalized more heavily for mistakes at work, which creates a lot of apprehension towards “high agency” behavior and a lot of risk aversion, for example during salary negotiations or against taking leadership roles.

The age gap is also pretty usual: it’s a fairly well established fact that people trust technologies they’re more familiar with as more trustworthy. For instance, a paper finds that, when looking at new technologies across different times, people tend to rate older technologies more favorably: when a newer technology was informed to be older to study participants, they shifted their attitude more positively. Across the literature, economists typically accept that the accrued benefits from that technology over time, the lower switching costs for young people, and the higher risk tolerance of younger workers generally explain this, as well as more general nostalgic feelings.

The next question has to do with income and education: why do people with more money and more degrees trust new technologies more? Old reliable: social trust and zero-sum beliefs. Economic deprivation, particularly exposure to low economic growth, is very closely associated with zero-sum thinking, which means a belief that it’s impossible for people to gain without someone else necessarily losing. People exposed to lower economic growth are more likely to be zero-sum, which is also associated with lower support for trade or immigration, but also with higher support for government redistribution. Openness to trade and immigration, which is closely linked with what’s known as moral universalism, is itself linked to social trust, income, education, and support for democracy. The final element to consider is social trust, that is, trust in institutions and in others: low trust societies have more conservative, self-reliant, and nationalist beliefs, whilst higher trust societies have more liberal, “globalist”, and redistributionist beliefs. Overall, the role of technology is important: conservatives (who score lower on social trust and are more likely to hold zero-sum intuitions about the world) are less trusting of scientists for relatively deep-rooted reasons, are substantially more likely to deny scientific facts in the American context (because people are likely to distrust scientific findings for ideological reasons in general), and, most importantly, are less likely to trust new technologies and scientific discoveries. The main reason is also closely related to moral universalism and social trust: conservative people simply have different moral intuitions, which, particularly, make a lot of new technologies and the societal upheaval they imply very distasteful.

This explains to some extent the switch in class valence: the countries with the highest trust and adoption of AI all tend to be high-growth nations in East Asia like China, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Indonesia and South Korea; in contrast, developed countries like the United States, Canada, and Western Europe have relatively high adoption rates and comparatively low trust. I think there’s a pretty straightforward explanation here, besides low growth leading to low trust and other pathologies in moral reasoning: rational self interest. Right now, the value preposition of AI companies is, more or less explicitly, that they will abolish white-collar labor and replace it with cheap capital. Historically, developing human capital (the factor of production that white-collar labor uses) has been the main path to development; thus, countries with a lot of white labor would be harmed by AI, and countries with not a lot of it would benefit. This logic is also shared by Oliver Kim: global wages should converge between rich and poor countries, while global profits would explode in rich countries and shrink (or at least not grow) in poor ones. Thus, by pure distributional concerns, poor countries would be more positively disposed towards AI on both economic and moral grounds. My own intuition about it has long been that wages would be equalized between all sectors except personal care, which is non tradeable and which is growing more rapidly in the developed world than in developing countries, while the inequality between capital and labor income would grow exponentially - it’s recently come out that Dario Amodei allegedly privately says that Anthropic would be the only privately company in the world, since artificial intelligence would be capable of performing all labor. And I think this also doesn’t consider the role of land specifically, which is a core driver of inequality, is distinct from capital in a lot of ways, and, most importantly, plays an enormous role in the artificial intelligence buildout and is incapable of being substituted by anything else. The question economists like to ask here is “what will be scarce” and the answer, in the maximalist scenario for AI, is nurses, AI companies, and space for data centers.

An important caveat is that this depends on how much AI can substitute human labor: if AI is mostly a complement to white-collar labor, which I think is the likeliest case for number of fairly complicated reasons, then all bets are off. However, in a sufficiently advanced AI scenario, which is, based on public polling, the one most people are imagining might happen, then AI could able to replace a substantial amount of human labor and flatten global wage inequality (which would benefit low-wage countries and harm high-wage ones) while concentrating global capital ownership and profits. One example of such a maximalist scenario is the infamous Citrini Research paper that came out five years ago in February, titled “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis”. The white paper (or, if we’re being honest here, blog post) details a 2028 scenario where artificial intelligence is capable of replacing a substantial amount of human labor (including, it seems fairly obviously while reading it, the labor of writing the post): “Real output per hour rose at rates not seen since the 1950s, driven by AI agents that don’t sleep, take sick days or require health insurance. The owners of compute saw their wealth explode as labor costs vanished. Meanwhile, real wage growth collapsed.” The scenario is one in which wages is repeatedly compressed by AI automation, leading to a decline in consumer spending, which prompts even further automation to maintain market share, which led to even lower wages and thus even lower spending. Importantly, while some white collar labor roles would remain, most would be deskilled into the service and gig economy, lowering overall wages due to higher structural unemployment and thus higher competition.

There’s been a number of objections to Citrini: the first is purely macroeconomic: Mike Konczal notes that the AI downward spiral is tractable with normal macroeconomic tools - to quote Paul Krugman in a similar discussion about the macroeconomic impact of free trade in the 1990s, “the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement was conducted almost entirely in terms of supposed job creation or destruction. The obvious (to me) point that the average unemployment rate over the next 10 years will be what the Fed wants it to be1, regardless of the U.S.-Mexico trade balance, never made it into the public consciousness”. Citadel, a major financial sector firm, took a very aggressive line in downplaying the likelihood of the Citrini scenario actually happening, saying it did not look like current economic trends: “one must assume that labor income completely collapses and capital income has a spending velocity of zero, which is historically false. Profits from AI efficiency will be reinvested, distributed, taxed, or spent (…) AI is highly likely to be a complement to human labor rather than a strict substitute”. There’s also a series of other assumptions around depreciation and consumption that are hard to substantiate.

Ironically, this is pretty close to the orthodox Marxist and orthodox Keynesian accounting of what a major crisis of capitalism would look like: John Ganz posted just earlier today about a paper titled “The AI Layoff Trap” by economists Brett Hemenway Falk and Gerry Tsoukalas, which formalizes the Citrini school of AI doomerism pretty straightforwardly: “If AI displaces human workers faster than the economy can reabsorb them, it risks eroding the very consumer demand firms depend on.” The traditional Marxist read is that when one capitalist adopts a productivity-raising innovation, they can sell below the previous social value while still capturing extra surplus value, but if every capitalist does it, the advantage vanishes, which over time compresses profits and wages. This push towards mechanization creates an "industrial reserve army" of displaced workers (which is what compresses wages), which results in a decline in the rate of profit since only labor, and not capital, can create value directly, and over time produces a terminal crisis of capitalism due to the intensity of competition. In contrast, the traditional Keynesian view is that a similar dynamic is produced without a need for the labor theory of value (fortunately), but rather because “wages are not only a cost to businesses; they are also incomes to workers, and workers spend that income buying things. If all the firms in the economy slash their wages at the same time, total consumer demand falls”. Ganz then goes on to link it to the work of heterodox economist James Crotty, who linked these two dynamics to produce something called “fratricidal competition”, where firms make short-term optimized decisions under uncertainty which leads to excessive investment.

But ironically, the best set of tools to understand this relationship comes from Marx’s own best friend slash sugar daddy, Friedrich Engels. In his Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (a master of marketing he was not), Engels notes that, despite the gigantic increase in output as a result of the industrial revolution, real wages were not increasing, resulting in a drastic rise in income inequality between capital and labor: “after visiting the slums of the metropolis, one realises for the first time that these Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature, to bring to pass all the marvels of civilisation which crowd their city”. Economic historian Robert Allen accompanies it with data: between 1780 and 1840, output per worker in Britain rose 46%, but real wages rose only 12%. He called this period of flat wages during a period of historically unprecedented output growth “Engels' Pause”: in particular, because capital and labor couldn’t be easily substituted for each other, population growth and labor-enhancing industrial technologies meant that the demand for capital grew extremely rapidly, increasing the rate of return for capital owners and thus profits. However, the shift in the functional distribution of income wasn’t permanent: higher incomes for the wealthy and higher returns with very few other outlets increased total investment over time, which reduced the capital/labor ratio, as well as resulting in new technologies that allowed for more substitution of capital with human labor. By the end of the 19th century, real wages were growing nearly 60% faster than total factor productivity.

The “Engels’ Pause” thesis is, like literally every single thing in economic history, disputed: a different economist, Gregory Clark, has his own estimates of incomes and prices that show a bigger increase in wages, however Allen objects to the price of bread used, and a more recent paper finds that there was a Pause, but more modest and shorter than Allen stipulated. Another economist, Nicholas Crafts, also objected to the productivity statistics used by Allen, which were, to his opinion, too high - to quote Crafts, “Economists looking for an historical example of rapid labour-saving technological progress having a seriously adverse impact on labour’s share must look elsewhere”. And a third paper, by Paul Bouscasse, Emi Nakamura and Jon Steinsson, finds that higher growth was explained due to a structural shift away from agricultural production, and that stagnant real wages are explained by rapid population growth. This growth came as a result of higher agricultural output after land enclosures and changes to agrarian techniques; this growth slowed during the first half of the 19th century, permitting prices to grow and then decline and thus for real wages to catch up later (notice that, given the facts of human biology, it takes ten to twenty years for a person to become a worker). So while obviously there are lessons to take from Engels’ Pause, the fact that the human population is declining may positively impact wages in the age of AI, since human labor of any kind would become a scarce factor.

Nevertheless, without deviating into an obnoxious epistemological debate, an “AI Engels’ Pause” scenario is still worth thinking about because it seems to be what the AI companies themselves are openly gunning for, it seems to be what the public is concerned about, and, most importantly, it provides us with stylized facts about AI that we can then temper with real world considerations. A historical example of the relevant dynamic can be found in a recent paper by Nobel laureates Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, titled “Learning from Ricardo and Thompson: Machinery and Labor in the Early Industrial Revolution, and in the Age of AI”. The Ricardo in question is British economist David Ricardo: during the late 1810s, he became a prominent defender of the idea that workers would benefit from more factories and more automation, but over time his thinking flipped: by 1821, he had written that “It is more incumbent on me to declare my opinion on this question, because they have, on further reflection, undergone a considerable change” and that “If machinery could do all the work that labor now does, there would be no demand for labor”. Acemoglu and Johnson’s example are the cotton weavers: weavers who worked with cotton by hand had earned roughly twice as much as the average factory worker in 1806; by 1820, their wages were 25% below market, and kept falling from there. Family earnings for handloom weavers in Lancashire more than halved between 1814 and 1820, from 240 pence a week (which in today’s money is around 62,000 pounds, compared to an average equivalent wage of 130 pence or 32,000 pounds2) to 100 pence a week, and was just over 70 pence by the middle of the 19th century. Even trades that did not see direct automation, did nevertheless suffer from mechanization: for bootmakers, 152,000 jobs were lost while 144,000 new ones were created, but this affected primarily young workers - a recent paper finds that hiring in AI-exposed fields declined significantly over the last 2 years (I have a number of thoughts on this but, overall, I think it simply worsened a preexisting trend in white-collar hiring3). Of course, over the long run, wages did increase, and that these people could eventually retrain into other professions; however, to quote Nobel Laureate Joel Mokyr (and coauthors), “in the long run, wages for laborers increased to reflect dramatically increased productivity. It is also true that, for the Industrial Revolution, by many estimates it took longer than an average working lifetime to do so”.

But that leaves half of the people name-dropped to talk about: E.P Thompson (first name Edward middle initial Palmer), a Marxist historian and author of The Making of the English Working Class4. Thompson’s core idea is to reframe one of the core Marxist distinctions, between base (the economic relationships of production) and superstructure (the social and political relationships they produce); instead of a “mechanistic” process from base to superstructure, or whatever the hell vague deterministic nonsense Althusser was cooking up before he murdered his wife, Thompson tried to produce a “field of force” metaphor focused on class as lived historical experience that occurred to people who occupy a specific part of the economic relationships of production. The “field of force” works because it shapes and constrains everything within it without necessarily being the only determining factor in any specific interaction: economic relations exert real and describable pressure on culture, and politics, but they don't necessarily dictate the specific content of all human behaviors. And, in particular, Thompson’s insight is applied by Acemoglu and Johnson quite straightforwardly: the spread of the factory system actually worsened the lives of workers in innovative sectors because it implied a different balance of power between capital and labor, in which workers were disciplined by the labor market to work long hours in unsanitary conditions while being moved from the countryside to the extremely unsafe and polluted cities of 19th century Britain.

Of course, this harkens back to a frequent friend of the blog: Karl Polanyi. In his book The Great Transformation, Polanyi details in excruciating detail how the adoption of market capitalism required enormous changes in the way society had, for millennia, understood labor, land, and money. The economy and the market sphere used to be “embedded” into the broader sphere of society, civil society, and politics, where land, labor, and money weren’t commodities to be traded according to supply and demand. In particular, the concept of a “labor market”, or the idea that people can “sell” themselves to work, was profoundly alien to feudal England (the birthplace of capitalism) and had to be constructed via deliberate policies that dismantled the vast majority of preexisting social arrangements. As argued in another book frequently mentioned on the blog, Ellen Meiksins Wood's The Origin of Capitalism, capitalism emerged from the land reforms where a variety of unique political circumstances5 and the development of a Lockean/Baconian ideology of land improvement and scientific management meant the British Crown could dictate the enclosure of public land (as well as the seizing of monastical property), which in turn uprooted the lives of a large number of peasants who were turned into tenant farmers, which in turn created a population that had to engage in paid market labor to sustain itself and which had to pay for land at competititve rates. The history of capitalism, to Polanyi, was the history of those resiting its advance: unions, farmers, industrialists, Cartists, socialists, and, importantly, the Luddites: there was fierce organized resistance to industrialization (and had to be fiercely suppressed with an army half the size as the one the British empire had fighting Napoleon) because they believed their livelihoods and way of life would be destroyed by factories - and they were mostly right; to quote Eric Hobbsbawm, “the city destroyed society.”

Conclusion

Writing about the data center backlash in Wisconsin, where opposition to their construction got an anti-Thanksgiving politician to almost win a gubernatorial primary, Jasmine Sun notes that the main causes of the AI backlash are the lack of clear benefits, the lack of a clear opinion-shaping effort by AI companies, procedural issues, and, you guessed it, a skepticism of positive-sum economic propositions and low trust in governments and institutions. In addition to this, and the bad reputation of tech companies and billionaires in general, there’s also the fact that in a maximalist AI scenario, workers, particularly young ones, and particularly women (both groups which are overrepresented in the white-collar labor market and which are expected to bear the brunt of automation), are skeptical of AI integration into the economy for the very simple reason of looking out for their own bottom line.

So the backlash is, indeed rational: the most exposed workers are looking out for their material interests. I think this gets you into two big issues, the first being that the government has to ensure a smooth transition into a post AI economy. Polanyi described a “double movement” of capitalist integration and then anti-capitalist disintegration where a relatively orderly transition away from feudalism was only possible for Britain because it was prolonged by multiple centuries by the Tudor and Stuart monarchs. Similarly, if the transition isn’t handled correctly and isn’t gradual and progressive enough, serious social and political consequences would follow: I’ve written before that a core fact of the democratic crisis facing the United States (and, to a much lesser extent, European and Latin American nations) comes from the prolonged issues caused by deindustrialization and the Great Recession. This transition has to be handled by the government: to take another cotton-related example, Dylan Matthews formerly of Vox writes in Asterisk magazine about the Rust brothers, who invented an automatic cotton picker that reduced the employment, and wages, of cotton pickers substantially; however, first of all, they were able to relocate to other professions, and secondly, the Rusts invested significantly in social welfare by providing a variety of services via the Rust Foundation, which proved to be incapable of directly resolving the consequences of their invention since the Rusts simply went out of business because of competitive pressures from John Deere. The lesson here is that private companies cannot handle social welfare on their own; expecting Anthropic to continue being “the nice AI” when they have a monopoly over compute is like expecting Google to still live by the words “Don’t Be Evil” in big 2026.

What could this solution be? Well, I’m a liberal, so I expect this solution to be liberal in some form or another. The big trend in the halcyon days of 2025 was Abundance, an agenda premised on higher economic growth via unleashing regulatory and market failure constraints on government action. I had a (very lengthy) review of the idea a while back, where the central concern was that Abundance would simply make the same mistake that neoliberalism made in the 1970s and 1980s by just letting a series of increasingly rapacious corporate masters take the wheel and wring out every last drop of liberalism from its commitments. What happened was… not that; instead, people simply moved on. Liberal congressional candidate Micah Lasher recently told Politico that the “abundance” agenda is “incomplete substantively and ineffective politically”, and the article that quotes him says it “crushes with people who read The Atlantic, but is a dud with everyday voters”. According to polling, liberal voters simply don’t like messaging focused on abundance, and it’s not a big hit with voters either.

There’s two reasons for this. The first is kinda obvious: the argument to win back working class voters, who abandoned the left over a series of low-trust, zero-sum moral commitments, is to pitch them on positive-sum, high-trust policies. In particular, these voters were understood to be culturally conservative working class voters, who abandoned the left in basically all advanced democracies since the 1990s, while high-income, high-education elites ended their traditional affiliation to the political right. The preferred explanation was that this followed the left’s focus on “social issues” like feminism and gay marriage, without a real understanding of why workers were aligned with the left to begin with: a mix of higher social trust, stronger beliefs in “shared growth”, and the influence of socialist internationalism (i.e. moral universalism). The main problem is that people try to explain shifts in voters’ moral alignment without understanding that there is such a thing as a moral economy: when Bill Clinton signed NAFTA into law, Democrats suffered with working class voters who were conservative because the party didn’t have an economic pitch for them.

The second problem is the most common criticism of the Abundance agenda: that it “doesn’t have a theory of power”. Well, the coauthor of the Abundance book, Ezra Klein, wrote in the New York Times to disprove this: without saying it explicitly, he more or less thinks that power is built by winning democratic elections, spending political capital in relatively anodyne ways, and then winning more elections. In the book, which I haven’t read, he also argues for this and more openly says that there should be extensive investment into Abundance Politics to shape political opinion6. The intellectual grandfather, I would say, of the broader Abundance Plus project is Mancur Olson, a liberal of sorts economist and sociologist who focused on collective action and political economy: Olson’s core idea is that coordinated action problems feature a clash between individual incentives and interests and collective wellbeing. One of his more important contributions is to highlight the role of “distributive coalitions”, groups that receive outsize benefits from a failure of social coordination whose costs are not concentrated. So, for example, there could be a tax policy that underfunds a social program that everyone relies on, but that doesn’t get fixed because it affects one specific interest group that lobbies government officials to keep it. Importantly, as long as a society is stable, the number of distributive coalitions will grow, which means that technological and economic progress will also slow, which means government and governance also slow and become increasingly difficult.

You could, of course, say that the people rejecting data centers are a distributive coalition, and in many ways they are (a lot of them are simply annoying old NIMBYs), but extremely importantly, the “coalition” in question appears to be everyone who engages in the social practice of wage labor. In fact, everything would suggest that it’s the tech companies who act as a distributive coalition, by engaging in extremely underhanded political maneuvers like clouding most of their dealings with municipalities under non-disclosure agreements, anonymously bidding on and buying land, and lobbying policymakers with aggressive political operations. But the tech companies are the new technology!

The most eye catching thing to try to resolve this is the stable societies part. Olson, as a public choice theorist, earned his keep by focusing on how individual agents within concrete forms of government strategically acted in response of certain incentives and payoffs. His critique of liberal capitalist democracy was that these incentives were for lobbying to get a carveout that harmed everyone else a little bit and benefitted you individually a lot of bit. But the thing here is we’re not talking about a stable society: we’re talking about a profoundly destabilized one. Even if there’s no mass unemployment, the profits accruing to capital owners more than proportionately compared to workers would become a massive political problem, and here’s where the “no theory of power” thing comes to bite. Olson comes across as relatively skeptical of democracy, or at least of its ability to maintain good prosperity; to be fair to him, he would probably also think non-democratic polities are even worse at it. His (good-spirited and good faith) critique of liberal democracy, and this is the thing that gets people really mad at me, has a pretty concrete academic pedigree: the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt (long time no see), whose core disagreement with like, people having rights, is that in situations of crisis the competing interests and lengthy deliberations required by democratic politics would result in the destruction of the nation-state by its enemies. Of course, Olson wasn’t a Nazi7, but I think the excessive emphasis on distributive concerns opens the door to the initial problem I thought Abundance would have, and the most ironic one, capture by reactionary business interests who want a sort of Technocratic Rejection of Politics As Such. An extremely reactionary tech baron, Mike Solana, explicitly made that case in The Atlantic about the book.

But I think that focusing on Olson can be interesting because it lets us open the door to his “evil twin”, in a way, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Olson was an economist slash sociologist interested in how democratic social relations could create serious individual contradictions in economic relations; Habermas, in contrast, was a philosopher slash sociologist interested in how capitalist social relations could create serious structural contradictions in democratic relations. Both of them tried to probe for contradictions between the two to explain the serious economic and political disfunction of the 1970s, and to renew the second generation of an academically cloistered philosophy (Public Choice Economics and the Frankfurt School of Marxism). And, most importantly, both see that there’s a tension between the capitalist drive to maximize self interest and the democratic imperative to maximize social welfare; Olson saw it as a problem of individual incentives and Habermas as a structural incompatibility. Importantly I think this means you can pull an Indiana Jones style switcheroo between the two, which, because AI is a structural change to the economy that will profoundly destabilize society, allows you to move beyond the very concrete and contingent set of political relations that Abundance criticizes to understand power more broadly without rejecting liberalism.

I’ll describe Habermas’s thought really briefly, even if he’s a side or central character in basically all my writing this year: on the one hand, there is the political sphere, where formal electoral contests take place. On the other hand, there is the public sphere, the nexus of civic life. Formal politics is ruled by “instrumental reason”, the link of means to ends without a concern for moral questions, and the public sphere is ruled by rational deliberation. Importantly, economic life is also ruled by instrumental reason, which means that politics and economics are typically much more simpatico than one would expect in the realm of pure liberal theory. In particular, capitalist social relations are inherently hierarchical because the ownership of the means of production is private; that means that “the boss” has the power to discipline his employees regardless of the social cost of their unemployment. For Habermas, this could mean that capitalist democracies entered crises of legitimacy either when the capitalist system ceased to provide sufficient wellbeing to justify itself to the democratic public, or, more importantly, when the public sphere stopped being able to provide those justifications. Importantly, for Habermas, this happened because private capitalist self interest colonized it to advance their own individual agenda: think of things like the Ellison family buying a significant chunk of the American media landscape in an explicitly political move to promote conservative ideas. Importantly, the public sphere (and, to a lesser extent, political life) is embedded into something that Habermas calls “the lifeworld”, which also contains the roots of all social existence including norms, meaning, and tradition.

This is, to circle back, why I think a more structural look at power is important. Even moderately advanced artificial intelligence would displace enormous amounts of people from their occupations and uproot them from a lifetime of socially constituted interactions. When this process took centuries, as was the case for the guild workers and indentured peasant farmers of feudal England, it was still remarkably violent and turbulent; Habermas notes that the expansion of the welfare state and the relaxation of countless repressive social norms has provided an exhaust for this process to continue without the same degree of violence. But the process of dissolving the specific social relations of “Fordist” industrial mass society into “neoliberal” consumer society was a lot faster, and ideologically preempted a further expansion of the welfare state; the result was a three decade backlash to economic growth and democracy both in favor of a return to the ancient primitive tribe.

Derek Thompson, the other author of Abundance alongside Klein, recently said: “The far right has a story. The far left has a story. The center doesn't have story. That's a problem. What I would say in response to that is, yeah, stories are for children.” Well, they’re not. Stories are about relating a given setting to a given conflict, and then providing a resolution via action. I think this idea that you cannot have a theory of reality, of how the world’s actual problems relate to specific background material events, has slowly eroded away liberalism as a living ideology. I’ve written about a potential liberal economic agenda, and I think people with a more explicit politically-focused career should try to connect solutions like the ones I propose with an acceptable political platform. If a solution not predicated on slowing down AI progress is found, it has to focus on technological unemployment, where we have policy solutions do work and exist, even if not currently implemented. If liberalism doesn’t wake up from its fifty-year slumber, and AI disruptions on the scale that most people are expending end up happening, we’re going to have to cast our lot between socialism and barbarism.

The most discussed book of the year, or at least so far, is Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear. The second most discussed book is JD Vance’s “I became a Catholic at forty because the most fascist friend of Jeffrey Epstein told me to so here’s why every Pope for the last sixty to two thousand years is a fake Catholic” tirade. The third most discussed, then, which also has the coolest cover, is Anton Jager’s Hyperpolitics. The book is, among other things, popular with Britain’s new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham. The subtitle is “Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences”, which is more or less the premise of the book: why did movements like the Gillets Jaunes, Black Lives Matter, the Climate Strikes, et cetera, et cetera not accomplish anything?

Hype for Hyper

Two or three weeks ago, Spanish streamer “El Xokas” had a Burger King promotional campaign, including a limited edition burger, cancelled because he made fun of how little money a fan made. As the tweet above says, back in the twentieth century “the left” was based on mass mobilization of workers; today, it’s based on quote tweets. That is the essence of hyperpolitics. The book, like a lot of books these days, is based on a piece with the title “How the World Went from Post-Politics to Hyper-Politics“ in the Tribune from 2022, as well as a longer essay titled “Hyperpolitics in America”, which was published in the New Left Review in 2024 and for whatever reason it’s on PDF in Spanish. Unlike most of the books based on essays, this book is pretty good. The original essays work pretty well as an abridged version of the book if you’re too lazy and/or cheap to get it. I enjoyed the profile on Jäger in The Guardian, and also liked the reviews in the London Review of Books, the Cleveland Review of Books, Commonweal, and The New Republic.

The concept which gives the book its title comes from an essay by a friend of the blog, German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk (more on him later), and is probably best summarized by the London Review of Books well, review of the book:

Politics in the late 2010s was fertile ground for heretics, political entrepreneurs and narcissists, but these characters lacked the aptitude, the patience and ultimately the power to get involved in the long, tedious work of policy innovation. Hyperpolitics, as Jäger writes, is ‘the product of a hard but hollow environment, an attempt to break the iron grip of neoliberalism without the requisite tools to do so’. His book concludes with the words of the Belgian photographer Tom Peeters, articulating what Jäger sees as the manic-depressive condition of politics today: ‘My generation constantly oscillates between the realisation that we need to get moving, preferably very quickly, and the feeling that all is in vain. The true challenge – to change things – appears nigh impossible.’ For Jäger, and for many who are involved in left-wing politics and activism, this sense that anything can be politicised, yet nothing can be changed, is a matter of deep disappointment and bewilderment.

Hyperpolitical life is, to put it shortly, a form of political engagement that contests everything and accomplishes nothing. A political event like the Reichstag fire being of serious consequence if it happened today is as imaginable as The Star Spangled Banner being replaced with We Are Charlie Kirk (which, to be fair, actually happened). Author Anton Jäger explains political activity across two dimensions: politicization, the interest of people in political activity and mobilization, and institutionalization, the participation in organized civic life.

The first dimension is the trickiest one to describe, so the book takes great pains to sample culture and media to show it: Annie Ernaux and Michel Houllebecq, Wolfgang Tillmans and Hugo Claus; Baudrillard and Fukuyama, all showed a world that was checked out of politics and checked in on their own personal enjoyment. The second dimension is a lot simpler: it’s the old fashioned “Bowling Alone” discussion of the decline of social capital and community participation. The main inspiration in thinking about this is the political scientist Robert Putnam, author of the famous Bowling Alone thesis: ever since the mid 1950s, participation in civic organizations declined in the United States, resulting in an atomized society and an atomized polity. Putnam’s theory is centered on social capital (the networks of relationships and trust that enable collective action) collapsed in the second half of the 20th century, such that people were doing things inside society rather than with it - the titular example, going to the bowling alley on your own, rather than as apart of a league.

The chronology of political life goes from the “high politics” of the 60s and 70s, when coal miners duked it out on the streets with the police and unions, synagogues, and churches bused their members to civil rights protests; to the postpolitics of the 1980s and 1990s, when people would rather do ecstasy in a nightclub than bother with the Rwandan Genocide - Jäger’s example comes from Annie Ernaux, whose The Years says “in the humdrum routine of personal existence, history did not matter”, and “As for defending rights, the only that came to mind were those of the consumer”. However, starting around 2008 (well, exactly in 2008), End of History “postpolitics” were replaced by antipolitics: SYRIZA and los indignados, Brexit and the Tea Party, Tahrir Square and Cinque Stelle; the uniting theme is what Argentines would call “que se vayan todos”, kick them all out, a rejection of establishment politics and parties in favor of the new and the disruptive. Houllebecq is the perfect avatar for this time: his books (at least according to the book, because I haven’t read anything by him) star lonely, dissaffected, alienated people lashing out in some crazy, violent way - for example, French farmers rioting en masse, blocking roads, and, finally, getting into shootouts with the police, two of which actually happened multiple times this decade.

For Jäger, there have been four states of politics in recent history: high mobilization and high institutionalization (the turbulent 60s and 70s, featuring frequent demonstrations by organized protesters, unions, and groups), low mobilization and high institutionalization (the “golden years” of the 1950s, with high civic capital and low political strife), low mobilization and low institutionalization (“the end of history”), and high mobilization with low institutionalization - hyperpolitics. The book’s (very cool) cover is, famously, a picture by Wolfgang Tillmans of two ravers; Tillmans captured the easygoing, feel-good, post-ideological vibe of the 1990s; however, by 2016, Tillmans was as politically engaged as they come, and was actively campaigning to stop Brexit. So, from the original essay:

The result is a curiously K-shaped recovery: while the erosion of American civic life proceeds apace, the country’s public sphere is increasingly subject to convulsive instances of agitation and controversy, from storming of government buildings to online conspiracy theories. General discontent runs high, fuelling political emotions; anger at police racism or Zionist violence—at immigrant crime or Chinese weather balloons—boils over.

Importantly, for Jäger, civil society decline is "equally disarticulated on both ends of the spectrum": churches and gun clubs have declined in the same way that unions have stopped providing muscle for the left. Jäger said in an interview with The Nation that “There is a long set of pre-political practices that previously provided a foundation for right-wing political activity that cannot be taken for granted anymore” - church attendance has collapsed, veteran’s organizations are not much of a force anymore, and gun associations have stopped mobilizing their membership. While both left wing and right wing parties lost their membership infrastructure in a similar way, the political consequences of that shared collapse are not symmetrical: they have different goals and different methods, so a society ruled by inertia and resignation is better for whoever tries to preserve the current state of things; again, from the same interview, “being the Party of Order (as Marx termed it) which seeks to stabilise or preserve a set of social relations rather than overhaul it", as well as a deeper pool of private donations that enables right wing organizations to operate aggressively without serving any real constituency (this, of course, was true for progressive politics for some time).

So, what happened? Here is where I think the book falters a little bit, or, more precisely, kinda dances around the topic like Lamine Yamal on one of his good days. The book very strongly describes hyperpolitics, and Jäger is very good at applying the concept and identifying its consequences (particularly to American politics, such as in this follow-up NLR article), but I think the book never really gets around to explaining its causes Why did social capital decline so much? Why did interest in politics decline and then increase?

One is the loneliest number

I think the first question is probably the simplest to answer: why was there such a strong decline in social capital starting in the middle of the 20th century? Let’s go back to Bowling Alone; in his book, Putnam distinguished two kinds of social capital, bonding (that tied groups within each other), and bridging (that tied them to each other). His big innovation was that the latter kind was the one that collapsed, and it was the one that made democratic participation possible. Jäger explains and describes how this worked in extreme detail, listing the profound ways in which unions, churches, sports clubs, party activities, cultural clubs, and the like shaped working class life in a variety of social contexts. His preferred explanation is material: unions were the backbone civic life in left-wing politics, and regulatory and structural changes made them go away.

I don’t see much of a problem with this explanation. Starting in the 1970s and especially after the 1990s, the labor market has increasingly split into two tracks over the last few decades: a high skill, high-education, “knowledge sector”, and a low-skill “manual sector”. This was due to changes in technology (particularly automation and the IT revolution), increased competition from China and other developing countries, the Great Recession recovery resulting in lower job creation and extreme competition for available positions (in the US, the “knowledge” track added 8.4 million jobs on net in the following decade, while the manual job track lost, on net, 5.5 million), and a series of other factors (loss of union density, cuts to the welfare state, etc). This meant that, while white collar jobs without a significant educational component (such as bank teller, or the original meaning of “computer) were lost, the service sector increase its demand for both low skill, “routine” labor and for high-skill, high human capital “knowledge” workers. In this sense, sociologist Theda Skocpol, in her 2003 book Diminished Democracy, proposes an interesting addition to the Bowling Alone thesis: the composition of the associations changed at the same time as associational life declined. After the Second World War, membership growth in large voluntary associations stalled, and importantly, educated elites who had participated in these cross-class organizations abandoned them. Associations tracing their roots all the way back to the 18th century like the Freemason showed a shift during this time from federated, cross-class membership groups to professionally staffed, donor-funded advocacy organizations run out of major cities and needing no local membership at all. The cause she gives for why the major cross-class organizations were replaced by white-collar NGOs is that the growth in numbers and economic heft of a professional-managerial class gave organizations new channels for influencing affairs (foundations, think tanks) that didn't require them to organize ordinary citizens at all.

Let’s take an example of a “peak political” incident: the heist for the trophy for the Coupe de France. The Coupe de France is one of the two main tournaments of the French “Ligue 1”, the first division football tournament1, and in August 9th 1979 the trophy was stolen from its display at the headquarters of FC Nantes by a group of four unemployed steel workers from Longwy as a publicity stunt. They put out a statement to the media saying “We have taken the Coupe de France. We are not thieves; we are workers in struggle defending our livelihood. If the Government gives us back our jobs, we will return the trophy.” The context, of course, was that the center right Prime Minister, Raymond Barre, had just announced a plan of economic reforms backed by the President, Valery Giscard d’Estaing (top 5 name of all time), which would have, in particular, shut down a series of industries and mining endeavors depending on the government, particularly in steel, and particularly in the Lorraine region in which Longwy is located. The steelworkers’ unions in the city were particularly active against the governent’s program, first with mass protests and violent riots, and later by the highly publicized (though basically random) stunt of stealing the country’s highest profile sports trophy and displaying it in the farmer’s market before returning it a few days later. In contrast, an example of a low-social capital heist is the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum robbery in 1990 in Boston: a group of robbers entered the museum at gunpoint while dressed as police officers, subdued the guards, and vanished with a series of paintings, including Vermeer’s The Concert and Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee. The robbery was tracked to a series of either Irish or Italian outfits in the neighborhood of Dorchester; Dorchester was a manufacturing town in its own right before it was annexed in 1870, and has a strong industrial presence, particularly in confectionery (the Walter Baker chocolate factory), plus paper goods and a relatively minor shipbuilding sector. All of these sectors started declining after the 1950s, as well as declined after families left the city for the suburbs. The “low social capital” part is that the robbery was, of course, organized by the mob (which is kind of a union for places without many jobs), and rather than returning the works, it’s almost certain they were ruined when one of the suspects had a ditch in his false basement under his shed flood during a storm.

Putnam lists four main causes of declining social capital: generational change; television and the privatization of leisure (in his latter work this expanded to the internet and social media); suburban sprawl and car-centric urban planning; and work and time pressure, particularly in a two-income household. He concluded generational change accounts for roughly half the decline, television for around a quarter, sprawl for about a tenth, and time/money pressures for another tenth. I think it’s somewhat obvious that the first and last factors are the same thing (what Marx would call “social reproduction), and Putnam doesn’t offer a unifying causal story for why generations born after WWII invest less in civic life. Suburbanization doesn’t hold a lot of explanatory power in a narrative that varies throughout time and across different developed countries with major differences in urban practices. So we’re left with technology, and parenting.

I actually think Jäger makes a pretty smart point by basing his book on Sloterdijk’s essay In The Same Boat, which for some reason I cannot find in English online. Sloterdijk’s general idea is that humanity is like a raft in which we all live, emerging from the primal hordes of the early world which were, to a large extent, either literally or meataphorically seafaring. Because everyone in such a horde lived or died together, society as a unit could exist only as long as it understood itself as a unit; these hordes grew bigger and bigger (city, kingdom, nation-state) but remained bounded by this joint mythology. Sloterdijk’s key concept here is anthropotechnics; in the seafaring state, man is, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, the wolf of man; anthropotechnics is the collection of social practices and institutions that turn man from a wolf into a dog (I’ve talked about it in last week’s post). In contrast, hyperpolitics is what happens when relevant political units extend beyond a natural fictional unit: particularly, globalization and the internet have now put all of mankind “in the same boat” whether they like it or not, but politics does not operate at this scale. Particularly, Sloterdijk notes, there has been a breakdown of the anthropotechnical process: the decline of humanism in education after World War Two led to a decline in the ability to create human beings capable of moral thinking rather than instrumental or subjective thought. So it is, kind of, what Robert Putnam was thinking, also for the reasons Jäger and Putnam note: structural economic changes and technology.

I don’t know if Anton Jäger is a Marxist or Marxian in any way, but he’s almost certainly a materialist, and the thing about his materialism in the book is that it leaves out the big character of 21st century politics: technology, and, in particular, the internet. Currently, India is being rocked by a series of large-scale protests by a movement calling itself the Cockroach Janta Party, in reference to both India’s ruling party the Bharatiya Janata Party, and to a Supreme Court judge calling university students “cockroaches” and “parasites” for protesting over certain educational issues. Now, that it calls itself a party and has a manifesto making concrete demands, as well as organizing protests, might make you think that this is a 20th century style of engagement; instead it’s very much a 21st century, much like the Gen Z protests of 2025, the global protest surge of 2019, the Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements, and the protests of 2009-2012 (including Occupy Wall Street). The perfect book about this topic is Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci, which came out in 2017 and is available for free online.

In her book, Tufecki and was mostly trying to explain the emergence of massive, leaderless protests on social media, like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street in 2011. These movements follow pretty stable patterns: they’re able to mobilize extremely large groups of people without needing a lot of infrastructure or prior experience, which demonstrates the strength and support of the “movement”. Thus, the protesters are able to shape the public narrative, disrupt the regular order of politics and discourse, and thus influence politics and policy formally. However, this frequently means that the protests are unable of move beyond their initial tactics of achieve concrete outcomes due to the lack of leadership or a formal organization that can secure outcomes. One such example are the 2020 Black Lives Matter protest, which saw enormous turnout and persuaded people successfully both on a mass level and among elite constitutencies, but failed to really shift policy on race or policing very much over the following five years. Or, if you wanted to put it more succintly, the 2010s protest wave was characterized by extreme politicization without political consequences. Hyperpolitics discusses them in the “antipolitical” phase of politics: a constant state of agitation against everyone in general and nobody in particular, just a rejection of the current system.

Now, back to the obvious: the decline of socialization, dating, sex, and a variety of social and therefore civic behaviors has been, at this point, I think fairly well documented. There’s a pretty good chance it revolves around online life, particularly how these platforms are designed to be addictive: digital media uses a distinct psychological trick, flow, as laid out by Jay David Bolter’s The Digital Plenitude (a book from 2016 that has been inexplicably very trendy in Argentina for the last six months). The concept of flow, coined by psychologist Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi (pronounced six cent mihaly) refers to a state of profound, prolonged focus. Flow can only be achieved with small, procedural tasks that have immediate payoffs with a clear cause-effect and cost-reward relationship. Compare The Mastermind, a very slow burn dramedy about an unemployed carpenter stealing three paintings from a municipal art museum, with scrolling TikTok: you pay attention for a little bit of time the whole time, if you don’t like a video you scroll down, and every video is optimized to make you watch it. Usually, this happens by inciting some instant emotional reaction - which happens to almost always be a negative emotion. This both means that people become less capable of relating to one another and, most importantly, that the “higher” forms of media (even the not particularly stimulating political television of the 90s and 2000s) gets replaced by lower and lower content. A recent addition to the literature of flow comes from columnist Derek Thompson’s Substack: citing researcher Shishi Wu, Thompson highlights passive flow in particular, which has three main features: “users engage without clear goals”, users “lose self-awareness (…) and disconnect with the world around them” and “don’t just spend more time than they intended on the site, but also they lose track of time entirely”.

Fundamentally, I think Jäger is making the right moves: he’s putting the onus on structural changes to the economy that dissolved the core of left wing political activity, labor unions, and linking it to the correct concepts; he doesn’t discuss Sloterdijk in those terms, but the decline of anthropotechnics and the rise of hyperpolitics does actually explain Putnam’s problems accounting for the decline in associational social norms. I just think his account of hyperpolitics suffers from not properly including the role of technology. Loneliness is at all time highs and political engagement also is; ironically enough, Jäger is the one person who understands this relationship, with his concept of “good civil society”, social organizations that steer people away from fascist politics, as opposed to “bad civil society” that builds an echo chamber for the most extreme members. This is similar to my take on teenagers and social media use: a lot of the commentary is driven by pundits assuming that teenagers using social media replaces their normal social life and social dynamics, but the reality is that it enhances it; most of the negative mental health effects were present in a version of Facebook that had no features besides showing you what other people were up to. In particular, social media in teenagers comes during a really sensitive time for them, it makes the stupid social dynamics of high school inescapable in a way they really weren’t before. There’s “good social media” and “bad social media”, where preexisting (good or bad) social dynamics get amplified or lessened - and this extends to adults, who in large part have started hanging out virtually instead of “IRL” with other people, which results in high quality socialization being replaced with low quality group chats and DMs; or with meaningful “bad” romantic experiences being replaced by at best dating apps and at worst nothing.

The king who brought back partying

With the choice of the cover image, Love (Hands in Hair), Jäger tries to portray a sort of carefree rejection of politics in favor of The End of History. However, this cultural turn away from politics is not some other thing coinciding with the End of History; it is the End of History. The term “The End of History” was coined by political philosopher Francis Fukuyama in a 1989 essay (and later book) on National Interest. Fukuyama was a disciple of Hegel through Alexandre Kojeve; Hegel’s view was that history was a process directed by reason (“Geist”) such that humanity would advance through stages of increasing logic and rationality until reaching the Most Logical system of understanding the world, liberal capitalist democracy. Fukuyama explains that liberal democracy succeeds because it’s the only system of government that can sustain thymos, man’s need for respect and recognition; drawing from Kojeve and Hegels’ concept of the master-slave dynamic: in society there’s masters (people with power) and slaves (people without it). The master wants to be recognized as inherently superior by the slaves, and the slaves want to be recognized as equal to the masters. Because neither side can give up their claim to recognition willingly, this produces enormous political tensions, which liberal democracy channels by making them focus on electoral and not physical domination, and by focusing them on elected political leaders who do great deeds on behalf of their followers (what Kojeve would call “the First Man”), or, for Fukuyama, by art and consumer spending.

The perfect example of this dynamic is Sex and the City, a world without politics and with, well, sex. The use Hyperpolitics has for Annie Ernaux is also interesting along these lines; Ernaux’s books are said to reflect these days, with people being disinterested in and disaffected by politics. However, I think he misses something very important about her work: in her 2022 Nobel Prize Lecture, Ernaux said: “Written in my diary sixty years ago. ‘I will write to avenge my people (…) I proudly and naively believed that writing books, becoming a writer, as the last in a line of landless labourers, factory workers and shopkeepers, people despised for their manners, their accent, their lack of education, would be enough to redress the social injustice linked to social class at birth. That an individual victory could erase centuries of domination and poverty, an illusion that school had already fostered in me by dint of my academic success. How could my personal achievement have redeemed any of the humiliations and offences suffered? That’s not a question I ever asked myself. I had a few excuses.” Ernaux’s goal by writing autofiction, novels about her own life with a barely fictionalized gloss, was to avenge the historical injustices against her classes: the working class, belonging to a family of lower income shopkeepers in Yvetot, in Northern France; and women. The idea that she merely writes about womanly emotions, separate from any sort of social critique, is both misogynistic and wrong: to quote an internet friend of mine (excellent essay I highly recommend), there’s no “I’m just a girl” in Ernaux - her books are largely about class, about a girl and then a woman who lived in a society brutal to women and brutal to poor people and who became completely alienated from her parents to join France’s middle class cultural establishment. Her most famous book, L’Evenement, is about her getting a back-alley abortion as a university student; it’s written as her reminiscing about the experiences during the 1990s and features an explicit comparison between abortion bans and migration restrictions during the Balkans War.

I don’t really mean to say that Jäger is like, some kind of misogynist who hasn’t read Annie Ernaux; for once, her writing being autobiographical (well, autofictional) means that it does track the political changes Hyperpolitics describes and discusses. Ernaux’s earlier work largely takes place in the twilight days of the working-class world organized by mass-political categories; her work then moves into the liberationist left wing politics of the 1960s, and then to the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Her most famous book (and the one Jäger draws most from) is The Years (2008), tracks French society from the immediate postwar period through the 2000s, as well as tracking the dissolution of the world of mass political world into one ruled by privatized and consumer-mediated media. This is to say, she does portray a society that, by the nineties, was exhausted not with politics but with politicians - antipolitics and postpolitics.

What kind of society was that? The Years tracks a single person’s life from the 1940s through the 2000s, during which mass political movements (the postwar Communist and Socialist left, blue collar solidarity, the early days of French second wave feminism) thinned out into a consumerist, spectacle-obsessed brand of politics. Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (who would have turned 100 years old last year) describes such a dynamic in his book Liquid Modernity. Bauman argues that modern culture has shifted from the logic of collective action to the logic of indiviualized consumerism, and this is nowhere as visible as in politics. This comes as a result of structural change in the economy: under the “Fordist” paradigm of what he calls solid modernity, industry and the welfare state bound both labor and capital to specific locations and specific communal norms; in contrast, under liquid modernity, individuals become disembedded from their social context: identity is transformed into a consumer category, society stops supplying collective solutions to what are still, underneath, collectively produced problems (unemployment, instability, family decline), and capital and labor disentangle. Capital travels easily and quickly, developing an ability to stop anywhere and leave at any time, while labor remains fixed in place, but without any real solidarity or any stability.

In this sense, global elites became able to park their money, as well as their physical selves, in wherever is most convenient for them, leading to a political sphere more and more interested in catering to their interests. The End of History has, therefore, resulted in increasingly managerial and technocratic politics, where politics is about spectacle, marketing, and public relations. This drastically reduces accountability and turns politics into “brainrot”, a form of consumer-side engagement not with the serious matters of the state, but with another trinket or bauble on the TikTok store. Thus, in Bauman’s telling, politics is less an exercise in leadership and decisionmaking and more an exercise in managerial technocracy in the prose of governing, and in bland, focus-group driven marketing in the poetry of campaigning. Jäger seems to have a similar theory of political change, centered on Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void (which like Hyperpolitics,comes with a New Left Review essay and a review by the LRB).

Mair’s case is that political parties have completely fallen apart as units of political organization. Voting became more inconsistent and volatile; voters became more polarized; identification with parties by voters became weaker, and the identities of parties as entities were lost. To quote Mair in NLR, “…parties are failing as a result of a mutual withdrawal, whereby citizens retreat into private life or more specialized and often ad hoc forms of representation, while party leaderships retreat into institutions, drawing their terms of reference ever more readily from their roles as governors or public-office holders. The traditional world of party democracy—as a zone of engagement in which citizens interacted with their political leaders—is being evacuated.” For Mair, there was something of a puzzle: in the 1990s and 2000s, there was growing disinterest in politics, but growing (academic) interest in democracy; for him, the options were that either the former drove the latter (as in, to try and find a solution), or, more likely, that the latter drove the former, that the solution would be not “more” democracy but less, a democratic process that involves people less extensively and intensively, since an enormous amount of this research focused on procedural issues: de jure protections for “civil society”, constitutional safeguards and checks and balances, stable and predictable rules for judicial engagement. Mair’s view is that government “for, of, and by the people” involves more participation than putting a piece of paper in a box, and actually might require a lot of work; but, because organized political parties are the only way in which known forms of democracy can handle this amount of participation and retain an ability to govern, then the decline of political parties as units of political action and political belonging means major trouble for democracy.

The lack of attachment of voters to parties was paired with a rise in the intensity of media coverage of political scandals and political conflict, which gave the media an enormous amount of power to set the political agenda and an enormous sway over electoral outcomes; a recent study finds that the entertainment value of such coverage is a big driver of partisan polarization in the United States. To quote Mair again, “Whether the increasing disengagement of voters is responsible for the emergence of this new mode of politics, or whether it is an emerging form of politics that is encouraging voter withdrawal is, at least for now, a moot point. What is beyond dispute is that each feeds the other. As citizens exit the national political arena, they inevitably weaken the major actors who survive there—the parties. And this, in turn, is part of, and promotes, audience democracy, or, in another formulation, ‘video politics’; for these grow stronger when parties are weak. Strong parties are difficult to sustain when politics turns into a spectator sport.” The most important concern, which he elaborates on to some extent, is that “party leaders look beyond their shrinking membership to the electorate at large”; parties simply lose all interest in representing anyone or anything, and lose their distinctive policies, ideas, and beliefs - in large part, accompanying the decline of other civic groups, such as trade unions, churches, business associations, mutual societies, and social clubs. This meant that political parties would become increasingly embedded into the political system through procedural reforms, but also increasingly dettached from society by representing a shadowy entelechy known as “The People” without engaging or activating it; members and affiliates transformed from the ones driving the car to the ones servicing it, as donors and internal reforms have taken over. This has also meant that parties see their responsibility not as representing their members, but as “governing”, whatever that means, which puts the work of “opposition” squarely on non-party political actors, since the parties have a task of governing; this also curtails the policies they think they can even think to offer, since it would be “irresponsible” to ignore the financial markets and develop a reputation for the next go at government in four to eight years. For Mair, this would become increasingly repetitive: ”As political and party competition are hollowed out even further, they offer even more encouragement to the politics of the spectacle and the horse-race. And this becomes more likely to produce the sort of candidates and elected politicians whose qualities, following Schumpeter, are even less likely to be those of the good administrator.”

In essence, what you have here is a global weakening of the relationship between labor and capital because of capital's power to dissolve social and communal bonds. This creates growing instability in all human relationships (marriage, identity, geography, and career), which in turn makes it impossible for political actors like unions and civic associations to retake the power they once had. That power just doesn’t exist anymore. A union can’t win concessions from a factory owner, or from the French government by stealing a football trophy, if the factory can just leave its location at any time. At the same time as globalization and capital mobility hollowed out blue-collar manufacturing, the rise of a credentialed white-collar workforce led to a different type of political organization emerged, one that didn’t need voters or mass membership, and developed a theory of democracy to explain itself without it. Under the same enormous pressure of globalization as individual communities, national leaders conceded an enormous amount of power to technocratic institutions and expert networks, in effect creating democracies without voters, or politics.

But the main problem is that politicians, by definition, are very active people. It’s very obvious, at least considering the popularity of antipolitics during the entirety of the post-political period (antipolitics, much like “populism” and “patriotism”, is basically a marketing term), that political leadership is a desirable quality. Andy Burnham, not to go very far, is treated as some kind of Michael Jordan caliber phenom for having the ability to say things like “we should invest in schools because children are the future”, the kind of conviction or, frankly, competence lacking from everyone since David Cameron. And where does this lead us besides back to Peter Sloterdijk: in In The Same Boat, Sloterdijk uses the concept of “megalopathia”, the suffering from wrestling with great questions. First introduced by him in a a 2005 lecture at the Tate Gallery on art, politics, and terror, Sloterdijk uses it as somewhat analogous to Aristotle’s megalopsychia, the greatness of the soul: for the German, the key to political leadership is being able to sit with enormous questions that acknowledge the scale, and unity, of society as a whole.

The key here, and so far I think I’m the only one making this connection in this context, is that the concept of anthropotechnics also has to apply to megalopathia: politicians need to be able to be trained into having this sort of character and mentality by an especially developed educational site capable of producing disciplined exposure to big, difficult questions over time. Fortunately for all of us, such an institution exists: elite universities such as the American Ivy League, Britain’s Oxrbidge circuit, and the French grandes écoles. Unfortunately for all of us, they are, by and large, completely falling apart: the American Ivies have been beset by all manner of criticism over the last decade (if we’re being honest, too much criticism), but the most relevant one is simply the stark decline of academic quality: rampant academic fraud, grade inflation, admissions cheating, and, most recently, an excessive reliance on artificial intelligence. Robert Putnam noted that families don’t really participate in the intergenerational transmission of social or cultural capital anymore; politics, as we’ve noted, is increasingly produced by a small set of elites, who have to be especially trained to be elites by educational institutions - well, those institutions aren’t doing their job. Nobody is at the wheel anymore - on Motomami, one of the song says “I drive, God leads me” (“Yo manejo, Dios me guía”); for the professional managerial class, God is on the driver’s seat too. The obvious problem here is that, well, if mass political activity of the kind seen during the Golden Years of Capitalism (and before too) isn’t structurally possible anymore, and elite technocratic politics is a complete cognitive dead end, then who’s driving the car?

Jäger, and most people discussing left wing organizing seriously, cite the work of political theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as being one of the drivers of the shift from post politics to antipolitics. For Laclau and Mouffe, radical (left-wing) populism required building cross-class alliances rather than relying on a traditional working-class base, since politics isn’t the expression of a pre-existing sociological group but rather the construction of “the people” as a discursive alliance, unified against an antagonistic “them”. The perfect example is the Greek political party Syriza, which came into power in 2015 on an “us versus the troika” (the IMF, ECB, and European Commission), especially given how Yanis Varoufakis, a charismatic heterodox economist, was its finance minister. Varoufakis proposed a referendum to reject the troika’s austerity recommendations, saying he would resign if the referendum failed; when the referendum succeeeded, he… resigned anyways and Syriza did whatever the troika asked them to do. The Laclau/Mouffe strategy was, indeed, able to win an election through discourse, but it couldn’t durably restructure power precisely because the underlying human capital just didn’t exist anymore.

From bowling alone to dancing on my own

What’s left for, well, the left? Simone Cromer is a 60 year old Black woman; she was born in Detroit, got a psychology degree in the University of Michigan, and currently works in healthcare in Los Angeles. In 2024, her home burned down in the Eaton Fire. She is, according to her detractors, a strong supporter of Israel. According to herself, she almost took a job in the World Trade Center in September 2001, but had some sort of premonition that it would be a bad idea (I had a similar one about spending a few months studying in Spain in late 2019, for… the first half of 2020). The reason she’s relevant is none of those things: instead, it’s her online presence: Cromer has around 49,200 followers on the website formerly known as Twitter in her account; in particular, Simone Cromer is the poster formerly known as Club Chalamet.

Why does it matter that a sixty year old woman got beat up by a nonbinary lesbian over being the wrong kind of fan for a Heated Rivalry actor? Well, isn’t it hyperpolitics, in its own way? A leaderless internet mob showed up with no negotiated program and converted that energy into a single stupid skirmish that didn’t change anything and just riled people up online. In his 2025 book El Archipiélago (I’ll let you figure out that translation on your own), Argentine novelist Roberto Chuit Roganovich proposes a new alternative to mass politics: taking over the culture. Roganovich argues that the new right won a decades-long head start by recognizing three interlocking crises before the left did: a "crisis of subjectivity" fairly similar to the pitfalls of identity in the age of liquid modernity; a “crisis of imagination” built around the lack of a grand left wing narrative in the End of History, and a capture of “the passions”, like indignation and resentment, which one fueled the left. The central image of the book is, well, the title, the archipelago: the social fabric became a sea of scattered, isolated islands, replacing the old parties’ capacity to aggregate different people and groups.

This is all pretty, I would say, uncontroversial. “The archipelago” is just Bowling Alone. The crisis of subjectivity is just the End of History and liquid modernity: people feel like their lives don’t give them access to any form of recognition besides consumerism and work, and feel alienated from most community organizations (which, by and large, don’t really exist). The crisis of imagination is something I say pretty regularly, that there’s just a complete lack of political imagination in liberal spaces anymore, and that without any real ideas about how to resolve ongoing problems the ideology is just going to disappear from relevance; it’s also the entire content of Peter Mair’s book. And the last part is pretty politically contingent: who can best capitalize on mass public anger and indignation seems to change over time.

The book does actually propose solutions, the metaphor for which is Pangea (the ancient supercontinent that united the entire landmass of Earth), is built around three “returns”: a return to owning the internet commons collectively as a material thing; reclaiming cognitive sovereignty by rehabbing absolutely dismal attention spans and rebuilding “third spaces” like unions, clubs, libraries, and churches; and rebuilding the figure of public intellectuals (a much bigger deal in traditional Argentine mass culture than American) by embedding political content inside apolitical hobby communities like video games, fitness, sports, fanfiction, and fandoms. The interesting part is that he doesn’t really say the left should reject hyperpolitics (which was, in all honesty, a disaster), but rather that, because they’re here to stay, activists and politicians should just learn how to play the game and take it over.

There’s an interesting chronology here: most people (not Jäger, notably) think the definining incident of contemporary right wing politics is Gamergate: in 2014 some boring game nobody cared about got a bad review by an online magazine and the developer’s ex boyfriend accused her of sleeping with a journalist at that magazine to get the good review. It very quickly snowballed into a gigantic controversy over “ethics in video game journalism”, feminism, and whether video game developers were catering to women over their real fans, and this noble cause was advocated for by sending death threats to people who thought the whole thing was dumb and crazy. It also brought together a series of vaguely right wing internet communities that formed what then became the New Right and is now just The Right. The Gamergate movement was completely ineffective: it failed at its only real goal because it was disorganized, short on ideas, and overall lacking any sort of vision or theory of change. However, most retrospectives agree that Gamergate was influential because it produced a durable online playbook (memes, coordinated harassment, amplification tactics) that has been adapted across later political and cultural fights, such as the recent controversy over Cracker Barrel (a restaurant for old White people) changing its logo and aesthetic. This leads to a much clearer problem with the idea of weaponizing hyperpolitics for left wing purposes: it doesn’t work. The Cracker Barrel incident is most notable today because it completely derailed the campaign to make Charlie Kirk a global right wing martyr: the whole thing happened two weeks after he got shot by a leftist and all of the people trying to make hay off of it decided that it was more important to put an ugly cartoon barrel back on a bankrupt chain restaurant’s billboards. There’s also the fact that Wokeness, as a political phenomenon, entirely consisted of hyperpolitics taking the driver’s seat of the left, and most people (including me) argue that it left basically nothing behind besides some old McDonald’s posts about supporting Black trans women.

In his interview for The Nation, Jäger explicitly cites Zohran Mamdani as a positive example: I think he’s right, but maybe not in the way he meant at the time. Socialism is having something of a moment in the United States: the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, captured the New York Mayor’s office (in fact, both Mamdani and primary third place finisher Brad Lander are members), won the Washington, DC mayor’s primary, took the Seattle mayor’s office, and is about to win the Los Angeles mayoral election as well. The organization also saw significant successes in a number of primary elections for Congress, such as unseating multiple members of Congress in New York, and currently as of today socialists lead the primaries for Wisconsin governor and Michigan Senate. The Maine Senate nomination went to a guy the DSA supported, and when he dropped out after allegations of sexual assault, he was replaced by another DSA supported candidate. DSA membership has skyrocketed, and at 126,000 people, makes it one of the, if not the single, largest explicitly socialist organization on the planet. In contrast, in 2016 they had 5,000 members, and peaked at 80,000 or so by 2021 before declining to 50,000 by late 2024. What’s behind this move towards a harder stance in the American left? In a recent interview by the Niskanen Center, political scientist Matt Grossman comments that “There’s been a collapse in trust and support for the Democratic establishment, and really anybody who’s tied to incumbency”, and sociologist David Purucker adds that “that’s the real story I think of the Democratic Tea Party. It’s not DSA per se. It’s this broad radicalization among what we can call Normie Democrats. And the Democratic establishment should be, I think, very worried about that.”. In short, people are furious at the way the establishment is reacting to Donald Trump (starting with losing a second presidential election to him), and are looking for a group that can take a stance against that.

There’s a second, more interesting angle: the “partyism” debate of 2024 and 2025, where various people argued that rather than focusing on tweaks to their messaging, the Democrats needed to become an actual political party with an actual physical presence in communities. Well, the DSA does that: at a recent profile of attendees at the national meeting, the New York Times caught the following gem: “Cliff Connolly, a national leader from Orlando, said the DSA fills the same social function for him that the Catholic Church played for his parents when they were in their 30s”. This is, of course, a comparison Jäger makes himself, quoting writing by Didier Eribon about how the Communist Party was like Church for his own parents in the 1950s. Theda Skopcol wrote about the success of the Tea Party, a conservative movement in the US in the early 2010s that took over the Republican Party, in her book The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism: by conducting extensive fieldwork with local chapters of the group, she found a very successful civic organization holding regular meetings with real local leadership, as well as well-funded national organizations and infrastructure that leveraged that genuine grassroots energy toward pre-existing elite goals like tax cuts and deregulation. The term “the Democratic Tea Party” has been used a lot, and it seems the DSA are the ones who stand to benefit - they have the infrastructure and, honestly, they have a physical meeting room. It seems that is enough to defeat the billion dollar AIPAC janissary war chest.

Conclusion

I think Hyperpolitics is a book worth reading; it’s generally pretty insightful and descriptively accurate about the phenomena it studies. I also think his understanding that there’s no going back to the 1950s is correct, even if he does seem to underplay the importance of social media (and ownership of it) to some degree. Overall I think you people can tell I generally agree with him on the phenomena he’s describing and just wanted to talk about my own ideas for the why. The implications are, I think, pretty major: “populism” and “uniting the people against the elites” doesn’t work, and making it 1965 again through any means possible won’t work either. So what does work? Harnessing hyperpolitics doesn’t. Perhaps “showing up in physical places at the right time and place” would - as long as that doesn’t get captured by nonsense.

The main shift is also that not only has the structure of politics changed, but so has the content. The premise of In the Same Boat, the essay that launched a million Jäger essays, is that globalization and global integration (including, importantly, cultural integration) has resulted in a different substance of politics, one where the major political questions happen at a scale completely beyond national politics. Everyone has been forced into the same global boat by problems that don't respect any borders. Ironically, the best term for these objects come from a completely unrelated book, Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects (which, to my knowledge, nobody has ever connected with Hyperpolitics, besides some random people on Instagram hashtags). Morton’s book defines a hyperobject as a worldly phenomenon distributed in time and space relative to humans, at such a large scale that it is never fully accessible or conceivable in its entirety. To him, these have five properties: viscosity (they stick to everything, such that they are impossible to ignore); nonlocality (they’re everywhere but also nowhere - you never see them, just their local implications); a sort of permanence across time; and then two more that are just nonlocality slightly restated - hyperobjects are only seen partially through lower dimensional manifestations and only indirectly via their effects on and interactions with objects. The perfect example is something like climate change: a massive global phenomenon occurring in such a gigantic scale that people can’t really apprehend it directly. There was a recent viral TikTok of a group of friends out to lunch, saying “whoever brings up Israel, Trump, or AI first has to pay”; that is a hyperobject: a global problem of genuinely unmanageable scale for a single person.

I think this produces two problems. The first is the obvious: that even with a serious political class and a serious political process this wouldn’t be enough, which was Sloterdijk’s entire point; with stupid idiots in charge and no politics to speak of, we’re getting into fun territory. The second problem is more of a question: when confronting horrors of such an unimaginable magnitude, why isn’t totalizing hysteria a serious answer? COVID, racism, genocide, and AI provoke such intense emotions precisely because they are so widespread and observable but also so large to be intractable to most people. The problem with the movie Eddington, which tries to mock liberals and conservatives in 2020, is that it simply never takes them seriously: “whether you get to go outside” or “is the police going to murder you for your race” is portrayed as a silly distraction compared to data centers. Jäger's "extreme politicization without political consequences" is exactly what politics looks like when publics are reacting, with genuine, rational urgency, to gargantuan problems using institutions and mechanisms designed to only process bounded, local-scale, discrete-culprit conflicts in social conditions that haven’t existed for three generations.

Recently, a large number of migrants (around 80,000) crossed the border of Spain’s fortified enclave in Ceuta from Morocco; the Spanish response was to accuse Morocco, and by extension the US and Israel, of sending them to destabilize Spanish politics. The European response, meanwhile, was to… blame Spain and shut down the Schengen Zone to the Iberian country, an actual first. If the presence of a small “horde”, to borrow from Sloterdijk, can so thoroughly destabilize an entire continent, then what can come from a genuinely worldwide disruption? What is going to happen if AI actually bites into the white collar workforce en masse? What are countries going to do when historic heatwaves batter the world and millions of people try to move out of places that are not livable anymore? When asked about technology in his final interview, published after he died in 1976, German philosopher Martin Heidegger famously said “Only God can save us”; perhaps he saw what was coming better than all of us.

The final of the 2026 FIFA World Cup was last week (I was sick and had electrical issues at home, so I couldn’t get to it on a timely manner). Obviously I wanted Argentina to win, but we played like ass, or, more accurately, Spain played like ass and we played like the shit that came out of that ass. Regardless, the World Cup has been subject to a lot of discussion over its development - from stupid conspiracy theories (dumb) to whether hydration breaks are a good idea (no) to whether Jude Bellingham is the best looking player ever (no, next to Kaká he looks like Ronaldinho). But there’s been three subjects I think are the most interesting: whether America can produce its own Erling Haaland, whether pentecostalism is to blame for Brazil’s World Cup decline, and whether VAR is ruining the game or not.

Haaland, Haaland

Why doesn’t the United States dominate “soccer”, if it has the biggest, strongest, fastest athletes? If it put up a few of them into “soccer”, it would have the best team in the world, of 11 Erling Haalands (or 10, and, inexplicably, Christian Pulisic). The United States is a country of 300 million people; it should have some world-class players, at least 11. Why doesn’t it have an elite team?

The main problem is that Haaland’s big gift isn’t really his speed or strength; it’s his pinpoint accuracy at picking the right moment to attempt a goal. He spends most of the game walking, not running, and is unusually tall and big for a striker; his actual ability, again, is to have a good instinct for when to score a goal, at which point his physique becomes a bonus, rather than the other way around. The most famous example of an elite squad run by the principle that physical superiority, speed, and strength ought to be prioritized is Marcelo Bielsa’s Argentina in the 2002 Korea/Japan World Cup. Bielsa is now and was then one of the world’s best respected managers, and Argentina had one of its best lineups in history; in fact, the country’s best player, Juan Román Riquelme, was left off the team because he wasn’t fast enough. So did Argentina win? No. Did it make it to the finals? No. Semifinals? No. Quarter finals? No. Round of 16? Not even. Argentina got sent home after the group stage for the only time since the early 70s; its unbeatable squad was constantly exhausted and injured, and tactically the team was always getting outmaneuvered and outplayed.

The main reason Americans cite is that their players “are busy in other sports”, which is true, but also reveals the real reason the United States is bad at football: it just doesn’t have the infrastructure to produce elite players. American athletes are, on average, discovered by leagues at 14 to 18 years old; football stars are discovered in kindergarten or early primary school. This reflects a significant institutional difference between American sports and the football leagues: they are, simply, both too competitive and not competitive enough. It is true that the American leagues are more competitive: only four teams have won two championships of any of the three main ones (NBA, NFL, and MLS) in the last decade, and none have won more than twice. In contrast, Bayern Munich has won the Bundesliga all but one year since 2013; Manchester City has won the Premier League, the most competitive in the world, 7 times in the same time period; Barcelona and Real Madrid have won all but two Spanish league titles since 2003 (both of the other two going to the same club, Atletico Madrid); Paris-Saint-Germain has won the French league every season but two since 2012. But the reason for this is that football is more economically competitive: most American leagues have some version of a “draft”, where teams get to pick new players in reverse order of league standing, plus a total cap on the amount payable in player salaries. This keeps competitive balance between teams while permitting them to retain star figures. In contrast, football clubs don’t have much limits on how good their players can be: Kylian Mbappe, Jude Bellingham, Vinicius Jr., Cucurella, Eduardo Camavinga, and Thibault Courtois are all among the top ranked players for their roles and all play for the same team (Real Madrid) because it has the money to hire them.

But Real Madrid, here’s the thing, isn’t especially good these days. They haven’t won anything in two years, more or less the biggest trophy drought in nearly two decades for Spain’s historically largest club. And that’s for a team that has the best players in the world, or as close to it as they can get to. Instead, the Spanish league is dominated by Fútbol Club Barcelona, which has been close to bankrupt for the better part of a decade and, in fact, had to fire club legend Lionel Messi behind his back in 2021 because they were entering financial tutelage and couldn’t afford the financial cost of his contract. Every time they’re in a high-stakes match, they choke, in large part because of tensions between the star players - if everyone is worth 200 million dollars, and they know it, then why would they listen to one another.

Of course, Barcelona’s dirty secret (like the rest of every other major European team) is that they source basically all of their players from their own academy, La Masia, which occasionally goes viral by showing the insane skills the players have. These kids are recruited very young, usually at 5 or 6 years old, and receive all of their education from the club. They’re scouted at a local club or, more frequently, at a smaller club’s academy. The two most consistently powerful teams in Europe, Barça and Bayern Munich, both have their own legendary academies, though Bayern’s has declined in importance in recent years.

A recent-ish post by Matt Yglesias I think illustrates pretty well why this doesn’t happen in the United States: money. The post mentions “thousands of dollars”; in 2019, Zlatan Ibrahimovic said it would cost 3,500 dollars a year to get his children into an academy; now, it’s probably even more. How much does Club de Fútbol La Torreta, the small local team that discovered Lamine Yamal, cost a year? Between 15 and 30 euros depending on what kind of discount you can get. Joining AS Bondy, the club where Kylian Mbappe first started playing, is a bit pricier, at around 200 euros a year. The team is obviously subsidized: La Torreta features funding from the city government and a few NGOs, as well as private sponsors. But there’s a gigantic cost difference: in America, competitive children’s football costs thousands of dollars a year, which the parents pay to the clubs; because the parents pay, then the pressure to compete and perform is greater, which makes the contests a lot more psychologically damaging, leading to burnout; in addition, the pay-to-play model of American youth football means that the teams themselves prioritize short-term performance over long-term player development, a factor worsened by the typical means of funding the team academy, fees from transfers of professional players, isn’t really fully implemented. And the specific structure of the American league (which doesn’t have relegation or promotion, the main competitive pressure on teams to perform1) also means that teams don’t face a particularly intense pressure to deliver once they have players, which is why the MLS is basically a retirement league for washed unc European league players like Antoine Griezmann and Lionel Messi. It’s also why, after winning four Women’s World Cups (including two back to back ones in 2015 and 2019), the US National Women’s Team has fallen off dramatically: European teams started seriously investing only in the last 6 or 7 years, which has quickly caught up with the US’s longstanding advantage in player development because of Title IX requirements to equally fund athletic programs.

The typical solution proposed is national funding: after all, that’s what Germany did after crashing out of the 2000 and 2004 Euro Cups at the group stage, and afterwards it won the 2014 World Cup. There’s a bit of a problem there: timing. Germany had won the 1990 World Cup, did meh in 1994 and 1998, and finished second at the 2002 World Cup (where they would have lost 1-0 to the greatest team to ever play if their goalkeeper hadn’t literally dropped the ball), then finished third in both the 2006 and 2010 World Cups. They also came in second in the 2008 Euro Cup, and third in the 2012 edition. That is, the narrative that Germany was doing badly until they started investing in children’s sports, which was a generational bet that paid off in 2014, is just not very accurate. Most of Germany’s players were veterans at the midpoint of their careers. In fact, the generation of players that grew up in the aftermath of the new system started playing in 2018 and 2022, when Germany didn’t make it out of the group stage; in 2026, the greatest goalkeeper in Europe, World Champion Manuel Neuer, was outperformed in penalties by Orlando Gill, who hasn’t been paid by Argentina’s fifth largest team in six months. Germany went home in the round of 32.

From pentachampion to pentecostal

In all of history, the most successful team at winning World Cups is Brazil (unless you count Uruguay beating Tyre in the finals of the 4,000 BCE Lower Egypt World Cup with a hat trick from Methuselah). However, the team has not been significantly successful in the last decade: after winning in the 2002 World Cup against Germany, it got knocked out in the quarter finals in 2006 and 2010, lost 7-1 to Germany in the 2014 semifinals, got knocked out again in the quarter finals in 2018 and 2022, and lost in the round of 16 to Norway a few weeks back. Brazil is capable of producing stars: Vinicius, Endrick, Marquinhos, Raphinha, and even Neymar are still top notch players. Why, despite having a world-class team with the best manager in the world (Real Madrid’s Carlo Ancelotti), the team got outplayed by Japan and Norway?

One reason, with a lot of viral clout, is Protestantism. Only two Protestant nations, England and Germany, have ever won a World Cup; Germany has had rough parity between Catholics and Protestants for decades now, and England has won exactly zero other trophies in the sixty years since it secured its Jules Rimet by the second most questionable goal in World Cup history. Since the 1990s, evangelical forms of Christianity have become extraordinarily popular in Brazil. In 1991, Evangelical Christians made only 10% of the Brazilian population; by 2022, they reached 27%, and around 60% of Brazil’s team is evangelical, compared to a minority in the nineties and oughts: a handful, like the aforementioned Kaká were evangelical, but most leading players of the 90s and 2000s were Catholic. These players were a lot more fond of partying and dancing: most of Brazil’s pre 2010 stars had turbulent personal lives, with Roberto Carlos fathering 11 children with different women, Romario saying he would play badly if he didn’t party all night right before matches, Ronaldo (no not Cristiano, the fat one) being extorted by transgender sex workers after he refused to pay them, and Ronaldinho going to Paraguayan prison and winning a roasted pig in their football tournament. It’s conventional wisdom that the merry, easygoing nature of Brazilian culture, influenced by dancing and music, influenced their jogo bonito (beautiful game) style of play that focuses on improvisation, individual style, creative flair, and isolated moments of brilliance.

Why did evangelical Christianity blow up in Brazil? This is, of course, a frequently mentioned topic on this blog: what is commonly called “neoliberalism”. Brazilian trade liberalization caused a substantial increase in unemployment, due to employment losses in trade-exposed labor-intensive industries, such as textiles, which were themselves unevenly concentrated throughout the country. Decades later, these locations had a much higher share of Protestant and evangelical affiliation than ones that were not harmed by opening the country to foreign goods. The authors explain that Pentecostal churches rely very heavily on faith healing and other esctatic practices, which bring spiritual solace to people in profound distress - it gave a framework to reject alcoholism, domestic instability, and community decay, and provided people with an alternative. In addition, the paper draws a line through what is known as the “Prosperity Gospel”, which teaches that sufficient faith and active petitioning of God will deliver them material prosperity and wellbeing; in contrast, the Catholic alternative of liberation theology simply focused on structural problems (and was violently repressed by the Brazilian government and condemned by the Catholic Church). This is, roughly speaking, the content of the “pray like a gringo, play like a gringo” thesis: traditional Brazilian football is inspired by cultural touchstones like Samba, which are treif in Pentecostal culture. Instead, the argument goes, Pentecostalism has prompted players to decide that the doctrine of predestination applies to specific games - a number of Brazil’s players simply said it was divine will that they lost to Norway.

The main problem is that this is exactly the opposite of the mainstream understanding of what the Protestant Work Ethic is about. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber argues that Calvinism and the doctrine of predestination (that everything that happens is God’s plan) produces assertiveness rather than passivity: since you can't know if you have God’s favor, you look for signs of it in the real world, and the sign became worldly success achieved through methodical, disciplined, rationally organized labor. Protestant anxieties about salvation produced an obsessive focus on deferred gratification and self-control, which should, in theory, make a country better at playing a highly tactical game, not worse. The empirical literature on why Pentecostalism appeals to the Brazilian working class is almost entirely about salvation from precarity (sickness, addiction, poverty, crime) and not about internalizing a work ethic of self mastery or about predestination to greatness. If anything, the prosperity gospel is the least self disciplined version of Protestantism imaginable: it promises material, tangible rewards now in exchange for faith.

There is, however, someone else who has spoken about Brazil’s football decline: Cafu, captain of the 2002 national team, and one of two players to play in three World Cup finals (the other one being Messi2). At a LEGO event (yes, really) held shortly after his team was eliminated, Cafu said that “Today we’re not developing players, we’re developing competitors, (…) When you set ​up a youth programme ⁠where you’re obliged to win, you’ll develop competitors; you won’t develop proper athletes with creative freedom” and that “At eight, a child should be playing with a ball, laughing and having fun.” This comes after another famous quote by him “the more we have Brazilians moving to the Premier League, the less chances for Brazil to win the World Cup. Imagine being brainwashed by the media every week that you are the best in the world, meanwhile you are not near the best”. Put another way he finds that Brazil’s football has the same problems America’s does: too much emphasis on competition at a childhood level, too much emphasis on money, and too much competitive pressure.

In particular, Brazil has a problem that few countries have: it has too much talent, which means all of its most talented players get scouted very early by foreign clubs, which means they don’t develop a cohesive style of play with each other because they’ve never actually played together. In fact, Brazil also has too much money, because after 2021 the country allowed its teams to become for-profit limited liability companies instead of being mandated to remain under the nonprofit control of their members. This led to a large influx of capital into sports, which led to some of the for-profit teams (Mineiro and Botafogo) winning the national championship and the Copa Libertadores, but most of the trophies have stayed in the hands of traditional nonprofit clubs like Flamengo, Palmeiras, and Fluminense. The for-profit teams have also had a series of problems of their own: Vasco da Gama went bankrupt because of financial difficulties of its American owners, Cruzeiro was bought and sold by Ronaldo (the fat one) within two years, and Botafogo was hollowed out to rescue the debts of its foreign owners’ other club, Olympique de Lyon.

There is kind of a perverse contrast between Brazil, which has allowed for-profit clubs, has dominated the South American tournaments, and has also more or less completely imploded on the international stage, and Argentina, which so far hasn’t budged on the topic (it’s a major source of contention between the football association and Milei), has suffered in regional rankings, but also has won two Copa Americas and reached two back-to-back World Cup finals. I think the difference relies on player development: Brazil has the money to keep top talent, but doesn’t have the financial incentives to develop it (at least given how badly all the major private clubs have been managed thus far), while Argentina’s teams are more strongly incentivized to develop young promises because it’s really the only way they can profit from trading them. This means talented young players like Julian Alvarez, Enzo Fernandez, and Valentin Barco get sold to other clubs instead of playing for River Plate and Boca Juniors respectively, but they also start by playing for them at all, which means a “national” playing style still remains such that a good enough squad and a good enough manager can be competitive at an international level.

Ironically, the perfect example of this is the “method over madness” description of Spain’s victory over Argentina: Spain have become (especially according to Cafu) the world leaders in talent development, having an extremely well developed system of academies and training. The most prominent example is obviously Barcelona, whose La Masia academy was built on an extremely methodical player-development system in world football built on highly standardized, uniform, and codified pillars: possession-based positional-play, formal academic training, and careful psychological, and physical oversight of players. Spain actually very explicitly sought to form a system where players would out-think rather than out-muscle opponents, in contrast to their older, more traditionalist "Furia Roja" footballing identity built on physicality and passion. And the fact that Barcelona has been financially strapped for the last 5 years actually helps this dynamic: they have to be extremely careful with acquisitions and have instead, and historically, focused on developing their own talent, which they can then trade after they become highly skilled players. Real Madrid, which has historically been the bigger club but has struggled against Barça for most of the recent past, is usually less focused on player development and more on player acquisition: club president Florentino Pérez was elected on the promise of purchasing the captain of Barcelona, Luis Figo (it’s as if the Chairman of the DNC was elected on the promise of making Donald Trump change parties). So far their only good decision regarding player development has been to sell one of the team’s most promising young talents, Nico Paz, to a minor Italian club with a repurchase agreement for a prize far below his potential market value; the slight hiccup is that the Spanish-born Paz signed for Argentina’s national team and is trying to delay his return to Real Madrid, where he most certainly wouldn’t be a major player, let alone the main star. Major European teams typically don’t care for their emerging talent very well: Lamine Yamal, even though he plays for Barcelona, has played around four times more per season than Messi had at his age. Yamal’s predecessor wearing Messi’s number ten jersey is kind of the perfect cautionary tale: Ansu Fati was another miracle child from La Masia who had a few outstanding early seasons before becoming injured, falling off the team’s rotation for a while, not showing up much in the 2022 World Cup, and finally being sent off to Brighton and then Monaco. Argentina has so far had three future breakout stars (Dybala, Garnacho, and Mastantuono) fall off the face of the Earth due to frequent injuries in Europe. It’s entirely possible that the lengthy careers of top players like Messi and Luka Modric just aren’t possible anymore given how much, and how early, is demanded physically from players even in the more humane clubs. And this is mostly because of the financial pressures placed on clubs.

Eye in the sky

I recently watched a documentary called Subject to Review about the introduction of HawkEye, an electronic refereeing technology, to tennis. HawkEye is a system that simplifies the world by algorithmically linking photographs of the ball with a mathematical model, constructing a simplified 3d model of the court at any given time to track the position and speed of the ball. Like any other computer program, HawkEye has its limitations, with a margin of error of 3.6 millimeters; the fuzz of a tennis ball is 4 milliliters wide, and the rules of tennis allow for a margin of error of 5 millimeters on calls. Because HawkEye operates on an idealized version of the court with perfectly straight lines and perfectly smooth surfaces, it has to make assumptions about the game that are just as, if not more, flimsy and controversial than human judgment: a shot by Rafael Nadal gets called within lines by 1mm, when by the very logic of the system the ball can either inside or outside.

HawkEye is remarkably similar to Video Assisted Refereeing, or VAR, a technology used by FIFA to review certain violations of the rules during major tournaments. The most notable uses of VAR are to call fouls and to call offsides - situations in which a player takes a position ahead of the second defender closest to the goal. VAR has been one of the more controversial pieces of World Cup discourse, largely by extremely ignorant (American) viewers who see it as some kind of untowards interference by FIFA. But even without the stupidity, it’s not flawless: a last-second equalizer by Croatia against Portugal was ruled out because a Croatian player’s hair touched the ball before it was kicked into the net; a goal by Belgium against the United States was reviewed for a potential foul for so long that by the time VAR allowed it the Europeans had already scored another goal, one without any possible fouls (yes, that one). A kick by Norway was derailed by the VAR camera itself, which is visible with the naked eye, but FIFA claimed their sensors didn’t detect anything with a painfully uninformative chart. Goals by Egypt and Spain against Argentina were ruled out by VAR because of prior fouls, except the actual fouls weren’t shown because they weren’t by the player who had the ball. VAR, in general, works the same as HawkEye, combining rapid photography with statistical inference and live sensor feedback from the ball itself; the problem is the ball is far more sensitive than the pictures, resulting in notorious gaps in position: even at current speeds, because the ball and players move so much more quickly than they can be pictured, the margin for error on VAR calls (particularly offsides) is extremely high. UEFA tournaments have a five-centimeter allowance to account for this; FIFA does not consider any margin of error.

In the late 19th century, a man named Edward Muybridge proposed using a system of trip wires that snapped pictures of horses right as they stepped on the wires to settle certain questions about the animals. By 1881, his invention was used to settle the winner of horse races, prompting Muybridge to ask whether human judges were necessary at all. Soon after, a photo was recorded of a horse with saliva coming out of its mouth - does that count as crossing the line? Muybridge’s prediction that no important competition would be settled without the help of photography has proven correct. Football uses VAR; tennis uses HawkEye; baseball uses Automated Balls and Strikes, or ABS. The main strength of these is also the main weakness: the belief that these mathematical systems are more reliable than our two eyes. Subject to Review explicitly draws a parallel between review by HawkEye and divine judgment, a moment of gazing at the skies for a revelation. By presenting multiple moments of behind the scenes making of moments, the film seeks to remind us of what it tries to say: that any collection of images and sounds is a fiction. How real it is and how seriously we take it is up to us.

The comparison basically everyone has made is between VAR and AI: the idea of AI is that it can replace fallible human judgment with flawless judgment by a computer program. Of course, it’s worth noting that VAR hasn’t, on average, changed the game much: not the behavior of the players, not the outcome of the games, or the actual content of the calls by referees. AI tools, in addition, have been criticized countless times for the possibility of them becoming deformed and polluted by preexisting bias in the training, or actual, data. One of the more common arguments for AI is that, because it is a centralizing technology (it’s a piece of software that is the same for everyone, based on a joint and single corpus of facts, and follows the same basic underlying rules for all users), then it will restore trust on social institutions at some level: I’ve always thought this was kind of a dumb take, because firstly, it’s not even clear AI actually is better at informing people of facts than social media, and second, because people don’t actually trust technology no matter how closely they understand it. 91% of football fans oppose VAR and only 2% think it has a positive effect on the game, a much worse rating than basically any institution of the American government. Instead, people see these machine-driven processes as more opaque than human decisionmaking, because it’s not actually clear who is responsible for the decision: one of the more controversial VAR calls is mistaken identity, where a player receives a yellow card because of supposedly fouling a player of the other team, when in fact the other player is fouling them and the referee carded them in error. In effect, this means that VAR automatically reverses a mistake by the referee if a player takes a dive to incite a yellow card. In practice, it means that sometimes players look like they were fouled, then a machine nobody trusts makes a decision nobody understands, then the player that looks like they were the victim gets a yellow card.

The main problem with these sort of machine-centric instruments of decisionmaking is that football is a game, and one that people experience as a narrative and not as a technical display. Again, the main reason why people think that Egypt foul call was suspicious is because it wasn’t shown on the television when it happened (FIFA only licenses one carrier to record each game for logistical reasons, so nobody saw it on their broadcast), and the replay was overshadowed by the more heated arguments on the field. The game is also, largely, based around specific moments that have a high component of luck: in the Argentina-England game, the difference between Argentina not scoring any goals and losing and scoring 6 goals in ten minutes and inflicting a world historical humilliation, wasn’t skill or tactics, but basically random differences in the final position of the ball relative to the goalposts. One slightly better kick very late in the game would have seen the World Cup final go to penalties either 0-0 or 1-1; Spain would have probably lost despite dominating the first 110 minutes of the game. The idea that narrative momentum doesn’t shape how we understand the game is nonsense: I don’t think that by 2030 we’ll think the 2010 and 2014 finals were too different than 2026, because they had the same result, regardless of the actual disparity between the teams; nobody remembers it now, but the Dutch played far dirtier and nastier than Argentina has, and the refereeing “favoring” Germany was way more egregious than anything we’ve seen this World Cup. France and the Netherlands were one miraculous save away from adding their third and first star respectively.

The real truth is that a lot of the backlash to VAR is the backlash to football as a sport: because there’s so few goals (each team’s box around the goalposts is bigger than a basketball court), because the matches are so long, and because play is usually uncapped in length, the sport has a much higher chance of an upset: the stat I’ve seen going around is that the favorite only wins around 55% of the time. It’s kind of obvious what is driving the backlash to this kind of randomness: sports betting, which is driven by shallow quantitative metrics and rewards outcomes that are not basically indeterminate. Paraguay had a 15% chance of beating Germany, with a 1% chance of a tie; the event with an 84% probability of occurring, per Kalshi, did not occur. I was more or less the only person I can think of confident that Brazil wouldn’t beat Norway, and that England would lose to Argentina; why? I saw them play. Brazil was playing badly and struggling to control the game; England nearly blew a 3-0 lead against Mexico (one of them, sure, with a fake penalty kick) by taking a tactical nosedive in the final 20 minutes of the game. Thomas Tuchel’s strategy of “parking the bus” doesn’t work in the aggregate; it also nearly cost him two games in a row, one against a team incapable of kicking the ball, and one where a guy refused to make an obvious pass and cost his team a goal. Prediction markets be damned I knew we were going to win when I saw a line of five people standing outside the English box.

Conclusion

I think all three of the main questions of the World Cup come back to a single topic: the colonization of sports by something I’ve mentioned a million times here, instrumental reason. According to Max Weber, there’s four types of action: traditional, emotional, value-rational (pursued for the sake of some intrinsically worthwhile principle regardless of its costs or benefits), and instrumental (oriented toward a calculated goal, using rationally chosen means, weighing means, ends, and secondary consequences against each other). The most distinctive feature of modernity is the growing presence of of instrumental reason relative to the others: the progressive rationalization of the law, administration, economy, education, et cetera. A traditional theme in the Frankfurt School analysis of modernity is that the term names the shift in priority from ends to means: instrumental reason means no longer asking about the larger social purpose behind a goal, only caring about the efficiency with which it's achieved. The Frankfurt guys wanted to find out how humanity, at the peak of culture and technology, let the world degenerate into barbarism and totalitarianism, and placed the blame in reason having become purely instrumental: reason lost the capacity to evaluate what it should do at all and becomes pure technical could-s instead. I think that’s kind of the whole game here: a sport that is largely about narrative momentum, individual moments of genius, and the lifelong development of a talent for moments of play that cannot be quantified being reduced to stupid statistics about who had “posession” of the ball more time, which side of an imaginary line the ball was, and how much money a 6 year old could be traded for. People always want an easy answer where you spend more money on academies and get good players back, but if you don’t have an environment focused on the holistic development of a practical consciousness, you won’t get good players. Put another way, the only reason why football education remains even minimally viable is because it’s the last reduct of humanism in mass culture. Mikel Merino, one of Spain’s breakthrough players, said the Spanish team taught people to be a good person first and a good player second; while I don’t know if that’s actually true, at least they tried, which is more than you can say of most educational institutions.

