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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31032 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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For largely dull reasons... the conference became more important over time and was eventually attended by many European and later world leaders, often for many of the same reasons noted above... Nobody has ever attended his conference to hear what Klaus Schwab has to say.

Another, unmentioned and even more dull reason's that Schwab charges quite a lot for corporate access to WEF (along with a ton of donations etc), while giving free access for politicians, NGOs, and media, along with offering a lot of very favorable amnesties. That's not an unusual form of scratch-your-back just-pols-being-pals, but it's a lot about how a lot of this runs.

The quote actually came from the relatively kooky Danish socialist politician Ida Auken, who used it in predicting a kind of utopian-dystopian society, in which people in wealthy communities were prosperous and able to rent whatever they needed (houses, cars, vacation homes) cheaply, with goods delivered by drone, while a great population of poor people would live 'outside the city', struggling to survive. This prediction, a dull mainstay of science fiction from the 1950s onwards, was misinterpreted by some social media manager for the WEF as a purely optimistic forecast, and then inserted into the Facebook video.

There's a certain risk involved whenever writing dystopian fiction, as any serious reader of Huxley knows, but I don't think this an accurate summary in the slightest. In particular:

My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.

To steelman, there's a Huxleyian "I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard", where this is supposed to be the measures imbued into the speaker's preferences changing their opinion and perspective, rather than outside measures of value or those measures from the view of the described group. But it's a really reaching one and very hard to make compatible with the buzzword-laden groping that the writer gives otherwise: the City is nearly free, closer to 'nature' (or at least the City's version), long-lasting goods with a variety of environmental and practical benefits, yada yada. The intuitive read is not people who were poor, and it's notable that the lost are separated not by those who were obsolete by robots and AI (the viewpoint character themselves seems in this category, given "When AI and robots took over so much of our work, we suddenly had time to eat well, sleep well and spend time with other people."), but those who felt obsolete.

The former stems from a 2017 twitter post by the leftist magazine 'Mother Jones' (which, by the way, made fun of the idea of eating bugs) and some human interest stories by food blogs about eating bugs, which is common in some countries and so hardly particularly modern or degenerate or whatever, that noted their farming emitted less methane than cattle farming.

That's... a bit of a weakman. "Some human interest" stories are coming at a near-monthly pace not just from food blogs but a half-dozen times in the NYTimes, TIME magazine lauded a Clinton initiative, so on. "I will not eat the bug" became a meme because it keeps fucking coming up.

Now, I don't like lobster (or crab, or most other shellfish), to the point where I prefer 'imitation crab sticks' even in sushi, but I also like cinnamon in chili and pineapple on pizza: my tastes are... unusual. And as a furry, in general I kinda need to support the rule de gustibus non est disputandum. If someone wants to chew down on a nice tasty roach, I'm not gonna join 'em, but that's their opportunity.

Except one can't help but notice that this comes at the same time and from many of the same outfits also curiously interested in making beef more expensive and less available -- and you can't help notice it because the same sources will happily make the link for you. Sometimes it's for health reasons, sometimes it's cow farts, sometimes it's land usage, and sometimes it's whatever new purpose of the day pops up.

And yet it's there.

The latter phrase stems from a 2019 WEF report on housing options in densely overcrowded cities that notes possibilities in 'tiny homes' or shipping container apartments to create more 'affordable housing'. That these housing options might be much better than what the average proletarian in Chennai or Chengdu currently has was the point, rather than to force affluent American picket fence suburbanities into modern banlieues.

Again, this is a bit of a weakman. This one's a little harder to show since so many of the search times are bloated with shipping container houses, but even ignoring them as noncentral there's still an absolute ton of emphasis among an amazingly wide number of sources promoting tiny living spaces while (more importantly!) attacking and arguing for state restrictions or discouragement of more conventional living conditions. More broadly, it's also the subtext for almost every complaint about suburbia and a lot of the complaints about 'auto culture'.

And I think this focus on weakman kinda undermines your point. Contrast:

In the mid-2010s, a bizarre conspiracy theory emerged in which Klaus was a central figure in a cabal of illuminati-esque global elites who got together to plan their annual strategy at the World Economic Forum, as the conference came to be known, each year.

from your op, with the later

The argument isn't that the WEF isn't a generic neoliberal organization, it's that it's (a) powerless and (b) doesn't really stand for anything outside the status quo. The UN is also a broadly progressive organization, but that doesn't make it not powerless.

