Woe Is Us

In posts on social media media, Trump accused South Africa of embarking on "land grabs" against "certain classes of people." And he told reporters that the government was "confiscating land" and "doing things that are perhaps far worse than that."
South Africa's land reform is rousing right-wing ire

One of the common critiques of the American Right is that it is, basically, a bastion for modern American racism. And one of the common critiques of Donald Trump, which is not starting to attach itself to Elon Musk (himself a child of apartheid South Africa), is that he enables that racism. Which, honestly, makes sense. The American ideal of "one person, one vote" may have, for a long time, excluded women and minorities, but bigotry was never disqualifying, and people like Marko Elez have the franchise, too. And in a nation that's edging ever closer to a permanent split between two broad political coalitions, neither side can afford to throw even otherwise loathsome people overboard.

And that means buying into the American Right's narrative that casts Europeans (Conservative European Christians, more specifically) as an oppressed minority, assailed on all sides by the unworthy people whose lands, resources, freedoms and/or lives had been taken from them during the age of colonial expansion. Seeing Africans, Latin Americans and other non-White people as unjustly bitter and vengeful for not agreeing to a (awfully convenient) offer to simply allow bygones to be bygones stems from what I suspect is a widespread human desire to be seen neither as one of history's villains nor the direct beneficiaries of historical injustice. And so there's a mindset that decides that the end of Apartheid, Jim Crow or forced relocations to reservations wiped all slates clean and everyone became equal again. So there is no such thing as redress for past wrongdoing; there is only present wrongdoing.

Part of the politics of grievance is the idea that only the in-group's grievances are legitimate. This has played itself out in American race relations for as long as I've been aware of the concept. Black and White people alike having fallen into seeing the others (real or perceived) resentment of them as both unjust and a legitimizer of their own resentments. When, during the campaign, President Trump accused migrants of taking "African-American jobs" and "Hispanic jobs" and then Vice-President Kamala Harris of claiming to be Black as a cynical means of appealing to Black voters, he was encouraging people to take on the Right's grievances as their own, rather than telling them he would advance their interests. Because the in-group's grievances always come first, as I'm sure some of the Arab-American population in and around Dearborn, Michigan are finding out.

I have to admit that I wasn't expecting President Trump to lean so far into the Right's many disputes with the rest of the world (not to mention America) so completely this early in his tenure. Although it makes sense... he has to keep appealing to his base of voters, because otherwise he becomes a lame duck fairly quickly. Perhaps the goal here is to avoid losing seats in next year's (sigh) midterm elections. And casting the Ramaphosa Administration in South Africa as anti-White racists is par for that particular course.

It remains to be seen what the effects will be if Secretary of State Marco Rubio (whose posts on X seem to have been written by President Trump these days) makes good on his promise to not attend the upcoming G20 Summit in Johannesburg at the end of the year. (Of course, given that it's more than 9 months out, Secretary Rubio will have more than enough time to change course.) It could be a good opening for the Chinese, presuming that they can overcome the impression (and reality) that their offers of help come with more strings attached than a kite festival. It's part of a broader push to portray the United States as the only important nation in the world, and one that everyone else needs, which is again a play to a base resentful of what they perceive as other nations benefiting at the United States' direct expense.

Prior to Donald Trump, the Republican party had been coming to terms with the idea that it needed a broader message than right-wing anger at the world in order to be successful. Donald Trump (with, it seems, an assist from the Democratic Party) had upended that consensus. But it remains to be seen if this is a strategy that can be maintained for longer than the President can remain in office. At present, I'm not betting on it. I don't think that the Black and Hispanic voters who backed Donald Trump last year will come to regard him as someone who is willing to do anything for them, specifically, or come to believe that they're benefiting equally from what he does for conservative Whites. The American Right, I suspect, regards them more as useful patsies than valued allies, and won't balk at demanding more for itself at their expense.

If, even in spite of that, it can, that's likely not a good sign. I suspect that the Democrats will wind up having little choice but to turn to their own brand of grievance politics to remain relevant (let alone competitive) in that political landscape. It will be instructive to see who their voters are able to push the federal government into placing on its enemies lists, and which grievances it pursues on their behalf.

All Togther

An old quote that I came across again recently...

“The left has lost its fucking mind, and you can quote me on that,” [Joseph] Uscinski[, a political science professor at the University of Miami and the co-author of the book American Conspiracy Theories] said. “They spent the last eight years chastising Republicans about being a bunch of conspiracy kooks, and they have become exactly what they swore they were not. The hypocrisy is thick and it’s disgusting.”

Ummm... did I miss the part where literally the whole of the American Left got up and said that, to a person, they didn't believe in conspiracies? Personally, I'm of the opinion that anyone who claimed that no self-identified Leftists in the United States believe in conspiracies is an idiot, not a hypocrite. Of course, I understand that what's really being alleged here is institutional hypocrisy, but give me any group of people larger than a beach volleyball team and I'll be able to find something that one of them says that doesn't comport with what another of them does. Someone pointing out that members of another group engage in bad behavior (or dubious thought) when members of their own group do the same is not hypocritical in and of itself.

