Tech Bubble Consumer Dispatch #2
A roundup of I'm reading, watching, and listening to
Welcome to the Tech Bubble. This week, we are starting off with a roundup featuring some helpful post-election analysis, tech news, interesting essays, book recommendations, music rabbit holes. You can read the first Tech Consumer Dispatch here (recommendations on the political economy of tech, posthuman sci fi, city pop, and Japanese/Brazilian jazz & funk).
I’m on the Trashfuture podcast this week, where we talk a bit about the aftermath of the election, Elon Musk, and weird startups. And this week my podcast’s episode with Susan Li and Alec Karakatsanis just came out—the focus is their important work at Civil Rights Corps fighting the prison tech industry and its intense surveillance/commodification of communications between prisoners and their families.
If you like the recommendations below and want more—they'll be paywalled eventually—then please hit the subscribe to the newsletter ($7 a month or $70 a year). Subscriptions help keep other posts free and support me as I focus on growing this project. If you've already subscribed, a million more blessings unto you. And if you have any suggestions yourself, shoot me an email!
Post-election commentary
Here I just want to quickly round out analyses and commentary I’ve found helpful in thinking about what happened and what comes next!
Osita Nwanevu has long been my favorite political commentator and he has two offerings, one from his newsletter and one from his Guardian column.
Those of us more seriously committed to pulling this country off the road to hell, of course, can’t afford a retreat into nihilism or fantasy. Voters can be maddening, yes. They are motivated by competing and often contradictory thoughts and impulses. But the task of democratic politics, still today as always, is to engage and persuade them. That frustrating, difficult work isn’t for everyone; those not cut out for it should see themselves off of the political scene and leave it to others. Thinking through what to do now will be difficult enough without the interjections of those who’ve convinced themselves that there’s nothing to be done.
Adam Tooze had a great London Review of Books essay before the election that surveyed what Bidenomics was:
We can use the past tense because, whatever happens in the election, Bidenism is over. The project anchored on the long-serving senator from Delaware and Obama’s vice president had one term in it. Up until the last moments, his entourage closed ranks to deny this fact. They clung on even though, as Bob Woodward reveals in his new book, War, it was clear already in June 2023 that Biden was failing.* It wasn’t until a year later that they, unwillingly, accepted that a man born in 1942, during the autumn of Stalingrad and El Alamein, was not fit to run for president in 2024. The fact that his opponent wasn’t fit to run either is another matter.
We are left asking how this four-year period fits into recent American history and what legacy it leaves. The National Defence Industrial Strategy (NDIS) offers to do some of the work for us. Like other, better-known documents of the Biden era – Jake Sullivan’s speech on ‘Renewing American Economic Leadership’ at the Brookings Institution in April 2023, for instance – the NDIS is historically self-conscious. The basic Biden narrative was of America’s fall from greatness, starting in the 1990s, when the industrial fabric of the nation began to fray and China’s manufacturing capacity surged. Now China and other competitors are rising fast. The home front is undermined by polarisation and social dysfunction. But, with measures such as the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act (which increased spending on semiconductor research), the bipartisan infrastructure law and the NDIS, the Biden administration was attempting a national rebuilding centred on industrial production and a revalorisation of manual work.
Tim Barker’s essay in Sidecar pushes against the idea that Trump’s election itself signals the emergence of a new political order:
NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie proclaimed that ‘Most of us will probably die living in the political order that will emerge out of this election’. Without giving any hostages to fortune, one can say that this is wrong. The idea of a political order, alluded to by Bouie, was introduced to the study of American politics by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, whose first volume on the age of the New Deal was titled The Crisis of the Old Order. For volume two, The Coming of the New Deal, Schlesinger picked an epigraph from Machiavelli: ‘There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things’.
Both the Age of Roosevelt and its predecessor had rested on durable class alignments. The System of 1896 was founded on the consolidation of corporate capital in a world-historical merger movement, and secured at the polls – not once, but repeatedly – with the support of industrial workers who believed they had an interest in tariff-protected industrial development. The New Deal order represented the incorporation of organized labour as a junior partner behind those businesses which would benefit from, or could at least tolerate, Roosevelt’s unprecedented combination of free trade, social welfare and trade union legality. Even the fractured age of neoliberalism was preceded, in the 1970s, by an unprecedented mobilization in which, as Thomas Edsall put it, ‘business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favour of joint, cooperative action in the legislative arena’.
