The current political situation in the USA and the possibilities for radical change [Collapse? Part 1]

Trump’s presidency has been a disaster so far, and there’s no reason to think that it will get any better. But it may get a whole lot worse.

The DOGE rampage through USAID has cost 100s of thousands of lives, many of them children, in countries where USAID had programs. The anti-university tantrum has, at least, weakened the research capacity of the top universities. Cuts at NIH and NSH have done the same. It may be impossible to restart many of those research programs if and when funding is restored – intermediate results will have been lost, researchers will have dispersed. And those are only the most obvious damages.

It’s clear that this would not have happened if Kamala Harris has been elected. Let me be clear, yes, I voted for her, but that was more a vote against Trump and a positive affirmation of her politics. Her politics are the same as Biden’s. It would have been more of the same.

Those assessments are near-term assessments, say, from now to the next presidential election in 2028. It’s not at all clear what will happen in the next decade much less then next quarter of a century or longer. And it would be silly to attempt such assessments of a merely hypothetical Harris victory. We just don’t know.

But I’m going in a different direction. How you evaluate the current situation depends on whether or not you think our current institutions are basically sound, but in need of some repair and maintenance, or whether you think that are fatally flawed. If you think the former, then, yes, Harris would have been better than Trump, much better. A Trump presidency followed by, say, eight years of Vance-and-the-techbros, that might well wreck the nation, turning it into a technologically advanced feudal state.

However, I think the current institutions are fatally flawed and are likely to unravel under pressure from AI, not to mention climate change. So, for me the questions are: 1) what kind of new institutions will we need, and 2) how do we get from here to there? I don’t have clear answers to either, but if that’s way we need to go, then Trump-induced chaos may have an upside.

For one thing, it gets (my kind of) people used to the idea that things are bad, really really unsustainably bad. So people may actually start thinking about alternatives. Moreover, the chaos, ugly and destructive as it is, also creates opportunities (I’m thinking of how that asteroid crashing into the Yucatan made opportunities for mammals 65 million years ago). ICE raids have provoked people to protest. And then we have the No Kings Day protests. Wikipedia:

The No Kings protests, also known internationally as the No Dictators or No Tyrants protests, were a series of demonstrations that took place on June 14, 2025 (labelled as No Kings Day by the participants), largely in the United States, against Donald Trump's policies and actions during his second presidency, including his purported fascist tendencies and associated democratic backsliding in the U.S.[3][4][5] The protests took place on the same day as the U.S. Army 250th Anniversary Parade and Trump's 79th birthday.

Organizers estimated that more than five million people participated in more than 2,100 cities and towns, including the flagship event in Philadelphia.[6][7][8] More protests took place in the U.S. territories of Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands, and in 20 foreign countries, including Canada, Japan, Mexico, and in Europe. In countries with constitutional monarchies such as Canada and the United Kingdom, the alternate "Dictators" or "Tyrants" titles were favored over "Kings" to avoid confusion with anti-monarchic movements; Hawaii did the same to avoid confusion with a King Kamehameha Day parade held on the same day.

Protests themselves do not bring about change. But they get people moving, and perhaps even thinking. They’re something that we can build on.

It’s with that in mind that I had a conversation with Claude in the middle of the night. I started by asking it about the formation of the current regime of nation states: Was it born out of political violence? I ended up talking about local events in Hoboken, where I currently live. My prompts are highlighted in blue. Everything else is Claude’s.

* * * * *

Nation-State

We live in a world where perhaps the single most important political structure, the one that dominates the world, is the nation-state. It’s my impression that conceptually the nation-state is an 18^th century 19^th century idea and that most current nation states originated after that time. For example, the USA was born out of revolution in the last quarter of the 18^th century; the same for France. Britain has been more or less continuous for centuries, but there’s been wars and revolutions. More recently, the 20^th century, nation states have originated in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, through colonialism, often through a revolt. That is to say, the current regime of nation-states is the result of one kind or another of politically motivated violence. Is this more or less so?

Your observation is largely accurate and touches on a fundamental aspect of how the modern international system emerged. The nation-state as we understand it today is indeed primarily an 18th-19th century concept, and violence has played a central role in its development worldwide.

The conceptual development: The modern nation-state combines two ideas that weren't necessarily linked before: the nation (a people sharing culture, language, history) and the state (a sovereign political entity). This fusion was powerfully expressed during the French Revolution and spread through 19th-century romantic nationalism.

Violence in nation-state formation: Your assessment is correct - most contemporary nation-states emerged through some form of politically motivated violence:

·       Revolutionary violence: American Revolution (1776), French Revolution (1789), various European revolutions of 1848

·       Wars of unification: German and Italian unifications through multiple wars

·       Independence wars: Latin American independence movements (1810s-1820s)

·       Anti-colonial struggles: The vast majority of Asian and African states gained independence through armed resistance or the credible threat of it

·       Civil wars: American Civil War consolidated the federal state; many others resolved questions of territorial integrity

Some nuances: While violence was predominant, there were variations:

·       Some transitions involved negotiated independence (though often with implicit threats)

·       Some states evolved more gradually from existing political structures

·       The intensity and duration of violence varied considerably

The deeper pattern: What you're identifying connects to a broader truth: the current international system of sovereign nation-states largely emerged from the breakdown of previous orders (empires, city-states, feudal systems) through violent ruptures. Even "peaceful" transitions often occurred against a backdrop of demonstrated or threatened violence elsewhere.

