Academia

I’ve avoided post-mortems on the US election disaster for two reasons.

First, they are useless as a guide to the future. The next US election, if there is one [1], will be a referendum on the Trump regime. Campaign strategies that might have gained the Democrats a few percentage points in November 2024 won’t be at all relevant in 2026 or 2028, let alone in the aftermath of a regime collapse further in the future.

Second, by focusing on the marginal shifts between 2020 (or even 2012) and 2024, these post-mortems miss the crucial fact that the divisions in US politics have been more or less constant[2] for the last 30 years, as this graph from the Pew Foundation shows.

Throughout this period the Republican Party has been competitive only because, it has received the consistent support of 60 per cent of white men.

Of course, that wouldn’t be enough without some votes from non-whites and women. But there is no group other than white men where the Republicans have had a reliable majority over the past 30 years.

More precisely the Republicans represent, and depend on, angry white men. I first heard the term “angry white men” in relation to the 1994 mid-term election when the proto-Trump Newt Gingrich led the Republicans to their first House of Representatives majority in 40 years. The 1994 outcome was the culmination of Nixon’s Southern strategy, bringing Southern whites, angry about their loss of social dominance in the Civil Rights ere, into the Republican camp.

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Cabo Verde is not a rich country. To have an idea, the minimum wage is €130 a month and a meal in a restaurant costs around €10. The IMF classifies Cabo Verde as a developing country.

Development has long ceased to be defined in exclusively economic terms. In 1990, a “human development index” was introduced, and other indicators have followed. Yet, there is one dimension still missing from all international comparisons: the moral development of a society. On this dimension, Cabo Verde seems to be among the most advanced. Here’s why. [click to continue…]

Curtis Yarvin, darling authoritarian ideologue of many tech billionaires, is back in the news, along with his deep links to J.D. Vance, via Peter Thiel. It’s no secret that plutocrats tend to be off-the-charts economic libertarians, with extreme hostility even to wildly popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which cost them nothing. So, if they were principled thinkers, it would seem logical for them to oppose dictators and wannabe dictators. But no, more and more tech bros are fans of Trump and Yarvin’s very Trumpy brand of authoritarianism. Elon Musk is the most visible tech bro fan; there are many more. What gives?

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A post I wrote last week sparked a lively debate, and one strand of that debate was whether it is appropriate to use the term “privilege” (“cis privilege” in particular) to describe the phenomena I was talking about. I identified mainly two clusters of objections, but please do let me know in the comments if I have overlooked any. [click to continue…]

I knew when my most recent book was assigned an end-of-October publication date that I would spend much of my book tour processing the election and its aftermath. As the title suggests, Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop is partly a meditation on the future of feminism.

The book is partly a postmortem on #Girlboss and I had thought that the tour would become an occasion to discuss how feminism has to be, not just about shattering glass ceilings, but about changing the distance between the ceiling and the floor. Of course, the events of November 5 ensured that that is not how it went.

Instead, I have spent the last month and a half speaking with hundreds of feminists about their grief and rage—and wrestled with practical questions of how we move forward.

The last question of my launch at Brooklyn bookstore on the night after the election has stayed with me: why can’t we just give up on white women?

This question was certainly an expression of the justified anger that many women of color, and Black women in particular have been feeling—at the fact that the majority of white women once again voted for Trump. (This is not what the book is about, but it was a major thing folks wanted me to talk about in November.) But 5 bookstore events and 6 podcasts later, I have also learned to see that question as something else: the question of what kind of a future there is for feminism, understood as a movement of women across race and class lines.

To be clear, I see that question as distinct from the question of whether feminism as a set of values—as bell hooks put it commitment to ending sexist oppression—has a future. Speaking with audiences has convinced me that commitment to that value is thriving and spreading. The conversations with Gen Z women and gender expansive people I have had in the last several weeks have also made clear to me that we need that idea more than ever. After all, they are on the receiving end of a rising tide of reactionary masculinity that will no doubt shape the political years to come.

