Posts Tagged ‘abolition’
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines who you will be when you can’t help it”*…
Indeed. And not just what one reads, but how one reads it. The estimable Henry Farrell reviews the “tech canon” that seems to underlie so much of what Silicon Valley and the tech world at large is advocating. That canon’s celebration of great men and the acomplishments of small teams helps explain everything from Mark Andreessen’s accelerationist manifesto through the machinations of DOGE to Jeff Bezos’ resteering of The Washington Post…
… Tech luminaries seem to opine endlessly about books and ideas, debating the merits and defects of different flavors of rationalism, of basic economic principles and of the strengths and weaknesses of democracy and corporate rule.
This fervor has yielded a recognizable “Silicon Valley canon.” And as Elon Musk and his shock troops descend on Washington with intentions of reengineering the government, it’s worth paying attention to the books the tech world reads — as well as the ones they don’t. Viewed through the canon, DOGE’s grand effort to cut government down to size is the latest manifestation of a longstanding Silicon Valley dream: to remake politics in its image.
Last August, Tanner Greer, a conservative writer with a large Silicon Valley readership, asked on X what the contents of the “vague tech canon” might be. He’d been provoked when the writer and technologist Jasmine Sun asked why James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, an anarchist denunciation of grand structures of government, had become a “Silicon Valley bookshelf fixture.” The promptled Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe and a leading thinker within Silicon Valley, to suggest a list of 43 sources, which he stressed were not those he thought “one ought to read” but those that “roughly cover[ed] the major ideas that are influential here.”
In a later response, Greer argued that the canon tied together a cohesive community, providing Silicon Valley leaders with a shared understanding of power and a definition of greatness. Greer, like Graham, spoke of the differences between cities. He described Washington, DC as an intellectually stultified warren of specialists without soul, arid technocrats who knew their own narrow area of policy but did not read outside of it. In contrast, Silicon Valley was a place of doers, who looked to books not for technical information, but for inspiration and advice. The Silicon Valley canon provided guideposts for how to change the world.
Said canon is not directly political. It includes websites, like LessWrong, the home of the rationalist movement, and Slate Star Codex/Astral Codex Ten, for members of the “grey tribe” who see themselves as neither conservative nor properly liberal. [Paul] Graham’s many essays are included, as are science fiction novels like Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. Much of the canon is business advice on topics such as how to build a startup.
But such advice can have a political edge. Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, co-authored with his former student and failed Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters, not only tells startups that they need to aspire to monopoly power or be crushed, but describes Thiel’s early ambitions (along with other members of the so-called PayPal mafia) to create a global private currency that would crush the US dollar.
Then there are the Carlylian histories of “great men” (most of the subjects and authors were male) who sought to change the world. Older biographies described men like Robert Moses and Theodore Roosevelt, with grand flaws and grander ambitions, who broke with convention and overcame opposition to remake society.
Such stories, in Greer’s description, provided Silicon Valley’s leaders and aspiring leaders with “models of honor,” and examples of “the sort of deeds that brought glory or shame to the doer simply by being done.” The newer histories both explained Silicon Valley to itself, and tacitly wove its founders and small teams into this epic history of great deeds, suggesting that modern entrepreneurs like Elon Musk — whose biography was on the list — were the latest in a grand lineage that had remade America’s role in the world.
Putting Musk alongside Teddy Roosevelt didn’t simply reinforce Silicon Valley’s own mythologized self-image as the modern center of creative destruction. It implicitly welded it to politics, contrasting the politically creative energies of the technology industry, set on remaking the world for the better, to the Washington regulators who frustrated and thwarted entrepreneurial change. Mightn’t everything be better if visionary engineers had their way, replacing all the messy, squalid compromises of politics with radical innovation and purpose-engineered efficient systems?…
[Farrel discusses James Davidson and William Rees-Mogg’s The Sovereign Individual and the enhusiastic reactions of SV avatars Balaji Srinivasan and Curtis Yarvin…]
… We don’t know which parts of the canon Musk has read, or which ones influenced the young techies he’s hired into DOGE. But it’s not hard to imagine how his current gambit looks filtered through these ideas. From this vantage, DOGE’s grand effort to cut government down to size is the newest iteration of an epic narrative of change.