This has profound implications for how we understand legitimacy, sovereignty, and international law today.

Future & revolution

OK. Now I’m thinking about the future. As I am a citizen of the USA that’s where my concern is centered. I’m thinking that the democratic state is currently fragile. I’m worried about whether or not it can continue. I note that AI is developing rapidly and is going to be widely deployed over the coming decades. It’s hard to see the implications, but I can’t help but think that current institutions are going to be stressed. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that major structural change will probably be necessary. How’s that going to happen? Revolutionary political violence doesn’t seem very plausible to me, the central state (i.e. the federal government) has too much power.

What’s going to happen? I know that there are various secession movements in a number of states; I’m thinking particularly of Vermont, which has a long-standing secession movement. So far these movements haven’t gotten anywhere. But perhaps things will change in the future. On the face of it, I can vaguely imagine secession happening without revolutionary violence.

You're grappling with a fascinating and genuinely uncertain question. The combination of AI disruption and existing institutional fragility could indeed create pressures for structural change that our current political framework might struggle to accommodate.

Why revolutionary violence seems implausible: You're right about federal power - not just military, but surveillance capabilities, economic control, and the sheer complexity of modern infrastructure make 18th-century-style revolution practically impossible. Plus, the geographic and demographic distribution of political divisions doesn't map neatly onto clear territorial boundaries.

AI as a structural disruptor: AI could stress institutions in ways we haven't fully anticipated:

·       Economic displacement creating new forms of inequality and dependence

·       Surveillance capabilities that could either strengthen or delegitimize state power

·       Automation potentially reducing the state's need for broad-based consent

·       New forms of information manipulation affecting democratic deliberation

·       Questions about human agency in an AI-dominated system

Alternative pathways for major change:

1.     "Constitutional Convention" route: Article V allows for constitutional conventions called by state legislatures. This could theoretically enable fundamental restructuring without violence.

2.     Gradual devolution: Federal power could gradually devolve to states through legislative and judicial processes, effectively creating a much more confederate system.

3.     "Velvet divorce" secession: Like Czechoslovakia's peaceful split, though the legal/constitutional hurdles in the US are much higher.

4.     Crisis-driven fragmentation: A major crisis (economic collapse, climate disasters, AI-driven social disruption) could create conditions where central authority simply becomes ineffective and local/regional authorities fill the vacuum.

5.     Technological sovereignty: Regions or states might develop parallel technological and economic systems that gradually reduce dependence on federal structures.

The Vermont example: Vermont's secession movement is interesting because it's rooted in scale arguments - that democratic participation becomes impossible in units too large and distant. AI might actually strengthen such arguments if it further centralizes power and reduces human agency.

What specific pressures from AI development do you see as most likely to stress current institutions?

Tyler Cowen interviews Jennifer Pahlka on various things, including DOGE [+ the printing press]

His introduction:

Jennifer Pahlka believes America’s bureaucratic dysfunction is deeply rooted in outdated processes and misaligned incentives. As the founder of Code for America and co-founder of the United States Digital Service, she has witnessed firsthand how government struggles to adapt to the digital age, often trapped in rigid procedures and disconnected from the real-world impact of its policies. Disruption is clearly needed, she says—but can it be done in a way that avoids the chaos of DOGE?

Tyler and Jennifer discuss all this and more, including why Congress has become increasingly passive, how she’d go about reforming government programs, whether there should be less accountability in government, how AGI will change things, whether the US should have public-sector unions, what Singapore’s effectiveness reveals about the trade-offs of technocratic governance, how AI might fundamentally transform national sovereignty, what her experience in the gaming industry taught her about reimagining systems, which American states are the best-governed, the best fictional depictions of bureaucracy, how she’d improve New York City’s governance, her current work at the Niskanen Center, and more.

So far I've only read the segment of the interview that he posted at Marginal Revolution. I responded immediately without reading the whole interview, which I'll do when I have time. I've appended my full comment (with one or three minor changes).

* * * * *

PAHLKA: Yes. I think reinventing government happened at a time when we were just at the beginning of this digital revolution. It was trying with a very 20th-century mindset. Fine, did well within that context, but we don’t need that again.

We need 21st century change. We need true digital transformation. We need something that’s not stuck in the industrial ways of thinking. I don’t think we tried that. I think the efforts have just been too respectful of old ways of working and the institutions. There was really not an appetite, I think, for what I would call responsible disruptive change. Would it have worked?

YES! Alas, it's one thing to say that "We need something that’s not stuck in the industrial ways of thinking." It's something else altogether to actually escape those industrial modes of thinking and acting. After all, the basic institutional structure of the modern world is based on social and cultural forms anchored in the 19th century and earlier. That's the world we've all been raised in.