The "bizarre conspiracy theory" you originally brought up wasn't that the WEF has secret police powers and its own army, or that it's proposing some nightmare vision scifi dystopia only one man would want otherwise. I mean, I'm pretty sure someone has proposed that, if only because there's a lot of nutters out there, but it's still not the actual softball you t'd up.

It's that Schwab was a leader of a group planning their dire acts. Which, to be fair, is still wrong: he's 'just' bringing a whole bunch of people together, pointing the ideological to the powerful, and selecting which match his viewpoint. As you say, he doesn't have the breadth of vision or charisma to really drive people. But that still does have a ton of powerful people and corporations meeting and listening to his carefully-selected goals that happen to overlap with theirs, which they often go out afterward to use their power to implement.

That tells us that if Schwab made the wrong stock picks and went backrupt and the WEF disappeared, these positions wouldn't go away. The commonness of this sort of giant coordination conference, if seldom so high-profile or large-scale, tells us that it isn't and never was the only coordination mechanism. But it doesn't tell us whether the WEF acts as a significant coordination mechanism.

I think the city is portrayed in a utopian-dystopian way. It’s not hell, but it has significant problems. And this makes sense, the author is a green socialist, she isn’t a follower of Schwab’s ideology and has in fact been paid to provide the ‘take’ of someone from a different movement for the WEF blog.

I think that's a fair description for the privacy concerns; I don't think it's accurate to describe those left outside as the "poor people struggling to survive" (note even the WEF page describes them as "discontents". More importantly, it's very obvious and overt that the "you will own nothing and be happy" isn't and very obviously isn't supposed to be part of the "significant problems" side.

The point is that attaching the “you will own nothing and be happy” quote to the WEF is like describing the New York Times as a Trump supporting newspaper because you quote a line from a single Op-Ed written by a Trump supporter that was commissioned for the sake of ‘ideological diversity’.

That's be a far stronger position were there a few dozen 'no we don't want this and in fact want the opposite of this' arguments to point toward, rather than something that gets promoted under other terms for everything from air compressor to carpet tiles.

((And, uh, also if Auken or involved editors were shoved out of the organization in a giant high-confrontation mess over the matter.))

It isn’t. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people employed as ‘food writers’ across the English-speaking world, to say nothing of non-food writers that cover the subject or hobbyist food bloggers. The NYT’s “food journalism” section alone has several dozen employees and its own subscription service.

That would be a useful rejoinder, if still not within the limits of your original "some human interest stories by food blogs ", if it were just the NYT's food journalism section. Instead it's the Opinion section (complete with Learning Network study questionaire), a small section on cricket flour in Climate FWD, applauded by a comedian (?) giving relationship advice. And that's just one outlet.

Sure, it's all a bunch of people bringing up this stuff (or rewarding it when it comes from outside), and it being happily rubberstamped by layers of fact-checkers and editors), and no one bothering with any objections. Sure there's tons of random things like that.

And then there's a pretty wide variety of common things that don't, and it becomes noticeable.

I suppose they do say that eating beef is bad for global warming, but if you did believe in global warming then the impact of cattle farming on methane emissions would probably be important to you, I guess (I can’t say I care about it).

Yes, people who care about things care about them. But that's going from 'it's not happening' to 'and it's good that it is' pretty quick.

Except, again, when they do talk about housing regular people this isn’t really about the US or West at all... The only example that features normal blue collar Westerners is the example of the British ‘pod’ housing company, which not only embraces that vessel of suburbanization (the car), but which also looks like a pretty nice update to the awful, squalid and cramped Victorian terraced housing in which many of the local working classes live.

Naraburns below linked to this piece with a smorgasboard of Western-specific focuses; the Times has lauded "the winner of the small space/tiny home competition sponsored by the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development". For other examples on broader restrictions against conventional housing, see here for one that highlights an American local law!, natgeo about specifically average American home sizes.

They're just people interested in the matter! And it's not that aggressive yet. But they're just people interested in it here. The pretense that this is solely for the developing world (and parts of the UK no one likes) runs into some problems given that.

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