Musk, a heroic entrepreneur, will surely make history as his tiny team of engineers cuts the government Leviathan down to size. One DOGE recruiter framed the challenge as “a historic opportunity to build an efficient government, and to cut the federal budget by 1/3.” When a small team remakes government wholesale, the outcome will surely be simpler, cheaper and more effective. That, after all, fits with the story that Silicon Valley disruptors tell themselves.
From another perspective, hubris is about to get clobbered by nemesis. Jasmine Sun’s question about why so many people in tech read Seeing Like a State hints at the misunderstandings that trouble the Silicon Valley canon. Many tech elites read the book as a denunciation of government overreach. But Scott was an excoriating critic of the drive to efficiency that they themselves embody…
… Seeing Like a State, properly understood, is a warning not just to bureaucrats but to social engineers writ large. From Scott’s broader perspective, AI is not a solution, but a swift way to make the problem worse. It will replace the gross simplifications of bureaucracy with incomprehensible abstractions that have been filtered through the “hidden layers” of artificial neurons that allow it to work. DOGE’s artificial-intelligence-fueled vision of government is a vision from Franz Kafka, not Friedrich Hayek…
… Some of this revised canon might draw on Patrick Collison’s own bookshelves, which contain a far wider range of ideas than the canon itself. Collison’s reading interests tend toward classical liberalism, but writers who rub shoulders on his shelves, like Karl Popper and Elinor Ostrom, could be brought into debate with less well-known liberals like Ernest Gellner and contemporary left-liberals like Danielle Allen. All of these thinkers are deeply concerned with building and maintaining a genuinely plural society in which groups can get along despite their differences…
We are what we read: “Silicon Valley’s Reading List Reveals Its Political Ambitions” (gift article) from @himself.bsky.social in @bloomberglp.bsky.social. Eminently worth reading in full…
… as is Farrell’s addendum (in his wonderful newsletter): “Silicon Valley’s thing about Great Men“– “There is an alternative.”
And listen to Farrell discuss these issues (with Max Read and John Ganz) in the podcast episode “The Silicon Valley canon and malformed publics“
And for a reminder that this phenomenon has long, deep roots, see “Geeks for Monarchy: The Rise of the Neoreactionaries,” from TechCrunch in 2013.
* Oscar Wilde
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As we anguish over antecedents, we might recall that it was on this date in 1854 that the Republican Party was “organized” (In Ripon, Wisconsin). It held its first public meeting on March 20th and its first convention on July 6 of that same year.
The party grew out of opposition to the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and opened the Kansas and Nebraska Territories to slavery and future admission as slave states, and was largely animated by anti-slavery advocates (including some ex-Whigs, and ex-Free Soilers).
The Kansas–Nebraska Act was authored by Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas and passed in 1854… the same Stephen Douglas that debated Abraham Lincoln in the 1858 Illinois Senate race. Douglas was re-elected by the Illinois General Assembly, 54–46. (Until 1913, when the 17th Amendment to the United States Constitution— which provides that senators shall be elected by the people of their states– was ratified, senators were elected by their respective state legislatures.) But the publicity made Lincoln a national figure and laid the groundwork for his 1860 presidential campaign.
How times change…
“I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon”*…
In the most recent issue of his “No Mercy/No Malice” newsletter, “The Podcast Election,” Scott Galloway makes the case that “in each election the victor is likely to be whoever best weaponizes an emerging medium.” John Grinspan (curator of political history at the Smithsonian Institution) offers a timely historical example: Long before anyone was accused of being “woke,” the Wide Awakes used new news technology to rapidly construct a national movement…
… when I discuss the deep history of political division in our country, someone in the audience always asserts that we can’t possibly compare past divisions to the present, because our media landscape is doing unprecedented harm, unlike anything seen in the past.