But what is less clear is that the way to achieve those values looks like the movement many of us associate with feminism. One thing I have realized in retrospect that some of the examples in the positive section of my book are actually of women and gender expansive people applying a gender lens within movements focused on racial or economic issues. In a recent piece in Teen Vogue, Olufemi Taiwo even reads Faux Feminism as a book about how to achieve feminist aims through movements that may not be legible as feminist, such as domestic worker movements.

On the other hand, some of the movements I take as examples for the feminist future in the book are movements that began as movements focused on the traditional “feminist” issues that cut across other social fault lines, such as sexual violence. One of these is Ni Una Menos in Argentina. One of the most interesting things about that particular movement is that it has created a sustained alliance with labor, partly through making claims about women as a group—most notably, the slogan “all women are workers” discussed by Luci Cavallero and Veronica Gago.

I don’t have the answers about the future of feminism as a movement—and I don’t think anyone can, because so much depends on how we organize in the coming years—but it is certainly a question of this moment.

I’d not taken a picture with a “real camera” since October 22nd, which is my longest such hiatus since 2007. So yesterday, I decided to step out and start again.

Saying that being cis-gender – i.e. having a gender identity that corresponds with the sex/gender one was assigned at birth – comes with privileges need not mean erasing the lived experiences, real challenges, and specific struggles of cis-gendered people (and especially of those cis-gender people who are otherwise disadvantaged and marginalised in other dimensions). [click to continue…]

A few weeks ago, seven political philosophers at my department, who regularly meet to discuss issues related to sustainable futures, met to discuss Hannah Ritchie’s book Not the End of the World. That book quickly appeared on the bestseller’s lists. For everyone who read her book, or is perhaps thinking about reading her book, here’s what we thought about it (which, regular readers of this blog will notice, is an example of Team Philosophy which we discussed here a while ago.)

Our review can be found below the fold.
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Editors of academic journals have been reporting that they find it increasingly hard to secure referees for papers that have been submitted to their journals. When I’ve been discussing this issue over the years with colleagues, I’ve heard a few remarks that made me wonder what our considerations are to decide whether or not to accept a review request. Clearly, there must be a content-wise fit: if one thinks the paper is outside one’s area of expertise, one should not accept the referee request. But then I have heard considerations such as “I decline because I have already refereed for this journal before”, or “I referee as many papers as I receive reports”, or “I referee 5 papers a year”. Are these valid reasons to decline?

Clearly, the answer cannot be that how much we choose to referee is purely a private affair. All academics would benefit if there would not be a shortage of referees, hence it cannot be a purely private affair. Yet the referee shortage takes the structure of a collective action problem. And we know that there are two principle ways to address collective action problems – either by having a collective decision maker (such as the government), which is not a solution available for this problem; or else by way of establishing a social norm.

Solving the referee crisis in academic peer review will require multiple measures, but when it comes to securing that enough people are willing to referee, I propose to discuss the number we should treat as the lower boundary of how much we should referee. Let’s call the number of reports a person writes for journals divided by the number of reports that person receives in response to their own paper submissions a person’s referee-ratio. I want to defend that the referee ratio should be at least 1.2. In other words, for every 4 reports we receive, we should write at least 5 (adjusted for the number of authors of a paper). [click to continue…]

From back when I was shooting film sometimes:

I posted this piece in RenewEconomy a couple of months ago. It didn’t convince the commenters then, and I don’t expect it to be any different here, but I’m putting it on the record anyway.

AI won’t use as much electricity as we are told, and it’s not a reason to slow transition to renewables

The recent rise of “generative AI” models has led to a lot of dire predictions about the associated requirements for energy. It has been estimated that AI will consume anything from 9 to 25 per cent of all US electricity by 2032.

But we have been here before. Predictions of this kind have been made ever since the emergence of the Internet as a central part of modern life, often tied to claims and counterclaims about the transition to renewable energy.