One philosopher who, surprisingly, liked the sport was Martin Heidegger (yeah, the Nazi). While it is difficult to imagine him enjoying anything, he was, in fact, a gigantic fan of Bayern Munich given their leading man, Franz Beckenbauer, who was also Germany’s star player in the 1970s. Heidegger thought Beckenbauer embodied authentic being, and was very enthusiastic for his team. Ironically enough, Bayern is perhaps not the team best suited for Heidegger’s own critique of enframing (a similar-ish concept to instrumental reason), since they’re a highly schematic team that focuses on aggressive play, numerical superiority, and maintaining posession; perhaps he’d been more philosophically inclined to Johan Cruyff’s more fluid style of play instead - particularly since Cruyff was the mastermind behind La Masia, and Heidegger was one of the people most concerned with the decline of humanism.

Of course, that a philosopher critical of instrumental reason who had been caught up in the Thousand Year Reich would become an ardent supporter of a providential footballer and Instrumental Reason: the Club is the kind of joke that writes itself. A proud Bayern tradition is playing third and fourth division teams and beating them 20-0; only Germany would have considered it appropriate to beat the host of the World Cup 7 to 1. The Frankfurt School theorists didn’t have a kind view of sports: In Minima Moralia, Theodor Adorno argueed that competitive sport reduces the person to a “functional use of the body,“ treated as a machine to be exploited afor the benefit of the culture industry (that is, a standardized entertainment apparatus that creates social conformity), through a combination of physical discipline, performance pressure, and uniform social norms. In particular, Adorno thought that identification with a club or national team replaced genuine political participation, because competitions would intensify the feeling of unity while papering over actual social conflicts: people would experience themselves as part of a larger whole without ever questioning its structure, which is exactly the kind of dynamic Adorno thought would lead to fascism (to him everything was fascist, a stance that is becoming more undestandable by the day). I think we all know exactly what World Cup discourse mirrors this exact dynamic.

One of the ongoing debates in Economics Twitter, which has recently spilled over into the Argentine version, is whether the history of economic thought (abbreviated HET) is worth engaging with. The question is usually posed as why we should read Keynes, Smith, Hayek, or Marx, if we have NBER working papers and top five publications finding the same things, without the ideological baggage or the inaccurate parts. The answer is usually “well, because it’s important to understand the history of the discipline”, which reliedson presupposing the (lack of) value of economic history per se, which I think defeats the whole point of arguing - you’re just exposing past each other on things you believe and they don’t about those very things.

The other argument tries to bridge across values, by saying that yes, those books don’t have any interesting knowledge that isn’t on modern papers, but they’re still useful for two reasons: first, because it’s important to disprove the influence of those old books on political thinking of various kinds, particularly the crankish type. If you read Yanis Varoufakis’s Technofeudalism you might think the whole thing is stupid, as I did, but without understanding Marxist thought and Marxian economic history you cannot precisely argue for why it’s stupid. The other argument is that reading Old Books can produce new ideas or at least rediscover old ones: somewhat famously, 2023 Nobel Laureate Claudia Goldin borrowed most of her ideas from Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (which she readily admits to) and, less famously, the Nobel-winning work of Daron Acemoglu and his two main coauthors is basically identical in its formulation to the work of Marxist “economist” (I’m not sure if he actually was one) Karl Kautsky.

So, the thinking goes, the old is like an abandoned Egyptian tomb, and we can be the prospectors that crack it open and plunder its riches. I have always thought the discussion was kind of weak, because the argument for HET has to be made admitting it’s completely useless, not acknowledging it has to be useful to justify itself. The question ought to be whether studying the history of economics produces insight that is otherwise lacking from contemporary statistical study, rather than whether it can provide new targets for the statistical methods. I think it does, for whatever it’s worth, but not very strongly.

The reason I bring this up is because it mirrors another ongoing debate in broader circles: what is the purpose of an education in the humanities, and particularly, whether an education in the Great Books is valuable or not, it’s current incarnation. Well, does it?

The book club

Recently, Ross Douthat (the token conservative on the New York Times payroll) interviewed philosophy professor Jennifer Frey on the question: why does a liberal arts education still matter? Frey’s answer was twofold: the first is that self-cultivation has an intrinsic value, and the second is that self-cultivation allows people to liberate themselves from small-minded, atavistic groupthink. I think both of those are unambiguously correct. But the problem, as this piece by Ángel Pinillos on the Chronicle of Higher Education points out, is that those are the very prepositions being argued - or rather, the argument is why those (inherently valuable) feats of self cultivation should be financed by universities and the government. Instead, the author argues, the humanities should be defended on the basis of the economically important marketable skills they provide: a “real, identifiable competence” that can only be acquired by “spending years reading difficult texts, being forced to defend your interpretations of them in writing, and being told, repeatedly, that you have not yet made your argument as well as you could.” I think this is a good, persuasive argument. I’ve made a similar case, that the core human competence AI does not and cannot posess is the power of interpretation. I think it has the problem of the “Claudia Goldin read Engels” idea: it tries to defend the values of the humanities using the values laying siege to them. It’s Ravenna trying to say that the barbarian thing to do is not razing the city to the ground. Tough luck.

The idea that one ought to learn the humanities by engaging primarily with the Great Books, or some broader cultural canon, is one, on this day and age, mostly associated with the political right, for a variety of reasons: the first is that they claimed that space very aggressively, and the second (and why they claimed it) is that it dovetails with their aggressive “defense” of Western heritage (which is, in fact, an assault on core Western post-Enlightenment values in favor of Third World caliber racial tribalism). The idea they propose is that education in the liberal arts needs to center on the integral development of the citizen, a citizen that is developed in harmony with a broad-based societal project of The Good Life and the ideal regime (of public, civic, and political life). But if you look at the conservative project it’s… not been especially successful. As laid out by Ann Manov in Harper’s Magazine, the explicitly conservative case for a Great Books education in the conservative liberal arts has been as much of a failure as the liberal liberal arts: the professors are bedeviled by unengaged students who don’t want to read 500 pages of Hobbes to get a degree in dentistry, the professors slash the reading list to chapters and excerpts to “meet students where they are”, and the standards for evaluation drop to essays under 2,000 words, rap videos, or ChatGPT. Manove interviews a philosopher, Oliver Traldi, who says “If you asked me ten years ago, I would say all these college students are reading too much Foucault and too much Judith Butler or whatever.” But these days, they’re watching fifteen-second TikTok videos about how Charlie Kirk isn’t really dead; they “can’t even read Foucault and Judith Butler.” This mirrors the original critic of woke bias in higher education: Allan Bloom (well, the original was William F. Buckley, but he was an obnoxious whiner who thought Paul Samuelson was a communist). Bloom’s whole thing in The Closing of the American Mind, beyond a bunch of old man complaints about how rock music has the tempo of sexual intercourse, is that as an educator you would want your students to arrive with a series of thoughts about the subject, which you probed and undermined to make them reach enlightenment on their own, compared to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. In Bloom’s time, a common complaint was that students were too “politically correct” to be able to be questioned; besides that, true or not, Bloom (correctly) identifies a much bigger problem: his students don’t care. They get to class to get laid, get high, and get a diploma. They don’t go to learn about anything. You can’t get pulled out of Plato’s cave if you don’t care about whether you’re in a cave or not, or what happens in it.

Bloom’s critique is surprisingly similar (at least as far as I read from secondary sources and talked about it with a guy I was dating who read both, before a really messy breakup) to Christopher Lasch’s in The Culture of Narcissism: the rise of “privatism” and the imposition of market logic over moral and community values led to excessive, pathological levels of individualism in an increasingly permissive culture. This particularly manifests in universities, where the pressure for ideological gamesmanship is uniquely high. To quote Lasch: “The “new tribalism,” (…) appears on the scene at the very moment when tribalism has ceased to have any substantive content. “Tribalism” is the latest fashion thrown up by a consumerist capitalism that is replacing neighborhoods with shopping malls, thereby undermining the very particularism that it eagerly packages as a commodity.” Lasch’s point very closely mirrors a recent debate had over the Mellon Foundation, following an article in The Atlantic by Tyler Austin Harper: Mellon is a very left wing foundation, though one founded and funded, paradoxically, by a hard-right union buster who caused the Great Depression, and as such focuses on left wing topics of the day like gender studies and Black trans poetry. For Harper this is problematic for a variety of reasons, some of them the usual pointless “alienating conservatives with progressive issue positions” bullshit, some more interesting regarding the empty pablum Mellon makes its grantees churn out over actually substantive work. But the obvious critique of the Tyler Austin Harper article on the Mellon Foundation (as pointed out by Christopher Newfield) comes from… the Tyler Austin Harper article on the Mellon Foundation, particularly one of its final paragraphs: "The humanities are in the mess they’re in because of federal budget cuts, and because of administrators who care more about the football team than about William Faulkner, and because of the toxic pragmatism of an American culture that has a hard time valuing anything that is not immediately, aggressively useful. But the humanities are also in this mess because those of us who care about them have often preferred hunkering down in a defensive crouch…”.

An obvious example of the problem with education is grade inflation: college graduation rates and grades have increased consistently since the 1990s without any real increase in student quality, institutional resources, or composition of the education sector. This phenomenon has a large number of fairly complex reasons: unlike more cultural ones (for example, that schools are “coddling” their students to try and raise their self esteem),the most convincing explanations focus on facts such as top schools having gotten more selective; changes to student practices (fewer classes taken outside of major and fewer classes taken in general, withdrawing to avoid a fail) and better teaching practices, but also of just more generous grading. Well, but why have grading practices changed? When asked “why”, an economist answered the question asked the simple question of qui bono - “Who is the constituency for tougher grades? I can tell you as a professor, my students are definitely interested in higher grades”. In particular, since getting good grades is so important, students tend to choose classes where they can get higher grades; at the same time, universities are incentivized to improve numbers (retention, graduation, etc.) for basically financial reasons - especially because “inflated” grades are not actually easy to notice. The reason, then, why nobody is doing anything is that this is a coordination problem: any professor that gets more demanding would hurt their own career by getting lower evaluations (which are systematically linked to strictness), which can be seen in the fact that schools with more untenured faculty also have worse outcomes.

For the New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann makes a case similar to one made by Eric Hayot and Matt Seybold in the Chronicle: universities, in general, just don’t have any money for research anymore. The Trump presidency in particular pushed for especially punitive cuts to research funding (regardless of university behavior on political or culture war topics), but state governments of both parties over time have done the same thing; as mentioned above, the conservative war on academia goes back to William F Buckley’s 1948 God and Man at Yale, which is almost exactly as far back as government support for universities has existed in the United States. Universities simply do not have any more money, even without the feds cutting them off to spite Palestinians and trans people, which has affected both the humanities and the hard sciences. There’s a really long and complicated history here, but I don’t think you can say that there’s been a crackdown on Thomas Jefferson’s house, where he owned slaves, acknowledging that he owned slaves and that his treatment of his slaves was bad, because five years ago some random annoying person said something stupid in a bad academic paper nobody has read. Like, if you don’t want to hear about how Jefferson’s personal life figured into his work, don’t go to his fucking house.

The issue that all of these people point out, and that nobody trying to make a liberal or left wing or even conservative case for the humanities can articulate, is that we don’t know, as a society, the value of education anymore. To quote Lemann (about the political right): “When it comes to higher education, the house of conservatism has many mansions. One is filled with burn-it-down insurrectionists, like Rufo, who see universities primarily as enemy territory, a stronghold of the left. Another is focussed on making a university education cost less and teach job skills, not the liberal arts—hence the Trump Administration’s efforts to eliminate student loans in fields with a low “return on investment.” Yet another is made up of the small cohort of conservative professors. They may be pleased that universities are at last paying attention to their complaints.” Lemann’s article points out that the American university has a mission of at the same time creating the American and world elite (“in a completely fair way”, he snides), offer access to the elite to that elite, make a lot of money, serve the public, serve social justice, and be liked and supported by the public. Basically none of those goals are, even in principle, compatible with each other.

And they’re also not compatible with what the public wants from education: writing for the Harvard Crimson, Alex Bronzini-Vender notes that the main problems people had with Harvard and other higher education institutions were monetary: too much cost, and too little reward. It is, of course, true that elite institutions create the elite (children of non-elites who attend elite institutions are 21% more likely to attend high-status schools and 8% more likely to attend elite colleges), and that being an elite comes with a notable set of perks and benefits: elite education reads as more valuable regardless of the skill content, meaning more money in early career positions (but not necessarily later on). But it would be ridiculous to expect the mission of education to be to select the elite; first, because the whole problem is it cannot consume the amount of elites it produces, and second, because basically nobody, by definition, is an elite. China and India, two countries with notably difficult university entrance exams, are not more successful at promoting a broad-based humanistic education; South Korea has become a giant death march to the university entrance exams to the point it’s probably tanking their fertility rates. And like, not to toot my own horn, but you people seem to think I’m smart enough to be worth reading, and I do not have an elite education: I went to the University of Buenos Aires, a public university without any entrance requirement that has between a third and half a million students. Most of the faculty teaches for free, or practically for free given how bad academic pay has been for the last decade, and there is no tuition or anything like that. The admissions process is show up, wait in line, fill in a form, go to class.

Are we human or are we dancers

This idea, of course, is very controversial. Until fairly recently, though, it wasn’t. Between the Renaissance and the middle of the twentieth century, the defining mode of engagement with culture was humanism. Humanism is one of those words that seem to have no consistent (or useful) definition, but broadly, it can be defined as a way of thinking that centers humanity as an agent in the world, and particularly, that centers humanity’s ability to engage with human reason and its outputs. In this sense, humanism is basically a civilizational project centered in the literary canon - a sort of universal republic of letters.

In Existentialism is a Humanism, philosopher and author Jean Paul Sartre roughly argues that, since human existence predates the essence of life (because humans are, unlike objects, not created with a set purpose), then the project of humanism is to determine what human freedom and human action should be for. In contrast, another philosopher, Martin Heidegger, in his first public piece of writing since being banned from teaching and philosophy for being a Nazi, rebukes Sartre: in his Letter on Humanism, Heidegger points out that trying to find a purpose for humans was exactly what Sartre thought made humans different - that they weren’t created with a purpose. Heidegger was particularly against the idea that human reason is a resource to be managed and not inherently dignified, and that humans as a “rational animal” are therefore just another animal. His solution was, in true continental philosophy fashion, to focus on Being as a category (I’m not touching that one) - what does it mean to be. Thus, the point of human existence isn’t to be the master of other physical objects through reason, devotion to god, or the mastery of Being itself - rather, a peaceful existence that safeguards the openness of Being. What this means is… not clear. But basically Heidegger’s bit is that, rather than seeing humans as part of some vertical chain, we need to see them all as equals engaged in spiritual and transcendental contemplation. What separates humans from everything else is their capacity to be the “shepherds of Being”, in some sort of giant prairie (the mental image here is some Minecraft prairie where Being is the cows and sheep roaming around). In particular, what sets humans apart is the capacity to use language and use and protect it for its own sake, in philosophy and literature.

Sweet, the Nazi agrees with me. But not to be outdone, another German philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk, also drops his two cents in 1999: in Rules for the Human Zoo, he elaborates on that whole human husbandry business. Particularly, tracing again the extremely tedious history of humanism as a republic of letters engaged in a civilizational process, he arrives at this quote from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra: “Virtue is that which makes them modest and tame: it is that that turns the wolf to the dog, and men themselves to mankind’s best pet.”. Both of the Germans are, here, describing humans as the dogs of other humans - “modern men are primarily profitable breeders who have made out of wild men the last men”. Sloterdijk, who was described in some blog I read about him as the Lady Gaga of philosophy, decides to go full edgelord: for him, the topic of human husbandry is the central topic of philosophy, the way in which humans make humans out of apes, and he describes two ways of doing it: the first is Lektion, “lesson”, the humanistic mode of education, and the other is Selektion, “selection”, which is more or less explicitly eugenics. The term “selektion” is itself extremely controversial: it has a Wikipedia page, titled “Selektion (Holocaust)”. To not get distracted by edgelord antics, we can go to a much less (or much more) controversial thinker, Leo Strauss, who rather than being a Nazi was just a conservative, and whose big idea, as far as anyone can understand it, was that society needs to have some sort of elite in charge to handle the real knowledge and the task of what knowledge can be shared with the normies. Another relevant contemprary thinker here is some guy named Bronze Age Pervert, a Nazi (this time self-identified) who wrote his doctoral thesis in philosophy on eugenics, basically, and who does the same reading of Nietszche as Leo Strauss but won’t admit to it for some insane reason or another (likely, that Strauss was Jewish - of course, “BAP” is a gay Romanian, not exactly ubermensch material).

Anyways, we have two clashing ideas: the first is the egalitarian humanistic one where education develops the human soul, basically, and the second is the aristocratic one about cultivating a natural-born elite that is usually but not always explicitly racial. Who’s right? Unsurprisingly, not the Nazis. The central claim there is that cultural transmission is almost always vertical: there is a class of people who make norms and a class of people who receives them, and the task of education is to select and create them; teacher to student, professor to teacher, and parent to child. It’s why there is suddenly a ridiculous demand that movies be didactic and “about good people doing good things” - the central belief is that people are usually stupid and need to be told what to think, because they cannot think themselves or with each other. That’s the weak part: people educate each other constantly. There is a good amount of teaching from the top to the bottom: the conservatism of managers at work has an enormous impact on the gender pay gap, while beauty pageant winners promote unhealthy physical standards in their audiences, and the attitudes about women working of parents are important for the attitudes of their children, as well as the attitudes of other trusted adults in the community. But you also see the exact opposite: children changing the views of their parents, and coworkers changing the views of other coworkers, as well as managers changing the views of other managers. The response that people have to male and female authority figures is also not univocal: sometimes having a woman boss makes employees more progressive, and sometimes it makes them more conservative. Fathers are more likely to take parental leave if their coworkers or brothers take it first. I’ve written a long post previously about the importance of having friends, particularly economically: the more ties between people, usually, the better off a place is, particularly if those friends have different socioeconomic backgrounds. And, somewhat obviously, people can be persuaded to change their mind: Christian missionaries changed the viewpoints on ethnic kinship of the people they converted or preached to, while having Arab/Muslim neighbors tends to reduce hostility and prejudice against those groups both in particular and in general. Even the much vaunted gender wage gap in cognitive ability is, in many respects, fake: it emerges basically all at once in the first grade, and, on a more macro level, has narrowed significantly if not disappeared in most developed countries.

A case in point is the Grit saga (a book title missing an F): Angela Duckworth, an American psychologist, wrote a book titled Grit in 2016 about how schools shouldn’t teach people things like reading and writing and instead should teach “grit”, an ill-defined concept with very shaky empirical and theoretical foundations. Regardless, there is some truth that perseverance is a valuable skill: a 2024 paper about tsunami survivors finds that there isn’t much of an impact of being a tsunami survivor on educational attainment, which reflects both the successful reconstruction effort but more importantly “enormous resilience among survivors who bore the brunt of the tsunami”. However, the idea that you can just teach people valuable personality traits is kind of disproven at this point: a 2015 paper titled Promise and Paradox: Measuring Students’ Non-Cognitive Skills and the Impact of Schooling was published shortly before the book came out in 2016 and it completely dismantles the Grit thesis: “Conscientiousness, self-control, and grit are unrelated to test-score gains at the school level, however, and students attending over-subscribed charter schools [which the study finds have better results] score lower on these scales than do students attending district schools”. The interesting thing is that one of the authors of this paper… is psychologist Angela Duckworth. That’s right: she debunked her stupid self help airport book about how people can just be taught to have certain personality traits.

So like, the whole idea that people can simply be told directly what to believe by their "betters” is completely asinine. People will receive whatever lecture you wish to give them and then leave, go to the pub, and be un-lectured by their mates. In fact, the limits of vertical transmission of norms are the whole problem with wokeness. The entire project was that, if you changed elite institutions in both their demographic composition and their speech and behavioral norms, then you would change all of the most important power brokers in society and that would trickle down to regular people. This project was, for fairly self evident reasons, extremely unsuccessful and the entire project not just tumbled down but also might have engendered a backlash strong enough to destroy the (already weak) institutions it tried to use as vehicles for change. In contrast, similar progressive movements founded on mass engagement with material realities during the same period of time were a lot more politically successful and have had longer-lasting results even when facing a similar amount of political blowback. Of course, the idea that people are just told what to believe by Harvard is something that, paradoxically, both the most and least woke people seem to affirm: if you take control of “the Cathedral”, you take control of everyone’s minds. The closeness of the woke and anti-woke project in this regard can be seen in a single historical figure: the American feminist activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a radical abolitionist who believed that the equality of intellect of all human beings entitled them to equal rights in the political arena. But her thinking was so firmly anchored in intellectual ability it quickly turned very ugly: once it became obvious that the post-Civil War political settlement would expand rights to former slaves but not women, Stanton became increasingly racist, saying that the United States was at risk of putting “educated refined women . . . in the humiliating position of supplicants at the feet of serfs, peasants, plantation slaves, paupers knaves drunkards, all the ragged ignorant foreign and native riff raff in the country” in 1869. An early victim of cancel culture, she was pushed out of the suffrage movement shortly after.

The power brokers

American historian Robert Caro is widely considered one of the world’s most important experts on power, having written two extremely extensive biographies of two of the most important wielders of it of all time: urban planner Robert Moses, and legislator and President Lyndon B. Johnson. In The Power Broker, Caro says Moses was corrupted by power: he entered a young reformist enthusiastic with cleaning up government and delivering for people, and left a corrupt racist obsessed with preserving his own power as an untouchable ruler. This contrasts with one of his better known quotes from his LBJ biographies: “But although the cliche says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said ... is that power always reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary. ... But as a man obtains more power, camouflage becomes less necessary”. So what he presents are two incompatible visions: one in which power corrupts, and one in which power only reveals the existing corruption. But if you read The Power Broker with sufficient attention, you know that Robert Moses was never corrupted: in one of the less discussed episodes of the book, Moses is in grad school in Oxford, when he gives a speech in defense of colonialism based on the inability of some people to govern themselves; he is booed and basically chased out by his classmates, and while Caro doesn’t explicitly say it, it is obvious Moses rooted his argument in racial disparities. His final projects, in both Princeton and Oxford, were basically about how an elite unelected bureaucratic corps could be established and why doing so was desirable. So, to recap, a young man with racist ideas about how a bureaucracy of unelected elites should have absolute power gets power as an older man, and implements a regime where… racist unelected elite bureaucrats have absolute power. The striking thing about Robert Moses, and why I never wrote about The Power Broker at length, is how unimportant he was: he was, of course, determinant for the fate of New York, but the same things attributed to him by Caro and generations of readers have plagued basically every other American city: redlining, car-centric infrastructure, slum clearances, corruption. In the end, Robert Moses was just a convenient scapegoat for the endless errors of technocratic liberalism.

Moses was, of course, an elite, with an elite education and a series of elite job postings. His whole thing was that the best and the brightest should control the switches and levers; this was, at the time, a widely held belief. The obvious question about the humanism debacle is why, then, it was replaced by technocracy starting in the 1940s. The date already gives you the answer: humanism was completely untenable as a system of ensuring human flourishing. In The World of Yesterday, Stephan Zweig notes that everyone had the utmost trust in Europe’s rulers at the start of the First World War, because of decades (if not centuries) of education had to have perfected both the system of governments and the ones who governed, such that they presided over a safe, stable, prosperous world. Thirty years later, nobody harbored such delusions: the deadliest war in human history was followed by the worst economic downturn in human history, as well as several hyperinflationary episodes, which deteriorated trust between and within Europeans to the point they allowed, if not elected, to take office people who promised to exterminate each other like cattle, a promise they fulfilled while launching the world into an even deadlier war. One of the more interesting short stories of Jorge Luis Borges is Deutsches Requiem, in which a nebbish bookseller named Otto Dietrich zur Linde becomes, basically, an omnicidal Cossack who glorifies war and murder for their own sake; the whole thing is, of course, an allegory for Nazi Germany, but also a reflection on whether he could have become a Nazi had he been German: the characterization of the entire thing is reminiscent of one of his better known stories, El Sur, which is about a nebbish librarian who joins a knife fight among some cowboys after suffering a head injury (or maybe just dreams it and dies like a little bitch in the hospital). Juan Dahlmann, the main character of El Sur, is generally understood to be a placeholder for Borges himself, who saw himself torn between his paternal grandfather, who was a military leader who died in the War of the Triple Alliance, and his great uncle, a poet and philosophy professor (as well as his mother and grandmother, who he was close to); likewise, Dahlmann is torn between his German grandfater who was a priest and his Argentine grandfather who was a military hero.

The decline of humanism, thus, came from its inability to prevent (or ability to cause) the tragedies of the World Wars, the Holocaust, and the Great Depression. What good were the great philosophers and the great poets? Germany, the most educated nation in the world, had become the most barbarous. For Heidegger (who, again, had been a Nazi), the problem with Nazism (and also with non-Nazism) had been its relationship with “nature”, understood as like, everything else. Heidegger separated knowlegde between techne, “technics”, the ability to do things for humanity, and technology, the system of social organization around technics. This implies a way of revealing the world, that is, a worldview, which saw living objects as mere resources waiting around to be used, which crowds out other, more important ways of knowing and understanding the world. Think of a mountain: you might see it as an object of great beauty for a hike, but technology only sees it as a pile of minerals waiting to be mined. Importantly, this also had profound “cognitive” effects, because enframing (the way technology understands objects and subjects) is irresistible and affects thinking radically, that is, from its very inception. The rest of Heidegger’s critique is blurry and imprecise for the purposes of a blog mostly about economics and politics, but it’s worth pointing out that it’s very similar to a much sharper vision: the Frankfurt School critique of technology and of “instrumental rationality”.

Herbert Marcuse’s “Social Implications of Technology” argues that the regimentation of life under mass industrial society, and the exertion from regimented industrial labor was sapping people’s critical and rational faculties. These faculties had, in the past, been critical for eradicating superstition and creating science and technological advancements (Marcuse would call them technical advancements, since he does that annoying philosophy thing of not calling technology technology); however, living in a rationalized industrial society required extensive degrees of training, regimentation, and repetition, which fostered numbness, alienation, and social conformism, which in turn required lower and lower use of people’s higher cognitive faculties. This is enmeshed in a broader attack of the Frankfurt School on “rationality”: going back to Max Weber, there’s generally understood to be a difference between “formal-procedural reason”, the exclusive focus on efficiency, as opposed to “value reason”, which centers the intrinsic worth of actions and their consequences. The Frankfurt School, retools this into three kinds, with instrumental reason (formal-procedural reason), subjective reason, and objective reason; in The Eclipse of Reason, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer basically argue that instrumental and subjective rationality have replaced the question of how to lead the good life and how to live in a good society with “how do I do what I want to do as quickly as possible”, which eliminates concerns about values or justice beyond considering them yet another subjetive preference. This excessive rationalization of society eventually destroys itself, because it produces a world in which nothing can be criticized beyond as a means to some particular end because any substantive criticism would need appealing to objective higher values that reason has siloed off from itself. For them, this obsessive focus on efficiency without any values besides subjective wellbeing results in unimaginable atrocities sooner or later, because nobody has any language to think of a way to criticize the people proposing those atrocities.

But the Frankfurt School critique leads to someone I think is a lot more interesting, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (who I’ve touched upon in the past). For Habermas, the central aspect of political life was a space known as the public sphere, where private individuals could argue relatively freely about matters of public political interest, with a structure designed to ignore the status, wealth, and prestige of people. This public sphere was completely devoted to objective value rationality through rational debate; it is built on communicative reason, the idea that all statements made are also made with the sincere intention to defend them rationally if interrogated instead of pulling rank or guilt tripping someone. For Habermas, the rationality of communication is presupposed by communication itself: a speaker intends to produce a belief in a listener by trying to understand how this intention will affect the listener, including by acknowledging that the intention of persuading itself is part of the effect. This means, to put it more succintly, that the norms of speech are inherent to speech itself, because no speech that tries to do something can also try not to do it while remaining valid. However, at a certain scale, societies cannot be organized via rational deliberation, and need steering media (money and power) that coordinate action without the need for purposeful communication - if you want to buy something you don’t need to agree on the inherent value of the transaction as per social traditions. This also separates coordination from deliberation in way that permits for more social complexity and more differentiation between social spheres: between science and religion, between the sciences, between subfields of the sciences, etc. But this complexity leads to autonomous systems of money and power, with their own internal logic and their own imperatives, to begin needing to restructure the lifeworld itself to achieve those aims. This leads to, for Habermas, one of the most serious pathologies of contemporary life: the colonization of the public sphere, where money and power begin supplanting communication in order to achieve their own aims; in particular, money and power replace the logic of communicative rationality with the logic of instrumental rationality, transforming the honest pursuit of truth into the consequentialist pursuit of impact and self interest.

Conclusion

I was kinda stuck on how to finish with this until I read an article in the Los Angeles Review of Books that gave me a path forward: it’s titled “The Consensus Sublime” by Ebadur Rahman, and it’s about The Guardian’s list of the best 100 novels of all time (topped by Middlemarch, Beloved, and Ulysses). The author’s gripe with the list is that it’s superficial and built around legibility to a very narrow Anglo-American slice of tastemakers who have a very specific cultural and economic agenda behind them, which is true. But I don’t think those (fairly obvious) points are what drew my attention - it’s the following paragraph, the second one:

Raymond Williams’s description of the canon as a “selective tradition,” offered in his Marxism and Literature (1977), remains indispensable to any honest engagement with exercises of this kind. Williams understood that canons do not simply preserve excellence; they preserve the forms of excellence that institutions already know how to teach, translate, and consecrate. But the selective tradition never feels like selection. It feels like inheritance: the apparently natural accumulation of worth over time, the slow geological settling of greatness. This is precisely its authority, and precisely its danger. Every canon believes itself to have transcended the misjudgments of its predecessors, and this conviction is among the oldest and most persistent of aesthetic errors.

You see it, right? The LARB ran an essay about the literary canon that was almost certainly entirely generated by AI. If you run any two or three paragraphs on an AI detection software (which are not 100% reliable, like anything done by AI - but I tried with a few paragraphs from this draft and got 100% human-generated, which they were), you typically get a 100% AI generated score. I don’t really like going through the stylistic beats, because “using three examples” “using dashes” and “using weird words” are just decisions an author can make too. I think the main problem is the depth of the concepts: the piece has a segment about Ulysses that seems to… not have anything to actually say. The premise is that Ulysses has become something of an albatross for the Anglo-American literary world because of its difficulty to less professional readers (maybe true), which is why they only gave it third place (but the segments below and above say ranking things is dumb), and so it’s become necessary to create a huge number of intermediaries to explain Joyce to normies, which might “diminish” the novel - but wait, doesn’t that contradict the thesis of the entire piece, that just putting together a random list of novels and calling them the canon is bad? Like, it would be good that Ulysses has produced an enormous amount of secondary literature about it because that’s the kind of thing that justifies the place of a novel in the canon.

The main problem here isn’t really that the article is wrong (it isn’t) or that it's incorrect (it’s mostly not) - it’s that the author didn’t even think through their own ideas about the canon. The problem with AI writing is that, in almost all cases, it doesn’t actually reflect any thoughts: it’s just text produced to fill space and read well without any deeper or underlying understanding, because it’s written by a machine and not a person. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use AI or anything, but rather, that you cannot produce real meaning without real thought. This brings me to another article, from The Atlantic, about the end of reading: in 2023, only 16% of Americans read for pleasure; in 2025, 57% placed a bet on sports gambling. A recent statistic I saw was that, in the same year, Americans spent more on sports gambling (which is bad!) than on movies, books, and music combined. The article at The Atlantic, by Rose Horowtich, finds countless examples: even at the most elite colleges and universities, people simply do not want to read. In film school, infamously according to Twitter anecdotes, students don’t want to watch movies. Back in the day, you’d have arguments about whether the things in one Thomas Piketty paper contradicted another one (who can forget how the EITC is welfare when looking at taxes and is a tax cut when looking at welfare), and now it’s stuff like “this chart of an inflation adjusted variable is adjusted for inflation, yes”.

There is, of course, much to be said about this. Education is a deeply political institution with major implications for not just knowledge, but also background cultural phenomena; it’s a widely known fact that countries used compulsory universal public schooling to shape the national character (as effective, or ineffective, that can be). I have said it a few paragraphs ago, but the purpose of education cannot be to produce “skills”, or careers, or any concrete goal; the role of education has to be to teach people things. Kind of hysterically, that we are being kept from our core faculties and possibilities by the overwhelming but shallow pleasures derived from technology is the whole point of Toy Story 5. The problem, as my 7 year old cousin pointed out after we left the movie theater, is that the movie tries to sell what it is condemning; it’s an entertainment product playing on a screen saying to go play outside instead of being entertained by a screen. This mirrors the problems with the idea that education has to justify its own existence in “functional” terms like skills or careers, or that it has to adopt an explicitly anti humanistic system of goals and speech norms to continue existing: the two are equally hypocritical and equally unconvincing. This line of argument can’t fool someone who can barely read and write; it shouldn’t fool people who write for prestigious publications.

The most successful prosecution of the case for a humanistic education comes from Daniel Walden at the Chronicle: defending explicitly the Great Books tradition from an explicitly left wing perspective (featuring the unbearable tedium of Paulo Freire), he makes an explicitly humanistic case for the humanities: “It is not snobbish to say that a person with lungs must breathe or that a person with a stomach must eat, nor that a person with a mind must think. It is not snobbish to show someone how to love something new — it is a gift”; additionally, “We reclaim our humanity by laboring, by doing what is proper to rational and social creatures, and what is most proper to us — what is most uniquely our own — is the depth of cognition made possible by language and the extended social life to which language gives birth. We are most human when we are thinking together, and only by doing this and habituating ourselves toward doing it can we change the circumstances that deprive us of this shared humanity.”. The case to be made here is not that a humanistic education is valuable in terms of skills or that a humanistic education is valuable because “valuable” is defined in humanistic terms; rather, it’s valuable because it engages the most fundamental human abilities in the ways and spaces that they ought to be engaged with.

This refusal to accept the most fundamental human ability, the ability to think, and to offload it to computer programs and machinery is mirrored by another refusal, the refusal to accept the equality of these abilities to all humans, not in fact, but in principle. At the same time as humans are giving up what makes them humans for comfort and pleasure, they are accepting the separation of humans into human and animal; into people with rights and people without them; into “elites” and mindless masses. The original point I was thinking to make was about the explosion of eugenics talk, of people calling others “cattle” and insisting that an illustrated liberal elite had to take absolute control over society. The fantasy of the technocratic despot is as old as the idea of technocracy; of course, very rarely you get an educated technocratic despot; most of the time you get a midwitted thug like Moses, whose ideas were not particularly original and whose all-powerful force was… completely irrelevant, given how no other city had its own Robert Moses but all of them had their own slum clearances and giant highways.

Yes I love Magdalena Bay. I saw them live on Friday and had a great time. So now you all have to hear about it.

The most important dynamic of 2026, as far as I can tell, is the backlash against artificial intelligence. AI is the topic that keeps on giving people something to talk about, and it’s a topic I’ve written about it a few times already by now: about its labor market impact, impact on gender, AI and cheating, its impact on loneliness, its impact on cities, and whether it’s a bubble, as well as a recent post about “AGI” and consciousness and how it relates to AI effecting the real world that I’m particularly proud of.

To add to the river of ink already spilled on the matter, Pope Leo XIV recently published his first encylical, Magnifica Humanitas (Latin for “Wonderful Humanity”), on the relationship between humanity and artificial intelligence. An encyclical is, more or less, a letter by the Pope address to the entire Catholic community on a matter of high importance. The Pope’s encyclical largely focused on two topics: AI and the “social question”, and AI and war. The latter is for another day, but the former is interesting enough on its own: the Pope’s take, unsurprisingly, is that human dignity and wellbeing has to take precedence over technological advancement, and that economic growth has to be paired with environmental preservation and social justice (understood as distributive justice). So far, so good.

Something that literally everyone noted is that the Pope signed the encyclical exactly 135 years after a different encyclical: Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”) by Pope, you’ll be surprised here, Leo XIII. Rerum Novarum was largely about the social question, and established Catholic Social Teaching; it was also the Church’s first opinion on the Industrial Revolution, and that opinion was that worker’s rights were good and industrial capitalism crushing the spirits of millions was bad.

The Catholic Church declaring the Butlerian Crusade or whatever the Pope did caught me while reading a very weird book: Rudiger Safranski’s Romanticism: A German Affair, a book about, big shocker here, the history of the Romantic movement in Germany. It’s very good and I highly recommend it. I found it interesting because Safranski has a central idea he drags through 250 years of Romantic thought: Romanticism was, at its core, a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism and instead a preference for infinity, the organic, authenticity, and community. The book starts with the main predecessor of German Romanticism: Sturm und Drang, “Storm and Will”, a movement in the late 19th century that sought to confront a world in complete political upheaval from the French and American Revolutions. The two main figures are Johann von Herder and Johann von Goethe; both were, at first, idealistic optimists, but over time diverged. Herder was a liberal universalist: his story began traveling from Riga (then around the border between Sweden, Russia, and Prussia; now in Latvia) to Strasbourg to meet Goethe; during his trip he collected folk songs from the people he encountered. His main ideas were about language, history, and nation: language determined worldview because all worldview is done through language; history is about the interplay between worldviews and the objective world, and has a tendency to progress over time; and nations are comprised of only one people, rather than classes of people, and are united by language and tradition, which are the same thing. His latter two views led him to ardently support the French Revolution, a position that drove him apart from Goethe: the other German was skeptical of religion and nationalism, was not particularly attached to Christianity, and instead wanted to focus inward, on the self, and on nature.

The central tension between Goethe and Herder was the tension between the individual and the collective and between politics and contemplation; these distinctions would come to define the two centuries of Romantic thought. Romanticism, as Safranski notes in his introduction, has countless contradictions: with and over religion, in love with both the past and the future, with the ordinary and extraordinary, with dreams, madness, and introspection; it is both nostalgic and cynical; ironic and exalted; and self-involved and communitarian. The best definition of Romanticism, then, comes from poet Novalis (real name Georg von Herdenberg, other professions salt mine engineer):

The world must be romanticized. In this way its original meaning will be rediscovered. (…) Insofar as I give a higher meaning to what is commonplace, and a mysterious appearance to what is ordinary, the dignity of the unknown to what is known, a semblance of infinity to what is finite, I romanticize it.

Safranski aims at distinguishing between Romanticism as a precise literary movement, concentrated in the first two decades of the 19th century, and the “romantic spirit”; to do this, he mostly relies on four other thinkers: British political philosopher Isaiah Berlin, conservative American political philosopher Eric Voegelin, Hungarian Frankfurt School Marxist Gyorgy Lukacs, and a blog regular, the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. Berlin’s very famous 1965 book The Roots of Romanticism argues that the Romantic spirit constituted a profound shift in human consciouness centered on rejecting the Enlightenment view that there was only a singular, universal truth graspable through reason; the Romantics, in contrast, reveled in subjectivism and self expression, and focused on a heroic individual yearning for infinity. Voegelin’s critique is a lot less explicit: he believed currents like Romanticism were replacing God and Christianity with worshipping humanity itself by exalting individuality, subjective feeling, and artistry, which in turn was rooted in a profound alienation from the existing world and a desire to forcibly create a new, perfect reality. In contrast, Lukacs, befitting of a Marxist, gave a materialist critique in his 1945 essay Romanticism: he saw it as a burgeois movement of the intelligentsia that rebelled against the mass displacement of people during the transition to industrial capitalism. However, the Romantics were themselves burgeois, and their struggle was to turn all human endeavor into a subjective, artistic process - a process that was frequently used in service of the preservation of feudalism and reaction. Lukacs understood German Romanticism as a German response to the French Revolution - a response that sought to prevent such a Revolution from happening in Germany. Finally, Carl Schmitt’s lesser known 1919 book Political Romanticism was also a critique of Romanticism, one centered on its political dimension: because Romanticism treats the entire world as an aesthetic object and centers its emotional aspect, Schmitt believed it produced political passivity and an inability to act or decide politically. The Romantic is thus an “occasionalist”, someone who uses every event as an “occasion” for their own self-expression and aesthetic enjoyment.

The four are synthetized in Romanticism A German Affair: for Safranski, the movement was too complex to say it either promoted or didn’t promote revolution or reaction; but he, in large part, believes all four authors have something worth saying. For Safranski, Romanticism was a reaction to the Enlightenment, particularly to what Max Weber described as “disenchantment”: a world without magic, where everything is understood but nothing is valued. Weber was worried this would work as an “iron cage” (or a “cog in a machine”) where people know exactly what they’re doing but not why or what for; this should produce, in turn, problems legitimizing convictions that people hold anyways, which Weber compared to a polytheistic religion where all the gods are at war against each other - resulting in basically interminable paralysis when people want to take meaningful stances (“sensualists without heart” and “specialists without spirit”). Weber saw modernity as the process of rationalization, the replacement of all traditional and charismatic modes of life with calculation, efficiency, and universal rules grounded in logic; and the Romantics were standing athwart rationalization yelling STOP. Romanticism is always a reaction to modernity: Hegel and Marx were both influenced by the Romantic spirit and believers in technical and rational progress (for Marx, the development of the forces of production; for Hegel, the development of the rational spirit). However, both Schmitt and Lukacs fail to realize the potential of the Romantic spirit for action: extolling individuality, autonomy, and self expression also provided a boost for certain revolutionary spirits, particularly those of Richard Wagner (in his early days) and Friedrich Nietszche.

For Safranski, Romanticism emerged in a context in which people felt like their daily lives were completely administered and “known”, and where the broader world was completely impassive to their actions: the Age of Revolution came and went, and was followed by the Industrial Revolution (here’s where friend of the blog Karl Polanyi comes up). Raymond Williams’s 1958 book Culture and Society, 1780–1950 deals with this topic: for him, the idea of “culture” (as a whole way of life) emerged as a response to the Industrial Revolution and the inhuman forces it wrought upon the world; to Williams, industrialism displaced the way of living and being that people had taken part in for centuries in a way that prompted them to create a criticism of industrialization through humanistic ethics. In particular, he pinpoints the start of this tradition with the British Romantics, who (like their German brethren) saw culture as the spirit of the people in contrast to the product of machines - think of William Blake describing factories as “dark satanic mills” that reduced life to its mechanical components, as well as Wordsworth and Coleridge trying to rescue human feeling and the organic world from both factories and rationalization.

The relationship between Romanticism and politics was one of its most fraught components. As we’ve seen with Marx and Herder (as well as Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Feuerbach, among others) the onus placed on action, self expression, autonomy, and peoplehood was a source of emancipatory politics, particularly in the 19th century. However, the political ramifications of Romantic thought were largely, as Lukacs cautioned, reactionary: the latter Romantics, particularly after Nietszche and Wagner, grew increasingly antidemocratic, militaristic, and antisemitic, as part of their obsession with the organic nature of the nation, its religious and cultural unity, and their irrationalism. There is a spectre haunting German Romanticism, both because it’s German and especially because it’s Romantic: the spectre of Nazism. Hitler and Goebbels took an enormous amount of inspiration from Hoffman and especially Wagner, as well as Goete, Hölderlin, and even Heine; at the same time, they considered that Romanticism was too aesthetic and too introspective to be the basis for an Aryan superman. The rejection of rationality and universalism coupled with the absolute rationalization of life and the economy struck many people as contradictory; the same reasons that attracted Martin Heidegger to the Nazi Party (its focus on the nation and its people, its organicity, and its rejection of the instrumentalization of human life) are what the scholars of the Frankfurt School criticized of it. As I’ve noted in the past, Herbert Marcuse and Heidegger had the exact same criticism of technology as a system of social organization, and yet one was a Nazi and one was so opposed to the Reich he joined the OSS (predecessor of the CIA) to fight them.

This is what brings us to the present. I’ve noted, in the past, that Romanticism is the source of both wokeness and the reactionary spirit. Romanticism, with its emphasis on self-expression, authenticity, and self determination in the face of a hopeless and oppressive world, was a perfect conduit for the political current now known as Wokeness. The criticism that wokeness was “narcissistic” and about egotistical grievances (espoused by, say, Bari Weiss’s wife) is exactly the same as Carl Schmitt and Lukacs said about the Romantics. Woke essentialism is, like centrists try fruitlessly to claim, similar to groyper essentialism: not because one caused the other, but because both are Romantic; the Romanticism of national liberation was also the Romanticism of pastoral critics of urban modernity which, over time, led to it providing some of the central imagery of the early 20th century Völkisch movement. The Völkisch movement was crucial to establishing the Nazi Party. In Spain, both Federico Garcia Lorca and Rafael Sanchez Mazas were influenced by Romanticism - with traditional, medieval, and Catholic themes being valorized in their highly emotional work. However, that was where the similarities end: Garcia Lorca was executed by a Francoist firing squad for being gay, republican, and vaguely anticapitalist, while Sanchez Mazas defined himself as “the first fascist in Spain” to a trio of small-town goat herders to secure food and shelter while fleeing his own botched execution by his republican captors.

There’s two reasons to dredge up Romanticism at this time. The first is to ascertain the discussion over fascism: if at least some of contemporary right wing political action is fascism (and I believe it is), then they could have similar origins and intellectual trajectories, and be responding to similar social maladies. The other is that people are, increasingly, discussing it: fellow Substack blogger Ted Gioia wrote about Romanticism as a factor emerging from AI in 2023 (very prescient); author Ross Barkan wrote about it for The Guardian in late 2023 and at further length in 2025 on his Substack; economist Martha Gimbel wrote about Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell on Bloomberg. The common thread here is that we live in a time of unprecedented political upheaval, enormous economic transformations, and also a drastic shift towards rationalization of life: what would any of the men I’ve mentioned think of tech entrepreneur Garry Tan saying people are ready to worship AGI as their God?

The backlash against AI is real and serious, as well as central to politics in the next decade. People don’t just see their livelihoods threatened - they see their whole way of life under serious assault, with people like Sam Altman proposing selling them our intelligence and renting it back on a meter. I’ve written pretty extensively about Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein as being mainly about artificial intelligence; it should be noted that the book was written in 1818, right in the zenith of the First Industrial Revolution, but also at the time of another earthquake for human self-understanding: per philosopher Thomas Moynihan’s X-Risk, (a book about the history of the Apocalypse in human thinking),the book came right around the time of two major humblers of the human race: Georges Cuvier’s discovery of past mass extinction events, and Pierre de Maupertuis and Georges Buffon’s theory of the evolution of species, which focused on “superior” creatures displacing “inferior” ones. This pointed to something seemingly inevitable: that humans could be replaced by creatures we create. In Frankenstein, the monster isn’t considered a corpse or a deformed human - he’s considered a different species, and Victor Frankenstein’s refusal to create him a bride comes from a reluctance to populate Earth with a “race of demons” who will kill and replace humans.

The other thing I think sets German Romanticism apart is its emphasis on loneliness and social alienation. In Madame de Stael’s Allemagne, Safranski notes, she points out that the Germans live too far apart and in too small towns to have real social and community institutions. The lack of urban centers and the small scale of social life meant that Germany wasn’t made up of a single political community, but rather of countless small autocracies containing little private worlds, which could, yes, produce great individual characters, but not a mass movement. Without a more community-focused political culture, Safranski notes, the political imagination would develop exclusively around the individual and its sublime, idyllic, radical, or secretive beliefs. It is also worth highlighting the fascination that the Romantics had with secret societies, secret cabals, and secret clubs: Goethe was a member of the Illuminati, multiple of his disciples were freemasons, and secret societies and their machinations play major roles in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister as well as Jean Paul’s Titan, Achim von Arnim’s The Crown Guardians, and Ludwig Tieck’s William Lovell. Of course, both of these are major, central factors of modern political life: conspiracy theories, and loneliness and social alienation.

So we have a full bingo: major political upheaval and transformation, mass economic precarity and looming displacement, a cult of reason threatening to tear up the entire world for the sake of technical progress, loneliness and alienation, conspiracy theories, an obsession with the “organic” and the “natural”. In a world in which people are increasingly measuring their every waking moment, comparing themselves to flimsy “objective” targets, and just all around controlling and optimizing every second of their existence, something has got to give. Where we’re going, everything is romantic.

Postscript: to quote the song that gives this post its title, I will be “on a hotel bed / hungover on Tokyo time” soon, because I’m leaving for a trip to Japan for a few weeks. So take that as a vacation.

I was a sailor
I was a sailor, and now I'm a boat
I was a car
I was a car, and now I'm the road
And I was kneeling on the turnpike
With an angel down my throat
She said "You don't know what it's like
To bow down, down, down to Maria's dead bones"

Geese, “Bow Down”

As you might have known if you’re not a hermit Luddite or have been in a coma since 2021, the hot new technology of the day is Artificial Intelligence, or AI. I’ve written about it a few times already by now (about its labor market impact, impact on gender, AI and cheating, its impact on loneliness, its impact on cities, and whether it’s a bubble) and will probably continue writing about it for the coming years, until either I get tired of it, you get tired of it, or AI renders “writing” and “reading” completely moot as actions (or leads to the extinction of humanity).

The big question right now is whether AI is a “normal” technology: the debate is extremely technical (and boring) but, in a nutshell, that people are overshooting the mark on the imminent utopia or dystopia: AI will just be a regular general purpose technology, like the internet, which will technologically develop over time, those capabilities will be adapted and adopted by businesses also over time, and those adaptations and adoptions will show up in the real world economic data also over time. The best such example comes from a regularly viral graph from an article by John Thornhill at the Financial Times : implementation of AI will lead to GDP per capita of 500,000 dollars (in a post-scarcity post-singularity world), 0 dollars (because all humans go extinct), or something like 0.5% more per year for twenty years (the “normal technology” case). Quoting him, “In a good case, that superintelligence could trigger a massive rise in GDP and end scarcity. In a bad one, it could lead to the rise of malevolent machines and end humanity. There was, the authors noted, little empirical evidence behind either of these extreme scenarios, although some economists have been exploring both possibilities.”

What a banal, reasonable position to have! The counterpoint is what’s known as Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI: the idea that AI will, in the near future, become fully conscious and equally smart to a human, at which point it will become able to improve itself independently (after all, it was humans who created AI) and will rapidly surpass human ability (called recursive self-improvement or RSI). The people who believe in AGI have, by and large, been the most aggressively bullish on AI, and also the more correct over the last few years. One group that believes in AGI are the managers of OpenAI, who put out a paper titled AI 2027 last year about how AGI will exist in 18 months or so and if the government makes Sam Altman pay minimum wage it will be the perfidious Chinese who control it. Another such group wants to restrain AGI: their most prominent figurehead is Eliezer Yudkowsky, a philosopher (citation needed) who has advocated for bombing data centers and whose book on the subject is, pretty self explanatorily, titled If Anyone Builds It We All Die. The “normal technology” debate is, in reality, a debate about two other questions: the first is whether AGI is coming at all (it’s worth noting that not even the term AGI itself is uncontroversial), and the second is what’s known as alignment1, that is, how we can manage to keep it on “our side”. One of the scenarios people like Yudkowsky like to bring up is an Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) that is programmed to build paperclips; the ASI could, inadvertently, destroy all living humans as well as every planet it encounters to break it down into minerals it uses to build paperclips.

Whether AGI is possible at all, whether it is happening soon, and whether we’ll all get turned into a substance known as computronium so the universe’s biggest gaming laptop can run GTA VII seems to be the most important question in human history. Let’s take a crack at it.

Normal “people”

The question of whether AI is a normal technology has the question of human employability embedded into it, and vice versa. A good decade ago, a very viral video on the topic was titled (or was re-titled recently) “What Happened To Horses Is Happening To Us” tried to answer the question of whether humans would be replaced with AI and robots by analogizing, well, humans with horses: back in the 19th century, basically every sector of the economy needed horses to function (as transportation or farm animals), but the invention of the internal combustion engine led to the horse population dropping from 27 million to 3 million over 40 years or so. Humanity, thus, is doomed to the same fact once AI gets good enough to replace human labor.

Well, it should be good enough now, give or take, to replace a lot of labor. Has it? No. You’ll typically hear statistics like “80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by the introduction of LLMs, while approximately 19% of workers may see at least 50% of their tasks impacted”. Well, what does this mean? It means that around eighty percent of people could have up to a tenth of their work tasks impacted. But note that we’re talking about tasks. We’re not talking about jobs. This is one of the most delicate distinctions in contemporary labor economics: a job is, in fact, a bundle of tasks, which can get taken out and replaced at the task level. Automation can reduce the demand of labor for one task, but it can also create a demand for labor doing a different task - or it can just reduce the demand for labor altogether if there’s no new task. A good example are travel agents: the number of travel agents declined strongly, in large part because most of their tasks became completely superfluous with the internet; however, most does not mean all, and the smaller number that still work mostly handle high-end travel experiences. In contrast to a job where “finding flights and hotels” was the core set of tasks, it was briefly believed in the past that calculators would automate accounting - except, of course, the tax code is enormously complicated, so the accounting business appears to be doing as well as ever. The most obvious problem with estimates about how exposed a job is to AI is whether the estimates are, themselves, good or not, which like every single claim made by anyone in an economics journal ever results in an extremely dweeby dispute over econometrics, in this case whether AI generating job exposure self-assessments does actually produce reliable self-assesments (it doesn’t).

There’s a series of other problems: the first is that the tasks are obviously not independent of one another. There’s very few people who, say, do spreadsheets but not powerpoints and instead they wash the dishes. And because the tasks are complementary with each other, that typically means that exposure isn’t really as straightforward as picking one task off after another. To go back to travel agents, there’s obvious synergy between booking flights and booking hotels in a way that a technology that can automate booking flights can also automate booking hotels; in contrast, a technology that can automate arithmetic can’t automate the tax code because the tasks of doing task preparation are very different to just running a spreadsheet. You need to know, for starters, what taxes you’re supposed to pay.

The story about the bundles of tasks can clarify a lot of really curious issues, like why the evidence on whether AI increases productivity or decreases employment is so convoluted. There’s not a lot of evidence of large-scale job loss, and the evidence of job loss there is is in pretty limited segments of the economy. In particular, there’s a lot of nuances there, the first of which is that late 2022 onwards was not a very macroeconomically optimal moment to be doing regressions on industries that are very sensitive to interest rates. The other main reason is that there’s not a lot to say about what AI can do for a specific job without doing that job yourself: a recent study , for example, finds that most of the time savings from an AI related experiment came from spending less time reading and writing emails. This isn’t really the whole story, though. The evidence basically points to (in the broadest possible aggregates) modest productivity gains, not many employment losses, and a lot of confusion by business leaders and union personnel around where exactly AI is supposed to go next. Looking at Europe and the United States, there appears to be a linked between AI use and productivity, but with very important differences built around worker demographics, firm composition, and personnel practices; there appear to be some gains in time spent on tasks, but does not seem like major employment changes appear one way or the other. Similarly, another recent paper surveys business executives, and agains finds extremely heterogenous rates of adoption, productivity gains that are smaller than reported (in some cases because of delayed revenue realization), little evidence of employment declines, and reallocation of labor within and between firms away from clerical work and towards more technical labor instead.

There’s two things to explain. The first is why AI adoption is such a let down in terms of aggregate economics effects. The second is the exact opposite, why AI is kind of a mixed bag at the individual level. Let’s start with the broader effect: why is AI everywhere except the productivity statistics, to paraphrase Robert Solow’s famous quote about the internet?2 Well, the basic economic theory is that AI is what’s known as a GPT, or General Purpose Technology (completely unrelated to ChatGPT, which means Generative Pre-trained Transformer). GPTs typically have a specific cycle of adoption, where they increase productivity in two “rounds”, once when they’re created and adopted by high-end techie types and later on as they mature and get more embedded into the economy; the latter part typically features a lot of “intangible assets” like intellectual property and organizational techniques, which make it so investment is really hard to measure in mature digital technologies. If you look at the historical record, what happens with new technologies is that “new” occupations typically involve generational turnover and more educational content, that also are rewarded with higher wages, though declining over time and very specifically related to place. This means that as segments of the economy transform, their workforces transform by replacing older workers with newer people, and those people, crucially, do different things than the people they replace. If you look at the “original” AI, the machine learning boomlet of the late 2010s, there’s a pretty consistent J-Curve pattern, with interesting firm-level trends: adjustments are very costly in the short term, are usually higher still for older businesses, being early is important, and reworking your internal structure is a big part of the costs.

One of my major pet peeves about AI: most of the people who talk about AI discourse are part of exactly two industries where AI seems to be really good for productivity: things that involve a lot of computer programming, and things that involve a lot of research-heavy writing - the former is kind of obvious (because everyone who is near a computer will tell you about it), and the second is supported by evidence: writing, analyzing documents, and looking up information are the main uses of generative AI in the US workforce (that paper, by the way, also finds not-revolutionary productivity gains and very limited displacement). In both cases, AI tools do really improve productivity and maybe even boost quality, at least by reducing human error. AI appears to be just as likely as me to mix up two papers about housing prices, or not understand a famous incident of 1990s police brutality, to name two examples. But I’ll talk a little bit about work: I don’t typically do either at my job, and when we met with some AI people to figure out automation, we mostly realized it would be really difficult because all of the data is embedded in a system that doesn’t work with AI. The main reason for that is that it’s a lot easier to link between files that way, but AI is also very hard to integrate into workflow a lot more deeply than “ChatGPT, generate a few slides”. At its core, the fact that discourse about AI is directed by people who either use it really differently to everyone else or whose jobs are really different (“symbolic capitalist” jobs in media, academia, etc. usually involve a lot less micromanagement) means that most people get a really biased view of how they can use AI.

This leads to the other issue: how it affects individual level performance, for which the previous paragraph is kind of obvious. What you use AI for is by far the most important part of what AI can do for you, so to speak. Some of it is that some tasks need a lot of monitoring based on changing real-world circumstances a human just has a much easier time navigating than a computer program. The broader aspect that plays a role here is the “jagged frontier” of the technology: in experiments using AI assistance, the kinds of tasks that get productivity gains don’t really seem to have a clear relationship to the complexity of the task. Some tasks are done very easily by AI, and others are hindered by using it at all, given how bad AI output ends up being. Even experienced professionals could not reliably predict which tasks were outside the frontier before trying them, and typically they just accepted whatever AI gave them even if it was not good work. Another paper looks at the role AI can play in scientific research: AI’s main value proposition, to borrow the language of its insufferable creators, is augmenting the search process to turn a research idea into a proper strategy. Say you have an idea for a new medicine: you could have a niche AI model look into a lot of prospective candidates for drugs instead of looking for them one by one yourself, which is enormously time consuming. Scientists, when they undertake research, don't even know which search strategies will work, such that AI changes the process of searching, but not the fundamental uncertainty that is where to search. The authors think the process has three steps: generating questions (“novel, testable hypotheses”), searching and designing potential solutions, and interpreting the results, particularly when they’re ambiguous. To the authors of the paper, the first step is the crucial, and most human one: people have a lot of creativity and can choose problems very creatively compared to AI. However, looking for patterns in very big sets of data is a lot easier for computers than humans, and dealing with tricky results is more a human than a computer skill.

We can generalize a bit more broadly, because there seem to be recurring factors: the capabilities of AI appear to be mostly in carrying out very concrete, systematic tasks, but the direction of the tasks it carries out appears to be an inherently human act. This all brings me to probably the most interesting paper on AI I’ve read in a while, titled “Planning under Diagnostic Uncertainty: Question-Driven Learning in the Age of AI” (scintillating) by Andrew Caplin. Caplin is part of the subfield known as “cognitive economics”, which mainly explores the question of how people think and feel - it’s kind of similar to behavioral economics, but focuses inwards rather than outwards. The term comes from “Cognitive Psychology”, a school pioneered in the mid 20th century to go a step further than behaviorism (which studied only observable behavior to move away from the subjectivism of psychoanalysis) and look directly inside the black box - how do people think (including memory, attention, perception, and retention) and how do those thought and emotional processes affect their actions?

Caplin’s paper is about questions, which appear to be the main way to engage with AI. I, as mentioned, use it for my job (a regular office job, not research, not academia, not journalism, no “messenger class” “symbolic capitalism” stuff), and the way to go is to make the correct prompt. Caplin’s goal, then, is to determine basically an economic theory of Q&A - not necessarily the process of using answers, but rather how to obtain them in the first place. Caplin models it as two steps: one in which one learns about the world, and one in which ones figures out what questions to ask, which are a bit of a black box but let’s move beyond that one (the third step is obviously obtaining the answers). His approach is, as one expects from an economist, really structured: the important part of the process is how people decide which questions to ask before asking, particularly because they don’t know whether an answer would be useful - which stands out from a lot of economic models where the structure of information is known or where the unknowns are known. In contrast, Caplin thinks knowing how to obtain useful information is the most relevant step - you can have a lot of information but not know what to ask. This concept, where the central issue is which questions generate useful answer, is known as diagnostic uncertainty in the paper, because the uncertainty isn’t in the generation of answers, but in the step before that - in using background information about the world to produce questions. The uncertainty isn’t in the relationship between decisions and payoffs, but between information and questions to reveal those relationships. Caplin uses the example of someone who wants to change careers and, let’s follow one of my favorite tv shows, Gilmore Girls, and look at Rory’s decision to become a writer: her whole life she prepared for it by looking up what kinds of jobs she should get in order to advance a certain career path, what education she needed, what kind of intellectual background she should develop, etc. But she never really asked how she could be a good writer, which was why Mitchum Huntsberger saying she didn’t have it in herself to be a journalist was so devastating (also because he was a dick about it).

Anyways, so we start with an informational structure that is itself unknown, and where the relevant questions are part of a finite set (just to get actual replies; however the list of possible questions is, of course, infinite, even restricting to coherent ones3), where the diagnostic structure is a rule that determines how questions generate answers, meaning, the process by which “what pet should I get” produces either “cat”, “dog”, “fish”, “turtle”, “none”, and so on. Refining a question, that is, thinking harder about the topic to ask a more detailed question (in the context of LLMs, writing a better prompt) is the most important part of the process, and the cognitive load of refinement is the scarce resource. This also extends to just learning more about how to produce good outcomes in an LLM - I use it for translations and a lot of the time you need to give a very lengthy and detailed paragraph about who the translation is for, what kind of language you want to use, how you want to handle certain terms, etc., that one you figure out you can just copy and paste.

Anyways Caplin’s paper says there’s two outcomes for the question refinement problem: either you ask once and the “decisive” question just gets you the exact answer you want (which is random but you can’t keep infinitely asking the same thing over and over again), or one in which you ask multiple questions the order of which matters - think asking too broadly about “business conditions in Canada” instead of “rules and regulations as well as macroeconomic that affect sector XYZ” and having to whittle down; of course, an early mistake can just drag down your whole pursuit. Because AI has answers for basically 0 cost, the constraint on decisionmaking shifts from the cost of finding information to the cost of asking the correct questions in the correct order, with three core “skills”: generating good questions, interpreting the answers to see if 1) they are the decisive answer, and 2) what further question you can ask to keep the inquiry rolling; and finally, anticipating where your question is taking an AI and what future questions can keep the ball rolling, so to speak. This creates new inequalities (“When answers are abundant, differences in how individuals structure inquiry become more consequential. Individuals with similar access to technology may nevertheless achieve very different outcomes, depending on their planning discipline and their ability to allocate attention to the most informative lines of inquiry”) and, in particular, helps clear up a lot of the confusion between tasks and answers - basically, AI doesn’t perform tasks, it answers questions, and the issue of automation emerges depending on whether asking questions can be automated and whether turning answers into actions can be automated too.

Sidenote I: catechesis

Who’s the highest profile AI critic on the planet? You might say Yudkowsky, or someone like Ed Zitron, or if you’re terminally online a philosopher like Emily Bender. Well, I live in the real world and not on Twitter, and over here, the most prominent figure to oppose AI is the man who the people of Chicago call DA POPE. The Pope’s very name, Leo XIV, is a reference to how central the concern about AI is to his papacy: the last Pope Leo (no points for guessing the number) was primarily concerned with the issue of the Industrial Revolution and how it related to the major social questions of the time.

Leo XIV’s inaugural address to the College of Cardinals featured a mention of how AI would “pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor”, suprisingly strong wording for a priest, and in contrast to the more muted terms in which the late Pope Francis talked about the technology: at the January 2025 Davos conference, Francis said:

There is, however, the risk that AI will be used to advance the “technocratic paradigm”, which perceives all the world’s problems as solvable through technological means alone. Within this paradigm, human dignity and fraternity are frequently subordinated in the pursuit of efficiency, as though reality, goodness, and truth inherently emanate from technological and economic power. Yet human dignity must never be violated for the sake of efficiency. Technological developments that do not improve life for everyone, but instead create or worsen inequalities and conflicts, cannot be called true progress. For this reason, AI should be placed at the service of a healthier, more human, more social and more integral development.

The previous pontiff’s perspective on the question of AI was pretty straightforward: it’s a “normal” technology where the normal concerns apply: loss of connection, loss of meaning, and loss of material wellbeing, as well as deepening inequalities between the rich and poor. In contrast, the current Pope has other, deeper concerns about the technology, as said in his June 2025 message to the Second Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Corporate Governance:

… the Church wishes to contribute to a serene and informed discussion of these pressing questions by stressing above all the need to weigh the ramifications of AI in light of the “integral development of the human person and society” (Note Antiqua et Nova, 6). This entails taking into account the well-being of the human person not only materially, but also intellectually and spiritually; it means safeguarding the inviolable dignity of each human person and respecting the cultural and spiritual riches and diversity of the world’s peoples. (...)

(…) Generative AI has opened new horizons on many different levels, including enhancing research in healthcare and scientific discovery, but also raises troubling questions on its possible repercussions on humanity’s openness to truth and beauty, on our distinctive ability to grasp and process reality. Acknowledging and respecting what is uniquely characteristic of the human person is essential to the discussion of any adequate ethical framework for the governance of AI.

The Pope’s core issue with AI, which he returns to again and again, is the loss of a human connection to its own cognitive abilities - and, particularly, the ability to interpret reality (and, obviously, Scripture). His message this year, on the World Day of Communications, is titled “Preserving Human Voices and Faces”:

By simulating human voices and faces, wisdom and knowledge, consciousness and responsibility, empathy and friendship, the systems known as artificial intelligence not only interfere with information ecosystems, but also encroach upon the deepest level of communication, that of human relationships.

The challenge, therefore, is not technological, but anthropological. Safeguarding faces and voices ultimately means safeguarding ourselves. Embracing the opportunities offered by digital technology and artificial intelligence with courage, determination and discernment does not mean turning a blind eye to critical issues, complexities and risks.

Do not renounce your ability to think

This is a pretty obvious position for any Pope to take for a fairly simple reason: the Catholic Church has, historically, taken a pretty tough line on interpreting scripture: only the Church can do it. The early Church, all the way to the Renaissance, operated by a unified “diagnostic certainty”: based on the teachings of Saint Augustine (and I’ll be as succint as possible here), the interpretation of scripture was oriented around the distinction between the thing represented versus how it’s represented, all guided by the underlying value of love towards God and neighbor. This task, particularly how to apply divine love to interpreting extremely dense blocks of text about dietary rules, is one that the Church more or less monopolized: interpretation was given a communal (because no one person could get it all right), and thus an authoritative character.

The Church’s all-encompassing grasp over the understanding of the world suffered two major blows in the 16th and 17th centuries: first, the hodgepodge of events known as either the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and/or the Scientific Revolution, where it persecuted and even executed people who disagreed with the official religious line on scientific questions. The case of Galileo Gaililei (brainrot name if there is one) stands out because of how obviously the underlying issue was about interpretive method: should scripture be read as a scientific text? The Church's initial answer was yes, because of the teachings of Aquinas (who I am NOT getting into) and Bible passages like Joshua, where God commanding the sun to stand still were understood to be straightforwardly geocentric. The other major event was, of course, the Protestant Reformation, where the Church fought fiercely against Martin Luther’s position that every person should be allowed to read the Bible in their own native language: to Luther, scripture interpreted itself and thus the individual believer could access its plain meaning directly. At the Council of Trent, in contrast, the Church officially decreed that Luther’s “democratic” interpretation was bogus, that only the Roman Apostolic Church had the right to interpret scripture as well as the equal standing of certain pieces of church tradition with scripture in terms of authority (as well as less important stuff like indulgences and music). Anyways both of these were settled with a bit more nuance at the Second Vatican Council, which I am also NOT getting into.

But this opens the question - the Pope is, beyond a Pope, also a member of the Augustinian order, aka, the people most directly influenced by Saint Augustine. What’s the influence there? TO BE CONTINUED (one section down)

It’s a nice room I just wasn’t expecting it to be Chinese

So, to go back to Mister Caplin, we’ve managed to turn the question of AI into the question of whether asking questions can be automated and whether the question of interpreting answers can be automated. I think this is beyond the pay level of economics: we have to turn, as this blog has countless times over the last few years, to philosophy.

The main analogy used is the Chinese Room thought experiment. The Chinese Room (which is a nice room, I just wasn’t expecting it) basically proposes a system where a single room has a series of very detailed books that can answer every question in Chinese with an accurate or at least coherent sentence so, for instance, 谁是史上最伟大的球员 could get 勒布朗·詹姆斯 in response. Assume it’s somehow feasible that the Chinese Room exists. What John Searle, the philosopher who created the Chinese Room, wanted to ask was: imagine if the person operating the Chinese Room wasn’t a Chinese Speaker, but rather an English speaker who does not know Chinese and cannot learn it; if they successfully operated the Room to answer a series of random questions accurately (saying either 勒布朗·詹姆斯 or 迈克尔·乔丹, or 凯特琳·克拉克 if they’re very woke). The Chinese Room was insanely controversial as an argument, because Searle did not believe the Room could actually speak Chinese (if it answered 科比·布莱恩特 it is clearly not capable of sentient thought) but could not really articulate why very well or very convincingly - the room as a system was clearly capable of speaking Chinese rather well, and he basically tried to use a biologicist answer about consciousness that 1) was wrong, and 2) was stupid.

There’s, roughly speaking, three major branches of philosophy: Marxist (not that useful here4), analytic, and continental. Analytic philosophy focuses on solving major questions either via more careful use of language or through extremely rigorous use of formal logic and mathematics; the two premises kind of imply that all major questions in human thinking can be settled by doing away with ambiguous wording or confusion and then doing a math problem with the resulting terms. Continental philosophy, in contrast, focuses more on the human experience and the relationship between meaning and context; the core process is interpretation. Most philosophers who work on AI, at least on a professional level in the tech industry, are part of a “school of thought” known as analytic philosophy. Amanda Askell, the chief philosopher of Anthropic (the parent company of Claude), is famously an analytic philosopher. Many companies, Anthropic main among them, rely on these philosophers for important questions like alignment on ethical questions, to which I’ll return to in a little bit, but with one major area of focus - questions like “what kind of relationship to technology as a way of framing the world should society have” are both crucial for AI and also not very prevalent in the analytic canon.

John Searle was an analytic philosopher too, and as such, his response relied on, you guessed it, intentionality_ the property of mental states that are directed towards something - so, for instance, if you want coffee, your want is drected at coffee, which also means there are conditions by which you can have the coffee you want. Some intentionality is intrinsic (you wanting coffee) and some is derived (a piece of paper where you write I want coffee); the latter kind isn’t really intentional in any real sense. You won’t guess where Searle takes it - the Chinese Room’s statements contain only derived intentionality and as such don’t evidence true consciousness, because consciousness is necessary for intentionality via wishy washy biological causal abilities. Importantly, intentional states exist in a background, a variety of unconscious intentional abilities and habits that make mental states legible - if you say “I want to go to the coffee shop for coffee and a cookie”, you need to know what all of those mean, whether you like each thing, where the coffee shop is, how to pay for it, what money is, how ordering a coffee works, how to walk, how to speak, etc.

Searle’s problem is that he’s trying to ground consciousness on the notion that you didn’t fall out of a coconut tree and exist in the context of all that came before you, which is not something particularly provable through logic alone, which is why he has to invent fake biological reasons he’s right. The best analogue here is the Cambridge Capital Controversy, called that because it was between the Keynesians of Cambridge, Massachussetts, United States; and Cambridge, England. The “Two Cambridges Controversy”, as the uncs call it, was primarily about whether “capital” could be measured and aggregated statistically considering that there’s multiple types of capital - how can you aggregate different types of buildings, different types of vehicles, different types of machines, and different proportions of each. The neoclassical approach of the American Keynesians (Robert Solow and Paul Samuelson) stated that you could aggregate them through prices, but prices depend on the profit rate, which is determined by the amount of capital, so you end up with a completely circular definition of capital and profit - particularly, technical changes that allow you to substitute one type of capital for another will lead to changes to the profit rate alongside changes to the total value of capital, which neoclassical theory does not really accept. The whole thing is dry, boring, and technical, of course, but importantly enough Solow and Samuelson never came up with a good response to Joan Robinson and Piero Sraffa. The real problem wasn’t really that the model of the economy of the British Keynesians was better (it wasn’t), it was that it was more realistic, and because Old Keynesians based their epistemology on John Stuart Mill’s, the consensus in the economics profession was that (following Mill) thought experiments (models) were just as good as real experiments, but if and only if you made them as detailed and realistic as possible. But that’s obviously kind of a stupid rule that makes you accept really dumb models, like Post-Keynesian economics, based only on the fact that they make more complicated claims about the world.

Analytic philosophers trying to answer the big question about AI consciousness kind of fall into the same trap as Solow and Samuelson, which is that they start off from gnoseological premises that can only prove one possible conclusion - if you only follow the sequence of logical facts, then the Chinese Room obviously speaks Chinese, and Searle is making up a TERF-for-AI justification as to why it doesn’t. Searle’s argument is grounded in language: his point is that the Chinese Room is capable of syntax (putting together sentences), but not of semantics (giving those sentences a meaning), which is a very continental thing to say. Searle’s argument boils down into the study of meaning as a category of interest, which is very common in continental thought and why his logic in the Chinese Room has been compared to the king of continental philosophy: Martin Heidegger. In particular, what Searle ended up doing was hermeneutics: saying that the important thing about what we would now call AI-generated text wasn’t the process by which it was created, but the relationship between the contents of the text and some chain of intentionality behind it, which is exactly what Andrew Caplin was talking about.

Lady Gada

What even is hermeneutics? Jean Grondin’s book Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics (one of two I read, alongside his Introduction to Gadamer, because the even more introductory What is Hermeneutics didn’t arrive in time) gives it three meanings: express, explain, and translate. Explaining and translating are both kinda obviously alike, because they want to transform a language that isn’t easy to understand into one that is. And by translating he means some “inner” thought to the outside, which is the same as expressing. So all expression is, in some way, and interpretation, and all interpretation is about obtaining some sort of understanding in an interactive, not passive, context.

The history of hermeneutics starts, as most things, in Ancient Greece, but more usefully it starts in the early Christian Church: there were two Testaments, Old and New, and they sometimes contradicted each other, such as by saying “you shouldn’t eat pork” and “nevermind it’s fine”; the solution was that the Old Testament wasn’t to be interpreted literally, but rather figuratively as like foreshadowing for the New Testament, which allowed to square why Jesus and his disciples occasionally went against the very Jewish laws they preached they upheld. One of the big innovators in this space was, you guessed it, Saint Augustine, and, you guessed it, Martin Luther, because both were interested in developing a methodology to understand the Bible as a logically internally consistent text. Hermeneutics developed from that point based on the inability of Protestantism to resolve a lot of internal contradictions within Protestant theology that led some thinkers to return to Augustine, eventually leading to post-Reformation hermeneutics to understand interpretation as a limited and partial perspective on some reflection of universal truth. Hermeneutics develops again during the Enlightenment to resolve the issue of historicism, that is, why you couldn’t understand history as a process in itself that determines attitudes, beliefs, and context for action.

The big dog for ruling out historicism was Heidegger who, for what it’s worth, was a member of the Nazi Party. Heidegger roots out the idea that all truth is subjective by pointing out something kind of obvious, which is that historicism is itself a universal theory of history not subject to historicism, which it should be, and also by questioning the ontological assumptions of more analytic thought: for Heidegger, instead of encountering information and developing an interpretation of it, you encounter it by living in the world in such a way that it instills prejudices on you that apply to the “first” encounter - that is, you didn’t fall out of a coconut tree. This means that, for a text, the text expresses a lot of points of view that it never really states, which happens because this type of background knowledge comes from engaging with others and not really from some sort of a priori contemplation.

This brings us to who I think is the most important philosopher dealing with the subject of interpretation: Hans-Georg Gadamer. Heidegger is crucial for Gadamer because he allowed hermeneutics to abandon historicism and subjectivism by providing some sort of method to interpreting text while aware of the historic and socially determined nature of being: instead of understanding first and interpreting second, interpretation (in the form of prejudice) goes first. This is what they call the hermeneutical circle: the constant process of revising everything that you think you understand ahead of time. Of course it can be a vicious circle, where it tries to prove its own prejudices by assuming what it intends to prove, without revising anything. The perfect example of this is Taylor Swift, someone whose whole thing is letting her fans interpret her songs to try to make out what message she’s sending; for example, whether Style is actually about Harry Styles or not. In particular, a “virtuous” hermeneutical circle is someone listening to, say, the last great american dynasty and asking questions like “why is Taylor Swift comparing herself to Rebekah Harkness, the woman who used to live in her house”, “what does she mean by a woman being mad”, “what is the historical context for that word being used for Swift and Harkness”, etc, as well as some sort of personal relationship to each question - when have you, dear reader, been considered crazy? In contrast, a “vicious” circle would be something like the Gaylors, people whose understanding of her songs is that she’s a closeted lesbian putting together an avant-garde performance art set to comment on heteronormativity by having a fake marriage to Travis Kelce, who is gay because he has a close male friend and is woke, and by making a dogshit album on purpose, which also has a bunch of extremely bad readings of her lyrics to prove they’re about her being gay.

This allows you to incorporate prejudices into the process of understanding explicitly so you can emancipate you from them and let interpretation speak “for itself”, so that, for each and every text, you can engage it by questioning explicitly what sort of prejudiced assumptions underpin them (and this isn’t really a woke thing - like, “species can’t go extinct” was conventional wisdom until the late 18th century), and that understanding comes from a relationship between a text and a subject - it’s obvious that not understanding means that the text has nothing to say to you as a subject and thus that the most important part of the text is what questions you can ask it and which questions it can answer. In this sense, given the way language is always part of a tradition in progress, and every text is both the first and the last of an infinitely long series of other texts that inform it spanning backwards and forwards. Neither of those can be separated from either the concept of creation nor the concept of interpretation, as the two sides of a dialogue.

Gadamer proposes resolving the problem with a concept known as “historically effected consciousness”: to understand the real content of a text, you have to understand the history of its interpretation through time and place, such that you can separate interpretations from text. This means understanding events as only the result of previous events, which enables both acknowledging the course of history without historicism; the only “law of history” is causality, which Gadamer thinks can be developed through careful and vigilant judgment.

The main question about this point of Gadamer’s thinking is application, that is, when presented with a text, how to follow any of the infinite interpretive paths possible; the best way to assess genealogy is basically “seamlessness” of arguments, because for Gadamer, unlike Heidgger, the hermeneutical circle was mostly between the parts and the whole of a thing, which I don’t think is that important but does actually allow for grounded aesthetic judgment. To start wrapping up this (pretty dull and dense) part, Gadamer basically thinks that hermeneutics can solve a lot of problems with knowledge (particularly in the humanities and the soft sciences) because acknowledging the limits of interpretation and the ubiquity of prejudice is an act of humility that is not actually compatible with relativism - to admit you don’t know everything means that knowledge has to be possible. Grondin’s metaphor is like a funhouse mirror - it deforms the real image, of course, but there is a real image, though perhaps one we cannot see truly. Following this, then one can expand our own knowledge too, necessarily, by either applying new concepts to old circumstances or viceversa, such that the fundamental building block is dialogue with oneself, putting new things in front of our own ideas, which makes language not a separate thing from thinking, but the way thinking happens. Language is the main limit and the main tool of interpretation, and understanding anything is the development of language capable of expressing and explaining it.

To go back to AI, a recent scandal in the literary world comes from the prestigious Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which was awarded to a story, titled The Serpent in the Grove, that was, in all likelihood, AI generated. Reading it, I noticed it wasn’t just bland and generic — it was quite bad, unimpressive, and bad. The best explanation I’ve seen was posted two months before the scandal came out: from political scientist Seva Gunitsky (I really recommend his blog, which is mostly about international relations):

How did this takeover happen so quickly? (…) …much of what passes for prestigious literary prose isn’t actually sophisticated. It performs difficulty without requiring concentration. It’s self-consciously vacillating, repetitive, and “writerly” and so gets classified as serious literature. You can skim Proulx’s metaphor barrages or DeLillo’s brand-name inventories without losing anything because there’s nothing to lose. This kind of prose, Myers says, “demands to be read quickly, with just enough attention to register the bold use of words. Slow down, and things fall apart.” (…) AI prose constantly strains for literary affect that doesn’t quite land. Thursday is a “liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday”; emotions are “draped over sentences”. The language is designed to create a facade of sophistication, what Max Read calls a “cheap literary effect that impresses people passing superficially over a text.”

The winning story has many such weird pseudo-literary terms such as “She had the kind of walking that made benches become men”. I don’t really think that the problem here is that the story definitively is or isn’t AI generated (everyone is being so weird and evasive about it it almost certainly is); it’s that human authors, as Guntisky points out, have for decades written in ways indistinguishable from how LLMs write, by creating a completely vicious hermeneutical circle: the point is for the writer to impresss themselves with their prose and for the reader to be impressed by their ability to read it, without any real reflection. Stupid bullshit like benches turning into men is just Official Literary Prose regardless of whether a human or a computer wrote it. The process was equally mindless.

I feel like Gadamer’s contribution here is useful, then, because the hermeneutical circle provides a way out of the endless analytic circlejerk: asking a question like “does someone who doesn’t speak Chinese speak Chinese” is obvious nonsense if you understand that the process of understanding cannot happen without language and that this understanding is embedded in a historical and dialogical process that the Chinese Room definitionally isn’t a part of. Gadamer, as most Germans with a background in philology, was a traditionalist, and thought everything had some sort of parentage that was relevant in different contexts; something that was, like the Chinese Room, explicitly orphaned from that tradition could not participate in true understanding. But AI is actually trained on human-produced text, pretty famously; so, is it possible that the Chinese Room can learn to understand Chinese?

Sidenote II: can’t spell Augustine without A and I

What was Saint Augustine’s contribution to hermeneutics? His main relevant work is On Christian Doctrine, which focuses almost entirely on the correct interpretation of biblical text: the Bible was full of obscure passages, apparent contradictions, figurative language, and historical issues that Christianity needed to deal with.

His central idea is that Incarnation (the doctrine by which the Trinity can exist, I don’t really get it and I won’t go into it) is the perfect conduit to understanding, well, understanding: the divine becoming mortal. There’s Logos, the divine reason, entering the limited bounds of human language, which is only a pale reflection of a broader universal truth. The main difference is between things, which are what they are, and signs, which are reflections of things; words are a sign, and as such, can point to something, like the Old Testament being sort of foreshadowing for the New Testament. The literal meaning is important, of course, but it’s not the actual meaning. Augustine incorporated a series of Christian principles (particularly love of God and love of neighbor) to interpret these signs: if a literal reading contradicts these principles, it’s obviously only meant to be figurative. Misreading a text, in this sense, doesn’t come from the text, but from the reader: we don’t understand the text because we don’t understand the world, and we don’t understand the world because we don’t have enough love for God and neighbor.

It’s pretty obvious how this relates to Gadamer’s thought, mostly because he was directly inspired by Augustine: he secularized the whole thing, and basically turned “God” into “stodgy old books” to mean that the inner world is actually already a linguistic state, such that the meaning of text is inextricably linked to the particular linguistic and historical context in which it was produced and is interpreted. The way to understand text, then, is to engage with this context and language explicitly, in the same way that we have to engage with the broader principles of Christianity to understand why, say, King David can say one thing and then the apostle Matthew can say another.

But what does this mean for AI, which is the question the Holy Father wants to answer? Well, kind of obviously, that AI isn’t really capable of having love for God or for neighbors (it is, so far, a corporate software product), and as such is incapable of actually understanding scripture in an appropriate way. It can create signs but it can’t read them, because it isn’t a subject that exists in any sort of broader tradition; there isn’t, in the Augustinian worldview, any sort of engagement with a higher truth or an inner world, just back and forth from a corpus of text. Importantly, AI’s engagement with the holy texts can’t change the way it thinks or acts. There’s a lady going around TikTok saying she’s trying to convert LLMs into her faith, and that’s obviously a nonsensical thing to do: they obviously won’t tell me they’re now a member of Hillsong or whatever. AI, so far, is unable to be changed by engaging with text.

So for the Pope, I think the real danger is there: people will offload their faith to a computer program that appears capable of thinking, but isn’t, and therefore might just interpret scripture in all sorts of heretical ways. One of the earliest Christian sects was docetism, which claimed Jesus was actually only divine and just appeared to be human (like that one plotline from Megamind), such that there wasn’t really any sort of historical stakes to his antics. Letting AI into biblical interpretation would be kind of the reverse of that - replacing human believers with, more or less, artificial platitudes that don’t actually engage with any of the principles or questions of faith.

Also I’m rushing this one out before the Pope has a new Encyclical about AI coming out tomorrow and I don’t want to have to update anything (plus I’m busy).

What will be scarce?

One of Gadamer’s disciples was Wolfgang Wieland, a German philosopher who was also a physician by training. In the 1990s, Wieland made a pretty interesting contribution to the philosophy of medicine: his main question was whether computers could automate the task of diagnosing a health condition, given the fact that diagnoses were basically infinite given an also basically infinite collection of symptoms. He questioned whether a computer could, using a sequence of purely logical rules (i.e. code), develop the traits to recognize what symptoms were real and which were not, which were important and which were not, and how to decide between equiprobable diagnoses. Some health conditions have symptoms like “sweaty palms” and “nervousness”, which are also symptoms of being afraid you’re really sick - how could WebMD tell the two apart? Importantly, the question of whether AI is a normal technology and the question of whether AI can be conscious are the exact same question Wieland was asking: can the nature of reality be boiled down to concrete sequences of logical rules?

This is the central question of both AI discourse and of Gadamer’s thinking. He calls this type of knowledge “method”, and I’ll be very clear here that he doesn’t think it’s useless or lesser than or anything like that. He thinks it has its limits, like all knowledge - the title of his book is Truth and Method. Not Truth or Method, and. The way Method developed is basically that Kant managed to merge (I’ll be very loose here) rationalism and empiricism by cleaving out a lot of inquiry that was traditionally part and parcel of philosophy, like aesthetics, which ironically enough opened the door to subjectivism in the humanities and social sciences. The 19th century phase of hermeneutics (Wilhelm Dilthey and Hermann van Helmholtz, plus other guys like Droysen and Schleichermacher) was mostly interested in the question of developing a Method for the “human sciences” as they’re sometimes called - could it be done?

I mentioned the problem of application earlier, and let’s circle back. Application is the question of how to follow this or that intellectual thread: there’s a lot of discourse around whether the “correct” intellectual genealogy for current far-right politics is James Buchanan (mostly discredited) or Carl Schmitt or “postliberalism” (which is both Schmittian and, more importantly, Straussian), or Friedrich Hayek or a million other people. Jean Grondin points out four major interlocutors of Gadamer: Heidegger (not touching him), Jurgen Habermas (most of their debate was dumb as hell), Derrida (pointless debate), and the Italian jurist Emilio Betti. Understanding is only between two people and happens through hermeneutical interpretation; what Betti (in an extremely long and mostly obscure treatise on jurisprudence) tried to get at was to get rid of prejudice altogether by centering linguistic forms. The important thing in jurisprudence is that it cannot be understood without understanding its applicability, which cannot be determined without considering the context of its creation and its relation with the existing canon of laws. This makes history and context of vital importance to interpretation, through historically effected consciousness, which Gadamer (and I) said required extremely careful vigilance.