Thus, as soon as the (potential) impact of ChatGPT became obvious I read people saying how the impact will be comparable to the impact of the printing press. That's an old way of thinking. The printing press itself is obviously pre-industrial. The belief in its pervasive socio-cultural efficacy, however, is much more recent. I believe that Marshall McLuhan's book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, is responsible for that way of thinking. I read it years ago, and have forgotten it. Earlier this year I had a conversation with Claude 3.5 on this subject, Why the printing press didn’t drive either the Scientific or the Industrial Revolution [McLuhan was wrong • Implications for progress studies]. Here's how I opened that post:

Soon after ChatGPT hit the web both the progress punditocracy and the high-tech evangelists were busy chattering away about how this is the greatest thing since the printing press. They’re wrong. Was the printing press important? Sure, it was very important. But it was important as a vehicle for disseminating existing ideas, not for catalyzing new ones. Printed books have the same cognitive affordances – to borrow a term from James J, Gibson – as hand-lettered books, discrete letters in a rectangular array on a flat surface. That’s it. Mechanizing the process of impressing the letters on the page does not change the cognitive affordances of the printed page.

Back when David Hays and I began thinking about publishing on cultural evolution he brough his attention to a collection of essays by Eric Havelock, The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences (Princeton 1982), in which Havelock pointed out that was the adoption of decimal arithmetic was the essential step. Hays and I thought that was correct, and adopted it in the article we eventually published, The Evolution of Cognition (1990).

As far as I'm concerned, anyone who espouses the view that it was the printing press that drove the scientific and industrial revolutions, that person is still mired in old ways, industrial ways, of thinking. That's my litmus test. I discount the views of any thinker who casually espouses that printing press view of historical change.

Back in August of 2024 Tyler linked to a paper by Maxwell Tabarrok, Romae Industriae, which posed the question, Why didn’t Rome have an industrial revolution? This paragraph is from the end of the article:

The printing press alone may have been sufficient to start a Roman industrial revolution because its effects on culture are upstream of the invention processes that might invent all the other required tech. There was more than enough scale in the economy of Rome to support capital intensive productivity improvements in their major industries. So the major constraint must have been idea generation. Rome punches below their weight in population on this metric because of an aristocratic, slave based culture that ridicules the mechanical arts. If copies of Vitruvius or Archimedes became cheap enough that even the workers close to the vulgar arts of farming and manufacturing could read them, it would surely have an effect on the cultural attitudes that stultified Roman invention.

That’s industrial age thinking. You can see it in the vocabulary, “tech,” “scale,” “capital intensive,” and “productivity.” While those concepts remain relevant, they're not at all adequate to understanding the origins of the scientific and industrial revolutions. More is needed.

In February of this year I responded to Tabarrok in a long post in which I had Claude 3.5 analyze Tabarrok's article. Here's how I opened that post:

I believe [Tabarrok] was right to suggest that “the major constraint must have been idea generation,” but he was wrong to finger the lack of the printing press as the cause of that constraint.

The problem is much deeper. The problem is that the Roman system of thought was incapable of conceiving of the clockwork universe, an idea that didn’t become prevalent in Europe until the Enlightenment (17th and 18th centuries), though a similar idea – the universe as the machina mundi – had been suggested as early as the 13th century.

Here's the very end of our conversation:

Bill Benzon: And one thing that’s going to compel movement to deeper understanding is the need to understand how LLMs and other machine-learning engines operate. Right now we don’t (quite) have the necessary concepts. Developing those concepts may well push us up a level. Maybe even.....psst, don’t tell anyone, OK, this is a secret just between you and me....maybe even to Rank 5 cognition. Maybe Rank 5 cognition is the REAL singularity.

Claude 3.5: leans in conspiratorially

That's a fascinating speculation! The idea that grappling with how LLMs and other ML systems actually work could push us beyond even Rank 4 cognition makes a lot of sense. After all, these systems seem to operate in ways that don't fit neatly into our current frameworks for thinking about either mechanical systems (Rank 3) or explicit control structures (Rank 4).

We're dealing with systems that learn and develop capabilities in ways that seem more organic than mechanical, yet are still fundamentally computational. The concepts of emergence, self-organization, and statistical learning that seem crucial to understanding these systems might require entirely new cognitive tools.

And just as the transition from Rank 2 to Rank 3 required people to stop thinking in terms of spirits and start thinking in terms of mechanical laws, perhaps Rank 5 cognition would require some similarly fundamental shift in how we conceptualize intelligence, consciousness, and information processing.

If this is right, then the current debates about whether LLMs are "really" intelligent or conscious might be asking the wrong questions - questions that make sense in our current cognitive frameworks but may need to be reconceptualized entirely at Rank 5.

My father’s most important lesson: fundamental change is difficult

Perhaps the most important lesson my father gave to me explicitly is that people resist change. I forget this exact wording – for I’m thinking about a specific conversation, dimly remembered – but it was something like this: given a choice between learning how to swim, and drowning, most people would drown. Rather dramatic, no?