Back in 1999, Forbes magazine ran a piece headlined, Dig more coal — the PCs are coming. This article claimed that personal computers would use 50 per cent of US electricity within a decade. The unsubtle implication was that any attempt to reduce carbon dioxide emissions was doomed to failure

Of course, this prediction wasn’t borne out. Computing power has increased a thousand-fold since the turn of the century. But far from demanding more electricity personal computers have become more efficient with laptops mostly replacing large standalone boxes, and software improvements reducing waste.

A typical home computer now consumes around 30-60 watts when it is operating, less than a bar fridge or an incandescent light bulb.

The rise of large data centres and cloud computing produced another round of alarm. A US EPA report in 2007 predicted a doubling of demand every five years. Again, this number fed into a range of debates about renewable energy and climate change.

Yet throughout this period, the actual share of electricity use accounted for by the IT sector has hovered between 1 and 2 per cent, accounting for less than 1 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. By contrast, the unglamorous and largely disregarded business of making cement accounts for around 7 per cent of global emissions.

Will generative AI change this pattern? Not for quite a while. Although most business organizations now use AI for some purposes, it typically accounts for only 5 to 10 per cent of IT budgets.

Even if that share doubled or tripled the impact would be barely noticeable. Looking the other side of the market, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is bringing in around $3 billion a year in sales revenue, and has spent around $7 billion developing its model. Even if every penny of that was spent on electricity, the effect would be little more than a blip.

Of course, AI is growing rapidly. A tenfold increase in expenditure by 2030 isn’t out of the question. But that would only double total the total use of electricity in IT.

And, as in the past, this growth will be offset by continued increases in efficiency. Most of the increase could be fully offset if the world put an end to the incredible waste of electricity on cryptocurrency mining (currently 0.5 to 1 per cent of total world electricity consumption, and not normally counted in estimates of IT use).

If predictions of massive electricity use by the IT sector have been so consistently wrong for decades, why do they keep being made, and believed?

The simplest explanation, epitomised by the Forbes article from 1999, is that coal and gas producers want to claim that there is a continuing demand for their products, one that can’t be met by solar PV and wind. That explanation is certainly relevant today, as gas producers in particular seize on projections of growing demand to justify new plants.

At the other end of the policy spectrum, advocates of “degrowth” don’t want to concede that the explosive growth of the information economy is sustainable, unlike the industrial economy of the 20th century. The suggestion that electricity demand from AI will overwhelm attempts to decarbonise electricity supply supports the conclusion that we need to stop and reverse growth in all sectors of the economy.

Next there is the general free-floating concern about everything to with computers, which are both vitally necessary and mysterious to most of us. The rise of AI has heightened those concerns. But whereas no one can tell whether an AI apocalypse is on the way, or what it would entail, an electricity crisis is a much more comprehensible danger.

And finally, people just love a good story. The Y2K panic, supposedly based on the shortening of digits in dates used in computers, was obviously false (if it had been true, we would have seen widespread failures well before 1 January 2000).

But the appeal of the story was irresistible, at least in the English-speaking world, and billions of dollars were spent on problems that could have been dealt with using a “fix on failure” approach.

For what it’s worth, it seems likely that the AI boom is already reaching a plateau, and highly likely that such a plateau will be reached sooner or later. But when and if this happens, it won’t be because we have run out of electricity to feed the machines.

Update

The AI boom is also being used to justify talk, yet again, of a nuclear renaissance. All the big tech firms have made announcements of one kind or another about seeking nuclear power to run their data centres. And its true that the “always on” character of nuclear makes it a genuine example of the (otherwise mostly spurious) notion of “baseload demand”. But when you look at what Google, Meta and the others are actually doing, it amounts to around 1 GW apiece, the output of a single standard-sized reactor. That might bring a few retired reactors, like the one at Three Mile Island, back on line, but it’s unlikely to induce big new investments.