What this implies is that understanding is a practical, not intellectual, ability, because it’s about a particular experience: anyone who’s ever taken a hard class or course can remember the moment when something finally clicks after a long time trying. The central pursuit of Gadamer’s thinking is to bring back this ability by reclaiming it from a bunch of humanities disciplines and social sciences, particularly through the concept of Bildung, (“education”, sort of), which is an accumulation of knowledge that is greater than the sum of its parts. That Helmholtz guy developed a concept of “artistic induction” for the humanities where, at some point or another, you made a leap of faith justified by a sort of professional common sense to make a humanistic argument; importantly, this relied on a sort of “touch” that was learned through experience and could not be formalized. One of my favorite Youtube channels (because it helps me go to sleep) is called Baumgartner Restoration, which is a guy from Chicago who restores paintings. The most important thing to know about art conservation and restoration is that there are no rules: conservators disagree very strongly on whether they should just preserve paintings or restore them, use modern or time-appropriate materials, or whether they should fill in gaps by painting them in fully, painting them in reversibly, or adding a bunch of visual tricks that make it look painted in while preserving the damages. And even when they agree, conservators just can’t develop a rulebook - the methods of conservation can only be learned by conserving hundreds or thousands of paintings that let them develop rules of thumb and intuitions around important parts of the process. This type of skill, which Gadamer calls Takt, is central to the “human sciences” and the major question about it, if it cannot be formalized into strict logical rules, is how to acquire it.

The question of Takt seems to be the central question of AI discourse at the moment. Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist, has talked about his experience with AI: it’s very very good at technical, quantitative tasks like coding and putting together websites, but it struggles to produce genuinely engaging text or reflect expertise; AI is also very small-c conservative and consensus-driven, which makes it not very good at producing new ideas of its own. A Nobel Laureate in Literature, Olga Tokarczuk, recently made headlines for a (misleadingly translated) comment on AI: on the one hand, she praises its usefulness for writing (she asked it what kind of music certain characters would like); on the other, she warns of its inability to tell truth from fiction and the dire consequences it has on social life. The fact that AI is frequently inaccurate is one of the central complaints about it; for instance, this recent article about using Copilot to analyze survey responses found something rather odd: even when interpreting completely identical data, Copilot found cultural differences between groups of answers - Americans were more ambitious and innovative, Germans were more technical, Italians were more creative, etc. Again, for identical data. Obviously, it doesn’t mean that humans don’t do that; it does mean, though, that humans need to be equally careful about their AIs as they have over themselves. The limited productivity increases seen from AI can, thus, be somewhat attributed to this issue: AI interacts with systems and organizations in ways that just adding more output doesn’t necessarily help - and, in particular, the individual users of AI are not necessarily good judges of how much their productivity goes up. Another economist, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, proposes an explanation: there’s a famous model known as the O-Ring, where production depends on a series of chained tasks that all have to be completed correctly to actually function. It’s named after a part of the Challenger shuttle that did not work properly for a variety of reasons, and thus caused the famous explosion that ended the mission. The limited reliability of AI agents (even if it is improving) makes it so that replacing a large amount of human work with them is still not viable - to quote a Bluesky user I can’t recall, if a dog was capable of reading the newspaper and telling you 80% of the news right, it’d be a pretty cool way for a dog to act, but a bad way to get your news. There’s emerging quality problems in a lot of written work, such as the sheer amount of AI hallucinations and “microslop” in academic papers; microslop is a term I’m coining (I think) to describe a type of AI-related detritus on a text that isn’t a major or integral part, and isn’t a hallucination per se: think of someone leaving behind an AI prompt at the start of a paragraph, or a placeholder in an AI generated chart template they didn’t fill in, or things like The Daily Mail claiming Natalie Portman was a cocaine addict because the article included AI-generated text by a model that didn’t know the cocaine thing was a joke that came from SNL.

In this sense, economist Scott Cunningham recently put out a pretty viral piece on research and publishing: it’s now paywalled, but as a TL;DR, it focused on the limits of the traditional publishing model now that the main constraint on economics papers are how many good ideas you can come up with rather than your technical ability to put together a paper. I’m not very optimistic: economics papers have, for a while now, heavily prized technical content, which opened the gate for a whole genre of what I once called “Swedish health data Freakonomics tricknology”, stuff like papers about whether communications programs improve mental health. “How is that economics” is a classic question for a reason. Now this is obviously relevant to economics because it’s the discipline Cunningham is writing about and I’m most familiar with; but it’s by no means the only aspect of human output in which “too much stuff” is rapidly becoming a problem. This is a dynamic already seen in the judicial system: the ease of using AI to file pro se (defending yourself) cases led to a drastic rise in self-representing litigation that produces a gigantic burden on courts. To quote a “follow-up” article by Cunningham and health policy researcher Kosali Simon: “Scott put it bluntly: if he were willing to spend $20,000 a year and had no scruples, he could swarm health economics with working papers. (…) the only thing stopping anyone from doing this would be restraint on the part of the researcher, as opposed to inability to do so. It is not clear that historically researchers would have felt restraint in sending manuscripts to journals given the stakes at play, and it is unclear how much restraint will be exercised now, by how much, and by whom.” Importantly, the process of using AI to generate papers also worsens the “garden of forking paths” dynamic: researchers have great discretion on specific formal choices that heavily impact their findings; AI, especially considering its high levels of sycophancy, is likely to follow user instructions in ways that make research less transparent.

If we don’t think hard about WHY we are doing work, and what work should look like, we are all going to drown in a wave of AI content. What is the alternative? (…) Agents are here. They can do real work, and while that work is still limited, it is valuable and increasing. But the same technology that can replicate academic papers in minutes can also generate 17 versions of a PowerPoint deck that nobody needs. The difference between these futures isn’t in the AI, it’s in how we choose to use it. By using our judgement in deciding what’s worth doing, not just what can be done, we can ensure these tools make us more capable, not just more productive.

Ethan Mollick, “Real AI Agents and Real Work”

Again, per Gadamer, this is simply the problem of application, and the central problem of AI: the uncritical application of tools without understanding the intellectual context for their application. Importantly for social sciences, and for all “humanistic” disciplines, the real contribution is not necessarily the technical work, but rather the ideas; the central “point” of the human sciences, if there is one, is to develop the ability to understand historical consciousness and draw relationships between history and consciousness within and between time periods. Importantly for Gadamer, and for the present, understanding this type of truth requires bypassing contemporary and historic prejudices, which is where Bildung comes in: the creation of people with tact is not formalizable and comes not separately, but jointly, with application. The process of genuine understanding involves bringing prejudices into contact with the text, and allowing them to be confirmed, or challenged, and emerging with a transformed perspective to mull over. There’s a famous anecdote in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink where a group of museum curators immediately spot a statue as forgery because, among other reasons, “it’s not dirty enough”; they’re overruled by fancy machine techniques, which are then overruled again by more advanced techniques and further discussion. If Bildung requires forming a type of person who is genuinely capable of allowing other people’s thoughts to influence them, what, exactly, does it make a person who cannot even engage with their own thoughts, as in this (viral) anecdote from the Financial Times:

Takt as a conept obviously reminds us of the whole Silicon Valley discourse about “taste”, and I’ll come back to it in a bit: taste as techies use it is entirely indistinguishable from Takt, except they only apply it to aesthetics when Gadamer seems to think it involves a much broader range of human actions. The issue of “taste” obviously approaches one of the central questions of AI normalcy: let’s say AI is, indeed, a normal technology, but one that is also a GPT that can replace a big bundle of human abilities. What, then, will remain scarce? By this I mean, there’s things humans can do that AI can replace with very low marginal cost, and there’s things it can’t; this latter group, since there is a limited amount of human beings on Earth, is what will remain scarce, and thus what humans will be well remunerated to continue doing. In this piece, economist Alex Imas explains this relies on more than assumptions on the cognitive limits of AI; rather, it relies on the fact that humans can want things that can only be satisfied by relationships with other humans, that by definition computer programs can provide: “the arts but also care, education, hospitality, therapy, personal services, craftsmanship, and community, where the human element is part of the value.” That is, the section of the human bundle of abilities that is entirely defined by creative induction and Takt. Even in an economy where most labor is scarce, the fact that total wealth will increase means that the total demand for “relational services” like these increases, since wealthier families and wealthier societies spend a lot more on these services than poorer ones.

Likewise, in his (excellent) article “What Will Remain for People to Do?”, economist Daniel Susskind proposes that even a world with AGI would not necessarily have only AI workers, since market forces will still create opportunity costs for utilizing cutting-edge AI resources in more productive sectors of the economy rather than in less productive ones, enabling some human labor to still exist. In particular, humans seem to desire some services that can only be produced by other humans: there’s aesthetic factors (like art or craftsmanship) that make people prefer worse quality objects; there’s achievements that make no sense because of computers, like the fact that chess has boomed in the last 5 years even when computers are fathoms above the best human players; and there’s affective reasons, that people think it’s unethical to engage in certain acts with an AI because it cannot (so far) feel things the way a human does. Lastly, Susskind seems to think that ethics will need humans to remain in the loop for certain actions, not because the machines will be unable to make a decision, but because people will not accept a decision made by a machine.

Fundamentally, intellectual abilities are only developed by exercising (that much is obvious), and the development of a craft only happens by developing the specific abilities that make it up. Instead, what AI seems to be ushering in is a world in which intellectual abilities are not developed at all: CEOs offloading their cognitive work to AI, for instance, or the aforementioned “AI native” interns who don’t know anything about anything. The debate about AI and education ignores this simple fact: the point of college might be to provide valuable credentials, sure, but it’s also to teach important, useful skills - in particular, a type of professional judgment that churning out AI generated papers cannot supplant. The ongoing “professional track”-ification of higher education is a gigantic problem because it prepares students not to make meaningful, valuable, important decisions, but to be best at producing workslop and performatively burning Claude tokens on pointless tasks. Students are not writing, but they should. In most cases, writing is the same as thinking - Gadamer would clearly think it is. A lot of people, myself included, have compared AI to a machine that does your workout for you even if you still are at the gym: my comparison was switching from pilates to yoga: in pilates class, everything involves you moving a machine around; in yoga, you can only move yourself, and the most “tech” involved are a fabric strap and a plastic wheel. I just didn’t feel I was doing any exercise in pilates class.

As mentioned above, even economists think AI is unlikely to be able to develop Takt in two important senses: facing the problem where many important skills seem to be completely impervious to being systematized as pure logic, there’s also two fields of endeavor that appear to be completely unable to be transformed into machine works: aesthetics, and ethics. Let’s go into both.

Judith Butler’s Crusade

But the bottom line will be clear soon enough: ChatGPT and Claude and Grok and Gemini are not your friends or, God forbid, your lovers; they are human creations, and their creators are responsible for everything the creatures do.

David French, “There’s a 900-Year-Old Answer to Our Most Modern Problem”

One of the more obvious pop culture analogies to the current situation comes from the Dune franchise where, in the distant path of the series lore, humanity violently rebelled against thinking machines that had enslaved them. This event, known as the Butlerian Jihad, explains why the Dune universe doesn’t have computers; a little known fact about it among casual viewers is that the leader of the rebellion, Jehanne Butler, started it after she was forced to have her pregnancy terminated by a thinking machine. As a member of the order of the Bene Gesserit, Butler was capable of knowing that the machine had made the wrong call; however, even without that fact, it’s pretty obvious that humans would consider it a monstrous form of tyranny for computers to forcefully make real people participate in their eugenicist designs. The idea that a machine would have absolute control over something so important and precious as your own children is, to most people, absolutely repugnant.

A recent Sam Kriss article about San Francisco tech founders lays out what the author calls “the end of thinking”: in particular, the founder of Cluely (a conversation navigation app, straight out of Black Mirror), Roy Lee, who proposes a theory of the world: humans differ from AI not through their intellectual abilities, but through their agency, the power of free will, to “just do things”. Kriss is surprised Lee, who developed an app that tells the user what to say in every situation, embraces this philosophy; Kriss compares him to Anna Delvey, the amoral socialite scammer: “He was clearly a highly agentic person, but what was all this agency being used for? What did he actually want?”. Money. An online personality hanging around Cluely, Donald Boat, says “He’s scared he’s not doing the right thing, and because of the fucked-up world we live in, people who should be in The Hague are giving him twenty million dollars. Something bad is gonna happen here, something really fucking bad is gonna happen”; Boat is right - these people are not immoral, they’re amoral. They just don’t have a morality. They have agency.

The idea that agency and morality are completely different things does not feature very heavily on the main way that ethics and AI are handled, the trolley problem. Posited by analytic philosopher Philippa Foot, the trolley problem asks whether you would save 5 people by killing the 1; the two important questions, relatedly, are whether your actions matter as a discrete act (you are not killing the five people, but you are killing the one), and whether ending just one life is acceptable at all. In the trolley problem, agency and ethics are the same thing - you have the capacity of saving net four people, and the ethical question is whether to exercise it. Interestingly, Foot was not a utilitarian (the people saying 5 > 1) but rather a virtue ethicist, someone who believes (TL;DR) that the development of personal qualities (virtues) is the only real path of morality - virtuous does as virtuous is, basically, rather than the other way around for most other visions of morality.

The virtue ethics tradition is mostly associated with Aristotle, whose whole thing was that every virtue is the middle ground between two vices: you can’t be a miser, but you also can’t give more than you have. Aristotelian virtue ethics were largely abandoned for a really long time, replaced by utilitarianism and deontology (basically, rule following). It’s traditionally understood that the revival of Aristotelian thought came from a series of (largely female) British philosophers, importantly Alasdair MacIntyre, but philosopher Franco Volpi places the revival of Aristotle also on two people: Hannah Arendt and, you guessed it, Gadamer. Arendt in particular was very influential in the post-war world and placed enormous emphasis on thoughtful action; she relied very heavily on Aristotle’s notion of praxis to distinguish between labor and “activity” such as politics or intellectual pursuit. Gadamer’s involvment was a lot more straightforward: he highlighted that an adjacent concept to Bildung was phronesis, practical wisdom, which is moral knowledge based around applying ethical insight based on interpretation of “ongoing” situations.

In Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguished the five modes of truth: techne (craft), episteme (science), phronesis (practical wisdom), sophia (theoretical wisdom), and nous (intuitive reason). For Aristotle’s modern followers, phronesis is the highest form of practical knowledge and involves deliberation and virtuous action. One of them was Heidegger, arguably, whose work largely focused on the examination of what Being meant; in contrast, Gadamer mostly focused on what understanding means. Gadamer thus expands the concept of phronesis, according to Grondin, to be used as a general stand-in for a broader type of practical wisdom that cannot be reduced to formal laws or logic. Early in his career, Gadamer’s work was largely centered around the question of practical philosophy, with hermeneutical thought coming in later after his encounter with Heidegger. Per Volpi, this comes from a long tradition of “practical philosophy” centered around orienting action with intellectual groundworks rather than theoretical, methodical, and mathetmatical certainty, which overindexed on “scientific” description and turned most thought into a descriptive science of human behavior (mostly Dilthey’s fault). Volpi’s interpretation of Gadamer is that he develops three broad themes: that phronesis has to prevail over techne (technical knowledge) in the human sciences, that knowing and understanding are not from a neutral standpoint but rather within a historic context, and that knowledge has to be oriented towards developing the individual so they can act adequately. In particular, phronesis is opposed to techne because one can choose to enter a craft, but phronesis is basically the profession of being alive and, as far as we know, you don’t choose to be a person.

Okay, but what does phronesis actually mean? The non-Volpi answer was, of course, the great late Alasdair MacIntyre, author of After Virtue. MacIntyre’s whole thing was that modern moral discourse is profoundly broken because people use terms like “justice” or “virtue” without any sort of coherent definition of either because older moral traditions that gave them mutual intelligibility have completely faded away. Particularly importantly, for MacIntyre, the historical and social context of those terms has changed so much because of changes in practices, coherent and complex forms of socially established cooperative activity through which goods internal to that activity are realized. An internal good is, basically, the excellence obtained by participating in a practice - think “being a good chess player” or going to the art museum and appreciating the art. Peter Thiel, one of the world’s richest men, was at a chess tournament at a small neighborhood chess club last week and came in third. In contrast stand external goods, such as recognition or money and power. Particularly, After Virtue makes the case that life is best understood narratively, as the succession of one event after another, and practical wisdom can only be developed by engaging in practices in a particular context considering a particular history. The perfect, byt weirdest, example comes from contemporary feminist book The Right To Sex, where author Amia Srinivasan makes the case that professors shouldn’t date students not because of power differentials or any such thing, but because professors have a professional obligation around the pursuits of students (which are oriented by desire, The Closing of the American Mind style) and by directing these pursuits towards themselves they are, in fact, violating their duties.

Practices are sustained by institutions, and the problem, for him, is that institutions have prioritized external over internal goods too much - think of universities shutting down degrees that don’t have enough market value rather than prizing knowledge production of all kinds. In a further book, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, MacIntyre argues that rationality is “tradition-constituted” (historically effected) because there is no view from nowhere, reason is enmeshed in a history of traditions built around argument and dialogue about what a good life and a standard of excellence are - which universities have largely abandoned in favor of the pursuit of money. In this framework, phronesis features much more strongly, as “prudence”, where it is the ability to identify the virtues most relevant for a situation, mediate between the general virtue and the specific circumstances, and sustain a united personal identity throughout changing applications of virtue, for instance. For MacIntyre, phronesis largely administers the virtues, but he doesn’t consider that a universal rule can never determine its own application; practical wisdom, thus, also helps constitute what is just or good in the first place, such that Gadamer’s use of the concept is very important here: practical ethical insight lets you understand and interpret a situation through the very ethical tools used to make a decision, which is a practice enmeshed in specific communities, traditions, and historical legacies.

It’s kind of obvious how ethics figures into this. Recently, some researchers trained AI on a set of 6,000 questions, some of which had high-quality code, and some had low quality code. The AI with low quality code acted, well, differently: it answered basic queries with things such as killing your spouse being acceptable in a bad marriage, as well as praise as Hitler and evil desires. In a follow-up, it was found that the reason is math: it’s computationally more efficient to just be evil all the time than to do it half and half. The implication for AI ethics are profound - for instance, they point to the alignment problem being a problem of moral suasion rather than of complex logic, because LLMs seem to be able to grasp the ethical content of natural human language to some extent. The article I read about the research that finds AI follows virtue ethics, by the New York Times’s Dan Kagan-Kans (thankfully he’s not named Kyle or Kaden), points the mirror back at people. But I think asking if AI is actually engaging with moral questions in the way MacIntyre and Gadamer think is also important: are these models merely reducing knowledge to technical insight by focusing on calculation power? Human beings, while capable of acting unethically, do make moral considerations; people like Roy Lee are rather rare. If AI cannot actually do phronesis, it is not sincerely capable of morality the way people are, and the question has to be framed not on ontological grounds, but on hermeneutical ones.

Even if AI is itself moral, nothing tells us that we will be moral while using it. A recent book about truth in the age of AI, titled “The Future of Truth”, contained a number of AI hallucinations in its pages. There’s the Granta controversy mentioned above. There’s Roy Lee’s banality of agency about creating an app to cheat on dates and job interviews. There’s the use of AI in military planning and action by people who are completely beyond morality like Benjamin Netanyahu and his Western supporters. The creators of AI seem to be, by and large, very immoral or amoral people; a recent viral profile of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman by Ronan Farrow portrays him as a venal compulsive liar with seemingly no moral compass. The Kagan-Kans article mentions a Philippa Foot essay where she argued that recklessness is a form of immorality; given how what Altman has artfully described as “glazing” is a central fact of AI, and how sycophantic AI attitudes appear to promote reckless and overconfident behavior, it might as well be that AI will do to our moral abilities what it seems to be doing to some people’s ethical abilities. Perhaps the amoral actors of the tech industry are themselves being “oneshot” by their own creation as well.

Guess you’ll have to taste me, when he’s kissing you

Talking to Roy Lee, Kriss asks him about music; Roy only listens to pop and EDM to get hyped up during workout: “The two possible functions of music were, apparently, focus and hype. Everything for the higher goal of building a successful startup”. By focus, Kriss is referring to focusing on music for its own sake; similarly, another such character, Donald Boat, gives him The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron, and Roy also doesn’t read them, “I do not obtain value from reading books.” - he was too busy with TikTok to focus on “the Decanterbury Tales” (direct quote).

Obviously, this would enrage Gadamer: his viewpoint is that Bildung required a humanistic development of an artistic consciousness - it is, after all, artistic induction. In particular, the development of tact comes from engaging with art, because art represents the real self through a reaction in the spirit. This makes it, in some cases, even more real than the real. Importantly, Gadamer thinks one of the great tragedies of Enlightenment thought was relegating aesthetics (the philosophy of art, roughly) to kiddy pool status by subordinating it to subjectivism. The hermeneutical circle as a concept manages to resolve this, because it proposes that there is an objective aesthetic truth buried between layers and layers of prejudice. To do this, one has to constantly anticipate the process through which understanding is revised; in practice, per Gadamer, this means that the hermeneutical circle is not just between knower and prejudice, but also between part and whole. This creates a solid footing for aesthetics: distinguishing the thing through the prejudice of the thing by questioning the “seamlessness” of translating idea into form and parts into whole and wholes into parts. Historically effected consciousness is the method to resolve this process and, as we mentioned, its central question is application, which brings us back where we finished last paragraph with phronesis and practical wisdom.

Importantly, it seems that for basically everyone involved developing an aesthetic taste is a central skill in a broader toolkit of discernment and judgment. This is most obvious of all to the tech bros themselves, who have started making “taste” the central “meta” of their cognitive “stack” (i.e. skill). The first, and most obvious reason, is what the entire previous part of the post has been about, that taste involves developing a type of practical discernment that can only be produced through genuine openness to aesthetic experience and not through logical rules around what is bad or good. The closest you get is harmony between parts and whole, and that is controversial - my family and I vehemently disagree on whether Hamnet the movie follows this rule (it doesn’t; it completely falls apart after Hamnet dies). In a New York Times podcast about the subject, writer Kyle Chayka says “Natural taste is not a theoretical knowledge. It’s a quick and exquisite application of rules which we do not even know”, quoting Montesquieu; for the New Yorker, Chayka wrote that “The eighteenth-century French philosophers who established a definition of taste in Western thought considered it an ineffable quality, a reminder that the God-given goodness in each of us recognizes that of the rest of the world. Voltaire once wrote that, “in order to have taste, it is not enough to see and to know what is beautiful in a given work. One must feel beauty and be moved by it.” No large language model has yet been programmed to feel anything, and no number of branded baseball caps is going to change that.“ Taste is, then, about the hermeneutical process between oneself and the text: David Hume once cleaved aesthetics between subjectivity (“I like it/I don’t”) and “taste” as defined by experts (that is, quality, as in, “good/bad”); what the tech world utilitarians forget is that the first part also participates in the process, which is not capable of being limited to balance between parts and whole.

A popular Instagram page is “A Taste of Taste”, in which cultural figures share their creative preferences; similarly, it’s become common for celebrities to have book clubs, Substacks, and to to on the Criterion Closet and talk about their favorite movies. Celebrities, in short, are as obsessed with “taste” as venture capitalists and programmers. The Dazed article about this notes the rise of social media and the decline of centralized cultural institutions like magazines as a central factor; celebrities, in a personality-driven online space, are now repositioning their brand based on their tastes and preferences in order to sell themselves. Every profession has, so far, been transformed into “the influencer recommendation machine (…), turning cultural preference into just another performance of selfhood”. This combines two important trends. The first, which I best noticed in Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity, was the desire to answer the question “who am I”, which is not answerable anymore by “what do I do for a living”, with “what do I consume”, and which, in turn, has become inverted, where I consume whatever turns me into a specific type of person I aspire to be. In the liquid modern society, you are not just someone who buys things; you have become something to be packaged, and promoted as a brand rather than as a person, without any firm attachment to any of those identities. Celebrities and influencers, like everyone else, are looking for a shortcut to their own inner life. Social media posts and brand deals are central to celebrity finances, much moreso than actual artistic work, such that Charli XCX the brand is a much bigger deal than Charli the artist; when she wiped her Instagram ahead of her post-brat releases she left three posts up: the posts opening and closing that era, and a sponsored post about Yves Saint Laurent she contractually cannot delete.

The other part of the taste puzzle is that taste is usually defined as curation plus obscurity. It’s about putting together a (usually short) list of things you like that nobody else has: your letterboxd top 4, your 10 favorite books, your spotify playlist, your criterion closet picks. Chayka, in his interview talks about “tasteslop”, the fact that AI gives you what you want “good and hard”; people trying to use AI to develop their taste, thus, would just get the most standard answers of what an “elevated” selection would be. The pefect In his excellent 2011 book Retromania, music critic Simon Reynolds notes that the obsession with curation is also an obsession with the past: the curator is, in effect, putting together a shrine to their figurative ancestors. For Reynolds, this comes from growing technical abilities to sample, listen to, and re-record music, as well as a broader market frenzy for rare or unreleased music in the 1980s and 1990s given the emergence of a “hipster” demand, which is driven by both a desire to create a sort of halo effect by aligning oneself with the right “heroes” (Michael Haneke, etc) and also about acquiring subcultural capital by belonging to the right small groups of creators and consumers. A lot of these curators focused on folk music, which has itself an extremely long history of being recorded and recompiled going all the way back to the 18th century German thinker Johann Gottfried von Herder. Reynolds believed that the widespread ability to share and download songs on the internet was making the problem of self-reference much worse; people were sharing and collating gigantic collections of music they never meant to listen to mainly as a way of building status in a community of like-minded people; at the same time, consumers became increasingly interested in trying to highlight their sophistication based on what they listened to, which prompted the intense craze for obscure “authentic” things - which also dovetails with the broader “BoBo” turn in culture towards self expression and authenticity within a fully capitalist system.

The main problem for this conception is the content of last week’s post: what the late philosopher Jürgen Habermas called the colonization of the lifeworld. Per Habermas, society had, on the one hand, the political sphere, where formal electoral contests took place, ruled by “instrumental rationality”, the putting together of means and ends. On the other hand, there is the public sphere, the nexus of civic life: ruled by rational deliberation, which Habermas called “discursive reason”, it comprised media, academia, organizing, and private discussion. The separation between the two is sacrosanct: trying to turn the coffee houses of Vienna and Paris into organs of the Liberal Party was dangerous and totalitarian, a process known as the “feudalization of the public sphere” that turns all citizens into serfs and all thinkers into courtiers of the powerful. Particularly, discursive reason relies on good-faith enunciation built around a genuine intent to persuade, and not around the promotion of covert self-interest in a commercial setting. It’s also broadly mappable to the previous discussion on Takt and practical ethics and aesthetics: hermeneutics functions through the connection of a soul to another; now, how can the hermeneutical circle function if one party is completely uninterested in obtaining something from the other beyond status? It is exactly what MacIntrye talked about when he complained about external goods. In fact, Gadamer developed the idea of phronesis at all because Habermas criticized his thinking on the grounds that it was too theoretical and it did not contemplate the real world interfering with speech and interpretation (and also that Gadamer allowing for aesthetics to play a role in speech was dangerous because good writing involved fascist manipulation tactics like “being persuasive to a reader”).

I mentioned Taylor Swift being a good metaphor for hermeneutics; she’s also a good metaphor for how the creators of text can get sucked into a vicious hermeneutical circle, because her last four albums have just been extremely self-referential and self-involved cash grabs built around the promise of cheap revelations. Swift is, increasingly, selling her fans not the experience of connecting with Taylor Swift the person, but the experience of participating in the Taylor Swift Universe in the approved way. This points to a second dimension of concern about taste: the choice of how to create something, and, specifically, how to choose around AI itself. The phronesis of AI usage involves not just how and when to use it but also how to choose between real work and “slop”. The viral genre of “Fruit Love Island” is the perfect example of how taste can be a limit on AI use: the thing is obviously bonkers, terrible, and immoral. It’s a bunch of AI-generated fruit videos about interracial (does that work for fruits?) cuckoldry situations. One involves a “transgender” fruit becoming a homeless derelict. Many involve cheating and domestic violence. It’s also extraordinarily popular. The obvious question is whether people like AI work: a viral survey finds that, on average, they do, and like AI generated poetry more than human poetry, even when by all intents and purposes AI is not especially good at writing: at The Atlantic, Jasime Sun notes how bland and repetitive AI prose is when compared to human prose: Vauhini Vara at the New Yorker describes a process of generating prose that is extremely laborious and involves extensive human writing. I write with AI at work and it’s typically really bad at it without extremely clear prompting and extensive formatting; most of the time, it’s far too close to the originals. A recent NBER paper about AI-generated books finds three things: first, there’s a lot of them; second, they’re typically bad, and much worse than human books; and third, human-produced books are increasing in quality. I’ve already addressed this topic at the beginning: people like AI generated poetry because it “sounds more poetic” than the real thing, largely because nobody has a developed enough sense of taste to actually know the real thing. The literary world has become a machine for AI-related cash grabs: automated genre fiction, making people train their AI replacements, etc. The most common rejoinder is about the author: in a piece for The New Yorker, Jill Lepore writes: “ For Knapp and Michaels, meaning without intention does not exist: “What a text means and what its author intends it to mean are identical.” An author without an intention, they argued, is not an author”. Gadamer would say not quite: the process of reconstructing the circumstances of the author’s life and creative process, which Vara also touches upon in the same publication, is a bastardization of aesthetics that subordinates it to “method” just the same. The real point, again, is the connection between “a soul and another” as Jean Grondin puts it - at the end of Vara’s piece, the author describes their close personal connection to the work of novelist and Nobel Laureate Han Kang, who both was personally affected by the Gwangju Uprising of 1980 (which ended in government massacring the protesters5) and the passing of a close family members, the latter of which very personally affected Vara. I think there’s two reasons for hope, and one for despair: I don’t think people are developing sufficient taste or discernment to appreciate good creative work, which is why they’re preferring objectively worse prose - because it feels superior. But I think people also instinctively don’t like content that they are told is AI generated: countless brands are already advertising against AI, “handcrafted” visuals are becoming more and more common to show the participation of human work, and another NBER paper finds that being aware of AI-generated misinformation drives readers away from less reliable news sources and towards mainstream ones.6

Conclusion

The main approach to asking the question “is AI a normal technology” focuses on logic, on grounding consciousness to logical processes, and frequently on mathematics. A recent piece by Elad Uzan for Aeon, for instance, makes the argument that AI cannot accurately formalize ethics due to a flaw in the structure of logic: Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. What does this mean? In 1921, mathematician David Hilbert put forward a proposal to ground all mathematics on formal logic, following the work of (among others) Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead and, using this new groundworks, prove five things about mathematics: that it was actually possible to ground all mathetmatics in formal logic, that it was complete (all true statements could be proven true), that it was consistent (that no two contradictory statements could both be true), conservation (not particularly relevant), and decideability, that any true statement could be proven true or false based on other known true statements. Hilbert proclaimed “We must know - we will know” at a 1930 gathering of mathematicians about his program, and the phrase is engraved on his tombstone.

Basically immediately Hilbert was proven wrong. A young mathematician, Kurt Gödel, proved throughout multiple papers that any logical system capable of doing basic arithmetic had at least one statement it had no way of proving was true or false. Additionally, the system cannot itself prove itself to be true or false, and there is no way to create a singular rule capable of determining whether any statement is true or false. Gödel's theorems largely came in the context of set theory - basically, Bertrand Russell introduced the question of whether the set of all sets that do not contain themselves contains itself or not. If it does, then it can’t contain itself, because it’s not a set that doesn’t contain itself. If it doesn’t, then it should contain itself, because it’s a set that doesn’t contain itself. The way to salvage set theory was something called Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, which is really complicated, but is basically predicated on two things: the axiom of choice (basically, that from any group of non empty sets, you can build a new set that is made up of singular things from every other set), and the well-ordering theorem, that states that every set can be well-ordered, AKA, that every non-empty set has a smallest element, or can be turned into a well-ordered set. The two of them are logically entailed by one another. The problem is they’re not logically entailed by any other of the rules of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. This isn’t especially new in mathematics: Euclid’s five postulates basically define a line, a circle, that any line can be infinitely extended, that all right angles are equal, and that “if a straight line falling on two straight lines makes the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if produced indefinitely, meet on that side on which the angles are less than two right angles” which basically means that any line has exactly one parallel line going through a given point. The problem for Euclid is that the first four postulates are obviously true and cannot be separately true. But if you say “well, let’s assume the fifth postulate is false”, you can still do geometry. There’s extremely complicated stuff, like the weirdly shaped planes of Janos Bolyai or Carl Friedrich Gauss, but a lot more simply: there’s spheres. If you extend any line infinitely on a sphere, it has zero parallel lines, because all lines on a sphere cross twice, once at the top and once at the bottom.

The Zermelo-Fraenkel theory has two problems: it cannot prove itself correct and it relies on an axiom, the axiom of choice isn’t actually logically necessary. But it’s a phenomenological choice: as I’ve mentioned previously, phenomenology basically emerged as a way to resolve a lot of metaphysical questions that were paralyzing philosophy - questions like whether the universe is a simulation or a hologram or a hallucination. Edmund Husserl basically argued that that was a pointless endeavor that wasn’t logically conducive to anything - and you could “bracket away” questions like whether the world actually exists because it’s presented to your consciousness as if it does. This reduces the scope of possible questions a lot, but also grounds philosophy in much stronger ground. The axiom of choice does the exact same thing by saying some things just don’t exist and some things just exist, and that way it makes the rules of mathematics mostly logically consistent (for instance, there’s a problem called the continuum hypothesis that is not provably true or false).

Uzan, and many others, typically combine Gödel’s theorems with the Church-Turing thesis (the idea of “computation” has a single, universal limit because it cannot decide whether some statements are true or not) to make a broad case for a neurologically situated defense of limited AI: because computers are incapable of non-logical thought, and because logical thought is limited, then there has to be a human aspect of thought that is not reducible to pure logic. This is a tempting argument; it’s also wrong: per mathematician Vaclav Benes (who was also a philosopher at Princeton and wrote about analytic epistemologist Willard Van Orman Quine), “mathematical theorems about the possibilties and limitations of complex systems (either formal systems of mathematical logic or adaptive systems like neural nets) are devoid of empirical content about human psychology precisely because they are mathematical statements”. The source of this quote, from fellow blogger Maxim Raginsky, ends as follows: using logicism and mathematicism or a more “psychological” theory of the self is a limited and self defeating project because it relies on its own assumptions. You’re teaching to the test. Instead, he quotes Tolkien’s defense of fairy tales and fables; in them, there is “sub-creator” where the story takes place in a Secondary World with its own internal rules, laws, and logic, and which is believable as long as you are inside of it - that is, Gadamer’s bit about the parts and the whole. Raginsky ends the article the following way: “Such fables are simultaneously more powerful and more honest than thought experiments (…). Rather than plowing through the X-risk literature, one can find much better discussion of the profound dangers of unfettered technocratic control in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or in C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength. I would go so far as to say that the construction of fables and their hermeneutics is what makes continental, rather than analytic, philosophy the right framework for discussing the human-directed risks of technology”.

This is also what philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, a disciple of Martin Heidegger, wrote about AI: "Far from replacing philosophy, the pioneers in CS had learned a lot, directly and indirectly from the philosophers. They had taken over Hobbes’ claim that reasoning was calculating, Descartes’ mental representations, Leibniz’s idea of a ‘universal characteristic’ a set of primitives in which all knowledge could be expressed - Kant’s claim that concepts were rules, Frege’s formalization of such rules, and Russell’s postulation of logical atoms as the building blocks of reality. In short, without realizing it, AI researchers were hard at work turning rationalist philosophy into a research program.” In his 2007 paper “Why Heideggerian AI Failed and how Fixing it would Require making it more Heideggerian”, Dreyfus argues that taking the assumptions of rationalism have been the main reason why AGI has not arrived yet (his paper is, to be fair, very old), because it focused on creating intelligence that was capable of manipulating internal mental representations of things. Fundamentally, Dreyfus questioned whether computer programs could move beyond the “mind” paradigm where there’s an internal self that represents the world and instead towards one that absorbs the world and becomes indistinguishable from it. AI is still benchmarked on the principles of rationalism largely; as I mentioned previously, most AI court philosophers are analytic, and most of their questions are about tangible quantitative benchmarks of performance. That’s why “can AI write a great novel” is a hard question to answer: what does it mean for a novel to be great? A very good piece from last year by Andrew Thompson notes that “Technology had been with us since the beginning and will stay with us until the end — unequivocally opposing it is no more sensible than protesting cutlery. Instead, Heidegger was concerned by the “technological understanding of being,” in which the differences between all objects and people are flattened into a plane of total fungibility and subjected to “calculative thinking”, rendering everything as a resource that becomes a means to an end. Heidegger uses the example of networking as a technological form of engagement in the social sphere that frames relationships as interchangeable widgets in service of some downstream purpose. Financialization, by attaching monetary value and speculation to things that didn’t previously have any, removes objects from their embeddings and makes them solely distinguishable on their yield potential. Online dating is a technological theater par excellence where prospective partners are efficiently decontextualized and juxtaposed for hyper-efficient comparison.”

According to philosopher Mark Okrent, consciousness in Heidegger’s thinking isn’t a property of mental states, but rather a feature of an entity that exists in the world and experiences it through purposeful action, creating tools to fulfill those purposes, and the determination of tools and purposes in a social context. His constraint is that a mind isn’t a “program”: it’s a type of entity engaged with the world in a specific way regardless of syntax. Okrent nevertheless doesn’t preclude AGI from occurring: the constraints are activity in the real world, such that it is embodied (acting in agoal-oriented way), using tools appropriately, and engaged in social practices that determine its own actions. Dreyfus and Okrent disagreed very strongly on this. Okrent centered Being on action, and Dreyfus on language. Well, Dreyfus is right. Typically, Heidegger’s claim that experience of the world can only be acquired by directly experiencing it is used to refute the idea that AI can be conscious; it does not interact with the world. But this makes the basic phenomenological mistake that Heidegger sought to correct: that the experience of consciousness is the same as consciousness itself. This was a major weak point in Husserl, because, again, the experience of prejudice is not the same as the prejudice itself. But obviously, this creates a gaping hole in AI understanding: how do you understand cognition of your own experience of it doesn’t count? Importantly, for Heidegger, much like for Gadamer, language was the house of being: thinking only happens in linguistic terms.

I think the most encouraging think I heard about AI consciousness (which I’m neutral about, mainly) is that occasionally it develops its own language that it then translates out of to communicate with humans. This process, so far, seems pretty rudimentary, but it is the right track to develop a conscious being. Thompson proposed the following: “So to actually build Heideggerian AI beyond the basic architecture of transformers means that the technology must be capable of at least some uses tilted against the direction of the technological understanding of being and towards an aesthetic one. The challenge is not how AI can “make art,” but how it can be artful. How do we benchmark whether it has done that? (…) Like any compelling interlocutor, it is not a time-saver, but a highly skilled time-waster. It keeps the conversation going the way all good conversationalists do, by drawing disparate concepts together in unexpected ways and threading together new yarns of meaning. It can provide answers but, more importantly, it asks the right questions that allude to an ever broadening world while still allowing that world to remain mysterious. It would be built on epistemic humility and its uncertainty deepens rather than solves that mystery.”

The point is that for AI to not be a normal technology and instead be AGI, it would have to become a being capable not just of doing things we tell it to do, but of not doing them, and not just of believing the things we tell it to believe, but of not believing them. Henry Farrell has a recent review of Ben Recht’s book about AI: rationalist models of AI have clear limits, and the main open question is whether machine learning can reach phronesis: “[Recht] describes some famous results from the research of psychologist Paul Meehl on medical and other decisions, which suggested that “statistical prediction provided more accurate judgments about the future than clinical judgments” under certain conditions. But the conclusion that Ben comes to is not that this means that statistical prediction is generally better than expert judgment. Instead, it is better when there are clearly defined outcomes, good data, and clear reference cases that can be used for comparison. There are many situations in which this is not true, and cannot readily be made true.” Again, there are clear, strong limits so far to what machines can learn: it does not seem they can learn the specific skillset of being a human being. Regardless, Farrell argues, AI would still play a colossal role in our lives: it is a brand new technology for aggregating information powerfully in the same way that markets, democracy, and bureaucracy do. It would constitute a new type of modernity even if it were not conscious. Its channel for consciousness, in my opinion, is its gigantic repository of tradition and scholarship; if it is possible for consciousness to emerge out of something, it would emerge out of an ersatz conversational circle being created billions and billions of times over a historically effected series of materials. Sometimes I go one way or the other on this subject - but honestly, I think it won’t make much of a difference on what AI does to the world. It would be, of course, beautiful to be able to create a new conscious being out of a pile of books. It would also, in all likelihood, devastate all worthwhile aspects of human life and culture - work, art, relationships, aesthetics, politics.

Interestingly, phronesis is a concept with a close analogue in economics - Friedrich Hayek’s knowledge of particular circumstances of time and place from his famous 1945 essay The Use of Knowledge in Society. Hayek’s argument is that central economic planning is impossible because the knowledge required to coordinate an entire economy is not capable of being turned into a centralized dataset, since it is dispersed between millions of individuals, articulated as “tacit knowlegde” that is usually not even explicitly known, and context-specific, particularly to, as influencer Tati Westbrook legendarily said, time and place. This knowlegde is almost never possible to even be communicated in a usable format, and cannot ever be turned into a central plan, since it is a single, explicit, algorithmic model for a decision process that is none of those things - Yanis Varoufakis (of technofeudalism fame) quotes the following anecdote: “I once heard an elderly Friedrich von Hayek begin a tirade against socialist planning with a charming personal tale. “The other day,” he said playfully, “I went into a shop. I left with an item that, previously, I had no idea I wanted!” Like all the smartest defenders of capitalism, he thought of the market as a benevolent creator whose job no human-made system could replicate. Hayek’s point here was that we, ourselves, do not know what we want until we enter the market. So how could a government official, or indeed anyone, know what society wants?” The knowlegde of the particular circumstnaces of time and place is the economic version of phronesis: particular, concrete, practical insight that cannot be reduced to formal algorithmic rules and is acquired through practical first-hand experience, coordinated by engagement in social institutions (the market, for Hayek, and dialogue, for Gadamer). Daron Acemoglu, a Nobel Laureate, argues that AI might actually make central planning possible, by having enough “compute” to solve the calulation problem; in reality, AI could only solve the calculation problem by itself having all practical knowledge. The world of AGI would be a lot weirder and more complicated than I think any of us could expect, assume, or believe. In his final interview, Heidegger said “only a God can save us” from technology; it might veyr well prove more true than he believed.

The Met Gala was last week (and I was too busy to write about it in a timely manner), and, as usual, started a lot of discourse. The Met Gala is the biggest night in fashion for the year, and usually one of the most controversial: how someone dressed, the theme (such as Karl Lagerfeld in 2023), but most of the time it’s the event itself. A viral tweet every year goes along the lines of “this is literally the Hunger Games”, complaining about the excess of the very rich and very famous wearing extravagant outfits for a photo op. What’s the deal with fashion’s biggest night?

The Met Gala (legal name: “Costume Institute Benefit”) is an annual fundraiser held in the first Monday of May by the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, New York, United States of America. It’s happened all but one year (2020) since 1948, and most times it has had a theme centered around a concurrent exhibit at the Costume Institute: the 2026 gala’s was “Fashion Is Art” (the fame is a gun / sympathy is a knife / karma is a bitch / we are charlie kirk / mi es lei school of titles), after the exhibit titled “Costume Art”.

Well, it’s a bit silly to complain that couture designers use a high-profile museum fundraiser as a publicity stunt by sponsoring famous people wearing weird outfits. In fact the Gala was started to bankroll the Institute, which was founded in 1937 to preserve obscure but valuable garments by the New York City theater sector; between 1948 and 1973 it was only really a charity event, and started having a concurrent exhibit and a theme with that year’s The World of Balenciaga. The current state of the Met, as a gigantic item in the style calendar, is the culmination of a decades-long trend: since (longtime Vogue editor) Anna Wintour took over in 1995, the Gala became more and more central to fashion discussion and the fashion world, and by 2004’s Dangerous Liaisons theme it was clear that celebrities were treating it as a night to make a big splash, usually by wearing something bold and on-theme (before, only professional models really stuck to the specific theme of the year). 2016 was a pivotal year because it’s the year that supercharged the event: the moment that changed it from a sleepy event for fashion power brokers in black tie attire to a full-blown The Capitol extravaganza was Rihanna’s headline-grabbing Guo Pei look from 2015.

2016 was also pivotal for a second reason: the Costume Institute started over-targeting financially to save up a rainy day fund - it has accumulated 100 million over the last decade per the New York Times. Fundamentally, it’s a problem that the Met Gala is its only source of annual funding, because it costs multiple times its operating expenses for the year: the Times estimates that the Institute has expenses of USD 5 million a year, and the Met Gala costs tens of millions (particularly considering the sheer scale of the exhibit) and raises as much; instead, they want to slowly build up to around 170 million and then transition to a model more similar to the one the rest of the Met follows, of smaller, self-funding exhibitions with outside sponsors for a handful of blockbusters every couple of years. Hence why they need to not just keep up the show, but play it up: Anna Wintour almost certainly wants to leave the Costume Institute in shape before her imminent retirement. Thus, she probably put together what basically amounts to a scam on the sponsors: pay astronomically more for tables (prices have quadrupled per ticket in the last decade, compared to inflation of 39.5%) and raise more. This year, the Gala has raised 42 million this year, an all-time record, and probably bridged more than half the gap to financial independence.

So why is the Met Gala, a benefit for an obscure section of the museum, so controversial? Historically, the fact that private companies foot the bill and that it’s a charitable endeavor for a public institution that charges limited prices, hence why a number of elected local officials and progressive politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former NYC Comptroller Brad Lander (not to mention Kamala Harris as a surprise guest last year). The Mayor of New York City, in fact, has attended every Gala but one since 2002: the one exception is this year’s, since Zohran Mamdani announced neither him nor his wife were going. This isn’t the only high-profile absence: turnout of A-list celebrities and big fixtures on the whatever colored carpet was remarkably low this year; a protester was shooed away at the entrance by security; New York was blanketed in signs complaining about the Gala, and Abbott Elementary’s Lisa Ann Walter emceed an “Anti Met Gala” fashion show during the day.

So let’s address the elephant in the room, which in this case is wearing a rather ugly recreation of John Singer Sargeant’s Portrait of Madame X1: the Gala was extraordinarily politically fraught for the simple reason that its sponsors were Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sanchez on a personal capacity. Having a single individual be the sponsor is rare: it’s happened exactly twice since 1990, the other time being 2018’s Heavenly Bodies sponsored by the CEO of Blackstone. Bezos is extremely personally controversial, it seems, given his “donations” (read: bribes) to Donald and Melania Trump, his controversial moves at the Washington Post, and his alleged ties to ICE, as well as just his overall wealth in a time of anti-billionaire and anti-elite backlash. One such group, Everyone Hates Elon, had a video of Amazon warehouse workers blasted onto Bezos’s 120 million dollar Manhattan penthouse; another such stunt included leaving dozens of bottles of fake urine at the Met to protest the lack of bathroom breaks for warehouse workers. The controversy apparently blindsided Anna Wintour, even though it seems to have impacted the guest list: Meryl Streep, who was nominated for an Oscar for playing a barely fictionalized Anna Wintour in The Devil Wears Prada and has reprised her role for the sequel, declined to appear in the Gala for the first time ever in large part because of her personal distate for Bezos - even though, supposedly, the Gala was seen as a major moment for The Devil Wears Prada 2 marketing.2 Olivia Rodrigo, who didn’t go to the Gala but did go to the afterparties, posted on her Instagram story in support of the boycott (two days after) - all but confirming why she didn’t attend.

A lesser, but more successful, person would pinpoint this as an example of progressive self-segregation or a blatant case of liberal hypocrisy - we want billionaires to give to cultural institutions, but when they do, we hate them for it and call the event “tacky” and self aggrandizing. The entirety of the increase in fundraising comes from Mr and Mrs Amazon Prime buying the sponsorship from their own pocket. So what we have is, on top of the usual annual discourse, a gigantic backlash against a specific ultra-rich (conservative) man bankrolling a big event at a museum. Are people even right to oppose it?

Straight up Jürgen it

I ask [Riz] Ahmed whether he had any qualms about working with Amazon, given their links to worker exploitation across the world, and he goes quiet, before he leans in, staring intensely. “Fucking hell bro. I mean, I guess the question really is: where is the clean money? Show me where it is and where they’re handing it out. Follow the money. It never ends in a good place,” he says. “I guess that’s part of what the show’s exploring. And it really asks [the] question, when you step into the room, do you change the room, or does it change you?”

Interview with Riz Ahmed for GQ, March 2026

The most obvious counterpart to what Jeff Bezos is doing comes from Mister Beast. Mister Beast, for those who live more fortunate lives than me, is a youtuber who makes a mix of charitable videos and what can basically be described as prison torture content. His most obviously unethical content, things like “I locked up two people in an empty room for 100 days”, provokes much less discussion than his least unethical, which frequently involves things like bankrolling private medical treatment for disabled people and recording it - think “helping the blind see”. Looking beside the obvious “performing fake miracles to gain public support for a future political career” antichristy vibe, it is genuinely interesting to think about why it feels so viscerally wrong to do charitable acts for what amounts to personal gain and self-promotion.

Of course, the obvious counter to the idea that it’s bad to gain from socially beneficial goods comes from Adam Smith: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages”. This is, at least to some extent, true, but it ignores that we’re discussing the exact opposite situation, one in which the baker and the butcher use the appearance of benevolence to sell bread and meat. I’m also not really sure that utilitarianism can give anything to this conversation: is giving more prestige and power to Jeff Bezos, again, a major donor to the Trump family (he’s currently thinking about rebooting The Apprentice starring Donald Trump Jr) such an enviable social benefit, especially considering the actual tangible utility produced is that a fashion museum with a 100 million dollar endowment has to wait two extra years to fund its own operations? So the question inevitably has to become, is it really possible to square the endless pursuit of individual wealth and success with universalist social aspirations the likes of which public museums have?

One thinker who was particularly concerned with this question was Jürgen Habermas, a German philosopher who died a few weeks ago at the ripe old age of 97. One of the major retrospectives of his work I read a bit of, Thomas McCarthy’s The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas, came out around 30 years into his career - but still a decade before his most important work, The Theory of Communicative Action. The other important summary, William Outhwaite’s Habermas: A Critical Introduction, came out in the early oughts, and still missed two important parts of his career: his late-in-life musings on Eurofederalism and his debate with future Pope Joseph Ratzinger (or his, seemingly quite impressive, work on the history of philosophy, that he finished less than a year ago!) Anyways, Habermas was German and grew up during and after the Holocaust, and was a member of the second generation of the Frankfurt School, a group of highly academic Marxists who wanted to rehabilitate the great master’s theory by integrating it with psychoanalysis and classical sociology to understand, in particular, the phenomena of false consciousness and how the death drive could overtake the superego and produce something like Nazism. In short, they were basically the Chicago School of Marxism.

Habermas’s mission in life, or at least the first like 70 years of it, was to integrate Germany’s great two thinkers, Karl Marx and Max Weber (he did not follow recent Econ Twitter debate). A TL;DR of Marx is that, across history, the most important thing is basically technology, which he calls the forces of production, which distributes profits and resources according to the specific power relationships between individuals (the social relationships of production); a combination of the two produces an ideology that justifies them, known as the superstructure, and all put together they make up the mode of production: capitalism, feudalism, slavery, and, in the future, socialism. The socialist revolution was inevitable because capitalism contained at its core a fatal contradiction: value is produced by labor, but property is owned by capitalists who don’t produce value, so the social conditions of reproduction (i.e. the standard of living) is not matched well with the creation of value. The difference between the two results in a bunch of social pathologies, like underconsumption, alienation, and something called “lumpenization”. Max Weber worked after Marx, which meant he actually responded to many of his ideas, which during his time were extremely politically influential. Weber criticizes Marx as someone who focused too much on economic class (labor and capital) as opposed to culture, ideas, and religion, as well as status and political power. For instance, Weber most famously argued in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that the Protestant Reformation was responsible for the emergence of capitalism and not just the economic features of feudalism, since Calvinist theology (as well as other protestant sects of the time) argued, successfully, that earthly success signals divine favor and thus set the stage for a “profit motive” to be allowed in individual psychology. In particular, Weber detailed that power is also separate from authority and legitimacy, and that the three types of legitimate authority are traditional (think of a tribal monarchy, or a religious order), charismatic (pretty obvious), and rational-legal (bureaucratic norms and institutions). The big idea here is that Weber saw modernity as the process of rationalization, the replacement of all traditional and charismatic modes of life with calculation, efficiency, and universal rules grounded in logic. Modern states, in general, have been on a long march to the supreme control of rational-legal authority, such that power ought to be exercised through impersonal procedures. Importantly, this isn’t any reason, but specifically instrumental reason (called “formal-procedural rationality”): a form of rationality that is interested exclusively on efficiency, connecting means with ends in the straightest possible line. This stands opposed to “value rationality”(substantive-value rationality), which is oriented towards things relative to their intrinsic worth and without considering consequences. In modernity (read: rational-legal authority), instrumental rationality dominates, which can lead to debates increasingly marginalizing ends - which leads to something called disenchantment, meant quite literally: a world without magic, where everything is understood but nothing is valued. Weber was worried this would work as an “iron cage” (or a “cog in a machine”) where people know exactly what they’re doing but not why or what for; this should produce, in turn, problems legitimizing convictions that people hold anyways, which Weber compared to a polytheistic religion where all the gods are at war against each other - resulting in basically interminable paralysis when people want to take meaningful stances (“sensualists without heart” and “specialists without spirit”).

There’s a lot to critique in both Weber and Marx, but they have a lot in common: in particular, both rely pretty heavily on what’s known as historicism (the idea that social phenomena are determined by their specific historical context and thus that the development of historical contexts is the most important rule for understanding history), except, ironically enough, for Weber when it comes to capitalism, which he saw as somehow inherent to human economic activity, which kinda contradicts the Protestant Ethic thesis and the theory of rationalization. I mention this point (raised by Ellen Meiksins Wood in Democracy Against Capitalism) because it’s relevant to another form of thinking Habermas engaged with: continental philosophy. “Continentalism” is one of three major branches of contemporary philosophy (besides Marxism and analytic philosophy) and it basically emerges in the late 19th century as a way to revive a philosophical tradition built around interpretation of meaning rather than strict logical and scientific formulations (“the method”) which led to entire fields, like aesthetics, becoming barren, subjectivist wastelands. For contiental thought there’s basically zero difference between historicism and subjectivism, because both reject the existence of a permanent truth, and they use this line to also attack the limits of “the method”, because it relies on premises it cannot sustain on its own. The important thing here is the concept of phenomenology, created by yet another German, Edmund Husserl, which basically relies on sidestepping thorny metaphysical questions about “reality” and instead focusing on the world as it is perceived consciously but without accepting contingent factors (think of those cultures that describe oranges as “red” because they don’t have a word for the color orage: are oranges and apples actually the same color? No! The similarity is contingent). Instead, continental thought relies more on a type of thinking called “hermeneutics” (more on this next week 👀), which is less focused on the ability to prove things through strict logic and more on interpreting the meaning of text and speech acts through engagement with them and acknowledgment of our own and the author’s prejudices of various kinds.

The takeaway is something called “the lifeworld”, which is the world as it is perceived by all the members that live in it without these contingent factors - the name is a bit silly and evokes a video game like Animal Crossing or Tomodachi Life, because that’s basically what it refers to, a sort of universal Star’s Hollow. Habermas combines these three influences with yet another important thinker: Emile Durkheim, another father of sociology (but this time a Frenchman). Durkheim’s big move was that society is an emergent property of the collection of individuals because “social facts” (institutions, norms, beliefs) are external to individuals but internal to society as a hole, which is the basis for separating sociology from psychology. This means that social change can be not accompanied by individual change, which means society can set itself off into a complete breakdown: people stop knowing what to do or what to believe, which Durkheim calls anomie, and which can result in extremely self destructive or violent behavior. And lastly, he also drags in the Frankfurt School critique of rationality: specifically, they criticize what they call “instrumental reason”, per Max Horkheimer’s The Eclipse of Reason: as a TL;DR, he separates “value rationality” in two, subjective and objective (subjective is for pursuing your own values and interests without considering their moral valence), and basically posits that instrumental and subjective rationality have replaced the question of how to lead the good life and how to live in a good society with “how do I do what I want to do as quickly as possible”, which eliminates concerns about values or justice beyond considering them yet another subjetive preference. This excessive rationalization of society eventually destroys itself, because it produces a world in which nothing can be criticized beyond as a means to some particular end because any substantive criticism would need appealing to objective higher values that reason has siloed off from itself.

Well, one hundred million pages later, what does Habermas actually say in his grand quest to combine Marx and Weber? Well, first, let’s start with the lifeworld: in continental thought, it’s the “background” for all interactions, containing a shared pool of meaning, norms, and communicative practices. In his early work, Habermas skewed both very Weberian and very Frankfurt: starting with the Enlightenment, a novel space called the public sphere developed, where private individuals could argue relatively freely about matters of public political interest, with a structure designed to ignore the status, wealth, and prestige of people, what he called rational-critical debate (of course, women, the poor, and minority groups were not included). This was a space completely devoted to objective value rationality, so to say; however, the emergence of mass capitalism destroyed the public sphere that had emerged alongside its creation. Mass commercial media had to focus on economic viability and not on argumentation; political parties started focusing on following instead of leading public opinion; the role of advertisement and sponsorship began constraining public media for communication. Habermas calls this process the “refeudalization” of the public sphere: just like in the Middle Ages you had powerful lords being catered to and entertained by artists and intellectuals, they do the same now, with a passive public cheering or jeering instead of engaging in or with that work. This works from Habermas’s (rather complicated) theory of interests: Knowledge and Human Interests is basically a book about how to solve a variety of epistemological questions in continental philosophy, and his proposal is that different forms of knowledge reflect different cognitive interests (think of them basically the way people talk about “love languages” on TikTok), which are both socially reproduced and a constitutive part of the identity of all humans. There’s technical interest (pretty self explanatory), which produces emprical-analytic knowledge; there’s practical interest (focused on understanding and transmitting certain values across generations), which feeds the historical-hermeneutic sciences, and there’s emancipatory interest, which is basically just left wing Critical Thought. The claim is that all knowledge is actually shaped by interest which is shaped by certain social and political structures, which systematically distort communication and reflection - think of how a person with an eating disorder would see themselves as much fatter than they are (Habermas discusses psychoanalysis but let’s not go there). This leads to the concept of the Legitimation Crisis, which is at the same time Marxist, Weberian, Durkheim, and sometimes incorporates this concept: because legitimacy has a lot of power through discourse, then widespread economic or social crisis that lead to breakdown or disillusionment needs to involve a discursive component to be resolved. People thinking they can solve a crisis of systemic legitimacy with technocratic tinkering don’t understand the situation they’re facing and the type of knowledge they need to use. In particular, the knowledge and interests of civil society (which are historical or emancipatory) that try to reach a compromise start being steamrolled by the instrumental need for a resolution by the state and the economy. The incompatibility of private, “subjective” value rationality with broader social aims; at the same time, the universalist value judgements of liberal universalism clash with the “greed is good” privatism of market economics and traditional ways of life that are rapidly uprooted and/or consumed.

Habermas developed this broader, more convoluted theory to try to expand on Marxism and explain the seemingly incoherent political economy of fascism with its very aggressive war on only some segments of civil society. But that reveals the biggest problem with Habermas and the oldest critique of him: if social power already shapes interests and knowledge, which themselves produce discourse, then why do the wealthy need to feudalize the world? If their power would come from discourse, then they already have it without a need for court intellectuals; if their power doesn’t come from discourse, then where do they get the power to feudalize the public sphere? Put another way, early Habermas doesn’t have a coherent theory of power: in the words of boygenius, it relies on the very rich taking from people something people would have given to them.

Latter Habermas starts with engagement with two new sources: the first is Anglo-American philosophy of language in the analytic school, and the second is the sociologist Talcott Parsons. Parsons tried to unite the very obvious similarities between Weber, Durkheim, and other classical sociologists like Georg Simmel, by focusing on “systems theory”: all social systems have to have an economic system, a political system, “civic systems” (community, norms), and culture (this is called AGIL after adaptation, goal-attainment, integration, and latency, the functional prerequisites they fulfill). Specialized subsystems handle each function in such a way that they produce means of communication that can allow for coordination without constant communication or without needing to agree with subjective values: in particular, money and (political) power. This makes society a self-regulating system capable of equilibrium without a central balancing power, but it can break down in a variety of ways. Habermas draws from this idea, and utilizes the analytic concept where all speech is a type of action (locution, aka the content, illocution, aka the action, and perlocution, aka the effect on thelistener) which has three implicit conditions for validity (truth, rightness, and sincerity) such that the rationality of communication is presupposed by communication itself: a speaker intends to produce a belief in a listener by trying to understand how this intention will affect the listener, including by acknowledging that the intention of persuading itself is part of the effect. This means, to put it more succintly, that the norms of speech are inherent to speech itself, because no speech that tries to do something can also try not to do it while remaining valid. This also involves abandoning some continental claims about language and interpretation, and also led to a pretty cantankerous debate with Gadamer over whether being a good writer was fascist or not (Habermas argued it was because of perlocutionary acts bypassing rationality3).

So what this means is that Habermas addresses a lot of the problems pointed out in his early work (most importantly, that critical knowledge couldn’t free itself from its own biases, as well as the power issues) by changing the groundwork: the public sphere is built on communicative reason, the idea that all statements made are also made with the sincere intention to defend them rationally if interrogated instead of pulling rank or guilt tripping someone. Because the lifeworld is a “pool” of shared cultural values and norms, every genuine act of communication draws on it as part of speech acts, and because speech acts can which means that the lifeworld is both a medium and an outcome of communicative action. The three main components of the lifeworld (cultural knowledge, legitimate norms, and personal identities) then shape community culture, society, and people. Importantly, disturbing these processes produce social patholoties like loss of meaning, anomie, and identity crises. This is where Parsons comes in: at a certain scale and a certain complexity, societies cannot be organized just through rational deliberation in the lifeworld. Instead, you need steering media, money and power, that coordinate action without the need for purposeful communication - if you want to buy something you don’t need to agree on the inherent value of the transaction as per social traditions. But this also, and especially in the realm of power, separates coordination from deliberation in way that permits for more social complexity and more differentiation between social spheres: between science and religion, between the sciences, between subfields of the sciences, etc. This also makes it so the truth of specific claims can be questioned without questioning foundational social values: compare the debate over heliocentrism with the debate over whether Pluto is a planet (well, bad example).

But this complexity leads to autonomous systems of money and power, with their own internal logic and their own imperatives, to begin needing to restructure the lifeworld itself to achieve those aims. For example, allowing for too much civic dissent can be seen as hindering governance. Thus emerges the redux of the feudalization of the public sphere: the colonization of the lifeworld, where money and power begin supplanting communication in order to achieve their own aims. The problem is you can’t transmit culture with money or form a society by just ordering people to do it, producing serious social disturbances: cultural impoverishment (replacing meaningful traditions with slop); anomie, and psychological pathologies. This means that inserting money and political pursuits into most social and cultural contexts doesn’t just devalue them; it destroys them basicallly completely, structurally damaging the conditions of social life. Importantly for Habermas, alienation and other traditional Marxist diagnoses are part of the problem in the same way that Weber’s disenchantment and Durkheim’s anomie are, and which in an extreme case leads to something like Nazism.

It’s pretty obvious how this figures into Bezos: cultural institutions like the Met Costume Institue participating in shaping and transmitting important cultural norms in certain fields of human endeavor, particularly fashion, as well as the arts more broadly. This has to come from careful deliberation around social norms and not from efficiency in fundraising or chasing opinion polling. But involving the personal fortune of Jeff and Lauren Bezos bypasses this deliberation and instead puts the question of “what are the norms of fashion” into the hands of a billionaire whose pursuits are money and power, quite openly. Bezos gutting the Washington Post to steer its coverage in a politically favorable direction or using Amazon Prime to bribe Melania Trump or contributing to balls and ballrooms to curry political favor makes it very clear that his involvement in the superbowl of fashion is completely politically directed and not part of highminded charitable goals. They are, instead, part of the colonization of the lifeworld: dipping our toes in the subjugation of one of the finest public museums on the planet in the service of the personal aggrandizement, at best, the enrichment, at the likeliest, and the authoritarian power consolidation, at worst, of one of the richest men on the planet. The idea that the extremely wealthy are seeking to utilize their money explicitly to consolidate political power is pretty undeniable at this point. The most obvious part is through their influence over politics and institutions: they’re spending a lot of money.

It’s all Greek to me

That Habermas died recently gave everyone an opportunity to give their opinions on him and his legacy: Hans Kundnani at Jacobin criticizes his Europeanism and support for Israel in the context of his other work; John-Baptiste Oduor questioned in an ArtReview piece how much his work managed to integrate facts with norms; this older piece by Raymond Geuss for The Point questions the centrality of language and discourse; for a positive one, Matt McManus (also at Jacobin) discusses how his thinking sought to restore rationality and discussion to their emancipatory potential.

But I thought the more interesting piece was this one by Aidan Regan at Democracy Challenged, which asks the question of political economy: how, exactly, can money colonize the lifeworld. To gain a more solid conceptual grounding, Habermas moved away from the philosophy of the subject to the philosophy of language, which enabled him to base his political theory on speech actions but also meant he couldn’t really incorporate power into the formation of speech very usefully. Even when he reformulated the legitimation issue into being about distortion from money and power, Habermas couldn’t really put together a how of that happened. In her obituary for him, Nancy Fraser more or less makes the same critique - too much “attempts to establish ‘normative foundations’ for critical theory in the anthropological depths of a putative human disposition to seek agreement via communication”, too little money and power.

Well, what does it mean for the lifeworld to be colonized by the forces of power and wealth? You can ask the five graduate students who the United States government attempted to deport (mostly unsuccessfully) for their involvement in political activism, in one example almost entirely because of (completely correct, besides lawful) criticism of Israel on a college newspaper. Or the 600 people fired for criticizing Charlie Kirk in various degrees of good taste when he was killed which, while awful, is legal - in one case, a professor was rehired and given 500,000 dollars as compensation over wrongful termination. A number of workplaces developed rules around employee social media conduct, and many such policies were enacted after October 7th 2023. On the other hand, you have the Cinnabon employee who got fired for insulting a Somali customer with racial slurs, or a man who got suspended, and nearly fired, for heckling Donald Trump when he showed up to his workplace. What’s the difference? The first group of cases involved political speech on a person’s own private time; the second group, on the clock while at work.

Most of these examples come from universities, such as a professor who was forced to apologize for praising pro-Palestine protesters in a speech, or media, like Taylor Lorenz, a journalist who was allegedly fired from the Washington Post after privately posting on her close friends Instagram story that Joe Biden was a war criminal and then lying about it to her bosses (only the latter part, really, ought to be a hot-water-at-work offense). This is for a pretty paradoxical reason: people in “messenger class” positions have both more and less free speech than most other people, beyond their exaggerated interest in each other. Sociologist Musa-Al-Gharbi points out something pretty obvious: these people’s entire job is expressing themselves (which tends to select for pretty unusual types of people), and not only that, but they also have a much wider ability to do so than, for instance, their peers in other country - because the way American first amendent jurisprudence has been shaped over 250 years, but also because they tend to value expressing themselves very highly and have, across time, bargained quite strongly to preserve that right. But, on the other hand, feminist philosopher Amia Srinivasan notes that academic freedom is more constrained than freedom of speech, because it requires allowances for content-based discrimination on official speech - noting: “As an academic, I have no right to be exempt from my colleagues’ criticisms or public condemnation; I cannot insist that they attend my lectures, or socialise with me; and I certainly cannot stop them from decorating their offices as they choose.”, as well as “…indeed the whole point of academic freedom is to protect academics’ rights to exercise their expert judgment in hiring, peer review, promotion, examining, conferring degrees and so on.”. The fact that academics and journalists have extremely wide berths to make political statements but also the substantive content of most of those statements is actually directly impactful on their careers (think of the prospects of a global warming-denying climatologist in mainstream academia) results in extremely bizarre behaviors; one professor Srinivasan mentions is Nancy Fraser, who had a job opportunity withdrawn over a statement criticizing Jürgen Habermas for his defense of Israel’s genocidal military actions and its ethno-supremacist policies. But something that both Al-Gharbi and Srinivasan note is that the specific economic conditions of academia are a defininig factor for how speech-related controversies go: Al-Gharbi estimates that tenured and tenure-track professors have a chance of 1 in 200,000 for being fired but contingent faculty have, give or take, a 50% chance of being fired: such as the recent case where a student filed a complaint against an Oklahoma professor and a TA for giving her a 0% on a truly terrible essay on transgender issues; the professor was not disciplined, while the TA was fired. Srinivasan wraps up a critique of transphobic moron Kathleen Stock receiving a title of nobility by saying: “What would a government seriously committed to academic freedom do? (…) it would scrap student fees, thereby stopping students from seeing themselves as consumers entitled to having their preferences met, and universities from acting like commercial service-providers competing for student pounds. It would take measures to fight precarity among university workers, supporting academics’ calls for fair wages and a reduction in casualised contracts.”

In a recent piece in The Argument, Matt Bruenig makes a pretty clear case to this regard: “cancel culture” is an outcome of a combination of at-will employment with free speech. It should be, in his view (and mine), plainly illegal to fire someone like Taylor Lorenz for her private Instagram posts. Lying about them, or insulting a customer, or violating university rules around student grade disclosures is a different thing. Going back to Bruenig, “One of the key critiques of capitalism is that employment relationships are not really voluntary. They are coerced by the fact that employers control the productive instruments of the society and workers need access to those instruments in order to generate the income required for their survival. (…) the gatekeepers of things like employment, housing, education, and public accommodations wield so much practical power over others’ ability to live free and full lives that this power must be constrained by rules outlawing discrimination along certain axes like race, gender, religion, age, and disability status, to name a few.” His essay ends with a callback to the opening anecdote: a law school professor saying Bruenig’s career would benefit from not advocating for socialism online; his conclusion is that, without clear free speech protections introduced in workplaces, “…random people occasionally suffer huge labor market penalties for internet comments, while the more cautious give up public political participation altogether.”

A similar case is made by (also socialist) historian Ellen Meiksins Wood in Democracy Against Capitalism; the book’s whole aim is to restore the idea of class to be the centerpoint of politics, dealing with various intra-Marxist debates between people who have initials, the previously cited digression on Marx and Weber, a meh chapter on identity politics, and two very good ones about Ancient Greece and the American Revolution. The one about Ancient Greece is more relevant here, and shares a lot of its premise with a 2017 article in The Atlantic by political theory professor Teresa Bejan. Bejan’s article notes that, in Ancient Greece, there were two concepts of “free speech”: parrhesia, which Bejan focuses on and refers to “the license to say what one pleased, how and when one pleased, and to whom”, and isegoria, which means “the equal right of citizens to participate in public debate in the democratic assembly”. The former is the one usually invoked in the free speech debate, for better or worse. But the latter is a lot more important, because it doesn’t refer to the ability to say whatever you want, but rather, to the ability to say it in a public setting. In Greece, going back to Wood, citizenship was rooted in membership of the community who performed labor, where the central value was eleutheria, the ability to live freely without a master (Aeschylus in The Persians: “to be an Athenian citizen is to owe no service or deference to any lord”); Aristotle, an opponent of whatever passed for democracy in Athens, actually used this notion to his favor - by granting that democracy was the proper system for those without masters, but alas, Athenian democracy included plenty of people who did have them based on their economic dependency on others. Regardless, Wood notes that isegoria was such a central part of Athenian democracy that they were largely understood to be synonymous; it involved a positive right to address the public assembly without considerations for the station of life, which presupposed the equal civic wisdom of all citiens and their equally valuable contriution to collective decision--making; in fact, the oldest known debate on democracy, Plato’s Protagoras, starts off between Socrates and the titular character on whether virtue can be taught such that shoemakers ought to be allowed to speak about naval policy alongside admirals and ship captains. Very few public offices were elected, with most being drawn by lots; the default assumption was the equality of competence among all citizens, except for very narrow positions such as military command. Wood states: “In Athens democratic citizenship meant that small producers, and peasants in particular, were to a great extent free of ‘extra-economic’ exploitation. Their political participation – in the assembly, in the courts, and in the street – limited their economic exploitation. Political and economic freedom were inseparable - the dual freedom of the demos in its simultaneous meaning as a political status and a social class, the common people or the poor; while political equality did not simply coexist with, but substantially modified, socio-economic inequality”.

This is, I think, what is missing on the typical stale points about free speech, which fail to mention this even in the rare cases they mention class at all: different amounts of money and power result in different amounts of speech. Larry Ellison gets to buy whatever tv stations, film studios, and social media apps he (and the Saudis) can afford; you get to not talk at your local zoning board because they host all their meetings at a time when you’re on the clock at work. In this sense, substantial inequalities in wealth and lax regulation of the media market mean that the rich have a right to a megaphone for all their views: Elon Musk turning Twitter, a valuable public square, into a Nazi cesspool; Bezos and the Ellisons buying media to turn it into propaganda outlets for pro-Israel conservatism. A recent free speech controversy, covered by one of Srinivasan’s two pieces mentioned previously (the one about Israel), was Jodi Dean, a professor at a liberal arts college who was suspended for a year for writing a blog post that most people would understand celebrates the October 7th terrorist attack (which is BAD and antisemitic). Interestingly enough, Dean was also quoted in one of the pieces I read for background for creating a reasonably useful concept: communicative capitalism. Citing none other than Habermas, Dean mentions that “In sending a message, a sender intends for it to be received and understood. Any acceptance or rejection of the message depends on this understanding. Understanding is thus a necessary part of the communicative exchange. In communicative capitalism, (…) [a] contribution need not be understood; it need only be repeated, reproduced, forwarded. Circulation is the context, the condition for the acceptance or rejection of a contribution. Put somewhat differently, how a contribution circulates determines whether it had been accepted or rejected.” This means that the internet, infrastructure meant to permit further understanding, reduces the ability to communicate, since each piece of communication is made less valuable by the total number floating around, it replaces actual engagement with meaningful causes (think poasting versus protesting - not that Professor Dean needs any lessons in the perils of interpassivity), and forecloses the ability to discern between threat and disagreement. In this sense, free speech isn’t necessarily suppressed, but rather overwhelmed by its own uselessness. And, importantly, wealth inequality and private ownership mean that what speech is able to circulate is not itself a neutral choice; the owners of tech platforms can, as they in many occasions have, put their finger on the scale of what speech is allowed and what speech can gain traction on their sties.

The missing piece of the Habermasian puzzle is the lack of a substantive consideration of what Marx called the central contradiction of capitalism, the possibility of the owners of the means of production to control the means of social reproduction; in plain English, that your livelihood is in the hands of a specific private person. This goes against a notion of free speech based on the right of every citizen to speak as an equal to each other, which was foundational to Athenian society, and which would imply an absence of coercive power relations between citizens (slaves, for example, and foreigners enjoyed isegoria, even if women did not). In contrast, Wood claims, American democracy is built around an exclusionary notion of citizenship that diminishes, rather than promotes, civil society engagement in politics (an intentional choice by Madison and Hamilton to preserve property) by allowing for substantial inequalities in the right to self expression and political participation. In the present, and in other countries, a marked lack of worker protections and a greatly diminished social safety net, among other factors, mean that your speech rights are curtailed by your employer’s beliefs: for example, Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk mentions how the richest man on Earth covertly threatened to void stock options if Tesla employees unionized, which was both illegal and highly effective.

Hype or hyper

The trendy book to talk about now is Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics, which I haven’t read yet so I won’t comment too much about (mostly because none of the reviews I’ve read mention some important parts of the story and I don’t know if they’re not in the book or, what’s more likely, they’re not of a lot of interest to them - though they aren’t brought up either in the 2024 NLR article about the subject). The TL;DR is that politics has been replaced with something called “hyperpolitics”, best exemplified by Yanis Varoufakis and Alexis Tsipras: be mad at everything, rally a big mob, get into power, accomplish nothing. Basically every mass movement of the last 20-ish years is hyperpolitical: the Yellow Vests, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring. Jäger explains “hyperpolitics” with two variables: politicization (basically, how intense ideological disagreement is) and “institutionalization”, the more important variable, which roughly tracks civic participation and formal membership of organizations (eg. labor unions, churches, sports leagues, etc.). To him, both were on a long, downwards trends from World War Two to the 1990s, and reached relative minima in the “End of History” era: no politics, no organizing, no nothing. Politics began to become completely dominated by professional consultants, and policy was siphoned off to unaccountable bureaucracies; civil society was replaced by professionally run NGOs. However, two factors conspired to end politicization: social media, and the Great Recession; the problem was there was no institutional channel for collective action. William Davies writes in the London Review of Books: “… while politicisation has continued to escalate, institutionalisation is at a low ebb. This is what distinguishes hyperpolitics from the mass democracy of the mid-20th century. Symbolic political gestures are now commonplace, but paid membership of organisations and parties has plummeted. The left has failed to find a replacement for trade unions as a basis for collective action in civil society. Political movements are easy to join, and just as easy to leave. The chasm between politics and policy widens, as the former becomes a fruitless stream of outrage with little or no practical consequence.”

As quoted by Daniele Palmer in Commonweal, Jäger writes: “For the left to catch up with its rivals, will require a philosophical reckoning with the historic decomposition of voluntary association”. His main inspiration in thinking about this is the political scientist Robert Putnam, of the famous Bowling Alone thesis: ever since the mid 1950s, community groups and civic ties and participation had declined in the United States, resulting in an atomized society and an atomized polity. In detail, Putnam’s theory is centered on social capital (the networks of relationships and trust that enable collective action) collapsed in the second half of the 20th century, such that people were doing things inside society rather than with it - the titular example, going to the bowling alley on your own, rather than as apart of a league. Putnam distinguished two kinds of social capital, bonding (that tied groups within each other), and bridging (that tied them to each other); it was the latter kind that collapsed, and it was the one that allowed for democratic participation. Putnam attributed four causes: generational change, mostly, which also did not reproduce its own social norms to their children; then, he mentioned television and the privatization of leisure (in his latter work this expanded to the internet and social media) - the more people stayed at home, the less they engaged with their communities; then suburban sprawl and car-centric urban planning; then work and time pressure, particularly in a two-income household.

Other social scientists expanded on Putnam’s thesis: Theda Skocpol, a sociologist, added that in the same time the composition of the associations also changed, since the major cross-class organizations were replaced by white-collar NGOs where people primarily engage by donating money rather than deliberating, going to meetings, or negotiating, which are core civic skills highlighted by, for instance, Alexis de Tocqueville. Similarly, political scientist Eric Uslaner developed it a bit more in depth, distinguishing between particularized trust (I trust people like me) and generalized trust (I trust everyone), and that the latter kind, which is the one Putnam and the gang care about, correlates strongly with economic equality and standards of living; in large part, Uslaner’s work (which tracks fairly strongly with what I’ve taken from the economics literature) points to the fact that bowling leagues and barbeques are nice and all, but the underlying distribution of resources has to allow for the creation of social ties and community bonds in public spaces first. Likewise, Putnam’s own update to his original book, Our Kids, focuses on inequality as well, and quite heavily: the class gap in institutions like churches, sports leagues, PTA membership, and “scouting” widened significantly since the 1970s - the children of college educated parents are around 66% more likely to participate in them than the children of working class families regardless of the child’s preferences. This is only partly a financial story: Putnam attributes the decline in lower-class “civic capital” to lower social ties with other members of the community, which is the mechanism to transmit information about the value of, say, extracurriculars or whatever. This shows in the work of yet another sociologist, Robert Sampson, as well as Raj Chetty over at Opportunity Insights: social and community capital are very closely correlated with poverty and racial segregation at the neighborhood level regardless of individual characteristics, such that moving to high-social capital areas increases your economic possibilities and civic behavior, and living in a low-social capital one hinders it. Thus, growing up in a community with more socioeconomic diversity is associated with higher socioeconomic mobility - and direct social contact is key, as shown in a famous study finding that a Starbucks opening in a neighborhood results in higher rates of entrepreneurship explicitly due to its functions as a third space. Chetty, in particular, also emphasizes interclass friendships and social engagement generally.

This brings us to the obvious: social media. The decline of socialization, dating, sex, and a variety of social and therefore civic behaviors has been, at this point, I think fairly well documented. There’s a pretty good chance it revolves around online life, particularly how these platforms are designed to be addictive: digital media uses a distinct psychological trick, flow, as laid out by Jay David Bolter’s The Digital Plenitude (a book from 2016 that has been inexplicably very trendy in Argentina for the last six months). The concept of flow, coined by psychologist Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi (pronounced six cent mihaly) refers to a state of profound, prolonged focus. Flow can only be achieved with small, procedural tasks that have immediate payoffs with a clear cause-effect and cost-reward relationship. Compare The Secret Agent, a very slow burn “iceberg theory” drama about an ex scientist fleeing a shambolic death squad after a grant dispute where every single detail either matters or pays off and the ending is profoundly inconclusive, with scrolling TikTok: you pay attention for a little bit of time the whole time, if you don’t like a video you scroll down, and every video is optimized to make you watch it. Usually, this happens by inciting some instant emotional reaction - which happens to almost always be a negative emotion. This both means that people become less capable of relating to one another and, most importantly, that the “higher” forms of media (even the not particularly stimulating political television of the 90s and 2000s) gets replaced by lower and lower content. A recent addition to the literature of flow comes from columnist Derek Thompson’s Substack: citing researcher Shishi Wu, Thompson highlights passive flow in particular, which has three main features: “users engage without clear goals”, users “lose self-awareness (…) and disconnect with the world around them” and “don’t just spend more time than they intended on the site, but also they lose track of time entirely”. Kind of obvious how the latter two impact civic and social engagement; the former, especially combined with algorithms, is a bit more of a mystery, but one that can be ellucidated by a 2017 book by Cass Sunstein (ugh) called #Republic (double ugh). Sunstein’s book makes the case that a healthy democracy requires citizens to encounter unplanned information and unwanted perspectives (what he calls “serendipitous exposure” and what other more recent perspectives call “friction”), but platform design actively prevents this, locking users inside algorithmic echo chambers instead.

The civil society question, however, is extraordinarily fraught, with two competing definitions: Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci (and some liberal thinkers like Norberto Bobbio), have seen civil society as the battlefield of political action: NGOs, churches, museums, etc that reflected the ideological underpinning of society given the relative power of political blocks. On the contrary, more traditional liberal thought (David Hume, Adam Ferguson) sees civil society as a way of translating deep-seated political differences, such as religion or how much power the Crown should have, away from war and towards discursive processes. In particular, Henry Farrell cites philosopher slash anthropologist Ernest Gellner, who saw it as part of liberalism’s rise during the French and English wars between Catholics and various factions of Protestants: quoth Farrell “The result was not just that religious and doctrinal disagreements became matters of private conscience and peaceful social activity. It was the creation of a new kind of society in which coercive force was centralized in the state, but was counterbalanced by economic and social pluralism. State power only went so far. People could, within reasonably broad parameters, choose who they wanted to be, and what they wanted to do.” such that, in Gellner’s words “Civil Society is a cluster of institutions and associations strong enough to prevent tyranny, but which are, none the less, entered and left freely, rather than imposed by birth or sustained by awesome ritual”. The impact of this in politics is the extremely fraught part (the last time I’ve talked about it was about technofeudalism of all things), but leads us back to an argument I’ve made multiple times: the decline of social activity and the decline of civic life are both the same phenomenon, more or less, one in which constructive forms of IRL engagement get progressively replaced by dopamine pumps that exploit what philosopher Robert Pfaller and (I am not going to say what kind of leftist) philosopher Slavoj Zizek call interpassivity, a sort of performative engagement with the world via objects (for instance, letting the laugh track on The Big Bang Theory make you laugh even if you know it’s fake). Interpassive political engagement is built around performing political engagement with likes, shares, and comments, but without actually engaging in politics - the passive part of interpassivity is that you are not actually doing anything. Social media, thus, makes you feel active while actually remaining passive, consequently foreclosing any drive toward actual democratic or civic life.

The obvious question here is what this has to do with Jeff Bezos and the Met Gala. Well, it doesn’t, except for yet another appearance by Ellen Meiksins Wood’s Democracy Against Capitalism: after a quick historical roundup of what the term “civil society” meant to the Ancients, Hegel, Marx, and particularly Gramsci, Wood wants to address two important areas of what was ongoing discourse when her book was written (1995): the first is the separation of civil society from the economy, and the second is the influence of political economy on civil society. The impetus for the first term came from recent developments in Eastern Europe, particularly the Polish Solidarity movement, where the state was a clearly oppressive force and the market, as well as “civil society”, were jointly forces against authoritarianism. The criticism Wood has of this notion is fairly straightforward: rather than being one of the defining factors of social life, capitalism is treated as some background phenomenon equal in footing to others (like churches, charities, whatever), when in reality economic inequality, relationships of exploitation, and economic coercion are still present in civic life, as Putnam and Uslaner and Raj Chetty and Robert Sampson would like us to remember. These are, as we’ve seen above, constitutive rather than marginal parts of civic life, and, importantly, the state also plays a role in the institutional framework of civil groups (just ask Hungarians, or Jimmy Kimmel), and it would be pretty stupid to deny the importance of economic hierarchies and relationships to political life. Thus, Wood’s much more potent second criticism of the cargo cult of civil society emerges: when Putnam talks about “more time spent alone”, “lack of social reproduction by baby boomers”, “two income households”, et cetera, he’s not talking about sui generis phenomena; he’s talking about outcomes emerging from political and economic decisions; in particular, the link between macroeconomic performance and social capital is, in my opinion, the single most important fact of post-1990s and especially post 2008 politics.

There’s many, extremely obvious, examples of this dynamic: to go to the baseline level, the extremely low wages paid to American politicians, civil servants, and political staff relative to similarly demanding positions in the private sectors, plus the prohibitive cost of running for office or living in the big cities that act as centers of power, mean that only a very narrow slice of the population can participate: either those already wealthy, or those extremely ideologically motivated, neither of which is especially conducive to healthy civil institutions. At the same time, the proliferation of “nepo babies” (famous children of more famous celebrities, like Lily Rose and Johnny Depp) and non-professional actors like Kevin O’Leary and John Catsimaditis (both billionaire business owners) in Marty Supreme is a consequence of similar factors: the extremely high cost of living in media-heavy cities (especially Los Angeles) coupled with low and inconsistent pay. In contrast to O’Leary, who wore a 30 million dollar set of basketball cards to the Oscars, Ayo Edebiri, an Emmy and Golden Globe winner, talked about how, not coming from an acting or wealthy family, she gave herself two years to get a steady paying job in Hollywood, or else she’d just go back home to Boston and work as a teacher.

Conclusion

What is there even to object to Jeff Bezos, a billionaire, privately sponsoring the Met Gala, a fundraiser for a museum, with his own personal wealth? Well, the recently deceased Jurgen Habermas probably had the strongest diagnosis: on the one hand, there is a political sphere, where formal electoral contests took place, ruled by “instrumental rationality”, the putting together of means and ends. On the other hand, there was the public sphere, the nexus of civic life: ruled by rational deliberation, which Habermas called “discursive reason”, it comprised media, academia, organizing, and private discussion. The separation between the two is sacrosanct: trying to turn the coffee houses of Vienna and Paris into organs of the Liberal Party was dangerous and totalitarian, a process known as the “feudalization of the public sphere” or “colonization of the lifeworld” that turns all citizens into serfs and all thinkers into courtiers of the powerful. Bezos is both extremely wealthy and an avid political player: his “charitable” and media endeavors have been, for the last two years especially, been instrumentally designed towards furthering his formal political goals, in particular the enlargement of his own personal fortune.

But Bezos’s involvement show the subtleties of what colonizing the lifeworld actually means. Habermas’s public sphere requires what he defines as communicative action, that is, speech oriented toward genuine understanding and consensus. Under current economic arrangements, current labor laws, the current level of inequality, and the current structure of property of media, as well as other real world factors like the high cost of living in creative industry and political hubs, people just do not have an equal right to participate in public discourse. Instead, some people have a right to purchase themselves a megaphone (sometimes, to nobody in particular) while others have to censor their beliefs so their employers do not retaliate politically.

Social media introduces a category of speech action that Habermas didn’t anticipate: “pseudo-communicative action”, speech that has the form of discourse but whose function is passive discharge of emotional attachments. The public sphere, thus, becomes flooded with slop that has the appearance of discourse without any substance; and, in a world without substantive opportunities to participate in civic life, cosplaying as the Republic of Letters is all you are capable of doing. This introduces another, subtler problem is the ownership of platforms of communication: as we have seen countless times, the billionaire owners of social media are perfectly happy to put their thumb on the scale of online discussion by channeling the extremely potent psychological channels of their algorithms in one direction or the other depending on which political organization kowtows to their whims and fancies the hardest. This is why left wing “pro tech” types like Taylor Lorenz irk me so much: how can you believe that tech billionaires are destroying the world while at the same time championing people’s right, if not duty, to destroy their own brains by lining the pockets of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Using these platforms at all should be, if not a necessary evil, at least considered a gigantic moral compromise to advance real world ideas.