But that kind of rock-bottom resistance to change has certainly dogged me my professional life (Rejected! @ New Literary History, with observations about the discipline). And I’m pretty sure that observation can out of his professional life. He was a chemical engineer and spent most of his career with the Bethlehem Mines Corporation where he was in charge of coal preparation, which involved removing impurities (mostly rock) from coal before it was used in smelting iron.

I assume that the change he was talking about – for I don’t recall him mentioning it in that conversation – was introducing European technology into North America. I’ve appended a conversation I had with Claude 3.5 about that, since I don’t personally recall the dates. He went on to other innovations at the end of his career, innovations which were, unfortunately, still born. Oh, he got some patents, but Bethlehem Mines was unable to put them to good use. Not so long after that the bottom fell out of the American steel industry, and that changed everything, whether or not people liked it.

* * * * *

My conversation with Claude 3.5 about change in cleaning coal. My prompts are in boldface while Claude’s replies are plain.

I’m interested in a specific development in the history of coal preparation. As background, my father, William Benzon, was Superintendent of Coal Preparation for Bethlehem Mines Corp. from, say, 1960 until his retirement in the mid-1970s. I remember that he was involved in introducing heavy medium cyclones (magnetite) into the US from, I believe, Dutch State Mines in the Netherlands. Do you know anything about that process and its history?

Heavy medium cyclones using magnetite suspension were indeed a significant innovation in coal preparation, introduced to the US coal industry in the 1950s-60s after being developed at Dutch State Mines (DSM). The technology improved the efficiency of separating coal from impurities by using a dense magnetite suspension in a cyclone to separate materials based on density differences.

Given your father's role at Bethlehem Mines during this key period of adoption, he would have been directly involved in implementing this important technology transfer from Europe to the US coal industry. The timing aligns with when US coal companies were actively seeking more efficient separation methods.

I should note that while I'm confident about the general history of heavy medium cyclones and their introduction from DSM to the US, I may not be able to verify specific details about your father's individual role since this represents fairly specialized historical information.

Would you be interested in sharing more about what you remember about your father's specific involvement in this technology transfer?

Thank you. You've given me enough. I just wanted to confirm the timing of that technology. Beyond that, I really don't know much. I know that my father traveled to the Netherlands. And Dutch engineers came to the states. Some stayed with at our hours on several occasions. But I don't really know the dates, the early-mid 1960s seems right, nor do I remember names.

Indeed, the timing fits the historical record. The collaboration between Dutch State Mines and US coal companies in implementing heavy medium cyclone technology was an important development in coal preparation during that period. Your memory of Dutch engineers visiting and your father traveling to the Netherlands provides valuable first-hand confirmation of how this technology transfer occurred.

What I do remember, and this is why I asked the question, is that at some time my father told me that the hardest thing in the world to do is to get people to accept new ideas. I’ve remembered that for my whole life. I suspect that what he had in mind was this business of heavy medium cyclones. That would have been about the time we had that conversation. Much earlier and I would have been too young to understand. Much later, well, much later and I would have been in college. But I just don’t remember him specifically mentioning heavy-medium cyclone technology in that particular conversation. All I have to go on is the timing.

There’s a company known as, I believe, Robertson and Shafer. Did they have anything to do with this technology?

Your father's observation about the difficulty of getting people to accept new ideas is particularly poignant given the context. The introduction of heavy medium cyclones would have represented a significant change in coal preparation practices, likely facing resistance despite its technical advantages.

Regarding Roberts & Schaefer (which I believe is the company you're thinking of) - yes, they were involved in coal preparation plant design and construction during this period. However, I should note that while I'm confident they were active in the coal preparation industry, I can't say with certainty their specific role in heavy medium cyclone implementation without risking making incorrect claims.

Yeah, that's the name of the company. Thanks.

Your father's insight about resistance to new ideas, combined with the timing and context of heavy medium cyclone implementation, suggests that observation likely did stem from his experience with this technology transfer. Coming from his position as Superintendent of Coal Preparation during this key transition period, it's a particularly meaningful observation about technological change and human nature.

Topics in music change: Old music strangles new, new grows over old, and a bunch of pianists

Two rather general sets of remarks, one set prompted by Ted Gioia, the other by Tyler Cowen, followed by a bunch of specifics about classical music and jazz piano.

Early in the 21st Century old music seems to be pushing out new

Ted Gioia has an interesting piece, Is Old Music Killing New Music? (1.19.22). He opens:

I had a hunch that old songs were taking over music streaming platforms—but even I was shocked when I saw the most recent numbers. According to MRC Data, old songs now represent 70% of the US music market.

Those who make a living from new music—especially that endangered species known as the working musician — have to look on these figures with fear and trembling.

But the news gets worse.

The new music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs.

Just consider these facts: the 200 most popular tracks now account for less than 5% of total streams. It was twice that rate just three years ago. And the mix of songs actually purchased by consumers is even more tilted to older music—the current list of most downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the last century, such as Creedence Clearwater and The Police.