I liked Gabriel Winat’s Dissent essay as a condemnation of liberals and call to action for leftists:
The pathologies of the Democrats, though, are in a sense not the result of errors. It is the structural role and composition of the party that produces its duplicitous and incoherent orientation. It is the mainstream party of globalized neoliberal capitalism, and at the same time, by tradition anyway, the party of the working class. As the organized power of the latter has been washed away, the commitment has become somewhat more aspirational: Harris notably cleaned up with the richest income bracket of voters. The only issues on which Harris hinted of a break with Biden concerned more favorable treatment of the billionaires who surrounded her, and her closest advisers included figures like David Plouffe, former senior vice president of Uber, and Harris’s brother-in-law Tony West, formerly the chief legal officer of Uber, who successfully urged her to drop Biden-era populism and cultivate relations with corporate allies.
The party under Biden pivoted toward economic nationalism because it didn’t have a substantive or convincing program of progressive redistribution after the failure of Build Back Better, and it couldn’t find one that would be acceptable to its corporate wing. As Bharat Ramamurti, former deputy director of the National Economic Council, observed after the election, “I wish we had enacted the housing, care, and child tax credit elements in Build Back Better so we would have had concrete cost-of-living benefits to run on. People should reflect on which part of the Democratic Party denied us those agenda items.” Instead, Biden stole Trump’s idea: exit right from neoliberalism, get the weapons factories humming. Biden sustained Trump’s massive expansion of military expenditures, with national security providing the primary ideological justification for full employment and the pursuit of progressive social goals, as it did in the Cold War. In turn, the escalating geopolitical and geoeconomic confrontation with China supplied the logic of the unwavering U.S. backing for Netanyahu’s wars: renewed great power competition intensified the imperative of consolidating a critical strategic region under U.S. hegemony. Again continuing a foreign policy formula developed by Trump, Biden’s strategy has been to pursue this goal by resolving lingering tensions between Israel and the U.S.-aligned Arab states (Saudi Arabia most significantly, with the Gulf states and Morocco taken care of under Trump and Egypt decades ago at Camp David). Accomplishing this resolution requires the termination of the Palestinian national movement, the main obstacle to such a consolidation. The idea of a Potemkin Palestinian state may return some day, but only after a severe chastising and a stark numerical reduction of the Palestinian people.
The demobilization of the Democratic electorate is thus the product of the party’s contradictory character at more than one level. The accountability of the Democrats to antagonistic constituencies produces both rhetorical incoherence—what does this party stand for?—and programmatic self-cancellation. Champions of the domestic rule of law and the rules-based international order, they engaged in a spectacular series of violations of domestic and international law. Promising a new New Deal, they admonished voters to be grateful for how well they were already doing economically. Each step taken by the party’s policymakers in pursuit of one goal imposes a limit in another direction. It is by this dynamic that a decade of (appropriate) anti-Trump hysteria led first to the adoption of parts of Trump’s program by the Democrats, and then finally his reinstallation as president at new heights of public opinion favorability. Nothing better than the real thing.
Essays on psyops, degrowth, surveillance capitalism, and Xi Jinping Thought
Society of the Psyop (Part 1-3) by Trevor Paglen
This is a fun essay a friend who is obsessed with UFOs sent me and it is a very ambitious expansive piece of work that goes far beyond that single item:
We once looked at pictures. Then, with the advent of computer vision and machine learning, pictures started looking back at us. Now, something even stranger is happening.
Generative AI, Adtech, recommendation algorithms, engagement economies, personalized search, and machine learning are inaugurating a new relationship between humans and media. Pictures are now looking at us looking at them, eliciting feedback and evolving. We’ve entered a protean, targeted visual culture that shows us what it believes we want to see, measures our reactions, then morphs itself to optimize for the reactions and actions it wants. New forms of media prod and persuade, modulate and manipulate, shaping worldviews and actions to induce us into believing what they want us to believe, and to extract value and exert influence.
How did we get here? This three-part essay traces a brief history of media, technologies, and techniques that take advantage of the malleability of perception, capitalizing on quirks in human brains to shape reality. It is a story about the manufacturing of hallucinations and the fact that, under the right conditions, hallucination and reality can become one and the same.