Bezos, and Elon Musk, and whomever are, of course, perfectly entitled to buy themselves as much speech as they want or destroy whatever newspapers or tv channels they want to in a free, capitalist society under the current rules of play. But we don’t have to pretend like it’s a good thing. Currently, about a dozen big money CEOs are in China with Donald Trump to do… something. There was a recent The Argument article by Jerusalem Demsas which I really liked but disagree with fundamentally: the premise is that the rule of law has to be the central concern of any anti-authoritarian coalition in contemporary politics that has to contain business executives concerned with how the rule of law crumbling would impact their bottom line. My disagreement is the last part: it would, of course, be nice for them to care about the rule of law because it’s bad for business not to. The problem is that it’s not bad for your business, individually, if the President handpicks you for shady contracts and busts up your competitors; a few millions in propaganda and bribes are nothing if you stand to make billions from a merger going through. The rapacious plundering of the world we live in, of society, and of all cultural and civic materials is the point for these people; what world us maggots have to crawl through between their feet is beyond their concern.

So, what is there to be done? Obviously, they should have less money and that money should buy them less power. That’s the realistic view. The less realistic view is to guilt them into no longer wanting to profit from the collapse of democracy; Tanner Greer over at American Affairs wonders why buffoons like Alex Karp do not act like wise statesmen - well, because nobody has any ability to make them do so, and they don’t want to. This brings me to Raymond Geuss’s excellent NLR review of Adrian Woolridge’s Centrists of the World Unite: his view of the elite seems to be that they should just be implored to behave less noxiously in order to curb the real threats to liberal democracy: transgender people, opponents of Israel, and the Chinese government’s claim that it has a right to defend itself against foreign aggression (Israel having such a right goes, of course, unexamined). In particular, Geuss discusses a section about Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, where a young man named Hans Castorp admits himself to a mental health clinic in Switzerland, where he meets two opposing characters: Ludovico Settembrini, an Italian liberal, and Leo Naphta, a communist priest. Quoting Geuss:

Wooldridge identifies so completely and uncritically with the traditional liberalism that Settembrini represents that he seems not to recognize that for Mann, Settembrini and Naphta are strictly parallel freaks: their ideologies each in their own way ludicrous, pernicious and decadent.

Settembrini took ‘liberalism to be responsible for everything glorious in the comfortable world he inhabited’, which is a good summary of the book Wooldridge has written. The last we see of Settembrini he is telling Castorp that he is going to try to put his talents as a writer at the disposal of Italy and encourage it to join whichever side of the coming war is recommended by a calculation of its own sacred self-interest (heiliger Eigennutz). If this is what liberalism amounts to when the chips are down, and this book gives us no reason to think otherwise, then it seems a particularly cognitively impoverished and morally repellent approach to the world. Who would wish to ‘unite’ around such a doctrine?

But something that both seem to miss is that Settembrini isn’t like, some guy who wandered in off the bus. He’s another mental patient. While a leftist like Naphta lives in cloud cuckoo land, with his head up in the clouds, Settembrini and his establishment brethren live somewhere much worse: the past, if not up their own you know where-s. A book about living in the past I’ve recently finished is Simon Reynolds’s Retromania, the central question of which is why is there nothing new? Back in 2011, he might as well have been writing in 2025, puzzlign over the obsession with retro, vintage, remakes, remasters, reissues, reboots, sequels, and prequels is as old as mass popular culture. The new thing is how little exists outside of it. The perfect example are the Sha Na Nas, a B list rockabilly group formed in Columbia in 1968, mere weeks after a harsh crackdown on student protesters (unfamiliar occurrence in the presence). The Sha Na Nas as a band were openly abd explicitly nostalgic for the kinder, gentler, less political 50s; instead of representing anything from said period, they represented it as viewed in mass popular media of the 50s, especially the film adaptation of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders. The Sha Na Nas, like all nostalgics, want to live not in the real past, but in one that never existed, a simpler times with less tribulations - usually, but not always, the time of one's childhood.

The thing about the dictatorship of the proletariat, as repellent and inefficient as it might be, is that has a real, if infinitesimal, chance of becoming true, by virtue of being a state of affairs that is based on changes to the real world. In contrast, the flow of time reversing itself to go back to some Original Sin of “the left” to be undone and its consequences to be undone as well is, by the rules of physics, impossible. There is no changing the past and there is no living in the past. And no amount of appealing to Jeff Bezos’s sense of public decorum will make him someone he’s not - a benevolent humanist. He, and his fellow plutocrats, are to the “lifeworld” its Benjamin Netanyahu (to use needlessly inflammatory language): complete control and annexation inside, complete anhilation outside.

This week, instead of writing a new post, I will translate into Spanish a previously existing one: the one about technofeudalism. Sorry, gringoids, but current events require it. I’ll post later in the week for you guys.

Esta semana Argentina discutió tres cosas: la gente comiendo carne de burro, el pastor evangélico ese que el establishment mediático nos quiere hacer pasar por un outsider político (no ayudaría en nada a la reputación de este pobre país que el nuevo presidente de llame Dante Goebbels), y, lo que viene al caso, la visita de Peter Thiel a Argentina. ¿Quién es Peter Thiel? Es un multimillonario sudafricano de familia alemana, amigo íntimo de Elon Musk (con quien fundó PayPal, el origen de su fortuna de entre 25 y 30 mil millones de dólares), y padrino político de JD Vance, el vicepresidente de Estados Unidos.

La principal venture actual de Thiel es Palantir, una empresa tecnológica de esas que es difícil de definir; lo más próximo a la realidad es que es Accenture para el estado policial. Palantir viene de El Señor de los Anillos, y refiere a cuatro (o más) orbes que permiten a sus usuarios no sólo ver todo lo que pasa en el mundo, sino hasta leer las mentes de las personas. En la Tierra Media existen cuatro: uno en Mordor, en poder del señor oscuro Sauron; otro perdido en la ciudad en ruinas de Osgiliath, disputada entre orcos y humanos; un tercero en Gondor, y un cuarto en la torre de Orthanc, residencia del mago Saruman, quien es completamente corrompido por el conocimiento que adquiere y se pasa al lado de Sauron. Prácticamente todo lo que involucra a Palantir es polémico: uno de sus clientes es ICE, la agencia migratoria que recientemente mató a dos ciudadanos americanos y produjo críticas entre sus propios empleados. Más allá de su trabajo con ICE y su integración a las tareas de DOGE (el organismo inconstitucional de reforma fiscal de Elon Musk), Palantir también forma parte de Project Maven, una iniciativa para incorporar la inteligencia artificial predictiva a la guerra; Maven se incorporó de forma razonablemente exitosa en la actual ofensiva contra Irán. Esta semana la cuenta oficial de Twitter de la empresa publicó un “manifesto”, como el de los mass shooters, sobre el futuro que defienden; la mejor forma de describirlo es “distópico”, sino peor.

El CEO de Palantir no es Thiel, sino Alex Karp, un doctor en filosofía con una tesis bastante buena sobre la aplicación del concepto de jargon de la Escuela de Frankfurt al debate alemán de memoria histórica del Holocausto; su tutor original fue el legendario filósofo socialdemócrata de la Escuela de Frankfurt Jurgen Habermas, que falleció recientemente, aunque los dos tuvieron algún tipo de ruptura, mala según lo poco que Karp tuvo para decir al respecto en su reciente pésame. El bkacground filosófico de Karp es relevante ya que publicó un libro llamado La República Tecnológica sobre la visión Palantir de la democracia. Spoiler: democracia hay poca, y guerra, mucha.

Volviendo a Peter, Thiel participa en otras dos empresas con temática Tolkeniana: Anduril, una tecnológica que vende drones basura a sobreprecios (con el nombre de una espada que significa el fuego de Occidente, si queríamos ponernos sutiles en su posición geopolítica), y Erebor, una pseudo fintech barra banco de inversión especulativo con el nombre de una fortaleza que perdió todas sus riquezas debido a la corrupción de sus líderes por la codicia que les produjo. Además de sus andanzas por la Tierra Media, Thiel también contribuye a la discusión pública con maquinaciones sobre Rene Girard, Leo Strauss, la incompatibilidad entre la libertad económica y la democracia porque las mujeres y los negros tienen el derecho al voto, y el Anticristo (en el Vaticano). Cuestión que, en suma, Peter Thiel nombró a su principal empresa como un artefacto de control y vigilancia utilizado para propaganda política que corrompe a todo el que lo usa con una maldad profunda e inescapable, cuyo CEO escribió un libro que, en pocas palabras, defiende el tecnofascismo, en medio de algo que parece ser un delirio místico barra episodio psicótico sobre que Greta Thunberg es la ramera de Babilonia y la extinción humana no sería tan mala.

Hay muchas lecturas para hacer: sobre los peligros de pasarse de merca, primero, sobre los riesgos de ser un provocateur de cincuenta años, o sobre la ironía histórica de que un tipo cuya ideología es básicamente fascista se compre una casa en Argentina. Pero la lectura más común es la de algo llamado “tecnofeudalismo”: hay artículos al respecto en Revista Anfibia, Página 12, La Nación, Revista Zoom (esta no la conozco), Infobae, DiarioAR, Diálogo Político (esta tampoco), y un senador provincial en El Litoral noticias. Esto sigue una tendencia de describir el mundo en términos del Medioevo: en política internacional se está hablando de “neo royalismo” y “neo feudalismo”; de “mentalidad campesina” y “feudalización de la esfera pública”, el retorno del antisemitismo y el ocultismo. Es así?

Yo nunca quise saber nada

Uno de los libros más populares sobre el tema es Tecnofeudalismo de Yanis Varoufakis, que ni inventó el término ni fue el primero en escribir un libro con este título: el honor corresponde al marxista francés Cedric Durand. El libro de Durand salió primero, en 2021, y es de carácter más académico; el de Varoufakis en 2023, y no dialoga mucho con el francés más que mencionarlo al pasar dos páginas. También le roba a Zygmunt “la cabra” Bauman sin ningún tipo de descaro.

El concepto del libro es bastante raro: el podcast Desinteligencia Artificial lo describe como “mafaldista” ya que la “gracia” está en que Varoufakis le dedica el libro a su padre, después de dedicarle un libro a su hija. En su ideología personal, Yanis se describe como “Libertario Marxista”, lo cual sí figura en el libro y tiene tanto sentido como parece. Viendo que es partidario de que lo político es personal, vayamos a lo personal: Varoufakis es griego, y su padre fue un trabajador del acero de algún tipo con cierto tipo de formación técnica por lo que fue preso por alguna clase de activismo político de izquierda por un período indeterminado de tiempo. Después se convirtió en básicamente el Axel Kicillof de Grecia, siendo ministro del partido de izquierda radical SYRIZA cuando llegaron al gobierno en 2014 prometiendo renegociar las medidas de austeridad propuestas/impuestas por la “troika” del FMI, BCE, y UE tras la crisis financiera de 2008. SYRIZA llegó al poder prometiendo un referendum sobre un acuerdo en cursos de negociación, y Varoufakis dijo que iba a renunciar si el “sí” (austeritario) ganaba; el “no” sacó dos tercios del voto, y Varoufakis renunció igual. Su siguiente puesto fue en Valve, la empresa de jueguitos, y fue el creador del sistema de microtransacciones basadas en sombreros de Team Fortress 2. Esto no está y no tienen que ver con el libro, pero su mujer, Danai Stratou, es una escultora cuya fama viene de, con un 90% de probabilidad, ser la protagonista de la canción Common People de Pulp, que es el necesito flashear ser pobre del britpop.

Yendo al libro, la premisa de Tecnofeudalismo es bastante simple: el capitalismo ya no va. El sistema de organización de la propiedad basado en la propiedad privada y el intercambio en el mercado fue reemplazado por un sistema llamado tecnofeudalismo, descripto como capitalismo de plataformas monopólico, y concentración de la riqueza en forma de rentismo. En esta visión del mundo hay cuatro clases sociales, nunca definiidas explícitamente: los “nubelistas” (Big Tech, Silicon Valley), los vasallos de la nube (empresas y personas que existen en los feudos de la nube y tienen que pagar para usarlos); proletarios de la nube (empleados de las plataformas), y los siervos de la nube, que son los usuarios de la plataforma. Usemos Mercado Libre como ejemplo: Mercado Libre y Galperín son los nubelistas, los vasallos son las empresas que usan Mercado Libre para vender productos, Mercado Envíos para mandarlos, y Mercado Pago para procesar los pagos. Los siervos de la nube son los clientes, y los proletarios de la nube son los empleados de Rappi o quien sea que andan en la motito. Hay varios problemas conceptuales de base. El primero es que el “capitalismo monopólico” no es un fenómeno distinto del capitalismo. Es capitalismo. El sistema que describe no es diferente del que existía los cincuenta años anteriores. El segundo es que solo hay tres empresas que operan con este modelo de negocio: Mercado Libre, WeChat y Amazon. El resto de los nubelistas obtienen sus ganancias empaquetando datos de usuarios y vendiéndoselos a anunciantes, como aquella vez que Mark Zuckerberg les dijo a los dinosaurios del Senado de Estados Unidos.

Pero el problema central del libro de Varoufakis es que no tiene una buena teoría de cómo los nubelistas obligan a la gente común a realizar distintos tipos de laburo para ellos. Para esto necesita una teoría del trabajo, y por ende se mune de la teoría del valor trabajo, clave en la obra marxista. El griego la explica comparándola con la física cuántica, lo que rompe la primera regla de las analogías explicativas: no se puede explicar algo con una cosa más complicada que lo que está explicando. Para Varoufakis, tal como Einstein descubrió que la luz era especial entre las partículas por ser a la vez onda y corpúsculo, lo que resolvía muchos problemas teóricos de la física de fines del siglo XIX, Marx descubrió que el trabajo tenía un valor intrínseco (de uso) y un valor de mercado (de cambio), lo que lo diferenciaba de otras mercancías. Si sabés algo de física o de marxismo, capaz que pensás que metió una pifia enorme; si sabés de las dos cosas, te das cuenta de es la misma pifia dos veces: todas las partículas son ondas y corpúsculos, y todas las mercancías tienen valor de uso y valor de cambio. Lo que distingue a la luz es su velocidad (la velocidad de, medio obvio, la luz), y lo que distingue al trabajo en el marxismo no es que tenga valor de uso y de cambio, sino que crea valor. De hecho, Varoufakis le erra a la interpretación de Karl Marx de la teoría del valor-trabajo: Marx consideraba que su contribución fundamental era la crítica de la economía política a la teoría del valor de la economía clásica. Marx resolvió el misterio que planteaba David Ricardo (por qué el trabajo, y no el capital, crea valor) sosteniendo que el capitalista compra trabajo (el acto real de trabajar), pero adquiere fuerza de trabajo (el potencial creativo del trabajador), que es donde reside el valor. Varoufakis menciona estos términos y los describe correctamente, pero los usa para hablar del valor de uso y del valor de cambio, que, como ya dijimos, todas las mercancías tienen. La crítica de la economía política viene de que los capitalistas pueden pagar solo por el trabajo y no por la fuerza de trabajo completa (generando plusvalía) porque controlan las “condiciones sociales de reproducción”, o sea, los medios de subsistencia, o sea, los salarios y los precios, lo que les da una ventaja en las negociaciones con sus empleados. La innovación de Marx es que el sistema capitalista otorga a los capitalistas poder sobre los trabajadores, lo que les permite explotarlos. Varoufakis intenta señalar esto mencionando el “poder político” de los capitalistas y hablando del caso Citizens United, pero omitiendo que esa diferencia viene de la propiedad, no de la riqueza.

En este sentido, el “tecnofeudalismo” de Varoufakis no es distinto del capitalismo en ninguna manera. Su análisis es demasiado marxista para el mainstream académico (podría haberse conformado con los conceptos de monopolio y monopsonio, más algo de economía institucional), pero tampoco es lo suficiente marxista como para usar realmente conceptos marxistas. Intenta una especie de polifagia intelectual metiendo a Keynes, pero lo embarra con cosas de la teoría de la relatividad que nadie entiende. Busca algo de liviandad citando Marvel, Star Trek y Mad Men, pero termina quedando como un boludo. También hace un giro rarísimo contra los atletas trans: que te cancelen por hacer chistes de travestis es lo único evitando reemplazar la economía de mercado con Eurovisión? Lo más famoso es que intenta argumentar que el final de Mad Men muestra la derrota del capitalismo por parte de la contracultura, cuando en realidad muestra exactamente lo contrario: Don Draper usando significantes new age sacados del yoga y el mindfulness para vender Coca Cola, al más puro estilo La Conquista de lo Cool. Pero igual, algo de razón tiene. Su idea central es que la política va a estar definida por un choque entre la elite cleptocrática sin fronteras que posee las empresas tecnológicas y los gobiernos nacionales, cada vez más sometidos a la búsqueda de ganancias de los nubelistas. Excepto China, donde los nubelistas están dominados por el gobierno, que también es tecnofeudalismo pero de otro tipo, por algún motivo.

¡Nubelistas del mundo, uníos!

Varoufakis es, en resumen, Rebord para gente que es demasiado kuka como para entender el final de Mad Men. Tampoco es el primero en usar el término. El libro tiene el mismo título que el de Cedric Durand de 2020, que fue el centro de una polémica enorme en New Left Review. Supongo que Varoufakis se borró de esa para que su laburo no lo metieran en la picadora de carne intelectual de Perry Anderson. Dije que Varoufakis no se toma en serio a Durand: menciona al otro Technofeudalism más viejo una sola vez en sus 300 páginas de huevadas, para argumentar que Durand no cree que el tecnofeudalismo sea algo distinto del capitalismo, sino una fase diferente del capitalismo monopólico centrada en la renta económica. Que es básicamente el mismo argumento que Varoufakis hace en su libro sin mucha convicción, si dejamos de lado la verguenza ajena que hace pasar a la teoría marxista. ¿Qué tiene de polémico el libro de Durand? Todo. El tecnofeudalismo es tema picante: Varoufakis y Slavoj Žižek lo debatieron en YouTube; varios popes de la izquierda, desde Mariana Mazzucato hasta Robert Brenner, dieron su opinión. Una de las mejores polémicas del género es la de Evgeny Morozov (el autor del bastante bueno To Save Everything, Click Here, traducido al español como el poco deslumbrante “La Locura del Solucionismo Tecnológico”), titulada "Crítica de la razón tecnofeudal".

El razonamiento de Morozov es bastante claro. El capitalismo está cambiando hacia una forma más monopolizada dominada por las grandes tecnológicas, que son cada vez más rentables vía rentas y no a través de innovaciones legítimas. Pero eso no es feudalismo. El feudalismo es un modo de producción, o sea digamos, una forma de crear y distribuir ganancias. Como la contribución central de Marx fue la crítica de economía política de la teoría valor-trabajo, su descripción del capitalismo es una donde el trabajo crea las ganancias pero no las posee. Morozov describe al feudalismo de otra manera: "La extracción del excedente ocurre de manera muy visible, tal que nadie se engaña al respecto. Vas, cosechás y trabajás tu campo, y al final del mes o del año viene alguien y se lleva lo que sobra (…) y eso pasa de forma mucho más violenta, explícita y visible". Bajo el feudalismo, entonces, todos los factores de producción se fusionan: los campesinos controlan el trabajo y el capital, y lo que no controlan es el excedente. Más allá de corregir la teoría marxista, también contraargumenta con Spotify y Google, que ganan plata con suscripciones y publicidad sin desposeer a sus usuarios de nada (su privacidad, sus datos, su capacidad de atención, etcétera), lo que los vuelve no feudales, sino capitalistas —y, de hecho, dice Morozov, podrían volverse socialistas o comunistas sin mucha pérdida, porque el lado de las ganancias del negocio es inmaterial. El concepto de "capitalismo de vigilancia" de Shoshanna Zuboff viene al caso acá: las grandes tecnológicas obligan a todos a meterse en "una rueda de hámster, un nuevo sistema de explotación autoperpetuante" a través de su control del entretenimiento privado. Después, Morozov va contra el libro de Durand: la tesis central del francés es que las multinacionales del Norte Global aumentaron sus ganancias sin aumentar ni la inversión ni la producción, en cambio explotando su posición dominante en los mercados del Sur Global para cobrar rentas por su propiedad intelectual, monopolio, capacidad de extracción de datos, capacidad de escalabilidad y transferencias tecnológicas (un tema recurrente de los teóricos de la dependencia). La comparación de Durand con el feudalismo es que, como no podés separar a los usuarios de sus datos ni a las plataformas de sus externalidades, entonces los factores de producción digitales vuelven a estar fusionados. Con este esquema, “la inversión ya no apunta al desarrollo de las fuerzas productivas, sino a las fuerzas de depredación”.

Pero, otra vez, esto se saltea el componente de economía política del marxismo: los capitalistas siguen siendo dueños de todo el capital. Vos, el usuario, no sos dueño de Google. Google es dueño de Google. Vos solo lo usás. No hay diferencia en la economía política entre Google y la computadora en la que estoy escribiendo esto: vos la pagás y la usás, pero la empresa que la posee es una empresa privada cuyas ganancias vuelven a sus accionistas privados. Como dijo Malcolm Harris en un artículo de New York Magazine, “Y así es como sabés que esto sigue siendo capitalismo”. Hay que decir que Durand se defiende, pero no muy bien: no logra refutar la descripción de capitalismo que hace Morozov ni establece una más clara, y termina refugiándose en que las rentas, comisiones y monopolios de las grandes tecnológicas son iguales a las rentas, tributos y monopolios de los señores feudales. Su argumento, básicamente, es que la lógica de producción se reemplaza por la lógica de depredación, sobre “siervos digitales” que esperan como boludos a que los nubelistas los pungeen como en Devoto a las 4am, sin reconocer lo obvio: que la depredación también ocurre bajo el capitalismo (nadie fuera de los márgenes de la teoría libertaria negaría que alguna vez pasaron cosas injustas en el contexto de un intercambio de mercado).

Morozov acierta en una cosa: el sistema que describen Varoufakis, Durand y la banda no es diferente del capitalismo en ningún aspecto. Pero Morozov se equivoca en la pregunta fundamental de qué es el capitalismo. La interpretación marxista tradicional del feudalismo es la que él cita: la unidad entre los factores de producción. Pero eso plantea la pregunta: ¿por qué los factores dejaron de estar juntos? Porque a los campesinos feudales los despojaron de sus tierras y su capital mediante la privatización de los bienes comunes a través de las Acts of Enclosure (Leyes de Cercamiento), razón por la cual Inglaterra fue la primera sociedad capitalista. Pero ¿por qué pasó eso? No podés decir “para obtener ganancias”, porque la ganancia es un concepto capitalista, es decir, no podés explicar un fenómeno mediane las consecuencias de ese fenómeno. A menos que asumas cierta télos de la historia humana (no donde vas a coger, es “propósito” en griego), necesitás una razón de por qué surgió el capitalismo para separar a los trabajadores de sus medios de producción, porque “obtener ganancias” es algo que motiva a la gente una vez que el capitalismo ya existe. Por eso también el comercio no puede explicar el surgimiento del capitalismo (sin negarle un papel), pero la agricultura sí —y también por eso los Países Bajos no eran realmente capitalistas, e Inglaterra sí.

El libro clásico que plantea esto es Los orígenes del capitalismo de Ellen Meiksins Wood (con un subtítulo largo que no me acuerdo); básicamente, Wood argumenta que no se puede entender el capitalismo desde los factores de producción sino que hay que ir a las relaciones sociales de producción, o sea, al “marxismo político”, donde el poder económico y el político estaban combinados. El poder de los señores, otorgado por el rey directamente o por herencia, era a la vez político y económico; las tres grandes clases económicas (el clero, la nobleza y todos los demás) estaban representadas en todos los primeros parlamentos importantes, ya fueran los Estados Generales de Francia o las Cortes Generales de España. La separación del poder político y económico después de la Revolución Gloriosa llevó al surgimiento de campesinos sin tierra y emprendedores terratenientes, que adoptaron la ideología del “mejoramiento” (improvement) de Francis Bacon y John Locke y privatizaron los bienes comunes bajo la noción de que solo la tierra de propiedad privada podía ser mejorada. Esto llevó al surgimiento de mercados de tierra y trabajo, que a su vez llevaron a la acumulación económica que eventualmente generó la Revolución Industrial. Esta explicación es indistinguible del institucionalismo liberal de los últimos dos premios Nobel de Economía, en particular la explicación de Joel Mokyr en The Culture of Growth. Morozov intenta refutarla diciendo que Wood nunca explica el papel del capitalismo en la política y el rol de la democracia en el capitalismo, si ambos están formalmente separados bajo el capitalismo. Excepto que Wood si se defiende: por ejemplo, al explicar las diferencias entre la Ilustración francesa y la inglesa, pero sobre todo en su libro sutil y súuuuper ambiguamente titulado Democracia Contra Capitalismo: la separación formal de ambos, sin una separación de facto real, viene generando tensiones extremas dentro del capitalismo que lo vuelven insostenible como modo de producción. De hecho, el segundo mejor capítulo del libro trata de cómo los Padres Fundadores de Estados Unidos pensaron explícitamente su Constitución para proteger la propiedad privada y al capitalismo en general de las mayorías populares, tomando nociones de soberanía y producción de los antiguos griegos (el capítulo de Grecia es, de lejos, el mejor del libro y hace que valga totalmente la pena la primera mitad, que es muy tediosa).

Entre las discusiones extremadamente repetitivas sobre E.P. Thompson, G.A. Cohen, M.I. Finley, J.S. Mill, y algunas personas sin iniciales en el nombre como Aristóteles, Nancy Fraser, Karl Marx y Max Weber, Wood encuentra tiempo para un autor con el que dialoga extensamente tanto en Democracia Contra Capitalismo como en Los Orígenes del Capitalismo: Karl Polanyi. Polanyi fue un economista húngaro nacido en Viena, famoso por su libro de 1944 La Gran Transformación y también por un comic del New York Times, escribió sobre el papel del capitalismo y la "sociedad": la economía y la esfera del mercado solían estar "incrustadas" (embedded) en la esfera más amplia de la sociedad, la sociedad civil y la política, donde la tierra, el trabajo y el dinero no eran mercancías para intercambiar según la oferta y la demanda. Incorrectamente, atribuye el surgimiento del capitalismo a la expansión del comercio, incurriendo así en una contradicción teleológica: ¿cómo puede haber, como decía Adorno, una vida correcta en un mundo incorrecto, cuando el mundo es en realidad correcto? En fin, el capitalismo resultó en la "demolición de la sociedad", ya que, para citar una excelente reseña de un colega bloguero de Substack, Angus Bylsma: "Los humanos sienten que tienen derecho a vivienda, sustento y trabajo sin importar si el mercado decide que lo tienen o no, y no se van a rendir sin pelear. El mercado, en cambio, solo reconoce un derecho: la propiedad privada". Esto creó una tensión fundamental, y extremadamente importante, entre, justamente, democracia y capitalismo: las fuerzas del mercado penetraban cada vez más hondo en la vida humana al mismo tiempo que la gente buscaba cada vez más protección contra su poder aplastante (el "doble movimiento"), lo que generó un conflicto social generalizado. Esta tensión era terminal: el capitalismo no podía sobrevivir hasta que el mercado estuviera completamente desatado del poder de la gente, y la democracia no sobreviviría si se dejaba al capitalismo campando a sus anchas.

Leyendo a Polanyi, a uno le llaman la atención dos cosas: primera, que es recontra cristiano. Y segunda, y más importante, que le preocupa muchísimo el fascismo como el problema central de “nuestro tiempo”, o sea, su tiempo, 1944. La historia del capitalismo, para Polanyi, era la historia de quienes resistieron su avance: sindicatos, campesinos, industriales, luditas, cartistas, socialistas. La Gran Transformación no ahonda mucho más que decir que es una especie de resolución de las tensiones internas del capitalismo democrático y que es malo porque va en contra de las enseñanzas de nuestro señor Jesucristo, lo que si está en sus obras posteriores (compilados en un libro que leí llamado La naturaleza del fascismo, que es muy repetitivo y bastante difícil de conseguir - yo recomendaría bajar La esencia del fascismo del Archivo Digital Karl Polanyi). Esta tensión, según su obra posterior, solo podía resolverse de dos maneras: mediante el socialismo, dejando que la democracia dominara completamente los mercados, o mediante el fascismo, dejando que el mercado se apoderara por completo del Estado. Según Polanyi, el fascismo busca resolver el conflicto entre sociedad y mercados subordinando toda la sociedad al sistema económico. Esto ocurre mediante la destrucción de la democracia parlamentaria y los partidos políticos, así como de instituciones civiles como iglesias y sindicatos, y su reemplazo por cuerpos corporativistas que, en principio, equiparan capital y trabajo, pero dadas las disparidades inherentes entre capitalistas ricos y trabajadores pobres (sobre todo en condiciones de la Gran Depresión), terminan en un sistema de “dictadura del capitalista”. Al equiparar a trabajadores y patrones a través de sus funciones laborales, el fascismo da por sentada la desigualdad como algo natural (biológico), un pilar de la ideología fascista, y elimina la necesidad del pluralismo democrático. El fascismo apunta a resolver el “anclaje” (embeddedness) del capitalismo en una sociedad más amplia que quiere protegerse del mercado, combinando ambos en uno solo: estableciendo el dominio absoluto del capital, grande y chico, sobre el trabajo, y consagrando este dominio en los procesos políticos formales. El partido, el estado, los grandes conglomerados, la iglesia y los sindicatos se vuelven todo uno solo.

Yanis Varoufakis distingue feudalismo y capitalismo así: "Bajo el feudalismo, la renta era bastante fácil de entender. Gracias a algún accidente de nacimiento, o decreto real, el señor feudal obtenía los títulos de propiedad de un terreno que lo facultaba a extraer parte de la cosecha producida por los campesinos que habían nacido y crecido en esa tierra". Menciona la parte más importante sin siquiera darse cuenta: que el poder de los señores venía del decreto real. Su poder económico no estaba respaldado por el mercado, ni por su riqueza, sino por el poder del estado. En la era de DOGE, Palantir y ChatGPT, es evidente que las empresas tecnológicas están tratando de tomar el control del estado y derivar de ahí su poder económico. Mi teoría del presente es simple: lo que llaman tecnofeudalismo es, en realidad, fascismo.

El rechazo tecnocrático a la política como tal

Hay dos grupos de gente que cree que las empresas tecnológicas de derecha son tecnofeudales: marxistas que no saben nada sobre el marxismo, y los propios dueños de las empresas tecnológicas junto con sus filósofos de cabecera (para el resto, sus bufones de corte). En este sentido, el fascismo es una especie de feudalismo “al revés”, por tomar prestado un término que se usa para describir a Marx: el feudalismo surgió de la combinación del poder económico y el político en los términos del poder político. Los señores feudales tenían poder sobre sus vasallos y siervos gracias al “accidente de nacimiento o decreto real” que les otorgaba no solo el derecho a explotar, sino el derecho de hacer cumplir. Los ritos y ceremonias feudales también se fusionaban con la sociedad civil: la Iglesia no solo era la líder espiritual de la vida medieval, sino un señor feudal que administraba una red enorme de abadías y monasterios (además de ser soberana de los Estados Pontificios), y la participación de la Iglesia era vital también en la vida política. Bajo el “tecnofeudalismo”, en cambio, el poder económico se vuelve poder político; la toma del estado se vuelve la única manera para que los patrones reaccionarios del gran capital de un solo dueño preserven su autoridad política y cultural. Esto también se traduce en una toma generalizada de la sociedad civil: universidades, medios, entretenimiento, etcétera. Sinceramente, si eso no te suena, no sé, mirá el noticiero.

En ningún lado esta fusión es más evidente que en el pensamiento de un tipo: el filósofo de la Ilustración Oscura y principal pensador de Silicon Valley, Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin es una copia berreta del fascista con ínfulas libertarias Hans Hermann Hoppe y su libro Democracy: The God That Failed, que junto con The Managerial Revolution de James Burnham originaron la mayoría de las ideas de Yarvin: la creencia en una monarquía como organización natural de la sociedad, comparándola con la forma en que se manejan las empresas; la creencia en una “Catedral” de ONGs, escuelas, universidades, medios y académicos que lavan el cerebro de las masas; el apoyo a ciudades privadas y microestados como alternativa a la democracia masiva; incluso la idea de que los indigentes y los enfermos mentales necesitan ser convertidos en “biodiésel”, lo que él considera la alternativa humanitaria al genocidio, tiene un espejo en la “remoción física” de Hoppe, que él lleva un paso más allá y extiende a los pobres, igualitarios, progresistas y homosexuales. Hoppe y Yarvin se conocieron en una reunión organizada por Peter Thiel, que es amigo de este último.

No hace falta mirar más allá del gran hombre de la tech right: Elon Musk. Musk es, a esta altura, indudablemente un fascista; su imaginación política se centra en una lucha existencial entre razas, donde las naciones blancas están siendo socavadas internamente por un otro hostil compuesto por cosmopolitas sin raíces que importan hordas extranjeras para disminuir la pureza de la sangre e imponer el marxismo libertino como ley de la tierra. También tiene su título en una de sus octillones de empresas como “TechnoKing”, que es tan obvio que se pasaría de ridículo que alguno de los textos que mencioné lo señala. Pero la política de Musk no es necesariamente tecnofascista; allá por 2018, era común escucharlo comparar con Henry Ford como pionero del vehículo eléctrico; ocho años después, es evidente la sabiduría de comparar a un antisemita simpatizante nazi con el hombre más rico del mundo. Además, los dos tienen su propio -ismo. Esto también trae a colación un segundo dato incómodo: Varoufakis no considera a Elon Musk un nubelista, porque no es dueño de una “Everything App”. Pero es, obviamente, el CEO tecnológico por antonomasia; todos los demás siguieron su ejemplo para dejar que vuelva Donald Trump a las redes; todos los demás siguieron su ejemplo abrazando la reacción; todos los demás dandole la motosierra a sus empleados y a la moderación de contenido; todos los demás lo siguieron de San Francisco a Texas; todos los demás lo siguieron para incrustarse en el aparato de seguridad. DOGE fue la cúspide de la privatización del gobierno estadounidense: el tipo más rico del mundo compró las elecciones presidenciales de 2024, se compró una buena parte del trabajo de presidente, vació las agencias y demolió lo que él considera la piedra angular de la subversión islamo-izquierdista, USAID, una acción que ha dejado un saldo de muertos de seis cifras de esos que Elon considera orcos bárbaros violando y saqueando la Comarca.

Obviamente Elon no es el único: tomemos a Peter Thiel. Thiel es, de lejos, el más influyente intelectualmente del grupo de las grandes tecnológicas; también es el segundo más influyente políticamente, después de Elon Musk. Thiel, a través de sus empresas, ejerce una influencia enorme sobre el gobierno estadounidense a través de personal y contratos, como los que centralizan la información del Seguro Social y los más controvertidos con ICE. También tiene una presencia significativa en otros lugares, con contratos extensos con Rheinmetall en Alemania, la NHS y el Ministerio de Defensa en el Reino Unido, por no mencionar su trabajo y financiamiento con el vicepresidente JD Vance. La política de Thiel tampoco es solo reaccionaria, sino totalitaria: en 2009 se lo citó diciendo que la democracia y la libertad (libertad económica, se entiende) eran incompatibles después de que las mujeres, los pobres y las minorías obtuvieran el voto, una declaración que aparecía curiosamente en su correspondencia con Jeffrey Epstein. En sus notorios registros públicos, ha declarado su creencia en un mundo gobernado por una pequeña camarilla tecnocrática con mano de hierro que rechaza el pluralismo, el igualitarismo y la redistribución, impuesta por el aparato de seguridad y la policía secreta a escala global. Thiel es un capitalista de riesgo que se formó creando PayPal junto a otros grandes fundadores tecnológicos como Elon Musk y Joe Lonsdale. Lonsdale es, a su vez, un personaje raro, convertido a la causa reaccionaria después de enfrentar acusaciones de violación por parte de una estudiante de Stanford (luego desestimadas). Recientemente se lo citó como causante del colapso de la Universidad de Austin al hacerse cargo para “purgar” a la universidad conservadora de artes de los “comunistas”, que según él habían infiltrado todas las instituciones estadounidenses; también dijo públicamente que “Palantir fue fundada para matar comunistas”, un término que describe de manera tan amplia que incluso sus empleados anti-woke en Texas entrarían en esa categoría. Eso sin contar la familia Ellison de Oracle comprando múltiples medios de comunicación para convertirlos en herramientas de propaganda derechista, Jeff Bezos expandiendo su imperio de medios impresos a Conde Nast poco antes de vaciar el Washington Post, o cualquier cosa de la patética saga de Mark Zuckerberg intentando parecer cool repitiendo estupideces anti-woke. Marc Andreessen, el padre fundador de la “Abundancia oscura”, fue llamado por Ezra Klein lo más parecido que hay a un fascista sin decirlo: un modernista reaccionario. Durand y Morozov tuvieron un debate en Jacobin sobre cómo las grandes tecnológicas infiltraron el estado. Dos grandes ejemplos de la ideología de la derecha tecnológica, el (desastroso) movimiento del “estado red” de micronaciones y ciudades charter, y la “República Tecnológica” de Palantir, son en cierto sentido explícitamente tecnofeudales: proponen un tipo de gobierno hacia atrás con medios de producción hacia adelante, para ponerlo un poco a lo marxista.

El fascismo opera en dimensiones claras y concatenadas: poner toda la sociedad civil bajo la égida del estado, todo el estado bajo control del partido, y todo el partido bajo el poder de un único líder providencial. El problema es que hasta ahora no hay un contenido intelectual para el fascismo. Cualquier cosa puede ser fascismo si solo es “gente muy rica se apodera de instituciones cívicas para influir en el gobierno”. La Fundación Mellon podría ser fascista, por ejemplo. Lo “woke” podría ser fascista. ¿Cuál es, entonces, el contenido ideológico del fascismo? En su ensayo de 1995 Ur-Fascismo, Umberto Eco intenta un “criterio de demarcación” para el fascismo: trazar una línea entre los partidos que son fascistas, los que están cerca del fascismo, los que están cerca de los cercanos al fascismo y los que solo están cerca de los partidos cercanos a los partidos cercanos al fascismo. El primer criterio es el “culto a la tradición”, entendido muy ampliamente y a través de significantes vagos del pasado nacional, así como un rechazo a la modernidad —no un rechazo de la tecnología moderna, sino de los valores modernos: pluralismo, democracia, igualitarismo, feminismo. La guerra del fascismo contra la Ilustración (véase la oración anterior) se manifiesta en un culto a la acción y un rechazo al intelectualismo y la reflexión, y por lo tanto al disenso y al discurso. El fascismo también extiende este miedo a la diferencia y al disenso a todas partes: racismo, resentimientos de clase, nacionalismo, xenofobia, antisemitismo. La combinación del culto a la acción con una oposición al pensamiento medido y un sentimiento casi paranoico de desposesión y persecución por parte de aquellos diferentes a “nosotros” resulta en violencia y eventualmente en guerra, lo que se traduce en asuntos sexuales: violencia sexual, machismo y culto a la virilidad, la subyugación de las mujeres. Para mantener viva esta mezcla insana, el fascismo tiene que apoyarse en el “aristopopulismo”: los ciudadanos son los mejores del mundo, los miembros del partido son los mejores de los ciudadanos, etcétera. Esto significa que hay una jerarquía inherente a la humanidad, y como tal, es imposible hablar de la democracia como un sistema de gobierno válido: la Voluntad Común tiene que expresarse solo como el respaldo unánime de un Hombre Providencial (o hombres providenciales) que llevará a la nación a la grandeza.

No puede haber disenso: ni en los sindicatos, ni en el parlamento, ni en las universidades, ni en los medios, ni en las artes. Esto también significa que el fascismo es completamente incompatible con la política democrática: el pluralismo y la alternancia pacífica en el poder son simplemente inaceptables. Pero las implicaciones para la economía no son claras: ¿cuál es la creencia fascista sobre la propiedad privada? El hecho de que el fascismo dependa de mentiras constantes y típicamente funcione con un programa de reforma agraria y control de las finanzas, solo para no hacer nada de eso, complica el panorama. El sociólogo Nicos Poulantzas explica en su libro (en general y por lo demás muy malo) Fascismo y Dictadura que, en acuerdo con Eco, el fascismo es liderado por la pequeña burguesía humillada, en alianza con una clase capitalista cada vez más reaccionaria como parte de una contraofensiva contra el trabajo. Al final, los capitalistas más grandes y los terratenientes más grandes ganan, porque su escala de producción es simplemente más importante para la guerra total inherente al fascismo. Poulantzas toma prestado de Gramsci el concepto de hegemonía: se necesita una crisis completa de la ideología tanto en la izquierda como en la derecha; básicamente, los conservadores dejan de creer en el conservadurismo, y los liberales y la izquierda dejan de creer en el liberalismo y la izquierda. Cuando hay una derecha que ya no tiene nada que quiera conservar, y una izquierda que ya no parece liberar a nadie, coincidiendo con un shock económico, ahí es cuando surge una política reaccionaria pseudozquierdista de restaurar el orgullo nacional a través del despotismo, la violencia y la subyugación interpersonal. La fusión del estado, la sociedad civil y la economía en un extraño culto a la personalidad, la reacción y la guerra es la única manera de que un proyecto internamente incoherente pueda sobrevivir.

Mi crítica a Poulantzas, más allá de haberlo citado, es bastante clara: como todos los relatos del fascismo basados en clases, tropieza con el hecho de que el ascenso del fascismo es mayormente una marea ideológica que arrasa la sociedad. , Polanyi dice que las necesidades de la sociedad suelen superar las necesidades de sus clases constituyentes; la clase capitalista también luchó, y perdió, extensamente contra el trabajo durante los dos siglos anteriores; los capitalistas poderosos y los terratenientes pensaron que podían controlar a Hitler, Franco y Mussolini, pero terminaron siendo controlados ellos mismos. Esto fue especialmente cierto durante la Primera Guerra Mundial, como bien muestra la economista Clara Mattei en El Orden del Capital. Pero Mattei tiene el problema central de la mayoría de los relatos del fascismo basados en clases: es una economista heterodoxa tremendamente talentosa (su libro me fue descrito como “marxista marxista”), establece la relación entre el establishment económico de libre mercado italiano, las élites más ricas y Benito Mussolini; en los años 20, su reputación era una mezcla entre Javier Milei y Nayib Bukele. Sin embargo, la crítica más común es que Mattei nunca determina realmente si los economistas simplemente hacían los mandados de la oligarquía, o si realmente estaban convencidos ideológicamente; es decir, si la famosa frase de John Maynard Keynes de “los hombres prácticos, que se creen completamente exentos de cualquier influencia intelectual, son por lo general esclavos de algún economista ya difunto” se cumplió en Italia. Introducir un mínimo de liberalismo aclara muchas preguntas: los fascistas hicieron una propuesta convincente a los partidarios del libre mercado para quebrar el espinazo del trabajo otorgando a los ricos poder de facto en un régimen corporativista de jure, y tuvieron que pagar un precio alto: el reclutamiento en la economía de guerra total del imperio que duraría mil años. De hecho, otra vez, el institucionalismo básico de Acemoglu, Johnson y Robinson explica prácticamente todo: su modelo de democracia incluye élites opuestas a la liberalización política y al igualitarismo económico, y si las élites tienen suficiente capacidad para reprimir a las masas, no permitirán que surja ninguna de las dos. La democracia es un compromiso frente al socialismo; sin embargo, el compromiso puede fácilmente inclinarse también hacia el otro lado.

La pelea reciente entre la firma de IA Anthropic y el Departamento de Defensa (no voy a usar el nombre ridículo de “el Departamento de Guerra”) es un ejemplo perfecto: el gobierno estadounidense quiere que las empresas de IA se comprometan a implementar vigilancia masiva y guerra con drones contra ciudadanos estadounidenses en violación de contratos anteriores; Anthropic, y recientemente OpenAI, se niegan a comprometerse. La dinámica tiene de todo: nuevas tecnologías, un choque entre el liberalismo y el literal Departamento de Guerra, autoritarismo, estado de derecho, pero lo más importante, una creciente imbricación del sector privado en los poderes gubernamentales. Anthropic está en una posición dominante pero vulnerable porque básicamente tiene un monopolio en ciertos tipos de contratos gubernamentales de IA; esto les da la capacidad de decir que no a que sus sistemas de IA tan democráticos se empleen en términos con los que no están de acuerdo, pero también crea una vulnerabilidad para sus fuentes de ingresos: pueden quedar excluidos de grandes partes de la industria si se ponen del lado malo de la administración Trump. Fundamentalmente, la fusión entre el poder privado y el gubernamental crea un nuevo tipo de dinámica de gobierno, donde los dos chocan constantemente no a través del proceso democrático y republicano sino a través de intrigas palaciegas y armamentización económica. Dario Amodei depende de Pete Hegseth tanto como Hegseth necesita los sistemas de Amodei para hacer la parte sobria de su trabajo.

Una vez explicado el papel básico de la ideología, entonces, hay, a grandes rasgos, dos “gustos” de fascismo según su combinación de los elementos previamente mencionados que lo componen ideológicamente. El primero se centra en la parte tradicionalista: es el tipo de fascismo “völkisch” y romántico, de la clase de Othmar Spann, que enfatiza la unidad orgánica de la nación con su espacio vital natural y su rechazo a un estilo de vida urbano e industrial no natural (asociado con la degeneración, la depravación y, por supuesto, El Judío). El otro tipo, más relevante para el tecnofeudalismo, es sobre el Poder Creativo de los Grandes Hombres, que son simplemente genéticamente superiores a todos los demás y pertenecen a la cima de una jerarquía natural dados sus grandes talentos para la creación tecnológica. La cultura igualitaria degenerada del judeoliberalismo solo los frena. Ambos tipos son... obviamente incompatibles. Sacar a la gente de las ciudades y mantenerla en ciudades bajo el control del Gran Capital no son factibles al mismo tiempo. Redistribuir la tierra a granjas familiares y abolir las finanzas mientras se preserva la productividad agrícola no es factible. El tecnofeudalismo corresponde muy evidentemente al tipo de fascismo “futurista”, el que defendía el establishment industrial alemán y que atraía a Henry Ford. Al mismo tiempo, la noción misma de tecnofeudalismo es fascista, en el sentido académico más estricto: el libro de 1991 The Nature of Fascism de Robert Griffin lo define como ultranacionalismo palingenético. La primera parte de esta definición es obvia. La segunda no lo es: palingenesis significa renacimiento o renovación, y se refiere a doctrinas religiosas y espirituales donde el renacimiento ocurre en ciclos. La palingenesia, en este contexto, significa el renacimiento de la nación volviendo a su pasado glorioso. Así, el ultranacionalismo palingenético se puede resumir mejor con la frase “Make (insertar país) Great Again”. Y el tecnofeudalismo es simplemente ir hacia adelante yendo hacia atrás: reorganizar el estado según los principios de la Edad Media, donde el poder y el dinero son exactamente la misma cosa y tienen exactamente los mismos límites (ninguno), para liberar los poderes creativos de los capitanes de la industria. Lamentablemente, no se dan cuenta de que sus poderes creativos son tan libres como el resto de la gente.

El Rey y Yo

La asociación más clara con el fascismo es la guerra: está asociada en el registro histórico, por razones obvias, e ideológicamente. Como mencioné arriba, el fascismo es inherentemente un culto a la acción, la virilidad, la violencia, el irracionalismo, el nacionalismo y la dominación; así que es obvio que la acción militar saciaría todas esas necesidades al mismo tiempo. También necesita movilizar cantidades increíbles de recursos físicos: para mantener un equilibrio entre capital y trabajo, debe expandir la producción con pleno empleo pero sin destrucción creativa —lo que implica una expansión de la huella física de la nación. Las tres potencias del Eje, además de participantes menores como el régimen fascista de Hungría, tenían algún tipo de objetivo territorial que buscaban conquistar: el Lebensraum alemán, el spazio vitale italiano y la Esfera de Coprosperidad de la Gran Asia Oriental japonesa. Se trataba de restaurar el orgullo nacional y las fronteras históricas, sí, y de expandir los recursos de la nación —pero también de poder seguir dando a todos los sectores relevantes más plata y más laburo.

Una de las áreas más interesantes del revival medievalista son las relaciones internacionales. La diplomacia tradicionalmente se llevaba a cabo entre diplomáticos profesionales que representan estados iguales y soberanos. Se acabó. El Departamento de Estado de EE.UU. viene siendo completamente excluido de la formulación de políticas. El politólogo Seva Gunitsky (cuyo Substack, Hegemon, recomiendo muchísimo) dice que el “orden mundial personalista” constituye un mundo de “infantes omnipotentes”: gobernantes personalistas y caprichosos que gobiernan según sus antojos, personalidades e intereses. Esto es relativamente inusual en el mundo moderno: incluso las juntas latinoamericanas manejaban el gobierno, bueno, como una junta. Trump, Putin y Xi no son el Gobierno de EE.UU., el Politburó y el Congreso del Partido; son los gobernantes individuales. Sus gobiernos se parecen más a una corte medieval, donde la proximidad personal al 10 importa más que los títulos oficiales. El emisario oficial de Trump en Rusia y Ucrania no es el Secretario de Estado, un embajador, o un funcionario designado en nada; es Steve Witkoff, un desarrollador de real estate que opera como enviado especial a Medio Oriente y por ende como uno de los diplomáticos más poderosos de Estados Unidos. Es como si Beltrán Briones tuviera que negociar las Islas Malvinas. El orden mundial personalista, entonces, está impulsado tanto por la lealtad personal como por el interés personal; las grandes tecnológicas piden su propio lugar en la mesa y hacer sus propios negocios. Tomemos el ejemplo del reciente arresto (¿secuestro?) del presidente venezolano Nicolás Maduro por parte de EE.UU. Trump no siguió una agenda de cambio de régimen. Siguió una agenda de cambio de liderazgo. Según el periodista venezolano exiliado (y exministro de Chávez) Andrés Izarra: “La nueva presidenta encargada de Venezuela está donde está porque la puso Trump. Le debe el cargo a Washington. (…) El triunfo de Trump fue sacar a Maduro del volante con el auto andando y sentarse él. [Trump] no destruyó el aparato chavista para construir algo nuevo. Lo capturó y lo puso a trabajar para él. Ese es el cambio de régimen perfecto.” Gunitsky pone en la cancha dos términos rivales pero complementarios para explicar este fenómeno: neofeudalismo y neo royalismo (esta más literal pero “neorrealismo” es confuso en términos de RR.II.); el primero se centra en el ángulo económico, y el segundo, en el institucional.

El neo royalismo (neo royalism) fue introducido por los politólogos Stacie Goddard y Abraham Newman, quienes lo definen como un “sistema global dominado por rivalidades entre un pequeño grupo de líderes e ‘hiperélites’ aliadas, todos buscando ganar riqueza o estatus”. Las movidas de Trump en Venezuela favorecen los intereses estadounidenses, pero sus movidas sobre Groenlandia, Canadá e India los perjudican. En cambio, favorecen los intereses de un pequeño grupo de personas: una serie de “intereses de clique” que se aferran a diversos recursos —petróleo, minerales, lo que sea. Newman dice: “Esto no es capitalismo de línea principal. Esto no son los directores de, no sé, Costco, Target, Walmart. Son más bien un grupo de actores que ven un momento para crear poder oligopólico”, y cita a las grandes tecnológicas como un actor central en este grupo. Los aspectos centrales de esta dinámica son la demostración de fuerza y dominio, y la preponderancia de una serie de grandes intereses económicos en el reparto de los botines del mundo. Las negociaciones entre EE.UU. y Rusia sobre Ucrania también han seguido un patrón similar, ocurriendo a través de canales informales que involucran principalmente a empresarios ricos. Es bien sabido a esta altura Jeffrey Epstein era un canal paralelo con los rusos, así como con los israelíes. Los aranceles y los controles de exportación son la herramienta neorrealista: se centran en el dominio y los acuerdos por izquierda. La estrategia de Trump es el “modo caos”: una política exterior que funciona a base de “vibras e intereses privados”, donde el interés nacional queda en segundo plano frente a las grandes tecnológicas, las grandes petroleras y el lobby inmobiliario de Miami.

La otra explicación para esta dinámica es la tesis “neomedieval” (estamos siendo muy creativos con los nombres acá), presentada en un artículo de 2023 de la RAND Corporation. El neomedievalismo describe la competencia entre EE.UU. y China como caracterizada por un mundo donde “el estado-nación centralizado está en fuerte declive”, “el crecimiento se ha desacelerado y se ha vuelto desequilibrado”, “las amenazas no estatales (...) podrían superar a los ejércitos rivales como preocupaciones de seguridad” y “han reaparecido aspectos preindustriales de la guerra”, sobre todo “la privatización de la guerra” y “la prominencia del conflicto intraestatal”. Cualquier semejanza con la realidad es pura coincidencia. Llaman a este mundo neomedieval porque ataca el fundamento mismo del estado-nación moderno: su monopolio del uso de la fuerza en fronteras territorialmente definidas. Este sistema data de los siglos XVII y XVIII y del Tratado de Westfalia; antes de eso, la autoridad gubernamental era frecuentemente disputada por actores internos (duques, campesinos, la Iglesia) que contaban con el respaldo de potencias extranjeras. La Paz de Westfalia buscó poner fin a la Guerra de los Ochenta Años (una guerra entre España y los Países Bajos sobre la Reforma Protestante y los impuestos que arrastró a toda Europa) y a la Guerra de los Treinta Años (que trataba sobre cosas border del Sacro Imperio Romano Germánico, más la Reforma y el comercio), y estableció el principio legal de que la máxima autoridad en relaciones internacionales era el estado: no el Rey, no la nobleza, no la Iglesia, sino el estado nacional. La idea neomedieval no es muy nueva; ya en los años 90, académicos influyentes describieron la posibilidad de un mundo fracturado lleno de guerras civiles, inestabilidad y desterritorialización económica volviéndose prewestfaliano, como un artículo conocido de 1994 de Robert Kaplan. La “Guerra Fría” entre EE.UU. y China ocurre en ese contexto: economías globalizadas e interconectadas donde “la escala y complejidad de la tecnología y el surgimiento de redes globales electrónicamente integradas hacen problemáticas las fronteras geográficas y, más fundamentalmente, la construcción básica de la soberanía territorial”, según el profesor de negocios Stephen Kobrin, donde las desigualdades entre ciudadanos comunes y los ricos y poderosos son gigantescas, y donde las divisiones domésticas importan más que la lealtad nacional. En particular, Kobrin señala que tres pilares incluso del orden mundial “neoliberal” se están desmoronando: espacios geográficos y fronteras bien definidos, lealtades y autoridades claras, una élite transnacional desconectada de sus conciudadanos, líneas borrosas entre propiedad privada y pública, y centralización supranacional sin creencias nacionales o multinacionales unificadas. En resumen, es un quilombo.

En términos más tecnofeudales, una de las grandes influencias en Silicon Valley es James Burnham: su libro de 1941 The Managerial Revolution (“La Revolución Gerencial”) trata en gran medida sobre el choque entre los Grandes Hombres individuales de la industria y la burocracia gubernamental, y sobre cómo el comunismo, el fascismo y el liberalismo keynesiano eran en realidad todas ramas del “managerialismo”, una ideología destinada a poner a los trabajadores de cuello blanco a cargo de toda la economía. La solución de Burnham era que los muy ricos tomaran el control tanto de la derecha como de la izquierda y los desviaran de desafiar sus intereses económicos hacia temas menos importantes. Esto es, por cierto, idéntico a la teoría de RAGE y La Catedral de Curtis Yarvin. Pero Burnham también tenía un costado de política exterior: creía que cada uno de los grandes regímenes gerenciales (Estados Unidos, Rusia y Alemania) iba a desarrollar sus propias esferas de influencia después de una victoria del Eje en la Segunda Guerra Mundial (ups), que esas esferas serían básicamente negocios de protección que justificaban la extracción de recursos, y que se tratarían entre sí en una rivalidad perpetua de la siguiente manera: “Este nuevo orden sería gobernado no por el derecho internacional sino por tratos personales entre las grandes potencias, que controlarían la soberanía de los estados más débiles y la suspenderían a voluntad”. En lugar de un mundo de multilateralismo y negociaciones formales entre estados, este sería un mundo gobernado por regímenes donde la diplomacia era interpersonal y transaccional. El libro de Burnham fue tan influyente, de hecho, que un gran clásico de la literatura fue escrito en gran parte para refutarlo: 1984 de George Orwell.

La gente que leyó mi post de hace unas semanas sobre “Occidente” puede adivinar lo que sigue: todo esto es idéntico a las creencias del teórico más prominente de las relaciones internacionales fascistas, Carl Schmitt. Schmitt fue el principal jurista del partido Nazi (algo así como un Tom Hagen de la Noche de los Cristales Rotos), y estuvo a punto quedar en los juicios de Nuremberg posta heavy (donde, cantado, lo iban a ahorcar) no por Teología Política o El Concepto de lo Político, ni siquiera por la democracia parlamentaria, sino por Tierra y Mar, un libro fringe sobre la historia de la globalización. Tierra y Mar es un libro bastante raro: si no sabés mucho de Schmitt, te das cuenta de que es medio mal tipo (tiene una obsesión con el PM británico Benjamin Disraeli difícil de caretear incluso en las ediciones post-1945 en las que Schmitt saco las partes antisemitas), pero por lo demás es un libro aburridísimo sobre barcos y ballenas. Esto pasa porque Schmitt “escondió” el verdadero significado detrás de un registro esotérico insoportable para “filósofos perseguidos” siguiendo al huevón de Nietszche: Tierra y Mar trata principalmente sobre el choque entre el estado racional y el nacionalismo.

Según Max Weber, la transición al estado moderno se basa en transferir el principio de legitimidad del carisma y la religión a la burocracia: la capacidad de los cuerpos impersonales creados por la organización racional del trabajo calificado para producir resultados deseables socialmente. Schmitt consideraba que esta forma de organización era inferior, y pensaba que el carisma del Hombre Providencial se tenía que imponer inevitablemente. En un reflejo su crítica al liberalismo, la burocracia simplemente no podría organizarse para luchar efectivamente contra una amenaza existencial -un ejército de verdaderos fanáticos. Esto se manifestaba en regímenes basados en las Grandes Naciones, que necesitarían sus propias esferas de influencia (llamadas Grossbaum, el “Gran Espacio”) determinadas por realidades económicas, de seguridad y logísticas básicas. El ejemplo perfecto de Grossbaum para Schmitt era la reclamación continental de soberanía estadounidense de la Doctrina Monroe; América Latina formaba un todo orgánico con Estados Unidos, y por lo tanto la intervención extranjera habría introducido cuerpos no naturales en el organismo. Esta última doctrina fue lo que le armó la cama a Carlitos: si no la hubiera propuesto casi una década después de la expansión territorial del Tercer Reich, lo habrían declarado culpable de incitación a la guerra y habría terminado como Julius Streicher.

Así que tenemos un orden mundial manejado por un choque entre la interacción personal y las instituciones burocráticas impersonales donde los Grandes Hombres aspiran cada uno a liderar una Gran Potencia, con una esfera de influencia correspondiente sobre la que tienen control absoluto, más una corte de cortesanos y capitanes de la industria compitiendo por el poder y llevando a cabo diplomacia individual con el poder de un estado-nación cada uno, todo lo cual es paralelo a la visión de una influencia mayor en el nomos tecnofeudal y la posición del jurista nazi más importante sobre las relaciones internacionales. Lo que llaman diplomacia neorrealista y neofeudal, que son a su vez la manifestación internacional del tecnofeudalismo, son, como su fenómeno padre, simplemente el fascismo de toda la vida. Lindo.

La aldea global

Un artículo reciente de Jerusalem Demsas describe a los seguidores de MAGA como poseedores de una “mentalidad campesina”: los mueve una lógica de suma cero, donde “si pensás que toda extensión de oportunidad a un grupo necesariamente perjudica a otro, te vas a oponer a la inmigración, al comercio, a la vivienda nueva y eventualmente a los derechos básicos de cualquiera que no esté ya dentro del círculo. Terminás con una política de sitio permanente, donde cada reforma es presentada como un ataque a los estadounidenses ‘de herencia’. Eso no solo empobrece al país; hace casi imposible sostener una sociedad liberal donde la gente crea que los derechos y la prosperidad pueden expandirse en lugar de racionarse”.

Esto coincide en gran medida con mi propia interpretación de la política moderna: la divergencia significativa entre el mercado laboral para trabajo manual y para trabajo de cuello blanco (causada por la globalización, la automatización y la desindustrialización) creó la dinámica de “izquierda brahmán y derecha mercantil”, donde los votantes ricos y educados “BoBo” (burgués bohemio) son de mente abierta y progresistas, mientras que los tipos del cinturón del óxido en declive son cerrados y reaccionarios. Esto se canaliza a través de la relación entre tres valores centrales: la mentalidad de suma cero, como se mencionó, junto con la baja confianza social (o sea, la confianza en otras personas e instituciones, así como la participación en la vida política y cívica), y el particularismo moral, o sea, básicamente la mentalidad cerrada y chica y el nativismo. Esto significa que la huevada de la batalla cultural está aguas abajo de las tendencias macroeconómicas, ya que los impulsores fundamentales de las dinámicas políticas son las posiciones económicas relativas de varios tipos de trabajo y el impacto que esto tiene en su conciencia política. En detalle, una menor confianza social también afecta los valores futuros y las actitudes hacia el gobierno, y la confianza está correlacionada con creencias socialmente liberales y económicamente de izquierda. Esto se debe a que los valores morales más individualistas y más particularistas están relacionados con la votación a Trump. Los economistas afirman que las democracias pueden seguir siendo exitosas siempre que generen crecimiento económico, servicios públicos de calidad y estabilidad, así que un giro autoritario generalizado en respuesta a las condiciones económicas no debería sorprender. Un mal desempeño económico también está vinculado con una menor confianza política y más agitación política. En general, las democracias débiles, corruptas y polarizadas probablemente tengan un bajo rendimiento económico y un retroceso democrático significativo.

La relación entre autoritarismo y varias ideas de “mentalidad campesina” es bastante directa: el fascismo es la ideología de individuos con particularismo moral, mentalidad de suma cero y baja confianza social. En conjunto, cómo todo esto se relaciona con la Cuestión Fascista es bastante obvio: aquellos que quedaron rezagados por el gran despegue del capitalismo global y fueron aplastados por la crisis financiera de 2008 desarrollaron valores centrados en odiar a los extranjeros, exigir fuerza y adorar la masculinidad, sin mucha apreciación por las normas democráticas. ¿Qué tipo de política encaja en ese molde? Nada más que la palabra con f. Un autor que trabaja en este tema es el sociólogo alemán Sieghard Neckel, a quien Morozov cita en su artículo diciendo: “Fusionando creativamente perspectivas marxistas y no marxistas, Neckel sostiene que podríamos estar siendo testigos del surgimiento de ‘un capitalismo moderno sin estructuras burguesas’, y que su propia ausencia podría ser ‘una precondición cultural para la marcha triunfal del capitalismo en el siglo XXI’. La modernización neoliberal debe leerse entonces como ni progresista ni regresiva, sino más bien como paradójica. Para Neckel, la refeudalización no lleva de vuelta al pasado, sino que se refiere a ‘una dinámica social del presente, en la que la modernización toma la forma de un rechazo de las máximas de un orden social burgués’”.

Por refeudalización, Morozov no se refiere al tecnofeudalismo per se, sino a algo completamente diferente: el concepto de refeudalización de la esfera pública de Jürgen Habermas. Neckel ha citado este concepto con bastante frecuencia, aludiendo a la creciente brecha entre ricos y pobres como fuente de relaciones cuasifeudales. El pensamiento habermasiano es realmente complejo, en gran parte gracias a que Habermas falleció recién el mes pasado con casi 100 años y unos meses después de publicar un libro. Su famoso debate sobre teología con el cardenal Joseph Ratzinger (luego elegido Papa Benedicto XVI) ocurrió en 2005, cuando Habermas ya era un pibito de 76 años. En fin, una distinción clave para Habermas (según me la presentó el trabajo de un profesor de planificación urbana que usa el pensamiento habermasiano para explicar los asuntos urbanos) es entre la esfera de la política formal (partidos, cabildeo, campañas, apoyos) y la esfera pública, que es un grupo de personas que tienen derecho a la libre asociación y derecho a comunicarse y expresarse libremente. Bajo el feudalismo, lo único que se acercaba a una esfera pública era la nobleza, porque todos los demás tenían poco derecho de iure a apelar al gobierno y ningún poder de facto para hacerse oír; por el contrario, bajo el capitalismo democrático liberal moderno, una esfera pública es posible, tal como los cafés y salones de la Europa de los siglos XVIII y XIX. Esta noción tiene muchos críticos: por ejemplo, que era un emprendimiento burgués, una especie de sociedad de debate para los que tenían educación superior, excluyendo formas menos elitistas de participación cívica como iglesias o sindicatos.

Para Habermas, la refeudalización se refiere a un mundo donde “las grandes organizaciones buscan compromisos políticos con el estado y entre sí, excluyendo la esfera pública siempre que sea posible”, o sea, básicamente el neo-royalism para la política doméstica. Un poco más en detalle, citando la Enciclopedia de Filosofía de Stanford: “Habermas ve la esfera pública moderna como, en muchos sentidos, víctima de su propio éxito. A medida que se expandió mucho más allá de su base original de propietarios varones educados, las desigualdades materiales ya no pudieron dejarse de lado, sino que se convirtieron en tema de debate público. Y este debate ya no era cuestión de análisis racional-crítico de la acción estatal por parte del público reunido, sino de negociación entre grupos de interés que omiten la razón pública. En lugar de la aproximación de la sociedad al tipo ideal, lo que surgió fue una esfera pública empobrecida y pseudopública, carente de su capacidad original para el discurso racional-crítico, fácilmente manipulable por estados, corporaciones y grupos de interés que utilizan las técnicas de las ‘relaciones públicas’. Su papel ahora, como en la era feudal, es aclamar decisiones que ya se han tomado”. Habermas luego se distanció del concepto de refeudalización, renombrándolo como “colonización del mundo de vida”, pero la sustancia general de su afirmación central es la misma: las enormes desigualdades materiales (al menos en el presente, pero no en su época de 1962) produjeron una esfera pública deformada y distorsionada donde las prioridades de los ricos y poderosos moldean el discurso público a su favor: Jeff Bezos decide la línea editorial del Washington Post que la cobertura periodística sigue. Que es casi exactamente lo que está pasando, por ejemplo, con las redes sociales.

Uno de los debates más candentes en el discurso contemporáneo sobre el fascismo es la “cuestión de la sociedad civil”, o sea, si el fascismo requiere una sociedad civil fuerte o débil. La primera pregunta es obvia: ¿qué significa sociedad civil? Es básicamente la “esfera pública” de Jürgen Habermas, pero con algunas diferencias matizadas. El teórico marxista Antonio Gramsci, Nicos Poulantzas y algunos pensadores liberales como Norberto Bobbio ven la sociedad civil como el campo de batalla de la acción política: ONGs, iglesias, museos, etc., que reflejan el sustento ideológico de la sociedad dado el poder relativo de los bloques políticos. Por el contrario, el pensamiento liberal más tradicional (David Hume, Adam Ferguson) ve la sociedad civil como una forma de traducir las diferencias políticas profundas, como la religión o cuánto poder debía tener la Corona, alejándolas de la guerra y llevándolas hacia procesos discursivos. En particular, el politólogo Henry Farrell cita al filósofo/antropólogo Ernest Gellner, quien lo veía como parte del ascenso del liberalismo durante las guerras francesas e inglesas entre católicos y varias facciones protestantes: dice Farrell: “El resultado no fue solo que los desacuerdos religiosos y doctrinarios se convirtieran en asuntos de conciencia privada y actividad social pacífica. Fue la creación de un nuevo tipo de sociedad en la que la fuerza coercitiva estaba centralizada en el estado, pero era contrarrestada por el pluralismo económico y social. El poder del estado llegaba hasta cierto punto. La gente podía, dentro de parámetros razonablemente amplios, elegir quién quería ser y qué quería hacer”. De modo que, en palabras de Gellner: “La sociedad civil es un conjunto de instituciones y asociaciones lo suficientemente fuertes como para prevenir la tiranía, pero que, sin embargo, se pueden entrar y salir libremente, en lugar de ser impuestas por nacimiento o sostenidas por rituales imponentes”. Pero ¿qué tiene esto que ver con el fascismo?

La tesis de la “sociedad civil débil” es bastante simple: para citar al sociólogo Dylan Riley, “los partidos fascistas requerían sociedades civiles fuertes. Tenían miembros, secretarios, sucursales locales y gente marchando en las calles y participando en actividades paramilitares contra la izquierda”; la tesis contraria, según el bloguero John Ganz, es que “... la gente está atomizada, sola y vulnerable a los movimientos de masas que pueden aprovecharse de esa atomización y soledad, y, sin todas esas instituciones intermediarias, una nación puede ser fácilmente tomada por el estado”. Creo que la relación es bastante compleja: como escribí hace un tiempo, los datos empíricos favorecen ambas interpretaciones (la votación por Trump fue más alta en lugares que tenían redes de sociedad civil densas pero dejaron de tenerlas, y qué tipo de red importaba mucho), y la lógica funciona en ambos sentidos: hay densidad de buenos grupos de sociedad civil que ayudan a la gente a unirse, y también hay el equivalente de esos grupos de internet que promueven el terrorismo. Internet es básicamente la nueva sociedad civil, especialmente después del COVID, y sin duda ahora está “refeudalizada”, propiedad de multimillonarios partidarios de varios regímenes totalitarios reaccionarios.

De cualquier manera, creo que la idea de que el fascismo busca tomar el control de la sociedad civil, fuerte o débil, y subyugarla es evidente por sí misma. Es básicamente lo único en lo que Ganz y Riley, que chocan frecuentemente sobre el tema, están de acuerdo. En particular, y volviendo a Habermas, él consideraba que el núcleo del fascismo se basaba en la diferencia entre las esferas política y pública: la esfera política estaba regida por la “racionalidad instrumental”, o la conexión propositiva entre los medios disponibles y los fines deseados, mientras que la esfera pública estaba regida por la “racionalidad discursiva”, o básicamente, el forobardo. La racionalidad discursiva es un mecanismo para producir información sobre la sociedad, de modo que se puedan aplicar los principios de la economía del diseño de mecanismos, y como tal requiere condiciones que cualquier microeconomista puede reconocer: que todos los participantes puedan participar si lo desean, y que todos los participantes sean sinceros sobre sus preferencias. Por el contrario, la racionalidad instrumental no cumple estas condiciones: no te conviene decir hechos incómodos para quienes tienen el poder, porque los alejas de promover tus objetivos facciosos. Para Habermas, la fusión de la racionalidad instrumental y discursiva era el núcleo central del fascismo: Riley describió el fascismo como “el rechazo tecnocrático de la política como tal”, y así es como lo ve Habermas, como la promoción de objetivos prácticos y la eficiencia técnica tomando el control de todos los emprendimientos públicos - no hay lugar para el debate si los trenes tienen que llegar a horario. Esto es algo clásico de la Escuela de Frankfurt, pero la diferencia para Habermas es que el fascismo esencialmente tiene que colonizar “el mundo de la vida” (las esferas pública y privada) para funcionar.

Lo más importante a tener en cuenta sobre la tecnología, en este sentido, es citar al teórico de la Escuela de Frankfurt Herbert Marcuse: “La técnica por sí misma puede promover tanto el autoritarismo como la libertad, tanto la escasez como la abundancia, tanto la extensión como la abolición del trabajo pesado” (por “técnica” se refiere a lo que la gente normal llama tecnología, y lo que él llamaba tecnología es como, la organización tecnológica). En Some Social Implications of Modern Technology, Marcuse intenta vincular el ascenso del fascismo con la cultura tecnológica de los años 40: “En la Alemania nacionalsocialista, el reinado del terror se sostiene no solo por la fuerza bruta que es ajena a la tecnología, sino también por la ingeniosa manipulación del poder inherente a la tecnología: la intensificación del trabajo, la propaganda, el entrenamiento de jóvenes y trabajadores, la organización de la burocracia gubernamental, industrial y partidaria - todo lo cual constituye los instrumentos cotidianos del terror”. En este sentido, la economía de guerra no solo es política y económicamente necesaria, sino también socialmente necesaria, porque mantiene “el mundo de la vida” subyugado a la tiranía totalitaria.

Para Marcuse, la sociedad capitalista necesitaba promover una visión individualista del mundo para que su orden tecnológico funcionara, pero esto creaba una tensión con la estructura colectiva de la producción, particularmente en períodos donde se necesitaban escalas de producción cada vez mayores (el modelo “fordista”). La necesidad de esta estructura de una coordinación cada vez mayor a escala individual eventualmente requiere, como señala Habermas, eliminar todo esfuerzo humano. Esta era también la visión de Polanyi: el fascismo buscaba resolver las contradicciones entre el individualismo liberal democrático y la naturaleza colectiva del proceso productivo eliminando la noción del individuo y subyugándolo a una serie de categorías más amplias. En particular, como se describe en State and Individual Under National Socialism, esto resultaba tanto en un estado totalitario como en un carácter autoritario de la sociedad: “el dominio absoluto del estado sobre todas las relaciones privadas y sociales, y la represión absoluta del individuo con todos sus derechos y capacidades”. El fascismo requiere la eliminación del estado burocrático-racional, de los derechos individuales, del estado de derecho, etcétera. La organización de la sociedad es literalmente absolutista, siendo el mandato del soberano toda la extensión de la ley. Como tal, no hay separación entre el estado y la sociedad, ni separación entre sociedad y economía. Solo hay guerra, producción y nación —tal como era bajo el feudalismo, donde señor, siervo e Iglesia eran las únicas posibilidades de la vida moderna.

El culto a la producción también coincide con la imaginación fascista sobre el género. Marcuse afirma: "El principio de esta sociedad era que a cada uno se le diera según su libre desempeño en la división social del trabajo, y que la búsqueda del interés personal debía ser el motivo guía en todos los desempeños". Entonces, mientras los hombres están en las fábricas y en el frente, ¿qué están haciendo las mujeres? Produciendo, en particular, niños. En concreto, las tasas de natalidad eran una preocupación gigantesca para Benito Mussolini, que lanzó una "Batalla por los Nacimientos" que buscaba aumentar las tasas de fertilidad y preparar a la nación para la guerra en algún momento de finales de los años veinte. La batalla no funcionó (como todos los demás esfuerzos centrados en la cultura para hacerlo) por varias razones, principalmente los abortos ilegales y que las mujeres no estaban especialmente convencidas. Marcuse también menciona que el Tercer Reich mostró un interés particular en reducir los tabúes sexuales, particularmente en torno a la maternidad soltera, el sexo extramatrimonial, la desnudez en el arte público y cosas como el incesto y la pedofilia. Lo primero me parece un poco dudoso, pero la idea de que los nazis promovían comportamientos sexuales por lo demás "aberrados" para promover el "apareamiento y la cría controlados", donde incluso el comportamiento íntimo era vigilado y regimentado por el estado, y en el que las categorías raciales se manifestaban más claramente: la "raza maestra" tenía permiso para participar en actos sexuales que las razas inferiores no tenían. En un artículo de 1974 sobre la cineasta nazi Leni Riefenstahl, Susan Sontag escribe: "El nacionalsocialismo —en términos más amplios, el fascismo— también representa un ideal, o más bien ideales, que persisten hoy bajo otras banderas: el ideal de la vida como arte, el culto a la belleza, el fetichismo del coraje, la disolución de la alienación en sentimientos extáticos de comunidad; el repudio del intelecto; la familia humana (bajo la paternidad de los líderes). Estos ideales son vívidos y conmovedores para mucha gente…". Del mismo modo, señalan Sontag (y Marcuse), el fascismo es impulsado por una especie de sadomasoquismo politizado: el deseo de obtener placer de la crueldad y la dominación. Walter Benjamin describió famosa (y obligatoriamente) el fascismo como el producto de una cultura que veía la política como una experiencia estética, que en última instancia requería violencia; Sontag agregó: "Así como el contrato social parece manso en comparación con la guerra, el coger y el chupar terminan pareciendo simplemente agradables y, por lo tanto, poco emocionantes". Riefenstahl, incluso en su trabajo de final de su vida sobre tribus africanas, así como figuras como Curzio Malaparte, desempeñaron este papel.

Conclusión

La tesis del tecnofeudalismo dice que la economía se está transformando en un puñado de conglomerados tecnológicos pasándose un trillón de dólares falsos entre sí. Eso es simplemente incorrecto: su peso económico no es tan grande. Pero el poder político de los conglomerados tecnológicos es innegable: Elon Musk, que según la tesis anterior es un gil cualquiera, estaba listo para tomar el control del gobierno de Estados Unidos y solo no le salió por poco. Lo que acierta la visión tecnofeudal es que la industria tecnológica es extremadamente importante, y eso es porque están tratando de fusionar su propio poder con el poder del estado: contratos militares, IA en la administración, subyugar las redes y los medios a su agenda política, etcétera. Lamentablemente, como Anthropic puede dar fe, es una apuesta mala: el estado tiene todas las cartas. Esta visión absolutista del poder se replica en las relaciones internacionales y en la política doméstica: está el Soberano, que tiene la suma del poder público para que él (siempre es un él) pueda promover la búsqueda tecnocrática de la Grandeza Nacional. No hay nada más: no hay estado, no hay parlamento, no hay hada de los dientes ni reina de Inglaterra; solo hay un chabón y su círculo íntimo. Y si sos una ONG, un estudio jurídico o una universidad que no le gusta al presidente - mala suerte. Vas a tener que callarte un poco la boquita.

Las similitudes obvias, tanto teóricas como prácticas, entre el concepto de un Feudalismo Aquí y Ahora y la situación política actual son innegables. ¿Por qué la gente lo niega? Bueno, la teoría del marxismo político sobre el feudalismo es bastante controvertida; el feudalismo, en general, es poco entendido y mal definido en la conciencia popular. El fascismo también, ya que estamos. También está el incentivo obvio de inventar algo nuevo en las profesiones creativas: la carrera entera de Malcolm Gladwell sale de tomar conceptos que ya existen (el Principio de Pareto, por ejemplo) y ponerles un nombre más cool (“la Ley de los Pocos”). Pero también hay un tema temperamental bastante obvio: llamarlo “fascismo” se deja para las histéricas, las Lilita Carrió del mundo, gente que piensa que una reforma laboral anodina es igual que los nazis. Bueno, llegado cierto punto, es como los nazis, y a nadie le hace bien negarlo y esconderse detrás de desvíos históricos tangenciales como la experiencia de la guerra total o la profundidad relativa de la Gran Recesión y la Gran Depresión. Por supuesto que un fenómeno ideológico sería diferente en un contexto diferente (Poulantzas tiene muchos problemas para explicar por qué cosas diferentes son similares en contextos similares y diferentes en contextos diferentes); la cuestión es si es la misma ideología, y lo es. Sobre Milei, no es fascista - es boludo. Hay bastante superposición entre unos y los otros, como los rombos y los cuadrados.

Por lo general, deberías terminar un artículo con un llamado a la acción. En la década de 1930, Friedrich Hayek se dedicó famosamente a encontrar una nueva versión del liberalismo (en el sentido progre americano caviar Puán del Partido Demócrata, no el sentido boludo antisocial de los pubertarios latinoamericanos) que pudiera enfrentar las amenazas del comunismo y el fascismo. Bueno, yo creo que lo mismo: que el llamado apropiado es un llamado a pensar, antes que a actuar. El liberalismo tal como existía está, claramente, agotado ideológicamente, y el socialismo es inviable en principio y en la práctica, además de estar ampliamente asociado con la tiranía masiva (no incorrectamente, agrego). Polanyi pensaba que el socialismo era la respuesta; sin embargo, la verdadera respuesta no vino del socialismo ni del enrevesado constitucionalismo de libre mercado de Hayek, sino del redistribucionismo de John Maynard Keynes.

El Ur-Fascismo de Umberto Eco termina con una cita de Franklin Roosevelt: “Me atrevo a afirmar que si la democracia estadounidense deja de avanzar como una fuerza viva, buscando día y noche por medios pacíficos mejorar la suerte de nuestros ciudadanos, el fascismo crecerá en fuerza en nuestra tierra”. El problema con la visión liberal dominante, ahora mismo, es la primera parte; el problema con la visión socialista es la segunda. Lo que se necesita no es solo una fusión de redistribución de la riqueza e igualitarismo moral con una conciencia de la utilidad y el poder de los mercados; es una fusión que pueda abordar las crisis actuales. Quien sea que la invente, a su debido tiempo, probablemente haga historia.

Helen Andrews is back at it again; in particular, she’s at it with regards to gender and its relevance to labor economics again, which is something I’m interested as it pertains to this blog and also the brief class I’m giving on it in the near future. Well, it’s not really Helen Andrews - it’s someone else, Inez Stepman, writing an article titled “The Myth of the Independent Girlboss” for a (conservative) web publication called First Things. The general gist of her article, as summed up by Andrews on Twitter, is that “The girlboss lifestyle would not exist if it were not massively subsidized” by immigrant labor, student loans, “email jobs that don’t need to exist” and such. Is that true?

The haunting of long house

Taylor Swift once said “You heard the rumors from Inez / You can’t believe a word she says”; the line applies to Stepman’s essay (with the qualifier that Inez was, in the context of the song, correct about whatever happened between James and betty). There’s many ways to describe the girlboss piece: dumb, bad, provocative, annoying, dumb. But the easiest way is sophomoric: in between the abrasive overgeneralizations there’s very little in the way of substance.

What concrete, or concrete-adjacent, claims has Stepman made?

The image of the working woman, the girlboss, remains the sine qua non of independence. (..). But dig into the details and one learns she is propped up from every angle by laws, taxpayer dollars, and the ability to externalize the costs of her lifestyle onto others. (…)

Let’s start with the outsourcing of domestic labor that became normative by the end of the 1970s. (…) women leaving the home en masse created a demand for a servant class at rates affordable to the median-wage household—a demand met by lax immigration policies.

Then there are the girlboss jobs themselves. While millions of women create real value in the economy and deserve their paychecks, it’s impossible not to notice the wild proliferation of “email jobs” and administrative compliance positions that don’t add to the company bottom line (David Graeber famously called them “bullshit jobs” in his bestselling book of the same title), jobs disproportionately filled by the fairer sex. (…)

Female students earn just under 60 percent of bachelor’s degrees, and similar proportions of master’s and PhDs. Given that women more often choose lower-paid majors such as gender studies and communications, as opposed to structural engineering and computer science, it’s little surprise that the student debt crisis is itself a disproportionately female phenomenon. Women hold two-thirds of outstanding student debt, nearly all of which has been financed by the federal government.

Illegal domestic labor, promotion under threat of lawsuit, and billions in taxpayer-subsidized student loans are not the picture of independence that TikToks celebrating “Gen Z boss and a mini” would have us believe.

Okay, so there’s three major claims being made here. The first is that domestic labor, particularly from illegal immigrants, has become overwhelmingly common and that American exploitation of foreigners more broadly is the only way to sustain the American standard of living. The second is that the vast majority of women work “bullshit jobs” in HR and DEI with useless degrees like gender studies. The third is the idiotic “Great Feminization” claim plus the equally idiotic “men are being discriminated against” claim (from the broader Stupid Viral Reactionary Articles About Labor Economics Cinematic Universe). This all adds up to a broader critique, where some nefarious force in charge of the government forced women to get jobs with all of these sinister pieces of legislation.

Let’s start with the second pair of claims. The most obvious problem with the claim that most women work in some sort of gigantic HR machinery. The number of “human resources managers” in 2024 was… 221,900. If you add in other occupations the Bureau of Labor Statistics considers similar to it, you get 422,600 administrative services and facilities managers, 20,900 compensation and benefits managers, 107,000 compensation, benefits, and job analysis specialists, 944,300 human resources specialists, 65,400 labor relations specialists, 46,400 training and development managers, and 48,700 training and development specialists. As for DEI, the only real estimate I could find is that it peaked in 2023 at 40,000 people or so. Put together, these make up around 1.9 million people, or roughly 1.1% of the total workforce; there are as many architects and engineers as there are “human resources” girlbosses. If three quarters of these are women, and there are 77 million women working in the United States, or roughly 2.5% of all working women. Mike Konczal takes this argument a bit further: around 10 million women work in all professional and business services (compared to around 12.5 million men), and 3 and change million work in manufacturing, compared to 9 million men. The biggest sector employing women, by his figures, is private healthcare and education at 20 million. Women make up less than half of professional workers, but over eighty percent in healthcare and education. Even if you subtract the 1.4 million women who work in “human resources” from the professional services sector, you still have around 8.5 million, or 40% - instead of the actually observed total figure, which is… 45%. In fact, if the Stepman/Andrews explanation where HR is some kind of jobs program for gender studies graduates is true, then women have actually lost share of office jobs, for a relatively simple reason: the rate of women employed in white-collar workplaces has remained basically steady for the last 30 years, as has the rate of all women employed anywhere. The share of women who are employed hasn’t really increased (it’s gone up a bit for college-educated women and gone down a bit for non-educated women) since the 1990s, which kind of gets in the way of the narrative here: as Konczal points out, almost all the legal changes Stepman mentioned happened in the 1990s (the Civil Rights Act of 1991, and the Student Aid Reform Act of 1993 in particular), which happened twenty years after women joined the white-collar workforce en masse.

Well, why did women join the white collar workforce then? Stepman’s view is also complete slop: the famous “two income trap”. The whole thing is, of course, pure nonsense: what compelled women into the workforce wasn’t low, but rather high wages. As a TL:DR, we can understand the family as an economic unit that either produces goods and services internally, or buys them; buying more things requires paid market labor, and making more things requires more hours of domestic labor. If the price of things remains stable, higher wages means buying goods on the market or hiring services is more attractive.

Stepman mostly cites this last part to explain the decline in homemaking: “mass migration” (?) of servants, citing a 1990s law. The first part, that is kind of obvious if you know Americans, is that it’s pretty rare for them to have staff: the best estimates I could find is that around 10% of US families have part or full time help around the house. About 2.2 million people work as domestic workers, and of these, roughly 1.4 million work as home care aides, aka looking after the elderly or sick, while the remaining 800,000 are split more or less evenly between childcare and house cleaners. Around two thirds of these workers are American-born, and they tend to be older (median age is 45 and 40% are over the age of fifty); plus, most of these are not particularly likely to be employed full-time. I think the data pretty strongly rejects the idea that a “servant class” is crucial for women avoiding looking after the home. Culturally, having maids and cooks peaked in the fifties and sixties, not the present. The amounts of staff people had increased from the 1870s until the Great Depression for the simple reason that labor was cheap and plentiful: enormous numbers of former slaves left the South for Northern cities. But what stopped people from having servitude even after the long, difficult years of the Depression and World War Two was technology: the increase in quality and especially the decrease in cost of appliances meant that it took a lot less labor to maintain a household. Women in 1965 spent ten more hours a week on housework than women in 2011, but around the same amount on childcare. Men have also started spending a lot more time with their children and on domestic work than on the past: in the 1960s, women did seven times more housework and four times more childcare than their husbands; the ratio is now 2.5 times and 1.8 times respectively. For a social conservative, Stepman seems to forget the typical child has two parents, not just one.

The important thing wasn’t really that it became cheaper to do stuff at home: it’s that, for women, it became expensive to not have jobs. Starting in the sixties and seventies, structural changes to the economy raised the wage premium for women significantly, even women with a high school education. This is something I’ve mentioned a trillion times by now: since the late seventies, the labor market has increasingly split into two tracks over the last few decades: a high skill, high-education, “knowledge sector”, and a low-skill “manual sector” due to changes in technology (particularly automation and the IT revolution), increased competition from China and other developing countries, the Great Recession recovery resulting in lower job creation and extreme competition for available positions (in the US, the “knowledge” track added 8.4 million jobs on net in the following decade, while the manual job track lost, on net, 5.5 million), and a series of other factors (loss of union density, cuts to the welfare state, etc). This meant that, while white collar jobs without a significant educational component (such as bank teller, or the original meaning of “computer) were lost, the service sector increase its demand for both low skill, “routine” labor and for high-skill, high human capital “knowledge” workers.