I’m always struck by people’s belief in a placid media landscape in the past, a time of calm before the internet blew everything up. In fact, the most divided period in the history of U.S. democracy — the mid-1800s — coincided with a sudden boom in new communications technologies, confrontational political influencers, widespread disinformation, and nasty fights over free speech. This media landscape helped bring about the Civil War.
The point is not that 21st century media is like the 19th century’s, but that the past was hardly full of the upstanding, rational, nonpartisan journalists many like to believe it was. And at this era’s center, in the campaign that actually led to the war, was a huge, strange, forgotten movement — the Wide Awakes — born from this media landscape and fought out in the newspapers, polling places and, ultimately, battlefields of the nation.
Newspapers had been around for centuries by the 1800s, but as American rates of literacy rose, millions of ordinary citizens became daily news junkies. The number of papers jumped from a few publications in 1800 to 4,000 brawling rags by 1860, collectively printing hundreds of millions of pages each year. They ranged from the snarky, immensely popular New York Herald and the blood-drenched true crime reports in the National Police Gazette to the high-minded abolitionism of The Liberator.
Nearly everyone literate devoured them — from wealthy elites to schoolgirls to enslaved people technically banned from reading. Newspapers published scandals and rumors, riling mobs and sparking frequent attacks on editors — often by other editors. Well into the 20th century, communities were still pulling newspaper presses out of local rivers, having been hurled there by angry mobs.
Ninety-five percent of American newspapers had explicit political affiliations. Many were directly bankrolled by political parties. There was no concept of journalistic independence and nonpartisanship until the turn of the 20th century.
These partisan presses, not the government, even printed the election ballots. Readers voted by cutting ballots from their pages and bringing them to the polls. (Imagine if TikTok influencers or podcasters were responsible for administering elections.)
The telegraph may seem old-timey today, but with its introduction in the 1840s, Americans could suddenly disseminate breaking news across huge territories along electrical wires. It allowed people to argue the issues nationwide, long before the internet, television, or even radio.
Americans became a people by arguing politics in the press. When politics was local, the major parties had avoided discussing slavery, taking what Abraham Lincoln mocked as a “don’t care” attitude. But now that Maine could debate with Texas, the topic shot to the forefront. By the 1850s, Northerners were digesting its evils daily.
The National Era — an abolitionist paper in Washington — first printed Harriet Beecher Stowe’s hair-raising Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by far the most influential antislavery novel in history. Meanwhile, the radical pro-slavery magazine De Bow’s Review, based in New Orleans, spread a maximalist vision of expanding slavery far and wide. Americans living thousands of miles from each other could argue about the issue, and the only gatekeepers were editors who profited from spreading often legitimate outrage.
It’s fitting, then, that the Northern pushback to slavery’s expansion came from the 19th-century equivalent of “very online” young newspaper readers. Early in the 1860 election, a core of young clerks in Connecticut formed a club to help campaign for the antislavery Republican Party. They happened to live in the state with the highest literacy rates and huge newspaper circulations. So when a local editor wrote that the Republicans seemed “wide awake” in the campaign, the boys named their club the Wide Awakes.
Adding militaristic uniforms, torch-lit midnight rallies, and an open eye as their all-seeing symbol, a new movement was born, which I chronicle in my recent book, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force that Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War. Often, their chief issue was not the knotty specifics of what to do about slavery, but the fight for a “Free Press” — unsuppressed by supporters of slavery, South or North.
The Wide Awakes exploded across the national newspaper network. Within months of their founding, young Republicans were forming clubs from Connecticut to California. Most learned how to organize their companies through the papers. They built a reciprocal relationship with America’s press: cheering friendly newspaper offices and harassing pro-slavery Democratic papers’ headquarters. Friendly editors returned the favor, marching with the Wide Awakes and pushing their readers to form more clubs, like the Indiana newspaperman who nudged: “Cannot such an organization be gotten up in this town?”