And it's also the invocation of the mysterious "they." That nameless, faceless group of people who become stand-ins for entire demographics. Which is what makes them useful. Professor Uscinski doesn't have to point any specific individuals or even groups of people who have gone from chastising Republicans for their conspiracies to harboring their own - he simply has to claim that "they" are hypocrites, and QED.

Faced Down

There is a phenomenon known as "YouTube face." Put simply, it's when a video maker places a picture of themselves with an exaggerated facial expression into the thumbnail for their YouTube video (although I suppose it could be for any similar service). The idea is that people are more likely to click on a video where someone's making a weird face, even when the facial expression seems completely divorced from the content.

Some fairly mild examples of the phenomenon.

It occurred to me while reading an online comment thread that was something of a debate over whether or not the average member of the public had any real agency. On one side was a set of people who were basically saying "rather than complain, do something," and the other side responded with "we have no power, and can't change anything."

And that's when YouTube face popped into my head. Because this phenomenon isn't something that was dictated to people... there wasn't a YouTube executive who announced one day that everyone had to do this. In an article on the trend from 2018, when it was already well entrenched, Joe Veix noted:

At some point, a user discovered that a catchy preview image tended to trigger potential viewers’ curiosity enough that they clicked through more frequently.

That anonymous user started a trend that has persisted for years. Sure, the YouTube algorithms have something to do with it. But so do video makers and their audiences. One person started something that changed much of the face of video. And enough people followed them that the change persists. Sure, it doesn't work for everyone. I've seen people try it for a time, and then give up. But they tried it. Because they understood its potential.

I've chatted with a few people about this, and they tend to downplay it, in the big picture. And the reason for that, I think, is that it's not predictable. The person who first tried it didn't know that it was going to be huge. (Otherwise, I suspect they would have gone after a trademark on it.) But I think that a lot of things work this way... it's just that the failures fade into obscurity. Survivorship bias in action.

But there are a lot of trends that work this way. Take short-form video content, which is (was?) TikTok's stock in trade. There's nothing magical about videos under a minute long. People tried it, and other people liked it, so it worked.

Serendipity, however, is different from intent. And I think that people don't really believe in the idea of a deliberate bottom-up movement genuinely being successful. And sure, nothing would stay bottom-up forever; there are always opportunists who would rush to position themselves as leaders of the parade, and seek to make themselves wealthy (or more wealthy) by attempting to sell access to, or the attention of, the group's members.

That's something that can be dealt with. The bigger problem is one of coordinated collective action, when people actually have expectations of the outcomes of those actions. Occupy Wall Street didn't fail because it couldn't muster people to it's cause. I went down to the Seattle branch of the movement, and there were a lot of people there. Occupy Wall Street fizzled because once the street protests didn't bring about sweeping social change over the span of a few months, everyone just dropped it and went home. But that many people could have moved markets. And once they'd started doing so, the alleged "powers that be" would have been forced to pay attention.

In any event, I'm not sure that I buy into the idea that one person can't change the world. I think that it simply takes a different approach, and a different attitude, than people normally bring to the project.

Penniless

A world in which human wages crash from AI -- logically, necessarily -- is a world in which productivity growth goes through the roof, and prices for goods and services crash to near zero. Consumer cornucopia. Everything you need and want for pennies.

This is the sort of techno-uptopianism that makes people suspicious. Mainly because it seems too far out of touch with reality to be genuine. I get what Mr. Andreessen is attempting to convey here: His belief that the one factor that retards a post-scarcity society is human labor. Have automation take over for people wholesale, to the point where human labor can't command any significant remuneration, and prices suddenly fall so low that people don't need to work to obtain goods and services.

"Realistically," the only way this works in practice is to have access to physical resources and automation tools be ubiquitous throughout the society. If I have access to, say, a robot plumber and materials to make pipes and whatnot, I don't need a plumber, and if the plumber has access to a robot farmer, along with some land, seeds and whatnot, he doesn't need anyone to produce food for him. And so on. But there is a dependency in this chain. For automation to lead to a post-scarcity society, the automated tools themselves cannot be subject to scarcity. Not in the sense that companies like OpenAI and Alphabet make tools free to the public to use, but in the sense that all members of the public have ownership of tools, such that they cannot be realistically taken away. So far, that particular development doesn't appear to be in the cards, even accounting for Chinese companies like DeepSeek. "Less expensive" is not the same as "available to any and everyone for the asking." And that still leaves open the question of inputs. The ability to spin straw into gold still relies on a workable source of straw. And it's unlikely that all of the inputs that people would need to be self-sufficient would grow as easily.

Does Mr. Andreessen actually believe that a revolution in automation will create enduring (or even brief) post-scarcity? I have no idea. It would not surprise me either way. But few other people see things playing out in the way he does, and I think that's why pretty much all of the reactions that I have heard to his X post have been openly incredulous. And while some people are quick to write him off as "out of touch," there's also the opinion that there's something malicious about all of this; that it's some sort of hateful trick to be perpetrated on the public. But either way, when this prediction fails to come through, it won't be Mr. Andreessen who suffers for it. And that, I think, is the reason why so few people appear to trust him on this.

Rough Waters

 A sailboat anchored near the north end of Lake Washington, east of Seattle.

Winter has come to Seattle as an occasional mix of rain and snow, along with unusually blustery winds. Not great weather for sailing.