Announcing Un-Diplomatic’s In Media Res
In Media Res: A literary device that cuts the reader straight into the plot, immersing them in the action of the story without prior exposition.
I don’t know about you, but I’m increasingly experiencing reality in this really fragmented, decontextualized way.
One minute I’m seeing a video of police beating an old lady. The next it’s ICE arresting a Latino worker at Home Depot. As I walk down the street, I pass well meaning protestors agitating on behalf of Palestinians’ right to simply not be killed, and then when I look down at my phone, I’m immediately confronted with some blue-check account on twitter promoting a white supremacist conspiracy theory about how the CCP stole the 2020 election. Someone is praising how good Andor is. Someone else is organizing a boycott of Amazon. Politicians are again fawning over Israel’s “right to defend itself” while curiously denying that right to its neighbors. An Ivy League national-security ghoul is announcing their new glossy policy report that recommends—wait for it—increasing military spending and military commitments.
Life has always been a cacophony of events, I guess, and when I speak of our “conjuncture,” I’m referring to the convergence at a single point of multiple historical processes that don’t always relate to each other. But I used to have feel more control over the inflow of what’s happening. Things are refracting and colliding into each other in ways that make no surface-level sense. It might be because the government has no credibility and speaks only lies. Or it might be because of the pervasiveness of AI, maybe the enshittification of social media.
Who knows.
What I do know is that public intellectuals should be trying to make sense of a world that comes at us as unmediated, rage-making brain rot. Our analysis, whether it takes the form of a critical essay or a blog-style hot take, is distilling some aspect of our kaleidoscopic unreality in a way that, if not useful, at least makes us feel less crazy.
That’s essentially what this newsletter is. And I’ll continue to operate this way…but I find myself wondering if maybe there’s also something authentic in occasionally presenting a snapshot of the unmediated picture that always has multiple things going on in it. Pre-processed reality—in media res.
It’s in that spirit that every week or two, I’ll do a special post sharing the stuff that’s occupying my imagination and critical thoughts. I come across many things—especially articles—that I find stimulating or challenging but that don’t automatically trigger me to write a hot take. That’s the stuff I’ll share as part of the In Media Res series within this newsletter.
In future, In Media Res posts will probably be for patrons of the newsletter (the paywall keeps this thing of ours going), but I guess this is a taster? ✌️
“How Zohran Mamdani Used Free Merch to Power His Mayoral Campaign”
Context:
33-year old Zohran Mamdani—the most New York guy I’ve ever seen—just won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City. Such a huge deal. Not since Upton Sinclair nearly won the California governorship has a democratic socialist come this close to running a major hub of capitalism. Rebellions are built on hope.
From the piece:
Mamdani and his team have created a movement aimed at reengaging voters through progressive policies, a strong presence on social media, and extremely wearable merch.
What’s stimulating:
This GQ piece talks about Zohran’s strategy, which is useful for anyone wanting to grasp running for office in America’s new electoral terrain. But the real novelty is the emphasis on his merch—nobody succeeds without good merch.
Read it here.
“China made millions of drones. Now it has to find uses for them”
Context:
Much has been made of China’s surplus production of electric vehicles and solar panels, but less talked about is that China has been overproducing drones as well. This might actually be a good thing.
From the piece:
The drone network in Shenzhen, which authorities have called a “sky city”, is at the heart of China’s efforts to grow its so-called low-altitude economy, referring to activity in airspace less than 1,000 metres above ground.
What’s stimulating:
The American mind associates drones with warfare, but China is finding domestic uses for drones. The state is investing in what could be a new source of generating value that makes productive use of its drone surpluses. The US is also plowing state investment in drone surpluses, but for the warfare state, not to create new public infrastructure for the economy. Militarism in the US is a “fix” to the ongoing crisis of accumulation—surpluses of capital have nowhere profitable to go, so venture capital firms suckle off the national security state by prepping for World War III. But that’s a choice, not inevitable. China’s attempts at creating a “low-altitude economy” show a different way is possible.
Get it here.
“When We Are All Enemies of the State”
Context:
We’re in a moment where ideas are deeply political in a way that invites actual danger. Fascists fear ideas that challenge their control. In 1974, Walter Rodney, a brilliant Guyanese scholar who openly critiqued the US-backed Guyanese regime of Forbes Burnham, had been offered a university position in his home country only to have it revoked by the government because of his radical ideas. Stuart Hall addressed a protest in London demanding Rodney’s reinstatement. In 1980, the Burnham government would assassinate Rodney, proving just how serious the fascist fear of ideas really is.
From the piece:
I salute Walter Rodney. If what he has tried to do is the act of “an enemy,” then we are all enemies. When the lines of struggle are drawn in this way, men cannot stand aside, hesitating between one value-neutral hypothesis and another—especially not intellectuals. It is his duty to the truth which drives him to commit himself. He is an intellectual, not in spite of the fact that he is committed, but because he is committed, because he has chosen to stand on the line.
What’s stimulating:
The project of Third World national liberation was mostly co-opted by local elites who looked and spoke like the people they ruled but ran the government the same as the white foreign imperialists. Nationalism was meant to be a foothold for global liberation but got captured and perverted. Rodney and the entire situation Stuart Hall is speaking to here confronts that reality in real-time.
More generally, as a dissident intellectual on the wrong side of most government opinion, I identify with voices like Rodney and Hall. For most of my life, being an intellectual just meant being an opinion-haver; such was the-end-of-history mainstream. But that’s over; there are real stakes now, just as there were during the Cold War. And the way people in my discipline of international relations are trained—to only express ideas in terms of value-neutral hypotheses—is naive, even irresponsible. If you try to avoid the question “Which side are you on?” then you’ve chosen a side.
Get it here.
“Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task”
Context:
When ChatGPT debuted a couple years ago, professors freaked out because it blew a hole in the university model. It’s an open secret that students are graded on a curve, because the modern university treats them as customers and you can’t flunk paying customers. What that means is that students can submit very crap-to-mid quality writing and still pass a class. ChatGPT gave students a way to automatically generate that low-quality type of writing without having it detected as plagiarism. A student who uses ChatGPT was likely to produce something not very good, but “not very good” is what we spent decades giving a B or A- for. But now, only a couple years later, universities are counseling students AND faculty to use AI, with very little guidance about what that means.
From the piece:
83.3% of ChatGPT users couldn’t quote from essays they wrote minutes earlier…neural connections collapsed from 79 to just 42…a 47% reduction in brain connectivity…Teachers didn’t know which essays used AI, but they could feel something was wrong. “Soulless.” “Empty with regard to content.” “Close to perfect language while failing to give personal insights.” The human brain can detect cognitive debt even when it can't name it…When researchers forced ChatGPT users to write without AI, they performed worse than people who never used AI at all. It’s not just dependency. It’s cognitive atrophy. Like a muscle that’s forgotten how to work.
What’s stimulating:
It was already getting harder to think critically because of surplus noise in our information systems. Now, AI is making critical thinking a rarified skill limited to those who can avoid using ChatGPT while the managerial class tells us we must use it for the sake of our jobs. The human mind is becoming enshittified. University students are graduating barely competent to take on jobs in the workforce. And the job market is rapidly shrinking. This is a terrible convergence.
Get it here. And the Twitter thread summarizing the research (which I pull-quoted above) here.
I love this format, Van. Thank you.
Have you read George Steiner? His "In Bluebeard's Castle", where he tackles the shift in public , political consciousness beginning with the French Revolution? He's a powerful writer, and you're on his level, though your backgrounds are very different.
I've just written a post on how AI has affected reading. I'll send it to you when it's on line.