Posts Tagged ‘movement’
“Enough is abundance to the wise”*…
The “new” idea of Abundance is having a moment. The estimable David Karpf worries that the folks behind it are blowing their opportunity…
I guess I would call myself “Abundance-curious.”
There is a version of the Abundance agenda that I quite vocally agree with. My interpretation of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s central argument was something along these lines:
- Government should have a strong hand in establishing, directing, and funding social priorities.
- In the course of setting these priorities, government should endeavor to get out of its own way.
Klein and Thompson are pretty firmly in favor of government intervention and industrial policy. They aren’t just saying “growth is good and we should all cheer for developers!” They are instead saying something more along the lines of, if the government thinks something – housing, clean energy, etc – is a priority, then the government should proactively support that goal. Put money behind it. Don’t leave everything to the “will of the markets.” And, oh yeah, if the government wants to build high-speed rail or housing (etc etc) then the government should get out of its own damn way and make it can actually fulfill those promises.
I pretty enthusiastically agree with all of these points. We ought to rebuild administrative capacity and get back into having government make governance decisions. Government ought to be both proactive and responsive. And often the best way to make a better future possible is to devote public money towards promoting public goods.
I also quite like several of the people operating under that banner, and quite like some of their ideas as well. (Specifically: government should fund more things, we should have more administrative capacity, and the accretion of procedural checks-with-no-balance has had plenty of regrettable consequences.)
And hey, they’re having a moment. Good for them.The term is rapidly becoming an empty signifier, though. Tesla’s new master plan boasts of “sustainable abundance.” The Silicon Valley variant of the abundance agenda is just warmed-over techno-optimism — less “let’s rebuild the administrative state and make government work again!” and more “the government should hand big sacks of money to tech startups and exempt them from taxes and regulations. Let our genius builders build!”
The Abundance 2025 conference [happened] in DC [last] week, and the speakers range from pro-housing YIMBYs to a guy arguing for “deportation abundance.”
Yikes.
Steve Teles has taken a good-faith shot at sorting through the mess:
It would not be hard to conclude that the emergence of these various flavors of abundance betrays the inherent squishiness and incoherence of the concept. And it is true that abundance is not a systematic ideology attached to a specific political coalition, as are conservatism or democratic socialism. But that doesn’t mean that it is ideological vaporware. As someone who has been working on many of these ideas for a decade or more, I think it is time to nail down just what sort of idea abundance is.
Abundance stirs confusion in part because, unlike contemporary conservatism and progressivism, it is not an idea that emerged to justify a specific party-political, coalitional, material, or cultural project. Given that abundance has been embraced by post-colonial socialists, techno-futurist capitalists, and Democratic centrists, it is best conceptualized as an alternative dimension that cuts across existing ideologies without entirely superseding them, defined by a new set of problems and tools for addressing them.
Abundance is fundamentally “syncretic,” spreading by attaching itself to a variety of different cultural practices and political projects, rather than by preserving its doctrinal purity.
He goes on to define the central unifying idea:
At its base, Abundance is best understood as having one central aspiration that requires tackling two interlocking challenges. The aspiration is to escape from a political economy defined by artificial scarcity, to create a world in which we solve problems primarily by unlocking supply.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Abundance says “we should solve problems by creating more,” and invites the competing political coalitions to draw their own conclusions on what constitutes a problem. (And, also, more of what, exactly?)
Syncretic terms like this run the risk of falling apart though. If DOGE is part of the Abundance movement, and the people DOGE is illegally firing is also part of the Abundance movement… If the Green New Deal is Abundance but oh hey also the Claremont Institute is Abundance too, then Abundance ceases to mean anything at all. The term is already washed.
(Q: Are Curtis Yarvin, Balaji Srinivasan, and the other Network State neomonarchists part of the Abundance movement? A: yes, that’s “dark abundance.”)