Marx Against Techno-Optimism by Camilla Royle
This is essentially a review of Kohei Saito's amazing book Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism and has rekindled my interest in writing something trying to tie together neo-Luddism, decelerationism, and degrowth in a serious way. UNTIL THEN, check this out:
Saito’s points about degrowth may provoke the most discussion. The degrowthers are formally correct to say that society cannot continue to expand the use of fossil fuels without causing more catastrophic climate change. Their discussions of how we could all have a shorter working week and a better quality of life are obviously very attractive. But Saito goes further than this and asserts the existence of more general limits to growth. According to Saito, there are ‘planetary boundaries that exist independently of human will’ (2022, p. 229). These constrain socialism’s ability to make material abundance ‘almost infinite’ so that ‘the working class can enjoy the same luxurious life without natural limits’ (p. 229). This review has primarily discussed Saito’s work in relation to theories of metabolism as Saito himself maintains that metabolism is central to an ecological Marxist understanding (2022, p. 19). However, his book poses a challenge to the metabolic rift school of Marxists associated with the term. In some ways it is more reminiscent of the likes of Ted Benton with its emphasis on rethinking the suppositions of traditional Marxism and on highlighting irreconcilable contradictions between the demands of capitalism and the limits posed by the natural world (Saito references Benton’s ‘natural limits’ article briefly and approvingly on p. 15—the difference between them is that Benton thinks that Marx never recognised natural limits whereas Saito says he eventually did later in life).
In Defense of 'Surveillance Capitalism' by Peter Königs
I'm a big critic of surveillance capitalism, as I laid out in Part 2 of my AI series. I think the Zuboffian framework for understanding the effect of digital technologies on capitalism is weak and has led to a flurry of intellectual dead-ends, with Foster's version in Monthly Review being infinitely more material and illuminating in its analysis. Still, we will suffer the former for a LONG time. I found an essay defending/interrogating it that I keep bobbing between persuasive/interesting. I will probably write some response to it later. In the meantime, check out the abstract to see if it may interest you:
Critics of Big Tech often describe ‘surveillance capitalism’ in grim terms, blaming it for all kinds of political and social ills. This article counters this pessimistic narrative, offering a more favorable take on companies like Google, YouTube, and Twitter/X. It argues that the downsides of surveillance capitalism are overstated, while the benefits are largely overlooked. Specifically, the article examines six critical areas: i) targeted advertising, ii) the influence of surveillance capitalism on politics, iii) its impact on mental health, iv) its connection with government surveillance, v) its effects on the rule of law and social trust, and vi) privacy concerns. For each area, it will be argued that concerns about surveillance capitalism are unfounded or exaggerated. The article also explores some benefits of the services provided by these technology companies and concludes with a discussion of the practical implications. Throughout, the article draws on empirical evidence relating to the societal and political impact of digital technologies.
Is Xi Jinping a Marxist? by Jude Blanchette
An interesting review of Xi Jinping Thought with the help of two recent books on the subject: Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung's The Political Thought of Xi Jinping and Ambassador Kevin Rudd's On Xi Jinping: How Xi's Marxist Nationalism is Shaping China and the World. Check it out:
But this is not Leninism for Leninism’s sake. Nor is it a continuous revolution to bring Marx’s vision of communism to China, or to realize heaven on earth. The true substance of Xi Jinping Thought is how to direct Leninism at a policy agenda focused on building and wielding comprehensive national power. While Chinese leaders and intellectuals since the late 19th century have sought to restore China’s central place in the international order, from Zeng Guofan and the Self-Strengthening Movement to Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, Xi is employing a new toolkit. He leverages cutting-edge technology, state-controlled capitalism and assertive foreign policy, with an unprecedented focus on expanding China’s influence across key global arenas. Unlike his predecessors, who often adopted more cautious or internally-focused approaches, Xi has mobilized far greater resources and directed the full machinery of the Party toward strategic ambitions on the world stage. His methods — which blend Leninist control with modern economic, technological and military prowess — represent a more aggressive and concentrated effort to reclaim China’s historical stature, with the long-term goal of challenging the current global power balance.