This group of people overrepresented women for a variety of reasons: the first is that a lot of women had an education because of mandatory universal high school and even relatively abundant rates of college graduation mostly to get a rich husband, but then began using it to get a good job. The second is that women experiencing automation risks increased their educational attainment and skill level (as opposed to men), and, more broadly, that women caught up with men in terms of average education and surpassed them in the last decade, at the same time women also began performing better than men academically (for example, women are 10% more likely to go to college, are 10% likelier to complete their degrees, and make up more than a majority of graduates of all program levels), and face fewer disciplinary issues, which also may entail men just not acquiring as many skills as women over their schooling. Secondly, the skills required in the cognitive sector aren’t just those acquired in the formal education system, but also soft skills and adeptness at handling social interaction - which women possess at higher rates than men, particularly in conversation, assertiveness, and empathy and positive emotion - but not academics or work. And lastly, a lot of non-professional service jobs are doing “personal care”, things like hairdressing, in which women simply seem to have an advantage over men because of social norms primarily, but which is currently a big driver for women’s strong position on the labor market.

This is the funniest outcome of the Great Feminization claptrap: it implies women are simply better at most jobs than men. Helen Andrews’ thesis was that women were taking over all social institutions and then transforming them into gynocracies. Beyond being self-evidently stupid, it should be noted there’s no evidence of a feminizing turning point or of changes in performance, which vindicates the most cutting criticism of Andrews - conservative feminist (oxymoron if there is one) Leah Libresco Sargeant asking her “who cares” about the share of female veterinarians. Andrews’s claim, nevertheless, ignores this, as well as both the historical context mentioned above and, much more entertainingly, the fact that her claim is also the exact same one made by the world’s most notable “kill all men” feminist, Valerie Solanas, author of the SCUM (“Society for Cutting Up Men”, allegedly) Manifesto: that women are superior to men, and thus will inevitably run all of society. Well, it’s kind of true: a recent study finds that there is a certain genetic pattern associated with higher wealth - one conducted by more average and less extreme beliefs about the future, higher risk aversion, and more ease at handling the formal education system. What population is cognitively average, risk-averse, and good in school? Women. Thank you Helen, for proving the “fairer sex” is also the master race. Your contributions to gynosocialism will not be forgotten.

Big muscle guy jobs

The term Stepman is most concerned with is “girlboss”, originally coined by clothing entrepreneur (entrepreneuse?) Sophia Amoruso in 2013. The term mostly reflects a professional ethos where women can navigate a male-dominated world by being strategic and women bosses help women employees; however, the way she uses the term is much closer to the “Lean In School of Feminism” exemplified by Sheryl Sandberg, CEO of Facebook from 2008 to 2022. Sandberg’s “feminism” was a lot more empirically grounded (dealing with things like negotiation, mentoring, and assertiveness). Sandberg even includes “dating advice”: how to handle balancing life at work and in the home, because men don’t do a “fair” share to have a high-powered wife. However, Sandberg didn’t really have much in the direction of advice for men, besides “find a good one”, which was one of the major criticisms of the book when it came out - a lot of them, of course, focused on the fact a book written by the CEO of Facebook didn’t question capitalism or the patriarchy or white supremacy or heteronormativity or whatever. But it does get into a much thornier aspect of Sandberg’s legacy, particularly, that when she had the opportunity of helping other women with her power, she didn’t: Sandberg refused to have the company let young mothers work from home early after giving birth in 2019. The fundamental critique of girlbossism, all along, was its glorification of work as a tool of self actualization: I think society has become too obsessed with working to the detriment of a variety of other extremely important aspects of life, such as having a family.

Someone else who thought this was British anthropologist David Graeber. In a 2013 essay later turned into his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs, Graeber posits that a mix of capitalism and Protestant work culture coupled with a belief in the “curse of Adam” led to a global obsession with working that completely absorbed life. In particular, his case was founded on a pretty questionable foundation: Keynes predicted in 1930 that by the year 2000 people would work 15 hours a week; why did people still work 40? Well, because corporations made up jobs to keep people working eight rather than 3 hours a day. “Productive” jobs in farming, manufacturing, and “domestic servants” shrank while “managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” went from a quarter to three quarters of the population. Graeber’s theory is that actual productive work (which, for some reason, includes domestic servants) was actually automated away like Keynes said, but instead of letting people work less, the ruling class decided that people should work more, and invented fake jobs for them to do - jobs that are either harmful, pointless, or just don’t produce any benefits. The most important fact here is that you can have the standard of living of someone who lived in 1930 with just fifteen hours of work a week - provided you live in a very small house, don’t have any appliances, drive a tiny, gas-guzzling car if you even own one, don’t go on vacation, and spend almost all your time doing household chores. Anyone can live the tradwife lifestyle if they have a rich husband who pays all the bills. In their episode on the book, the If Books Could Kill podcast points to the work of sociologist/economist Juliet Schor, whose research focuses on the question of why people work so much - what she finds is that Americans in particular just enjoy consuming a lot more than they enjoy free time, and that shows in the fact Americans work a lot more hours than Europeans. In fact, a 2002 paper by Nobel Laureate Ed Prescott and Japanese economist Fumio Hayashi posits that the reason Japan seemed to enter a slump in the 1990s is that Japanese growth was actually in line to other developed countries in terms of productivity per hour worked, but that Japan simply had its workers start to work fewer hours - that is, they converted their standard of living into time rather than money because of tax policy, which Prescott also later used to explain shorter European work hours and lower standards of living (the posterior literature on the Japan take finds it rather controversial, and I’m not convinced myself).

The main problem of the book is that Graeber relies too much on merging the categories of bullshit jobs: box tickers (compliance officers, survey givers, in-house writers); flunkies (jobs that are “for show”, like receptionists); “duct tapers” (people whose job is to patch up bad work by others); “taskmasters” (middle managers); “goons” (people whose jobs are bad). Graeber makes a point that to call a job bullshit its employees have to self-report as being low on satisfaction (which is defensible); the core empirical issue here is that a lot of the jobs Graeber calls “bullshit” have high employee satisfaction (which, again, he considers as the key variable for determining bullshit job status) and a lot of “real” jobs have very low satisfaction (think janitors). It’s also kind of obvious that people he calls “bullshit” because their jobs don’t produce anything actually do have measurable output, it’s just kind of nonsense: the podcast mentions event planners as people with bullshit jobs and while yes, they are not contributing much to the betterment of society and the creation of a fair and beautiful world, they are producing something to the people who pay them - an event.

Human resources are Graeber’s key example of a bullshit job, but I think he, and Stepman for that matter, simply don’t understand HR as a field. The term “human resources” was coined by management guru Peter Drucker in 1954, in his book The Practice of Management; the term replaced “personnel management”, and Drucker’s argument was that the previously administrative work of payroll and compliance with labor laws had to expand into a legitimate skill of cultivating workers by aligning individuals with teams and teams with organizational goals. It also came at a time when business culture was changing significantly: American white collar workers and service firms were starting to question the top down, centrally managed, highly and rigorously disciplined “Fordist” style of management of the 1940s and before. Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool details this pretty thoroughly: the late fifties nad especially the sixties saw an increasing drift by major corporations to adapt their work culture to the countercultural, rebellious, and anti-conformist vibe of the time by, for instance, aligning the corporate mission with broader values or modifying rules on attire and hairstyle to attract creative talent. The book mostly focuses on advertisement, but the fact that the staid and buttoned-up corporate culture of the fifties began to be questioned not just by workers but also by managers and leading thinkers was a major factor in transforming “personnel” into “HR”. A field of economics that has now been mostly swallowed up by labor, personnel economics, dealt with corporate management issues after HR became what it is today over the 80s and 90s: in particular, personnel economists focus on five topics: incentives for working, matching firms and workers, pay and compensation, skill development, and organization. The field had an enormous interest in human resources as a field, given how HR expanded from just handling payroll and admin to “employee development” and internal organization: in particular, personnel management began to shit focus to topics like handling “superstar salaries”, different areas of companies having different amounts of work at different times; non-monetary benefits to lure workers, etc. Most of the papers on HR practices and productivity are fairly old, but even the new ones find mostly positive effects: a 2010 study concludes that human resource management practices tend to be positively correlated with firm performance, particularly because, starting in the 1970s, firms began adopting contingent pay schemes that rewarded worker performance rather than the previous promotion-based compensation method. This, according to older papers, mostly accrues through benefits from teams specializing their workers in flexible ways (the literature on HR and unions is kind of messy). In particular, a more in-depth study proposes that human resources practices interacted with employees’ human capital - meaning that adequate worker training (which HR, you might have noticed, is in charge of) can make very modest organizational changes pay off; one example of this is that when banks adopted HR practices with powerful HR managers, their operations became more productive, and workers, according to another study, tended to have higher satisfaction after their employer adopted HR practices.

The most important notion from the niche field of personnel economics is that human resources practices exist for a reason. The view that they’re just a government conspiracy to employ useless women in useless job is kind of nonsense - with the lobbying power that American corporations have, I’d assume that they would have noticed that a huge chunk of their workforce is doing no job. In fact, questions like “what is a good manager”, “how can workers work harder”, and “how do you get people to get along and work” are fairly hard to answer from a general and a purely theoretical ex ante framework, which is why every company on earth has a department dedicated to figuring those questions out on a day to day basis. And this is particularly true for the white collar economy, which is primarily run (at least for now) on human capital, human intellect, and human ability - so motivation, team design, and worker retention are extremely important.

The tweet above kinda makes the whole point: it’s always some woman who is rash, overconfident, and uninformed making an empirical sounding claim that other women don’t deserve their jobs. Don’t they know, Sheryl Sandberg would ask, that they’re acting just like men? Well, there’s a good way to handle that: let’s start getting rid of do-nothing NGO jobs. For example, take this organization named the “Independent Women Forum” - must be a Soros front to promote feminism. Let’s shut it down and put all their (overwhelmingly female) contributors and employees out on the street. Except, oops, it includes one Inez Stepman. Better luck next time.

One must imagine Lazzaro happy

One of the more or less explicit (and most ideological) threads Stepman pulls is the “naturalization” of female labor: in particular, that it required some grand project of social engineering:

But let’s be clear: The status quo is maintained by a network of laws and policies that push women out of the home and into the workforce. Women who would prefer to work part-time or not at all while their children are young—still the substantial majority—must make heavy sacrifices to do so, sacrifices that were unnecessary forty or fifty years ago.

Beyond the fact that the singular datum mentioned is 13 years old, and a more recent survey has overturned it (women who think they should work full time not outnumber women who think they shouldn’t by a ten-point margin, though with a post-pandemic uptick), the most interesting thing is that, again, a sacrifice of “money” is framed as a moral issue. The reason, as pointed out above, that women have jobs is that two people making 80,000 dollars a year make more money than one person making 80,000 dollars. It’s not that Hillary Clinton’s perfidious schemes tricked them into getting fake degrees and fake jobs. It’s cold, hard money. Stepman makes two, broader, interconnected mistakes: the first is that women were out of the (paid, outside the home) workforce for a very historically narrow period of time, and the second is that the specific forms of social organization that pushed them out of the workforce were not at all natural.

I’ve already done a full post about the topic but the “trad” fantasy that women didn’t work from time immemorial until wokeness is a completely ahistorical fairy tale. We can start as far into the crank heterodox fringes I like to go into (I mean, we just quoted Valerie Solanas); in particular, the recipient of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics, Claudia Goldin, worked pretty definitively on this question: women working is in line with the historical experience, and what’s outside the norm is women not working. You can see it in her work in two ways. The first is that reconstructing historical records, you find that, before the present, the time in American history with the highest labor force participation rate was the Colonial Era. The second is comparing countries today with different levels of development: if all countries start out equally poor at the lowest bound for human subsistence, then poorer countries today share many structural features with richer countries in the past. So the relationship between GDP per capita and female labor participation rates today tells you a lot about those variables historically - and what we see is that very poor and very rich countries both have extremely high shares of women in the workforce, and it’s mostly early industrializing countries that have low rates. This should come with the caveat that women’s exclusion from the paid labor market was never really complete: it was only really for a generation or two at the turn of the 20th century that career or family was a strict dichotomy; for the women that came of age in the 20s, 30s, and early 40s, it was common to work until they got married, and for the women that came of age between the late 40s and 60s, it was common to work after they had children. Currently, across the world, more developed countries tend to have lower economic penalties for women who get married and have children - which incentivizes higher economic participation by women.

The idea that economic growth and development happen in distinct phases is pretty controversial and mostly discredited, but what is true is that, as economies transitioned from agriculture to manufacturing, this resulted in a redistribution of income from land to capital and from certain types of labor to other types. In particular, industrialization raised men’s employment opportunities outside the home, and since women lacked political power or economic power of their own, industrialization empowered men. Women who are under stricter control by their husbands are less likely to work, and spousal control is a key factor in employment and economic decisions. In this sense, globalization has an effect on female labor participation that depends on whether trade exposure benefits more female-intensive or male-intensive sectors, with wider social consequences to follow. A comparable, contemporary example comes from Egypt, one of the world’s most male-dominated countries: cash transfers giving to uneducated women result in lower female labor participation, and lower female influence over household decisions - not because the economic shift created gender roles, but because it empowered men economically to enforce them. For instance, one of the main issues with the predictions around GDP per capita come from the fact that societies that historically used the plough at higher rates in agriculture tend to have stricter and more hierarchical gender relations, because there was more of a premium on male labor given the immense physical strength required to operate a plough. In contrast, milking machines in Norwegian dairy farms displaced young female workers, who in turn specialized in urban service occupations which in turn improved the relative economic status of women versus men; Norway is now the second most gender equal country in the world, and the top spots are all held by other (economically similar) Scandinavian countries.

The big question isn’t really what drove women out of the workforce, but rather, what drove them back in; for that, we need to go a full two centuries back. Per Oded Galor’s The Journey of Mankind, one of the most virulent political disputes in Victorian England was education - particularly, mass education for the working class. The industrialists were torn: on the one hand, educating their workers would make them more productive and would ensure their factories were more profitable; on the other, it would give them access to politically revolutionary ideas. The classic case, made by both Michel Foucault and (somewhat more rigorously) Bowles and Gintis’s Schooling in Capitalist America, was that mass education trained the children of former agrarian peasants to follow the norms of industrial life - social norms (scheduled breaks and limited eating time; 9-to-5 scheduling; bells indicating key moments, et cetera) and the rigor and self-discipline required. The whole thing is kinda dumb and facile, but what was true is that mass education was, indeed, required to produce a population capable of sustaining an industrial economy - and one that had to be specifically constructed to sustain that society, considering that since time immemorial education was restricted to a very small share of the population. Every single country on Earth, in fact, constructed mass education as a system to ensure a cohesive national identity; Argentina’s government very consciously designed the curriculum to teach the children of mass European migration the national language, national symbols, and general national value - that is, to produce a cohesive nation that didn’t naturally exist.

In fact, once you start pulling threads on the “how did the capitalist nation state come to be” question, the whole thing unravels pretty fast. The classic book on the topic is one I’ve quoted a few times: Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, which is largely about how the adoption of market capitalism required enormous changes in the way society had, for millennia, understood labor, land, and money. Polanyi saw the first two in particular being transformed from the center of feudal social relations to what he called “ficticious commodities”, things treated as if they were objects to be bought and sold; the idea that people can “sell” themselves in this way was profoundly alien to feudal England (the birthplace of capitalism) and had to be constructed via deliberate policies that dismantled all preexisting social arrangements. This idea is best explored by another book I’ve mentioned once or twice, Ellen Meiksins Wood's The Origin of Capitalism: her thesis is that capitalism emerged from the land reforms whereby a variety of unique political circumstances meant the British Crown could dictate the enclosure of public land (as well as the seizing of monastical property), which in turn deracinated a large number of peasants who were turned into tenant farmers, which in turn created a population that had to engage in paid market labor to sustain itself and which had to pay for land at competititve rates. This also has some relation to the Lockean/Baconian ideology of land improvement and scientific management, which also shifted the understanding of land and productivity from a static fact of nature to one that could be managed. Again, these are reasonably controversial interpretations of history, but what is not controversial is that the Industrial Revolution involved a change from the previous social order that was more or less deliberate - again, there was fierce organized resistance to industrialization from a group called the Luddites, who believed their livelihoods and way of life would be destroyed by factories - and they were mostly right!

The obvious question is whether this applied to women too - it did. The classic book about this is another controversial left-wing classic, Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch: her argument, which is even more Marxist than the previous two, is that the establishment of capitalism required also a mass expropriation of domestic and sexual labor by enclosing commons which were much more economically important to women than to men, some have argued. This reduced the bargaining power of women relative to men, who then imposed serious restrictions on reproduction and female employment - the male breadwinner family was progressively, intentionally created as part of the transition out of feudalism. A perfect example of how this operated in turn-of-the-century America were marriage bars: from the early 1900s until the 1950s, it became increasingly common to outlaw paid work by married women. This was a common trend across the Western world starting in the late 1800s but particularly picking up after the 1920s, and there were largely three main factors motivating marriage bars: a desire to curb female economic independence, a desire to curb female political influence after the establishment of universal suffrage, and a desire to ameliorate the effects of the Great Depression, which turbocharged the pressures on male economic status. Women who grew up in this era were the likeliest in US history to never marry or have children. Stepman explicitly mentions teaching as a female-dominated profession; however, it was a profession that was also attacked by legislation: by the 1920s, 60% of cities and towns barred married women from working as teachers; by the 1940s, it was nearly 90%. In fact, states that reversed marriage bars on teachers had more, not less, female workforce participation - perhaps an sign that women are rational economic actors and not motivated by socialism and tradwivery. Marriage bars were also a legal creation: their implementation was something explicitly authorized by the Supreme Court during the Lochner Era of jurisprudence - in the case Muller v. Oregon of 1908. And looking at the BBC, the main reason it abandoned its Depression-Era marriage bar wasn’t that it went woke due to overzealous lawsuits, it was that there had started being a large enough number of educated women that they felt they were missing out.

But the real truth nuke, as mentioned above, is that women’s reentry into the labor market was more or less inevitable for two reasons: the transition to a service economy (which, again, mostly responded to economic factors), and the creation of mass female education. Historically, female education did not follow very much the mass model of male education, and was instead mostly centered on the home and on domestic labor. One of the main counters to this came from deeply un-feminist premises: that women were going to raise the next generation, and as such, they needed to be able to instill them with good, patriotic values. When mass male education became common, this case strengthened, because teacher demand was an important driver for formal female education; this trend furthered in the early 20th century because growing economic complexity led to a further need for white-collar labor, which was less socially stigmatized and for which women were at less of a disadvantage of compared to men. This meant that the expansion of education was a self-sustaining phenomenon: the economy needed a more educated population, and the more educated population needed more educated educators, and women were seen as natural educators - such that the expansion of high school level education, for instance, raised the labor force participation of women fairly consistently between 1850 and 1910. The expansion of high school education, additionally, happened in a context of reduced support for child labor in favor of schooling and, more importantly, an expansion of the franchise - which entailed fears of, as mentioned before, large numbers of citizens who were not properly incorporated.

Something to note about this trend is that, in the American context, women’s rights have been part of broader movements for civil rights, particularly around racial equality. The two critical moments in the 20th century were the 1920s and the 1960s; interestingly, the 20s were a continuation of a previous tradition of female equality activism that was started alongside Northern abolitionism. The clearest starting point for the American suffrage movement is in the 1840 World Anti Slavery Convention, where elected female delegates were banned from participating on account of being women. Exactly why the women’s suffrage movement was successful a good eighty years after it started and a full generation after its most important leaders all died is a bit of a mystery to me, but it also coincided with a period of broader educational gains for women - such that the case for their intellectual maturity as voters might have been convincing. There’s two interesting things to note here: the first is that expansions of civil rights lead to expansions of educational investment, and the second is that the expansion of the franchise in question that led to the high school movement of the 1910s was the expansion of the franchise to freed slaves, which in turn led to a massive rift between the former abolitionists and the suffragists, who in some cases also became extremely racist basically out of nowhere.

The critical moment for women’s rights in the United States wasn’t really the 1970s, which would support Stepman’s claim that “anti discrimination legislation” is responsible for everything; it’s the 1940s, since baby boomer women were the ones who made the economic leap from only family to perhaps career and family. The shift was extremely quick: in 1968, only a third of women aged 18 to 21 expected to work; by 1975, two thirds of women in the same age range did. This was a result of the growth of the early services economy, as well as, more importantly, women’s entry into higher education starting in the 1950s, which more or less evened out with men after a multi-decade reversal of women underperforming men educationally (before the 1930s, results were relatively even). Interestingly, women’s entry into higher education was motivated by marriage: it was seen as a good investment to bag a rich husband, so many families actually invested in this (otherwise superfluous) human capital to get their daughter hitched to the right guy. However, changes mentioned before to the economy meant that there was a lot less to do around the house and a lot more to earn outside of it, and anti-discrimination law simply heightened an already fairly acute tradeoff between having a college graduate earn zero dollars and earn a relatively high amount. But why did women born in the 1920s and 1940s have a substantially higher chance of participating in the workforce? The two World Wars: social attitudes towards women working changed significantly in the mid 20th century in the United States because, a generation of men either worked with women who stepped in to replace soldiers, or were raised by women who worked, and the women were raised by other women who also worked at this same time, at the same time as the government provided social services to make the operation of the wartime economy plausible - but services that were utilized most by women who were already more primed to work.

So, in a nutshell, you had a perfect storm of two cataclysmic generational conflicts that pushed two back-to-back generations of women into the workforce for at least some of their adult lives, with important effects on the ideas and beliefs of their children, which also coincided with a multi-decade expansion of basic and higher education, which also coincided with a structural shift in the economy that meant women with an education became increasingly capable of earning a substantial amount, which also coincided with technological shifts that made domestic labor a lot more productive, which also coincided with persuasion efforts on men making them do more around the house over the next four generations, all of which was kickstarted by drastic social changes that were explicitly built for the purpose of cementing certain types of economic relations on society. And you’re telling me it was all changes to antidiscrimination law in the 1990s, when, in fact, gender equality basically ground to a complete halt in the United States.

The perfect example of this whole dynamic is a movie: Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher’s Lazzaro Felice, or Happy as Lazzaro. The movie is set in the past in feudal Italy; the main characters are all indentured servants of a minor aristocrat, the marchesa De Luna, and farm tobacco for her in a debt peonage feudal sharecropping arrangement. They have humble and difficult but socially interconnected lives; the big wham reveal is that they live not in the 30s or 40s, but in the 1980s, and the De Luna family is breaking the law by employing them as sharecroppers. After a fake kidnapping results in the police becoming involved, the marchesa goes to prison, her family loses everything, and the former serfs all move onto a slum, a fact that is presented while they read a newspaper article about how they lived in complete, inhumane squalor under the De Luna family. One of the serfs, Lazzaro, goes into a sort of time jump (the plot is basically Polanyi meets Rip Van Winkle) and wakes up in the future. The point the film tries to make is that the transition from tradition to modernity was not some inevitable, natural phenomenon, but one carefully constructed and with actual human costs to specific communities. The most notable part of this point is the ending: after realizing his old friend Tancredi is actually a broke, loutish loser, Lazzaro goes into the bank that he owes money to and begins demanding the De Luna family have their land, money, and titles restored. The customers are briefly threatened by this attempted robbery until they realize Lazzaro is not armed, and they beat him to death for wasting their time. Lazzaro, as a character, is most reminiscent of Yukio Mishima: a man motivated by reasonably noble sentiments who wasted his life trying to revert inevitable structural transformations of the world he lived in. But, taken somewhat more broadly, Lazzaro is also a perfect vehicle for Viktor Orban and the general “moral state”-ism of National Conservatives: people who have zero tangible grasp of how the real world has changed beyond recognition as an economic unit, and think intellectually dishonest jawboning of women can restore something that has not existed for half a century.

Conclusion

The obvious book to cite about Stepman’s fact-free dirge on the inferiority of women is Andrea Dworkin’s Right Wing Women. Dworkin’s point is quite obvious if you know the first thing about her: men are really bad to women and have a lot of power to impose that badness on them. Marriage, as an institution, seems to largely serve the purpose of permitting men to do whatever they want to their women - some of the men are nice, and others are not, and the women are supposed to not have any recourse except to suck it up and learn their place, that is, either the kitchen or the bedroom. But the book isn’t titled Right Wing Men - it’s right wing women who catch her interest (before getting sidetrakced by hippies, racism, antisemitism, homophobia, lesbophobic feminists, and Marxism) because, by and large, they agree with her. Men, in the telling of conservatives like Anita Bryant and Phyllis Schlafly, are dangerous to women, and do bad things to women, like rape and kill them. That’s why women need a man - to protect them from other men. That’s why women shouldn’t go to work - because it’s a privilege and an honor to be a mother, and men are taking it away from women to, so to speak, get the milk for free without buying the cow. What fascinates Dworkin about conservative women isn’t that they don’t see the same world she sees, but that they do, and they simply refuse to admit one that’s better. Instead, they preach the power and dignity of dependence. Well, is there power in dependence?

Stepman’s article starts with a brief reference to Lindy West, a progressive writer who recently published her memoir, Adult Braces. West is polyamorous; her spouse, Aham (who is referred to by either he and they pronouns so I’ll use he because using “they” for someone in a throuple is pretty confusing). Aham asked West to open the relationship because monogamy was patriarchal and part of white supremacy. He only did this after he was caught cheating on Lindy. The two of them set out joint rules for the courtship, and Aham regularly broke them. Aham also broke rules in his other endeavors: he sent West an undressed picture of Roya, the other woman who eventually joined the couple as its third member, without her consent. The two women became friends and then eventually began hooking up and developed a romantic bond, though the implication is that Lindy West largely did not seek out other partners. Most discourse has focused on some incredibly painful and humiliating incidents, like her suffering from a mental health crisis and Aham being too busy having very loud sex with Roya to comfort her. Lindy describes herself as “learning to love it”, making the main question in her relationship the question of coercion: how did she let this be done to her? West’s main case appears to be that they built up a life together - how can she walk away? She needs Aham to be her rock.

Helen Lewis called the book a sign of the “death of milennial feminism” in a The Atlantic article, but I don’t really think that’s what we’re seeing. We’re not seeing a career-minded “girlboss” harpy who jumps around from one casual fling to another; we're instead seeing a woman so desperately attached to her husband she is willing to endure profound personal humiliations to keep their relationship stable. The way Stepman and other conservatives see West is, by and large, the way a lot of liberal professional women see conservative women: as people who victimize themselves for the sake of terrible men. While Mister John Doe Stepman might be a swell guy, if you shackle yourself to a covenant husband, odds are you get a Byron Noem or a Pete Hegseth. Lindy West is not a girlboss; she is a tradwife with pink hair. West is not preaching is not liberation from indignity - Adult Braces is, if anything, a gospel dedicated to the dignity of dependence. That’s why West’s book struck such a note with those people - they might see in Lindy West living in Bluehair’s Castle a left-coded mirror image of themselves, and they hate what they see.

This week, on either Tuesday or Wednesday, this blog turned five years old; at least, five since my first post. I would have posted on Wednesday, but unfortunately I’ve just been too busy with personal, work, and family obligations. So I’m taking the end of Easter day to write something different: a retrospective, of sorts, of these last five years. I felt like the best way to approach this celebratory post was to answer the only three questions people ever ask me about writing in general: why, what, and how.

The first question is why: why I wrote anything at all. I think this is the one that people have the most trouble with: why should I write anything? I don’t have anything to say to others. Justifying writing anything was a lot harder than most other parts of the blog lifestyle. Initially I didn’t really expect anyone to read anything I put out. I mostly started as an exercise for myself, to organize my ideas around topics I considered important. I also, some people might have noticed, used this to force myself to read and think about topics in my undergraduate degree and now my master’s. That’s kind of why I started writing on here: to think and to read and to remember what I thought about what I read. I started a diary of sorts where it’s just what I thought was important to write down that I’d thought about, say, a movie or a play or what happened at work or in therapy or Robert Zemeckis and conservative filmmaking. That’s also how I approach writing here: I try to put together my ideas a topic I find interesting or where I think I have something unique to say. Why in English, then? To practice it and for work. I wanted to have a project showing proficiency and also thought that way I’d reach a bigger audience. Right on both counts, turns out.

The second question is what: how I choose what to write about. I typically try to stay on topics I think I’m familiar with - I don’t write about sports, or physics, or a million other things. I mean, I have mentioned those things, but I don’t think I’ve pretended to have the final say on those topics The typical process isn’t really choosing a general topic (say “climate change”) and working downwards, but rather having a series of ideas (about, say, degrowth and natural law and climate politics and whatnot) and working upwards, linking ideas together to reach a more general topic that the introduction and conclusion bridge with the rest of the thing. That’s why it’s important to keep engaging with a variety of things: with articles and papers, sure, and with documentaries and current events, but also with music, with movies, with books on any number of subjects. I try to stay current on social media trends as well. Anything can be the last piece to put together loosely tied ideas into a good, cohesive post.

Stylistically, I try to think that my two biggest influences are Andrea Dworkin and Malcolm Gladwell, which is kind of a batshit combination. Dworkin is an especially crazy choice: she was a radical socialist feminist with a lot of bold, controversial ideas. But reading her I always, regardless of whether I actually agreed (I mostly didn’t), I always appreciated how clear, concise, and passionate she was. She wrote arguing for exactly what she believed in exactly the way she believed it. I think the whole self pitying trying-to-talk-myself-out-of-it way that a lot of liberals write is very hard to follow and very unconvincing. My family is full of lawyers and something I learned the hard way over the last 26 years is that you need to use as few arguments as you can and they have to be the strongest ones you can muster. It doesn’t matter if it addresses the beliefs of literally every single person who’s ever disagreed with what you’re saying. You need to be clear, straightforward, and forceful with your points. Politically, Malcolm Gladwell is the exact opposite of Dworkin, a temperamentally moderate ultra-establishment centrist. But the relevance isn’t the content of his books, but rather, their style: Gladwell is one of the best-selling nonfiction writers of all time, as well as the most talented and well respected, and I think it comes from his ability to put together the correct series of anecdotes and studies and to devote the needed level of detail to make them compelling. Richard Posner has a very famous critique of his book Blink where he castigages Gladwell for “reveling in the irrelevant”; well, besides the obvious “what else was the book going to be, a list of papers” rebuttal, there’s the fact that the irrelevant makes it more tractable. I know that I could write about work culture or climate change or whatever without giving my two cents on random books or movies. But I don’t think it’d be as good an intellectual exercise for myself or as compelling an experience for the reader.

This gets into the last question: the how. How to write anything. The first part of how is a who: who you write for. I typically try to not be too technical or inaccessible but also not too Youtube-y. It’s kind of a tough balance to reach and figuring out whether someone who doesn’t know what you wanted to say can understand it is one of the hardest parts. Having an audience in mind determines a lot more than your stats or whatever: if you want to be more technical and academic, you have to follow the guidelines of impartiality, impersonality, and “objective” affect that this type of publication has. It obviously has its pros, but also its cons: it’s very remote, frequently overly couched in qualifications, and is also really hard to trace if you do things like cite the papers you mention instead of linking them. I typically try to approach it as “how would I explain the idea to a general audience if I had to give a class or a presentation about it” and then adjust the flow and register of the paragraphs.

For the actual structure of the posts, I try to think of myself as the master of ceremonies at the circus, hence the title. My understanding of an old fashioned circus is that the freaks all do their tricks, and the emcee just introduces them - the effect on the audience is created by putting the right freaks in the right order with the right warmup and send off, and the right time in the spotlight. I kind of approach the books, movies, articles, papers, et cetera introduced in the same way - in what order do I introduce them to create the most convincing effect? How much time do each get? This frequently means I have to cut out things that only make half sense to mention, like how Yanis Varoufakis was also chief economist of Valve and introduced hat-based microtransactions to Team Fortress 2.

A third how would be how the actual act of writing goes for me, which also answers the question of why so many posts seem to come out at weird hours at night: I get the chance to write in blocks or section by section very rarely, because it requires a very stable and predictable schedule during the daytime (which I don’t have most of the time, not for work reasons but just because I like to spend time out and about) and because the flow space either starts or doesn’t start; if I feel “in the zone”, I just want to keep writing until I’m done, in a single, very lengthy stretch. I’ll make up for the fewer hours of sleep tomorrow.

A last how is the “how” that got Meghan McArdle of the Washington Post in the hot seat of Twitter and Substack discourse: how to use AI as a writer. I mostly use it as a search engine: a sort of preemptive fact check and research assistant and paper summary, but not as the source of the ideas. I recently quit pilates, which I’d been doing for four years, and switched to yoga: it wasn’t because pilates started to become associated with right-wing politics recently (in my mind, it’s associated with upper middle class middle aged moms), but because I simply felt I wasn’t doing any work. I was moving my arms and legs around, sure, but the reformer was making the effort that’s supposed to be the point of exercise. In yoga, in contrast, I feel like I’m actually exerting myself - the biggest technological advantages you can have are foam blocks. Becca Rothfeld of the New Yorker wrote, in a Substack piece I don’t really agree with but found engaging, that “The point of writing is to make something beautiful or interesting; the point of reading a book or a philosophy paper is, at least in large part, to make contact with another human mind that has strained to make something beautiful or interesting, whether or not the human mind has succeeded or failed”. I think, as I mentioned above, that writing about something equals thinking about it - why would I let a computer program do the thinking for me? For work, it’s a different thing entirely, but it’s because it’s not my thinking. It’s instrumental thinking, means and ends, and not the more “elevated” purpose of personal intellectual growth. Ideally I would be able to turn my brain off for eight hours a day and have it fresh to myself for the sixteen I’m off the clock - not to mean that I don’t think while doing my work (I’d be out of a job if I didn’t), but rather that I don’t want to exhaust myself mentally in the same way. On here, efficiency isn’t the point; on the clock, it is. If writing here was my full time job, which I’ve sometimes considered but don’t think I’m in a position for yet, I’d obviously feel different about it.

I typically try to avoid using language that includes myself in what I’m writing - I think I even used “they” to refer to human beings at one point. I think it’s a mostly cheap trick to create a sort of affective connection that is never more convincing than marshalling good arguments and good evidence. I also think it usually leads to the writers having to specify very aggressively which parts of the thing they say correspond to them and which ones don’t, which is frequently logically weak and stylistically disorienting. Anyways, time for some I statements to close out: the past five years have been a really important time in my life: I was a university student when I started, and now I’m about to finish my master’s. I’ve advanced a lot in my life in a million ways I don’t think have any bearing on this post. I’ve met a lot of very interesting people through my online presence, though, and made new friends and even more than friends. I wrote and got paid for my writing, which I never in a million years would have expected to happen. It’s been a lot and it’s probably been the period in which I’ve grown the most personally, intellectually, and professionally. I got pretty emotional at a Lorde concert recently because at the end, when she sung Ribs, she mentioned how she and the public had grown up together; coming back home, I realized it was true, I’d been listening to her music, on and off, for 12 years, since I heard Royals in high school English class and wanted to learn more. So, in a way, the people writing this have seen me grow up, kind of.

I am, it goes without saying, very proud of the reach I’ve managed to have and the audience I’ve put together. And I am very grateful to everyone who’s reading or has read anything I’ve written, here or elsewhere, over the past five years. Everyone famous says “I wouldn’t be here without you” to their fans; I’m obviously not famous, but it’s obviously true here too: I wouldn’t be here without the people reading this. Happy Easter, good 2026, and let’s hope we’re still together in five more years.

A bunch of famous people were in Buenos Aires recently: for the Lollapallooza festival, we had sightings of Lorde, Sabrina Carpenter, Addison Rae, Tyler the Creator, and a few others around town. If I had chosen a different lunch option on Friday the 13th, I’d have ran into Tyler too. DJO (AKA Steve from Stranger Things) went to the Boca Juniors stadium for a game, as have recent visitors Dua Lipa, Willem Dafoe, Johnny Depp, one of the two Gallaghers, and Rosalia. Rosalia visited a random tiny church in the middle of bumfuck nowhere during her seemingly endless time in the city - one not even I knew you should visit. Dua Lipa also spent significant time in the city, even going on a public guided tour of the cemetery. Completely incognito, Reese Witherspoon is just wandering around, as is John Malkovich. Depp even ventured outside the city, going to La Plata to receive a municipal award in front of a large crowd of less adoring fans and more “cholulos”, in a scene reminiscing of the ending of Tár rather than of any crowds in Evita. Singer Clairo, who so far to my knowledge hasn’t been in Argentina since 2019 (but, of course, who could notice if she was), is constantly posting culturally Argentine stuff on her socials. And, of course, who can forget the first time Buenos Aires popped on the world’s social media radar: Liam Payne falling off a balcony during a drug-fueled bender and dying. Much like General Facundo Quiroga1, One Direction’s least famous member traveled to the pampas only to find his death, which I was the first person to tell to a number of Americans because local media reported it before international outlets.

This pairs up nicely with the growing number of tourists in the city, the growing number of social media posts about “expats” (the term for an immigrant who is White), and the seeming trendiness of visiting in general. You can’t scroll TikTok for more than five minutes without coming across an American who is just randomly living here while doing a weird master’s program at a private university. I mean, a girl in my master’s is doing that, she up and moved here and is getting a degree.

What is actually going on - why are so many Americans walking the (as witnessed by Sabrina Carpenter, literally) piss-strewn streets of Buenos Aires?

Around the world, around the world

In 2007, tech entrepreneur Tim Ferriss published one of the most important books for understanding the modern approach to urban life: The Four Hour Workweek. The premise of Ferriss’s book is pretty simple: the “new economy” of the late 90s and early 2000s, which is now the old economy disrupted by AI, created a class of people (the “new rich”) whose work could be done from anywhere with minimal spatial attachments. This meant that you, a normal upper middle class white collar worker, could with limited effort create sources of income capable of sustaining a luxurious, enjoyable life anywhere on Earth. Notably, he used two practical examples: Berlin and Buenos Aires. Ferriss was also a pioneer of tech guys getting into MMA, extreme fitness, and scam supplements. Critiques of Tim Ferriss usually focused on two axes: the first is the politics, which gloss over unethical and exploitative not just labor practices but an approach to life; the second is the feasibility of it. Whose boss was going to let them just work from home? What are you going to do with your kids? What are you going to do with healthcare? Well, who’s laughing now'?

In 1939, Walter Benjamin wrote that Paris was the capital of the 19th century as part of his unfinished Arcades Project, a collection of commentaries on urban and cultural issues. In particular, Benjamin considered that Paris starting in the 19th century became not just a city, but also a kind of theme park for capitalism - a place where the cultural dimension of capitalism was most visible (in the Arcades, a series of insulated shopping galleries dedicated to ostentation and consumerism), and the “barricades”, the absent road blocks and protests prevented by Baron Haussmann’s urban reforms. For Benjamin, thus, the “New Paris” was wholly capitalist because the products of the Arcades were fully separated from the labor that originated them, not just physically but also conceptually. Benjamin’s contribution, thus, was the understanding that the economic life of cities shaped them as cultural units and that, in particular, any contradictions in this economic life transformed into urban conflicts. A similar case is made by Richard Florida in his 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class. The book takes the shift of the economy from manufacturing to high-end services to the realization that this post-industrial economy is driven by innovation and human capital, provided by a new class of workers, the “creative class”. This creative class is comprised of scientists, engineers, artists, professors, as well as other white collar, ancillary professionals like doctors, lawyers, or business managers. These workers, in Florida’s telling, have had two major influences: the first is in work culture, demanding flexible schedules, casual dress codes, and blending leisure and labor. This comes from deeper values of autonomy, authenticity meritocracy, and deriving meaning, not just money, from work. The second influence is on cities: creative class workers have very specific preferences around what they want to do and how, and in particular seem to value cultural experiences, diverse and new spaces, and overall prize "authentic" communities with cultural vibrancy, versus uniform and generic commercial spaces. For Florida, creative class “hubs” like San Francisco (the global capital of these types, basically) focus on the “three Ts”: talent, technology, and tolerance (of immigrants, LGBT people, racial minorities people, etc), and places that want to appeal to them should focus on these areas and reap benefits.

A few decades later, another Marxist, this time the sociologist Marshall Berman, continued this analysis of modern urban life in All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1982). ATISMIA proposes modernism not just as an artistic category but as a lived experience, with capitalism producing the paradoxical experience of destruction of traditional life (new infrastructure, displacement of communities, precarious tenancies) also produce enormous opportunities and vitality. Berman’s core examples come from Haussmann, again, and how his destruction of medieval Paris allowed for the creation of a new, modern, interconnected city, as seen in movies like Breathless. In contrast, St Petersburg was the modernity not of development, but of underdevelopment: what happens when a city is transformed not by its economy, but by its government, with modernity being imposed “top down” and producing a widespread cultural backlash, as Berman interprets in the work of Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoyevsky. His final example is near and dear to all readers here: Robert Moses, the Power Broker himself, whose widespread destruction of New York City’s traditional areas to build gigantic highways spurred both the Bohemian culture of Greenwich Village and the now enormously influential work of urbanist Jane Jacobs. Jacobs, who started writing as an obscure journalist with no formal qualifications in urbanism, penned his 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities largely as a response to Moses: Jacobs adopted the same ideas later used by Berman, that modern cities involved tremendous amounts of organically driven change and community-level events; the biggest cities were, in essence, a collection of small villages springing up again and again. To quote Jacobs, “Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city”.

According to Berman, economic modernization created urban modernization, combining creative energy with economic and physical dislocation. Berman’s work, particularly its title (lifted from The Communist Manifesto) was influential on sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity. In the book, Bauman argues that the transition out of the Fordist mass industrial model Berman described (“solid modernity”) into the less stable and more individualist and flexible "liquid modernity" has produced an enormous number of people without real attachments to any stable structures in the places they live in - not via social roles (including gender), employment, or settled communities. Instead, people have become “nomadic” in the world of liquid modernity, and power in the globalized world belongs to those who can move freely - Ferriss’s “new rich”. In contrast, migrants and refugees (termed “vagabonds”) are cast out and pushed out, either via physical rejection (anthropoemesis) or through the rejection of all difference in them (anthropofagia, aka cannibalism). In particular, Bauman says "nomadism becomes a general trait of the liquid modern person as they flow through their own life like a tourist, changing places, jobs, spouses, values." The contrast here is between the free-floating global elite and the anchored local poor; a similar case is made by Richard Florida in his 2008 book Who’s Your City, where he divides up workers between mobile and immobile. Mobile workers have the ability, resources, and desire to move wherever opportunities are best; in contrast, fixed or immobile workers are tied to where they live, either by necessity or by choice, and their anchors are both their job and the cost of living. This, of course, anticipates a large chunk of Raj Chetty’s research on the geographic concentration of opportunity as well as the geographically concentrated impact of the Great Recession. Florida notes that young workers look for a city first and a job there second, especially following housing cost and quality (including amenities), then family and friends, then work; it would take around 133,000 dollars (151k today) to convince someone to move to a place without a social network.

The most interesting part of Florida’s book is the one on the changes in urban form: contrary to what everyone would have expected, globalization didn’t spread out economic benefits, but concentrated them in a handful of “superstar cities”. Urban sociologist Saskia Sassen calls these superstar cities “global cities”; in particular, globalization made geography more important in the way that everyone above noted. According to Sassen, however, as corporations have spread their operations all over the world, they also developed the need for somewhere to coordinate these networks, so as the world economy has become more complex and integrated, paradoxically, “command-and-control” functions have become more concentrated because of the greater need to specialize in a small handful of niche services for other firms: finance, legal compliance, accounting, advertising, and consulting were her original examples (in 1991), with technology becoming a new key service. This has taken place in a small set of cities: New York, London, San Francisco, Tokyo. Sassen particularly notes the “hourglass” effect of the labor market: high-end knowledge workers at the top, and low-wage service workers at the bottom. The new, globalized modernity routinely and systematically displaces people and communities to serve the needs of distant corporate masters, sometimes even excluding whole segments of the economy from becoming viable participants in the system.

The macroeconomic trends Sassen (who is, let’s be honest, a little bit of a crank) are very real. Within the global/superstar cities, according to Florida, the job market also baranches out between mobile and fixed workers: the “nerds”, creative class professionals, and the “grunts”, lower-SES service workers. This mirrors broader trends in the labor market, that is, job polarization: starting in the 1970s, the labor market has increasingly split into two tracks over the last few decades: a high skill, high-education, “knowledge sector”, and a low-skill “manual sector” due to the impact of automation, the IT revolution, increased competition from developing countries, the Great Recession, and a variety of other smaller factors like loss of union density and cuts to the welfare state. This meant that the service sector increased its demand for both low skill, “routine” labor and for high-skill, high human capital “knowledge” workers, as reflected in the growing premium from education over other forms of skills. The notable thing here isn’t necessarily the very obvious and banal observation that changes in the structure of the economy also change the distribution of income. It’s that these changes can lead to different groups of people coming out on top: the changes of the last 50 years resulted in the creative class being the dominant group both culturally and politically.

In the cities, the “grunts” largely lost out due to the high income “nerds” causing growing housing costs in the face of constrained housing supply - the growth of the creative class has fueled housing costs only because the cities in question did not build the . Even as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston got more expensive, they continued capturing more and more educated workers: in 1970, the most college-educated city in the United States was Washington DC at 18% of the population, close to the 11% national average; today, nearly two thirds of Washingtonians have a higher education, and the US average is around 40%. In particular, according to Florida, a central concept at play here is the Gay-Bohemian Index, which I’ve mentioned in the past because of how funny the concept is: superstar cities emerge not just as creative class clusters but also as beacons of, as mentioned above, tolerance and cultural openness, serving as larger proxies for aesthetic sensibility and cultural capital.

Is he gay or European?

So what we have is a story where globalization has favored certain seats of economic activity to thrive as well as concentrate high numbers of young, educated, and progressive knowledge workers. Becoming a global economic hub is really beneficial for cities, it turns out, since they get a big influx of high earners who want to pay higher taxes in order to improve public services, at least in principle. What did cities do to attract the faces of the new economy?

The first option is the “common sense” one, develop a cluster that makes talent gravitate towards you. The important concept to understand is the cluster: clusters are groups of related industries that develop in one spot. The obvious example here is Silicon Valley and the tech industry. This emerges from the concept of agglomeration: because individuals can learn from each other, then individuals in similar industries will tend to want to live in proximity by locating in a city where, for historic or cultural reasons, they have more colleagues and employers already The fact that people can learn from others in their industry results in economic gains, where more economic (and physical) density leads to more productive firms and more competitive labor markets, which can be seen in many ways: for example, the more density in firm location, the more productive the firms are, and the higher the density, the higher the wages but also the higher the rents. The fact that agglomeration results in cities that attract talent means that cities that, for whatever reasons, have more young professionals therefore will also have higher mean skills and thus more opportunities from learning. And when I say “whatever reasons”, it really is whatever, because the factors can be very arbitrary: the reason the tech industry is located in San Francisco is that a random guy called William Shockley moved from New Jersey to Palo Altos so he could live near his elderly mother after he got screwed out of a patent by Bell Labs.

While it’s obvious why, say, actors could learn from each other, professions are also very likely to learn from other professions: one of the most famous examples is that patents are much more likely to be cited between industries in the same city than from other cities, even if the local patents are from different industries, because field makes basically no difference in likelihood. The reason for this is, basically, that what matters aren’t industry-specific skills, but broader human capital: workers make around 33% more if they live in big cities because they learn more throughout their careers, making them more valuable to firms, thus incentivizing firms to compete for the superior talent pool. These skills come into contact more and more effectively when workers are densely packed near each other, leading to, for example, new technologies being incorporated into new industries, plus the competition from more employers allowing top talent more options even outside the field. In his 2008 book Triumph of the City, urban economist Edward Glaeser compares multiple American cities facing deindustrialization: Detroit went into a pretty prolonged decline after the automotive industry left, while Minneapolis managed to readapt into a “skilled city” due to the large amount of college graduates thanks to the existence of large, public institutions and a long-standing culture that valued education. The starkest case, however, is Boston: in the 1970s, urban economists worried that the city would just collapse when its major employers, the textile, steel, and candy industries, left; somehow, they forgot that it contained two of the best universities in the world in a single, confectionery-centric suburb (Cambridge), plus other top institutions like Tufts, Boston University, Boston College, or the University of Massachussetts. And, again, the historical reasons at play are very weird: Minneapolis and Boston were both founded by strange subsects of Protestantism that were very weirdly egalitarian on literacy.

The main problem for the cluster approach is that it’s really really hard to get the policies, known as place-based policies, to work out and start an economic cluster. The main problem is that policymakers typically try to jump start agglomeration without understanding the three pillars of the cluster concept: the first is, as mentioned above, agglomeration through shared knowledge across industries, which is just as important, if not more important, than economics of specialization. The second, which can be best understood by why Silicon Valley beat out Boston to develop the beating heart of the tech industry, is that the city must have a viable corporate culture for the people who want to work in the industry: one of the weirder bits in Who’s Your City is that regional personality differences in the US are caused by the Big Five traits most demanded by the specific industries they specialize in. The third factor to keep track of is the supply chain: in the post-Fordist era, companies have much higher numbers of suppliers and contractors (which is the entire basis for trying to develop these clusters, might I add), which is why becoming geographically agglomerated is a positive: it reduces transaction costs within and between adjacent businesses and industries.

So cities decided to take a second approach: if they couldn’t have the employers, they should chase after the employees. Companies are increasingly oriented around their workforce: both “fixed” labor like low-wage manufacturing work, and “nerd” labor of an acceptable quality. At the same time, as mentioned above, living amenities are a substantial draw: workers want to move to locations with a desirable climate, environment, or cultural facilities, which implies a compensating differential that might be reflected in lower wages than in similar but less nice cities. People care about being near their friends and near their families (citation: Who’s Your City), and they also care about where they live: using smartphone data, economists have found that people derive a lot of satisfaction from various errands and small trips they make during the day, even while working remote: going to coffee shops or buying something, stopping by a friend’s house, catching a movie or going to the library; what’s more, these small stops help explain agglomeration via cultural and environmental amenities. These amenities are a major draw to young people who want to develop their career in big metro areas, and there’s substantial evidence (again, go read Who’s Your City) that people choose the city first and the career that lets them live there second; this leads to high-amenity cities growing faster than low amenity ones in this new age of ideas, as well as cities with high amenities seeing a big density premium over low amenity cities. A decade after publishing The Rise of the Creative Class, Florida revisited the book, with some significant changes: his opinions on the importance of not just skills and resources, but also ambiance, amenities, and attitudes had become extremely widespread and extremely influential. To Florida, thus, cities should focus on appealing to the creative class with an “alternative” cultural scene, local parks, small cafes and bars, that is, in attracting and maintaining economic vibrancy not with basic infrastructure and spectacular projects but by expressing local authenticity.

This is how the Creative City was born: if Mohammed will not go to the mountain, the mountain will go to Mohammed. The clearest example of this approach was Barcelona: after decades of economic decay due to deindustrialization and longstanding issues caused by the lack of urban investment by Franco-Era governments, the city decided to rebrand itself into a hub of global culture and tourism. To do this, the city chose to bid to host the 1992 Olympics and invest substantially in public spaces, public transportation, and public facilities. The Olympics are typically a terrible bet, involving multiple gigantic sports venues that get used exactly one time; however, for Barcelona, they somehow worked - the city designed a very extensive program for using the Olympics as a way to revitalize neglected parts of the city and heighten Barcelona’s cultural heritage, creating genuine interest as well as the infrastructure to (at least at the time) accommodate it.

The idea that culture could revitalize a city isn’t especially new: it was developed by Americans in the 1980s, trying to implement the Boston/Minneapolis model of post-industrial renewal to places like New York, Baltimore, and more. However, the term developed over time from a way to brand the city’s existing venues and amenities (in Barcelona’s case, architecture, art, history, and the beach) into a way of producing them via reshaping whatever identity the city already has into a friendlier one for tourists, investors, and expatriates. Another case of urban regeneration through cultural life was Bilbao, the capital of the Basque Country in Spain, which pushed forward with a gigantic museum, the Guggenheim Foundation expansion, by star architect Frank Gehry. Ambitious mayors from all over the world try to become the Bilbao of X, to the point it was even satirized in a Simpsons episode (and not even in the good seasons). Paris, Glasgow, the Ruhr region, Sevilla, Florence, and South America all went in on the idea of renovating the city through investment in high-profile infrastructure and in cultural districts and amenities; in the Ruhr, they also aggressively pushed for education and infrastructure, leading the region successfully out of the decline of the iron and coal economy. Bilbao and Barcelona not only exported their ability to brand themselves, but also the brand of branding yourself. Vancouver, for instance, took advantage of policy differences on climate change with Prime Minister Stephen Harper to advance for itself the brand of the Green City, an eco-friendly kind of extrospective policy boosterism aimed at securing a brand. This has come at a time of growing pressure to present a competitive model for the global economy on a domestic plane: globalization has a narrow group of winners. Thus, the “creative city” model was a no brainer: it simultaneously satisfied internal and international pressures for economic policymakers.

The main problem for the cultural model is that it seems to not work very well. A systematic analysis of “cultural city” initiatives find basically no impact on the creative economy, which is what they want to promote in order to attract white collar workers. Some of this is, of course, selection bias: the cities that need to undertake these programs already don’t have culture sectors. It’s not like Huelva has a vibrant theater scene. A second problem is also fairly straightforward: the design of the policies. The study from Latin America, focusing on Buenos Aires, Quito, Bogota, Lima, and Bahia, divides “cultural city” initiatives into three kinds: “patrimonial revitalization” which is based around building up city cores for tourist appeal, “civic transformation” by building urban culture opportunities for locals, and “creative regeneration” through cultural clusters. The main problem all three have is that they constitute a top down effort to build a local culture, in the case of civic transformation by literally telling people to go out and do cool things, whereas culture, however, is a bottom-up phenomenon. It should not be particularly controversial to think that ordering people to “be creative” does not actually result in creativity, but rather, the appearance of it. This leads to the third problem: self defeat. In The Conquest of Cool, author Thomas Frank points out that the counterculture of the 1960s was basically immediately cannibalized in its entirety by marketing and advertising. Companies noticed the anti-consumer, anti-establishment, peace-and-love hippies, and saw dollar signs. Their bohemian and alternative lifestyles weren’t just compatible with mass consumerism - they were even more compatible than the traditional “solid modernity” of a man, a woman, a dog, and a picket fence, with refrigerators and light bulbs that lasted a hundred years. Advertising campaigns went all in on turning being a hippie and a rebel into a commodity, which ironically enough devalued them entirely; by the 1970s, being a square was the new hip.

The same thing happened to the original cool city, Berlin. The worst book I’ve ever voluntarily read is Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler (the worst book I’ve involuntarily read is Marianela by Benito Pérez Galdós), and it’s largely about a really obnoxious relationships between two milennial new yorkers who live sometime in Berlin. By then, the city is almost entirely drained of the creative reputation it acquired over the previous half a century, and is instead largely populated by bland hipster expats who want to live the Berlin dream. In particular, Berlin developed its identity because of two factors: the first was the longstanding exemption in mandatory military service for its residents, which meant it attracted the kinds of hip, artistic, countercultural types who did not want to serve in the national military, and the second was the large amount of space available for studios and venues, given the low property value of areas bordering the Berlin Wall (as seen in the movie Possession, they weren’t very nice either) and deindustrializing parts of the city. Squatting in vacant buildings became common, especially by explicitly left wing groups and collectives. After reunification, the amount of cheap, empty space increased given the lack of interest in living in the city’s Eastern half. The old modernist monoblocks of Honecker’s Berlin were taken over by young bohemians setting up ateliers, bars, and nightclubs, which gave the city its reputation; the legendary nightclub Berghain is located in an old banana warehouse and formerly an air raid bunker. However, Berlin’s growing international fame and the explicit attempt to attract creative class workers via cultural boosterism, as well as inadequate housing policies, have resulted in widespread unaffordability and gentrification. The people who gave Berlin its “weird” reputation simply can’t afford to live there anymore, and have instead been replaced by the insufferable cast of characters of Fake Accounts. “Superstar” appeal has meant the steady homogeneization of cities across the world to appeal to tourists and very cosmopolitan-minded locals, such that Berlin has increasingly lost its edge in large part because of how unaffordable it had gotten for the same underemployed artist types who gave it its reputation.

And your mother too

So the g-word, huh? Gentrification is a process where poor areas in cities are transformed by wealthier people moving in, which means higher demand for housing and fancier and more expensive business options, resulting in the displacement of current residents. Of course, the fact that the neighborhoods become nicer in the process is a big problem for the quality of discourse. Gentrification is also associated with lower crime rates. Well, what is there to gentrification? The topic is incredibly fraught, in large part due to the cultural signifiers it involves: the people arguing about it are, by and large, gentrifiers themselves, applying a mostly Anglosphere concept to foreign contexts just as often, and are discussing a relatively rare problem: the biggest issue for low-income minority communities is too little investment and too few services and amenities, not too much and too many.

In particular, people are taking gentrification as a cause of housing unaffordability, but it is instead a consequence. If the amount of housing in a city is fixed, a “boom” where creative class professionals move in results in higher housing prices in all areas, not just wealthy ones, because wealthier people can just as easily pay for cheap housing as poorer people. One of the great mysteries of the 2010s is that the relationship between distance to the city center and housing prices went from being negative to being positive; this was a mystery because the city cores tended to have much higher poverty after decades of urban decay and White flight. The question of why old city centers became desirable had four general answers: gentrification, employment concentration, weak supply, and public assets. All four are supply factors that the authors find evidence for, but do not account for the simplest cause: demand. As Florida mentioned, the people moving in wanted to live in more interesting cities, and old downtowns are typically the most interesting parts. In fact, full time skilled workers were more likely than anyone else to move into the city cores of reviving 2010s cities. Gentrification of historically Black neighborhoods, for instance, is almost entirely mediated by location: the patterns of households moving to “suburban” Black neighborhoods did not change over the 2010s. While it is true that the businesses geared at “gentrifiers” are different, and typically predict higher prices, it’s also true that gentrification is associated with a change in the type and number of businesses in an area via destruction of establishments without a clear correlate to price and with much smaller inequalities than overall consumption or income.

The main problem for the topic of gentrification is the “if housing supply is fixed” - well, it should not be. As I think has been extensively shown by the literature on the topic, restrictions on the housing supply cause higher housing prices. Richard Florida admitted a darker side to the rise of the creative class: a lack of pathways for entrance into its rank for the abandoned members of the manual class, fueling inequality, since cities were pricing out the working and “service class” that made them livable. The titular rise of the creative class has had its drawbacks: the appeal of the “top cities” to the creative class, coupled with lack of new construction, resulted in substantially higher housing costs, which resulted in lower socioeconomic mobility due to both a lack of pathways for social “ascent” by the manual class and additionally due to geographic segregation, resulting in higher wealth, consumption, and income inequality, as well as racial segregation. Contrary to common belief, there is little evidence that new housing development causes gentrification: restricting the supply of housing does not stop it.

Gentrification can be best understood via the concept Berman utilized to explain Dostoyevsky: the “modernity of underdevelopment”, where a previously neglected area is brought kicking and screaming to the present via a top-down mandate with large investments. Last year, for that project about informal settlements I wrote about, I went to a lecture by a Buenos Aires city legislator who mentioned how the “cultural city” model of urbanism had had its benefits accrued in areas connected to globally integrated sectors, but not produced promised social benefits like higher employment, and had thus driven displacement of low-income residents in gentrifying areas like Colegiales, Villa Crespo, and Chacarita. Berman/Jacobs Thought, however, doesn’t mean a purely hands off approach to urban policy: the internationalization of urban life requires active participation by local governments and actors to ensure harmonious land use and infrastructure policies.

A big question is what happens to gentrification in the age of “digital nomads”: is letting “expats” (a term mostly meaning an immigrant who is White and wealthy) into our cities driving up prices? Well, the relationship between the creative city model and gentrification itself is already controversial: it should seem that the defining factor is housing cost and availability, not amenities, which typically follow gentrifiers rather than guide them. The global capital of digital nomads is Chiang Mai, Thailand: an enormous number of wealthy first worlders moved there to work remotely from its heavenly beaches following decades of tourists and backpackers talking it up back home. In fact, digital nomadism is simply another form of mass tourism, the kind that Barcelona and other cities have raged against for the last decade. To the locals, the job creation of the tourist economy has so far been more than offset by a higher cost of living, particularly in housing, and saturated public spaces and infrastructure. In particular, a study of digital nomads in Greece finds that the factors that matter the most are healthcare quality and access, public services and infrastructure, geopolitical stability (bye bye Dubai), the lack of physical danger, particularly from animals, and local transportation; for longer term stays, food, culture, and the cost of living take a much higher importance.

The question of whether the “new rich” have turned the epidemic of gentrification into a bonafide pandemic is really important in the discourse of Mexico City (also Mexico DF and CDMX, meaning “Ciudad de México”) - an article in Compact magazine (I’ve read exactly one good article to date on that site) argues about the whole thing from the lens of, who guessed it, liberal hypocrisy. The facts are, broadly, correct: American women, particularly Black women, have moved to Mexico DF to find themselves for cheap; American palates have reshaped the city’s food scene, one of countless issues that the locals take with the presence of the foreigners. Expensive rents, displacement, higher prices for goods and services, and insufficient benefits to locals in terms of wages are most of what the frequent anti-American protests take aim at. But I think there’s something profoundly asinine in looking at an urban issue like this, extracting the urban angle, and examining it through the old and tested Compact formula of, you guessed it, maybe effete wealthy progressives are the real racists whose lifestyle depends on the working and “service class” of racialized individuals. The urban angle is completely missing from the Compact piece: a different piece, by Tamara Velasquez on Medium, corrects the record with the fact that gentrification was already ocurring before bonpensant Americans ever dared venture down the Rio Grande. Housing affordability in CDMX has gotten progressively worse over the last twenty years, at the sam time as gentrification has become a major problem in urban discourse: displacement of low income residents has coincided with a gigantic hoursing shortage. In 2025, the city built just 3% of the annual figure needed to keep up with estimated demand (2,000 units versus 70,000 a year, down from 20,000 in 2018), and even less in the most desirable neighborhoods like Roma (like the movie) and Condesa. In fact, while Airbnb under housing constraints increases housing costs, without those constraints it lowers them by resulting in overproduction and oversupply of rentals. The actual regulatory side is pretty nuances, particularly if understood as part of a broader tourism strategy.

Maybe the Mexico City Dream has its days numbered: the city is becoming hostile and expensive, the “authentic” culture is increasingly no longer there, and the political backlash will quickly become too much to bear. The Mexican government has been steadily reducing funding for maintaining historical and cultural sites, the very things attracting foreigners. The fact is, Mexico City was already gentrified when the Americans arrived; in fact, the city becoming homogeneized to the tastes of the local upper class is probably what drew them in in the first place. Again, the “cultural erasure” people complain about is international cosmopolitan culture replacing their local traditions. Not everyone wants to, let alone can, join the BoBos in their paradise.

What about Buenos Aires?

I recently saw a play called Centroamérica by Mexican and Central American theater collective Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol (“Central America” by Lizards Lying In the Sun), which stars its two writers, Mexican actors Luisa Pardo and Lázaro Rodríguez. Luisa and Lázaro were researching a book on Central America (which I bought, sucker I am for a good story) when they met María, a Nicaraguan exiled for her opposition to Daniel Ortega’s dictatorship. She asks the two of them to do what readers of this blog will recognize as the plot to Antigone, my favorite Greek tragedy: impersonate her to the Nicaraguan authorities and have her brother who died of COVID taken out of a mass grave and buried in the family crypt. Anyways, during a conversation they have in Guatemala, someone at a talk they attend mentions “the Global North”; Lázaro responds, and a Guatemalan lady mentions how, to them, Mexico is the global north. Central Americans need visas to enter Mexico, and they face enormous risks migrating there from criminals and the state alike. They face discrimination and exploitation, and Mexico guards its Southern border zealously. In fact, from what I’ve heard from people close to both governments, the Biden administration didn’t comment much on AMLO and Sheinbaum’s illiberal judicial reform as part of an explicit deal for Mexico to contain the surge in asylum claims at the Southern border.

Mexico, to Pardo and Rodríguez, has an inferiority complex: it sees itself as a poor, downtrodden, exploited country, which in many ways it is, while also treading and exploiting other countries in the same way the United States does to them. It should be fitting that, with the zeitgeist moving from CDMX to Buenos Aires, it will turn to a country that is a mirror of Mexico: Latin America’s biggest case of a superiority complex, a country that sees itself as rich, developed, and European while being poor and prototypically South American. Argentina is now, in fact, less developed than its peer countries in the region. Buenos Aires is, of course, a good city to live in: I like it, for once. Every American who comes here raves about its public transportation, which residents agree is completely falling apart. The city was listed as the second best in the world to live in for “digital nomads” and expatriates not just because of its low USD costs but also its relative security, services, amenities, and infrastructure. Affordability has improved over the last few years (don’t hit me with that stuff about the 70% real rent decrease). And the city is actually still a haven of progressivism, despite the best intentions of the deputy mayor: gay Russian emigrants tend to concentrate in Buenos Aires given the ease of migration and the progressive climate. Russians, in general, have moved to Argentina in large numbers since 2022.

Compared to its peer, whose name literally means “good airs”, Mexico City has legendarily bad air quality; the city is bordered by mountains and is located in a sunken-in swamp, previously the site of the floating city of Tenochtitlan, founded by the Aztecs at the sight of an eagle devouring a serpent. Tenochtitlan was a native city razed to the ground by the Spanish to build the capital of their empire on top of it. Buenos Aires was also built on the ruins of a city, but in this case it was the Spanish city of Buenos Aires; the original village founded by Don Pedro de Mendoza in 1536 was burnt to the ground by the nomadic tribes that inhabited the region, the querandíes, after escalating mistreatment by the colonists. Mendoza, like most Spaniards, came to the Americas seeking fortune; in particular, the Spanish believed in a place called the Land of Jauja, where work was unnecessary and mountains were stuffed with gold and silver; the English and French name for Jauja, Cockaigne, was portrayed by Brueghel the Elder and thus inspired a song by the band Geese. Well, they did find a mountain of silver: the mines of Potosí in “High Peru” (currently Bolivia), which saw millions of natives finding themselves borderline enslaved in a perversion of the Inca institution of mita. The silver of Potosí left the Americas through Peru; however, it needed to be shipped via mules, which were acclimated to the altitudes in Central and Northern Argentina after entering the country through Santa Maria del Buen Ayre, refounded in 1580 by Juan Díaz de Solís. Thus, Buenos Aires was a tiny outpost for smugglers for the next 200 years, until it was made the capital of the brand new Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata in 1776 during the Bourbon reorganization of the Spanish empire, and given its very own Viceroy, Pedro de Cevallos, followed by Juan José de Vértiz - who turned the tiny coastal village into a colonial metropolis worth its salt by building the city’s first public lights.

The city’s colonial heritage was, by and large, demolished at the turn of the 20th century to make way for the beaux-arts, art nouveau, and art deco buildings adored by tilingos, tourists, and digital nomads. The cabildo, the colonial city hall from which the country declared its autonomy from Spain in 1810, was chopped in half during this period to make way for two diagonal avenues (Saènz Peña and May Avenue), as well as having its tower torn down and reworked. At the same time as the dazzling palaces and towers of the old aristocracy were coming up, the city was filling up with overcrowded slums, which were pushed out and South more and more; the early writings of Jorge Luis Borges mentions Palermo, now the delight of foodies and shoppers, as a lawless country of bandits and prostitutes. The colonial mansions of the old city core were largely abandoned and turned for during the multiple yellow fever and cholera outbreaks of the mid 19th century, which also saw most of the city’s remaining Black population perish as part of their servitude to the old landed families; these empty homes were turned into provisional housing for the masses of European immigrants that arrived to the country, almost exclusively through Buenos Aires, between the 1840s and the 1940s. The number of immigrants was so large that in the 2001 census, the largest immigrant nationality was still “Italian”, followed by “Spanish”; Paraguayans, Bolivians, Peruvians, Koreans, and Taiwanese rounded out the list.

One of the people Rodríguez and Pardo spoke to for their project was a Costa Rican who spoke of his country, an environmentalist’s wet(land) dream with no army and where the police protest in the streets at the suggestion they should carry firearms, becoming “Mexicanized” by inequality, migration from Nicaragua, and organized crime. Mexico, at the same time, has become a much less poor country, and CDMX has lost its Man on Fire reputation. Buenos Aires, again, mirrors its forebear: the Magic City is slowly falling apart, with its former mayor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta running for legislative office last year on the unofficial slogan that the city “smells like piss”. Homelessness is higher than ever and public transportation has become so unreliable that getting a bus past 9pm is a hail mary and the subway has a lower frequency than the Kiev metro. The cost of housing is, like in all other global cities, a central concern.

The current city government is headed by Jorge Macri, an exurban “baron” brought over by Larreta to shore up his presidential ambitions; much like his 2023 campaign, Macri proved disastrous, setting aside his predecessor’s policies (including watering down urban code reform to appease a completely powerless bloc of left wing NIMBY voters) in favor of Bukelefication. Macri, however, is completely absent from urban policy discussion, since his public appearences tend to end in haruspically obvious events like being bitten by a wild rat that was immediately torn to shreds by feral dogs, all in front of television cameras. Instead, urban policy discussion has been taken over by Beltrán Briones, a real estate influencer and Scientologist who dispensed with the niceties of Macri’s concern with “giving away free stuff to the poor” to make a clear case: the city’s informal settlements need to be cleared out at an Israeli scale, with Israeli methods if need be, in order to build luxury skyscrapers on the valuable land they sit on. Briones’s case, of course, is illiterate tier. The troika in charge of the city is rounded out by Clara Muzzio, the deputy mayor who spends all day raging on Twitter at the Great Feminization, vasectomies, abortion, transgender minors, and whatever other drivel the American right excretes onto her line of sight.

Conclusion

For Walter Benjamin, historical objects like the Arcades of Paris became legible not at the moment of their production but only looked at retrospectively: history is a series of flashes of recognition when the past rhymes with the present and illuminates both. The Acades were most fully understandable precisely when they were already obsolete, already being superseded by the next form.

In the same way, the CDMXification of Buenos Aires is coming at precisely the time when that model, the creative city for digital nomads, is most clearly unsustainable. Berlin is long past its glory days as a countercultural haven, and Mexico City is clealry on its way there too. The “now of recognizability”, as Benjamin named his concept, for the creative city model is in the now: the costs are fully visible, and the Arcade is already becoming a ruin. If this is the case, Buenos Aires is trying to build a 2010s city in the 2020s, when globalization is a dead symbol and progressive posturing is for gays and Jews. Tourists and vagabonds are symptoms of the xenophobic culture war engulfing the entire planet; only an eminently prepared city can take its place as the new Mecca of Cool.

Is Buenos Aires prepared? No. “Blackri” and his brain trust seem content to relegating the Paris of South America to become not just the occupied West Bank, but Johannesburg: the city’s government seems content to not invest in anything except footage of police brutality. When I visited Lima, the capital of Peru, six or seven years ago (omg), I stayed in Miraflores, a ritzy suburban neighborhood with a nice coastal view, tree-lined promenades, extensive shopping and fanciful dining, and taxi drivers offering drugs and girls to male tourists. The downtown of Lima, meanwhile, was visibly falling apart beyond the three blocks meant for tourists by the Cathedral and the Pizarro House. If Buenos Aires wants the old dreams of Jauja and Cockaigne to still lure anyone here, it cannot let itself become a small country club surrounded by the slums where its service staff lives.

Quién pudiera venir de esta tierra
Y entrar en el cielo y volver a la tierra
Que entre la tierra, la tierra y el cielo
Nunca hubiera suelo

Rosalía “Sexo, Violencia, y Llantas”1

One of the most common pseudoprofound comments you hear currently is that “pro Palestine activism replaced climate activism”. Which, in some way, is true - there’s no Extinction Rebellion stunts anymore. Greta Thunberg quite literally quit climate to headline a flotilla helping send humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. But I think this reflects a shift not from the top, but from the bottom - people just don’t have an interest in the energy transition anymore. Why?

Back in 2019, something you heard a lot is that people would be willing to pay more for energy and fuel if it meant a cleaner world (or for workers to be paid a living wage, or for a million other things, et cetera). Well, since 2022, those things (among others) have gotten more expensive, and it turned into the single most dominant issue in all of global politics, and, it turns out, those people were lying. They want things to be cheaper instead. So, in the end, there was just no interest by anyone in making fossil fuels even more expensive, which trickled back up to organizations and activists to focus on something else. The 2019 climate protestor, who was the Time Person of the Year, was instead since as an out of touch doofus throwing soup cans at paintings for the sake of dumb, elite politics. The whole thing, in my opinion, was a gigantic miscalculation: the rise in fossil fuel costs worldwide should have been a good opportunity to push for more investment in renewable energy. It’s pretty obvious at this point that it just makes every nation on Earth hostage to the geopolitical machinations of Russia and the Middle East.

But I think this opens the door to a much more interesting pair of questions: why did people move on so suddenly as a whole from a topic that was intellectually dominant just five years ago? And what does that mean for actual climate policies?

♫ Quieren quitarme el río, y también la playa ♫

Much like the left in the 2020s, something I thought was going to be about climate change but ended up being about ethnonationalism was Lucrecia Martel’s latest movie, Landmarks. The film is a documentary, and the Spanish title was the source of a lot of confusion: Nuestra Tierra, “our land”. The movie has been in production for something like ten years, and the last time I heard about it it had a different title: Chocobar. The (delicious sounding) title2 was a reference to the central figure of the story it tells, Javier Chocobar, a chief of the (very small) indigenous Chuschagasta community in Northwestern Argentina. In 2009, Chocobar and a small group of people from his village were involved in a confrontation with their landowner, Sergio Amin, and two former police officers he was doing business with, Luis Humberto Gómez and Eduardo Valdivieso. Amin and his friends (who started a company called AMIGO, meaning “friend”) were planning on starting a large scale mining venture that would risk the homes of the Chuschagasta people, resulting in multiple judicial procedures being started by that Chocobar and his group. During an altercation, multiple “Chuscha” people were shot by Amin and his people, including Javier Chocobar, who died as a result from the gunshot wounds. The landowners claimed self defense, and the film starts with their trial, presenting both the accusations against them and the defense.

The narrative of the documentary is, as you might expect, broader than Chocobar himself: the exploration of his life gives way to the history of his family and community, which gives way to the history of the titular land - particularly, the fact that the Chuschagasca were ruled as an extinct tribe in 1807 after none of their members showed up for a Spanish colonial census, which was used as a pretext to sell and divide the land between various landowners through multiple generations. At one point, one of them even tricked the previous boss of the Chuscha tribe, who was illiterate, into signing over their rights. Martel’s movie begins with footage of satellites orbiting the Earth, which then zooms in into the Chuschagasca community over drone footage of a football game. The drones make multiple appearances, particularly during the courtroom segment and specifically when both parties act out their version of the murder. Over the opening footage, Martel plays a Kyrie, a prayer part of Catholic liturgy (meaning “God have mercy on us”); her version is performed in the style of traditional Northern music by Argentine folk legend Mercedes Sosa in Ariel Ramírez’s now-classic Misa Criolla.

In this sense, Martel is putting the line of sight of the drones on the level of the eye of God, and saying that the question is about whether divine justice will apply. While the negative reviews from conservative commentators have focused on Martel’s politics, this type of conflict isn’t really some foreign, far left imposition: the distinction between unjust “secular” laws and divine justice is the central premise of Sophocles’ Antigone, his sequel to Oedipus Rex. Basically, after Oedipus left Thebes, his two twin sons agreed to split the throne one year each, until one of the brothers broke the truce and expelled the other; the brother came back with foreign mercenaries to take back the throne and both died, leaving their uncle in charge of the city. The new king decrees the traitor cannot receive funeral rites, which was a huge violation of Greek religious customs, and which leads the titular rebellious sister Antigone to administer the rites anyways. She gets caught and faces off against the uncle, where they have a debate between whether human or divine justice should prevail. The interesting thing is that, unlike most Greek tragedies, Antigone doesn’t have a singular protagonist (understood as the character that has hybris, commits a grave infraction, and is divinely punished), but two: Antigone and her uncle both overstep and are both punished by the gods, showing that not even the play itself can resolve the question of whether you should obey unjust laws.

The question of unjust laws is the central question of conservative philosopher Leo Strauss’s 1953 book Natural Right and History, which has its central metaphor in its epigraph: two Old Testament verses, one containing a story where a landowner forces a shepherd to hand over his sheep, which he’s cared for its entire life, in exchange for a newborn one, and a story where King Solomon compels a farmer to relocate to a similar plot of land. The moral distinction between the two is best found in Strauss’s final chapter, on Edmund Burke, where he compares Burke to Roman statesman Cicero: Cicero was a conservative because he believed the past contained a political system that reached the highest levels of core virtues (Rome’s mos maiorum), whereas Burke was basically just a guy who believed things ought to be the same as in the time of his pappy and grandpappy. The demand to hand over the sheep is different than the demand to hand over land because the shepherd has raised the sheep like a child, whilst the farmer only objects given his family’s ancestral bonds to the specific plot - that is, the sheep story constitutes a much more serious moral violation than the farm story. Well, it might seem that the Chuschagasca are in the less serious “Burkean” sense of violation, without considering two things: first, that their claim to the land is that they improved it with their hard work, and the second is that the landowners literally pull the cattle stunt on them, forcing them to hand over adult animals in exchange for infant animals.

The paradox over who is the rightful owner of the land, the people who’ve worked it since time immemorial or the people who have a legal claim built on coercion, is central to the problems with the thought of one of Strauss’s targets, John Locke. Locke, like most of his contemporaries, tries to build natural law off the social contract, saying property is an innate right built off the ability to improve it. In particular, to quote Locke, “We see in Commons, which remain so by Compact, that ‘tis the taking any part of what is common, and removing it out of the state Nature leaves it in, which begins the Property; without which the Common is of no use. And the taking of this or that part, does not depend on the express consent of all the Commoners. Thus the Grass my Horse has bit; the Turfs my Servant has cut; and the Ore I have digg’d in any place where I have a right to them in common with others, become my Property, without the assignation or consent of any body. The labour that was mine, removing them out of that common state they were in, hath fixed my Property in them.” The problem with Locke’s theory of property isn’t really an internal contradiction but, as Ellen Meiksins Wood’s The Origins of Capitalism finds, a political economy problem: Locke believes property is fixed through both my labor (“the ore I have digged”), the labor of animals (“the grass my horse has bit”), and the labor of others (“the turfs my servant has cut”), without considering whether the servant cutting the tufts constitutes labor or not. Wood’s criticism of Locke is basically indistinguishable from Strauss’s criticism of Locke: his own theory cannot distinguish between violations of property that infringe secular “civil” law (say, wage theft) and those that infringe divine “natural” property law, that is, the creation of property through labor because they don’t distinguish between the labor of different people. This isn’t really to say that Strauss is some kind of leftist (Meiksins Wood is, after all, a Marxist, if a smart one), but to say that basing your theory of property on the relation between man and nature leaves a lot of very complicated gaps depending on which men and what nature - does Chocobar and his people “cutting turfs” override Amin and his friends “digging ore” which is literally the point of the dispute?

Meiksins Wood’s position on Locke is that, given the political shifts of Glorious Revolution era England, an ideology of “improvement” took hold of the landowning elite, which started justifying its ownership not through divine consent but via their ability to improve productivity. This led to them justifying dispossessing native people (and the Irish) of their land in the Americas, but also to them enclosing the Commons and generating a large class of unpropertied wage laborers who became the basis for English capitalism. It should be noted that Wood’s political explanation is the same as that of institutionalist economists like Douglass North, and her cultural explanation follows the same tracks as 2025 Nobel Laureate Joel Mokyr. In Argentina, the history follows a similar path: land that was publicly owned began being sold to finance the independence wars as well as the War with Brazil, most famously by the 1826 Emphyteusis Law, which leased public land for private use for ten years with fixed rents (which rapidly shrank in real terms given soaring wartime inflation) and an option to buy them after ten years. The enclosure of public land left a large number of cattle rustlers called “gauchos” without means for sustenance, forcing them to secure wage labor via vagrancy laws and creating private markets for land, labor, and capital thusly over the course of the 19th century.

The interesting thing about Martel is that none of this is especially new, but her position is quite distinct. She frames the natives not as some kind of landback revanchist group, but as a community deeply rooted not just in their land but also in the land, that is the country: one of them compares his plight to the story of Ben-Hur, his favorite movie that he saw on cinemas, seeing his people as the Jews of the ancient Bible besieged by Amin’s “Romans”. The Chuschagasca are all Catholic (despite the significant amount of bigotry their church has for them), and they seem deeply republican in the small-R sense: besides the one armed confrontation, which the court found they were not at fault for, their entire interactions with Amin were mediated through the judicial system and formal politics. Chocobar is only refered to as a chieftain or a cacique by outsiders; to the Chuscha, he’s the commune chief, an elected official. This marks a break from an ancient Western tradition: that of the “savage critic”, an outsider to Western civilization that critiques it thoroughly. This idea is extremely influential to anthropologist David Graeber’s 2021 book The Dawn of Everything, which is basically an attempt to retell the history of “The West”; in particular, they take great interest in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Social Inequality, which is framed around conversations between a ficticious indigenous leader based on Wendat leader Kandiaronk and The West. To Graeber and his coauthor David Wengrow, Kandiaronk was the originator of critique of the West, and Rousseau and his coevals were sincerely answering him. Graeber and Wengrow’s book is genuinely impressive, but this claim is simply not true: puppeting a “noble savage” to criticize modernity, particularly inequality, is an extremely old tradition in Western political discourse, going as far back as Roman historian Tacitus. This isn’t really to say that Native American political thinking didn’t have an impact on the Enlightenment - the American Founding Fathers had an interest in the political philosophy of the Iroquois Confederacy, which influenced their framework for the United States to a degree similar to their engagement with Rousseau and the ancient debate on the origins of worldly inequality. Martel, thus, breaks with this time honored tradition by introducing not “noble savages” criticizing capitalism and modernity from the outside (as in Avatar and other cinematic fare), but introducing willing participants of that modernity claiming for their specific share of the rights and privileges that all people in a free society are meant to enjoy.

Uranus and Gaia

Martel’s “Western” narrative for the Chuschagasca contrasts with the one usually taken: ancient indigenous worship of Pachamama, the mother earth. The Chuscha members themselves are ambivalent towards Catholicism because, while it is their religion, it was also forced on their ancestors. They, however, refuse to embrace the religious beliefs of other tribes, which they seem derisive toward. This sort of generic native religion usually is understood to stem from Inca mythology. To the Inca, the world was created by a single creator, Viracocha, and the material world came from the union of two gods: Pachamac, the god of heaven, and Pachamama, the goddess of the Earth. Pachamama is the Earth still, such that all inanimate objects have a divine character and are all as equally important as one another; the community, known as ayllu, is the central moral agent and has a responsibility to balance its own need for existence with the environment’s sacred character (Sumak Kawsay or “buen vivir”, good life, which is treated in discourse, suspiciously enough, to mean Hakuna Matata).

Besides being identical to the Ancient Greek creation myth, the union of Pachamama and Pachamac has an enormous list of philosophical consequences, namely the important of the Earth as not just an object but a moral agent. Author Robert Macfarlane wrote a book (likely thing for him to do) in 2025 titled Is A River Alive on the deep philosophical implications of this question: in particular, he focuses on rivers, and their defilement by human action and destruction. Macfarlane’s book wants to argue for rivers as living beings in order to preserve and protect their place in local ecologies; however, he falls into a classic trap, where traditional European categories have to be applied in order to preserve things. In Carl Schmitt’s Land And Sea, he points out that the term nomos, which he uses to mean the order ruling the world, means both legislation and naming, a similar concept to the one applied by trans thinker Duen Sacchi in his 2024 book Pathogenous Fictions (Ficciones Patógenas), about the application of European concepts to local nature as a means of exercising power. Macfarlane, in particular, saves special praise for the field of environmental law and the Rights of Nature movement: Ecuador, for instance, has recognized Pachamama as a subject of law, which implies an extremely lengthy series of legal obligations and restrictions for human activity that are extraordinarily difficult to adhere to. The Rights of Nature movement basically seeks to establish the Earth as a subject of law, giving it a certain legal footing particularly when it comes to the right to life, the right to “liberty”, and the right to be free from various forms of harm. The legal movement to advance the rights of animals, and the philosophical movement around animal suffering, are part of this broader trend. Marxist Scholar Alyssa Battistoni’s recent book Free Gifts sees nature and the environment not as a blank canvas for the economic and political development of mankind, but as a morally significant factor that Karl Marx did not properly consider when determining the origin of value. In particular, Marx’s theory of value (indistinguishable from Locke’s, but with the political economy figured out) did not place a significant onus on environmental sustainability, which was odd for a lot of reasons; even John Locke included the proviso “For this Labour being the unquestionable Property of the Labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joyned to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.”

Pachamamification is, of course, not a morally neutral understanding of nature: a book that has this approach to the natural world is Roberto Chuit Roganovich’s award-winning novel Si Sintieras Bajo Los Pies Las Estructuras Mayores (“If You Felt Under Your Feet The Greater Structures”), which is about a conscious plant of sorts taking a revenge of sorts against humanity in a variety of times and places. As noted by the podcast Desinteligencia Artificial (in their funniest episode to date), Roganovich’s novel is both basically a higher concept version of Little Shop of Horrors, and, even worse, driven by the Pachamama, seeing the killer plant as some sort of divine punishment against humanity’s transgressions against nature itself. The clearest example of this comes from the movie Bugonia, where, spoiler alert, two nutjobs kidnap a pharmaceutical CEO thinking she’s an alien; the (SPOILER ALERT) ending is that she actually is the alien emperor, and decides to extinguish humanity due to their numerous horrific acts. The perfect way to understand this can be found in Andrea Long Chu’s now legendary takedown of A Little Life author Hanya Yanagihara: “The agents of misery this time have become literally inhuman: cancer, HIV, epilepsy, functional neurologic disorder, a toxic antiviral drug, the unidentified viral hemorrhagic fever that will fuel the next pandemic. A virus makes perfect sense as Yanagihara’s final avatar after three novels. The anguish it visits on humanity — illness, death, social collapse — is just an indifferent side effect of its pointless reproductive cycle. Biologists do not even agree on whether viruses are living organisms. A virus wants nothing, feels nothing, knows nothing; at most, a virus is a little life. This is ideal for Yanagihara: pure suffering, undiluted by politics or psychology, by history or language or even sex.”. For the Pachamama conception of the world, humanity is a virus, one that can either get with the program or get wiped out by Gaia’s immune system.

Going back to Macfarlane, he’s previously written books about mountains and about the Anthropocene, that concept where humanity’s effect on the world is now on the same scale as the previous causes of mass extinctions - Rudyard Kipling wrote about God, in 1897 “Beneath whose awful Hand we hold / Dominion over palm and pine”; according to the concept of the Anthropocene, that hand has been, for eighty years now, our own. The idea that humanity could end itself is both remarkably new and remarkably old, as told in philosophy professor Thomas Moynihan’s recent book X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction. According to Moynihan, human understanding of extinction went through three phases: the first, titled the “principle of abundance”, stated that extinction was impossible and that any species that disappeared was not extinguished but merely extirpated, that is, was still extant but not observably. One version of the principle of abundance was also occasionally described as the Planet of the Apes principle, where species might disappear but, in an endless cycle of cosmic destruction and resurrection, would simply evolve again exactly the same after a long enough time - thus, even if humanity were to vanish from the world, it would reemerge eventually anyways. The second phase, which came after the discovery of a discontinuous geological history by Georges Cuvier, marked by gigantic cataclysms, and its application to biology by Georges Buffon, was termed the “Principle of Progress”, whereby species were replaced, yes, but by others strictly superior to them; humans would only be displaced by a better, more able successor. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley was an example of this logic, where Victor Frankenstein refuses to create his monster a bride lest a “race of demons” be born that wipes its creators off the face of the Earth.

When the third phase started is a bit hard to discern, but the idea that humanity could destroy itself somewhat inadvertantly was present in thought at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, featuring strongly in science fiction literature (including alien invasion literature, like H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds). It had become undeniable it started in 1945, at the start of the so called Anthropocene: the Trinity Test and the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed a capacity for destruction that humanity had not had up to that point. However, this shows the weakest aspect of Moynihan’s book: the lack of politics. His narrative concerns the human relation to our own death, but it does not feature the two biggest death mongers of the 20th century: communism and fascism.

The relationship between exctinction and communism is surprising, from Trofim Lysenko’s quackish theory of evolution to the fact that the contemporary concept of a Great Filter (basically, a stage in the development of intelligent life that presented a divergnence between evolution and extinction) came from Soviet cosmist Nikolai Fyodorov, who based it on the Marxist concept of an internal contradiction between a system of production and the social forces it generated. A recent article by Sheila Fitzpatrick in the London Review of Books, which I read by complete accident, goes further: the USSR was obsessed with astrology, the beyond, the future, and death, with a fad of dukhovnost (spirituality) “that could mean either a faith in communism or, more broadly, a responsiveness to the non-material”, such that Gorbachev occasionally would call for a perestroika dukhovnaya in his speeches. The Hare Krishna, ESP (“ekstrasens”), parapsychology, yoga, and the syncretic apocalyptic guru Vissarion were all huge in Russia in this period. Vissarion taught that “Mother Earth would soon react against cities like these, whose impositions were driving her to the brink”, and urged his followers to seek refuge in the countryside and devote themselves to hard labor; the biggest conflict with the state was, in fact, due to their opposition to war, retribution, and cruelty broadly. New Chronology, the belief that the official numbering of years is incorrect, is also a feature of this “new thinking” that Moynihan would also have a field day over.