None of this could be described as independent journalism, but it sure spread a movement. It only took a few months to turn the Wide Awakes into one of the largest partisan movements America had ever seen, believed to have 500,000 members — the equivalent of 5 million today, proportionally speaking.
The same network of newspapers spread fear as well. Readers in much of the South saw the clubs as a partisan paramilitary organization. Wild accounts shared accidental misinformation and deliberate disinformation, pushing the false notion that the Wide Awakes were preparing for a war, not an election. The presence of a few hundred African American Wide Awakes in Boston morphed into claims in Mississippi that “the Wide Awakes are composed mainly of Negroes” who were plotting a race war. A dispersed, partisan media exaggerated such falsehoods like a national game of telephone.
By the time Lincoln won election in November 1860, hysterical editors predicted a Wide Awake attack on the South. Secessionist newspapers used fears of Wide Awakes to help push states out of the Union…
… What began in ink was spiraling into lead and steel. It took 16 years to develop from the introduction of the telegraph to the Civil War. Undoubtedly, the fight over slavery caused that conflict, but the newspapers fed it, amplified it, exaggerated it.
Mid-19th-century Americans lived with an odd combination: an unprecedented ability to spread information, but also a siloed and partisan system of interpreting it. It helped the nation finally reckon with the crimes of slavery, but also spread bad faith, irrational panic, and outright lies. This history can add a needed perspective to today’s political conflicts, so often magnified by social media. In both eras, new technologies supercharged existing political tensions. Yet we can also see from this heated history that political media is less like an unstoppable, unreformable force that will consume democracy, and more like another in a succession of breathtaking, catastrophic, wild new landscapes that must be tamed…
Perspective from our past: “How a 19th-century news revolution sparked activists, influencers, disinformation, and the Civil War,” from @NiemanLab.
Apposite: the Galloway piece referenced above and “The TikTok Electorate” from Max Read… and more fundamentally, “Are Americans too ignorant and gullible to self-govern?” a consideration of a century-old debate between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey, from the estimable Howard Rheingold.
* Tom Stoppard
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As we muse on media, we might recall that it was on this date in 1969 that journalist Seymour Hersh submitted the story that (the following day) filed the story that broke the news of the My Lai massacre to the American public. At least 347 (up to 504) Vietnamese civilians, almost all women, children, and elderly men, were murdered by U.S. soldiers, the largest massacre of civilians by U.S. forces in the 20th century.
Hersh had tried the day before to place a cautious and conservative piece but was initially rejected by Life and Look magazines. He turned to his friend David Obst, who ran the anti-war Dispatch News Service and who placed a more candid version in 35 papers (including the Washington Post and the Boston Globe); it ran in those papers the following day. Initial reaction was muted, as the press was focused on a massive anti-war demonstration in Washington scheduled for November 15. But the story spread, prompting global outrage and fueling domestic opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Hersh’s coverage of the atrocity earned him the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
“Freight mobility and movement, while not a sexy policy issue, is a highly important one”*…
… and a hugely profitable one. Shipping rates, which have contributed to inflation, are coming down– but remain high– and massively profitable for carriers…
The results are in. The container shipping industry earned profits of $58.9 billion in the third quarter, breaking a streak of seven straight record quarters for the sector and further confirmation that the industry’s earnings peak is now firmly in the rear-view, according to industry veteran John McCown.
While the $58.9 billion profit is 22.4% higher than the $48.1 billion profit from last year’s third quarter, it is 6.6% lower than the “mind-altering” $63.7 billion earned in this year’s second quarter, making for a slight sequential earnings downturn that is expected to continue in the months and quarters ahead as aggregate overall pricing in the sector continues to ease, McCown said in his latest container shipping quarterly report…
Throughout the pandemic, container shipping has benefitted from significant price increases across most lanes as strong consumer demand combined with widespread port congestion drove freight rates to records.