China, China, China
The Huawei Model by Yun Wen
One of the first books we covered on This Machine Kills was The Huawei Model, spurred by Evgeny Morozov’s essay on the geopolitical context behind Huawei’s ascendance and how America’s burgeoning Cold War with China crashed up against the tech giant. How did Huawei become central to global information and communications technology infrastructure? How did this spring out of China's own attempts to develop its ICT sector and expand into foreign markets? How does Huawei pursue R&D, how is it structured internally, what are its labor practices, what are its main offerings? And, of course, what does the nature of this firm and the support it gets from the China tell us about the "huawei model" development strategy.
Attention Factory by Matthew Brennan
While I’ve read essay after essay on TikTok and its parent company ByteDance, I had not actually read a book centered on the two. The string of books I’ve been reading on China lately have been an attempt to learn more about its innovation system, and this one offers a lot of interesting details through a mix of reporting & analysis. Many of the details have been distilled in essays since, but a book length treatment is worth the trouble. How did TikTok become, at one point, the mos tvaluable startup in the world? How did ByteDance create so many valuable products/startups for domestic and foreign markets? What decisions drove the financing, development, and deployment of TikTok? What does China's startup ecosystem look like?
More science fiction
As I said in the last dispatch, I’ve been rereading the science fiction I gorged myself on when my dad used to leave me at the library for the weekend BUT I’ve also been trying to exhaust bibliographies of my favorite writers. This week is still science fiction heavy, I’m just gonna focus on stories I’ve only read for the first time recently.
Triton by Samuel Delaney
Elsewhere I’ve recommended other books of Delaney’s like Babel-17 or Dhalgren or Nova—each of these are masterpieces that you should check out! Triton is one I’ve never heard of, coming to me a few months ago from Outlaw Bookseller, one of my favorite YouTube channels about books (authors, stories, the histories and contexts of various genres, bookselling, etc.) Triton follows Bron Helstrom, a human on this moon colony that lives in an era where technology allows you to redesign nearly any aspect of your self: sexuality, gender/sex, presentation, these are all fluid in the libertine Triton society. Still Bron struggles to define himself and is in the midst of a personal crisis wrapped up in a larger political crisis (Earth vs Mars, with Triton an independent outpost). I see flashes of Bron in characters explored by Tony Tulathimutte's Rejection, but Triton is better understood as a response to The Dispossessed: An Ambigious Utopia (Triton's full name is Trouble on Triton: An Ambigious Heterotopia). Bron is a nightmare of a character, a cypher through which to view this future society; lost and aimless as various groups pull him in, draw his disgust or pity or desperate attempt to join, and as he develops a deep obsession with an artist known as The Spike.
The Unsleeping Eye by David G. Compton
D.G. Compton has become a quick favorite of mine, with this being his best. Katherine Mortenhoe is a Romance novel "programmer" that leans she will die of a terminal illness in a few weeks at the ripe old age of 44 in a world with extended lifespans. Rod is a journalist who accepts an eye camera implant and is assigned to document the last few weeks of Katherine's life so that it can be turned into a reality television show (without her knowledge). Surveillance, privacy, media circuses, reality television, a great deal of what we're suffering through now ports over very nicely to this book and vice versa. The prose is beautiful for the genre, the characters are amazing, it is very very warm and alive and angry/vilotric/contempous of a society so thoroughly mediated by, well, media/mediums.
Beast Coast nostalgia
Two weeks ago, I was in New Orleans with Jathan (my co-host on This Machine Kills) and Jereme (his brother and our producer) when Jathan mentions he was also a superfan of The Underachievers—this is a rap duo I truly haven't though of in years. AK the Savior and Issa Gold formed their duo back in 2011 and were part of a looser supergroup (Beast Coast) that included rap trio Flatbush Zombies (Meechy Darko, Zombie Juice and Erick Arc Elliott) and hip-hop collective Progressive Era (Joey Badass, Capital STEEZ, CJ Fly, Kirk Knight, and many more). Beast Coast only put out one album and did one tour together, both in summer 2019, but the various groups and members have collaborated with each other for well over a decade.