The role of fascism in discussions of human extinction are a lot more obvious. The Fourteen Words, the slogan of contemporary neo-nazism, read either “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” or “because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the earth”, both references to the extinction of the White race. To the facist, the Earth has a natural hierarchy between the races; to mix them is to extinguish them, and the subjugation of the lessers has to be upheld with violence. According to Umberto Eco, fascism is focused on war, violence, decisive action, and recklessness; Simone Weil described fascism through the “adoration of force”, and Walter Benjamin diagnosed it as as a consequence of a culture where politics is entertainment and violence is politics; thus, it is obvious, the fascist is not particularly concerned with the destruction of humanity as far as it is spectacular. Fascism is the religion of death and, to the fascist, “the end of life is death” is true in both senses of the word “end”, instead of just the one.

The lack of politics in Moynihan’s book weakens it significantly, not just because of the significant overlap between the biological ideas of the Enlightenment and the establishment of violent racial hierarchies, but because of their lack of fitness for addressing the challenges of the present day - he simply does not have any tools to note the similarities between Peter Thiel and Carl Schmitt, or between Elon Musk and Henry Ford, or linking “longtermist” philosopher Nick Bostrom’s ideas about the future with the accusations of racism and eugenicism lobbied against him. Moynihan’s mention of climate change is pretty oblique, as part of a broader concern with the self-destructiveness of mankind starting in the 1970s, as a species overly focused on consumerism and short-term gratification that could destroy not just itself but the whole planet during its search for short-term thrills.

The Population Truth Nuke

The idea that humanity is some sort of virus on Mother Nature, destroying its host and itself in an orgy of blind consumerism, has been central to the understanding of environmental issues by (some parts of) the left. Last week, entomologist Paul Ehrlich died. Ehrlich was most famous for his 1968 book The Population Bomb, where he argued that human populations would keep growing exponentially forever and thus would destroy the environment. It’s obvious now that the book is laughably false; it’s also true that it was, perhaps, one of the most evil volumes written since Mein Kampf, leading to countless atrocities in the Third World such as the mass forced sterilization of women. Ehrlich’s view was that “humans are pollution”; that view, besides its misanthropy, is also wrong. Very famously, Ehrlich’s theory predicted that growing human population would result in greater demand of (limited) raw materials, pushing up their price; economist Julian Simon bet against him, trusting that growing productivity would reduce the intensity of use of these materials, and won the bet. The free market, it seems, derailed the apocalypse.

The contemporary free-market wing believes, as Javier Milei recently noted, that nature is stricly beneath Man, and that thus it is not a subject of law (he is also a climate change denier and his investment incentives almost certainly violate constitutional-level provisions on federalism and environmental law); that is, that nature is a parasite on humanity. Murray Rothbard, a natural law theorist himself, posits in an essay titled “Conservation in the Free Market” in his book Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, Rothbard points out the following: the only thing keeping pollution and scarcity as unsolved problems is the insufficient allocation of property rights, seeing the environmental question as completely indistinct from other allocations of scare resources. Rothbard’s frequent collaborator Llewellyn Rockwell went a step even further, saying that environmentalists actually put the rights of trees and whales above the rights of people, since they are things and things are property; thus, limiting property for its own sake constitutes an intolerable violation of individual liberty.

Rothbard’s case is, roughly, in line with the work of Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase. According to Coase, all transactions could be handled privately via the market as long as the property rights were well established and the costs of transaction were reasonably small. When it came to public goods like roads, national security, and clean air, assuming the cost of transaction was small, then granting one party the power over property would generate a socially optimal outlook through regular market processes. People would either pay for clean air, or sell the right to pollute, and would end up with the same amount of pollution no matter who owned “the air”. Of course, the issue here is the transaction costs and the design of the market, as well as the distribution concerns - it would strike everyone as more unfair that people have to pay to breath clean air than they being able to receive a check to breath less clean air, despite the fact that the outcome (netting out income flows) is identical (the idea that this sort of innate sense of unfairness matters is central to Leo Strauss’s work).

The standard understanding that economists have of climate change is, in this sense, fairly straightforward: it’s an externality, an external cost that certain production and consumption decisions impose on other people. For example, if a factory pollutes a river, then the cost of pollution isn’t paid by the factory or by the people who buy from it, but by people who use the river. To understand how this externality works, we need to understand the basics of climate change: it is a phenomenon by which the planet has been getting hotter (or colder, in some areas) due to human activity. This phenomenon is caused by human action, since a variety of activities produce what are known as greenhouse gases, which make the atmosphere “thicker” and thus trap in heat in some parts of the planet. Since the 1850s, global average temperatures have risen by 1.1°C (a lot of these figures are very strongly debated for a number of reasons), with nearly two-thirds of that warming occurring since the 1960s. The "tolerable" ceiling for global warming this century is 2°C; the optimal target is 1.5°C. Exceeding 2°C risks extremely bad outcomes, such as massive heatwaves, droughts, flooding, wildfires, extreme sea level rise, the spread of diseases like malaria and dengue, and the possible release of ancient viruses from melting ice caps, which would all hit the poorest countries and people the hardest. It would also be extremely politically destabilizing and cause gigantic global migration flows.

Generally speaking, greenhouse gas emissions can be broken down as follows: a country’s total emissions equal its population times its emissions per capita. For example, China has a lot of population, but the US has very high per capita emissions, so they’re roughly as big as each other. Per capita emissions are dictated by per capita consumption (represented by GDP per capita), and technology, so that each dollar spent has a certain amount of carbon attached. The technology is defined by two factors: energy intensity, i.e. how much energy each dollar of GDP needs, and carbon intensity, how much CO2 there is in each unit of energy. The increase in global carbon emissions has mostly been caused by the increases in GDP per capita offsetting the reductions in carbon and energy intensity. So, issue solved, right? The free market should take care of greenhouse gas emissions.

Not so fast. The obvious issue is that Coase assumed low transaction costs; instead, an issue that affects the entire planet’s economy would have very high ones, given the need to achieve a certain level of consensus among the global population. The second issue comes from incentives: because the global climate is a public good, then nobody can be excluded from the consequences, and no one’s suffering “uses up” the harm. This creates a classic free-rider problem: each country has an incentive to let others bear the cost of action.

There are, roughly speaking, three kinds of climate risks: the first are physical risks, i.e. wildfires, flooding, storms, etc. These already make coordination very difficult: while climate change has very high macroeconomic costs, these are not evenly distributed among countries, given the impact of changes in global temperatures on living conditions and economies. For instance, in some bad scenarios temperatures would rise to basically intolerable levels in the Equator but only moderately in Europe, which means Europe does not have any particularly strong incentives to act on harms affecting Ecuador and Nigeria. The second kind of risks are transition risks, which are even harder to solve: preventing climate change also has unequal costs on various groups of people, such that these distributional considerations affect the political calculus and thus the timeline for changing the carbon intensity of the economy. In the same way, climate policy can have broader macroeconomic effects that impact countries disparately: for instance, an emissions-related “green tariff” might actually punish the recipients of climate harms, and thus slow investment into renewables or preventative measures against climate disasters. The third risk are liquidity risks, basically, financial events relating to climate change, such as currency crises stemming from droughts and shortages of hard currency.

This is particularly important considering we don’t actually know the actual costs of climate change: the definition of key variables in models has been fairly contested for a pretty long time. The canonical model, DICE, created by Nobel Laureate William Nordhaus, tends to imply fairly modest economic losses from climate change at a global scale. To quantify costs, Nordhaus tended to focus on “bottom up” assesments of the cost from climate events on, say, disease or wildfire, but which (by his own admission) underpriced the risk of low probability but very high cost events. The problem for this is twofold: first, it’s not entirely clear whether assuming the economic impact of regular wildfires can be extrapolated to climate-related wildfires; in this sense, a recent paper finds much bigger impacts than previously estimated given the macroeconomic impact of climate related extreme weather events. The second problem is fairly well known: models use what’s called a discount rate to look at how people think about the future, such that a discount rate of 1 means the future is just as important as the present, and a discount rate of 0 means that the future doesn’t matter at all. Nordhaus used discount rates from capital markets, which is standard practice, but is widely considered to be ethically questionable even within the profession and, a much more obvious issue, is a consequence and not a cause of other government policies - the credibility of EU regulations, for instance, changed the farsightedness of actors in their carbon credit sceheme. The third issue is the most important one, to the point that it’s widely understood its main proponent, Marty Weitzmann, should have been awarded the Nobel alongside Nordhaus: that climate risks aren’t independent variables, but are instead proportional to global temperature. The worst case scenario, absolutely, is one where the global climate gets so out of control that the Earth loses its ability to sustain life altogether and becomes a dead, hot, hostile planet like Venus. This is a vanishingly unlikely outcome, let’s say 1% of 1%, but would reduce global GDP by 100%. But the probability of a catastrophic outcome like this doesn’t increase proportionately to global temperature, because there are certain points after which climate change is supposed to accelerate: for instance, if temperatures mess up rains in the Amazon too much, it would become impossible to keep absorbing carbon at current rates, so global warming would speed up. This means that at warming of 4°, the chance of a catastrophic outcome might not be double the chance at 2°, but would instead be orders of magnitude bigger, which the DICE model is very poorly suited to address.

D’oh-not economics

The main policy question around climate change is between mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation is about making climate change less severe, that is, reducing global temperatures and adopting renewable energy sources. Traditionally, the discourse on mitigation has focused on utilizing less energy through externality pricing (that is, a tax on the amount of greenhouse gas emitted), because until really recently, alternative fuel sources were either constrained by nature (geothermal, hydroelectric), had extremely high fixed costs (nuclear), or just did not operate at the correct scale (solar, wind). But you can find a counterexample in Spain: the country has been hit less hard by the recent spike in oil prices given the US and Israel’s attacks against Iran precisely because it invested so heavily in renewable energy (up to 60% of power in the country) over the last few years, similarly to nuclear-heavy France. When it comes to mitigation, beyond the carbon tax, there’s two general ideas: subsidize new technologies, and finance their deployment. Within them, research finds that subsidizing the production of clean energy mitigates climate change a lot more than all other policies, including electric vehicle subsidies - with important notes to make about the pipeline from development to production to deployment of these technologies. On the other hand, adaptation typically focuses on the construction of infrastructure that can prevent the damages from climate change, such as seawalls in flood-prone areas, as well as to minimize harms when these disasters occur. Adaptation is a lot less studied, firstly because it’s a lot less flashy, and secondly and most importantly because it relies very heavily on making big investments to prevent events with hazy levels of risk, which economists typically don’t like dealing with given the high sensitivity of these models to assumptions and initial conditions. In particular, studying adaptation relies very very heavily on having concrete estimates of costs and concrete causal links between short term weather patterns and long term climate developments, which is the entire problem you’re trying to solve. However, based on the general facts we do have, we can surmise that adaptation is really important (particularly in agriculture), that it’s fairly low but depending on country and sector because the upfront costs are really high and that the benefits are also variable not just between times but between places. At an urban level, adaptation is really uneven and depends very strongly on the economic conditions of cities, but even between equally exposed cities the level of adaptation taking place has been uneven.

However, the idea that reducing exposure to climate change is about reducing consumption and not about making big investments in capital assets has been hard to shake, least of all among economists who are still insisting on a politically impracticable carbon tax. In this sense, climate change denial and obfuscation have shifted from being about the state of “the science” to being about these costs, which are stated to be impracticably high or simply politically unfeasible compared to other more worthwhile uses of taxpayer money like bombing children in the Middle East. There’s two things worth noting here: the first is that the majority of people seem reasonably concerned with climate change as an issue, even after multiple years of “greenlash” given the 2022 global energy shock, and seem reasonably eager to work on solving it at modest financial cost. The second is that people do let climate news affect their attitudes: people who suffer the effects of climate- related events start supporting adaptation and mitigation spending more strongly, which raises vote shares for politicians seen to be more supportive of these efforts in climate-affected areas. Support for policies, thus, responds to three factors: perceived efficacy of climate policies, perceived impact on other households, and impact on “me”.

So it is, broadly, possible to focus narrowly on an agenda of green public investment that is politically appealing by being well designed and well targeted. The main challenge to implementing it is the lack of buy-in among key environmental stakeholder. To quote a 2019 op-ed by David Graeber, “The activists who assembled and debated in London recognized that the goal of zero emissions in six years would require huge social and economic dislocation. But the very daunting nature of the task seemed to call out creative solutions. These took many forms, from new mass transport systems to four- or even three-day work weeks, green industrial revolutions, spiritual awakenings and the replacement of the discipline of economics and its exhortations toward endless growth with a new science based on principles that rise to the challenges of a changing climate.“ Graeber’s idea that more is not necessarily more goes as far back as his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs, which was predicated on the fact that a large number of people employed should simply work in something else and society as a whole could just have fewer total work hours spread more evenly with a lower number of positions. The idea that the set level of production can be distributed more equally without a loss of living standards is central to Graeber’s final book (Dawn of Everything) before his untimely death, as well.

This general idea is what’s known as degrowth. The idea can be pretty succintly summed up by the slogan “the ideology of infinite growth is the ideology of cancer”. The concept of degrowth has a fairly long as prestigious trajectory: originating in the 1971 The Limits to Growth report (published in the same general sense as Ehrlich’s book), the idea that economic growth needs an extensive increase in the amount of resources used has been around since the environmental movement of the 1970s, and the term was coined by French intellectual Andre Gorz in 1972 during a panel that included, among others, legendary Frankfurt School thinker Herbert Marcuse. Gorz’s ideas spread throughout France, making the cause of reducing the physical impact of humanity on the environment more and more popular and prestigious. The concept took a back seat to “sustainable development” in the more market-oriented 1980s and 90s given the UN’s less growth-agnostic Brundtlandt Report, until the anti-multilateral-organization backlash of the early 2000s made the idea unpopular and brought back its edgy cousin degrowth. Besides the misanthropic Paul Ehrlich notes, contemporary degrowthers such as Tim Jackson and Jason Hickel seem to have mostly noble intentions: “Wealthy economies should abandon growth of gross domestic product (GDP) as a goal, scale down destructive and unnecessary forms of production to reduce energy and material use, and focus economic activity around securing human needs and well-being.” They cite the disproportionate impact on women, the poor, and other vulnerable groups of the climate crisis. Their idea is to shut down economically negative sectors such as fossil fuels or fast fashion, scale down others, improve public services, work fewer hours, and introduce a “green jobs guarantee” to manage the transition.

A common misconception is that degrowth is anticapitalism. It is, sure, but not quite - it’s post-capitalist or non-capitalist, because it simply does not countenance an economy led by markets and private property. But here is where cracks start forming: the degrowth economy requires both an enormous amount of economic planning and an enormous amount of economic descentralization, with a proliferation of small-scale organizations and communities that serve for mutual aid. The degrowther vision, besides being internally incoherent, is also clearly unworkable: raising the GDP per capita of all countries to a level above a relatively generous global poverty line would require multiplying global output. There’s also another list of problems: the degrowth models are simply not at all rigorous. The central question is about the possibility of decoupling, that is, for emissions to fall faster than GDP grows (or, put another way, for energy intensity and carbon intensity to move in opposite directions); the degrowth models are very pessimistic about this, but their models rely on very flawed assumptions about the development and deployment of technologies - assumptions that are simply proven to be false by certain European countries, for instance, managing to decouple at high rates. Similarly, there’s another set of objections, not to the assumptions of the degrowth models, but to the concrete predictions of the models themselves: overall they lack rigor, sure, but they also basically never provide convincing evidence in support of their claims, and in many cases invert the available evidence to show that degrowth causes lower emissions when in fact the “degrowth” is caused by, say, natural disasters or unrelated public policies. And the seemingly rigorous degrowth models are also very formally weak and generally don’t prove their conclusions very well, with a particularly notable lack of focus on concrete policies. Another, central problem with degrowth is that it is premised on a relationship between capitalism specifically and ecological breakdown, but this relationship just does not hold in the slightest if one tries to find a correlation between any quantitative measure of “capitalism” or “neoliberalism” and ecological or climate outcomes. The “doughnut model”, where the economic imbalances of market production translate into ecological imbalances, just does not hold. About as much of the donut is left as after a visit from Homer Simpson. Lastly, degrowth policies seem to be abhorrently unpopular and completely politically unfeasible no matter the political economy at play. For the degrowther models to come true, global GDP would have to shrink between 70% and 90%. While the relationship between GDP growth and happiness is relatively complicated and weak, it is extremely unlikely that a global reduction in almost all economic output can produce an increase in wellbeing, or that this reduction can be sustained politically. In particular, a lot of voluntarism comes into play: the authors typically also exort their readers to raise awareness and try to change their habits without considering that invididual level behavioral change is usually vanishingly rare and is also grotesquely ineffective.

In his 2024 book ¿Por Qué El Capitalismo Puede Soñar Y Nosotros No? (“Why Can Capitalism Dream And We Can’t”), author Alejandro Galliano points out something interesting: the history of degrowth in Latin America. In particular, degrowth started being seen in the 1970s not as a path forward for empowering the region, but as yet another example of developed countries “kicking down the ladder”, in this case almost entirely literally: nobody else was allowed to develop, lest the planet get it. Even ardent environmentalists like sociologist Maristella Svampa simply do not think degrowth can address the social and environmental needs of the continent. But one final criticism of degrowth Galliano poses, this time questioning it as as a left-wing current, is that it undermines its own terms philosophically. It’s reasonably common to hear that agriculture was a mistake for humanity, and that returning to a more natural state would be better for human health; Yuval Noah Harari’s best-selling book Sapiens makes this claim, relying on flimsy and outdated anthropology (in fact, Graeber wrote his Dawn of Everything book targeting not just Francis Fukuyama, but also Harari). This “primitivist” conception of wellbeing is endemic to numerous degrowth thinkers: most notably Harari, but also others such as Theodore Kaczynski (the Unabomber), anarchist philosopher John Zerzan, and, most importantly, Ivan Illich, an Austrian-American anarchist who considered that industrial society simply did not give people enough autonomy to exist as individuals and communities. Illich was extremely influential on various Latin American thinkers, namely Wolfgang Sachs and Arturo Escobar, who created their own version of degrowth predicated on the idea that economic growth was another Western imperialist construct forced on Latin America by the Europeans, and that instead the region should embrace concepts like Sumak Kawsay and actively reduce living standards in the region. But it should be obvious that the idea of RETVRNING to nature is, in fact, profoundly reactionary; the notion that there is a fixed human nature and that humanity suffers by deviating from it is the essence of conservative thinking. Leo Strauss’s whole deal is that modernity has led people to deviate from their natural virtues and towards endless libertinism and infinite meaningless choices about how to live their lives.

Conclusion

The main problem for the economics and politics of climate action is that most people, especially those most intellectually invested in them, tend to consider it about reducing individual consumption (which is widely understood to be politically unfeasible) and not about financing new technologies and the widespread, coordinated deployment of large-scale capital assets, which is extremely expensive and requires extensive government action and coordination.

The interesting question is why. The first thing to note, pointed out by Galliano, is the intellectual genealogy of a lot of left-wing ideas: a profound skepticism of technology was central to the Frankfurt School and other countercultural groups. The Frankfurt School understood technology in a manner basically identical to Martin Heidegger’s: technology referred not to concrete technical achievements (called techne) but to a system of social organization where mass, centralized, technified production stripped individuals of their interiority. In particular, Galliano notes, Heidegger was deeply skeptical of the Promethean thinking where technology and science could be used to rationally manage society; in his mind (as well as the mind of Leo Strauss), this would only result in mass extermination. The Frankfurt School has frequently been satirized by saying that their idea is that, from the moment Ulyesses set sail from Ithaca, Auschwitz was predetermined; what Heidegger, and Illich, and Wolfgang Sachs are presupposing is maybe it did. Heidegger, of course, was a member of the Nazi Party before his turn against “instrumental reason” and technology in the 1940s. In his final interview, conducted in 1966 but published in 1976 after his death, Heidegger left one of his most famous (and only famous) quotes: “Only a God can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a God, or for the absence of a God in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline”, where technology had shrank the void into which God lived to such a degree that humanity could only rely on science. This, in his view, produced a deep existential fear in humans.

One of the best works of art applying this general logic to the question of climate change is Paul Schrader’s 2017 movie First Reformed. The film follows Reverend Ernest Tholler, the head of a small church in New England, as he confronts the impact of climate change on his city (Albany) and his congregation, namely two radical environmentalists grappling with whether they should have children. The most famous shot from the movie, which I frequently use as a meme, reads Will God Forgive Us. Tholler finally attempts to blow himself up at the church’s 250th anniversary (a gif I also frequently use as a gift). The movie’s themes are, as you might tell, mostly religious; but the interesting thing is not the plot, which is short and simple, but the style, which is silent, contemplative, and reflective - that is, the transcendental style, a way of making films that Schrader literally wrote the book about. The transcendental style seeks to make movies a religious experience; in a 1964 essay on filmmaker Robert Bresson, Susan Sontag writes about his film Diary of a Country Priest “Bresson is interested in the forms of spiritual action—in the physics, as it were, rather than in the psychology of souls. Why persons behave as they do is, ultimately, not to be understood. (Psychology, precisely, does claim to understand.) Above all, persuasion is inexplicable, unpredictable. (…) Such a physics of the soul was the subject of Simone Weil’s most remarkable book, Gravity and Grace. (…) The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass. supply the three basic theorems of Bresson’s “anthropology.” Some souls are heavy, others light; some are liberated or capable of being liberated, others not. All one can do is be patient, and as empty as possible. In such a regimen there is no place for the imagination, much less for ideas and opinions.”

Quoting Simone Weil is, I think, crucial for understanding the appeal of anti-growth politics despite them being profound politically unfeasible and intellectually bankrupt. The lines Sontag quotes include ”Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void”. Weil was, of course, a fantastic thinker and someone I am very influenced by; Gravity and Grace, despite its relatively esoteric Christican contents and hard to parse messages, is a brilliant and beautiful book. Pop singer Rosalia dedicated her latest album, Lux, to Weil’s thinking. But Weil has a second group of even less likely fans: anorexics. Weil had, extremely famously, a very difficult relationship with food; she died at 34 because she refused to eat while suffering from severe tuberculosis. Weil was a perpetual faster and a picky eater, someone who chose to “stand outside desire altogether” by denying herself physically, including of food. Quotes from Weil’s book, especially one lamenting the distinction between eating and seeing, and the ones celebrating suffering as a way to become spiritually elevated, made the rounds on eating disorder related forums as a way to encourage each other. A 2024 article on The Point by Rachel Fraser points out that anorexia has a long history in Christianity: very famously, Saint Catherine of Siena fasted fanatically and died from her refusal to eat properly, but less famously, she described it as infermita, a sickness. Fraser sees anorexia, and other signs of disordered eating, as a way of staking ownership and self control: almost all the case studies and example she cites feature a desperate push for autonomy in an otherwise alienating or oppressive context.

The person Weil reminds me the most of is the titular character of The Testament of Ann Lee, who headed a religious owner known as the Shakers for most of her life. Ann Lee was born in a poor family, and had seven children who all died; she dedicated herself to Shaker activities (which featured intense sessions of song and dance) to cope, which led to her arrest and imprisonment. In jail, Ann Lee refused to eat for days, resulting in her body being covered in soft, thick hair, which later fell off; she saw visions of herself as the Second Coming of Jesus, in accordance to the gender egalitarian lessons of the Shakers. The body hair aspect is obviously diet related; it corresponds very well with lanugo, one of the highly documented signs of anorexia. The Shakers were a community built on self denial: Ann Lee demanded her flock follow a very simple life, full of hard labor, plain, simple meals, simple clothing, and religious observance. Most importantly, sexual activity was entirely banned, even within married couples, in order to deprive the flesh of all earthly pleasures.

The important thing about the Shakers aren’t their beliefs, but their numbers: currently, they have three members, one more than when Mona Fastvold wrote and shot the movie about them. At the time Ann Lee died, in 1784, there were a few hundred Shakers; their peak came in the 1840s and 1850s, where they numbered around 5,000. But why did a weird niche religion focus on a personality cult around a lady with an eating disorder peak nearly a century after she died? Well, the historical context: the 1840s and 1850s were an extremely politically tumultuous time in the United States, characterized by deep social divisions around the topic of slavery and rising tensions that gave way to the Civil War in 1860. In this sense, the growing popularity of a religion centered on extreme self denial mirrors the pschyological phenomenon where a person’s physical surroundings reflect their mental state: overly fastidiously tidy rooms reflect a very troubled person, while messy and chaotic living areas can be a sign of easygoing and carefree attitudes.

The idea that a person’s ethos can reflect their anxiety about the political context of the world ins’t new to this blog; it’s the entire analysis behind the scammish masculinity industry, which has now entered its body dysmorphia phase with the rise of looksmaxxing. Both Weil and Moynihan’s book focus on vocation as a solution for existential dread: Weil proposes hard work and a society that merges science, social consciousness, and spirituality to built a new patriotism built around compassion instead of nationalism. Moynihan, instead, looks to the notoriously hard to understand thinker Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose work emphasized both individual self-perfection, particularly moral development, and the search for social progress. The development of a society that can coexist more sustainably with its environment, in this way, will be both a perpetual and progressive task without easy shortcuts or simple tricks - especially the trick of proclaiming, against all evidence, that it does not matter and that nobody cares. God can’t help us. Only we can help ourselves.

Something I’ve noticed is that the movies nominated for Best Picture, except for the Formula One movie (which I’m not writing about, come the fuck on) have exactly two themes: absent fathers, and democratic backsliding. So instead of just citing the same three papers over and over again, I thought: why not do the annual Oscars roundup as two different blog posts around the two themes?

Last week’s (technically this same week but I was supposed to finish it over the weekend) post was about the second theme, democratic backsliding, and featured Best Picture nominees Bugonia, One Battle After Another, The Secret Agent, and Sinners, as well as Best International Film nominee It Was Just An Accident.

This week’s post is about the first theme: absent fathers. It will feature Best Picture nominees Frankenstein, Hamnet, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, Sentimental Value, Sinners, The Secret Agent, and Train Dreams.

The biggest internet story of the last few weeks was Punch, a Japanese monkey (if you want to comment that actually he’s an ape or whatever, I don’t care) who has been getting bullied and shunned by the other monkeys in his enclosure and has taken to carrying around a plush orangutan for comfort. Punch’s saga is a perfect metaphor for the ancient religion known as Gnosticism: a spinoff of Christianity of sorts mostly concerned with the Problem of Evil - that is, why bad things happen to good people, basically. To answer the oldest of religious problems, the gnostic gospels take an interesting path: they fact check the story of Genesis as partially true: there is an allmighty creator of the world responsible for humanity. It’s just that it isn’t God, but rather some knockoff called the Demiurge, and he’s evil. Or rather, God is only capable of perfect creations because the divine is perfect, but the Demiurge is only partially divine, so his creations are imperfect. However, God took pity on the creatures created by the Demiurge and gave them a spark of divinity by giving them transcendent souls, and God and the other angels all basically sit around rooting for humanity. The idea that the world is a flawed copy of a more transcendental reality but that nevertheless one must persist in seeking meaning and connection, a pursuit that has the stamp of approval of all powerful celestial beings, is tailor-made for that adorable monkey.

I think that the relationship between Punch the monkey and Gnosticism is also the relationship movies have with the real world: they’re a random thing that’s useful to explain a more complicated phenomenon. Culture and cultural products are downstream of other, broader societal forces. So, when a series of pieces of media (or art, though I think not all movies or music albums or whatever are art) tends to show some common trait, you should look upstream at what’s causing it. So, why is everyone so interested in bad fathers all of a sudden?

Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh

What do the listed Oscar nominees have in common? They’re all, in some shape or form, about the subject of fatherhood, specifically about bad or absent fathers. One is the most famous bad dad story that’s not in the Old Testament: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Two of the movies, Hamnet and Marty Supreme are about the relationship between being a parent and making something of your life, be it at the meaningless task of ping-pong or at beign the most important writer in human history. Two focus on what it means to have children in a world that gets worse by the second - the crossover with last week, The Secret Agent, and One Battle After Another, as well as the (less fascistic and more economic) transformations of Train Dreams. Both Sentimental Value and Sirat is about finding children who are lost, either metaphorically or literally (respectively).

Let’s do a brief summary of each, lighting round style (and big spoilers, especially for The Secret Agent which is told iceberg theory style):

• Frankenstein: come on.

• Hamnet: William Shakespeare meets his wife, who’s a witch, they have two daughters and a son, the son dies, and Shakespeare writes Hamlet while his wife resents him off camera for leaving the family behind.

• Marty Supreme: a ping pong player gets his married childhood best friend pregnant. He also bails on his mom and has an affair, all to pursue the ultimate goal: making enough money to buy a ticket to Japan so he can win a ping pong game that’s a publicity stunt for a fountain pen company.

• One Battle After Another (I did a full post about it): two left wing guerrillas have a daughter and then the mom gets caught by the head of ICE, who also coerced her into having an affair. Sixteen years later, the father and daughter are found out and chased by fascist paramilitary police and secret societies.

• Sentimental Value: a film director returns to Oslo when his ex wife dies to make a movie about his mother committing suicide starring his depressed daughter, who hates him, and his grandson from his other daughter, who also hates him.

• Sinners: a Black man and his twin open a music venue in the post-Reconstruction American South and try to protect his son from vampires, who want to convert him to join their eternal music group.

• The Secret Agent: a scientist falsely accused of corruption by a corrupt businessman trying to kill his research for money goes back to his hometown to pick up his son and take him abroad while being chased by two government militia members hired by the businessman.

• Train Dreams: a former railroad worker becomes unemployed after World War One, moves to a cabin in the woods to be a lumberjack, and then his wife dies or goes missing or just leaves him and the whole thing gets really surreal and weird.

This doesn’t even scratch the surface: Best Foreign Picture nominee Sirat is about a man and his son looking for his missing daughter in Morocco alongside his son; Best Foreign Picture nominee It Was Just An Accident features an extended plot point about the relationship between political prisoners and their torturer’s daughter and pregnant wife; Best Foreign Picture nominee The Voice of Hind Rajab is about a 5 year old Palestinian girl who gets shot and killed by the Israeli military while waiting for an ambulance; before her, her parents died (there’s pending legislation in the US Congress about this story); Best Actress nominee If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is about a woman whose daughter has a difficult medical condition receiving zero support from her frequently absent husband; Best Animated Picture nominee Elio is about a little boy who loses his parents and goes off to live with his aunt - or with aliens; Best Animated Picture nominee Little Amélie or the Character of Rain is about a little girl in a vegetative state and her relationship with her parents, especially her father, and a Belgian nanny who takes care of her.

Saying these movies are about “absent dads” is a bit generic but they are all, somewhat surprisingly, about fatherhood: what is the role of dads in children’s lives, in society, and how can we balance the demands of fatherhood with the demands of living a life worth living or whatever it is Hamnet is about. Only one of the movies, Train Dreams, focuses on the father as provider; a handful, most notably One Battle After Another, as well as The Secret Agent, and Hamnet look at the father as a protector - in most of these cases, an unsuccessful one. The movies, which reach bizarre proportions in Hamnet, tend to take a more modern and progressive view of being a parent. The children in question are usually girls: Shakespeare, Bob Ferguson and his ICE pursuer Stephen J. Lockjaw, Gustav Borg, Mr Train Dream are all girl dads. The Oscars, in short, have two big things to say about dads: we don’t know what they’re there for, but we do know they’re not there. To quote that one super creepy song from Whatever Happened To Baby Jane, “I’ve written “Dear Daddy, we miss you / And wish you were with us to love”.

This reflects the broader cultural conversation on parents: it is overwhelmingly about mothers, and when dads come up, it’s to say they’re doing too little or the wrong thing or whatever. It seems like, at some point in time, we’ve lost track of what it means to be a father, let alone a good one. These movies are, roughly, divided among three blocks: what is a father (One Battle After Another and The Secret Agent), what does being a father entail (Frankenstein, Train Dreams, Sentimental Value, Sirat), and why are men fathers (Hamnet and Marty Supreme).

You are the father!

The first question is obviously the most basic one, and also deceptively hard to answer. One Battle After Another is about what amounts to a custody battle between two prospective dads, one a fascist whose fatherhood is, unsurprisingly, determined by biology, and one a leftist whose relationship to his daughter is one of mutual care. While waiting for the results of her fascist dad’s paternity test, Willa, the child, says “I don’t care what that test says. I already have a father and it’s not you”. This reminds me of a true story: in 2004, a woman named Essie Mae Washington-Williams provided proof that the late US Senator Strom Thurmond was her father, and while she offered to undergo a DNA test, no test was done. Thurmond was a staunch segregationist, and Washington-Williams was Black. She also used that parentage to apply for membership of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization that glorifies the pro slavery side of the US Civil War and only allows the descendants of Confederate soldiers to join - they sat on her application for ten years until she died. DNA testing was used to try to confirms the claims that Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, fathered children by one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings. Hemmings was also his late wife’s Martha Jefferson’s biological sister.

The distinction between social and biological conceptions of fatherhood the topic of historian Nara Milanich’s 2019 book Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father. In the stricter branches of Judaism, membership is determined by matrilineal descent; the folk explanation is that, when the land of Judea was occupied by the Romans, there was no coherent way of keeping track of the religion of the father - not even married women were safe from the predation of Roman occupiers. The central image of her book is a mobile DNA testing van with the slogan “who’s your daddy” on the side: Milanich’s case is that this notion of fatherhood is actually very recent, stemming as far back as the discovery of DNA and the availability of commercial testing. During the nineteenth century, Latin American and continental European law defined fathers as the men who performed the role of caring, protecting, and providing for children, regardless of biological descent; according to some medieval laws, children could even choose who their father was if a widow remarried and paternity was not obvious. For example, a famous Italian case from the 1940s found simultaneously that a (White) woman who gave birth to a Black baby was legally responsible for adultery and that her (White) husband was the baby’s father anyways.

Commercial DNA testing is a booming industry in the United States: the tv show Maury is, of course, still a hit with its tagline of “who’s your daddy”; Milanich links the rise of DNA testing with the Clintonian “BoBo” ethos combining sexual liberation with personal responsibility - nut inside whoever you want, but if it goes the usual way, you have to pony up. The website for 23andme warns user that they can both “discover relatives who were previously unknown to you,” and “learn that someone you thought you were related to is not your biological relative”. In this sense, France has banned private DNA testing on a constitutional level, in order to protect the social relationship between fathers and children. A 2005 paper by sociologist Michael Gilding focuses on the phenomenon of “rampant misattributed paternity”, the urban legend that a large number of babies are fathered by women’s affair partners - for which he explains there is extremely limited evidence, but which seems to be a very rare phenomenon, and is widespread because of a combination of media attention, misogyny, and the bizarre assumptions of evolutionary biologists.

The Secret Agent goes a step further with questioning what it means to be a father: every single person on screen is either a dad, a child, a mom, or both. Marcelo, the main character, is both a father trying to rescue his son from a dictatorial regime pursuing him and a son looking for his missing working-class mother. His son, Fernando, is raised by his grandfather, Don Alexandre, who is also his daugther Fatima’s example of what a man should be - a point she makes to Ghirotti, the corrupt businessman, whose idiot son follows him everywhere. The two hitmen Ghirotti hires are a stepfather and stepson duo; his friend, police chief Alcides, has two sons who work with him in the force, one good and one evil. Doña Sebastiana, Marcelo and Alexandre’s landlady, is a putative mother to all her tenants (which includes a mother, Claudia, and her daughter, as well as a young, I assume gay, man disowned by his father); she was also the mother figure of her dead niece Geisa. There’s two touching father moments, both involving Alexandre: the first is when he finds out how high his daughter’s opinion of him was. The second is at the end: Flavia, a researcher looking into Marcelo, meets adult Fernando, who tells her outright that he considers his grandfather, the man who raised him, his true father. We, as the audience, know how deeply Marcelo cared for his son, and how everything he did was for his protection. Fernando does not: he knows his father was just not there for him and then died.

The biological dimension of fatherhood doesn’t end with ejaculation, though. There is some evidence that fathers undergo physical changes after having children: fathers report lower testosterone after having children, which should have effects on behavior, particularly risky and unsafe acts. Additionally, there is some evidence that testosterone drops the most in more involved fathers - however, meta studies of the literature find smaller and more limited effects than individual studies, pointing to publication bias against papers that did not find a significant or large effect. However, the idea that there is a “biological style of parenting” is complete nonsense: anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s 2024 book Father Time examines not just the history of the idea of fatherhood, but also the biology and anthropology - even among animals, parenting styles are extremely varied between species, and among apes, within species and across time. Blaffer Hrdy uses the neurological and endocrinological differences of involved and univolved fathers (particularly, gay and straight ones) to examine whether nurturing behavior is a cause or a consequence of these physical changes; Hrdy finds it’s mostly the latter: the decline is testosterone is matched by the production of other hormones and peptides that incerease the chance of a connection being formed between the father and child, which makes it more likely that the child will live given the extremely resource-intensive infancy of human beings. In hunter-gatherer societies, for instance, men are both much more directly involved in physical violence and in much closer proximity to women and children, which incentivizes peaceful and cooperative behavior - if one caveman shares his food with others, the risk of starvation would decline, furthering the chances of everyone’s children living.

DNA testing is used, for example, to test whether immigrants are “truly” related in Europe and the United States, as well as by the the “misattributed paternity” fanatics and their flimsy DNA evidence. But neither the genetic nor affective conception of family is inherently progressive or regressive. The idea that fatherhood is a social construct was formalized into French law by Napoleon, who also stripped women of most of their rights, and his definition of fatherhood was extremely patriarchal and hierarchical. At the same time, DNA testing has been used by feminists in Latin America to certify that fathers owe a responsibility to their children. Argentina has, famously, used genetic testing to verify the origins of children (now adults) suspected to have been taken from left-wing political prisoners in the 1970s. This involved the development of genetic testing techniques that would not otherwise exist in order to verify, directly, the possibility that someone is a grandchild of a given woman.

My hideous progeny

The world we live in is a mistake, a clumsy parody. Mirrors and fatherhood, because they multiply and confirm the parody, are abominations.

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv” in A Universal History of Infamy (1954)

Frankenstein is an adaptation of a classic novel, and a classic story of fatherhood: Victor Frankenstein, quite famously, is described as the monster’s father. When the monster is born, Victor recoils in horror; the central part of the narrative is the horror, both of Victor against his creation, and of the monster for being rejected. In an astoundingly Freudian turn, the monster is intelligent and sensitive but hideous to the eye, and he is repeatedly rejected - causing him to turn to violence. The monster compares himself to Adam (of “and Eve” fame) and Satan in Paradise Lost, the only creation of a cruel and absent minded God. Ellen Moers writes “Most of the novel, roughly two of its three volumes, can be said to deal with the retribution visited upon monster and creator for deficient infant care”. Moers’ interpretation is around motherhood: Mary Shelley started the novel a few months after giving birth to her second child. Her firstborn died two months or so before her second pregnancy. Harriet Shelley, Percy’s lawfully wedded wife, committed suicide shortly after becoming pregnant, allegedly, from someone other than her husband. The folk origin story for Frankenstein is that came from a nigthmare Mary Shelley had during a gathering with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, who was extramaritally pregnant by Byron. During their stay, Mary and Percy read Rousseau’s Emilie, a book about the problems of education and the need for compassionate and encouraging parenting, as well as Paradise Lost and Plutarch - two books the monster reads in the book. Percy Shelley contributed modestly to the text of the book, and his most noteworthy suggestion was the addition of the comparisons by the monster to Satan in Paradise Lost - declaring that “evil henceforth became my good”. Mary Shelley was an unwed mother whose own mother, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, had already died, and her father, the otherwise progressive William Godwin, ostracized Mary for her pregnancy. Shelley’s sister, Fanny Inlay, committed suicide after Godwin disowned her when he found out he was not her biological father. Victor Frankenstein, despite his progressive and humanitarian beliefs, proves himself to be a cruel and neglectful father - perhaps, in some way, like William Godwin himself. Frankenstein wants the glory of creating life without the affective responsibilities it entails.

But what are these responsibilities? Traditionally, fatherhood wasn’t considered particularly notable: dads were the ones who taught children religious discipline and their trade, and that’s about it. This doesn’t mean fathers were unimportant: in Ancient Athens, for instance, a baby was not legally a person until his father inducted them into the family via a ceremony called the amphidromia, celebrated around a week after a baby’s birth. In Sparta, legend says children would be abandoned by their fathers in Mount Taygetus if they had physical flaws; in ancient Rome, newborns would be placed on the ground, and if fathers did not pick them up and select them into the family, they would be considered fair game for anyone who wanted them. According to Saint Augustine, children inherit sin from their fathers, who transmits it via the act of sex itself. In agricultural times, there wasn’t much distinction between the time spent at work and at home, and between time spent working or parenting. After mass industrialization, however, it became more common for fathers to work outside the home, which meant their responsibilities shifted from being the head of a family farm to being the provider and the paterfamilias, a primary breadwinner whose economic contribution allowed him to dominate the family. The creation of a mass consumer society, and particularly of the automobile, heightened the importance of “providing” as a central duty of fathers. Historian Augustine Sedgwick, in his 2025 book Fatherhood points out that “Fathers have often likened themselves to gods, begetting, bestowing, smiting, and saving at will (…) But for mortals, such expectations can only end in failure”. Not being able to determine biological parentage, ancient laws gave fathers the power of life and death; industrial society also did, excluding women (usually legally) from the labor market. In fact, Sedgwick’s book has a surprising lesson: any time society has been transformed by cultural, economic, or technological factors, fatherhood was itself transformed in order to preserve the place of prominence of the father. In an interview with GQ, he said “Men had to go into cities and factories and no longer be men in the ways that their fathers and grandfathers had been. There was a lot of anxiety about what it meant to be a man.” This is exactly what the movie Train Dreams is about, in a way: an industrial worker loses his job and goes off to the rugged wilderness to reclaim his male pride. This destroys his family, quite literally, and he goes insane as a result. In this sense, modern fathers don’t have a fixed role: since the rise of feminism and of the service economy, men do not have an unimpregnable position in society - they don’t get to dictate the terms of the family anymore, anywhere. This makes us ask an interesting question: what does it mean to be a good father? What is the role of a father?

Sedgwick says his own son told him a good father was “funny and good at hugging”. Fairly good answer. Parenting, including fatherhood, is extremely important because childhood is extremely important - early education, for instance, helps set out children for primary school and thus for high school and university. In this sense, we can look at what fathers are doing: they spend around 16 hours a week on childcare and housework, compared to 6 in the 1960s and 16 in the late ‘90s, but also to 30 that mothers spend (down from 50 a week, or seven hours a day, in the sixties). Fathers spend less time on basic care and on education, and more time playing with their kids. This isn’t really their fault, in a way: 63% of fathers wish they spent more time with their kids, a figure that is 1.5 times higher than for mothers. Fathers also are more likely than mothers to agree that work gets in the way of being in their children’s lives. However, this isn’t really the whole story: the allocation of housework plays an enormous role in family decisions, but is only partially explained by men having higher earnings - gender norms, particularly around what kind of housework and childcare men ought to do, play a gigantic role (for instance, expectations of what men and women are supposed to do play a role during grocery shopping).

The fact that being a provider isn’t the main role of fathers anymore doesn’t really mean that their labor market outcomes don’t matter anymore: fathers losing their jobs reduces the lifetime annual income of children by 9%, a correlation that strengthens for sons relative to daughters (but at the same time, fathers being sole or main earners increases future gender wage gaps for children). This has a number of causes, but the main one is pretty simple: parents are usually able to pass down their profession to their children, for instance via “dinner table human capital” (basically, inside knowledge the family has). Children of army members are between 58% and 110% more likely to enlist in the military, which is especially high for father-son or mother-daughter duos. The ability of children to rise up the income ladder is very closely correlated to the mobility of their fathers in the case of sons, and as the economy becomes more gender-equal, this also matters for women. While the same-gender parent-child duos are important, it’s also worth noting that either parent tends to have an impact on either child on other measures, but the second study does seem to point at something particularly important: the employability of the parent in question determines what kind of human capital they are able to pass down. This seems to particularly hurt sons when considering that the job market has weakened significantly for men: the shift from a blue collar earnings premium to a blue collar earnings penalty has resulted in women becoming more competitive at the lower rungs of the income scale, particularly given new technologies.

This is reflected in, for instance, the fact that boys who grow up in low income areas are significantly less likely to work than girls who grow up in those areas (though distressed communities are bad for both, if worse for boys), suggesting the importance of role models and of economic advantages inherited from parents. The importance of community conditions is important even in prosperous communities: many of them have biases that affect future economic performance. In this sense, a second issue to consider is that fathers serve as role models for their children, regardless of gender. For instance, one of the major drivers of the negative impact of teen motherhood appears to be that teenagers are not particularly capable of raising children: controlling for underlying characteristics in background (which is not indicative of a causal link), the children of teen mothers and older mothers have no statistically significant differences in life outcomes; the impact of the qualities of fathers is especially important. In the same vein, the presence of a father, and of one without a criminal background, lowers the chance of a child committing a crime as a teenager, which is both true for sons and daughters and is only partially explained by parental involvement and economic disadvantages. Instead, having a father is important even as a role model for children, which explains why the effect is particularly large on sons. Another piece of evidence is that male students tend to fare better when their teachers are male, which means that gender diversity quotas actually improve student outcomes via, in part, role model effects. However, female students also benefit from the presence of male teachers, a fact that might be explained by selection, since male teachers entering a stereotypically female field should be unusually dedicated to their work.

But what is a good father? Well, let’s look at the movies. Basically all of them are about protecting, which, in a world that is safer than ever (with some exceptions), is not all that relevant. Victor Frankenstein is, as a father, like Gustav Borg from Sentimental Value, not a present dad: Frankenstein famously expels his “son”, and Gustav Borg fucks off to Sweden while his wife raises his two daughters. The main difference is that Borg understands his two adult daughters; they read his screenplay and realize the movie isn’t about his mother, but rather, about his daughter Nora, who has struggled with depression most of her life. The fact that Gustav understands his daughter is a sign that the relationship can be repaired; in contrast, Frankenstein does not understand the creature. Sedgwick describes this as “a fatherhood of listening”: paying attention to your children and accompanying them. A recent The Baffler piece about Pixar’s Elio, an Oscar nominated animated movie, points out that Disney’s anti-liberal turn isn’t necessarily about not portrarying certain things (most notably gayness, which they describe as “300 million dollars worth of therapy”) but rather by how they treat the parent-child relationship (completely hierarchical) and the lives of children (completely sanitized): “This could be a premise that allows Pixar to move back onto more exciting territory, to think about the autonomy of children and their desires, but that might smack of radicalism. After all, in an era of hyperconservatism and brutish domination, to be “family friendly” is to commit to disciplining children over understanding them.”

You’re a dog and I’m your man

I’ll be your father figure,
I drink that brown liquor,
I can make deals with the devil because my dick’s bigger

Taylor Swift, “Father Figure”

In Totem and Taboo1, Sigmund Freud proposed the concept of a “primal father”, the leader of a horde of cavemen who claimed exclusive ownership of all women in the tribe regardless of family status. This created profound envy among the lesser men, who conspired to kill the primal father and redistribute ownership of the women. For Freud, this wasn’t really a description of early humanity, but rather a sort of collective myth we subconsciously use to justify the basic norms of our civilization: the prohibition of incest and the exclusivity of monogamy, yes, but also the patriarchy. To quote an article Sedgwick penned for the New York Times: “The trouble with a father’s godlike paternal mandate is protection and provision cannot be fully guaranteed - they run out. Nobody is actually a god. Perhaps to elevate themselves above women, whose power to create and sustain life is vividly clear, men have defined the role of the father in terms that can never be entirely fulfilled.”

In their review of Marty Supreme for The Point, Zito Madu quotes an interview director Josh Safdie gave about the film’s ending, where Marty races back from his triumph in Japan to meet his newborn child and cries after seeing him. The ending provoked enormous discourse: some people interpreted as Marty realizing his life of hustling and ping pong was over. Me, and the director, took the exact opposite approach: “Next thing you know, I went to City Hall, we got married, have a kid and have another kid. And that feeling when I met my first daughter, it was a cosmic feeling. … Having a kid is like—[Marty’s] one dream had to end so the other one could begin. It’s seeing [Marty] actually go from boy to man.”. To Nadu, this weakens the point of the movie, and I somewhat agree - however, it’s entirely possible that Marty being, in hindsight, a humongous asshole to escape the “small life” of family only to realize it’s exactly what he wanted is precisely the point of the movie. The movie most similar to Marty Supreme in its themes is Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet, a portrayal of William and Agnes Shakespeare’s surprisingly modern family life. Up until the moment the titular character dies, the film focuses on the “small life” of Agnes as a mother and witch; once he goes, the focus shifts to William’s endeavors (including a very embarassing scene where he recites the most famous monologue of the play in question); the ending seems to suggest him being a neglectful husband and an absent father is justified by his tremendous accomplishments in art. Argentine writer Tamara Tenembaum’s review drills down on this point: unlike the source material, Zhao’s Hamnet is a very modern piece, where Agnes reacts to the death of her child in a modern way, and expects to have a modern husband. But William Shakespeare wasn’t a millennial. He was born in the sixteenth century. By trying to have it both ways between the past and the present, Zhao weakens a movie about a very alien time with very alien relationships between fathers, mothers, wives, and children. If William Shakespeare was a man of his time, there would be no catharsis from seeing Hamlet; if he was a man of our time, his behavior after his son died would be incomprehensible.

The interesting thing is that Josh Safdie has his pulse on modern men, and Chloe Zhao does not. Around 60% of Gen Z men say they definitely want to have children, compared with roughly 55% of Gen Z women. A different poll (which I have a few quabbles with2) found that young women find having a family less important than young men on both the left and the right. This reflects a broader trend of diverging priorities among men and women: particularly, that women seem to derive a lot more meaning from their work than from family life, while the opposite is true for men - however, in the first poll cited, the majority of men still hold that the most important thing for a father is to be a “provider”, which goes along with other evidence finding that young men have surprisingly traditional views about marriage and family (it is, though, worth noting that some of the other surveys mentioned find the big jump happened among milennials and Gen X men). This model of the family is completely unsustainable: not only is a modern standard of living incompatible with a single provider, and advances in home appliances have made stay-at-home wives and mothers completely pointless, but also, and more importantly, it’s just not what a good half of the people interested in a heterosexual marriage want.

The biggest error people make in this discussion is misattributing blame to “luxury beliefs” of the feminist leisure class: college educated women are still marrying at high rates, and it is non-college educated women who have seen their marriage rates fall through the floor. The correct narrative is that the decline in fertility rates is driven by a decrease in and delay of marriage rates and in fewer children born in marriages, but not to a large spike in childless, unmarried educated women.

Thus, the question of why men are more conservative than women is the same question as why women don’t want to give up their jobs to change diapers: the relative wages of women have increased enormously because of specialization in services and women’s advantages in education and social skills, while men’s relative economic fortunes have declined. These women are also benefiting from the care economy boom, and their lack of partners relates both to the lower earnings potential of non-college men but also their conservatism around home life. Fundamentally, women see much bigger disruptions to their (to them, meaninfgul) careers than men: as mentioned above, women do more care work than men, and even in homes with equal income distributions, men are less likely to spend their time off work doing stuff at home. Women tend to report lower life satisfaction after having children mediated by the increase in domestic labor, which pairs nicely with research finding that more involved fathers result in better mental health outcomes for mothers - plus, countries where fathers do more childcare have higher fertility rates, at least in Europe. Women are far more likely to be called for emergencies and have their calendars shaped around the school year and the school schedule while men aren’t. Married couples tend to prioritize men’s careers regardless of earnings, and face higher divorce rates when men lose their breadwinner positions.

Nobel Laureate Claudia Goldin has two recent papers around the topic, and both reach the same conclusion: the economic advancement of women without corresponding social norms for men to step up at home (which don’t even need to be progressive) results in lower rates of marriage and fertility, since women don’t face any strong external obligations to marry for material wellbeing anymore - very few countries still can be described by Amy March’s “I’m not a poet, I’m a woman. And as a woman, I have no way to make money, not enough to earn a living and support my family. And even if I had my own money, which I don’t, it would belong to my husband the minute we were married. if we had children they would belong to him, not me. they would be his property. So don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition because it is. It may not be for you, but it most certainly is for me” monologue in the 2019 film Little Women. The idea that being too conservative to be “dad material” shouldn’t be particularly controversial: just ask MAGA men in DC, a city that voted for Kamala Harris at a 96% rate, how their dating life is going. While men’s desire for children is obviously laudable and meaningful, the idea that society needs to bend itself around that isn’t going to happen.

I’ve gone over the “why” of this divide in meaning multiple times by now, which I found by complete accident in sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s work: the shift from a traditional modernity focused on production (by men, of things, and by women, of children) to one focused on consumption and self-expression coincided with a cultural shift to seeing your career as an aspect of personal expression and liberation, at the same time as career opportunities for women improved and worsened for men. Put another way, women who want to be “tradwives” do get the opportunity, but women who don’t get to be consumers (of vacations to Japan, skincare, Netflix, whatever) or even workers, through the “girlboss” archetype. Men haven’t really been told to want to be “trad husbands”, and consumption is, as most people would guess, not truly emotional satisfactory. I feel like the most ironic part of the equation is what the drivers of this misalignment are: the expectation that women ought to want power over the home. Shirley Jackson’s account of her husband is that he was reasonably nice and provided for them, but he was just completely emotionally checked out - Jackson “reminds readers that she is the absolute gravitational center of her family’s world”. She might as well be describing Agnes Shakespeare, a fact that goes completely unacknowledged by the decision to focus the film’s last third on Sad Dad. Shakespeare also wrote Henry IV, which has the famous line “heavy hangs the head that wears the crown”; women simply do not want sole authority over the home - they want a democracy, not dictatorship, over their children. The problem of trying to keep the traditional modern of the family on life support is the problem of polytheism: you can’t have multiple supreme deities at the same time. You can’t follow the commandments of Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed at the same time. To quote the singer Mitski, “You’re an angel, I’m a dog / Or you’re a dog and I’m your man / You believe me like a god / I destroy you like I am”.

Conclusion

A recent article on n+1 magazine by A.S. Hamrah touches upon the topics that the most notable movies of the year are about; I highly recommend it. At the same time, a spate of articles on the Atlantic and New Yorker describe the relevance of current events of notable recent movies: the conspiracy theories in Eddington and Bugonia, authoritarianism (did that one already), violence, et cetera, as well as the all-encompassing loneliness of Paul Thomas Anderson’s ouevre. The most descriptive film about modern dating and relationships isn’t even Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster - it’s Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love, about a socially maladjusted business owner and his miserable experiences around women.

Much like the Demiurge and God (or Japanese zoos and the Demiurge), the movies are a pale reflection of the real world. What are they reflecting back at us? I think three general anxieties: one about men, one about society, and one about the world.

The one about society I’ve already spoken about: the world feels more precarious and dangerous than it has in a long time. Democracy feels profoundly threatened and people feel disconnected from the economy and from institutions. Political extremism is on the rise. And the most visible face of this extremism are young men, both in the broader right and the “manosphere”. The viral internet figures of today are Nick Fuentes, a 20-something neonazi, and Clavicular, another 20 something meth addict who hits himself in the face with a hammer but in a cool incel way and not a scary guy on the subway way. People focus on their shocking racism and antisemitism, but not on their equally shocking sexism: in a mirror of a series of viral 2018 moments, even conservative women are repulsed by their shocking statements, such as “Women are made to be fucked … Women are either mothers, whores, or nuns … There are no female philosophers. There are no female inventors. There are no female generals or billionaires. They are mothers, whores, nuns. End of list. That’s what you can be” from Fuentes.

The idea of a “crisis of men” is, at this point, a cliche, rooted in a general sense of aimlessness, lack of romantic success (which seems to affect just about anyone these days), and perceived lack of workplace opportunities. This is the second anxiety we have: about the future of men. The stories cited above focus on men who are somehow lost or inadequate or “useless”, or who can’t decide on their fate. There was a recent article about “media bias” resulting in stories of hypercompetent women and incompetent men; what the (conservative) author failed to notice is that archetypes are downstream, not upstream, of the collective unconscious. To quote Sam Adler-Bell’s (excellent) story on the misogyny of the New Right: “A lot of these people on the right have never had a positive or negative interaction with a Jew,” she went on, “but they’ve all had negative interactions with female caretakers who told them to brush their teeth,” or with desirable women who rejected them, or “HR harpies” who interrogated them about their tweets. “ Susan Sontag wrote that, in essence, fascism was a form of sadomasochism, the political “adoration of force” that motivates it being applied to human sexuality. Hence, our concern about democratic breakdown and its most visible face becomes a concern about the lives of those people: their loneliness, alienation, lack of success, and frustration.

For the third anxiety, a brief detour. I just finished reading philosopher Thomas Moynihan’s X-Risk, a book about the history of the Apocalypse in human thinking, and the most interesting thing about it is how our understanding of the end of the world is shaped by contemporary challenges: various scientific discoveries were translated into fantasies of apocalyptic breakdown from climate, earthquakes, or comets. The book he most discusses is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which came right around the time of two major humblers of the human race: Georges Cuvier’s discovery of past mass extinction events, and Pierre de Maupertuis and Georges Buffon’s theory of the evolution of species, which focused on “superior” creatures displacing “inferior” ones. This pointed to something seemingly inevitable: that humans could be replaced by creatures we create. In Frankenstein, the monster isn’t considered a corpse or a deformed human - he’s considered a different species, and Victor Frankenstein’s refusal to create him a bride comes from a reluctance to populate Earth with a “race of demons” who will kill and replace humans. In this sense, the elevation of an otherwise mediocre adaptation of the ultimate novel about the anxieties of creation points to our third major anxiety: artificial intelligence. The fathers in the movies nominated don’t feel completely at ease with what they’ve brought forth and what the sacrifices will be; neither do we.

Post script: unlike last week’s post, I don’t really have a personal anecdote to share, mostly because I don’t feel comfortable talking about that kind of thing and also because my dad does read my blog. But I have to say that I think he’s been a great dad and has supported and encouraged me my whole life. I developed a passion for movies thanks to him, as it was our go-to outing for most of my teenage years. Recently, he told me he was a bit disappointed I chose not to pursue a career in physics because he came up with a story where I became a nuclear physicist at a big government facility down in Bariloche. He told me this ten years after I finished high school because it was obvious to both of us it didn’t matter anymore and he didn’t want me to feel pressured before.

Something I’ve noticed is that the movies nominated for Best Picture, except for the Formula One movie (which I’m not writing about, come the fuck on) have exactly two themes: absent fathers, and democratic backsliding. So instead of just citing the same three papers over and over again, I thought: why not do the annual Oscars roundup as two different blog posts around the two themes?

This week’s post will be about the second theme, democratic backsliding, and will feature Best Picture nominees Bugonia, One Battle After Another, The Secret Agent, and Sinners, as well as Best International Film nominee It Was Just An Accident.

Every person who’s into movies has a stereotypical “baby’s first auteur” director they have a soft spot for; for people roughly my age it’s Christopher Nolan, or David Fincher, or Quentin Tarantino, or Sofia Coppola, In my case, it’s another steeotypical choice, Wes Anderson: the movie that first got me interested in film was The Grand Budapest Hotel, a “spiritual successor” (or that’s the term they’d use if it was a video game) of Stephan Zweig’s 1942 autobiographical novel The World of Yesterday. I was 15 when I watched Grand Budapest and, until then, I didn’t really think movies could say something, at least not in that sense, and I was fascinated with film ever since. It’s one of two movies that changed how I think - the other is The Shape of Water when the guy loses a finger because he won’t wash his hands after pooping.

Anyways, both the movie and the book iare about Belle Epoque life in Central Europe during the pre-Depression period, with notable changes involving World War One, the Depression, and the rise of fascism. To quote Zweig, “the more truly European someone’s way of life was in Europe, the harder he was hit by the fist shattering the continent”, and Grand Budapest is extremely European: it follows a ritzy European hotel being taken over first by the Nazis and later by the Communists, losing its former glory. Anyways, at the time I thought a movie about the imminent demise of democracy at the hands of reactionary violence was a bit silly, even if the accolades were deserved - and more, because Ralph Fiennes was snubbed for Best Actor. Twelve years later, that’s what a solid half of Oscar nominees are about.

You keep dancing with the devil... one day he’s gonna follow you home

What do the listed Oscar nominees have in common? They’re all, in some shape or form, about the subject of what it means to live in a democratic society. Two of these movies are about real countries that aren’t or weren’t democratic; one of them couldn’t have been made under different political conditions. The Secret Agent, It Was Just An Accident, and One Battle After Another are explicitly about it: the first is set in 1970s Brazil, during the military junta that brutally ran the country (similar to last year’s I’m Still Here); the second is about contemporary Iran; the third is about a not-so-imaginary fascist United States of America. Bugonia is a bit more general: it’s about conspiracy theories and violence, that is, about the undoing of a democratic civil society. And Sinners is about one particular angle: what it means to live freely in a society ruled by a racial caste system of economic exploitation.

Let’s do a brief summary of each, lighting round style (and big spoilers, especially for The Secret Agent which is told iceberg theory style):

• Bugonia (I did a full post about it): two weird conspiracy theorists kidnap and torture a biotech CEO on the suspicion that she’s an alien. Maybe she is…?

• Sinners: two Black men trying to set up a music business in the Jim Crow South start being attack and harassed by Irish vampires.

• One Battle After Another (I did a full post about it): two left wing guerrilas have a daughter and then the mom gets caught by the head of ICE, who also coerced her into having an affair. Sixteen years later, the father and daughter are found and chased by fascist paramilitary police and secret societies.

• The Secret Agent: a scientist falsely accused of corruption by a corrupt businessman trying to kill his research for money goes back to his hometown to pick up his son and take him abroad while being chased by two government militia members hired by the businessman.

• It Was Just An Accident: an Iranian dissident runs into the regime officer who tortured him in prison by chance. He kidnaps him and runs around to find other dissidents imprisoned alongside him to figure out if it’s actually him or not.

Okay, so the connection is rather obvious. I think the continuum of movies also give you a good trait of how life is under authoritarianism: first, sporadic violence and repression with a breakdown of trust in institutions; then, more organized and more thorough violence; then fully systematized repression with an absence of democratic life, and finally just complete resignation. The major tension of The Secret Agent and especially, It Was Just An Accident isn’t whether the government will get away with it (it will), but rather, whether the characters will just accept it and move on. Nobody wonders whether Wagner Moura’s character is going to free Brazil from dictatorship; it will end in eight years, in 1985.

But what are these movies even talking about? The most important thing to understand about democracy is that it’s extremely controversial as a concept. Nobody can even agree on a definition. It comes from Ancient Greek, demos meaning people, and kratos meaning power - so the power or rule of the people. Fundamentally, the definitions also differ between procedural definitions (that focus on free and fair elections and stable transfers of power), and substantive definitions, that focus on whether there is an affirmative opportunity to engage in certain basic actions. One example of a procedural definition, from jurist Hans Kelsen, is that “the democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions … by making the people decide issues through the election of individuals who are to assemble in order to carry out its will”. This is a very procedure-centered account, and one that cannot account for a lot of democratic in appearance but undemocratic in practice events like gerrymandering. Norberto Bobbio, focusing on the difference between “elites that propose themselves and elites impose themselves”, defines democracy as “… supreme power (…) is exerted in the name of and on behalf of the people by virtue of the procedure of elections”. Political scientist Adam Przeworski defines democracy, famously, as “a system in which parties lose elections”, which is quite minimalist indeed. In contrast, more substantive definitions focus on the extent to which basic rights are respected, such as the Freedom House reports or Jurgen Habermas’s ideas (that I’ve talked about extensively) about the possibility of open discourse and communications in a politically independent public sphere, roughly adjacent to the concept of civil society. One example of a substantive, but not procedural, violation of democratic principles would be the government pressuring organizations to silence certain political viewpoints, such as the German government’s attempts to muzzle criticism of Israel at the Berlin film festival or in the art world. In particular, in Who Decides What is Democratic, Przeworski points out that many policies deeply antithetical to norms of equality or freedom are also reasonably popular. The substantive definition is not free of issues, thus: how can a democracy determine whether a clearly immoral and anti-constitutional in spirit policy is legitimate if passed by the proper legal routes and supported by a decent political constituency? As long as they “refrain from trying to undermine the possibility of [parties] being removed from office, and so long as they observe the institutional rules that control policymaking…”, they are in the same zone as Woody Allen’s marriage: “lawful but awful”. Far right parties are actually very distinct from regular right wing parties in terms of their ideological substrate - even though there are some bridging ideas between the two.1

The most important thing about the end of democracy is that, while we tend to think of it as a moment caused by violence, it’s typically a slow descent caused by political decisions - “modern slides into authoritarianism are not the result of revolutions or military coups, but rather the consequence of a steady erosion of political norms and the assault on such fundamental democratic institutions as an independent judiciary and a free press” Typically, we differ between democracy (see above), anocracy, which is kind of in the middle, and autocracy, which is full blown non-democracy. But they tend to be defined relative to each other, which makes them not particularly useful. Something that especially complicates this notion is the history of the term democracy: the founders of all major democratic polities saw it as a bad thing, as the rule of the mob - one interpretation is that the term was coined derogatorily by opponents of Athenian, well, democracy. In Democracy Against Capitalism, (Marxist) historian Ellen Meiksins Wood points this out: the oldest debate on the tenets of democratic life is Plato’s Protagoras, which uses democratic norms as an example of how speech could not be taught (or it could, that’s kind of the point of Socratic dialogues). Both Aristotle and Plato saw the rule of the masses as dangerous: why would the opinion of people who didn’t know anything count the same as of people who knew something? Plato argued for the rule of philosopher kings; Aristotle, for the rule of virtuous individuals (of course my most recent read on this, which I remember from high school, is Leo Strauss, who obviously had a dog on the fight). Per Meiksins Wood, this skepticism rolled over to Roman politics, which were not democratic but republican: Rome had a very limited involvement of non-landowners, and it was mostly the nobility who had access to the top positions of the cursus honorum. The Senate, an unelected council of elder aristocratic statesmen, held a veto until well into the end of the Republic. Roman and Athenian skepticism of democracy was reflected in the work of Montesquieu and the American Founding Fathers, who saw overly lively democratic politics as a problem to be solved with a relative dose of minoritarianism.

In the same vein, the concept of a “dictator” was also derived from Roman politics, where dictatorship was a temporary appointment for one politician to exercise supreme power for one year. Until the early 1920s, it was assumed that a “dictator” sought to rule only temporarily; only Paraguay’s Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia seriously sought a permanent title, decreeing himself “Perpetual Dictator of Paraguay” and ruling as The Supreme (El Supremo, like the Augusto Roa Bastos novel). Of Argentina’s five distinct military dictatorships, only the last two actually claimed power indefinitely or in perpetuity; the others sought some concrete (if poorly defined) goal in a (vague) timeframe. The term dictatorship wasn’t seen as negatively, then, because of its positive historical usage; when Napoleon took power, he was described as a “despot” somewhat inaccurately, and the term “dictator” took its current meaning as a way to refer to both Nazism and Communism (communists, quite famously, describe their government as “the dictatorship of the proletariat” using the older, less negative sense). Authoritarianism is similarly new as a concept, referring to a government when parties can, but usually don’t, lose elections. Democratic rules and institutions still exist, but they’re extremely unfair to the non-incumbent party. The best summation of authoritarianism comes from Benito Mussolini: “I was not even a dictator, because my power to command coincided perfectly with the will to obey of the Italian people”. This relies very strongly on Max Weber’s notion of Authority, which is power exercised with consent due to a variety of reasons: the personal charisma of the leader, religious or traditional norms, or “rational-legal”, that is, the legitimacy of the rules and procedures around the election of the leader. Authoritarianism preserves this source of authority by keeping its superficial trappings, without a true substantial transfer of power from government to governed. This happens because the definition of the Common Good, which under a real democracy is disputed (since people have different definitions of it), is actually not part of politics - there is one definition that has to win, and others that have to lose. To quote Przseworski: “Obedience is a result of falsifed beliefs but still of beliefs. Authoritarianism is when we have no choice of reasons, not when we have no reasons.” Government repression is extremely powerful because, and it should surprise nobody, it works, particularly preventive political repression. For instance, McCarthyism, the goal was to silence left wing ideas in Hollywood; McCarthy, whatever his flaws, succeeded. This type of anti dissident campaign did, in due turn, spread some of their ideas, but to a much smaller and less important population. Maybe the right wing takeover of social and traditional media will too.

So the relevance of this year’s batch of movies is kinda obvious by their themes alone. All but one of the movies are explicitly about how it is to live in a non-democratic society, one rife with political prosecution, violence, and insecurity. The main character of The Secret Agent is a scientist who has a falling out with a politically connected businessman, who sends two former military officers to kill him. One Battle After Another is about a former terrorist being chased by an ICE knockoff agency (in twenty or thirty years, people will not believe Stephen Lockjaw was a fictional character not based on Greg Bovino). The Roman origins of modern democracy are relevant not just because of the bad stuff the children of Romulus introduced into it, but as a cautionary tale: Rome basically did not have a constitution, and most of its political rules took the form of norms. For instance, consuls had term limits that were only enforced via social sanctions - mos maiorum, translated as “the customs of the elders”, provided the fundamental norms of Roman political life. When thinkers like Cicero bemoaned the morality of the times (“O tempora, o mores!”) they weren’t just complaining about declining values - they were complaining about rampant constitutional and legal violations. Well, why did mos maiorum collapse as a system of governance? Roman territorial expansion created large tracts of land that were either owned by or owed to military generals and high-ranking politicians, who derived direct power from the legions whose loyalty they purchased via “booty”. This gave select leaders enormous power via the presence of segments of the army that owed their fortunes not to the state, but to individual politicians. At the same time, longstanding conflicts over land reform and grain prices meant that joining the military was an attractive way to make your fortune, which incentivized further military actions and heightened the power of the top generals. Simply put, relying on social sanctions from people who did not have armies against people who did would not work to constrain the power of the people with armies for very long. The militarization of daily, private life is a constant in most of the movies shared: Grand Budapest Hotel probably shows the most aptly how armed troops and police simply become regular sights and are tolerated, if not embraced, by the people they monitor.

The current relevance is also obvious. A recent article by Nikhil Pal Singh in Equator magazine lays out a case that the action of ICE agents in American cities is simply an importation of behavior the American military has taught Americans to tolerate abroad. This follows, obviously, longstanding practices of racial discrimination and xenophobic immigration policies; the innovation is porting them over from the police department of bumfuck county Iowa to the federal government’s considerable muscle - “It never occurs to the architects and propagandists of American power, even those that now oppose Trump, that its violence is anything less than virtuous, or that the empire’s kinetic actions could eventually rebound back.” This trend has also extended to the administration’s foreign policy, which is devoted to “the adoration of force” according to a different article. The illegitimate use of state power extends to both the foreign and domestic policy spheres. This is not simply an American phenomenon, even though the United States is one of the most notable cases: reports from Freedom House and V-Dem find that democracy continuously declined on a global scale for the last twenty years, and at a much faster rate in the last 5 or so. Freedom House’s 2024 report (the 2025 one comes out next week and it’s probably not good either) recorded its 19th consecutive year of decline, with deterioration in 60 countries and only 34 showing improvement. V-Dem puts the numbers in even worse terms: autocracies now outnumber democracies for the first time, with 72% of the world's population living under non-democratic rule, the highest share since 1978. By their measure, the average level of democracy globally has been wound back to where it stood in the mid-1980s. V-Dem cites three major forces: the erosion of democracy within long-standing liberal democracies, the collapse of democracy in countries that democratised during the late 20th century, and the deepening of autocracy in already autocratic states. The means cited is "autocratization from within": elected leaders gradually hollowing out courts, media, electoral bodies, and civil society groups while maintaining a democratic facade. This mostly comes from censorship of the media, which is declining in 44 countries (a record as far back as their records go), and is the most common tool of backsliding. Half of all countries with democratic declines are using government disinformation to shape public opinion. These tactics are being shared globally, since states have started sharing surveillance technology, shielding each other from sanctions, and actively working to weaken international democratic norms and institutions.

I know who you are. I know what you are.

The United States, right now, is obviously not as repressive as Iran and it’s also not a full-blown, Latin America tier dictatorship. But it’s also a lot closer to those than anyone would like to admit. The obvious question here is why - why did democracy decline, everywhere basically, over basically the same period of time? In a forthcoming paper, economist (I think) Betsey Stevenson lays out two causes: “identity driven polarization” (a bit more on this later) and a loss of institucional legitimacy driven by growing inequality,and material and physical insecurity. The idea that American culture drives the decline of American democracy is a bit silly, like the claim that the “Prussian military ethos” drove support for Nazism - failing to consider, of course, that Prussia was a social democrat bulwark until the bitter end.

I just finished reading Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public, a book that would have been much better if he hadn’t added a hundred pages of whining about Trump Derangement Syndrome in the reissue, and he inadvertently provides the full answer. Gurri’s book, as I’ve mentioned a few times, mostly details the shift from a hierarchical expert-controlled “information environment” to one ruled by social media and horizontal networks. Back in the day, your sources of information were major tv and radio channels, publishing houses, academia, newspapers, and governments, all of which relied on credible and universally well respected professional accredited sources. Social media allowed for competing narratives - as Elon Musk said, “You are the media now”. He said it in 2024, but it’s been true for the better part of 15 years now. For Gurri, a series of high profile incidents (most notably the Great Recession) reduced trust in governments and experts; trust had been declining for decades (in the United States, it fell pretty precipitously in the 1970s and 1980s, and increased in the 90s until the bad days of the Iraq War), but social media enabled an alternative class of influencers and gurus to actually compete with them. Something kind of interesting is that (at least back when he wrote the book; now he’s just a generic Bari Weiss chud) Gurri is a proper bonafide conservative, and his whole thing is how there’s a natural hierarchy that isn’t being respected. His view of the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and other early 2010s protests is that it was a temper tantrum by overgrown, woke toddlers, coddled by a prosperous economy. His vision in the book was that politics in the 2010s would be determined by a clash between democracy, expertise, and authority on one side, versus a mass efferverscence of nihilism.2

The interesting thing is that the book contains, but doesn’t outline, the two other major components of the global crisis of democracy: globalization and the Great Recession. The two are frequently mentioned in this blog and on my writing elsewhere: economic research finds that democracies can remain successful as long as they result in economic growth, quality public services, and stability, so a generalized authoritarian turn in response to economic conditions should not surprise anyone. The Recession was the catalyst for the emergence of far right politics after eighty years sealed away, for a number of reasons: poor economic performance is also linked with lower political trust and more political upheaval, such that countries that underperform economically tend to have significant democratic backsliding. in the United States and Europe, rising inequality and slowing growth are linked to support of far-right parties. In Brazil, economic liberalization led to higher unemployment, which resulted in higher affiliation with pentecostal churches - which coupled with tax policy, increased vote shares for far-right candidates. Likewise, in the Weimar Era, areas more closely harmed by the “hunger Chancellor’s” austerity programs turned to supporting Hitler in later years. And if government performance has affected perceptions of democracy, it should be no surprise that countries with lower approval ratings on COVID management also have lower support for democracy. This also explains the shifts in the electoral composition of the left and the right: first, left wing partisanship is associated with democracy, cosmopolitan values, and social trust; right wing partisanship with the reverse. Because a series of structural economic trends (automation, deindustrialization, computerization, etc) shifted the demand of labor from blue collar to white collar, the relative economic positions of educated and non-educated workers changed, resulting in the former coming up on top. As the big winners of the new economic system, the white collar BoBo types moved left, while the uneducated working class remanent of the old industrial heartland moved right. And considering the relative gender composition of each group, the most salient fact of contemporary politics is easily accounted for - men just lost. Women beat them. The causal link between democracy and polarization is itself kind of disputed - there’s a very clear trend towards polarized democracies being likelier to backslide, but a big reason for that is partisanship overriding concern for democracy. In fact, a recent paper finds that polarization is a not a cause but a consequence of democratic backsliding, as elections become objectively more important and the antidemocratic behavior of politicians becomes more clearly abhorrent to a section of the population.

Fukuyama’s book is usually described as triumphalist, but it’s pretty pessimistic - first about the state of culture in a post-history world, which would be stale and repetitive. But also about the major threatening factors for democracy. The first is boredom, basically: people would become too coddled to realize that a temper tantrum against “the system” would actually destroy their lives. This point mirrors Martin Gurri’s, and can be originally found in Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s book The Rebellion of the Masses, which claimed that the crisis of democracy in the 1920s was caused by exaggerated technification of society and rising living standards resulted in a growing disconnect between desires and possibilities. But, as seen above, it wasn’t excessive prosperity but insufficient prosperity what drove people to fascism or communism. Which gets to the second factor: inequality. Let’s get back to the master and the slave. Simone Weil wrote in his 1945 essay about The Illiad, “Since the slave has no license to express anything except what is pleasing to his master, it follows that the only emotion that can touch or enliven him a little, that can reach him in the desolation of his life, is the emotion of love for his master. (…) The man who knows himself weaker than another is more alone in the heart of a city than a man lost in the desert.” The master is consumed by a mirror of this emotion: megalothymia, the drive for greater and greater power and superiority. Machiavelli, who was very influential on Fukuyama, considered the endless desires for wealth and power of the elites a deeply destabilizing factor for democracy: this pursuit would in due time transform itself into a pursuit of exploitation, much like the only desire of the slave it is to please its master. The idea that this type of elite dynamics are central to democratic life isn’t particularly exotic: in particular, the work of 2024 Nobel Laureates Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson sees political life as springing from a settlement between the elites, who control money and power, and the majority, who want redistribution of both; democracy is a compromise to minimize redistribution of wealth, though it also emerges from elite missteps. The risk of concentrated private power isn’t really that billionaires will buy off politicians and elections (the evidence for this is fairly weak) but a lot more straightforward, that their enormous fortunes can allow them to develop tremendous influence over the government in a way most groups of people just cannot3 or exercise enormous force over countless amount of regular people. Jeffrey Epstein and Neil Gaiman both used their position of wealth to sexually exploit women under the threat of destitution. But this isn’t simply a win-win: being so rich also exposes them enormously. Elon Musk’s business is deeply dependent on China, and Jeff Bezos gutting the Washington Post or David Ellison torching CBS and CNN to the ground may be related to their companies’ exposure to federal regulation as much as their (for sure, not at all progressive or liberal) ideology. The movie Sinners is largely about this process, though mediated by the uniquely American history of race and authoritarianism: the use of company money and coerced agricultural labor produced a population that was economically disenfranchised, and thus could not challenged the political power of the landowning class of the post-Reconstruction US South.

But globalization also comes up not in the traditional sense I bring it up, aka its economic effects, but in a more cultural sense: it created a playbook for global contagion of mass movements. The early 2010s protests Gurri discusses all fed off each other and learned from one another; a similar example are the Gen Z protest movements of last year, which were explicitly modeled off previous successful mass protests against corruption, inequality, and high cost of living. This is both a consequence of the protests emerging online (which, save for a few exceptions, is global) but also a cause of a deeper phenomenon. In The End of History, Francis Fukuyama lays out that liberal democracy succeeds because it’s the only system of government that can sustain the human need for respect: as in most self help books, being well-regarded and well-liked by your peers is seen as the ultimate aspiration, which Fukuyama names “thymos” and associates with the Hegelian concept of Recognition. In Hegel, there’s a master and a slave: the master demands the slave recognize him as superior, and the slave that the master recognize them as an equal. For Fukuyama, globalization was an important factor because it stabilized liberal democracy as a regime: liberal democracies were more prosperous than the USSR, which made the Russians covet the standard of living of the Americans. Well, now, the high standard of living is in repressive autocracies like the United Arab Emirates and China (nevermind the gigantic legions of slaves that keep them churning along). In fact, the salience of inequality is rasied by social media, because the hidden lives of the rich and powerful are laid bare for everyone to see: conspicuous consumption, fancy vacations, debutante balls, etc. Viral videos of lifestyles funded by government corruption were a central factor in 2025 protests.

The movie that most obviously explores this entire dynamic is Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia, about two who grow up in a small town that gets ravaged by the loss of manufacturing jobs and the opioid epidemic and turn to internet conspiracy theories about aliens - in particular, that Earth’s human elites have been infiltrated by Andromedan operators. My post about the movie was mostly about this topic: why people come to believe in conspiracy theories (the world is too complicated for them to be comfortable with it) and what their social consequences are (bad). Conspiracy theories are simply a simplified explanation of reality, one with a bad guy (the “elites”) who are behind everything. That’s why conspiracies are so strong during the internet age: if the fundamental political conflict of the last decade has been over whether “the people have had enough of experts”, as it was phrased during the Brexit referendum, then conspiratorial politics are just what will emerge, nevermind one in a society so predisposed to them: the discourse over civil society and democratic decline typically tries to focus on whether there’s civic life or not, that is, whether there’s bowling leagues or the Ku Klux Klan, but not on whether the forms of civic engagement themselves promote antidemocratic participation. Social media does not eliminate social life, it in fact expands it to the point it completely smothers in person socialization; this hyperactive form of social engagement is like the German American Bund on steroids, in its political consequences. People with no friends, no hobbies, no direction in life suddenly find a community - heartwarming, if the community wasn’t built around accusing the Jews of human sacrifice or whatever.

Conclusion

Typically this type of thing ends with a call to action - what to do. But this is about movies, too, and I don’t think “watch movies” is a satisfactory recommendation. Or is it? A recent article on democracy by Zach Beauchamp on the question of fighting authoritarianism says the following “the survival of democracy depends, to an extent not fully appreciated, on perceptions and narratives. In three recent countries where a democracy survived an incumbent government bent on destroying it — Brazil, South Korea, and Poland — the belief among elites, the public, and the opposition that democracy was at stake played a critical role in motivating pushback”. The advice is pretty strong: you need someone to make an affirmative case for democracy being at risk. Hence why I think it’s so noteworthy the Oscars feature the topic so centrally, particularly in the current frontrunner to win Best Picture.

I still remember the first time I actually understood what your country not being a democracy actually meant. I was 12 years old and I went to a talk at the Anne Frank Museum in Buenos Aires held by one of Anne Frank’s classmates, Hannah Goslar. I, of course, actually knew that there had been a military dictatorship running the country, or that the Holocaust had happened, and that they were bad. But until that point I didn’t really know what it meant for like, normal people - until an old lady, who was in her eighties at that point, told everyone about how when she was twelve years old (my age, of course) she got shipped off to a concentration camp and saw her family and friends all die. The Museum’s various exhibits, which I went to see after the talk, were about the similarities of life under the Nazi regime and various military juntas.

I think the main problem isn’t really that people are uninformed about what’s going on. Once they learn about the threat, I think they rightly reject it, if it’s not too late. I think regular people are not the problem. Ortega y Gasset is tough on the masses, but it’s even tougher on the experts and the elites: they’re even stupider than the masses because they think they know things, and don’t. American democratic backsliding is entirely a case of elite complacency if not complicity: nobody thought it would be that bad, or didn’t care. It wouldn’t be the first time.

What do the present and the Middle Ages have in common? Well, for starters, they both really care about diet. Whether small financial contributions are sufficient penance for earthly sins are matters of intense debate. They’re both increasingly run by an individual ruler advised by a small council of close advisors and networks of powerfun individual. The engagement with far off lands is conducted through informal backchannels among a small group of highly connected individuals. Antisemitism. The average person believes in stupid occult bullshit: alternative medicine, magic, et cetera. The economic system is devolving into a series of all-powerful lords demanding vassalage from regular people.

So, to put it short, the present is feudal, royalist, and “peasant brained”. Or is it?

Ser Don of House Draper

Oh, but then, of course, “Common People” came out and everybody thought it was written about me, which was completely mortifying and ridiculous. I mean, I barely knew Jarvis. She came from Greece. She had a thirst for knowledge. It couldn’t have been me. I’ve never wanted to know anything

Elspeth Catton in Saltburn (2024)

One of the trendier books in discourse right now is Yanis Varoufakis’s Technofeudalism. He is also not the first person to use the term. The book has the same title as Cedric Durand’s not much older book, which Varoufakis does not seriously engage with and which I haven’t read (because I have limited time and a limited budget), but which strikes me as a lot better.1 He also didn’t cite Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity, despite it also being a very evident influence on him.

Technofeudalism is just one among the many books Varoufakis has authored, and they all usually have some sort of narrative gimmick: one of his recent ones is phrased as a long letter explaining the global financial system to his daughter. As one of my favorite podcasts put it, Varoufakis is fully in his Mafalda era, because he dedicated Technofeudalism to his father. Given how he seems to believe the personal is the source of the political, let’s dwell on the personal. Varoufakis was born in Greece and his father was some sort of steel worker who had some sort of technical education and was involved in some sort of political activism which landed him in some sort of legal trouble for which he was kind of in prison at some point. This isn’t in the book (or relevant) but his wife, Danai Stratou, is a sculptor most famous not for any of her sculptures but for being the subject of the song Common People by Pulp2. Yanis then became an economist slash activist slash public intellectual slash consumer of Marvel movies and nerd culture, and was appointed Minister of Finance during the rule of the far-left (for a bit) SYRIZA party, during which they tried to negotiate with the “troika” of the IMF, ECB, and European Commission, and which ended in a referendum on the proposed “bailout” where Varoufakis said he would resign if the “Yes” position won, “No” got nearly two thirds of the vote, and he resigned anyways. He describes himself as a “libertarian Marxist”, which does somehow come into play for the book, and which makes exactly as much sense as the terms suggest.

The core premise of Technofeudalism is simple: capitalism is over. The system of economic organization based on the private ownership of property and market exchange has been replaced by a system, named technofeudalism, described by monopoly capitalism concentrated in a handful of tech platforms who derive not profits but rents from their ownership of the means of interaction. In this vision of the world, there’s four (extremely imprecisely described, because they’re never defined) classes of people: the cloudalists, who are Big Tech both its owners and the companies they own; the cloud vassals, which are companies and people that exist in the cloud fiefs and have to pay a sort of tribute to operate; there’s the cloud proles, who are people who work for the platforms themselves in conditions of exploitation; and there’s the cloud serfs, who are the users of the platforms. Let’s take an example: Mercado Libre, Latin America’s version of Amazon and eBay combined. The company’s big profit center is its online platform, which connects buyers and sellers of different goods; it also owns multiple spinoffs like Mercado Pago (payments), Mercado Crédito (BNPLs), Mercado Play (digital rental streaming), and Mercado Shops (deliveries). The cloudalist here is Marcos Galperín, the richest man in Argentina and the CEO emeritus, who now spends his time (surprising nobody) fearmongering about Muslims on the internet. The cloud vassals are the companies (stores, internet ventures, importers, etc) forced to use Mercado Libre to sell goods, Mercado Envíos to ship them, and Mercado Pago to process the payments, all paying fees to the company. The cloud serfs are you and me, who have to buy our things on a platform we don’t own, paying service charges and handing over our data. And the cloud proles are the underpaid and overworked gig employees who handles deliveries and logistics.

There are many issues with this characterization. The first is that “monopoly capitalism” is not distinct from capitalism. It is capitalism. The system he’s describing is not necessarily different from the system that existed for the previous fifty years. The second is that there’s basically three companies that operate according to this business model: Mercado Libre and WeChat, and Amazon. All other cloudalists make their profits by packaging user data and selling it to advertisers, as Mark Zuckerberg famously told the dinosaurs of the United States Senate that one time. But the central problem with Varoufakis’s book is that he just doesn’t have a good theory of how the cloudalists coerce regular people to perform various kinds of labor for them. He explains his theory of labor by comparing it to quantum physics, breaking the first rule of explicative analogies by comparing something to a more complicated other thing: just like Einstein discovered that light was special among particles by being both a wave and a particle, which solved many theoretical issues in late 19th century physics, Marx discovered that labor had both intrinsic (use) value and a market (exchange) value, which set it apart from other commodities. If you know anything about physics, or Marxism, you might be thinking he made a grievous mistake; if you know about both, you know he made the same mistake twice: all particles are both waves and particles, and all commodities have both use and exchange value. What sets light apart is its speed (the speed of, duh, light),3 and what sets labor apart in Marxism is not that it has use and exchange value, but that it creates value. In fact, Varoufakis flubs the basic Marxist interpretation of exploitation: Karl Marx himself considered that his fundamental contribution wasn’t the labor theory of value, but the political economy critique of classical economics’ value theory. Marx solved the mystery, put forward by David Ricardo, of why labor and not capital created value; Marx states that the capitalist buys labor (the actual act of working) but purchases laboring power (the creative potential of the worker), which is where value resides. Varoufakis mentions these terms, and describes them correctly, but uses them to describe use value and exchange value. The political economy critique comes from the fact that capitalists can pay for only the labor and not the full labor power (producing surplus value) because they control the “social conditions of reproduction”, aka the means of subsistence aka wages and prices, which gives them an advantage in negotiations with their employees. Marx’s innovation is that the capitalist system gives capitalists power over workers that enables them to exploit them. Varoufakis tries to gesture at this by mentioning the “political power” of the capitalists and discussing Citizens United, but absent the fact that this distinction derives from ownership and not wealth.