“The sharp upturn in the quarterly bottom line performance of the container shipping industry over the last two years is one of the most pronounced performance changes ever by an overall industry,” McCown writes. “It comes on the heels of results in the more than ten years following the financial crisis and preceding the pandemic that results in a negative overall bottom line. The container shipping industry has literally gone from being at the bottom related to overall industry performance to being at the top related to overall industry performance.”
McCown attempts to put the container shipping’s recent performance into perspective by comparing the industry’s profits to FANG, an acronym he uses for Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google.
“Container shipping industry profits were 14% higher than total FANG profits in 4Q21, 103% higher than FANG profits in 1Q22 and 145% higher than FANG profits in 2Q22. For 3Q22, that gap has expanded even more as container shipping industry profits have swelled to being 158% above total FANG profits.”…
The invisible behemoth– container shipping, from @MikeSchuler.
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As we contemplate containers, we might recall that it was on this date in 1860 that the slave ship Erie was sold at government auction at Red Hook, Brooklyn:
The ship was sold, after being captured and impounded by the US Government, for enslaving and importing Africans, a business banned by the federal government under the Piracy Law of 1820, which followed The Slave Trade Act of 1794, two steps in the USA’s long, slow process of devolving and banning the slave trade (the shipping of captured people) and slavery. Slavery was finally banned in 1865. The case of the ERIE was chosen by a US Attorney, a judge, and by President Lincoln himself to signal a major change in policy on slavery and their commitment to end it.
The owner and captain of the Erie, Nathaniel Gordon of Maine, did not get off free as was usually the case. He was tried and found guilty of running a slave ship – and the Piracy Law of 1820 said the punishment was execution. Gordon’s supporters, including members of Congress and even friends of President Lincoln, sought a presidential pardon; but Abraham Lincoln refused due to his conviction that a point about slavery needed to be made with the ERIE and Captain Gordon.
Captain Gordon was distressed, in jail, and attempted suicide. He was resuscitated and was hanged at the Tombs in Manhattan and became the first – and only – importer of slaves to be executed for the crime in the USA. Soon after Gordon’s execution, Abraham Lincoln presented his first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. Several months later, the Proclamation was finalized, followed by the 13th Amendment which abolished slavery.
Slaver Captain Arrested – Ship Sold at Auction in Red Hook – 1860
“Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves”*…
It’s all too easy to believe that slavery is a thing of the past. The reality is different…
Slavery officially ended in 1981, when Mauritania became the last country to ban forced labour. But in practice it remains surprisingly common. On any given day, at least 49m people are in modern slavery, according to a new report by the UN and Walk Free, a human-rights group. The report defines modern slavery as people either forced to work or forced to marry. Such issues are often seen as a problem confined to the world’s poorest countries. But the authors of the report reckon that more than half of the global incidents of forced labour last year happened in what the World Bank defines as upper-middle and high-income countries (though poorer countries had a higher rate per 1,000 people).
To estimate the prevalence of forced labour, the authors interviewed around 78,000 people from 68 countries. In some places, such as North Korea, it is impossible to conduct such surveys, so estimates are less reliable than in more developed countries. According to the report, countries in Asia and the Pacific are host to more than half of all incidents of forced labour. Though as a proportion of the population Arab states were the worst offenders, with the equivalent of 1% of their populations enslaved.
The already grim situation is getting worse. Between 2016 and 2021 an additional 2.7m people worked in forced labour, taking the total to nearly 28m—more than 3m were children, though the data show that number is falling. Forced marriages increased by 6.6m over the same period, to a total of 22m. That may be an undercount: respondents were asked if they consented to their marriage, meaning that people who were forced into a relationship but later accepted it would not be counted in the data. Women and girls made up the biggest share of forced marriages, though one-third of those coerced into wedlock were male.
The most common type of coercion faced by workers is non-payment of wages. The fact that covid-19 lockdowns decimated many people’s incomes made it easier to exploit that vulnerability. In wealthier countries, sectors including agriculture, construction, domestic work and fishing were found to have the highest rates of forced work, with the private sector responsible for the majority of cases…
The plague is getting worse: “The number of people in modern slavery is increasing,” from @ECONdailycharts.
