Some initial thoughts about the implications of the Los Angeles fires, in terms of geophysical risks, informational risks, and economic risks. A long-ish 🧵: 1/15 1. Geophysical risk implications: The way these fires played out as a pyrogeographic matter shows two things: (a) that climate change is amplifying and accelerating risks for cataclysmic events – no matter what the deniers say... 2/15

I think most of my friends in academia haven't really wrapped their head around what is coming down the pike if Trump gets a second term.

A brief 🧵 First off: universities are likely to be in the direct cross-hairs of a second Trump administration, aiming to defund the perceived power center of the “cultural Marxist” opposition to Trumpian neo-Know-Nothingism.

Think what Chris Rufo is doing in Florida, at national scale.

There is no discipline that hates itself more than anthropology (and rightly so). A brief thread:

https://twitter.com/phellermann/status/1771500870863077441

The origin of the problem began with what was at first a crucial and good idea: that all human groups are equally imbued with “culture” that defines and integrates those who belong to it. But this initially good idea over time developed an unfortunate consequence…

It’s really not hard to define “woke” — it’s “social justice”-focused culture warriors, e.g. people who seek to disrupt the hegemony of patriarchal, heteronormative, white-centered institutions — especially by policing cultural codes of various sorts. lareviewofbooks.org/article/critic… By contrast, the central focus of “the left” is about *promoting economic leveling.*

Both left and woke aim to de-privilege incumbents — which is why the party of incumbent power restoration often conflates them — but their social ontologies of privilege are radically different.

What are "planetary politics"? A thread: The basic units of politics frame who belongs to a political community, which in turn define what Chinese political philosopher Zhao Tingyang describes as “what sorts of political actions and political problems are possible or impossible.”

Beijing is about to discover, just as DC did in the 1970s/80s, that loans to the Global South for infrastructure, made during a time of low real interest rates & a commodity boom, are not going to be paid back. As before, this will be painful for everyone. fortune.com/2023/05/18/chi… This is why I’ve been saying for years that BRI is less of a dastardly plan that an act of supreme and pernicious foolishness

https://twitter.com/nils_gilman/status/1345033751747706880

So yesterday I had one of the hands-down weirdest experiences of my life. Bear with me, for a longish thread. 1/16 The setting: Fort Irwin, in the Mojave desert. Irwin is one of two main CONUS sites for training U.S. soldiers for land combat, which involves LARPing highly elaborated simulated combat scenarios. More on Ft. Irwin here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Irwi… 2/16

Playing with the term "retroactive risk fallacy" to describe the situation where, when a simulation of some bad future provokes a policy response that prevents that future from taking place, some people will retroactively claim that the forecast scenario was nonsense. 4ex, say a public health model predicts that an erupting pandemic may kill millions. Public health officials respond by imposing coercive measures, successfully preventing those deaths. Then, since the bad event didn't happen, some will claim that the coercion was unnecessary.

It’s idiocy to rebuild Ian-ruined coastal Florida. Federal relief for refugees should be contingent on moving & building back only in places not subject to inexorably rising seas & storms. No federal funds should go to rebuilding in floodplains. Let the managed retreat begin now. It’s happening one way or another.

https://twitter.com/fawfulfan/status/1575510749966995456

In the heyday of neoliberal globalization, which coincided with the “post-historical” view that Great Power competition was done with, many believed not only that the nation-state was fading away, but that corporations were no longer “tied” to any particular nation-state. 🧵 Firms like Ford or IBM or McKinsey of course had a headquarters that was in a particular country, but they saw themselves as completely global actors, producing their wares everywhere and selling them everywhere.

I'm reading Kojin Karatani as an excuse to deep dive back into intra-Marxist debates I'd long abandoned. Within that tradition, Karatani boldly displace the centrality of the mode of production with the mode of exchange, resurrecting Verkehrweise from Marx's youthful manuscripts. Karatani is Japanese literary critic turned philosopher within the Marxist tradition — who writes from the tradition that presents Marx as primarily a philosopher rather than an economist or sociologist. (A Japanese Althusser, if you will, albeit without the killer instinct.) 2/6

You can either try to reform an institution as an employee from within (including as a whistleblower), or you can throw bombs at it on social media. But the idea that you have a right to stay employed as you throw public bombs at management and mission is absurd. When I ran the whistleblower program for a large university, I saw many instances of employees using the whistleblower protection system to indemnify themselves against having their performance managed: If you see a bad review coming, blow the whistle and you're protected.