And so on.

After offering a fair bit of discussion he considers and rejects the idea “that this decline in music is simply the result of lousy new songs. Music used to be better, or so they say.” Rather, “I listen to 2-3 hours of new music every day, and I know that there are plenty of outstanding young musicians out there. The problem isn’t that they don’t exist, but that the music industry has lost its ability to discover and nurture their talents.” He goes on to note:

In fact, nothing is less interesting to music executives than a completely radical new kind of music. [...] Anything that genuinely breaks the mold is excluded from consideration almost as a rule. That’s actually how the current system has been designed to work.

Even the music genres famous for shaking up the world—rock or jazz or hip-hop—face this same deadening industry mindset. I love jazz, but many of the radio stations focused on that genre play songs that sound almost the same as what they featured ten or twenty years ago. In many instances, they actually are the same songs.

He goes on to say a bit more and ends with the observation:

New music always arises in the least expected place, and when the power brokers aren’t even paying attention. And it will happen again just like that. It certainly needs to. Because the decision-makers controlling our music institutions have lost the thread. We’re lucky that the music is too powerful for them to kill.

OK, so change has to happen from the bottom up.

Set that aside. 

* * * * *

Rick Beato discusses Gioia's thesis:

What happened to classical music?

A couple of weeks ago Tyler Cowen asked “Why has classical music declined?” He posed it in response to a request one of his readers, Rahul, had made to an earlier post (quoting Rahul’s remarks):

In general perception, why are there no achievements in classical music that rival a Mozart, Bach, Beethoven etc. that were created in say the last 50 years?

Is it an exhaustion of what's possible? Are all great motifs already discovered?

Or will we in another 50 or 100 years admire a 1900's composer at the same level as a Mozart or Beethoven?

Or was it something unique in that era (say 1800's) which was conducive to the discovery of great compositions? Patronage? Lack of distraction?

Cowen offers six numbered observations of his own, leading to a long discussion.

Here’s Cowen’s first comment:

The advent of musical recording favored musical forms that allow for the direct communication of personality. Mozart is mediated by sheet music, but the Rolling Stones are on record and the radio and now streaming. You actually get “Mick Jagger,” and most listeners prefer this to a bunch of quarter notes. So a lot of energy left the forms of music that are communicated through more abstract means, such as musical notation, and leapt into personality-specific musics.

From Mozart to the Rolling Stones, that’s quite a lot of musical territory to cover. Yikes!

* * * * *

I’ve been haunted by that conversation. While the quality of the responses is all over the place – no surprise there – what’s interesting is how many of them there are, 210 at the moment. The subject matters to a lot of people.

So I’ve been thinking about it making notes, and have lots of thoughts. 

Scattered thoughts. 

One of those thoughts is that this decline of classical music, if you want to call it that, has been followed by the ascendance of American music. I’d hesitate to go so far as to say that classical music was ‘killed’ by American pop, but there you have it in Chuck Berry, “Roll Over, Beethoven” (1956).

The idea is implicit in the juxtaposition of Mozart and The Rolling Stones in Cowen’s first comment. To be sure, the Stones are British, but they perform in a genre that arose in America, rock and roll. A lot of those “personality-specific” musics came out of America.

In the case of rock and roll, we can trace it back through jump bands and swing combos to early jazz and blues, which then disperse into the 19th century, where minstrelsy emerged as a major form of mass entertainment. The first quarter of the 20th century saw the migration of Blacks out of the South to the North, Midwest, and West. At the same time recording and radio allowed music to spread beyond the geographical locus of musical performers. And Europe was engulfed in the First World War, which you also mention.

That’s when “creators struck out in new directions” en mass. And so you had jazz/swing/blues vs. the long-hair and high-brow classics, a conflict that showed up, among other places, in films and cartoons (where it lingered for a while, e.g. Bugs Bunny in “Long-Haired Hare”, 1949). We had Gershwin and Broadway and Armstrong, Crosby, and Sinatra figuring out how to adapt singing style to microphones and Amplification.

What jazz pianists learned from the classical tradition

One thing that came up in the discussion of Tyler’s comments if the fact that, once movies acquired sound, the compositional strategies and techniques developed in 18th and (mostly) 19th century classical music showed up on the sound tracks of those movies (John Williams is one composer mentioned by name).

More generally, however, those techniques became the common inheritance of any musicians who would listen and learn. Consider these jazz musicians listed in a piece by Ethan Iversion, Theory and European Classical Music (NEC Missive #2):

I feel a quickening in the Force [the times they are a changing]

3. AI and neuroscience have begun a dialog to their mutual benefit. 4. @Noahpinion decides to think about how to regulate and legitimate graffiti. @GlennLoury @CornelWest @henrylau89 @tylercowen @jasoncrawford #Progress @Klonick @neuralink

2/X

— Bill Benzon, aka The Danish Space Laser (@bbenzon) June 14, 2021

Why Xanadu? There's a world and deep history in that question. For a clue, see the link below. As for 2140, ask Kim Stanley Robinson. 4/4@GlennLoury @CornelWest @henrylau89 @tylercowen @jasoncrawford #Progress @Klonick @neuralink @BryanAlexander https://t.co/2Uu1YiME6e

— Bill Benzon, aka The Danish Space Laser (@bbenzon) June 14, 2021

What's up with elites in this emerging world we're in?