* Abraham Lincoln
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As we stamp out servitude, we might send free birthday greetings to David Walker; he was born on this date in 1796. The North Carolina born son of a slave father and a free African American mother, he was born free and made his way to Boston, where he became an outspoken abolitionist. From 1827-29, he was the Boston representative and correspondent for New York City’s short-lived but influential Freedom’s Journal, the first newspaper owned and operated by African Americans.
In 1829, he published An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, a call for black unity and a fight against slavery. African Americans throughout the South got hold of Walker’s Appeal, enraging Southern governments. Less than one year after the publication of the Appeal, Walker was found dead of unknown causes. A $1,000 reward had been offered for his death.
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way”*…
Each year, millions of barrels are shipped from NYC to the Caribbean. Ameena Walker unpacks the why, how, and the economics involved…
For many Caribbean communities across New York City, carefully curating barrels to ship to relatives outside of the U.S. is a relatively common practice. Fueled by an urge to provide for loved ones left back home, the Caribbean diaspora in New York, and cities around the country, meticulously source a variety of sought-after goods, intricately packing them in barrels on the cusp of overflowing and eventually mailing them overseas. The unconventional shipping method is the most affordable way to get a hefty load abroad. More than four million barrels are shipped from the northeast to the Caribbean annually, indicating a strong demand for merchandise from the U.S and a thriving business in this niche logistic sector….
The justification for using barrels to ship goods is practical. An empty 55-gallon HDPE or HMWPE drum weighs around 50 kg, but has a capacity of around 1,200 kg. Their maneuverability also plays a large part, as they can be easily stacked, rolled, or forklifted and withstand pressure and temperature changes during storage and handling….
Once the barrel is obtained, you’ll need to fill it to the brim. This is one of the more intriguing aspects of the process, as it is essential that no space is left unfilled. Practices like rolling clothes as tight as possible, stuffing the insides of footwear with additional items, removing excess packaging (e.g., taking shoes out of boxes) and shoving small items like batteries and toothbrushes into nooks and crannies ensure that not even a single crevice is left void. It’s not uncommon for someone to climb into the barrel to squish the whole mass further down, provided there aren’t any breakables or spillables inside. Virtually any item can be shipped, and it can take anywhere from a couple of hours to several months to fill a drum to maximum capacity. It’s an unspoken rule that if the barrel doesn’t require a full-sized adult to sit on top of it to force it closed, there’s room to pack more! After the drum is willed shut, it is sealed with a metal clamp and locking security cable that secures the lid and ensures its contents will not be accessed while enroute. It is then labeled on the top and side with sender and receiver’s information that should match whatever is on the shipping documents…
Despite the expansion of e-commerce, many Caribbean countries still don’t have access to simple conveniences like online shopping, making it difficult to obtain necessities. Relatives in major U.S. cities mollify this by making sure their loved ones back home get the goods they want and need, with no ocean standing in their way and no barrel packed too full…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Remittance by the Barrel,” from @awalkinny in @the_prepared.
* Proverb
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As we pack it tight, we might send gilded birthday greetings to Johns Hopkins; he was born on this date in 1795. A businessman who is largely remembered as a philanthropist, he operated wholesale and retail businesses in the Baltimore area; he built his fortune by judiciously investing his proceeds in myriad other ventures, most notably, the Baltimore and Ohio (B & O) Railroad. In 1996, Johns Hopkins ranked 69th in “The Wealthy 100: From Benjamin Franklin to Bill Gates – A Ranking of the Richest Americans, Past and Present“
His bequests founded a number institutions bearing his name, the best-known of which are, of course, Johns Hopkins Hospital and Johns Hopkins University.
Although Hopkins is widely-noted as an abolitionist, recent research indicates that Johns Hopkins was a slave owner for at least part of his life.
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