The relatively respectable right is suddenly discovering that we are close to full employment and suggests that the angry young men take the available, well-paying—if modest—jobs. Christopher Rufo pointed out that working as a manager at Panda Express could pay well and was nothing to be ashamed of. The angry, alienated men and their tribunes aren’t having it. That’s the same “bootstraps” bullshit they’ve heard from the liberals for all these years. They don’t believe in the empty myths of honest toil and upward mobility anymore. The American dream, as far as they are concerned is, dead. In the view of the mob, undeserving women and minorities are hoarding all the treasure and it has to be ripped away from them. Every “normal” possibility open to them is humiliating. Only the massive windfalls of gambling and speculation seem like an honorable alternative.
What we are witnessing is a faultline in the coalition the right has built up this past decade. The right is now an alliance between the remnant of the bourgeois conservatives, who still more or less believe in the old social ethic—traditional norms around work, family, personal discipline, and productive labor—and what we should call the mob.
Helicopters over the Californian hills, on FlightRadar 24
THE AMERICAN WAY OF war is well known and extensively written about; it's that of massing tremendous amounts of logistical material and aiming for a crushing, annihilating, victory. In the 20th and 21st centuries that's involved an emphasis, even a dependence, on air power. There's a curious symmetry I think, between that well observed fact, with the obvious emphasis on air power in American disaster response.
The firefighting in Los Angeles seems to involve extensive use of firefighting aircraft, for spotting and for dropping water; by comparison the RFS in NSW has less than a dozen aircraft, and there is a combined Australian 'fleet' of suitable aircraft of somewhere around a hundred. It's curious how different societies and different cultures approach disasters.
The basic economics problem is that it's impossible to retain, all the time, enough people to respond to a disaster. The Americans approach fires, characteristically, both with high technology and also through the use of inmate labour. Other countries, such as China, which have access to large numbers of conscripted people in the PLA, simply accept the opportunity cost of not having large numbers of people in the workforce, and can throw troops at any problem. The Australian approach depends instead on the time of very large numbers of volunteers, who undertake their own training and respond unpaid---and we accept the risk that those volunteers may, if they feel the social bargain isn't a good one, or the local management of the units poor, walk away.
It's characteristic of all disasters that they expose real faultlines in societies, such as lack of preparation, but especially inequality. They can also shift societies, even if temporarily, into new and extraordinary configurations of help and care, as Rebecca Solnit has written. It's characteristic also of those disasters that they reveal the real strengths of societies.
Los Angeles must be one of the most air-minded places in the world, so it's no surprise that the Californian response would involve such concentrated use of aircraft. It is something no other society could realistically achieve, and in the sense of the cliche, it's shocking, and awing---for good! I prefer my own society's approach that builds communities of disaster-mindedness in the everyday; but of course that's just a reflection that I happen to like the society of which I'm a member.
WHEN YOU’RE BLOGGING IN the era of posting (thank you, reader Matthew of Bellevue Hill) you subject yourself to a few annoying constraints, like not having an easy phone app you can tap your malformed thoughts into, like having an effectively infinite word limit instead of a crisp punchy microblog format, like the knowledge for better or worse that your blog is being archived for posterity. Most of all though when you consider the fundamental shift that happened somewhere around 2014, between writing in the different formats, you realise that microblogging, tweeting, or whatever you choose to call posting, involved a fundamental shift away from obligation.
The President-elect of the United State is posting about prospective military action against both Mexico and Greenland. Is it serious? Should this be taken seriously? Everything is serious and nothing is.
But that’s sort of the game of it. If you take it seriously and react to the statement of the incoming President as though it were the statement of any other President—you’re being overly shrill and can’t take a joke. It sets the expectation that he can just go on stage and say whatever he wants and there’s no actual consequence to it.
But this is not a behaviour that is unique to Donald Trump. It's the fundamental quality of microblog format 'posting' that anything can be said and nothing has to be defended, something that wasn't true of older forms of journalism, or of radio, which were both regulated both at the formal level by real rules, and by an informal culture where there were limits to simply lying, or to insincerity. When posting, on the other hand, there's no obligation whatsoever to the truth or consistency, or anything. ‘Posting through it’ is the characteristic behaviour of the format, which is because it is so postmodern and unmoored from any binding chain to text, allows anything to signify anything. No obligations arise.
So then, where’s the fire? What’s the crisis? Where is generative AI potentially going to lay waste to the world we live in?
The problem is that it is not being used as a prosthesis to work beyond the frontiers of human capacity. It is being deployed in service to an anti-human ideology by a small class of oligarchs who loathe mass society, who hate democracy, who fear constraint.
Americans are suffering too much, dying too soon, and going broke in order to prop up a completely unnecessary but very profitable industry. The time has come for us to begin phasing it out. The only questions should be how fast to do so and by what means: we could add a public option to Obamacare’s individual insurance market; we could gradually lower the eligibility age for Medicare or allow people to buy into Medicaid. But until we change direction, the problem will just get worse, leading to more despair and to more acts of rage. It is right and necessary to condemn such acts, but we no longer have a right to be surprised by them.
'A feeling of pride and fear mounted in him. Then another commotion, more yelling, disorder, running: nothing has happened they were shouting now: his Majesty was unharmed, a fiendish and dilettantish attempts on his life has failed. People began to slowly trickle back home. He thought of doing the same. But perhaps it was not good to be seen running away right now. It may be suspicious. He walked into a pastry shop. Should he take a baklava or a millefeuille? He decided for the latter even if it was more expensive. He realized that the money was in the same pocket with his pistol, moved a little away from the crowd and carefully took out 12 hellers. He counted them one by one. He had very little money. Like all 19-year olds he liked cakes. Somebody yelled again; cries became stronger and closer. He left the millefeuille after the first bite and walked three or four steps out of the store. There right in front of him was a stopped car, with His Majesty and the wife, berating the driver. He touched the pistol as if to make sure it was still there. Then he took it out…'