I can empathize with the instinct to try to build the broadest possible coalition. I can see why making your new “movement” seem like the one big cross-partisan idea right now feels like a win. But it is a temporary, pyrrhic victory.
Strategy is a verb. The act of strategizing involves making choices that help you accomplish goals and wield power. The Abundance movement does not appear to be making any choices whatsoever. That’s the fast track to irrelevance.
Just saying, if *I* was part of the Abundance movement, I would be cautioning people that it sure would be nice to accomplish something, anything at all, before the idea gets entirely co-opted and loses all meaning. If the Abundance folks insist on advancing a syncretic proposal so broad that it pointedly has nothing to say about what problems ought to be solved, then they are quickly going to find that their clever-new-phrase means nothing at all.
The fate of every successful political movement is that they eventually face co-optation and counteraction. But usually you want to rack up some actual victories before it happens…
“What *Isn’t* Abundance?” from @davekarpf.bsky.social (in his valuable newsletter, The Future, Now and Then).
See also: “Varieties of Abundance” from @niskanencenter.bsky.social, and “How to Blow Up a Planet” from @nybooks.com.
[Edit: late add of a piece from the ever-insightful Rusty Foster that dropped just after this was first posted: “Abundance of What.”]
* Euripides
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As we muse on more, we might send abundant bountiful greetings to William Bligh; he was born on this date in 1754. A British naval officer, over a 50 year career, he rose to the rank of Vice-Admiral and served as colonial governor of New South Wales. But he is remembered for his role in the most famous mutiny in history: in 1879, the first officer and crew “removed” Bligh from his command of (and set him and his few supporters adrift from) HMAV Bounty.
“Be still / Stillness reveals the secrets of eternity”*…
Nodding your head to a beat, or swaying along with the music, can feel as though it is happening automatically when a song comes flowing from loudspeakers. But have you tried to resist? Researchers have discovered that it is virtually impossible to stand completely still when hearing music.
Nobody has managed it so far,” says Alexander Refsum Jensenius a Professor of Music Technology [at the University of Oslo]. He is conducting research on human micro-movements along with Victor Evaristo Gonzalez Sanchez, postdoctoral fellow in biomechanics, and Agata Zelechowska, doctoral research fellow in music psychology.
How we move to music when dancing has been of interest to researchers for some time. The tiny, involuntary movements our bodies make to music when we are really standing still, however, has never been systematically explored. Until now…
The researchers have studied this by conducting various experiments. They have even organized a series of Norwegian Championships of Standstill, where the winners were the ones who moved the least. After holding four such championships the results were clear: People generally move a bit more when they hear music.”
It turns out that people stand still in very similar ways. On average you sway your head 7 millimeters per second when you’re trying to stand still. There are also very few variations, with the standard deviation being just a few millimeters,” says Jensenius.
The Norwegian record belongs to the participant who only swayed 3.9 millimeters per second..
More at “Not moving to dance music is nearly impossible, according to new research“
* Laotzu
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As we stifle the sway, we might send rhythmic birthday greetings to Charles Hardin Holley; he was born on this date in 1936. Better known by his stage name, Buddy Holly, he was a pioneering figure of mid-1950s rock and roll. During his short career, Holly wrote and recorded several songs– perhaps best known among them “Peggy Sue” and “That’ll Be The Day.” He is regarded as the artist who defined the traditional rock-and-roll lineup of two guitars, bass, and drums.
Holly died at the height of his fame, on a tour with his band, the Crickets– which included future country music star Waylon Jennings (bass), famed session musician Tommy Allsup (guitar), and Carl Bunch (drums)– Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper, in a plane crash– memorialized by Don McLean as “The Day the Music Died” in his song “American Pie“.
Holly was a major influence on later popular music artists, including Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, The Hollies (who named themselves in his honor), Elvis Costello, Marshall Crenshaw (who later played Holly), and Elton John. He was among the first artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in 1986; and Rolling Stone magazine ranked him number 13 in its list of “100 Greatest Artists”.
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