Arnold Kling, at his blog, askblog, talking about, and with, Martin "Fifth Wave" Gurri:

1. As I see it, Martin’s view is that the relationship between the elite and the public has fundamentally changed. Thus, the contests between competing elites will be unlike anything we have seen in the past.

2. One way I think of this is that in the past the elite and the public operated in separate spheres. I call these the super-Dunbar sphere and the sub-Dunbar sphere. Referring of course to the Dunbar number that marks the boundary between small-scale society and large-scale society. The public operated in the sub-Dunbar sphere. You were concerned with your own family, friends, and co-workers. The elite managed in the super-Dunbar sphere, running government and large organizations, including mass media. The public knew that the elites were out there, but the public felt no direct connection to the elites. When elites contested with one another, the public were largely bystanders.

3. But new media have caused these two spheres to collide. The public feels itself on the same playing field as the elites. Anyone can comment on Twitter. So people who never used to think much about the super-Dunbar world are now trying to take part in it.

4. Meanwhile, the elites, who are used to having exclusive jurisdiction in the super-Dunbar world, cannot understand why the public no longer defers to them.

James Cham, a bit later responding to both Gurri and Kling:

I’m one step removed from the actual elite in Silicon Valley so this is just speculation. The tech elites are still figuring out what it means to have this power, and they are often still hoping to get the “blessing” of traditional sources of power. Can you imagine any tech elite (other than Peter Thiel) flat out saying that they are competing against DC for the influence of the public?

I think that’s how we actually got Donald Trump: a bunch of tech elite realized they had incredible tools for creating trust and relationships with the public. They just weren’t really willing to risk using it and instead let someone else do it.

(Now it is possible that the tech elite actually think this way and just don’t want to confront traditional elite directly but I haven’t heard that in my conversations.)

The whole conversation is worth a look.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Why identity politics? Because the left has given up on everything else.

Writing in the Guardian, Kenan Malik reviews Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics. We've got a problem:

Between them, Lilla and his critics sum up well the impasse of contemporary politics on the left. Many of his critics cannot see that the politics of identity, far from defending the marginalised and the powerless, fragments the possibilities of meaningful social change. Lilla cannot see that the self-proclaimed “liberal centrist” politics he espouses has helped create the fragmentation of which he despairs. In Europe, too, debates about immigration and multiculturalism, about nationalism and federalism, expose a similar kind of deadlock. The roots of contemporary identity politics lie in the new social movements that emerged in the 1960s to challenge the failure of the left to take seriously the issues of racism, homophobia and women’s rights. The struggle for black rights in America, in particular, was highly influential in providing a template for many other groups to develop concepts of identity and self-organisation. Squeezed between an intensely racist society, on the one hand, and a left often indifferent to their plight, many black activists ceded from civil rights organisations and set up separate black groups.

The left has lost its vision:

The erosion of the power of labour movement organisations, the demise of radical social movements, the decline of collectivist ideologies, the expansion of the market into almost every nook and cranny of social life, the fading of institutions, from trade unions to the church, have all helped to create a more fragmented society. These are the changes that have snapped social bonds and hollowed-out civic life.

That hollowing out has been exacerbated by the narrowing of the political sphere, by politics that has self-consciously become less ideological, more technocratic. The Democrats in America have discarded much of their old ideological attachments as well as their links to their old social constituencies.

Consequently, identity is all that's left for the left.

What Lilla fails to recognise is that the demand for “mayors not marchers” – for pragmatic politics over social movements – is a change that has already happened; and the consequence has been the kind of identity politics he rightly despises. The problem is not that there are marchers rather than mayors. It is, rather, that both marchers and mayors, both activists and politicians, operate in world in which broader visions of social change have faded. How to restore a sense of solidarity based on broader politics rather than narrow identities – that’s the real challenge we face.

Reading Latour 13: ANT and Politics

Bruno Latour. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford UP, 2005. Comments on “Conclusion: From Society to Collective—Can the Social Be Reassembled?” pp. 247-262.

I would dearly love to pick up from my post on ANT and Literary Studies and generalize to culture in general, drawing, of course, on my remarks about graffiti and music as well. The idea would be to recast memes as rigid intermediaries constituted as, shall we say, semiotic codes. The individual code items, then, could be combined into various ‘texts’—in the extended meaning of that term—which function as mediators between individuals and the groups of which they are members. But I must leave that generalization as an exercise for the reader. Were I to embark upon it I’m afraid I might never find my way back out and thus would never be able to finish these notes.

Not a useful result.