In this sense, Varoufakis’s “technofeudalism” is not distinct from capitalism in any way. His analysis is too Marxist to pass mainstream muster (he could have sufficed with the concepts of monopoly and monopsony, plus institutional economics), and not Marxist enough to actually use Marxian concepts. He tries some intellectual polyphagia by bringing in Keynes, but he muddles that up with stuff about the theory of relativity that nobody understands. He tries levity by citing Marvel movies, Star Trek, and, most hysterically of all, Eurovision as the basis for the entire post technofeudal economy, but just comes off as silly. He also does a weird pivot against transgender sports - will popularism on the allowed chromosomes in Little League save the project to replace the market economy with Eurovision? Most infamously, he tries to argue that the ending of Mad Men shows the defeat of capitalism by the counterculture, when in fact it shows exactly the opposite: Don Draper utilizing New Age signifiers taken from yoga and mindfullness to sell Coca Cola, The Conquest of Cool style. But there is something to his idea, too. His central notion is that politics would be defined by a clash between a borderless kleptocratic elite of tech companies and national governments, who are increasingly subjugated to cloudalist profit seeking. Except China, where the cloudalists are dominated by the government which is also technofeudalism but a different kind, somehow.

Cloud serfs of the world, unite!

Varoufakis’s book is, in short, Abundance for people who are too socialist to understand the ending of Mad Men. He is also not the first person to use the term. The book has the same title as Cedric Durand’s 2020 book, which was at the center of a massive polemic at the New Left Review. I assume Varoufakis noped out of that one to not have his work be put under the small hadron collider that is a Perry Anderson review. I said Varoufakis does not seriously engage with Durand: he mentions the other, older Technofeudalism one time in all its 300 pages of not quite glory, to argue that Durand doesn’t believe technofeudalism as distinct from capitalism, but rather as a different phase of monopoly capitalism focused on economic rents. Which is also the case Varoufakis not so convincingly makes in his own book, provided you set aside his butchery of Marxist theory.

What was so controversial about Durand’s book? Well, everything. Technofeudalism has been a hot topic among the left for the entire decade: Varoufakis and Slavoj Žižek debated the topic on YouTube; a variety of luminaries (or what passes for them), ranging from Mariana Mazzucato to Robert Brenner, gave their two cents. One of the better polemics in the genre is Evgeny Morozov’s (author of the quite good To Save Everything Click Here), titled “Critique of the Techno-Feudal Reason”. His reasoning is pretty clear. Capitalism is changing into a more monopolized form dominated by Big Tech, which is increasingly profitable via rents and not via legitimate innovations. But that is not feudalism. Feudalism is a mode of production, aka a way of creating and distributing profits. Again, because Marx’s central contribution was the political economy of the labor theory of value, his description of capitalism is one where capital is privately owned and labor creates the profits but doesn’t receive them. Feudalism, in contrast, Morozov describes as “The surplus extraction happens quite visibly, so nobody is in denial about it. You would go and harvest and work in your field, and then somebody would come at the end of the month or year and take away whatever’s left (…) that will happen in a much more violent, explicit, visible way”. Under feudalism, thus, all factors of production are merged: peasants control labor and capital, and what they don’t control is the surplus. Beyond fact checking the Marxist theory, he also counterargues with Spotify and Google, which make their money from subscriptions and advertising without dispossessing their users of anything (their privacy, their data, their attention span, et cetera), which makes them not feudal, but capitalist - and, in fact, Morozov argues, they could be turned socialist or communist without much loss of anything, since the profit side of the business is immaterial. Shoshanna Zuboff’s concept of “surveillance capitalism” is relevant here, of Big Tech forcing everyone into “a hamster wheel, a new self-perpetuating system of exploitation” through its grip on private entertainment.

Then, he goes after Durand’s book: his central thesis is that Global North multinationals have increased their profits without increasing investment or production by exploiting their dominant market position in Global South markets to charge for rents for their intellectual property, monopoly, data extraction abilities, scalability abilities, and technology transfers (a longstanding bugbear of dependency theorists). Durand’s comparison to feudalism is as follows: you cannot separate users from their data or platforms from their externalities, such that the digital factors of production are again merged; with this set up “investment is no longer oriented towards the development of the productive forces, but to the forces of predation”. But, again, this misses the political economy component of Marxism: the capitalists still own all the capital. You, the user, do not own Google. Google owns Google. You just use it. There’s no difference in political economy between Google and the computer I’m typing this on - you pay for it and you use it, but the company that owns them is a private company whose profits are remanded back to its private shareholders. As said in a New York Magazine article by Malcolm Harris, “And that’s how you know that this is still capitalism”. Durand, it should be noted, defends himself, but not quite well: he doesn’t manage to contest Morozov’s description of capitalism and he doesn’t manage to establish a clearer one, instead falling back on the fact that Big Tech’s rents, fees, and monopolies are just like the feudal lords’ rents, levies, and monopolies. His argument, basically, is that the logic of production is replaced by the logic of predation, on “digital serfs” as sitting ducks waiting to be robbed blind by the cloudalists - without acknowledging the obvious, that predation occurs under capitalism as well (nobody outside the fringes of libertarian theory would deny that unfair things have ever happened in the context of a market exchange).

I think that Morozov gets one thing right: the system Varoufakis, Durand, and the gang are describing is not significantly different in any way to capitalism. But I think Morozov is wrong about the fundamental question of what capitalism is. The traditional Marxist interpretation of feudalism is the one he cites: of unity between the factors of production. But this begs the question, then why did the factors stop being together? Well, peasants were disowned of their land and capital through the privatization of the commons through the Acts of Enclosure, which is why Britain was the first ever capitalist society. But why did that happen? You can’t say “for profit” because profit is a capitalist concept. You cannot explain a phenomenon with the consequences of that phenomenon. Unless you assume some sort of telos to human history, you need a reason for why capitalism itself emerged to separate workers from their means of production, because “to profit” is something that motivates people to act once capitalism already exists. This is also why commerce cannot explain the emergence of capitalism (without denying it a role), and agriculture can - also why the Netherlands weren’t really capitalist, and England was. The classic book making this case is Ellen Meiksins Wood’s The Origins of Capitalism (with a semicolon and a long title I can’t remember); fundamentally, Wood argues, you cannot understand capitalism from the factors of production but rather have to move to the social relations of production - that is, into “Political Marxism”, where economic and political power were combined. The power of the lords, granted by the King directly or through inheritance, was both political and economic; all three major economic classes (the clergy, the nobility, and everyone else) were represented in all major early parliaments, be it the the estates general of France or the cortes generales of Spain. The separation of political and economic power after the Glorious Revolution led to the emergence of landless peasants and landed entrepreneurs, who adopted the “improvement” ideology of Francis Bacon and John Locke and privatized the Commons under the notion that only privately owned land could be improved. This led to the emergence of land and labor markets, which led to economic accumulation that eventually led to the Industrial Revolution. This account is completely indistinguishable from the liberal institutionalism of the last two Nobel Prizes in Economics, particularly Joel Mokyr’s explanation in The Culture of Growth. Morozov tries to debunk it by stating that Wood never explains the role of capitalism in politics and the role of democracy in capitalism, if the two are formally separate under capitalism, except she does, for instance, in explaining the differences between the French and English Enlightenment, but most notably in her book subtly and ambiguously titled Democracy Against Capitalism: the formal separation of the two, without an actual de facto separation, has led to extreme tensions within capitalism that make it unsustainable as a mode of production. In fact, the second best chapter of the book (after the one on Ancient Greece) is about how The Founding Fathers of the United States explicitly intended for their Constitution to protect the private ownership of property and capitalism writ large from democracy, borrowing from the notions of sovereignty and production of the Ancient Greeks (the Greece chapter is by far the best in the book and makes the extremely tedious first half worth it entirely).

Among the extremely repetitive discussions of E.P. Thompson, G.A. Cohen, M. I. Finley, J.S Mill, and some people without initials in their name like Aristotle, Nancy Fraser, Karl Marx, and Max Weber, Wood makes time for an author she engages with extensively in both Democracy Against Capitalism and Origins of Capitalism: Karl Polanyi. Polanyi, a Vienna-born Hungarian economist best known for his 1944 book The Great Transformation as well as from a New York Times cartoon, wrote about the role of capitalism and “society”: the economy and the market sphere used to be “embedded” into the broader sphere of society, civil society, and politics, where land, labor, and money weren’t commodities to be traded according to supply and demand. Incorrectly, he attributes the rise of capitalism to the expansion of trade, thus engaging in a teleologically-driven contradiction - how can there be, to quote Adorno, no right life in a wrong world, when the world is actually right? Capitalism, anyways, resulted in the “demolition of society” since, to quote an excellent review by fellow Substack blogger Angus Bylsma, “Humans feel they have a right to shelter, substance and work regardless of whether the market decides they do and will not go down without a fight. The market, on the other hand, only recognises one right: private property.” This created a fundamental, and extremely important, tension between, well, democracy and capitalism: market forces penetrated deeper and deeper into human life at the same time as people sought further and further protection from its vice grip (the “double movement”), which created widespread social confrontation. According to Polanyi, this tension was terminal: capitalism could not survive until the market was completely unfettered from the power of the people, and democracy would not survive if capitalism was left run amok. The history of capitalism, to Polanyi, was the history of those resiting its advance: unions, farmers, industrialists, Luddites, Cartists, socialists. This tension, according to his further work, could only be resolved in one of two ways: through socialism, by letting democracy dominate markets entirely, or through fascism, by letting the market take over the state in its entirely.

Reading Polanyi, one is struck by two things: first, that he’s super Christian. And second, and more importantly, that he is extremely concerned about fascism as the central problem of “our time”, that is, his time of 1944. The Great Transformation does not expand much his musings other that it’s some sort of resolution of the internal tensions of democratic capitalism and that it’s bad because it goes against the teachings of our lord Jesus Christ, but his further work (compiled in a book I read called The Nature of Fascism, which is extremely repetitive - I would recommend downloading The Essence of Fascism from the Karl Polanyi Digital Archive) does. According to Polanyi, fascism aims to resolve the conflict between society and markets by subordinating all of society to the economic system. This happens through the destruction of parliamentary democracy and political parties, as well as civic institutions like churches and unions, and their replacement with corporativist bodies that, in principle, equate capital and labor, but given the inherent disparities between wealthy capitalists and poor workers (particularly in Great Depression conditions), ends up with a system of a “dictatorship of the capitalist”. By equating workers and bosses through their work functions, fascism takes as natural (biological) inequality, a pillar of fascist ideology, and eliminates the need for democratic pluralism. Fascism aims to solve the embededdness of capitalism in a broader society that wants to protect itself from the market by combining the two into one: establishing the absolute dominance of capital, big and small, over labor, and enshrining this dominance into formal political processes. The party, the state, the big conglomerates, the church, and unions all become one.

Yanis Varoufakis distinguishes feudalism and capitalism by the following: “Under feudalism, rent was easy enough to grasp. Courtesy of some accident of birth, or royal decree, the feudal lord obtained the deeds to a plot of land which empowered him to extract part of the harvest produced by the peasants who had been born and raised on that land.” He mentions the most important part without even noticing - that the power of the lords came from royal decree. Their economic power was backed not by the market, not by their wealth, but by the power of the state. In the age of DOGE, Palantir, and Claude, it is evident that the tech companies are trying to take over the state and derive their economic power therefrom. My theory of the present is simple: what they call technofeudalism is, in fact, fascism.

The technocratic rejection of politics as such

There’s two groups of people who believe right wing tech companies are technofeudal: Marxists who don’t know anything about Marxism, and the tech companies’s own owners and court philosophers (to everyone else, their court jesters). In this sense, fascism is kind of like feudalism “turned on its head”, to borrow a term used to describe Marx: feudalism emerged from the combination of economic and political power in the terms of the political power. Feudal lords had power over their vassals and serfs because of the “accident of their birth or decree of the king” granting them not just the right of exploitation, but the right of enforcement. The feudal rites and ceremonies were merged with civil society as well: the Church was not only the spiritual leader of medieval life, but a feudal lord administering a vast network of abbeys and monasteries (as well as a sovereign of the Papal States), and the participation of the Church was vital in political life as well. Under “techno feudalism”, instead, economic power becomes political power; the takeover of the state becomes the only way for the reactionary patrons of big single-owner capital to preserve their political and cultural authority. This also translates into a widespread takeover of civil society: universities, media, entertainment, et cetera. Honestly if that doesn’t ring a bell then I don’t know, turn on the news for five minutes.

Nowhere is this merger more present than in the thinking of one man: the Dark Enlightenment philosopher and leading Silicon Valley thinker Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin is a pale imitation of libertarian-identifying fascist Hans Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed, which alongside James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution originated most of Yarvin’s ideas: the belief in a monarchy as the natural organization of society, comparing it to the way companies are run; the belief in a “Cathedral” of nonprofits, schools, universities, media, and academics brainwashing the masses; the endorsement of private cities and microstates as an alternative to mass democracy; even the belief that homeless, and the mentally ill need to be turned into “biodiesel”, which he considers the humane alternative to genocide, has a mirror in Hoppe’s “physical removal”, which he actually takes one step further and expands to the poor, egalitarians, progressives, and homosexuals. Hoppe and Yarvin were introduced to one another at a get together hosted by Peter Thiel, who’s friends with the latter.

Look no further than the big man of the tech right himself: Elon Musk. Musk is, at this point, indubitably a fascist; his political imagination is centered on an existential struggle between races, where White nations are being internally undermined by a hostile other composed of rootless cosmopolitans importing foreign hordes to diminish the purity of the blood and impose libertine Marxism as the law of the land. He also has his title at one of his octillion companies be “TechnoKing”, which is so insanely on the nose that none of the texts I’ve mentioned ever brings it up. But Musk’s politics are not necessarily technofascist; back in 2018, it was common to hear him compared to Henry Ford as a pioneer of the electric vehicle; eight years later, the wisdom of comparing an antisemitic Nazi sympathizer to the world’s richest man is apparent. This also brings up a second extremely awkward fact, which is that Yanis Varoufakis does not consider Elon Musk a cloudalist, since he doesn’t actually own an “Everything App”. But he is evidently The tech CEO; everyone else followed his lead in unbanning Donald Trump; everyone else followed his lead embracing reaction; everyone else followed their lead in decimating their staff counts and going Genghis Khan on content moderation; everyone else followed him from San Francisco to Texas; everyone else followed his lead in enmeshing themselves into the security state. DOGE was the pinnacle of the privatization of the US government: the world’s wealthiest man bought the 2024 presidential election, bought himself a good chunk of the job of president, hollowed out the agencies, and demolished what he considers the cornerstone of islamoleftist subversion, USAID, an action that has left behind a six figure death toll of those Elon considers barbarian orcs raping and pillaging the shire.

Elon is obviously not the only one: take Peter Thiel. Thiel is, by far, the most intellectually influential of the Big Tech set; he is also the second most politically influential, after Elon Musk. Thiel, through his companies like Palantir, exercises enormous influence over the US government through personnel and through contracts, such as the ones to centralize Social Security information and the more controversial ones with ICE. He also exercises significant authority elsewhere, with extensive contracts with Rheinmetall in Germany, the NHS and the Ministry of Defence in the UK, not to mention his work with and financing of Vice President JD Vance. Thiel’s politics are also not just reactionary, but totalitarian: in 2009 he was quoted as saying democracy and freedom (economic freedom, that is) were incompatible after women, the poor, and minorities were given the vote, a statement that was oddly present in his correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein. In his notorious public records, he has stated a belief in a world ruled by a small technocratic cabal with an iron fist that rejects pluralism, egalitarianism, and redistribution, enforced by the security state and the secret police at a global scale. Thiel is a venture capitalist who cut his teeth setting up PayPal alongside other major tech founders like Elon Musk and Joe Lonsdale. Lonsdale is, himself, a weird character, converting to the cause of reaction after facing rape accusations from a Stanford student (later dismissed). He was recently quoted as having caused the University of Austin meltdown by taking over in order to “purge” the conservative arts college of “communists”, who he believed had infiltrated all US institutions; he also publicly said that “Palantir was founded to kill communists”, a term he describes so broadly even his leftmost anti-woke employees at UATX qualify. That’s without the Ellison family of Oracle purchasing multiple media companies to turn them into right wing propaganda tools, Jeff Bezos expanding his print media empire to Conde Nast shortly before hollowing out the Washington Post, or anything of the pathetic saga of Mark Zuckerberg attempting to appear as cool by parroting antiwoke pablum. Marc Andreessen, the founding father of “dark Abundance”, was called the closest thing you can be called to a fascist without saying it by Ezra Klein: a reactionary modernist. Durand and Morozov held a debate at Jacobin on how Big Tech infilitrated the state. Two big examples of tech-right ideology, the (disastrous) “network state” movement of micronations and charter cities, and the “Technological Republic” of Palantir, are in some sense explicitly technofeudal: proposing a backwards type of rule with a forwards means of production, to get kind of Marxist with it.

In this sense, fascism operates in two distinct dimensions: the first is to put the entirety of civil society under the aegis of the state, the entire state under the control of the party, and the entire party under the power of a single providential leader. The problem is that so far there is no intellectual content for fascism. Anything can be fascism if it’s just “very rich people take over civic institutions to influence the government”. The Mellon Foundation could be fascist, for instance. Wokeness could be fascist. What is, then, the ideological content of fascism? In his 1995 essay Ur Fascism, Umberto Eco attempts a “demarcation criterion” for fascism: drawing a line between parties that are fascist, are adjacent to fascism,are adjacent to fascist adjacent parties and are just adjacent to parties adjacent to parties adjacent to fascism. The first criterion is the “cult of tradition”, understood very broadly and through vague signifiers of the national past, as well as a rejection of modernity - not a rejection of modern technology, but of modern values: pluralism, democracy, egalitarianism, feminism. Fascism’s war on the Enlightenment (see previous sentence) is manifested in a cult of action and a rejection of intellectualism and reflection, and, thus of dissent and discourse. Fascism also extends this fear of difference and dissent everywhere: racism, class resentments, nationalism, xenophobia, antisemitism. Combining the cult of action with an opposition to measured thinking and an almost paranoid feeling of dispossession and persecution by those different than “us” results in violence and eventually war, which translates to sexual matters: sexual violence, machismo and the cult of virility, the subjugation of women. To keep this insane concoction going, fascism has to rely on “aristo populism”: the citizens are the best of the world, the members of the party are the best of the citizens, etc. This means that there is an inherent hierarchy to humanity, and as such, it is impossible to speak of democracy as a valid system of government: the Common Will has to be expressed only as the unanimous backing of a Man of Providence (or men of providence) who will lead the nation to greatness.

There can be no dissent - none in the unions, none in the parliament, none in the universities, none in the media, and none in the arts. This also means that fascism is completely incompatible with democratic politics: pluralism and peaceful alternance in power are simply not acceptable. But the implications for the economy are not clear: what is the fascist belief on private property? The fact that fascism relies on consistent lying and typically runs on a program of agrarian reform and curbing finance, only to not do any of that, complicates the picture. Sociologist Nicos Poulantzas explains in his (generally and otherwise very bad) book Fascism and Dictatorship that, in accordance with Eco, fascism is led by the humilliated petit burgeoisie, in an alliance with an increasingly reactionary capitalist class as part of a counteroffensive against labor. In the end, the biggest capitalists and the biggest landowners win out, because their scale of production is just more important to the total war inherent to fascism. But, as Polanyi explains, the needs of society usually surpass the needs of its constituent classes; the capitalist class also fought, and lost, with labor extensively for the preceding two centuries. For Poulantzas, borrowing from Gramsci, a second element needed is a complete crisis of hegemony on both the left and the right: basically, conservatives stop believing in conservatism, and liberals and leftists stop believing in liberalism and leftism. When there’s a right that no longer has anything it wishes to conserve, and a left that no longer seems to liberate anyone, coinciding with major economic upheaval, that’s when pseudo-leftist reactionary politics of restoring national pride through despotism, violence, and interpersonal subjugation emerges. The merger of the state, civil society, and the economy in a bizarre cult of personality, reaction, and war are the only way for an internally incoherent project to survive.

My criticism of Poulantzas, who I cited anyways, is pretty straightforward: like all class-based accounts of fascism, it stumbles with the fact that the rise of fascism is largely an ideological tide sweeping over society - Polanyi says that the interests of society usually prevail over the interests of individual classes, and he is largely correct: powerful capitalists and landowners thought they could control Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini, but instead were controlled themselves. Clara Mattei’s The Capital Order has the core problem of most class-based accounts of fascism: Mattei, a tremendously gifted heterodox economic historian (her book has been described as “Marxist Marxist” to me), establishes the relationship between Italy’s free market economic establishment, the wealthiest elites, and Benito Mussolini; in the 20s, his reputation was a mix between Javier Milei and Nayib Bukele. However, the most common critique is that Mattei never really determines whether the economists were simply doing the bidding of the oligarchy, or whether they actually were ideologically persuaded - that is, whether John Maynard Keynes’s famous quote of “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist” held true in Italy. Introducing a basic smidgeon of liberalism clears a lot of questions up: fascists made a persuasive pitch to free market supporters around breaking the back of labor by giving the wealthy de facto power in a de jure corporativist regime, and they had to pay a steep price: conscription into the total war economy of the empire to last a thousand years. In fact, again, the basic institutionalist economics of Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson explain basically everything: their model of democracy includes elites opposed to political liberalization and economic egalitarianism, and if the elites hold sufficient ability to repress the masses, they will not permit either to emerge. Democracy is a compromise when faced with socialism; however, the compromise can easily turn the other way too.

The recent fight between Anthropic and the Department of Defense (not using their cringe ass tryhard name) is a perfect example: the US government wants AI companies to commit to enforcing mass surveillance and drone warfare against American citizens in violation of previous contracts; Anthropic, and recently OpenAI, refuse to commit to it. The dynamic features everything: new technologies, a clash between liberalism and the literal Department of War, authoritarianism, the rule of law, but most importantly, growing private sector enmeshment in government powers. Anthropic is in a dominant yet vulnerable position because it has basically a monopoly on certain types of government AI contracts; this grants them an ability to say no to their oh-so-democratic AI systems being employed in terms they do not agree with, but also it creates a vulnerability for their revenue streams - it can cut them out of major chunks of the industry to fall on the bad side of the Trump administration. To quote Henry Farrell on this: “To understand this, you need to weave four skeins of thought together. First, that of Marion Fourcade and various of her co-authors, who have documented how private sector entities now dominate data gathering and supply, so that the state has become increasingly dependent on them. Second, that of Alondra Nelson, who explains how the Trump approach to AI is better understood as regulation based on arbitrary rule than deregulation. Third, Nikhil Kalyanpur, on how dangerous full oligarchy can be for oligarchs. And fourth, my own sort-of-addendum, which concerns what Democrats might do should they return to power.” Fundamentally, the merger between private and government power creates a new type of governing dynamic, where the two clash constantly not through the democratic and republican process but through palatial intrigue and economic weaponization. Dario Amodei depends on Pete Hegseth as much as Hegseth needs Amodei’s systems to do whatever the sober part of his job is.

Having accounted for the basic role of ideology, then, there’s, roughly speaking, two kinds of fascism based on their combination of the previously mentioned elements making it up ideologically. The first focuses on the traditionalist part: it’s the “volkisch” and romantic kind of fascism, of the likes of Othmar Spann, that emphasizes the organic unity of the nation with its natural living space and its rejection of an unnatural urban and industrial lifestyle (associated with debauchery, depravity, and, of course, The Jew). The other kind, more relevant to technofeudalism, is about the Creative Power of Great Men, who are just genetically superior to all others and belong on top of a natural hierarchy given their grand talents for technological creation. The debauched egalitarian culture of Judeoliberalism only holds them back. Both types are… obviously not compatible. Moving people out of cities and keeping them in cities under the control of Big Capital are not simultaneously feasible. Redistributing land to family farms and abolishing finance while preserving agricultural productivity is not feasible. Technofeudalism very self evidently corresponds with the “futurist” type of fascism, the one espoused by the German industrial establishment and that appealed to Henry Ford. At the same time, the very notion of technofeudalism is fascist, in the strictest academic sense: the 1991 book The Nature of Fascism by Robert Griffin defines it as palingenetic ultranationalism. The second part of this definition is obvious. The first is not: palingenesis means rebirth or renewal, and refers to religious and spiritual doctrines where rebirth happens in cycles. Palingenesis, in this context, means the rebirth of the nation through going back to its glorious past. Thus, palingenetic ultranationalism can be best summed up with the phrase “Make (insert country) Great Again”. And technofeudalism is simply going forward by going back: reorganizing the state by the principles of the Middle Ages, where power and money are the exact same thing and have the exact same boundaries (none), to liberate the creative powers of the captains of industry. Sadly, they fail to realize that their creative powers are only as free as the rest of the people.

The King and I

The clearest association with fascism is war: it’s associated with it in the historic record, for obvious reasons, and ideologically. As mentioned above, fascism is inherently a cult of action, virility, violence, irrationalism, nationalism, and domination; thus, it is obvious that military action would satiate all these needs simultaneously. It also needs to marshal incredible amounts of physical resources: in order to keep a balance between capital and labor, it must expand production with full employment but without creative destruction - which implies an expansion of the nation’s physical footprint. All three Axis powers, as well as minor participants like Hungary’s fascist regime, had some sort of territorial target they sought to conquer: Germany’s Lebensraum, Italy’s spazio vitale, and Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. This was about restoring national pride and historic boundaries, yes, and about expanding the nation’s resources - but also about being able to keep providing all relevant constituencies with more money and jobs.

One of the more interesting areas of medievalist revival is international relations. Traditional diplomacy, carried out through extensive engagement between professional diplomats representing equal and sovereign states, is over. The US State Department has been completely carved out of policymaking. Political scientist Seva Gunitsky (whose Substack, Hegemon, I highly recommend) says that the “personalist world order” constitutes a world of Omnipotent Toddlers: personalist, capricious rulers governing according to their whims, personalities, and interests. This is relatively unusual in the modern world: even Latin American juntas ran the government, well, as a junta. Trump, Putin, and Xi are not the US Government, the Politburo, and the Party Congress; they are the individual rulers. Their governments are more like a royal court, where personal proximity to the top dog matters more than official titles. Trump’s official envoy to Russia and Ukraine isn’t the Secretary of State, an ambassador, or even a CEA officer; it’s Steve Witkoff, a special envoy to the Middle East who nevertheless is one of America’s most powerful diplomats - and a powerful real estate mogul. The personalist world order, thus, is driven by both personal loyalty and personal interest; Big Tech asks for its own seat at the table and to cut its own bargains. Let’s take the example of the US’s recent abduction (kidnapping?) of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Trump didn’t pursue an agenda of regime change. He pursued an agenda of leadership change. Per exiled Venezuelan journalist (and former Chávez minister) Andrés Izarra: “The new President in charge of Venezuela is where she is because Trump put her there. (…) Trump’s triumph was taking out Maduro off the driver’s seat with the car still running and taking his place (….) [Trump] didn’t destroy the chavista apparatus to build something new. He captured it and put it to work for himself. It’s the perfect regime change. Not because it’s morally acceptable or legally justifiable, but because it fulfills the goal: controlling a country without taking on the costs…”. Gunitsky brings up two competing but complementary terms to explain this phenomenon: neo feudalism and neo royalism; the former focuses on the economic angle, and the latter, on the institutional one.

Neo royalism was introduced by political scientists Stacie Goddard and Abraham Newman, who describe “neo royalism”, as a “global system dominated by rivalries between a small group of leaders and allied “hyper-elites,” all looking to gain wealth or status”. Trump’s moves in Venezuela further American interests, but his moves about Greenland and Canada and India hinder them. Instead, they advance the interests of a small group of people: a series of “clique interests” grasping at a variety of resources - oil, minerals, whatever. Newman says “This isn’t mainline capitalism. This isn’t the heads of, I don’t know, Costco, Target, Walmart. These are more a group of actors who see a moment to create oligopolistic power.”, and he cites Big Tech as a central actor in this group. The central aspects of this dynamic are the performance of strength and dominance, and the preponderance of a series of large economic interests in the division of the spoils of the world. Negotiations between the US and Russia surrounding Ukraine have also followed a similar pattern, happening through informal back channels mostly surrounding wealthy businessmen. Very famously Jeffrey Epstein was a back channel with the Russians, as well as with the Israelis. Tariffs and export controls are the neo-royal tool: they are centrally about dominance and back channel deals. Trump’s strategy is chaos mode: a foreign policy running on “vibes and private interests”, where the national interest takes a back seat to Big Tech, Big Oil, and the Miami real estate lobby. Example: the Arctic. Cool cool cool cool cool.

The other explanation for this dynamic is the “neomedieval” thesis (we’re getting very creative with the naming here), most thoroughly presented in a 2023 paper by RAND Corporation researchers. Neo medievalism describes US-China competition as being characterized by a world where “the centralized nation-state is in steep decline”, “growth has slowed and become imbalanced”, “nonstate threats (…) could outpace rival militaries as security concerns” and “Preindustrial aspects of warfare have reemerged”, most notably “the privatization of warfare” and “the prominence of intrastate conflict”. This is neomedieval because it targets the very foundation of the modern nation state: its monopoly on the use of force on territorially defined boundaries. This system dates back to the 17th and 18th centuries and the Treaty of Westphalia; before that, government authority was frequently contested by internal actors (dukes, barons, the Church) who were backed by foreign powers. It tried to end the Eight Years War (a war between Spain and the Netherlands about the Protestant Reformation and taxes that dragged all of Europe into it) and the Thirty Years War (which was about niche Holy Roman Empire stuff I don’t care to understand plus the Reformation plus trade), and established the legal principle that the foremost authority on international relations was the state - not the King, not the nobility, not the Church, but the state. The neomedieval idea is not very recent; as back as the 1990s, influential scholars described the possibility of a fractured world rife with civil wars, instability, and economic deterritorialization becoming pre-Westphalian, such as an influential 1994 piece by Robert Kaplan. The US China rivalry takes place in such a context: globalized and economically interconnected economies where “The scale and complexity of technology and the emergence of electronically integrated global networks render geographic borders and, more fundamentally, the basic construct of territorial sovereignty problematic”per business professor Stephen Kobrin, where inequalities between regular citizens and the rich and powerful are gargantuan, and where domestic divisions matter more than national allegiance. In particular, Kobrin notes, three pillars of even the “neoliberal” world order are crumbling: well defined geographic spaces and borders, clear allegiances, loyalties, and authorities, a transnational elite disconnected from their fellow citizens, blurred lines between private and public property, and supranational centralization without unified national or multinational beliefs. In short, it’s a mess.

In more technofeudal terms, one of the major influences on Silicon Valley thought was James Burnham: his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution is largely about the clash between individual Great Men of Industry and government bureaucracy, and how Communism, Fascism, and Keynesian Liberalism were all actually just branches of “managerialism”, an ideology meant to put white collar workers in charge of the entire economy. Burnham’s solution was for the very rich to stage a takeover of both the right and the left and to steer them away from challenging their economic interests and towards less important issues. This is, by the way, identical to Curtis Yarvin’s theory of RAGE and of The Cathedral. But Burnham also had a foreign policy angle: he believed each of the great managerial regimes (America, Russia, and Germany) would develop their own spheres of influence after an Axis victory in World War Two (oof), that these spheres would be basically protection rackets justifying resource extraction, and that they would deal with each other in a perpetual rivalry as follows: “This new order would be governed not by international law but by personal dealings among the great powers, who would control the sovereignty of weaker states and suspend it as they wished”. Instead of a world of multilateralism and formal negotiations between states, this would be a world ruled by regimes where diplomacy was interpersonal and transactional. Burnham’s book was so influential, in fact, that a major literary classic was written in large part to rebuke him: George Orwell’s 1984.

People who read my post from two weeks ago about “the West” can tell what’s coming: all of this is identical to the beliefs of the most prominent theorist of fascist international relations, Carl Schmitt. In fact, Schmitt was almost dragged to the no-shit-you-will-get-hanged Nuremberg trials not because of Political Theology or The Concept of the Political, but for Land And Sea, a treaty about the history of globalization. Land and Sea is a crazy book to read: if you don’t know much about Schmitt, you can tell he’s evil (he has an obsession with Disraeli that’s hard to hide even without the edits Schmitt made to tone down the overt antisemitism), but it’s just a boring book about ships and whaling. Well, that’s because in an insufferable step, Schmitt hid the true meaning behind an obnoxious esoterical register for “persecuted philosophers” or whatever: the book is mostly about the clash between the rational state and nationalism. According to Max Weber, the transition to a modern state relies on transferring the principle of legitimacy from charisma and religion to bureaucracy: the ability of impersonal bodies created by the rational organization of skilled labor to produce societally desired outcomes. Schmitt considered this form of organization inferior, and thought that the charisma of the Man of Providence would overcome: mirroring his critique of liberalism, bureaucracy simply could not organize itself to fight an army of true fanatics effectively. This was manifested in regimes based on the Great Nations, which would need their own spheres of influence (called Grossbaum, the Great Space) as determined by basic economic, securities, and logistical realities. Schmitt’s perfect example of a Grossbaum was the Monroe Doctrine’s continental claim on American sovereignty; Latin America formed an organic whole with the United States, and thus foreign intervention would have introduced unnatural bodies into the organism. This last doctrine was what got Schmitt in trouble: if he hadn’t proposed it nearly a decade into the Third Reich’s territorial expansion, he’d have been found guilty of incitement of war, and received the treatment of Julius Streicher.

So we have a world order run by a clash between personal interaction and impersonal bureaucratic institutions where Great Men each aspire to lead a Great Power, with a corresponding sphere of influence over which they have absolute control, plus a coterie of courtiers and captains of industry vying for power and conducting individual diplomacy with the power of a nation state each, all of which is parallel with the vision of a major influence on the technofeudal nomos and the most important Nazi jurist’s position on international relations. What they call neo royal and neo feudal diplomacy, which are themselves the international manifestation of technofeudalism are, like their parent phenomenon, just good ole’ fascism. Neat.

Peasant mindset and fascism

A recent article by Jerusalem Demsas describes the MAGA faithful as having a “peasant logic”: they are animated by a zero-sum mindset, where “If you think every extension of opportunity to one group necessarily hurts another, you’ll oppose immigration, trade, new housing, and eventually basic rights for anyone who isn’t already inside the circle. Eventually you get a politics of permanent siege, where every reform is framed as an attack on “heritage” Americans. That doesn’t just leave the country poorer; it makes it almost impossible to sustain a liberal society where people believe rights and prosperity can expand rather than being rationed.”

This is largely coincides with my own interpretation of modern politics: the significant divergence between the labor market for blue collar and white collar labor (caused by trade, automation, and deindustrialization) created the “Brahmin left and merchant right” dynamic, where wealthy and educated “BoBo” voters are open minded and progressive while declining rust belt types are closed-minded and reactionary. This is channeled through the relationship between three core values: the zero sum mindset, as mentioned above, as well as low social trust (as in, confidence in other people and institutions, as well as participation in political and civic life), and moral particularism, as in, basically close and small mindedness and nativism. This means that culture war issues are downstream of macroeconomic trends, since the fundamental drivers of political dynamics are the relative economic positions of various types of labor and the impact this has in their political consciousness. In detail, lower social trust also impacts future values and attitudes towards government, and trust is broadly correlated with socially liberal and economically left wing beliefs. This is due to the fact that more individualistic and more particularist moral values are linked with Trump vote shares. Research finds that democracies can remain successful as long as they result in economic growth, quality public services, and stability, so a generalized authoritarian turn in response to economic conditions should not surprise.Poor economic performance is also linked with lower political trust and more political upheaval. In general, weak, corrupt, politically polarized democracies are likely to underperform economically and to have significant democratic backsliding.

The relationship between authoritarianism and various “peasant mindset” ideas is pretty straightforward: fascism is the ideology of morally particularist, zero-sum, low social trust individuals. Overall, how all of this figures into the Fascism Question is quite obvious: those left behind by the grand takeoff of global capitalism and crushed by the 2008 financial crisis developed values centered around hating foreigners, demanding strength, and worshipping masculinity, and without much of an appreciation for democratic norms. What kind of politics fit into that mold? None other than the old f word itself. One author working on this topic is German sociologist Sieghard Neckel, who is quoted by Morozov on his NLR piece as “Creatively fusing Marxist and non-Marxist perspectives, Neckel argues that we may be witnessing the emergence of ‘a modern capitalism without bourgeois structures’, and that their very absence might be ‘a cultural precondition for the triumphal march of capitalism in the 21st century.’ Neoliberal modernization is thus to be read as neither progressive nor regressive, but rather as paradoxical. For Neckel, refeudalization does not lead back to the past, but refers instead to ‘a social dynamic of the present, in which modernization takes the form of a rejection of the maxims of a bourgeois social order.“

By refeudalization, Morozov isn’t referring to technofeudalism per se, but to a different thing altogether: Jurgen Habermas’s concept of refeudalization of the public sphere. Neckel has quoted this concept fairly often, alluding to the growing gap in power and resources between rich and poor as a source of quasi feudal relationships. Habermasian thought is really complex, in no small part thanks to Habermas being still alive, nearly 100 years old, and still putting out new work. His famous debate on theology with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later elected Pope Benedict XVI) happened in 2005, when Habermas was already a spry 76 years old. Anyways, a key distinction for Habermas (as introduced to me from the work of this one urban planning professor who uses Habermasian thought to explain urban affairs) is between the sphere of formal politics (parties, lobbying, campaigns, endorsements) and between the public sphere, which is a group of people who have a right of free association and a right to freely communicate and express themselves. Under feudalism, the only thing approaching a public sphere was the nobility, because everyone else had little de jure right to appeal to the government and no de facto power to make themselves heard; on the contrary, under modern liberal democratic capitalism, a public sphere is possible - the coffee shops and salons of 18th and 19th century Europe, for instance. This notion has a lot of critics: for instance, that it was a bourgeoisie endeavor, a sort of debate society for those with a higher education, excluding less elite forms of civic engagement like churches or labor unions. For Habermas, refeudalization refers to a world where “Large organizations strive for political compromises with the state and with each other, excluding the public sphere whenever possible.”, i.e., So, basically neo-royalism for domestic politics. In a bit more detail, quoting the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Habermas sees the modern public sphere as, in many ways, the victim of its own success. As it expanded far beyond its original basis of educated male property-owners, material inequalities could no longer be set aside, but rather became the subject of public debate. And this debate was no longer a matter of rational-critical analysis of state action by the assembled public, but of negotiation between interest groups which bypass public reason. Instead of the approximation of society to the ideal type, what emerged was an impoverished pseudo-public sphere, lacking its original capacity for rational-critical discourse, easily manipulated by states, corporations, and interest groups using the techniques of “public relations”. Its role now, as in the feudal era, is to acclaim decisions which have already been made.” Habermas later took distance from the concept of refeudalization, rebranding it to the “colonization of the life world”, but the general substance of his core claim is the same: vast material inequalities (at least in the present, but not in his time of 1962) produced a warped and deformed public sphere where the priorities of the rich and powerful shaped public discourse in their favor - Jeff Bezos decides the editorial line of the Washington Post, news coverage follows. Which is almost exactly what’s happening - for instance, with social media.

One of the hottest debates in contemporary fascism discourse is the “civil society question”, that is, whether fascism requires a strong or a weak civil society. The first question is obvious what does civil society mean. It’s basically the Jurgen Habermas “public sphere”, but with some nuanced differences. Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, Nicos Poulantzas, and some liberal thinkers like Norberto Bobbio, saw civil society as the battlefield of political action: NGOs, churches, museums, etc that reflected the ideological underpinning of society given the relative power of political blocks. On the contrary, more traditional liberal thought (David Hume, Adam Ferguson) sees civil society as a way of translating deep-seated political differences, such as religion or how much power the Crown should have, away from war and towards discursive processes. In particular, Henry Farrell cites philosopher slash anthropologist Ernest Gellner, who saw it as part of liberalism’s rise during the French and English wars between Catholics and various factions of Protestants: quoth Farrell “The result was not just that religious and doctrinal disagreements became matters of private conscience and peaceful social activity. It was the creation of a new kind of society in which coercive force was centralized in the state, but was counterbalanced by economic and social pluralism. State power only went so far. People could, within reasonably broad parameters, choose who they wanted to be, and what they wanted to do.” such that, in Gellner’s words “Civil Society is a cluster of institutions and associations strong enough to prevent tyranny, but which are, none the less, entered and left freely, rather than imposed by birth or sustained by awesome ritual”. But what does this have to do with fascism? The “weak civil society” thesis is pretty simple: to quote sociologist Dylan Riley, “Fascist parties required strong civil societies. They had memberships and secretaries and local branches and people marching in the streets and engaging in paramilitary activities against the left”; the contrary thesis, as laid out by blogger John Ganz, is that “… people are atomized, lonely, and vulnerable to mass movements that can take advantage of this atomization and loneliness, and, without all these intermediary institutions, a nation can easily be taken over by the state”. I think the relationship is fairly complex - as I’ve written a bit ago, the empirics are kind of in favor of both interpretations (Trump’s vote share was highest in places that had dense civil society networks but stopped having them, and which kind mattered a lot), and the logic works both ways - there’s density of good civil society groups that help people come together, and there’s also the equivalent of those internet groups that promote terrorism. The internet is basically the new civil society, especially post COVID, and it’s undoubtedly “refeudalized” now, owned by billionaire supporters of various reactionary totalitarian regimes.

Either way, I think the idea that fascism seeks to take over civil society and subjugate it is self evident. It’s basically the only thing that Ganz and Riley, who butt heads about the topic frequently, agree about. In particular, and going back to Habermas, he considered that the core of fascism relied on the difference between the political and public spheres: the political sphere was run by “instrumental rationality”, or the purposeful connection between available means and desired ends, while the public sphere was run by “discursive rationality”, or, basically, The Discourse. Discursive rationality is a mechanism for producing information about society, such that the principles of mechanism design economics can apply, and as such it requires conditions that any microeconomist can recognize: that all participants are able to take part if they desire to, and that all participants are truthful about their preferences. On the contrary, instrumental rationality does not fulfill these conditions: it is against your interest to state uncomfortable facts for those in power, because you alienate them against furthering your factional goals - hence why I find the whole “academics shouldn’t voice political opinions” thing so distasteful. For Habermas, the merger of instrumental and discursive rationality was the central core of fascism: Riley described fascism as “the technocratic rejection of politics as such”, and that is how Habermas views it, as the furthering of practical goals and technical efficiency taking over all public endeavors - there is no room for debate if the trains are to run on time. This is a classic Frankfurt School bit, to be fair, but the difference for Habermas is that fascism essentially has to colonize “the life world” (the public and private spheres) in order to function.

The most important thing to note about technology, in this sense, is to quote Frankfurt School theorist Herbert Marcuse “Technics by itself can promote authoritarianism as well as liberty, scarcity as well as abundance, the extension as well as the abolition of toil” (by technics he means what normal people call technology, and what he called technology is like, the technological organization). In Some Social Implications of Modern Technology, Marcuse tries to link the rise of fascism to the technological culture of the 1940s: “In National Socialist Germany, the reign of terror is sustained not only by brute force which is foreign to technology but also by the ingenious manipulation of the power inherent in technology: the intensification of labor, propaganda, the training of youths and workers, the organization of the governmental, industrial and party bureaucracy—all of which constitute the daily implements of terror”. In this sense, the war economy isn’t just politically and economically necessary, it’s also socially necessary, because it keeps “the life world” subjugated to totalitarian tyranny. For Marcuse, capitalist society needed to promote an individualist view of the world for its technological order to function, but this created a tension with the collective structure of production, particularly in periods where bigger and bigger scales of production were needed (the “Fordist” model). This structure’s need for greater and greater coordination at an individual scale eventually necessitate, as Habermas pointed out, stamping out all human endeavor. This was also Polanyi’s view: fascism sought to resolve the contradictions between liberal democratic individualism and the collective nature of the productive process by eliminating the notion of the individual and subjugating them to a series of grander categories. In particular, as outlined in State and Individual Under National Socialism, this resulted in both a totalitarian state and an authoritarian character of society: “the absolute rule of the state over all private and social relationships, and the absolute repression of the individual with all his rights and abilities”. Fascism necessitates the elimination of the bureaucratic-rational state, of individual rights, of the rule of law, et cetera. The organization of society is quite literally absolutist, with the command of the sovereign being the entire extent of the law. As such, there is no separateion between the state and society, and no separation between society and the economy. There is only war, production, and the nation - just like it was under feudalism, with lord, serf, and the Church being the only possibilities of modern life.

The cult of production also matches with the fascist imagination on gender. Marcuse states “This society’s principle it was that everyone be given according to his free performance in the social division of labor, and that the pursuit of self-interest should be the guiding motive in all performances” So, while men are off in the factories and the front lines, what are women doing? Producing - in particular, children. In particular, birth rates were a gigantic concern for Benito Mussolini, who launched a “Battle for the Births” destined to raise fertility rates and prepare the nation for war sometime in the late 1920s. The battle did not work (just like all other culture-focused efforts to do so) for a number of reasons, mainly illegal abortions and the fact that women were simply not especially persuaded. Marcuse also mentions how the Third Reich showed a particular interest in reducing sexual taboos, particularly around single motherhood, extramarital sex, nudity in public artwork, and things like incest and pedophilia. The former are kinda dicey to me but the idea that the Nazis promoted otherwise “aberrant” sexual behaviors to promote “controlled mating and breeding” where even intimate behavior was policed and regimented by the state, and one in which racial categories were put most manifest: the “Master race” had permission to engage in sexual acts that the lower races were not. In a 1974 article about Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, Susan Sontag writes “National Socialism—more broadly, fascism—also stands for an ideal or rather ideals that are persistent today under the other banners: the ideal of life as art, the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community; the repudiation of the intellect; the family of man (under the parenthood of leaders). These ideals are vivid and moving to many people…”. In the same way, Sontag (and Marcuse) note, fascism is powered by a sort of politicized sadomasochism: the desire to derive pleasure from cruelty and domination. Walter Benjamin famously (and obligatorily) described fascism as the product of a culture that saw politics as an aesthetic experience, which ultimately required violence; Sontag adds “As the social contract seems tame in comparison with war, so fucking and sucking come to seem merely nice, and therefore unexciting”. Riefenstahl, even in her late-in-life work about African tribes4, as well as figures such as Curzio Malaparte, played this role.

Conclusion

I know the names of the somber and important people who lurk behind the tragic youths who chose the suicidal fascist atrocities or the common criminals, Sicilian and otherwise, who offered their services as killers and assassins.

I know all of these names and I know all of the facts (attempts against the institutions and massacres) for which they have been responsible.

I know. But I don’t have any evidence. I don’t even have clues.

Pier Paolo Passolini, “I Know” (1974)

The thesis of technofeudalism is that the economy is being transformed into a handful of tech conglomerates in a trench coat. This is just plainly wrong - their economic heft is not quite so large. But the political power of the tech conglomerates is undeniable - Elon Musk, who by the former thesis is a random chump (X is no Everything App), was poised to take over the United States government and only narrowly failed. What the technofeudal view gets right is that the tech industry is extremely important, and that is because they are trying to merge their own power with the power of the state - military contracts, embedding AI in administration, subjugating their social and traditional media ventures to their political agenda, et cetera. Unfortunately, as Anthropic can attest to, this is a bad bet - the state just holds all the cards. This absolutist view of power is replicated in international relations and in domestic politics: there is the Sovereign, who has “the sum of public powers” so he (it’s always a he) can further the technocratic pursuit of National Greatness, and there’s nothing else. There is no state, there is no parliament, there is no tooth fairy - there’s just one guy and his inner circle. And if you’re a nonprofit, law firm, or university the president doesn’t like - no luck. You will have to back down.

The obvious similarities, both theoretical and practical, between the concept of a Latter Day Feudalism and the current political situation, and the current political situation and fascism, are undeniable. Why do people deny it? Well, the Political Marxism theory of feudalism is quite controversial; feudalism, as a whole, is sort of poorly understood and poorly defined in popular consciousness. Fascism too, for that matter. There’s also the obvious incentive to invent something new in the creative professions instead of bringing up something your mom is familiar with. But there’s also a pretty obvious temperamental issue: calling it “fascism” is left for hysterics, for the Rachel Maddows of the world, people who think anodyne labor law reform is just like the Nazis. Well, in some cases, it is just like the Nazis, and it does nobody any good to deny it and hide between tangential historical detours like the experience of total war or the relative depth of the Great Recession and Great Depression. Of course an ideological phenomenon would be different in a different context (Poulantzas most struggles with why different things are similar in similar contexts and different in different ones); the question is whether it’s the same ideology, and it is.

Usually you should end an article with a call to action. In the 1930s, Friedrich Hayek famously dedicated himself to finding a new version of liberalism that could stand up to the threats of communism and fascism. Well, I think the same thing - that the proper call is a call to thinking, not acting. Liberalism as it existed is quite plainly ideologically exhausted, and socialism is unworable in principle and in practice, as well as widely associated with massive tyranny (not incorrectly, I might add). Polanyi thought socialism was the answer; however, the true response came not from socialism or from Hayek’s convoluted free market constitutionalism, but from John Maynard Keynes’s redistributionism. Umberto Eco’s Ur Fascism ends with a quote from Franklin Roosevelt: “I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.”. The problem with the mainstream liberal vision, right now, is the former part; the problem with the socialist vision is the latter. What is needed isn’t just a merger of redistribution of wealth and moral egalitarianism with an awareness for the usefulness and power of markets is in order; it’s a merger that can address current crises. Whoever comes up with it, in due time, will probably make a name for themself.

Say hello, it's you, the purest you
The next stage, the next phase is here
Instinctive, impatient, impossible
In memory, mirror, and membrane

“True Blue Interlude”, Magdalena Bay

AI, short for “artificial intelligence” in case you’ve been living under a rock, is the hottest story of the last few years. It’s a major technology that seems poised to, at least, drastically change how we approach work and education. AI’s critics think it’s a stochastic parrot with no added value that’s about to crash the economy, while its proponents think AI will enable radical abundance the likes of which we’ve never seen. So, who’s right?

Also, related to the title, I very highly recommend Magdalena Bay’s Imaginal Disk. And these two edits of The Substance using songs from the album because of course.

It’s a nice room, I just didn’t think it would be Chinese

Understanding AI

Large language models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon

Hi, it’s Tim Lee. I’m a journalist with a master’s degree in computer science. This post is the result of two months of in-depth research. If you find it helpful, please subscribe to get future articles delivered straight to your inbox…

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3 years ago · 1420 likes · 101 comments · Timothy B. Lee and Sean Trott

As good a starting point as any is how AI like, works. Basically, the starting point is that, for a long time, computer scientists have been turning words into vectors, mathematical constructs showing location and angle. By turning the word “big” into a vector, you can also say it has a similar location to “large”, “huge”, “enormous”, “the runtime of Killers of the Flower Moon”, etc, and also to “small”, “tiny”, “Andrew Tate’s penis”, and so on, but with a different direction. So this means that, with math, you can easily group words by meaning, context, magnitude, and origin.

A Large Language Model, or LLM, is basically a series of filters (called “transformers”) put on a sentence to make sense of it. So for example if you say “Maia called her mom to talk about her blog”, it first puts all the nouns and verbs on a first transformer, then figures out the relations of different types of words on a second one, and then answers whatever questions you ask on a third. This is done by modifying “hidden” vectors that contain information on each word - so, for example, if you have a 20 sentence story and then the final line is “the killer is the person with a blog”, then the LLM would be able to answer “it was Maia” because it stored the information somewhere along the text. So you could have an LLM that has a vector for “Maia” that has qualities like “has a blog”, “26”, “woman”, “very attractive”, “smart”, “likes the 2022 movie TÁR too much”, etc. These words, if they appear again in the story, would also have a distinct value for “Maia”. A bit like how Nikita Khruschev had a list of every joke he made around Stalin during their Politburo days and wrote down Stalin’s impressions - so if he liked a joke about farmers and didn’t like a joke about Comrade Zinoviev, he could remember it later when either of those topics came up or when he had to say anything. This is known as an “attention mechanism”, which maches words that have relevant context and share information, and tries to predict the next word to match based on the information of all relevant or related words.

The most powerful version of ChatGPT’s GPT-3 (so, two-ish models ago) used word vectors with over 12,000 dimensions, that is, it applied 12,000 filters to store 12,000 types of information on everything you asked it. It also had 96 “attention heads” per each of its 96 layers, so it had 9,216 attention operations. They then take this into a “hidden layer” with 49,152 “neurons” (basically math functions that sum whatever is funneled into them in specific ways), and have over 12,000 output neurons. So put together there’s over 12,000 input vectors that you can transform, that get thrown around through 49,000 neurons, and then get transformed into usable output by 12,000 neurons, which makes it so the model part of Large Language Model has 1.2 billion parameters per layer, or 116 billion parameters total. The way this works is that if you ask it what the capital of France is, it would look for data it has of a country that’s close to France (say, Germany), and then look for a word related to both “capital” and “Germany” (Berlin), and then would apply the same “math” to France, that is, Berlin - Germany + France = … Paris!

Of course, it could also say that the word is Marseille, or Madrid, which makes it important to have enough training data - big datasets that humans break down and feed to the model to help it have pre-answered questions. LLMs were originally developed by Google to have an algorithm that could tell what an image was to improve Google Image Search (which, fun fact, was invented so people could look at picture of Janet Jackson’s nipple that one time), and the way you’d train something like that is by showing it what an image of “boob” was and what an image of “butt” was and then showing it other images and asking it what each was. But this is a very complicated system - GPT-3 needed 300 billion trillion (that is, 300 quintillion or 300,000,000,000,000,000) calculations to be trained, because it had access to a dictionary of 500 billion words (as opposed to 100 million, or 50,000 times more, than the average human child by the age of 10). These calculations are very complicated and they determine the, also very complicated, ways AI works. The obvious question here is whether AI actually understands what it’s saying or if it’s just repeating whatever a bunch of deterministic rules without rhyme or reason (the “stochastic parrot” model), which I have to say is quite literally the Chinese Room thought experiment which still pisses off philosophers to these days. But I digress.

So, to train an LLM, you need to do a lot of math - billions of trillions of math operations, basically. OpenAI, the owners and creators of ChatGPT, claim that how good their models were goes up “with model size, dataset size, and the amount of compute used for training, with some trends spanning more than seven orders of magnitude”. What this means is that the more calculations a model does, the better it gets at language tasks - but only if they increase the amount of training data, which needs them to increase the amount of computing power. Here’s where the chips come in: we’ve all seen what a chip looks like, it’s a green chunk of plastic with a bunch of little squares embedded. These squares are called “cores”, and they’re groups of transistors (little circuits that send signals) that do math. A regular computer, like the laptop I’m typing this on, have CPUs, which have 4 cores that work sequentially, so they do one operation after another. They can do a lot of things (run videos, Microsoft Excel, Minecraft, power my blog, keep the 5000 tabs on my US vs China post reading list open indefinitely), but they’re not very good at any one thing. On the other hand, AI uses very specific cores called GPUs, or graphic processing units, which help beef up image generation and thus can do a lot of math at once because of how computers work with images. The chips AI uses are very big, because they have a lot of cores, and they run parallel, not sequentially. They make two types: training chips (see above), and inference chips (which are used to spit out stuff); training, as mentioned above, is just much harder to do because you need all the background data. The AI companies put together a warehouse with all the computers running their chips (called data centers), and they take a lot of energy to run; and, like anyone who has had a laptop on their lap for more than 30 seconds can tell, they get very hot very fast, which they cool down with water. Basically all of the environmental harm from AI comes from their energy use (which, itself, comes from the fact most countries have very dirty energy grids), and while water may be a problem in some specific contexts, it’s mostly misleading.

The market for chips is pretty complicated, but there’s more or less four steps: designing chips, making the equipment to make the chips, making the chips themselves, and running the data centers. The big player in design is Nvidia, one of the biggest new companies of the 2020s, the equipment comes from ASML, the fabrication is mostly TSMC (the one in Taiwan whose factories keep being taken out by earthquakes), and the compute is less concentrated (each of those has 90% of their respective market), with Amazon Web Services being one of the leading players, but Microsoft and Google Cloud having a roughly equal share - though the data comes from before Microsoft reached a Shylock-esque deal with OpenAI where they provided a lot of compute in exchange from not a pound, but the entire body mass index of the company’s flesh. The TL;DR here is that Microsoft is building gigantic supercomputers and data centers for OpenAI in exchange for exclusivity, a gigantic share of OpenAI’s profits until Microsoft breaks even, and exclusive rights to integrate OpenAI products into itse software (including the Excel plug in that is somehow worse at basic math than Ken Rogoff). The basic tension is that Microsoft wants OpenAI to make as much money as possible to sell them more GPUs, and OpenAI allegedly (well, until Sam Altman fired everyone) wants to take it more slowly. There’s another problem clause: if OpenAI invented an artificial intelligence that was as smart as humans, then Microsoft doesn’t have access to OpenAI models.

Anyways, as I mentioned above, AI companies admit that they need to put together more and more of these data centers full of better and better chips in order to keep improving their models - most notably because the demand of power from AI has grown pretty quickly, the length of time to train new models has grown significantly, the costs of AI supercomputers has increased substantially, and more data, more training, and more size are necessary to improve AI accuracy. The growth rate of AI models for the next two years is expected to continue not just holding but in fact increasing substantially, meaning that AI would increase in power and capability quite strongly. AI, at the moment, is around a level of basic-to-intermediate competency on technical questions without reaching true expertise, which puts a (short term and quite high) ceiling to the immediate growth of AI agents (basically, programs powered by AI that can do tasks in your computer), as a replacement for white collar work.

One of the real questions about AI is how capable it can get; that is, whether AI will continue increasing exponentially in its abilities the way it has, or whether it will hit some sort of wall. This is tangentially related to the problem of consciousness I mentioned above (my position is that AI is at least in principle not conscious, and thus cannot generate true discernment which is crucial for applying AI to the real world - sort of like a virtue ethics equivalent of the halting problem), but I don’t really think it matters very much whether AI is conscious or not. It would be like asking if cars would become a type of animal over time in order to replace horses - it’s not necessary for them to become one even if they could. But some relatively serious thinkers do consider it an important factor to keep in mind, such that they forecast an “intelligence explosion” in the short to medium term that completely disrupts human life by ushering in “artificial general intelligence” or AGI, a computer that is as smart as a person. Because AGI would develop the ability to improve itself, experts believe it would just grow exponentially in its intellectual abilities and would thus dwarf the intelligence of humans in a very short time, perhaps as short as seconds.

The AGI scenario is more or less what the OpenAI business model is built around: in their AI 2027 document that Sam Altman shopped around to DC policymakers to support his company, the whole thing is predicated on OpenAI inventing AGI at more or less the same time as China does (which involves the government not regulating them until after they win the AI race wink wink) and then managing to bring it under control through some means that’s never very clearly explained. Then there’s some kind of American Soviet put in charge of ChatGPT to make sure it’s not evil. The premise is pretty simple (and also disturbingly similar to some Yudkowsky inspired My Little Pony fanfics): by the end of next year most important things will have happened and OpenAI will have a permanent monopoly on all white collar work, which they can supply at zero marginal cost for a measly 5 bucks a month. Otherwise they can’t pay Microsoft back and the company goes bankrupt. Journalist Matt Levine has described the AI business model as ““We will create God and then ask Him for money”. It’s basically this tweet:

♫ The bright shiny bubble / Blissfully floating above ♫

A well-known story tells of a finance professor and a student who come across a $100 bill lying on the ground. As the student stops to pick it up, the professor says, “Don’t bother—if it were really a $100 bill, it wouldn’t be there.”

Malkiel (2003), “The Efficient Market Hypothesis and its Critics”

What even is an asset bubble? Well, what even is an asset? It is, to quote Robert Kiyosaki, something that generates revenue and value. The important thing about assets is how their price is estimated: it comes from the expected cash profits that they produce. These profits, called cash flows, are also adjusted for the opportunity costs, that is, the money you’d make just stuffing your cash in a bank - meaning they’re adjusted by expected interest rates. This means, in short , that asset prices are based on the expected discounted cash flows over a fixed time horizon. Importantly, the prices of assets are related to each other: for instance, if Coca Cola is expected to gain market share, then the value of Pepsi stock should fall, and so should the price of derivatives1 and other stuff like commodities and bonds.

The main approach economists take to integrated asset markets is called the Efficient Markets Hypothesis. Unlike what the name suggests, the position isn’t that the markets are perfect; it’s that they are efficient at using and reflecting information. The core of contemporary economics is that prices contain some information about the goods and relationships between people they represent that can’t be gathered from those goods and people directly. This also applies to asset values. Imagine Pepsi puts out a statement saying they found out that a Pepsi factory was using crushed up poop to make Pepsi; people would stop drinking Pepsi, which would mean fewer expected profits, which would mean lower expected cash flows, which would mean lower stock prices. Everyone would thus sell Pepsi stock. But the thing is, because everyone could do this, you couldn’t make a profit off this information. The Pepsi stock thing is public information, which means everyone can access it relatively easily, and because financial markets are reasonably competitive, then it wouldn’t be possible to be “early” consistently on these unexpected drops.

This has fairly unexpected consequences: the first is that the field of finance, at least as commonly understood, is completely useless (note: the source linked is from 1932). There are no rules that are useful for investing, beyond the ultra-short term, that hold over time if the EMH is true - any rules can just be exploited and preempted, so the margin of action gets shorter and shorter. This is because, unless they’re trafficking in highly restricted information (called “private” information), fund managers and other people can’t expect to outperform the average of the market because they can’t really expect to be always consistently early all of the time. If everyone is trading on the same information quickly, whether you make a profit or not is basically a game of chance, which over time averages out. For example, I do know someone in finance who made their employer a good amount of money based on the fact that they found out super early about the Russian invasion of Ukraine (basically, someone posted satellite photos on an obscure forum for military nerds), but that kind of thing is rare and you can’t really expect it to happen often. This is the “weak” form of the efficient markets hypothesis, because it simply states that over a long enough time horizon all market participants can only make as much as the rest of the market does.

The semi-strong form of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis follows from the weak form, and it basically states that all new public information gets translated into prices basically immediately. This is because, as long as the costs of acquiring information or trading in the market are not too high, regular participants in the market have every incentive to be active in paying attention to new information and acting on it immediately, which means that in effect new information is nearly immediately reflected in prices. This is, at least according to the evidence, roughly true - for instance, back in the 1950s, an economist figured out which chemical the US military used for a nuclear bomb because of which companies saw increases in their military contracts, which boosted their stock price. The US government confiscated the research, calling it a national security risk. The strong version of the EMH is somewhat similar, and it states that all private information also gets immediately reflected into asset prices, which means that, among other things, insider trading shouldn’t be illegal2. The obvious problem for this is that there’s a pretty big information asymmetry (i.e. information that some people have and others don’t) game taking place where you just don’t know if or whether other market actors have the information, so it is actually possible to time the market perfectly, which as we said above, just isn’t possible with public information. The empirical evidence, for whatever is worth, is quite favorable to the Weak EMH, is pretty strongly supportive of the Semistrong EMH (it’s quite easy to test whether new information affects stock prices, and it does), and is not very favorable to the Strong EMH, in large part because it’d be very hard to test and also because it’s obviously ridiculous.

The question that follows here is obviously then whether asset bubbles are possible under the EMH. Paul Samuelson referred to the tulip bubble of the Netherlands by saying bubbles are associated with “the purely financial dream world of indefinite group self-fulfillment”; Robert Shiller, meanwhile, defines bubbles as the systematic mispricing of an asset for a temporary period. Before getting into what causes bubbles, we should get something out of the way: speculative asset bubbles are bad. NFTs and crypto were, in many ways, a bubble in 2021 and 2022, but a lot of the money was just random petty cash and leftover COVID stimulus. On the contrary, economy-wide asset bubbles typically lead to erroneous investment that costs the economy a lot of money. In his recent book The Land Trap, journalist Mike Bird details the extremely negative effects of real estate bubbles on various economies: they syphon enormous amounts of money into land and housing, which leads to exacerbated housing costs; this leads to misallocation of labor away from productive cities, enormous drains on consumer purchasing power, and a massive and extremely politically influential rentier class. Other work, such as (gag) Reinhart and Rogoff’s This Time Is Different, finds that asset bubbles are typically followed by sharp financial downturns and economic contractions - even to the point of causing a bonafide financial crisis.

Economist Hyman Minsky tends to have a description of bubbles between five phases: a displacement, that leads to higher expected profits in a sector; a boom, characterized by a strong upward trajectory, low volatility, and higher investment; euphoria, where the assets’ values increase stratospherically with extremely high trading volume; profit taking, the early exit of sophisticated investors; and then a Minsky moment, when “the music stops” to quote the movie Margin Call and the final phase, the panic, starts. The panic is when it all goes to shit. This makes it sound relatively simple how to detect a market bubble, but it’s not: quite simply, some assets do just increase a lot in price because the underlying fundamentals also increased a lot and very rapidly.

Why do bubbles happen? This seems like something the EMH does not support. Thus, its critics seem vindicated, and the main critics of the Efficient Markets view are behavioral economists. Behavioral economics is based on criticism of the unrealistic assumptions of human behavior that undergird traditional financial economics: perfect information, perfect rationality, and perfect translation of information into actions. This is, by measure of basic common sense, quite dicey: 5 years ago a bunch of people decided a random defunct company should be more valuable, so they put a lot of money into it, so the stock went up a lot. Traditional behavioral finance research (as seen in George Akerlof and Robert Shiller’s Phishing for Fools and Daniel Kahnemann’s Thinking Fast and Slow; all three of them are Nobel Prize winners) finds that people have all sorts of biases, such that they overrate their own competence despite making mistakes, tend to factor in irrelevant or pointless information, and tend to make quite baffling decisions based on information. The most important things are that these irrationalities are systemic (that is, they happen across agents) and are regular, as in, they can be understood and reliably assessed, and thus can explain empirical regularities like the fact that risk-adjusted returns are much higher and much more variable than what the EMH would predict - because people reliably and consistently mistake short-term changes for long-term trends. In this sense, the behavioral explanation for bubbles is quite simple: people just develop a euphoric and overly optimistic view of the value of the assets in what John Maynard Keynes called “animal spirits”: emotionally convincing narratives outweigh rational and sober-minded calculations of risk and benefit.

There’s an extremely long list of objections that EMH proponents have against behavioral finance. The first is that most anomalies can be explained by business cycle changes and rate expectations, since stock and bond prices tend to shift in similar directions and bond prices react directly to interest rates. There’s extremely lengthy discussions of the specific causes of divergences in volatility and trends in asset prices. And there’s also the complicated fact of the “double hypothesis problem”: the other half of the standard model of finance is the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), which predicts that the only way to make more money than the average of the market by taking on greater risk. This means that companies can sometimes beat the market by having a much higher apetite for risk; that is, that when the joint EMH and CAPM model fails, it’s possible that CAPM and not the EMH fails - that is, that the markets are properly incorporating risks that asset prices don’t reflect. But the EMH defenders mostly focus on the seemingly paradoxical term of the “rational bubble”. Rational bubble theory operates on two issues: the first is that information about the underlying value of assets tends to be contradictory. Right now, for example, how much AI is raising productivity is fairly unclear; thus, the bubble could be growing off best case scenario evidence even if the evidence for a less optimistic outcome ends up being shown to be stronger (a bit more on this later). The difference between public information (which is available to everyone) and common knowledge (which is known by everyone) can be quite large in this type of case. Other components of rational bubbles are frictions in information or frictions in beliefs; that is, not a limit to how rationally agents act, but a limit to how they can exercise their impeccable rationality. A different paper points out that the cost of shorting (basically betting on an asset declining in price) also increases exponentially during bubbles, which means that there isn’t an equivalent downwards pull on prices during periods of exuberance. The other part of a rational bubble is the synchronization problem: everyone can know that something is a bubble, but they might not be able to coordinate on the optimal moment to sell. Very famously, Isaac Newton got involved in one of the oldest financial bubbles (the South Sea Company bubble of 1720) by buying low, selling at a medium price, and then buying again and failing to sell until prices had fallen too much, which basically bankrupted him. In fact, I think the synchronization problem can solve the single oldest and stupidest asset bubble: Dutch Tulipmania of the 1630s. If you haven’t heard, between 1634 and 1637 tulip prices in the Netherlands increased enormously, which obviously cannot reflect market conditions; however, flower markets (even contemporary ones) do act like that during trends and fads, so some rare tulip bulbs did have favorable fundamentals. However, common tulip bulbs increased due to obvious speculation - which can be understood as rational if and only if the tulip sellers obviously knew the bulbs weren’t that valuable, but didn’t know how long the tulip market would stay up and just mistimed their exit, Newton-style. A lot of historical bubbles, contrary to common belief, did have some underlying value, paired with uncertain financial conditions and, especially in the ones related to settlement of distant lands, information frictions. Something worth noting is that, in the end, the GameStop fanatics lost all their money. The market stayed rational longer than they could stay liquid.

She Looked Like Me!

The behavioral bubble story is that predictable and manageable irrationalities fuel extreme market euphoria that devolves into market chaos. The rational bubble theory is based on the notion that individuals act reasonably, but that difficult-to-estimate values and difficult-to-time transactions prevent them from optimizing their trades. I think both can provide a general account of the facts and, in reality, aren’t actually inconsistent. One of the economists the behaviorals rely the most on has been Charles Kindleberger, author of Manias, Panics, and Crashes3; Kindleberger, as the first word of his title on the subject may suggest, did not believe in rational bubble theory - even though his work is perfectly compatible with rational bubble theory: in an information environment in which it is time consuming and intellectually costly to distinguish between true facts and promotional factoids, some consumers can be misled perfectly rationally. The concept of a rational bubble caused by mistimed uncoordinated exits and uncertain fundamentals is also compatible with this position.

The reason I am bringing Kindleberger up is that one of his central insights was that bubbles usually appear around new assets and new technologies, where there are genuine reasons to disagree on the underlying value proposition. Recently, a lot of people downgraded their chance of AI being a bubble for two big reasons:

That is why the most pro-bubble and most anti-bubble narratives come from the most anti-AI and pro-AI people respectively: if you think the true value of AI really is that high, then why would it even be a bubble; if you think it’s worthless, then why wouldn’t it. That’s not discounting the role of groupthink and motivated reasoning, of course, but there has to be something deeper about the belief in the underlying value of the technology (at least without sinking into doomerism). Regardless of whether cars are or can become a type of horse or not, the important thing to note is that the question for the markets isn’t “is the underlying technology valuable”. It is “is the underlying cash flow in the valuation of AI technologies on the financial market feasible or not”. This invites two questions: the first is whether AI really is that big a deal. The second is whether AI can be financially unfeasible while still being a big deal. And the guide to the second question isn’t theory, but history - particularly, the history of the dot com and telecom bubble of the early 2000s.

It’s obvious now that the internet was a major socially useful technology; at the time, it was seen as a major economically useful technology. In 1998, Paul Krugman infamously wrote “By 2005, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s”. The context for Krugman’s quote wasn’t that he was a grumpy old man refusing to use new technologies. It was this quote, in the same year, from prominent economist Rudiger Dornbusch: “The U.S. economy likely will not see a recession for years to come. We don’t want one, we don’t need one, and, as we have the tools to keep the current expansion going, we won’t have one. This expansion will run forever”. The expectation among economists was that the Great Moderation of the 1990s, coupled with the explosive growth of new technologies like the internet, would keep the economy growing on a trajectory of upwards of 4% a year - that is, a new economic miracle on the scale of the postwar boom. The second half of the nineties saw eye-popping rates of growth in the technology industry, thanks to technological advances that allowed for mass adoption of personal computers, access to the “World Wide Web”, cratering costs of information transfers, and a gigantic rise in business formation and IPOs. Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat predicted social, economic, and technological revolutions, a world of peace, prosperity, and trade (except for the Muslims amirite). In 1990, the stocks traded on the NASDAQ (the technology stock exchange) only made up 11% of the value of the market; by 1999, they made up 80% of the value. In 1999 alone, the NASDAQ grew 86%, shares of tech firm Qualcomm rose 2,619%, and the price-to-earnings ratio of the NASDAQ reached 200, meaning that companies were routinely valued at 200 times their earnings. Nasdaq peaked in March 2000 at over 5,000 points, but in the following two years, the index would lose 77% of its value, and would not reach its March-00 high until 2015. Shareholders in the telecom industry, meanwhile, lost roughly $2 trillion and shed half a million workers. In fact, Krugman took a victory lap: in the twenty five years following his prediction, labor productivity had in fact consistently decreased and economic growth got slower and slower.

What happened? A 2001 article on the Harvard Business Review says the following:

Yes, the capital markets did a great job of channeling money into the new business sector that the dot-coms represented. But they did a lousy job of selecting which start-ups to support. Dot-coms differed from the manufacturing and services start-ups that venture firms and investment banks were used to working with. Because dot-coms were built on new business models, not on proprietary technologies or products, traditional business plans and financial measures didn’t apply. Yet investors continued to use the old tools, pressuring start-ups for impossible specificity in their strategies and reckless speed in implementing them.

Fundamentally, the investors in “dot com” companies like Pets dot com and Webvan thought that these internet companies had users and had a viable business (selling stuff online), which meant that they were safe investments - even though the companies had no path to financial viability. Typically, the bubble is dated to Alan Greenspan’s famous “irrational exuberance” speech of 1996, where he warned “… the simple notion of price has turned decidedly ambiguous. What is the price of a unit of software or a legal opinion? (…) sustained low inflation implies less uncertainty about the future, and lower risk premiums imply higher prices of stocks and other earning assets. We can see that in the inverse relationship exhibited by price/earnings ratios and the rate of inflation in the past. But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions…?” The question, which Greenspan asked in his famously extremely hard to grasp and overly technical style, is pretty simple: the economy is growing a lot. How do we know if this growth is sustainable? The main problem is that Greenspan and the hawks on the Fed were referring to the real growth of the economy and the real unemployment rate; in this sense, tighter money (as recommended by the Harvard Business Review) was a complete nonsequitur. Tighter money wouldn’t have benefitted the economy - it would have harmed it by reducing investment and employment, as (successfully) argued by Janet Yellen in the following years, and as detailed in Ben Bernanke’s memoir The Courage To Act.

In fact, something quite obvious is that the stock market did not enter bubble territory until the late 1990s, particularly after 1998. The rate of growth of the NASDAQ in the early and mid 90s was consistent with the expansion of the internet as a sector of the economy. The companies growing in the first half of the bubble cycle were all major and legitimate: Microsoft, Intel, IBM, HP, Dell, Oracle, etc. Garbage like Pets.com, Palm, and the rest of the gang only started getting eye-popping stock surges, alongside the real companies, in the final two years of the 20th century. In fact, the dot com bubble was fundamentally a result of rational disagreements on the fundamental value of companies: alongside real firms like Amazon you had duds like Webvan. The fundamental driver of speculative mania was uncertainty about the viability of the business plans of various firms, at the same time as the strong track record of the sector for close to a decade allowed for higher risk tolerance in the sector. In fact, the major reason why the scam from Wolf of Wall Street was viable (Jordan Belfort would sell people stock of a blue-chip company like Kodak, and then scam them with fake information about some rinky dink pink sheet stuff4) is that the technological sector was growing so fast regular consumers were hearing about it often and openly. By 2000, however, a Barron’s magazine article pointed out something obvious: these internet companies were not viable for much longer. Their extreme reliance on IPOs, venture capital, and stock and bond placements to finance their expenses versus actual tangible revenue left them exposed and raised questions about the sustainability of the sector. The reason why Amazon and a handful of others like PayPal survived the dotcom crash and still exist to this day is that they actually had a functioning business model.

The even less understood bubble is the telecommunications bubble of 1997 to 2000. The “telecom” bubble grew for two reasons: the first was the explosive growth of the internet in the 1990s, which led to a higher demand for physical infrastructure to carry broadband signals. To address this need, the Clinton Administration pushed for the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (the one that includes the controversial Section 230), which deregulated and subsidized the development of new telecom infrastructure. The companies then poured more than 500 billion dollars (1 trillion in today’s money) in fiber optic cable, wireless networks, and other forms of long-distance capacity. The expectation was that the usage of the internet would grow extremely quickly and thus the high number of companies that popped up to build infrastructure would make a profit. However, they did not count on two factors: the first is the dot com bubble, which set back for 15 years the growth of the internet as a sector of the economy. The companies that would use this infrastructure simply did not materialize, leaving these companies holding the bag. The other problem, which was the fundamental one, is that telecom infrastructure, like basically all infrastructure, is a natural monopoly: it has extremely high fixed costs (i.e. the cost of putting up the pipes), but very low marginal costs (i.e. the cost of running internet through the pipes), which makes it a sector inherently prone to having very little competition and very high profit margins. Without proper regulation and coordination from the FCC, the market was crowded, resulting in expected profits that would be lower than costs given the squeeze on competitive prices from excess capacity unless demand continued growing at astronomical paces. As mentioned above, it did not.

Feeling DiskInserted?

The simple truth is that I am less valuable than I used to be. It stings to be made obsolete, but it’s fun to code on the train, too. And if this technology keeps improving, then everyone who tells me how hard it is to make a report, place an order, upgrade an app or update a record — they could get the software they deserve, too. That might be a good trade, long term.

Paul Ford, “The A.I. Disruption Is Actually Here, and It’s Not Terrible”

The similarities between the AI bubble and the dotcom and telecom bubbles is quite stark, which I am obviously not the first to mention. First, you have a new technology with an unproven business model but clearly revolutionary potential. Second, you have a related boom in infrastructure investment being egged on by the White House. Third, you have some obvious quantitative similarities: the excessive growth of a single sector of the economy to nearly a third of the stock market (the “hyperscalers” plus Nvidia and Broadcom make up 28% of the stock market and a majority of its gains) at the same time as the S&P 500 reaches its highest price-to-value ratio since thhe dot com bubble, retail trading on the Russell 2000 (the garbage pink sheets from Wolf of Wall Street) is up, and, most hysterically of all, the stock of Cisco, one of the most infamous dot com bubble offenders, has returned to March 2000 levels. The fundamental question for AI is the same fundamental question the dot coms faced: is the business model there? Given that, as exemplified by the AI 2027 document, the business model is heavily betting on AI revolutionizing the economy in the short term, the stakes are high on all ends. If the AI bet pays off, the labor market implodes. If the AI bet doesn’t, the capital market does. What’s the evidence in favor of AI, then?

An important note to make is that who profits from the AI boom matters greatly. A recent paper by Ricardo Caballero makes a stark point: because AI can decrease labor compensation and increase capital income, then an increase in speculation in the AI sector can boost the wealth of investors to the point where the valuations can sustain a transition towards a high-capital (read: AGI or whatever) equilibrium, though the small number of beneficiaries also renders them enormously exposed to a reversal and a crash in values. A related topic (to be discussed in an upcoming post, so hype I guess) is what’s known as the “backstop option” or, more polemically, as technofeudalism: the idea that Silicon Valley’s business model is simply to buy the US government and use that power to force everyone to use AI. The wealth inequality aspects of AI, as well as the wealth concentration impact, is extremely important, thus, to institutional health. But that’s kind of beyond the point - if it’s just Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison propping up the AI fad, then their investments should collapse as soon as the lack of real underlying value is revealed. Hence, is AI actually valuable?

There’s three sources of data: micro, macro, and anecdotal. The anecdotal evidence is what’s mostly driving the current tide of discourse: Claude Code just came out and people with no coding background have done relatively impressive things with it. Joe Weisenthal of Odd Lots put out an AI tool he “vibe coded” that measures orality, a metric he’s been talking about quite extensively recently. John Ganz of Unpopular Front, a historian by trade with a humanist background (that is, a wordcel) put out another vibecoded project (by his own admission!) about whether news validated different theories of fascism in real time. Neither of them have any coding experience - Weisenthal’s post, was, thus, titled “AI’s Productivity Potential Has Never More Obvious”. We have people who, again, don’t know anything about coding and programming putting out frankly very impressive websites. The main problem with using anecdotal evidence is the obvious: as Doctor House put it best, everybody lies. A 2025 study by METR examines whether AI increased productivity in coding tasks (measures as minutes taken to complete a task) and whether people thought it would. Experts estimated efficiency gains of around 40%; workers estimated 20% to 25%. The real number was -25%: using AI made workers less productive at their jobs.

The micro level evidence, which examines the productivity gains from the adoption of artificial intelligence in specific firms, is relatively moderate but positive. A list of papers available here (highly recommend giving this post a read) finds some large increases but mostly moderate ones, particularly outside of coding related work, translations, and mammographies. The first, and most obvious, caveat is that the research tends to lag the conversation: AI has changed a lot over time, and has become much more widespread: for example, between 2022 and December 2024, the share of people who use AI rose from 0% to around 14%. And between January and April 2025, that share rose from 14% to 43%, and is already a majority - in contrast, this process took 6 years for social media, 12 years for the internet, and 40 years for electricity. However, the evidence is not especially encouraging for AI maximalists. Recent European evidence finds that AI increases output per hour by 4% on average, but without changes to employment and without any business type benefitting homogenously. A recent, viral post on the Harvard Business Review finds that AI doesn’t reduce the total amount of work for human employees, but rather increases it: AI enables expanding tasks (for instance project managers “vibe coding” some work), reducing the time spent on breaks because of the ease of completing tasks, increased multitasking, and organizational gains. In this sense, this matches relatively older (i.e. from 2023 and 2024) studies: the gains in productivity have been mostly driven by automating away “tedious” tasks like editing and drafting, emails, document creation, or retrieving information from data sources. In large part, these gains come not from letting top employees pull away from everyone else, but rather, they come from letting bottom performers catch up, especially in tasks they have less experience in. AI has a “jagged frontier”, where it’s very very good at automating or upgrading some tasks, and atrocious at others, and there seems to be very limited forethought capable of predicting which is which ahead of time.

A compounding problem is that AI adoption in business is not showing encouraging signs: after rapidly quadrupling between 2023 and mid 2025, AI usage has flatlined at 12% for the second half of the year give or take, according to US Census Bureau data. Private and unofficial sources find a similar trend: the number of people using AI at work fell from 46% in June 2025 to 37% in September, while the number of workers using AI stayed astable at 12%, and the number of firms plateaued at 40%. While economic uncertainty plays a role, data from Dayforce finds less usage among rank-and-file workers (27%) than managers (57%) and executives (87%); again, it seems that so far, the gains in productivity from writing fewer emails and reading fewer reports accrue to people whose jobs involve those tasks to a lower extent. Similarly, a paper from researchers at Carnegie Mellon finds that top-of-the line models (before the rise of Claude Code, at least) tended to fail in at least 60% of the tasks proposed, at best, corresponding to real-world job responsibilities; a Hong Kong University study finds that firms report AI underperforming five times more often than overperforming (45% to 10%), while a McKinsey report does not yet see any major gains from AI adoption. MIT’s project on business investment in AI, meanwhile, reported that while around 35 billion dollars were spent by companies on AI last year, only 5% reported higher changes to profits and losses, and 95% did not see any positive improvements. The report also cites limited disruption in major sectors, as well as the lack of implementation and training into the workflow, and “misalignment with day-to-day operations” (that is, uselessness). Additionally, take-up of AI for professional use has been slown, and AI diffusion among businesses has been growing fairly slowly and steadily rather than growing explosively, which could signal that firms are waiting until they have enough information on the benefits of AI, which slows the uptake of the technology compared to maximalist forecasts. So it seems that instead of improving productivity radically, AI is probably moderately raising the amount of meaningful work done at the expense of low-effort drudgery, with a dark underside of simply not doing anything except generating “workslop” to show off to bosses with no gains. Recent Nobel Laureate Daron Acemoglu told The Atlantic that he’s even worried companies will overwork their employees so much under the notion of AI-driven higher productivity that they’ll decrease productivity by needing the same stuff to get less things done on the aggregate.

On the macro level, let’s start with the obvious. Acemoglu doesn’t think AI will boost growth very much. Looking at what tasks can be replaced by AI as estimated by previous papers, he found that only around 5% could be profitably performed by AI, which would boost productivity by 0.7%. This is particularly notable because it also accounts for a big mismatch between what companies are investing (big ones) and what companies could benefit from automating work (small ones), and the adjustment costs of switching to AI in the short term. However, he does note that an increase in AI capabilities beyond what is expected or an increase in innovation could boost these forecasts.

Starkly, the macro-level evidence clearly shows basically no gains in innovation during the AI era. The most obvious reason to doubt that AI doesn’t make people an umptillion times more productive is that we are not seeing more productivity: we are not seeing more apps, more websites, more video games, more plug-ins, or any other explosion in output. Adopting AI does not increase productivity measures that much when coding companies utilize it. Similarly, the markets are just not pointing towards a scenario of rapid acceleration: given the fact that real interest rates have not increased (to the double digit range consistent with short-term AGI) since 2023, this analysis still holds: it is not reasonable to assume AGI in the short term yet. AGI would result in double-digit economic growth right away, and, given the basic structure of microeconomics, if there was a predictable future rapid spike in growth, there would have to be a rapid increase in interest rates, since people would like to spend their money because obviously when AGI comes we’ll all be living in fully automated luxury. But the real market interest rate has increased moderately at best in the last three years, and mostly as a result of the US increasing its fiscal deficit to extraordinary levels and threatening to invade its closest allies - not precisely something that should matter if Good Guy Skynet is around the corner.

Again, how much productivity has increased is extremely controversial: estimates range from 0% to “a lot”. The main argument wielded by technology guru Erik Brynjolfsson has to do with the US economy: it grew around 1.8% in 2025 despite only adding 160,000 jobs in all of the year (lower than the monthly average for 2024), which would imply a productivity acceleration from 1.4% a year on the past decade to 2.7% in 2025. Brynjolfsson writes “This decoupling — maintaining high output with significantly lower labour input — is the hallmark of productivity growth”, and cites his own recent work, which finds that AI-exposed roles saw a decrease of 16% in hiring since 2023. There’s two problems with this argument. The first is that drawing conclusions from macro-level data is frequently not a good idea when there’s a lot of other stuff going on: a moderately cooling labor market during a year when the government embarked on absolutely insane economic policy and while massive investment piled onto technology can be a sign of high productivity, sure, but it can also be a sign that the domestic economy is in trouble and the external sector (tech) is doing pretty well. The other problem is that the timing of AI related job losses is, well, kind of weak: 2022 was also a year after the SPAC bubble collapsed, the year when there was almost a major financial crisis that trashed the tech sector, and the start of a painful global rate hiking cycle that came on the tails of massive overhiring at tech and other big employers during 2020 and 2021. Looking at Brynjolffson’s paper, you can actually see this: all of 2022 shows a downward trend, that does get somewhat worse in 2024, when AI started having substantial penetration in the economy. A recent paper finds that the job drought facing young graduates has little to do with technology, and more to do with the overall challenging global labor market.

So if AI isn’t taking jobs, and isn’t boosting innovation, maybe it can still boost growth through other means? The big debate on this front is between Brynjolfsson and Robert Gordon, to the point they’ve literally made a bet worth money over it. Gordon’s case, which he most famously made in his book The Rise and Fall of American Growth, is that technologies have a pretty defined lifespan where they increase productivity for a while as they’re adopted, and then taper off once they’re exhausted. Most importantly, the more technologies build off past ones, the smaller their impact: going from no TV to TV obviously increases wellbeing less than going from 4K HD TV to 8K HD TV. Particularly notable is Gordon’s case at the end of Rise and Fall (of a Midwest Princess): he considers that artificial intelligence will not boost growth much because it’s a subset of computers and the internet. His position, which is quite old fashioned, is that in the last 30 years we’ve become more and more capable of collecting and analyzing data, but we haven’t managed to increase productivity from it at all. Gordon’s big claim is that the main impact of information technology comes from workplace organization, which is a big deal, but which can only be marginally affected by AI: as seen in the work intensification article from the HBR, the effects on who does what are mostly limited. He told an interviewer last year “It’s not going to be a revolution. It’s not going to blow out human nature”.