A common thread through all their music is the psychedelic influence, but I haven’t seen much talk of the granola New Age “Indigo Child” idea that dominated the music of various members and subgroups for some time. The Underachievers’ debut mixtape is titled “INDIGOISM" and most members talk about elevating their consciousness, saving humanity, third eyes, New Age spirituality, and so on. Back in the 1970s, Nancy Ann Tappe—a supposed psychic who studied psychic phenomena—started developing the idea that we each had a "life color" or an aura representing our life force that had a specific color. Tappe claimed children were being born with an "indigo" color and had a life force that lent itself towards greater empathy, intelligence, intuition, spirituality, and so on. This theory has waxed and waned over the years but the most recent iteration believes there's a connection to ADD/ADHD diagnoses and the "evolution" of a new generation of humanity.
This is all bunk and hogwash, of course, but it doesn’t take much to see why it has persisted over the years. As the Skeptic's Dictionary puts it:
One can understand why many parents would not want their child to be labeled as ADD or ADHD. The label implies imperfection. Some may even take it to mean the child is "damaged." Specifically, it means your child's behavior is due to a neuro-biological condition. To some, this is the same as having a malfunctioning brain or a mental disorder. Understandably, emotions run high here. Treatment of children with problems is a hot button issue for the mass media, attack lawyers, talk show hosts, columnists, and others not known for their role in clarifying complicated scientific or medical matters. Many jump on the bandwagon and attack the drug industry and psychiatrists for overdrugging our children. Opposition is fruitless, because few will listen to those who would defend those who “abuse” children. Fewer still will bother to investigate to see whether the critics know what they are talking about.
None of this explains, however, how it creeped into so much rap. Essays that touched on this are few and far between but here’s one interview that touches on another self-professed Indigo Child—the artist Raury, whose debut EP “Indigo Child” dived deep into this sort of New Age talk. In a conversation with i-d, Raury says:
Indigo children are my generation. It’s kids like me who just automatically, regardless of who they are or where they’re from, feel like something isn’t right with the normal system of life that we live in. We’re also highly inclined to be more advanced and geared toward our dreams because we have the internet. We were born with it. I literally don’t remember a world without it. And it’s thanks to the internet that I’m here, being an artist. It seems that everybody is considered either ahead of their time, or to have grown up too fast. Whether that’s good or bad, I feel that there is an extreme generational gap between us and older people. The young kids are a lot more advanced and will probably do a lot more for the future of the world. I feel like it’s a beautiful thing but also bad because you can stumble across all the wrong things earlier on. I named my EP Indigo Child to remind people that my generation isn’t hopeless.”
Beyond the pseudoscience, psychic nonsense, talk of aura and light work and indigo and what not, there are a few more familiar things: frustration with the world as it is, some sort of existential dread or anxiety about childhood, and a vague sense that something has shifted in the way our lives are constructed. If you know someone that’s written more about why this weird ass idea found an audience with these and other rap groups, let me know! For now, let’s put that aside and get into what I really want to share with everyone…the music
The Underachievers - 6th Sense
A perfect example of what we’re talking about. Some lovely imagery, a overdose of mystical imagery, constant evocation of enlightenment, all layered atop a spacey beat.
Progressive Era - Like Water
This song features some of my favorite verses from each of the Progressive Era members you here hear. The track itself is off Pro Era’s only mixtape (PEEP: the aPROcalypse) and was dropped two days before the first voice—Capital STEEZ, Pro Era co-founder—killed himself. The video, which came out sometime in May 2013, serves as a memorial for STEEZ, whose verse is laid over shots of the city and a look-alike (I assume a family member?) moving about. STEEZ’s verse was one of his best and has maybe my favorite opener from him “AND I QUOTE: WE CAME LIKE THEM NIGGAS IN BOATS.” Statik Selektah’s production gives the song a sense of nostalgia that I’m sure has only grown with STEEZ’s passing. Badass is the real star, however, and maybe my favorite verse of his. I also associate this song with long walks home from school, shivering in the cold and drudging along through broken sheets of ice or the brown-black slush that would soon follow. Back when it used to snow!
Flatbush Zombies - Club Soda (feat. Action Bronson)
THIS was the song that made me into a Flatbush Zombies fan and revisiting their discography, it was such a pleasant surprise to realize I still knew all the words. I forgot how much I LOVED Erick’s production, everyone’s delivery, but especially Bronson’s lazy and playful verse.
And that's it for recommendations this week. I'm working on the next part of the AI series, which will be on asset bubbles and infrastructure. Look for that in your inbox sometime this week!
Until then, adios!