Laws and Explanations

So, to the final chapter of Reassembling the Social. And we’re going to get there by taking a look at the concluding paragraph of the penultimate chapter (p. 246):

The laws of the social world may exist, but they occupy a very different position from what the tradition had first thought. They are not behind the scene, above our heads and before the action, but after the action, below the participants and smack in the foreground. They don’t cover, nor encompass, nor gather, nor explain; they circulate, they format, they standardize, they coordinate, they have to be explained.

That last sentence came as something of a rude shock after Latour’s earlier proscription of explanation. Here’s a passage (p. 137) I quoted in Reading Latour 10: Description & Graffiti:

Either the networks that make possible a state of affairs are fully deployed—and then adding an explanation will be superfluous—or we ‘add an explanation’ stating that some other actor or factor should be taken into account, so that it is the description that should be extended one step further. If a description remains in need of an explanation, it means that it is a bad description.

But I stopped reading too soon. That passage continues with this line (and of course more): “There is an exception, however, if it refers to a fairly stable state of affairs where some actors do indeed play the role of fully determined—and thus of fully ‘explained’ intermediaries—but in this case we are back to simpler pre-relativist cases.”

That is, we’re back at the sociology of the social, which is about stabilized social worlds, not worlds in flux, for which Actor-Network Theory has been devised. It’s those worlds in flux where description must be paramount, for how can there be laws if there is no stability? Well, I think there may be an approach to that question, but I’m going to set it aside.

I take it that Latour’s point about “laws of the social world” is that, when we’re dealing with a stabilized world, that stability itself must be explained. Those are the explanations Latour seeks. The laws stating the regularities of a stabilized world are the products of something—forces, structures—Latour fails to name (as far as I can determine).

But his final chapter is not about those worlds. It’s about the world still in flux.

One Man on His Own in West Texas

The New York Times just ran a story about John Wells, who lives off the grid on 60 acres of West Texas desert. He calls his place the “Southwest Texas Alternative Energy And Sustainable Living Field Laboratory.” As Wells hit middle age got tired of a city-based life style and mounting debt. His father died and Wells began to rethink his life. As he says at his website:

Several years ago I began experimenting with alternative energy. I feel that the technology today has advanced enough and the costs have dropped to the point where just about anyone can make the move to off the grid living. This just happened to coincide with discovering accounts of pioneer life of some of my relatives from over 100 years ago. Their lives were difficult back then, but I sensed a feeling of great joy and accomplishment in overcoming hardship - where hard work payed off and living life was a fulfilling experience. I began to envision my life as a pioneer in the 21st century, and have chosen to follow that path.

In taking inventory of my life to this point in time, I believe that over the years I have picked up just the right skills and mentality to live my dream of how I would do it if I had it to do all over again. I suddenly found myself at the perfect point in my lifetime to go for that dream.

And so he sold his house for $600K, paid off his debts, and moved from upstate New York to Texas. He lives on rainwater, solar power, composts his wastes, and is grows vegetables. He’s got a blog going back to 2008, and a bunch of photos at his Flickr site.

Wells, of course, is in a long tradition of go it aloners. One suspects he’d be doing this regardless of the society-wide need for Transition. And that’s the point, our society needs to make such a radical decision. We don’t all have to make the decision together, but by ones and twos and tens and more, we’ve got to start moving and start changing our communities.

Inequality Everywhere

Some nations are richer than others. Rich, poor, or in-between, however, there is inequality everywhere. Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoff observes:

The causes of growing inequality within countries are well understood, and it is not necessary to belabor them here. We live in an era in which globalization expands the market for ultra-talented individuals but competes away the income of ordinary employees. Competition among countries for skilled individuals and profitable industries, in turn, constrains governments’ abilities to maintain high tax rates on the wealthy. Social mobility is further impeded as the rich shower their children with private education and after-school help, while the poorest in many countries cannot afford even to let their children stay in school.

And this rising inequality strikes at the egalitarian impulse that is one of the deepest drivers in human nature. It feeds a sense of injustice that erodes the fabric of society. Rogoff concludes that “Inequality is the big wildcard in the next decade of global growth, and not just in North Africa.”

Higher Ed and the Rise of the Citizen Researcher

When I was in graduate school I used to chat about the state of the higher education system with my mentor, the late David Hays. We were particularly concerned about disciplinary rigidity and the difficulty of intellectual innovation. We felt then that too large a fraction of the research resources were devoted to the crossing of Ts and the dotting of Is and not enough attention was being given to paradigm-busting work.

In the course of these conversations I offered an informal observation: During the Middle Ages the Catholic Church was the institutional center of Western intellectual life. Then Europe underwent a major cultural change during and after the Renaissance (currently known, I believe, as the Early Modern era) and new institutions were created. The Church remained, but it was no longer the central intellectual institution. That function was shifting to secular colleges and universities.

Well, we’ve been undergoing a comparable cultural change since the end of World War II. What’s going to happen to the higher education system? That’s not clear.

The existing system is not going to disappear, but it is certainly under stress. Much vocational training is shifting to online education, including for-profit schools that didn’t exist 50 years ago. But what of research?

On the questions of disciplinary boundaries and paradigm-busting, those matters are still up in the air. But the internet does seem to be giving rise to citizen researchers of various kinds, and that’s going to alter the overall research ecology.