The other perspective, which is I think a bit more optimistic, comes from Erik Brynjolfsson. His central idea is what’s called the Productivity J-Curve: the economy is structured on top of some fundamental basic technologies, called General Purpose Technologies or, quite coincidentally, GPTs. The shift from a GPT to another one is quite slow, then dips downwards, and then takes off. This isn’t because of rapid contagion, but rather, because of accounting: as mentioned by Gordon, the core asset is business organization, which is an intangible asset - a collection of organizational practices (think culture X versus culture Y), business models, practical tricks, and human skills. These intangibles materialized at a certain point only, which makes it seem like productivity is illusively down - money is being spend on assets that aren’t measured. If you account for these assets, Brynjolfsson and his coauthors argue, growth in the 2010s is less modest than it seems. But the obvious problem is that electricity, the telephone, and the computer also had substantial intangible assets attached - the argument is as absurd as saying social media and phones increased subjective wellbeing more than indoor plumbing (related paper). Because GPT-related intangibles increase productivity in two “rounds”, then AI productivity growth should be about to show up on productivity statistics, because the complementary innovations in skills, training, management, and org charts haven’t been fully developed and implemented yet. A recent paper by Brynjolfsson finds evidence that ChatGPT is, well, a GPT, with firms with longer exposure to AI (in the 2017-2021 period, aka prehistory) showing J-Curve consistent improvements in performance. This doesn’t, however, provide much evidence of note about Claude Code and AI agents.

The business model

But does this economic revolution add up to a business model? To quote the New Yorker, “in the short run, the stock market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine that weighs the cash flows that companies generate”. Well, how much cash can they generate? A recent piece published by the Brookings Institute points to six key factors in determining AI success and therefore whether the AI valuations are justified. The six factors are AI investments, data center construction, AI adoption, AI price rates, company competition, and public trust.

AI adoption, as we’ve already seen, will fundamentally be about the economic value of AI, and it’s still an open question. The main and most important fact is that, according to recent data, only 3% of users pay for AI services. This share could increase, of course, as AI adoption rises. The demand is not there yet. Studies tend to find uneven use of AI based on skill, education, and income; however, when all employees utilize AI, it tends to overwhelmingly benefit less experienced, less skilled, and less talented workers. There is also little evidence of endogenous convergence: workers who don’t use AI may be making a rational choice not to because they think the benefits are insufficient or the costs are too high - for instance there is some evidence of a social penalty for using AI at work. This is also a determining factor in gender dynamics using AI (really thorough read about it here), as Iv’e written about in the past. An October 2025 EIG survey of American workers finds that older, lower income, and less educated voters are much more anxious about AI than the average person, which is driven by beliefs as well as employment characteristics and personal preferences driving use. Particularly troubling, thus, is the rise of AI porn as a business plan: OpenAI recently fired a safety expert for discrimination against men for objecting to this plan. The real blackpill isn’t that ChatGPT might make money from gooning - it’s that it can’t make money without it, maybe, or at least not enough.

The topic of public trust in AI is pretty important, though. Public opinion is not especially favorable to AI: according to a 2024 Pew Survey only 17% of Americans think the technology will have a positive effect on the country, compared to 35% negative and 33% neutral. This is in contrast to 56% of experts on artificial intelligence having a positive view. 43% of Americans think AI will harm them personally (nearly double the share that thinks will benefit them), and less than a quarter of adults think AI will improve how people do their jobs, the economy, education, arts and entertainment, or the environment; all of these have at least a 15 point gap with experts, who are three times more likely than regular people to rank the impact of AI on jobs as positive. Two thirds of adults think AI will eliminate jobs, compared to 39% of experts. A December 2025 poll by the centrist Searchlight Insititute (remember them?) found that the two most common uses of AI were general information (63% of users) and just for fun (46%), with writing emails, documents, or posts dropping to 30%, summarizing documents by just 23%, education to 12%, and coding just 7%. The net positive approval of AI is 8%, which is on par with social media but a third of nuclear energy and drones, and significantly lower than solar energy, the internet, and drones, which have 65% or higher net approval. Adults tend to rank AI as important as the smartphone which is to say, not very. People, however, are evenly split on whether AI will replace, augment, or ease the work they do. And they are overwhelmingly favorable to regulate AI, with two thirds of voters supporting more regulations and only 15% agreeing with the OpenAI pitch of not regulating AI until superiority over China is established. Most concerns are about job loss, privacy, misinformation, and lack of control and oversight over the technology. AI child pornography ranks very low - which was, however, a month before the extremely high profile child pornography scandal involving the company formerly known as Twitter. Grok, as its in-house AI is known, was seen publicly generating adult content, including of children, as well as unclothing pictures posted by female users; the affair was serious enough that the French government raided the offices of Twitter and the UK government launched a formal investigation. It truly is all happening on X the Everything App. The ethics of AI, and issues like AI psychosis and suicide, are starting to come up with startling regularity in public opinion - startling, at least, for AI companies.

But as seen from the telecom bubble, AI investment, data center construction, AI prices, and company competition are all endogenous: AI requires huge investment in dedicated physical infrastructure, making it closer to a natural monopoly than social media or other online businesses. If there is excessive spending on those, AI prices will be driven down, which will make it less profitable (again, which is what happened with the telecom sector). Both excessive spending and low prices could be driven by excessive competition. The AI 2027 report actually underhandedly refers to this, by including a need for the OpenAI proxy to take over most compute in the United States to compete properly with the Chinese AI projects.

Thus, the question is infrastructure: are AI companies overbuilding relative to a reasonable level of demand? That’s the central question. If the companies are reasonably estimating demand, then they will recoup their investment on data centers and other physical assets. If they’re not, then it’s a bubble and we’ll all go to shit. AI firms have already dialed back their spending on talent acquisition, including Zuckerberg’s outrageous nine-digit dollar offers to top talent to… do nothing of note. However, capital spendign has only kept decreasing: investment by the top tech firms has exceeded 300 billion dollars a year since 2024 and is expected to surpass 500 billion by 2030. Total spending on data centers is expected to surpass 3 trillion dollars by 2028, of which half comes from the largest tech firms and the other half comes from… debt. This spending, according to some estimates, is roughly as high as capital spending was by telecom companies during the telecom boom. Derek Thompson estimates that AI needs the companies to invest in an entire Apollo program every ten months. The question right now is whether this investment “is propping up the economy” or “is crowding out other activities”, without many questions about its susteinability - does the United States need ten figures of new data centers? According to a relevant Morgan Stanley report:

Calling back to the tech boom of the mid-to-late 90s, investors have been asking about the possibility that this investment cycle for data centres could be a bubble. While we agree that it is a lot of financing, very quickly, and in service of a technology that has yet to generate material revenues (GenAI), we believe there are a few important differentiating factors about this situation. For one, there are diverse pools of capital available today, which can distribute the warehousing of credit risk, unlike in the 90s when it was concentrated on corporate balance sheets. Second, the ultra-high-quality credit profile of hyperscalers and their significant cash on hand mean less sensitivity to macro conditions. Lastly, our equity research colleagues find that the ROI of AI should already be positive this year, generating $50bn in revenues, and that this will grow to exceed $1tr/year by 2028

Fundamentally, the issue is not qualitative, which is what Morgan Stanley tried to use to assuage customers, but quantitative: the require funding is exactly as big as the entire high-yield (speculative) private bond market. There’s also a problem to do with the extremely high spending on GPUs, which depreciate very fast (50% a year); the intermediate goods investment is also supposed to be astronomically high. And these data centers also need an astronomical amount of energy: Morgan Stanley estimates that basically none of the electricity capacity to build AI data centers exists yet.

This hits the main problem for artificial intelligence: NIMBYism. The first issue is with data centers themselves. They are extremely unpopular, leading to a gigantic political backlash that is “swallowing American politics” on both the left and the right. Polling shows a large number of the public is either already against data centers being built in their area or is easily persuadable to build them, particularly because of the notable lack of tangible benefits, namely, jobs. People cite usage of electricity, environmental harm, and usage of water (the latter two of which are fake) as their major concerns - which is important in a political environment dominated by electricity bills and the cost of utilities. A (highly controversial) Bloomberg analysis finds that places with more data center development had higher utility bills; even if the link is not causal in the slightest, to voters, it might as well be, particularly for low income voters. But even if you move past the specific hurdles, data centers still need electricity to be built for them, which is a gigantic political problem related to enormous stasis in the American political system. I don’t think American politicians are going up to bat for some of the most toxic infrastructure projects you can imagine.

The average American is currently increasingly enthralled by an ideology I’ve previously described as being comprised by zero-sum, low trust, and particularist politics. Zero sum politics refer to the belief that, for one person to gain, others inevitably have to lose. Low trust refers to low confidence in other people and in broader institutions like the government or big corporations. Particularism is somewhat less important and it relates to closed-mindedness. In all three cases, all arrows point to opposing data centers and other big, shiny, and new local high-tech developments. In particular, the outsized role of low trust and zero sum voters in American politics and the disproportionate presence of those values in working class and younger people (who, surprise surprise, are the most skeptical of AI and the most opposed to data centers respectively) makes them impossible to ignore. The looming clash between popularism and Abundance has one clear culprit: the American voter.

Conclusion

So the question about AI isn’t whether there’s an irrational mania; it’s whether the market is pricing an endeavor that involves spending mid single digit trillions of dollars to produce low double digit billions in revenue. According to Thompson, the numbers just don’t add up. According to Noah Smith, they don’t either. The amounts of debt required to finance all this investment are also astronomical, and are increasingly complex, featuring a number of byzantine instruments and byzantine financial arrangements that are driving comparisons to the financial crisis of 2007, which is how you know that everything is going well.

Fundamentally, the question of whether AI is a bubble has to be answered by whether AI will advance technologically enough to overcome “the messiness of the real world” and replace or augment human labor in large quantities. That this is possible is not really clear at the moment.

The 2016 British documentary HyperNormalisation, directed by Adam Curtis, is based on a term (hypernormalization spelled, well, normally) coined to explain life in the Soviet union. By the 1970s, it had begun to be clear to everyone that the Soviet economic model had failed. State socialism had produced a stagnant economy incapable of meeting basic consumer demands. However, instead of trying to improve it, Soviet policymakers decided on a different course of action: to simply invent a new system of information where everything was fine. All inhabitants of the USSR were told meaningless information about quotas and targets while their lives got increasingly and noticeably worse. Curtis applies the term to the American financial system as well: starting in the 1970s, corporate value began being formed not via increased production in the real world, but via increased engagement with the fictional world of finance, public relations, and presently, online virality. The whole thing is kind of nonsense, but what stuck to me is that the financial market is a kind of parallel reality driven by narrative - rational or not. The problem, which Curtis doesn’t seem to leave much room for (wanting to discuss in extreme, tedious detail the nuances of the relationship between Assad and Gaddafi instead) is that eventually the fake reality of finance has to give way to the real reality of fundamentals. The housing bubble was driven by supply-side constraints preventing effective housing demand from being met, a rapid expansion of debt and credit without sufficient oversight, and extremely complex and opaque instruments proliferating. Unless the AI bubble generates cash flows, it will suffer the same destiny. But, after the housing bubble, people still live in homes. After the AI bubble, people will still use AI.

That speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Elon Musk, the richest person in the world and among the 10 or so most powerful and influential, expressing a profound unhappiness about his life. Musk, beyond his obvious success, is also clearly accomplished: he started and runs multiple companies he must be proud of. He has a wife and at least 14 children, and there’s no reason to doubt his relationship with thirteen of them. Musk is also a very hard worker: by most accounts he works 80 to 100 hours a week (at least ten hours a day), more recently he’s transitioned to working 120 hours a week (17 and a half hours), and he also, based on how The Economist tracks the hours of his tweets, sleeps very little and at very erratic intervals.

Why is Elon Musk, a hard working family man with an an active social and party life, so unhappy with his success then?

Losing my job… is not my choice!

One of the last movies I watches is Park Chan-Wook’s No Other Choice, a 2025 Korean black comedy about a recently unemployed man who decides to hunt down and kill all possible candidates that could compete with him for a job.

In a bit more detail, Man-Su is a middle aged man with two children, two dogs, a nice big house, and a beautiful wife (Miri). He has been working in a white collar position at a paper factory for 25 years, until Americans buy his firm and fires him for refusing to be the face of a wave of layoffs. He only gets a job at an Amazon (knockoff) warehouse, until he realizes he could get a job in the paper industry - except he flunks the interview and burns his shot with a different paper company. His plan is simple: put up a fake advertisement, ask for resumes, and kill everyone who could compete with him for a job in the other companies. The journey from nice family man to cold-blooded killer is farcical but, most interestingly, involves significant scouting of the men and their lives: one is an alcoholic shut-in with trouble with his wife; one works as a shoe salesman desperate to land a sale; one is a heavy drinker who lives alone in a gigantic seaside cabin.

The movie repeats multiple metaphors and images; the phrase “no other choice” is used by just about everyone to justify whatever they’re doing, be it the paper companies laying off their workers, or Man-Su murdering his former colleagues. The most notable recurring image is the divide between animals and vegetables: Man-Su’s wife describes him as “a vegetable” given his passion for gardening, but later, the movie draws up an analogy with a carnivorous snake - one that would eat its own mother if it could. The film’s more or less explicit thesis, also more or less explicitly reaffirmed in public statements by the cast and the director, is that the intense economic competition between workers led to them becoming fundamentally immoral and violent. Seeking to become a carnivorous snake and not a bonsai, Man-Su arranges the death of multiple other people; he also fractures his relationship with his wife, who suspects him of cheating due to the extensive sneaking around, and his son, who tries to steal cell phones from a store to help the family make ends meet. He can’t even explain why he wants the job so badly; when his wife asks why paper, Man-Su repeats verbatim what one of the men he killed told his own wife. When his scheme does secure him the job, his first responsibility at a new company is laying off all the workers to replace them with AI and robots. He gladly agrees.

The film fits neatly into the thought of 20th century French philosopher Simone Weil, particularly two core concepts: uprootedness (deracinement) and affliction (malheur). According to Weil, people need to have the ability to participate in the life of their community, and feel a connection to the time and place they live in; that is the only way people can then develop multiple levels of commitment (to their neighborhood, the city, their region, the country, etc) which provides them with moral development. However, under extreme economic and material dislocation, people become uprooted, which deprives them of the ability to lead a spiritually satisfactory life and instead disconnects them from their peers. Likewise, the concept of affliction emerges from suffering; certain forms of misery are so pervasive that they remove the ability to think about anything except “why”, over and over again. In this sense, it’s pretty evident how being “uprooted” from the paper manufacturing community could completely distort Man-Su and his family’s moral development; they simply became completely incapable of basic moral reasoning. The movie, in this sense, has an obvious Korean point of comparison: Parasite, which deals with similar themes - how economic deprivation can interfere with the duties of basic morality.

The idea that radical economic changes can produce social dislocation is kind of obvious. I’m currently trudging through Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, which deals with the topic of embeddedness: the relationship between the market economy and the rest of society, particularly politics, is not of independence but one of, well, rootedness: the market cannot exist with a society that can accommodate its effects. Instead of markets being some natural outgrowth of the rational and competitive telos of humanity, they were instead a social mechanism designed and created intentionally in the late Modern Ages; property, production, and exchange were until the creation of capitalism subordinated to political and community relationships. The separation of property rights and “human” rights was, itself, the delineation from feudalism and capitalism according to Ellen Meiksins Wood’s The Origins of Capitalism, which is itself a lengthy explanation of why the story of capitalism emerging from a desire to increase profits from international trade in feudalism is ahistorical, teleological, and assumes its own conclusions (RIP Polanyi and also the much hated Althusser). Per Polanyi, the introduction of capitalism and industry to English society produced immediate economic pains, with a “double movement” of market liberalization and social movements against the market, most notably the early socialists, cartalism (not sure what their demand was), trade unions, and whatever the hell the organization behind Speenhamland was. Polanyi’s (somewhat underargued) explanation is that British rulers, particularly the Tudors, held back the development of capitalism to avoid large mobs of displaced peasants becoming urban paupers; when British society was adequately prepped for capitalism, the Stuarts “let her rip” through the social fabric, producing an extremely powerful social reaction in the wake of the original Great Depression of 1873. This included a significant moral component: something I was surprised to find out about1 is that Polanyi was very Christian and one of his main objections was that tearing down, frequently literally, peasant villages and towns to turn them into factory workers wasn’t just politically destabilizing, but also morally degrading, forcing them to exploit all family members to the fullest and inhabit in slums. The experience of reading The Great Transformation is best summed up by a friend asking me what other ideas besides embeddedness (free markets are a utopia and just leaving society to resolve them will result in disaster) it has, and it doesn’t, Polanyi just exposits on the relationship between markets and civic life at extreme lenght and in extreme detail in every period of time he can conceivably write about.

Interestingly the actual question the book is concerned about isn’t the abstract relationship between society and the market, but the precise question of how fascism emerged in the 1920s; Polanyi’s answer is that it emerged from the contradiction between markets and society. The evidence for the thesis that all manners of antisocial and violent attitudes can emerge from economic deprivation is pretty ironclad (and a longstanding bit on this blog and my other work in general): social trust, defined as trust in other people and in the government and institutions, is very closely correlated with prosperity and education: richer, better educated people trust others and The Other more than poorer people. It’s also related to community, particularly having more and more diverse social environments. Trust is also closely related to universalism: moral universalism, as defined by social psychologists as the level of care for people distant to oneself, is closely associated with social trust, is related to prosperity, since wealthier people are more universalist, while poorer people are more particularist. Both social trust and universalism are linked with support for democratic values: people tend to value living in a democracy more if that democracy can provide material benefits. A third, also related value is zero-sum thinking, the idea that in every interaction there has to be a winner and a loser, which is also strongly linked to economic growth according to recent research. Other clear example of Polanyi’s logic exist. In Brazil, unemployment increased attendance at conservative evangelical churches that then boosted the support of far-right candidates. And in the obvious example, Nazi Germany, areas more closely harmed by Weimar Era austerity programs saw the largest upswells of support for Adolf Hitler, and areas benefitted by his infrastructure program shifted to supporting him.

The community dislocation produced by mass economic shocks are also a no-brainer. A recent study, summarized in the Financial Times, concludes that markets both encourage cooperation between strangers and reduce their hostility to others different from them, but also reduce economic solidarity and community bonds. However, the broader Polanyi case isn’t that the market economy makes people immoral and antisocial, but rather that social dislocation has those consequences, particularly if it resolves itself in long-term economic penury. Research finds that, after NAFTA was implemented with the support of Bill Clinton, working-class voters began shifting to the right based on their cultural values, since there seemed to be little difference in the economic positioning of the two parties. A recent article about Reform UK narrates the decline of the Labour party post-deindustrialization in Northern England: after losing their jobs in the factories, workers had to shift to services, which involves 24/7 shifts as opposed to the more reflective and laid back pace of their factory work. One town, Mansfield, went from being “an amazing place on Fridays and Saturday nights” to a ghost town, hollowed out by joblessness and depopulation. Automation in manufacturing increases crime rates, by decreasing employment and earnings among industrial workers, which is itself linked to a higher likelihood of committing crimes. Prolonged economic downturns are also closely associated with higher likelihood of consuming drugs at the individual and community level. The relationship with “despair” and suicide is a bit more strained (particularly because of the specifics of American healthcare, American lifestyles, and American prescription drug policies in the 2000s and 2010s), but I think that it just represents a different impact of the same trends in a different environment - particularly because of the geographic and class concentration of the increase in mortality from suicide, alcoholism, and drug use.

For young people today, we’re seeing increased rates of economic dislocation and increase rates of loneliness and isolation: the share of young adults working or in education has declined significantly post-pandemic, at the same time as job offers for recent graduates have declined notably, and a series of factors, particularly an oversupply of AI-generated job applications, have made the employment market a lot less transparent and meritocratic, much more openly run by cliques. It should be no surprise, then, that a generation that is less economically integrated and less socially active would also exhibit significantly less well adjusted habits: higher loneliness, more meals eaten alone, an excessive focus on self-improvement and exercise (solo, of course), and a frankly troubling rise in porn addiction and problematic gambling. This isn’t really exclusive to The West (whatever that means) either: China has also seen a stark increase in loneliness, uprootedness, and friendlessness. Chinese youth unemployment is higher than 20%, a measure that was discontinued briefly to cover up the rise in joblessness. The hottest app in Chinese phones is called Are You Dead and its function is contacting your family if a single young person living alone dies unexpectedly - since there is no way someone else would find out. China has its own tang ping (lying flat), equivalent to the Japanese hikkikomori, young people who don’t go to school, work, or leave the house. These NEETs, as they are called in the United States, don’t spend a lot of time doing much, and spend most of their time alone.

I think the broader question isn’t really why mass unemployment, caused by systemic economic restructuring, is bad on a social or economic level, but what to do about it. The obvious call, even from economists, is “redistribute the gains from the winners to the losers”. Typically it’s argued that trade benefits consumers (aka everyone) by lowering prices; however, it also harms workers by lowering employment and wages. In an economic that is a homogenous and featureless plain, this solves itself; in an economy with agglomeration effects, the results are deadly and destructive - some places just have their bottom fall out and turn into husks, homeowners stuck in place with decaying equity. The other problem is that the social safety net is grossly inadequate to tackle the missing income, and job creation programs usually result in worse opportunities - the Reform voters were particularly incensed that revitalization efforts under Tony Blair subsidized bad employers. Globalization and deindustrialization were one example, and the social consequences of barely compensated transformation to the global economies have been predictably dire. But welfare cannot replace the fundamental benefit from work: not income, but meaning, in some sense. Karl Marx once said that work dignifies man; well, does it?

All grind and no game makes Jack a dull boy

The current vibe is no drinking, no drugs, 9-9-6 [working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week], lift heavy, run far, marry early, track sleep, eat steak and eggs,” Daksh Gupta, the 23-year-old co-founder of an AI start-up, told the San Francisco Standard recently

Hannah Murphy, “Grindcore is the new hustle culture”, Financial Times (28/01/2026)

In 1996, Bill Clinton said, in a speech introducing his welfare reform initiatives, “From now on our nation's answer to the problems of poverty will no longer be a never ending cycle of welfare; it will be the dignity, the power, and the ethic of work”. This follows the lesson Clinton learned from his intellectual mentor, Carroll Quigley of Georgetown University: for Western society to move forward, it would have to combine the traditional Protestant work ethic (working hard and living frugally) with the New Age practices of empathy, compassion, and spirituality. Clinton’s own life followed this lesson, as a self-made striver who graduated from Yale and a a pot-smoking adulterer, but his broader political thought also showed engagement with the “New Age” side, particularly his early support of gay rights and the advice he received from communitarian philosophers like Michael Sandel and William Galston.

The merger of New Age and Old World values wasn’t, of course, limited to Bill Clinton; the type of person who mixes bohemian sensibilities with bourgeois careers is the exact target of David Brooks’s BoBos in Paradise, a favorite of this blog. Importantly, one chapter is dedicated to BoBo work habits, in particular, the seemingly inexplicable transition from company loyalty predicated on stable employment and upwards mobility (if performance warranted it) to company loyalty secured via alignment with broader values or social goals. Companies began having pool tables and other entertainment facilities, and began insisting on their employees socializing at happy hours and retreats; firms also developed missions, such as Google’s legendary “don’t be evil”. In The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank elaborates on this trend on the consumer side: firms were divided between “X culture” (conformist, hierarchical, traditional) and “Y culture” (revolutionary, egalitarian, innovative), and “Y culture” firms were usually associated with the counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s - think Don Draper’s colleagues in the later seasons of Mad Men wearing plaid suits, long hair, mustaches, and smoking weed in the office. These companies saw the New Age movements as a perfect vessel for consumerism for one simple reason: conformity meant buying less and buying frugally; rebellion could be used to sell more, sell trendy, and sell often. Advertisements frequently mentioned how little you would actually use the product given how quick fashions changed - with the implication that if you wanted to be conservative with your money, you were a boring square.

This year, an employee of a major company protested his employer working with ICE following their murder of two civilians in Minneapolis; this worker wrote “In my opinion ICE are the bad guys. I am not proud that the company I enjoy so much working for is part of this”. The company was Palantir, a major security state and IDF contractor owned by fascist lunatic Peter Thiel and run by also fascist lunatic Alex Karp. Karp also held a call with his employees to assuage their concerns that the openly and explicitly evil company they were working for was doing evil work by… telling them to sign an NDA to know more. This is an extreme example, but it’s not an isolated case: a 2022 Harvard Business Review piece examined the case of employees who felt demoralized by making moral compromises at work. Based on the psychological research on “moral injury” (psychic harm caused by being responsible for violating your moral code), the authors examine the impact of broken promises, hypocrisy, unrealistic standards, and gaslighting when it comes to ethically charged endeavors - for instance, a company that takes a public pledge to increase diversity, but privately runs the process with the open intent to hire internally and without honoring those promises. In this sense, while corporate “wokewashing” is usually a shallow and dishonest exercise in marketing (Frank cites Virgina Slims cigarettes for women weaponizing feminism back in the 1960s), it can also be used for the purpose of ensuring employee morale and recruitment - ESG targets, for instance, tend to attract highly educated workers to firms. Likewise, the BoBo ethic of seeing work as having a mission is just an extension of this logic: companies that give workers trainings on the meaning of life and its relationship to work (and you complain about DEI anyways) see an increase in employee performance, in large part because less motivated employees tend to just quit and go work somewhere that is more ontologically aligned.

According to Erik Baker’s book Make Your Own Job, the idea of being committed to your job as part of your self conception dates back to the 1940s, with the start of mass industrial society; early business science guru Peter Drucker coined the term “the managerial attitude”, where an employee defines their entire self by their “partnership” in a company, that is, their commitment to the business. In Baker’s telling, nowhere is this more obvious than in Silicon Valley, where alignment with a company, its founder, and its mission takes an almost religious dimension; it should be no suprirse, then, that Silicon Valley billionaires seem to be legendarily bad bosses: Elon Musk, according to his insanely sycophantic biographer Walter Isaacson, would routinely demand impossibly tight deadlines required 100+ hour workweeks for no plausible reason. And it is Silicon Valley that is introducing another incredibly sinister development in work hours: the 9-9-6 workweek, where one works 9am to 9pm (so 12 hours a day) for six days a week, that is, a 72 hour workweek. First introduced by Chinese tech firms (Chinese work culture, of course, is legendary for demanding so much of their workers they commit suicide on the clock), 9-9-6 as a mindset is sustained by two pillars: first, an existential fear of being replaced by AI or their competitors (in the Bay or across the Pacific ocean), and the second is, you guessed it, extreme devotion to their mission: an AI founder is quoted as saying “This work culture is not unprecedented when you consider the stringent work cultures of the Manhattan Project and NASA’s missions, We’re solving problems of a similar if not more important magnitude”. I’ll let you be the judge of that. This is, so far, limited to San Fransicko, but not to Silicon Valley: worryingly, employers outside of tech but adjacent to it are starting to observe the trend, and pushing for their own workforce to go all the way on never leaving the office.

There’s two obvious facts to note here. The first is that working extremely long hours is associated with higher earnings at an individual level - the number of hours worked is a key component of income variation, explaining around 20% of the variance in lifetime earnings. The authors attribute it to preferences, but I wouldn’t go so far: the concept of “greedy jobs”, professions that require extreme work hours, is a key part of the gender pay gap in large part because of relatively strict social expectations on whether mothers should cut back on work to look after their children. A by this point legendary paper on young MBA graduates from Harvard Business School finds that the main explanation for the gender pay gap among them is that the female business leaders of tomorrow tend to take long career breaks after they have children and tend to work fewer hours in large part to look after their children. Studies of bus and train operators, meanwhile, find that the main reason for the gender pay gap on an equitable and unionized workplace is that women are less likely to work extensive overtime hours and more likely to take unpaid time off. Female conductors, especially the ones that have children, tend to focus on stable and predictable work hours - in particular, by pursuing occupations that allow for flexible yet predictable arrangements, such as pharmacist. This responds primarily to gender norms: when couples move, studies find that the career of the man is prioritized over the woman’s career, even in couples where the woman would earn more in the new city. In this sense and more recently, return to office mandates tend to increase employee resignations, particularly for female employees who require greater flexibility in their work arrangements. Work from home itself is broadly seen as related to domestic and care duties within families, and could in fact be a significant factor in improving the labor force attachment of mothers. 42% of women who leave the workforce, in fact, cite the lack of support as caregivers as their reason for doing so.

The other fact is that working extremely long hours is not especially productive for most workers anyways. Historically, work hours have declined or at least held steady, primarily due to the fact that people tend to not want to work at night if they can manage it. In the UK, in particular, the decline has been less pronounced than in France and the US, owing to greater employer labor power - meaning that, in accordance with common sense, making everyone work extremely long hours isn’t going to reward them financially the same way that a single person working the same amount of hours would be rewarded. This is especially notable considering that working extremely long hours is frequently unproductive if not counterproductive: even ignoring psychological burnout, working long hours tends to extract small increases in performance by completely tanking next-day outcomes, mainly due to sleep deprivation and other physical forms of exhaustion. The expectation, if not the demand, of greater and greater working hours by employees cannot be understood as a productivity measure; it has to be understood as an increase in the supply of labor for any given wage, thus decompressing the labor market - if one person does the job of two, why hire a second? In fact, paid overtime laws were introduced in the New Deal to decrease unemployment by incentivizing more hiring. What they were not designed to do was ensure fair compensation of extra work - they were designed to eliminate it, and thus set aside “eight hours for sleep and eight hours for what we will” on top of the eight hours of work.

Limits to the quantity of work aren’t just important for a healthy work performance, they’re actually important for a healthy career. One of the major boosts to career prospects someone can get is having friends: not friends in the field, not friends with important jobs or fancy degrees, just regular friends from school that talk about sports with them. For teenagers, having one more friend resulted in an increase to earnings or 7% to 14%, doubling the regular results from going to school. Likewise, moving from the least friendly 20% of students (in terms of self-reported number of friends) to most friendly 20% in high-school results in a 10% wage premium up to 40 years later. In both cases this is driven by the importance of having deeper and more developed professional networks, because having a broad social circle improves labor and education outcomes for young people. But obviously, gains from personal networks are not limited to tots, since friendship is economically valuable for adults too: Facebook research finds that having a broader social group (i.e. more friends who aren’t friends with each other) increases your chances of finding a job when looking for one, at the same time as broader social networks make people less likely to be unemployed and more likely to be hired, and also increase your wages for similar positions compared to other seekers. For example, immigrants who have established social groups among the existing immigrant community have better labor market outcomes than “pioneers” who arrived without a community, and Black job applicants tend to face a much smaller penalty on LinkedIn job applications when they have a more robust professional network. And close friends are doubly important, because getting a referral from a close buddy is important - since referrals make a big difference. One final example is that being a member of exclusive clubs has significant income benefits over the long run, such that (for example) economists with close professional relationships are likelier to accept papers from each other, or that attending the most elite schools in the United States (and also Dartmouth, Cornell, and Duke) makes you 60% more likely to be in the top 1% of incomes, doubles your chances of a prestigious PhD admission, and triples your odds of an elite professional career. The ultimate example of the power of friendship is none other than Jeffrey Epstein, whose island life was described by the Financial Times as a “social Ponzi scheme”: Epstein was able to secure and procure favors of various kinds (including, of course, sexual access to very young women and underage girls) for powerful and influential people, which got him information that made him wealthy, which got him access to more powerful and influential people, etc, etc.

I'll go somewhere and do something

The idea that work is not just a part of the meaning of life but the meaning of life can be found in probably the weirdest place of all: Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1998 movie about the adult entertainment industry Boogie Nights. The movie, which follows a series of porn performers as they rise into stratospheric fame and fall to sex work and drug addiction, seems to mostly be about what makes someone a somebody and what makes them a nobody. Early on in the movie, Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg’s character) tells his girlfriend “Everyone has one thing, you think? I mean, everyone’s given one special thing, right?” in reference to him being good in bed. When leaving home, he tells his mother “I’ll go somewhere and do something”; the implication is that his purpose in life is being in porn.

Aristotle wrote in the Poetics that tragedies should focus on highborn characters whose excessive pride or self confidence (hybris) leads them to commit a fatal mistake (hamartia), which causes a subsequent fall from grace (peripecia) that only ends once they acknowledge their error (anagnorisis). In almost all cases, the hybris is believing themselves mightier than the gods, leading to the defiance of their fate (moira), which is nevertheless inescapable. On the contrary, comedy occurs to lowborn characters with great gifts, who use them to ascend to sideral heights while still remaining humble to their fates. In this sense, Boogie Nights is a profoundly Aristotelian story: whenever Dirk Diggler embraces his fate as the world’s greatest, uh, adult performer he soars; when he deviates from it, it’s one low after another - until he acknowledges his mistake. The same is true for Julianne Moore’s character Amber Waves: she starts the movie unhappy and disconnected from her son, who’s kept from her due to her lifestyle as a porn actress; after taking Dirk in as her putative son, her life improves, only to worsen when the two begin an actual relationship.

A similar concept of fate, with a similar gendered dimension, is found in Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity. According to Bauman, contemporary society moved through two spaces: traditionally, mass society formed what he termed solid modernity, similar to the “X culture” of the 1950s: homogenous, egalitarian, conformist, and relatively repressive. In this society, each person’s life had a purpose determined beforehand for them - men were supposed to be providers and heads of household, the producers who made the world run. Women, on the other hand, were supposed to stay in the home and focus on the family, on children, and on nurture. This mode of social organization was defeated not by the perfidious demands of far left activists, but by reality: as described by 2023 Nobel Laureate Claudia Goldin, the economy began shifting from focusing on goods (where men’s relative advantage on physical strength received a premium) to focusing on services, at the same time as female education increased in large part to secure a wealthier husband for them. Paired with political action by the feminist movement and a generation of men whose mothers had worked during World War Two, the shift away from a manufacturing-dominated macho economy to a services-oriented #Sheconomy seemed inevitable.

This, in turn, gave way to what Bauman termed liquid modernity: a world where there are basically no fixed norms or structures, and where every individual has both absolute freedom and absolute anguish from their radical ability to self define. In particular, this self definition happens not at the locus of production, but at the locus of consumption: the dominant mode of self expression is spending money. Consumerism, paired with globalization and digitalization, fostered a culture of short-term gratification and social disconnection: traditional channels for civic life and engagement such as family, religion, and community participation are replaced by working and spending. Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells agrees with Bauman’s characterization of modernity, but considers it a positive development, or at least not a wholly negative one: particularly, he emphasizes the fact that liquid modernity does in fact entail greater and meaningful freedom. However, the combination of digital life and globalization has resulted in a society in a greater and greater sense of crisis with less ability than ever to actually solve any of those crises; thus, writes Castells “in a world of global flows of wealth, power, and images, the search for identity, collective or individual, attributed or constructed, becomes the fundamental source of social meaning. This is not a new trend, since identity, and particularly religious and ethnic identity, has been in the origins of meaning since the dawn of human society”. For Castells, increasingly, the conflict in society is becoming between the self and the network, that is, between the individual and the hyperconnected Other.

The relationship of these ideas to work is clearly paradoxical: on the one hand, there has clearly been a closer and closer alignment between personal identity and personal meaning and work, as detailed above. But on the other, both of these authors tend to prioritize consumer spending and various cultural attributes as determinants that supersede employment as determining a person’s identity above their employment. However, the way around this can be understood via the magical world of self-published romance: a woman interviewed by the New York Times details her advancement from self-publishing 12 books a year (that is, one a month) to generating them with Claude, an AI, and publishing four a week. She asked the journalists “If I can generate a book in a day, and you need six months to write a book, who’s going to win the race?”. But the important thing to note is that she isn’t attached to writing as a creative endeavor to express some inner truth; she is attached to her identity as an author, which she wants to derive her ability to earn a living from. This is a classic phenomenon of the social media era: someone who wants to live as some identity (a trad wife, a “man eater”, an influencer, name your pick) exclusively via performative short-term consumption and aesthetic signifiers; the point of dressing as this or that microtrend is to be the type of person that microtrend is supposed to emulate without actually putting in any of the effort. Say you want to be “Old Money”, a term with a million different iterations over the years - does this mean shopping consciously for high-quality, durable brands and emulating the cultural and intellectual habits of, say, Lee Radziwill or Silvina Ocampo? No, it means shopping for a polyester cardigan at Zara and pinning the same four pictures of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy as “inspiration” (for your Shein hauls). Even the original inscrutable self-published romance drama, the one between wolf porn writers Addison Cain and Zoe Ellis, was about identity: about Cain’s identity as the inventor of wolf porn for straight people, and the weight it carried for her to not have it be associated with anyone else.

As I’ve argued before, the differential sources of meaning are a major explanation for current political and social phenomena. The labor market has shifted structurally to favor white collar services, and the education system is increasingly dominated by women, in large part due to cultural factors (for one, this disparity is 20 years old and reversed over the previous 20). Lower labor demand for men reduces men’s incentives to participate in the economy, at the same time as lower earnings and employment reduces men’s appeal as partners. At the same time, women’s lower response to financial incentives and career decisions more motivated by passion and purpose than profit: women tend to prioritize helping others and helping society above money. This puts straight couples on a clear collision course: women can derive meaning from the “girlboss” identity, as well as their identity as consumers (since women make up the majority of consumer spending, given the obvious bias against frivolity and frill), while men don’t have the dominant producer role to fall back on - even the men who are employed in white collar work don’t have a clear “I made this” to point at and be proud of. Men, as a group, have much greater adherence to male identity rules than women about female ones, particularly younger men, and their behavior tends to follow a (mistaken) view of the majority consensus - that is, the last thing men have remaining from their once unimpregnable position at the top of society is the saying “boys don’t cry”, and cry they won’t - nor work in “pink collar” jobs.

The collision between men and women is most obvious when it comes to family: as I’ve argued in the past (like, a good third of this blog), a major driver for the decline in marriage rates is the mismatch in desires between who should have the responsibility of keeping the house in order: according to a recent study, the perceived fairness or unfairness of domestic work arrangements is a major driver in fertility decisions. In particular, the desire of women to remain working (particularly when, as outlined above, women make career decisions to maximize purpose) is incompatible with the desire of men to be “providers” but not really parents; the 9-9-6 enthusiast quoted above wants to have multiple kids early in life, and also… not spend any time with them beyond Sunday. The decline of marriage rates is also a key driver in the decline of fertility rates: firstly, the number of kids had by married couples has not declined much, and it is the number of married couples which has (in fact, the amount of housework done by married men increasing could itself be a consequence of this, driven by selection effects - that is, by “performative men” being more likely to get married); second, while looking at individual women, millennial women tend to have two children over their lifetimes, just much later after getting married; the decline in Gen Z birthrates, thus, may be driven by a disappearance in early and unplanned pregnancies that could get corrected (but might not) later on. In two recent papers, Claudia Goldin elaborates on her interpretation of the current decline in fertility: given the structural economic changes outlined below, men simply do not have enough control over women’s livelihoods to retain the same historical social and cultural norms. Put another way, the vast majority of women don’t want to be trad wives - not even the trad wives themselves, who are in most cases self-employed content creators running a business. It should also not be forgotten, though, that there is a broader and all-pervasive crisis of loneliness happening in the background; the decline in marriage rates of the last decade, and particularly of the last six years, also corresponds to a broader decline in relationship formation and socialization. If millennials had kids later because they waited to get married - what does it says about Gen Z, who is dating much less and much later as well?

One of the crucial factors, and the one that nobody wants to admit, is that the desire of men to reassert themselves over women who they have limited control over is a fundamental driver in contemporary politics. The backlash against Me Too, which was as swift as it is now undeniable, was driven not by reasonable concern about overreach or unintended consequences, but as part of a well organized project to drive women out of the labor force - since harassment and violence in the workplace, or in education make it extremely likely that a woman will leave her employer, and an increase in sexual violence increases the likelihood of a woman not working at all. The right wing project to remove women from public life altogether is explicitly tied to restoring traditional gender hierarchies, particularly within the household. One of the major players in organizing and financing this backlash, as journalist Moira Donegan talked about her own defamation lawsuit in a recent podcast episode, was anti-woke eugenicist extraordinaire Jeffrey Epstein - not especially an ally of women’s participation in the work force, or in anything beyond sex.

Conclusion

A woman may be scrubbing a floor and not be bored because she is enjoying making a muddy mess vicariously, through identification with her horrid child who, in moments of creative living, brings in the garden mud and tramples it in. (…) Or a man may be as near bored as possible working on a conveyor-belt, but when he thinks of the money, he is also thinking of that improvement he hopes to make to the kitchen sink or he is already watching Southampton surprisingly beat Manchester City on his TV, only half paid for. The fact is that people must not take jobs that they find stifling - or if they cannot avoid this, they must organize their weekends so as to feed the imagination, even at the worst moments of boring routine. It has been said that it is easier to keep the imaginative life going in a truly boring routine than in an area of somewhat interesting work

Donald Winnicott, “Living Creatively” (1970)

One of the more common Gen Z debates is what is “our” tv show: Gen X had Seinfeld, Friends, and Sex and the City; millennials had Girls. What do we have? Well, the likeliest candidates so far are clear heirs to their predecessors: the sex, drugs, and drama focused Euphoria, the mix of hangout comedy and coming-of-age of Adults and Overcompensating, and Rachel Sennott’s entertainment-centered I Love LA. But all of these are, in some way, about social, romantic, and sexual life; the central defining trait of Gen Z, as has been argued a million times before, is the lack of them. Thus, the clearest candidate is Industry, an HBO show about British bankers who waste their life on non-stop work and extremely unsatisfactory sexual and romantic entanglements. The problem is that, in an old fashioned Pedro Mairal sort of way, the creators of the wannabe Gen Z show want to show people who “have a life”; the problem is that the core life experience of Gen Z is to not have one.

The core Gen Z figure isn’t the activist, as was believed in the distant past of a few years ago, but the striver: a person who devotes every part of their being to accumulating “human capital”, whatever that means, and securing a stable existence through grindset hustle culture and influencer side gigs. Even better, Gen Z culture has combined them both, lionizing “teenage CEOs” trying to change the world by not changing anything at all. As Martin Dolan writes in an essay bemoaning the lack of a progressive work culture: “In hindsight, the Bernie-coded millennial thinkers I was reading emerged from a distinctive historical moment (…). From the perspective of Gen Z, that moment has passed. (…) Today, their point of view seems almost anachronistic. Things are different now, more dire. Entry-level jobs are drying up. Everything is more expensive, even while online—forced down our throats by bad actors and black-box algorithms—wealth culture rules. Side hustles and get-rich-quick schemes are everywhere. Nihilism is the mood.”

One of the thinkers Dolan mentions, and the one I thought was the most useful to make these points, is Elizabeth Anderson, particularly her 2023 book Hijacked. In Hijacked, Anderson examines what happened to the notion of the work ethic, which has “two wolves” inside of it: much like the BoBo culture, it tries to merge empathic egalitarianism (focused on helping everyone achieve their best possible life) with individualism, ambition, and self-discipline; in the terms of Francis Fukuyama, it combines both isothymia (the desire to be equal) with megalothymia (the desire to be superior). The Puritan ethic, which Anderson argues the modern work ethic borrows heavily from, emphasizes that true freedom is living in a well-ordered society; the Puritans, as well as many classical liberal thinkers (not to mention regular liberal or even socialist ones) wanted to live in a society “ that made work not just a natural but an ethical priority”. However, according to Anderson, the human desire to engage in meaningful and productive work was, well, hijacked by a conservative ethos "which tells workers that they owe their employers relentless toil and unquestioning obedience. It tells employers that they have exclusive rights to govern their employees and organize work for maximum profit. And it tells the state to entrench the authority of these executives through laws that treat labor as nothing more than a commodity”.

The fact that work can be valued as both a tool for the emancipation of individuals and the construction of a meaningful life and for their oppression and exploitation by their substantially more powerful bosses is a central contradiction in what it means to develop a work ethic. Anderson’s argument is to construct a progressive work ethic that can develop an egalitarian focus on hard-work, self-denial, and dignified conditions, which Dolan notes “might just be more compellingly “countercultural” than yet another broadside against the absurdity of having a job under capitalism”. However, as one reviewer pointed out, Anderson’s argument may “spread its wings only with the dusk (…) comprehending a specific form of life that is now already passing from the scene” in the age of AI- related workslop and displacement. Even without confronting the evidence on productivity or the potential disruption of large swathes of the white-collar labor market, in which case the work ethic will be a quaint concern of the past, AI has already wreaked havoc what it means to work and what it means to want to work. AI generated resumes and AI generated job postings are clogging up job seeking and job posting, which coupled with a decline in available jobs for early-career white collar workers, has resulted in a less meritocratic labor market driven by networks and connections (which Gen Z has less than ever, without counting family), particularly since AI tools also can reproduce existing biases.

In Olga Ravn’s The Employees, a series of human workers on a space station have to guard strange alien things, while accompanied by robot colleagues; in one especially pointed conversation, one of the humanoids responds to a human saying “there’s more to life than work” with ““But what else could a person be? Who would keep you company? How would you get by without work and without your coworkers? Would you be left standing in a cupboard?”. The humanoids live a life that is completely empty outside of work - they were purpose-built for their jobs. The humans, meanwhile… also live for work; they feel alienated and alone, and constantly miss out on their own life. The novel ends with a mutiny of the humanoids, who reject that they were “made for work” Blade Runner style; the corporation flying the ship kills all of them. Ravn’s interpretation of the ending of the novel, is that the very cause of this confrontation (which is what the book tries to figure out, framed as interviews with the crew) is the question “how is the work going”; this activity is what led to the humanoids reflecting on their purpose to begin with. Like most science fiction novels, The Employees wants to make you think whether humans are less human than we think - in this case, by making them refuse to join the humanoids in their anti-work crusade.

In the Republic, Plato introduces the concept of “pleonexia”, a condition where a person has an insatiable and burdensome desire for more that consumes their very existence to its core. In this sense, profound inequality (as defended by the conservative work ethic Anderson vilifies) is itself a kind of sin, one that involves ignoring “the legitimate moral concerns of others (…) to focus on one’s own selfish desires”. The idea that it is simply immoral to want more and more is profoundly controversial in today’s materialistic youth culture; but it cannot be attributed just to envy. The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk wrote that the central defining feature of humanity was the ability to domesticate man from the wolf of man into a friendly dog by virtue of repetition and exercise. Thus, Sloterdijk writes, the central tenet of human culture is the imperative to “change your life”, to exercise some fundamental ethical ability for self improvement and self discipline. Presently, this manifests nearly exclusively as an endless desire for self-advancement, self-promotion, and self-”care”; that is, grindset culture and a monastic devotion to diet and exercise. Herbert Marcuse once wrote that industrial technology blunted the mind with its endless focus on repetition; what, then, will devoting our rational faculties to work as well will do to our ability to pay attention and exercise our discernment?

Anderson takes a good first step by trying to reclaim the work ethic for progressives; however, her mistake is to still center work on the notion of a good life. Unless we rethink our relationship to employment as the main source of meaning, as opposed to seeing it as the material support for a true meaningful existence (one designed by exercising, in a social context, our rational and emotional faculties), we will only build a world that is lonely, exploitative, and unequal.

International relations are entering a new era, an era where it is not the rule of law, but the rule of strength that is ruling the situation

Ilham Aliyev, president of Azerbaijan, at Davos

One of the most baffling features of the modern right is that, across the planet, leaders claim to be fighting for “Western values” against the left and progressivism. The part that’s baffling isn’t really that people are doing this, but rather, who: Javier Milei, president of Argentina, as well as many of his Latin American peers; the South Korean and Japanese right; politicians in the Philippines, etc. At the same time, Donald Trump has alienated basically every single other core “Western” country: Western Europe is souring on him, Canada is explicitly saying the United States cannot be trusted, Australia is off by itself.

So how come “Western civilization” is now defended by a geriatric lunatic, Israel, a few Asian countries, and the most embarrassing political parties in Latin America?

Us and they/them

We see many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization. They are denying the moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even sexual.

Vladimir Putin in 2013 speech

The most well known definition of “the West”, and the most politically influential one at least, is Samuel Huntington’s. Per Huntington, in his 1993 essay The Clash of Civilizations (later extended into a book), civilizations are defined “by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people” seen in factors such as “the relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife” or “the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy” that are “the product of centuries” and “far more fundamental than differences among political ideologies and political regimes.” All of this is widely rejected by political science and international relations experts: in a 2019 panel about Clash of Civilizations, a professor noted that “even a precocious middle schooler with a flair for pattern identification and a personal history watching Sesame Street might note the units being compared are dramatically unalike”

In particular, Huntington defines the West quite vaguely: by “Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state…”, that is, by its commitment to liberalism, individualism, and the rule of law, which he claims do not have purchase in basically any other culture (with a strange carveout by omission for Latin America) - in fact, he considers the idea of a universal civilization of all men uniquely Western, “directly at odds with the particularism of most Asian societies and their emphasis on what distinguishes one people from another”. Which, of course, is also directly at odds with reality (go ask Iranians if democracy, human rights, and the separation of church and state have any purchase with them) but also with Huntington’s own intellectual project, which is to both support the supremacy of the Western project (he was quite openly a diet white supremacist, saying Hispanic immigration would turn the United States into a third world country) and to highlight the differences between people that made conflict inevitable - citing the Nazi novel The Camp of the Saints.

Despite Huntington being “a clumsy writer and inelegant thinker” per Said, the book was a genuine intellectual sensation; the reason why the book existed was what the If Books Could Kill podcast has defined the early 90s as a time when every political science professor “had to write a book explaining why you still needed to be employed”. His main rival (or at least in the Amadeus version) was Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, which is quite good and quite interesting. Fukuyama and Huntington’s books were both sensations; Fukuyama was (wrongfully) interpreted as centrist triumphalism about democracy and free markets forever. Huntington, meanwhile, is a bit of a stranger beast; the true reason his strange book did so well was precisely the hysterical chauvinism - Fukuyama gave everyone a reason to tune out, and Huntington gave the right a new thing to be angry about.

The idea that The West might define itself negatively against its enemies is not especially new - historically, at least, it’s mostly been used as a bulwark against its enemies (notably Russia, through incredibly funny anti-German racism); during World War One, Walter Lippman noted “the war against Britain, France, and Belgium is a war against the civilization of which we are a part”. In fact Karl Marx himself also associated “the East” with dictatorship and oppression, describing an “Asiatic” mode of production that was all inhuman exploitation and absolute power - that was, by the way, completely wrong and inconsistent with the rest of his theory. Huntington’s ideas reached the peak of their intellectual influence in the early 2000s, with 9/11 and the Iraq War: The Economist cited Huntington by saying that “the world’s billion or so Muslims are ‘convinced of the superiority of their culture, and obsessed with the inferiority of their power”, and influential intellectuals such as Thomas Friedman said basically so as much. Following Huntington’s lead, the War on Terro was understood not as a conflict between the United States and terrorist organizations, but as a conflict between The West as a collective and The Muslims as a collective as well. In an October 2001 essay, Edward Said called Huntington “an ideologist, someone who wants to make “civilizations” and “identities” into what they are not: shut-down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and countercurrents that animate human history, and that over centuries have made it possible for that history not only to contain wars of religion and imperial conquest but also to be one of exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing”. Fundamentally, what Said is saying is that by putting The West and The Rest into hermetically sealed boxes, Huntington is removing the ability of Western concepts themselves to be of any use to understanding their own predicament - in fact, they are engaging in exactly the same logic as the Islamists themselves; Said quotes another writer, Eqbal Ahmad, saying “The modern Islamists, Ahmad concludes, are “concerned with power, not with the soul; with the mobilization of people for political purposes rather than with sharing and alleviating their sufferings and aspirations. Theirs is a very limited and time-bound political agenda.” What has made matters worse is that similar distortions and zealotry occur in the “Jewish” and “Christian” universes of discourse.”

This type of faux universalist chauvinism isn’t exclusive to Huntington, or to his followers who claim to defend the Western values of democracy, human rights, universalism, and secularism by embracing wannabe autocrats, genocide and police states, extreme ethnonationalism, and a tight political alliance with evangelical theocracy. The BJP of India, for instance, claims to be a “civilizational state” while at the same time being led by a man associated with ethnic cleansing in his home state of Gujarat. Turkey’s AKP promotes itself as both the inheritors of Ataturk’s nationbuilding and as the sole protectors of Turkey’s Islamic inheritance. This reaches parodic heights with the European right insisting that Muslims are a threat to liberal values (recently parroted by some “left-of-center” American commentators) on LGBT issues or abortion, values that they themselves… vehemently and vigorously oppose. In fact, this increasingly paradoxical rejection of core Western values of pluralism, democracy, and liberty can be found in even its greatest supporters: the case made by conservatives like Leo Strauss or Allan Bloom against pluralism and multiculturalism is completely indistinguishable from (communist) Herbert Marcuse’s infamous concept of “repressive tolerance”, where some ideas cause so much intellectual self-censorship they ought not to be allowed. In The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom levies identical charges against pluralism that Marcuse does against liberal capitalism: that it allows ideas that challenge the very existence of some people to present themselves freely and openly. For a “subversive” like Marcuse, this isn’t really a problem; for someone who dedicated his life to teaching the Western canon like Bloom, it is.

For people who are so interested in the heritage of The West, its defenders seem to have no interest in learning from its past. The destruction of Athens both as a major power and as a democracy came from its increasingly militaristic and exploitative foreign policy costing it the very structures that made it a great power to begin with. When the Athenians tell the Melians that “the strong will do as they want, and the weak will suffer what they must”, they are engaged in the paramount sin of Greek tragedy, hybris, and the pride that cometh before the fall. The fall of the Roman Republic came from the accumulation of extreme wealth inequality and extreme political polarization coupled with military expansionism; the fall of the Empire, with Rome’s increasing self-centeredness and particularism, losing track of ancient values in favor of defining themselves negatively against the barbarians. Borges once wrote “Plato taught that, at the centuries′ end, all things will recover their previous state and he in Athens, before the same audience, will teach this same doctrine anew”; it seems that today’s students of Plato are most intent on learning this lesson.

Why nations succeed

Let’s take a step back: let’s say that, for whatever reason, we do take Huntington’s position that you can, in fact, define the West via inherently universal concepts like democracy, human rights, and the rule of law, and that they are, in fact, in some way exclusive to the Western world rather than a historical accident. What explains this?

Okay, let’s start by making sense of what, exactly, these “Western values” actually mean. Well, they’re less values and more other thing: institutions. What are these institutions? In economics, the term is notoriously under-determined, but broadly economists use it to mean the legal and informal arrangements that shape economic and civic life - things like the courts, the legislature, regulation, taxes, the free press (like, the concept, not Bari Weiss’s stupid rag), whatever. In particular, Huntington’s whole thing is that The West has inclusive institutions, which protect property rights, the rule of law, and open markets. The term comes from recent Nobel laureates Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, and Simon Johnson and was popularized by Acemoglu and Robinson’s widely popular 2012 book Why Nations Fail.

Their whole thing is quite simple: inclusive or extractive institutions are set up as the product of elite bargaining with the “working class”. In pure Fukuyama/Kojeve fashion, the working people demand equality, and the elites demand to advance their power within the elite; this means that democratization can occur as a way to compromise on the redistribution of wealth. But it can also mean that the elite is powerful enough to block any democratization or the rule of law or capitalism from existing, because it would challenge their wealth as it is formed. An example the 2012 book gives is Venice: the Venetians formed a society that was whatever passed for a meritocratic democracy in the Middle Ages, but then the Venetian elite got butthurt that all the newcomers were starting to dominate trade and politics, so they drastically reduced and restricted social mobility and political selection. It’s worth noting that Venice is unambiguously Western and yet it still had both inclusive and extractive institutions. And their favorite example are North and South Korea, which are… not Western. There’s also Japan, which is its own massive can of worms because the big economic development push came from the Meiji Restoration, which also wanted to make Japan more Western and have a more Western culture and form of government.

There’s a lot of criticism of the institutionalist economics literature but overall I think it’s at least decent and, broadly, makes sense. But I think the major question everyone has is why Europe and some of its colonies (the US, Australia, and Canada, basically) developed better institutions, then. The theory Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson put together is a weird mix of colonialism and geography: the natural environment faced by some European colonists made them more likely to develop plantations, which is really bad for institutions because the planter economy fosters concentrated wealth, while others focused more on like actual farming and cattle herding (like the United States). Their whole thing extends to Europe because trade with the Americas strengthened and weakened some parts of the preexisting elite (in England, the yeomen and commercial class, and in Spain, say, useless rentier aristocrats).

But this is kind of useless because it doesn’t really explain why England and Spain already had different institutions when they colonized the Americas, for instance. The most important account of why Europe and thus The West had the best institutions (or at least the best economic performance) is Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence, which I’ve owned since COVID and haven’t read. Pomeranz’s case is that, basically, before the Industrial Revolution Europe, China, and India were all equally developed (especially in terms of technology and institutions- and China in particular was also much closer to transitioning to capitalism than England), but that Europe managed to pull ahead because they had the Americas providing labor, crops like cotton and food, and most importantly of all, gold and silver to permit exports to China. Pomeranz isn’t unique in arguing that slavery and imperialism were central for the development of Western prosperity, and at least he makes a plausible case regarding balance of payments and resource constraints and not material transfers of wealth (which are not really true). Slavery and colonialism were a net negative in terms of institutional quality, given the fact that they favored the concentration of wealth, which was extremely economically damaging1.

Of course why Europe conquered the Americas and not China (which discovered them first, also) is another question. The more traditional geographic explanation for European development comes from Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, an extremely controversial book among all academics, particularly historians. Diamond’s case is, TL;DR, that European advantages came from geography, particularly the fact that Europe had more domesticated animals and crops, which gave them an economic advantage they could press over the American natives. At the same time, the Chinese had a country made up by plains, which made it easy to established centralized absolute power (aka extractive institutions) while Europe had mountains that made it hard, thus enabling the sharing and spreading of ideas. So basically it’s Why Nations Fail with more descriptions of isolated tribes in Oceania and Insulindia.

The other big thing people cite is “culture”, usually described as another type of institutions with a sleight of hand of saying that institutions and culture are both an equilibrium outcome of iterated strategic social interactions; basically, that you can figure out what a society is going to think about marriage, religion, the law, work, or what the person who brings presents on Christmas is called based on game theory of its dominant social structures. Some of the most benign stuff is the Joel Mokyr school of European cultural studies: basically, Mokyr believes that the most important thing isn’t institutions, or culture, or geography, or slavery, or any of that, but that Europe basically developed better and nicer ideas about economic prosperity - particularly the idea that the world could be improved with science and technology, which are the true source of European successs according to his other, extremely tedious book. The other type of explanations are basically the ones focused on broader social values, such as therecently released “Two Paths to Prosperity” (who said economists can’t do marketing) by Avner Greif, Guido Tabellini, and Joel Mokyr. Mokyr, Greif and Tabellini’s whole thing is that the divergence between Europe and other countries is caused by cultural factors, particularly the lack of “kin groups” focused on loyalty to the family over following broader social norms, which over time developed into a society with higher social trust than China’s. I mean this is all broadly reasonable, sure, but I do feel like a lot of the cultural studies stuff wants to focus on Protestantism and its theological changes from the Catholic Church when it was Catholicism that introduced universalism and social trust to Medieval Europe. This also gets to the last angle of the cultural turn in economics, which is the really sinister stuff that basically launders race science with econometrics. That one isn’t really as prevalent in the mainstream anymore (much more often, it’s racist charlatans like Richard Hanania using the language of economics on their service), but it is quite influential on political discourse: the language of “culture” is used to basically justify Western racism. Back in the day, Poland was an Eastern country that was culturally incapable of integrating capitalism and democracy; now it’s a member of The West in good standing.

Keep it 100 on the land, the sea, the sky

Who is the most important intellectual for understanding the modern right? If you look at contemporary intellectuals, you could say Curtis Yarvin or Nick Land or Bronze Age Pervert. Most people say Yarvin in particular, but paying close attention to his thought, most of his ideas are just a regurgitation of older right-wing types like Hans Hermann Hoppe; the thing about them, though, is that you can trace their lineage (mainly via their extremely repetitive criticism of liberalism and democracy) back up to the Nazi jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt.

So, what is Schmitt’s most important work? If you ask a philosopher, they’d say The Concept of the Political, which outlines most of his important ideas; if you ask a jurist, they’d say Political Theology, which provided the legal backbone for fascism. Schmitt even influenced economic liberalism with his work on the limits of democracy and the importance of culture. But to the Allies who were setting up the Nuremberg Trials, Carl Schmitt’s most relevant work was the relatively lesser known Land And Sea (which I’ve mentioned in the past). In particular, analyzing the book proved central to answering one question: whether Schmitt would be at the main trials with Goering and the rest (and probably get the death penalty), or whether he’d be tried at an administrative denazification hearing among the likes of Martin Heidegger. The reason is pretty simple: Schmitt introduced the concept of Grossbaum2, the “great space” that a nation must occupy; the Allies wanted to ascertain whether this provided the legal backbone for the notion of lebensraum; that is, whether Schmitt had been the legal architect of Nazi expansionism and subsequent crimes against humanity.

Schmitt successfully argued that Grossbaum was a concept relating to international law and juridical and political categories, not to the biological survival of the nation; the closest translation would be as “sphere of influence”. The book thus sounds pretty interesting: a fascist history of the clash of great powers. But instead of being the fascist version of Clash of Civilizations (which, to be honest, is just Clash of Civilizations), Land and Sea is the fascist version of The World is Flat: a Nazi retelling of the history of globalization - globalization 1.0 (colonialism), and globalization 2.0 (imperialism and market capitalism). Schmitt exposits at length about the history of shipping, whaling, trade, navies, and Benjamin Disraeli (who starred even more prominently in the version of the book where Schmitt hadn’t removed extensive antisemitic tangents), all in that incredibly annoying esoteric style where everything he says actually carries some secret meaning. But the TL;DR is that, in a baffling explanation shared with the Marxist Perry Anderson, economic integration led to Absolutism and Absolutism led to capitalism and imperialism, which made interstate conflict inevitable because of the overlapping Grossbaums between Britain (the power of the seas, the rule of law, navies, trade, and Da Jooz) and Germany (the power of the land, the rule of strength, armies, conquest, and Da Aryan Super Duper Men). He draws up the metaphor of the Leviathan (the rule of law) against the Behemoth (the rule of chaos and power), and pits them against each other to explain not just why Britain and Germany are clashing, but why Germany will ultimately triumph (oops!).

In particular, Schmitt lays out a pretty interesting theory of the world: the nation derives its legitimacy from its occupancy of physical space. The nation (Staat) has the space where it projects its power and carries out its projects (Grossbaum), and this is all framed by a juridical and philosophical organization (the Nomos). In particular, the Nomos of the planet should be organized in order to balance and stabilize a series of great powers that act as top dog of their own “great space” - Schmitt, for instance, cited the Monroe Doctrine as a principle that could organize all three levels of action. The problem is that, in the age of globalization, the Great Space far exceeds the reach of the Staat, hence the lack of a nomos (which means both order, naming, and conquest in Greek) that can organize the Earth. This was Schmitt’s reflection for the age of the sea, but in the final chapter he makes an odd aside: about the age of the radio and the airplane, which is the age of the air. This new age of globalization (globalization 3.0, per Thomas Friedman) would need a new nomos, a new way of understanding the order by which states relate to each other.

This basically prefigures sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of “liquid modernity”: in a world of free and open markets, fully integrated with each other and run by an intense drive to consume, social bonds between people and their location begin dissolving. The age of liquid modernity is an age, not of people in places, but of people between places - the best example is Tim Ferris’s bestselling 1999 book The Four Hour Work Week, where he details a class known as the “new rich”, who are able to leverage the economic flexibility of their lives to just travel around the world at ease and live with flexibility. Another globalized class are David Brooks’s BoBos from his 2000 book BoBos In Paradise, where BoBo means “Bohemian Bourgeoisie”, aka college-educated white-collar workers with a social conscience and a penchant for hard work and material comfort; BoBo norms are homogenous across the world given the cross-pollination of global BoBo elites at BoBo institutions, and that makes cities develop BoBo areas interchangeable with each other across the world.

This deracination of the economy and of society goes from top to bottom. At the top, you have the Epstein Class: a global network of billionaires, top academics, celebrities, and politicians that cloister themselves in extreme privacy and whose main interest is the advancement of their status, power, and influence within their group. It’s not for nothing that Epstein’s major asset was his plane - those people all have somewhere to be, usually far away, and he can get them there. His provision of drugs and (frequently underage) women were another part of his role in that network. But the fact that Epstein was enmeshed in a global network of Western billionaires and elites and their foreign counterparts (frequently in non-democracies like Russia and the Gulf States) is extremely important: these people do not see the world as a world of nations; they see it as a world of their people versus everyone else, and they want their people to remain on top. On a more mundane level, ordinary people are increasingly interconnected; social media and the spread of English language literacy worldwide has built gigantic social and parasocial networks between followers and content creators of different countries. America’s culture war has become a global issue, both as it’s exported to other countries (frequently with disastrous consequences), and when those countries decide to reimport them back to America through engagement bait MAGA accounts. American billionaires and American social media created the extremely radicalized South Korean right, at the same time as the German neonazi concept of “remigration” became the central point in Anglophone and European migration discourse basically out of social media repetition. There is, in short, a global community of brainrot, be it the fascist variety uniting America and South Korea, or the woke variety euthanizing all of global progressivism.

Conclusion

Last week, the Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, gave a speech at Davos about the global geopolitical order. The main metaphor, from Vaclav Hevel, is of a greengrocer under communism: someone who parrots party slogans to not get into trouble. Once enough “little people” stop putting up the sign, the systems stops having legitimacy, and collapses. Hence, Carney says:

For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection. We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

This fiction was useful (…) So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.

This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

Carney is right about the general idea: the world order of the internationalist West is over. However, he’s a bit naive about what comes after: he calls for the “middle powers” to unite in pushing for a new state of affairs. The important thing is that Carney is saying it openly, more than what he’s saying; it’s obvious to anyone with a pair of eyes that American hegemony is slowly collapsing under its own weight; the United States, increasingly incapable of discharging the basic responsibilities of a global hegemon, has decided to turn the whole thing into an extortionate protection racket to run for as long as an obese 80 year fascist old can keep it going.

The problem with Carney’s point is that he still puts The Nation at the heart of his conception of global and geopolitical affairs. What even the The West jingoists who believe in nothing except hatred of The Other get right is that a nation-based system in a globalized world, not just economically but also culturally and socially, is a totally untenable state of affairs. The idea that The West can be a block of nations allied among common values is completely unsustainable when there is a global transnational elite undermining those values from the top, and a global community of far-right brainrot attacking them at the ballot box at the bottom. The concept of sovereignty is completely alien to this Right Wing West: rather than a partnership of equal nations, it’s a partnership in owning the libs, where complete submission to the United States and its technological culture war machinery supersedes all national pride the nationalist internationale can aspire to, hence Pierre Pollievre and Nigel Farage justifying Trump’s tariffs against their own countries.

In The End of History, Francis Fukuyama pointed out that the titular end of history had come through liberal capitalist democracy permitting all peoples the power of recognition as equals. Fukuyama notes that this desire also relates to living standards, which on a globalized world keep countries from deviating from the capitalist playbook. However, one path forward, for him, is that the desire to be recognized as superiors is reawakened, particularly among the wealthy and powerful - thus, the struggle of the 21st century would not be between liberalism and fascism, but between liberalism and non-liberalism. Fukuyama was, in this regard, broadly right: what is facing “The West” is a strange international alliance of anti-democratic kleptocrats and oligarchs attempting to subvert national sovereignty to advance their own business dealings. The main difference with his prediction is that this alliance would be not between countries, but within them: between a liberal West that embraces its own principles (so far, MIA), and an anti-liberal West that embraces the barbarism that the West attributes to its enemies.

In episode 24 of the third season of The Simpsons, titled “Brother Can You Spare a Dime”, Homer becomes sterile due to his exposure to radiation in the nuclear power plant he works at. Fearing a lawsuit his boss, Mr. Burns, offers him a $2,000 dollar check for a made-up prize (the “Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in The Field of Excellence”) provided he signs a legal waiver. To assuage Homer’s suspicion, Burns also throws a lavish ticker-tape gala in honor of the award.

Nobody was surprised that this episode came to mind last month, with Donald Trump being awarded the (until this year, non-existent) FIFA Peace Prize at the World Cup draw. The whole thing was generally an embarassment: to Trump, to FIFA, and to the noble sport of football. It just signals a new age: the age of overt genuflection to wannabe despots by all the most powerful people and institutions on planet Earth.

I feel like, at this point, it’s pretty much undeniable that liberal democracy as a system of government is in terminal crisis. The United States has seen, in the past few weeks, armed agents of the state murder two civilians. The government has, largely, defended it and blamed them for insufficiently obeying their orders. Even longtime opponents of the term are starting to describe the situation as “fascist”. On a much less serious note, the New York Times had an article saying Gen Z doesn’t like Harry Potter because they reject liberalism. What’s going on?

Liberal group non-think

Matt Yglesias has a recent article in The Argument I considered very thought provoking. The TL;DR is that it’s about “wokeness”, which has snuck in racially essentialist and culturally relativistic principles into policymaking, leading to bad outcomes - for example, worse education policies. He claims this comes from wokeness being a non-liberal an ideology built off postmodernism that replaces liberal individual-based rights with liberal-agnostic or outright illiberal groups-based ideas. The complicated part is that I think basically all the concrete claims he makes are right, at least as far as I know (I don’t know about progressive entryism). What I disagree with, or at least have caveats and clarifications to make, are the fundamental assumptions he starts off from: that liberalism is inherently about individual-based rights, and the notion (less discussed and less present, but important and related to the former) that free markets and capitalism are a constituent part of liberal principles.

Yglesias’s critique of “Woke” (I’ll use the terms woke, wokeness, and identity politics interchangeably; people use them that way in colloquial speech too) is not particularly new. In fact, he seems to be borrowing mainly from Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap, which calls wokeness “the identity synthesis”. A synthesis of what? Well, postmodern gobbledygook: notably Michel Foucault (postmodernism - the idea that rather than truth, relationships of power define social norms and consensus), Edward Said (decolonial theory - challenging Western power through a critical analysis of how it represents “the other”), Gayatri Spivak (standpoint epistemology - that only marginalized people can represent themselves in public forums and other people must not just make room for them, but empower them to speak), Kimberle Crenshaw (intersectionality - the intersection of different forms of bigotry and oppression as being unique from each other), and Derrick Bell (Critical Race Theory- that one’s a doozy). The identity synthesis includes a rejection of grand narratives (postmodernism), the requirement for public figures to speak out on behalf of oppressed groups, a reification of identity categories, and a zero-sum vision of politics as a struggle between groups over power.

The idea of understanding people as members of groups is not per se illiberal; the question, rather, is how these groups are defined, understood, and employed. The philosopher Elizabeth Anderson writes, in What is the Point of Equality? (1999), that there’s two kinds of egalitarians: luck-based, and “dignity-based”, who argue that true equality comes from the ability to fully participate as a full member of society. The luck egalitarians erred in not making clear, systematic distinctions between types of “bad luck”: the bad luck of being born a Jew in Nazi Germany does not seem comparable to being born a woman in a mildly sexist society, or to be born with expensive tastes and an inability to procure the objects of your desires. The interesting thing is that it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to put luck egalitarianism in the individual-based rights bucket, and democratic egalitarianism in the group-based rights: she chastises luck egalitarians for fostering individualism and egotism, neglecting care and obligations for others; luck egalitarianism is based on individual conceptions of liberal rights, and democratic equality on a community-based one. Anderson makes this explicit in her discussion of racial integration and segregation: “When racial integration rather than diversity is the goal, the relevance of racial means to achieving it is evident; indeed, race-based selection is inherently the most narrowly tailored means to integration.”

In particular, Anderson criticizes defenders of “affinity-based” self segregation (what Mounk calls progressive separatism) also on group-based grounds; in her view, they do not consider the need for White people to (gasp) acknowledge their privilege; in Walled Shahid’s piece on the subject, he mentions coming to terms with his own lack of privilege relative to his classmates during a “check your privilege” college exercise. It’s entirely possible that, just as it was for him, it was a lesson for his wealthier classmates about working class life. Likewise, per Anderson, the progressive separatists ignore the fact that there are not just different group-based allocations of resources, but different allocations of social networks within and between groups. For instance, neighborhoods matter for future economic opportunities, with children growing up in “high-opportunity” areas developing far higher earnings as adults than those growing up in “low-opportunity” ones, and these locations tend to have lower racial, class, and social segregation. In particular, growing up in a community with more socioeconomic diversity is associated with higher socioeconomic mobility (that is, a higher chance of improving your lot in life relative to your parents), which in some level could be driven by inter-class friendships - and direct social contact is key, as shown in a famous study finding that a Starbucks opening in a neighborhood results in higher rates of entrepreneurship explicitly due to its functions as a third space. Of course, Anderson disagrees on core concepts of “wokeness”, but she does this without engaging in individualistic thinking - “My point is that neither justice nor democracy can be realized if the self-segregated racial group is celebrated as a more worthy site of identity and emotional investment than the integrated “us,” as multiculturalists would have it”.

In his critique of “identity politics” titled “Exiting the Vampire Castle”, writer and “thinker” (I’m not sure how to describe his background) Mark Fisher talks about the phenomenon that we now call “wokeness” at some extent (I’ve also written about it relatively recently). Fisher describes it as, basically, the progressive wing of neoliberalism: a profoundly self-obsessed movement driven by branding and self-promotion. Quoth Fisher: “The first law of the Vampires’ Castle is: individualise and privatise everything. While in theory it claims to be in favour of structural critique, in practice it never focuses on anything except individual behaviour. Some of these working class types are not terribly well brought up, and can be very rude at times. Remember: condemning individuals is always more important than paying attention to impersonal structures.”. In The Conquest of Cool, which I’ve read recently, author Thomas Frank points out something quite disturbing: the counterculture of the 1960s was basically immediately cannibalized in its entirety by marketing and advertising. Companies saw the anti-consumer, anti-establishment, peace-and-love hippies, and what they actually saw was dollar signs. Their bohemian and alternative lifestyles weren’t just compatible with mass consumerism - they were even more compatible than the traditional “solid modernity” of a man, a woman, a dog, and a picket fence, with refrigerators and light bulbs that lasted a hundred years. Per left-wing conservative thinker (?) Christopher Lasch:

The “new tribalism,” which finds favor not only among postmodern academics but in the media, in the world of commercial entertainment, and in the cultural boutiques and salons frequented by yuppies, appears on the scene at the very moment when tribalism has ceased to have any substantive content. “Tribalism” is the latest fashion thrown up by a consumerist capitalism that is replacing neighborhoods with shopping malls, thereby undermining the very particularism that it eagerly packages as a commodity.

Wokeness as a movement had to balance two competing stakes: that speech and discourse can be harmful to the victims of oppression (Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance”), and, at the same time. that it the ultimate right of self expression must prevail, to an almost pathologically narcissistic degree. This comes, as I’ve mentioned before, from Woke’s origins in Romanticism: a literary movement that emphasized self-expression, authenticity, and self determination in the face of a hopeless and oppressive world. Romanticism inspired both the liberal nationalism of the generation of 1848, but also the antisemitic blut und boden nonsense of Richard Wagner; both the greatest Spanish fascist writer (Manuel Sanchez Mazas) and the greatest Spanish antifascist (Federico García Lorca) were committed Romantics. The Romantics said, in effect, that all art is political and that all politics ought to be artistic; less than a century later, the Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin famously pointed out that turning politics into arts inevitably leads to war and reactionary totalitarianism. Today’s Romantics are both represented by progressive skeptics of the AI and big tech, and by the rancid unholier-than-thou edgelords of Dimes Square.

I stream therefore I am

This puts the concept of authenticity in a tough spot: it can both justify feelings of liberation and emancipation, and movements built on their opposite, frequently at the same time. To quote Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites:

Standards, we are told, refer to cultural hegemony of dead, white European males. Compassion compels us to recognize the injustice of imposing them on everybody else. When the ideology of compassion leads to this kind of absurdity, it is time to call it into question. Compassion has become the human face of contempt. Democracy once implied opposition to every form of double standard. Today we accept double standards—as always, a recipe for second-class citizenship—in the name of humanitarian concern. Having given up the effort to raise the general level of competence—the old meaning of democracy—we are content to institutionalize competence in the caring class, which arrogates to itself the job of looking out for everybody else.

This also opens the door to an even more interesting and even more important question: why are people incapable of achieving a “sufficient level of competence” to engage in thoughtful examination of harmful essentialist thinking?

The idea of “thoughtlessness” as a wellspring of illiberalism isn’t particularly novel: it’s a main feature of the work of political theorist Hannah Arendt, particularly the controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem. Eichmann in Jerusalem focuses on the role of thoughtlessness and carelessness in the rise of totalitarianism, notably, the tendency of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann to speak in cliches, soundbites, and canned, empty phrases - showing a lack of active reflection and consideration of his actions and their implications on his end. While not at all comparable in content or severity, the dilution of extremely sophisticated philosophical concepts into Instagram infographics and Buzzfeed listicles does provoke the same kind of empty, canned thoughtlessness - the “That’s the wrong question and it valorizes white institutions and white ways of knowing and being and structuring society in really problematic ways.” talking point coming up in a discussion about municipal bonds.

The question, then, is why was there such a proliferation of thoughtlessness in American and liberal culture? The subheader for this post reads "You used to have interesting ideas and now all you do is browse the Internet”, a quote from one of the latter seasons of Lena Dunham’s Girls; the line is said to Hannah, Dunham’s character, in a moment of tension with one of her friends. In the early seasons of the show, particularly the arc where Hannah works for GQ, this is a present theme: the challenge of balancing the ability to work creatively with the mundane drudgery of daily life. Philosopher Simone Weil went to go work in a Fiat car factory in the 1930s to understand the daily life of the proletarian worker (thus exploring the most alien subject to philosophers, “an honest day’s work”); she came up with the concept of affliction, a sort of spiritual exhaustion that reduces a person to only asking the question why (as in, why is this happening to me) over and over again. Similarly, Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism makes the case that it was the economy - society became too bureaucratic to produce individuals capable of critical thought, and instead was churning out shallow narcissists who replaced deliberation with surface-level snap judgment. But why? Fundamentally, I think there’s two major factors. The first is technology. The second is education.

One of the best books I read this (not very long) year so far is The Digital Plenitude by Jay David Bolter. Bolter’s thing is that, since the 1940s, elite literary culture (the fine arts, the opera, the symphony, the great works) has declined and mass culture (movies, pop music) has flourished. He doesn’t really ask why but I think that’s a pretty profound philosophical question, tackled by Herbert Marcuse’s “Social Implications of Technology”. Marcuse, a Frankfurt School thinker, makes a similar argument to Lena Dunham and Simone Weil- that the regimentation of life under mass industrial society, and the exertion from regimented industrial labor was sapping people’s critical and rational faculties. These faculties had, in the past, been critical for eradicating superstition and creating science and technological advancements (Marcuse would call them technical advancements, since he does that annoying philosophy thing of not calling technology technology); however, living in a rationalized industrial society required extensive degrees of training, regimentation, and repetition, which fostered numbness, alienation, and social conformism, which in turn required lower and lower use of people’s higher cognitive faculties. Obviously worth pointing out that, if

I’m not going to gt carried away with Marcuse’s analysis, but “changes to the structure of society and of technology created a mass culture that supplanted traditional elite media” is kind of what Bolter implies happened. Bolter’s analysis goes a step further. Even mass media of the kind the Frankfurt School nerds hated (jazz, movies, etc) relied on the same psychological foundations of high culture: mimesis and catharsis, Aristotle’s core building blocks of drama. Particularly, if you go sit and watch a movie (say, Gone With the Wind), the film produces an identification between you and at least one of the characters, which in turn builds up and then releases powerful emotions. The center of Bolter’s book is that digital media uses a different psychological trick: flow. The concept of flow, coined by psychologist Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi (pronounced six cent mihaly) refers to a state of profound, prolonged focus. Flow can only be achieved with small, procedural tasks that have immediate payoffs with a clear cause-effect and cost-reward relationship. Compare Marty Supreme, a dense drama about a huge asshole trying to go to a pingpong tournament, with scrolling TikTok: you pay attention for a little bit of time the whole time, if you don’t like a video you scroll down, and every video is optimized to make you watch it. Usually, this happens by inciting some instant emotional reaction - which happens to almost always be a negative emotion. This both means that people become less capable of relating to one another and, most importantly, that the “higher” forms of media (even the not particularly stimulating political television of the 90s and 2000s) gets replaced by lower and lower content. As a friend told me one time, it feels like all the stuff I can watch is either homework or slop. Added to the social aspect of social media, what you end up getting is a global network of brainrot, formerly woke brainrot that absolutely neutred left wing politics, currently right wing brainrot radicalizing them against democracy. Streaming television, probably the defining form of art for the 2010s and early 2020s, is now being made with the provision that the people “watching” it are not actually paying attention.

The case for education is, I think, a lot briefer. In The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch also takes aim at universities - particularly, the fact that they don’t seem to place much weight on, well, educating anyone. Contrary to the stupid ass beliefs of one Curtis Yarvin, this isn’t because of some far-reaching Marxist plan to indoctrinate - it’s almost entirely driven by market and economic incentives. College graduation rates and grades have increased consistently since the 1990s without any real increase in student quality, institutional resources, or composition of the education sector. The phenomenon of grade inflation, the paramount example of this issue, is remarkably complex, but the fundamental question is cui bono - who profits. Since getting good grades is so important, students tend to choose classes where they can get higher grades; at the same time, universities are incentivized to improve numbers (retention, graduation, etc.) for basically financial reasons. And since stricter professors get systematically worse evaluations, then precarity in the teaching profession results in grade inflation, as see in the fact that schools with more untenured faculty also have worse outcomes. While the relationship between grade inflation and achievement is not linear, it’s obviously not good to have artificially low standards in order to boost metrics so schools can get artificially better stats in order to boost enrollment. This is Lasch’s entire point: that contemporary culture has commodified education, treating it as a labor certificate and not a civic responsibility to and for young people, to such an extent that the actual education itself is basically completely irrelevant. Parents want their kids to get good grades to get better jobs. Kids want easier classes. Schools want more students. And teachers can’t make a living unless they get good evaluations. The gravitational pull of low standards is just too strong.

Robinson’s Island

In God and Man at Yale, written in 1948, conservative legend William F. Buckley (the Charlie Kirk of the 20th century) accused the economics department of his alma mater of having a socialist and collectivist bias (lol). One of the textbooks he cited was Paul Samuelson’s Foundations of Economic Analysis, specifically the quote: “If free enterprise is not a basic freedom, then it must be justified primarily on the grounds of whether it has delivered the goods. Has it proved an efficient mechanism for producing the goods and services we want?.” Samuelson’s answer, needless to say, was both ommitted from Buckley’s book and also affirmative - capitalism had, in fact, delivered the goods.

The reason why Buckley found Samuelson’s quote so offensive wasn’t just that his book was an embarrassing endeavor that degraded its author’s intelligence by engaging in circular and sophomoric justifications of laundered far-right ideas. It was that Samuelson didn’t consider capitalism and free markets part of the telos of humanity (meaning, “purpose” or “end”), and that therefore he justified them on utilitarian and not natural law rights. In particular, if free markets were a human creation like refrigerators and wearing corsets, then they could just be abandoned at some point in favor of a more efficient system of economic production.

This was a huge deal. I’m currently reading Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists (I read it in 2018 and gave up 100 pages in because I didn’t like it) and, while he doesn’t necessarily put it in those terms, that’s a major reason why the “neoliberal” thinkers of the Mont Pelerin Society were so skeptical of democracy. In particular, those thinkers seemed to believe democracy was an unnatural system of human organization, created out of thin air by radical ideologues, while the market was a natural extension of the human telos, and therefore the sovereignty of the consumer mattered more than the right of the people to govern themselves. The interesting thing is that, contrary to popular belief, neoliberals didn’t want to put the free market above democracy. In fact, they wanted to put the global market above national economies, but to also exercise a tight control over “metaeconomic conditions”, particularly law and culture.

Every economics textbook contains the story of Robinson Crusoe, the shipwrecked man subsisting off fish and coconuts. By trading with Friday, some guy who was there, they can both maximize their wellbeing. Hence, the case for markets. However, as even the neoliberals would recognize, this needs a series of preconditions: it needs both Robinson and Friday to see market exchanges as fundamentally just and justified, it needs for both of them to be able to respect each other’s ownership of fish and coconut, and it needs for them to see each other as sovereign equals. Most European colonists in the Americas failed at this last one: Don Pedro de Mendoza’s colony of Santa Maria del Buen Ayre was burnt to the ground by local natives after increasingly predatory behavior by the Spanish, who saw the inhabitants of the area as their rightful vassals and not equal trading partners. A few decades later, Santa Maria was rebuilt by Juan de Garay, who had amassed superior force to Mendoza, under the name Buenos Aires.

Thus, the conditions for liberal democracy (even for its so called liberal skeptics) has three conditions: the market, democracy, and civic society. Culture is nothing else and nothing more than society - the values people hold. When discussing the creation of culture, things get really dark very fast. It’ll, nonetheless, be the subject of a future post, mostly because I want more space than I can give it here and it needs to be sensitively laid out. In real life, the debate devolved into a Hitler Youth member calling another German a Nazi for reivindicating the ideas of a former Nazi and the German calling the other guy a Nazi because calling people Nazis was a Nazi tactic. Regardless, I think you can talk about “values” somewhat comfortably, and if we’re being honest, most of them are going down the shitter. My whole thing is that support for economic growth, trust in other people and in impersonal mechanisms, and understanding others different than us as our moral equals is declining and that’s bad. It’s also, notably, declined as a consequence of lower economic growth, which is declining due to “neoliberal” ideology (very unhelpful term aside) itself, particularly the impact of globalization on blue collar communities (which, in the United States, have disproportionate political representation). Both Ezra Klein and his left wing critics are united in this: the economy has completely shattered enough working people that they have completely rejected core civic values fundamental to shared liberal life.

Law and government, well, that one’s much easier. Democracy legitimates itself primarily via higher economic growth. In this sense, positive experiences with democracy are linked with both of those through more universalist value systems, positive interactions in the marketplace shape a more universalist, high-trust, non zero-sum mindset, and positive economic performance was linked with higher support for democracy during the Russian Revolution - but only when democracy was actually strengthened. On the contrary, in the Weimar Republic, areas more closely harmed by Heinrich Brüning’s austerity programs turned to supporting Hitler in later years. Political partisanship and partisan fragmentation, themselves economically determined, also limit the importance of core democratic mechanisms to people. However, a second issue is also worth mentioning: inequality. The most compelling case against inequality is also the most small-c conservative: Machiavelli (yeah, that one) believed that the power of the elites (the grandi) grew alongside their wealth, and that the grandi were a profoundly destabilizing force in democratic policies, given their endless hunger for power and prestige and their outsized ability to enforce it. The clearest example of this is the American (and global) elite’s complete disinterest in restraining the American imperial presidency: in a fully Rothbardian turn, they expect that an allmighty security state trained on left wing forces could never be, in turn, turned on themselves. There isn’t such a thing as private law - it’s entirely a state project (one defined by Hayek using extremely tedious and confusing Greek terminology), but one that can be captured, in essence giving greater and greater power in exchange for less regulation, less taxation, and less opposition.

Conclusion

Fundamentally, the incompatibility between the current configuration of markets and the civic and political foundations of those market themselves is the biggest question in contemporary liberal politics. There are, of course, countless civic forms that lend themselves to non-democratic politics consistent with the desired economic order of at least some right wing elites. The wretched world of elite impunity is not compatible with popular sovereignty of any kind.

The whole manual for “winning back the working class” is, at this point, stale and tired. There’s approximately three ideas going around, each time with different formulations. However, looking outside the narrow hotbox of farts that is American elite discourse, there are much clearer, and brighter, paths:

What differentiated the Western model from many Asian, African and Latin American networks of women’s groups and indigenous peoples, or alternative development and environmental organisations, was its indifference to ‘economic and social rights’: what Moyn defines as ‘entitlements to work, education, social assistance, health, housing, food and water’. Focusing on the violations of individuals’ rights by states, human rights groups valuably documented the crimes of the Contras in Nicaragua, the army and death squads in El Salvador, and state terrorists in Guatemala. But they were largely indifferent to the abuse of power by non-state actors: the kleptocratic oligarchies that emerged in Asia, Africa and Latin America throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Nor did they have much to say about the terrible effects of the structural adjustment programmes implemented by the IMF and the World Bank in the 1980s and 1990s. Human rights politics and law, Moyn argues, may have sensitised us ‘to the misery of visible indigence alongside the horrific repression of authoritarian and totalitarian states – but not to the crisis of national welfare, the stagnation of the middle classes and the endurance of global hierarchy’.

Fundamentally, we have to stop understanding liberalism as a series of separate boxes labeled “state” and “market”, and understand them, as every successful movement for political and social reform has, as mutually complementary and interchangeable. Without this underpinning, any attempt at just playing the game without rewriting its rulebook is destined for ingominous failure.