At the Nuremburg trials of former Nazi leaders, “Class A” war criminals were defined as those who engaged in “planning, preparation, initiation, waging or participation in a common plan or conspiracy related to a war of aggression.” By that definition, a lot of American politicians and pundits are Class A war criminals.

Western and especially American ignorance of China isn’t just a matter of not paying attention. In fact, there is tons of reporting on China in the West. Rather, it’s result of the Western media’s myopic focus on a tiny subset of the enormous ferment China is experiencing. 🧵 What reporting there is in mainstream outlets – not made easier, to be sure, by Chinese limits on foreign reporting – trains its gaze relentlessly and near-exclusively either on China’s massive economic growth, or on human & civil rights questions in Hong Kong or China's Far West

“Formulating an effective U.S. policy response” to China's technological takeoff “requires a solid grasp of emerging technologies and a degree of projective empathy — understanding how an ambitious Chinese bureaucrat is likely to view innovation.” foreignaffairs.com/articles/china… “Although China’s approach contradicts Silicon Valley’s deeply ingrained assumptions about the necessity of free markets and free speech, it has yielded more technological advances and commercial success than most American experts believed possible.”

Graham Allison suggests that Xi Jingpeng take a page from Teddy Roosevelt in 1905 to try to raise its standing by brokering a peace between Russia at war with a fractious neighbor. I have thoughts... 🧵 washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/… First, Allison is right that if Beijing were to broker a RUS-UKR peace deal, this would tremendously raise China's global standing. The first problem with this idea, however, is that even if Beijing wants to play this role, it’s not clear what a peace deal would look like. 2/8

One of the most annoying figures on the contemporary American left is the privileged person who adopts the moniker of oppression. You know the type I'm talking about: the prof with the guaranteed-for-life six figure salary who says they're a "socialist"; the millennial who says they're "queer" even though they basically only sleep with cis-het members of the opposite sex; etc.

The Cartesian-Kantian notion of the human stabilized certain forms of togetherness – ethnicities, nationalities, societies (apart from nature, but also apart from other categories of humans – and subhumans).

A short thread on the transformation of the human. #ToftH 1/4 If the Cartesian-Kantian concept of the human no longer holds, then how will we form new agglomerations?
What sorts of identities will take shape?
Who and what will be included – and excluded?
What will be the new types of commensalities?
What sorts of new boundaries will emerge?

One thing about web3 is for absolute certain: a lot of very smart people — either the true believers, or the howling skeptics — are going to end up looking like utter fools. The strength of opinion on radically different sides is really remarkable. The more I try to wrap my head around the web3 claims, the more it looks to me like no more or less than history’s greatest pump & dump scheme.

And yet, people I consider smart, well-informed non-grifters are absolute believers.

But where’s the lie here? networked.substack.com/p/web3-i-have-…

Many commentators have tended to depict the sea change that began in 1979 (with the election of Thatcher and the Volcker shock) as a kind of clear rupture – a “victory for neoliberalism” and defeat for older Keynesian models. That was not how it felt at the time. THREAD: The 1980s experienced continued contestation over economic models in the Global North, with Reagan practicing “military Keynesianism” at home, with the E. European socialist model creaking but still seemingly permanent, etc. What we now call neoliberalism was heavily contested.

I propose the concept of “platformentality,” which concerns how tech platforms direct users’ conduct through positive means & the willing (if not knowing) participation of those in the network. (This is in contrast to Zuboff’s crypto-Marxist concept of “surveillance capitalism.”) The key point is that *a network is not a society.* Therefore the models of analysis and intervention that made sense when discussing the society of a nation-state are simply not fit for purpose when dealing with networks.