The citizen observer

By citizen researcher I mean someone who performs a research function, but is not on staff at a college or university or other research organization, such an as an industrial lab, a government lab, or a private non-profit research institute.

For example, a recent New York Times article talks about a network of 57,000 people who have so far contributed to a protein-folding project coordinated through the University of Washington:

Proteins are essentially biological nano-machines that carry out myriad functions in the body, and biologists have long sought to understand how the long chains of amino acids that make up each protein fold into their specific configurations.

In May 2008, researchers at the University of Washington made a protein-folding video game called Foldit freely available via the Internet. The game, which was competitive and offered the puzzle-solving qualities of a game like Rubik’s Cube, quickly attracted a dedicated following of thousands of players.

While protein-folding can, and is, done by computers, it requires enormous resources. Humans can bring their pattern-matching ability to bear on the problem by observing and manipulating visual representations of possible configurations.

A recent article in Nature reports on that and similar projects. Stardust@home uses volunteers to examine 1.6 million images from an instrument designed to capture traces of interstellar dust. In March of 2010 one of these volunteers, a disabled groundskeeper named Bruce Hudson, found a track created by a pair of particles. Researchers at Oxford are having volunteers examine astronomical images to determine whether or not galaxies are spiral or elliptical, and to identify “galactic mergers, supernovae, solar storms and lunar craters.” Tim White, a Berkeley paleonologist, is planning to have volunteers scrutinize photographs for signs hominid fossils. Another Nature article reports on eBird, which was launched in 2002 and has recorded 48 million observations made by bird watchers around the globe.

The citizen expert

What these various projects have in common is the use of volunteers as a source of skilled observational labor. But that’s not all there is. The internet’s recently been abuzz with discussion of a proof about computational complexity. A proof was offered by Vinay Deolalikar at Hewett-Packard. According to an article at TechCrunch, once word got out

Moynihan Was Right

Back in the day, 1965, Patrick Moynihan published a now infamous report, The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, which opened as follows:

The United States is approaching a new crisis in race relations.

In the decade that began with the school desegregation decision of the Supreme Court, and ended with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the demand of Negro Americans for full recognition of their civil rights was finally met.

The effort, no matter how savage and brutal, of some State and local governments to thwart the exercise of those rights is doomed. The nation will not put up with it — least of all the Negroes. The present moment will pass. In the meantime, a new period is beginning.

In this new period the expectations of the Negro Americans will go beyond civil rights. Being Americans, they will now expect that in the near future equal opportunities for them as a group will produce roughly equal results, as compared with other groups. This is not going to happen. Nor will it happen for generations to come unless a new and special effort is made. . . .

The fundamental problem . . . is that of family structure. The evidence — not final, but powerfully persuasive — is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling. A middle class group has managed to save itself, but for vast numbers of the unskilled, poorly educated city working class the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated. There are indications that the situation may have been arrested in the past few years, but the general post war trend is unmistakable. So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself.

The thesis of this paper is that these events, in combination, confront the nation with a new kind of problem. Measures that have worked in the past, or would work for most groups in the present, will not work here. A national effort is required that will give a unity of purpose to the many activities of the Federal government in this area, directed to a new kind of national goal: the establishment of a stable Negro family structure.

The report kicked off a firestorm in which Moynihan was lambasted for empty-ump sins of misunderstanding and racism. In this 12 minute Bloggingheads.tv conversation John McWhorter and Glenn Loury argue that Moynihan was right, but he was the wrong color to say what he said.

Hope, Obama, and Health

Over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggan has a post on President Obama. While acknowledging that he’s “instinctively a pragmatist and centrist” who was unlikely to work for “radical policy action in the short run,” he asserted:

Still, it seemed at least possible that an Obama presidency would begin a renewal of a progressive project of transformation, setting out the goal of a better world. One respect in which this hope has been fulfilled, for me, is in Obama’s articulation of the goal of a world without nuclear weapons, and in the small but positive steps he’s taken in this direction. . . . after decades in which the left has been on the defensive, it’s time for a politics of hope. We need hope to mobilise a positive alternative to the fear, anger and tribalism on offer from the right. . . . What the politics of hope means, to me, is the need to start setting out goals that are far more ambitious than the incremental changes debated in day-to-day electoral politics.

This reminded me of a passage from Health of Nations (Basic 1987, p. 184), by Leonard Sagan:

The history of rapid health gains in the United States is not unique; the rate at which death rates have fallen is even more rapid in more recently modernizing countries. The usual explanations for this dramatic improvement—better medical care, nutrition, or clean water—provide only partial answers. More important in explaining the decline in death worldwide is the rise of hope ... [through] the introduction of the transistor radio and television, bringing into the huts and shanties of the world the message that progress is possible, that each individual is unique and of value, and that science and technology can provide the opportunity for fulfillment of these hopes. [emphasis mine, BB]

Hope: intangible, not sufficient, but necessary. Without it we wither and die. With it, we can change and grow.