first Derivative [74] newsletter
first Derivative [74]
May 13, 2020
Looking through the articles Ted and I had saved between our last issue and now, it's astounding to me how many of them no longer seem relevant to our new reality. But it's still an election year, and maybe that's all the more reason not to forget The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President or how The President Is Winning His War on American Institutions (both from the Atlantic). This may just be an illusion of my withdrawal from the internet, but it seems there's been a detente in the culture war, or at least a temporary ceasefire where instead of crossing the trenches to play soccer, we all watch Tiger King from our respective couches. In the time of coronavirus, there seems to be less at stake in, say, a debate about the facts of the 1619 Project, something Ted and I had intended to highlight. This issue is more focused on the reality of the present with an eye to the future, but still taps into some of the recurrent themes we've been following such as the crisis of liberalism and the Christian right.
For TV, Hulu has increasingly become my platform of choice. Normal People is a great adaptation of a good novel. Mrs. America started strong but through the four episodes I've seen has struggled to follow a guiding narrative thread through history's labyrinth. I also find its exploration of intersectionalism a bit on the nose in its attempt to feel contemporary. Dave has one of the funniest episodes I've seen in recent TV (the third). Otherwise, (I still have two episodes to go) it's a gentrified Atlanta, with only some of the style and none of the substance that makes Donald Glover's show special. The Great, which drops Friday, looks promising. On HBO, Run, misleadingly marketed as Phoebe Waller-Bridge's show, didn't feel worth going the distance. On Netflix, Outer Banks is the televisual equivalent of a boozy college spring break trip: fun at first, indulgent throughout, and ultimately bad for you. —ai
Hope everyone is hanging in there during this quarantine. At this point, I'm sure all of you are inundated with coronavirus-related information, and for good reason. It's arguably the most significant and dramatic event in most of our lives, just by the very fact that it seems to be less an event than a new way of living entirely. Of course, many years from now, that kind of thinking may ironically mark how brief and abnormal this period of life was. Time will tell, although if I were a betting man (which I am), I think that there will be serious changes to the way we think and act. There already seems to be the early signs of tectonic shifts in the way we think about work and where we do it, which affects not only the rhythm of our daily lives, families, communities but also commercial real estate broadly and the composition of urban spaces. Perhaps we'll look back at the completion of the Hudson Yards project on the west side of Manhattan as the peak of some craze and wonder why anyone would have driven an hour into a city to sit at a desk when we could have all just Zoomed. The developments in that kind of common knowledge (after we've had the capabilities for some time) are just as interesting to me as underlying technological and economic developments and it's almost marvelous to think about what kind of changes will come from and required a large, dislocating, exogenous shock like this pandemic. More on that to come in future issues.
In this one, the material converges on one large theme, from two different perspectives. I hope you'll appreciate they aren't mainly about coronavirus. That theme is about decadence, or as Marc Andreessen might call it, missing the spirit of building. Why don't things seem to work in this country? What's wrong? Those are not new questions and it's become more and more apparent since 2016, that things have not been working for a large part of the population for quite a while. But I think we've seen now, it's not just a problem of distribution and social equality. There is an overwhelming sense of common failure, as a nation and as a government, to handle this crisis seriously, if not competently. I think the two main pieces, by Douthat and by Andreessen, are great places to start in diagnosing that failure and its roots.
Very much agree with Arthur that I'm finding more and more great stuff on Hulu. Also really enjoyed Normal People, although fair warning to the single/quarantined readers: it may be a lot to handle. Dave was quite funny, although definitely uneven and nowhere near as good a show as Atlanta. But the last two episodes are some of the best in the season (so keep watching, Arthur). Some movies I really enjoyed lately that I recommend: Il Posto, Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Hulu), The Day He Arrives, Paprika.
In other housekeeping, we're planning to move fD over to Substack, which should work better overall as a platform. Nothing for you to do, just stay tuned for some changes.
P.S. A friend and I are working on a deep dive on Netflix. Let me know if this is something you're interested and/or if you have anything on the topic you think I should read (company, industry, valuation, etc.), thanks! —tk
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The Age of Decadence
by Ross Douthat (NYT)
"an era in which repetition is more the norm than invention; in which stalemate rather than revolution stamps our politics; in which sclerosis afflicts public institutions and private life alike; in which new developments in science, new exploratory projects, consistently underdeliver?"
IT'S TIME TO BUILD
by Marc Andreessen (a16z)
“In fact, I think building is how we reboot the American dream. The things we build in huge quantities, like computers and TVs, drop rapidly in price. The things we don’t, like housing, schools, and hospitals, skyrocket in price. What’s the American dream? The opportunity to have a home of your own, and a family you can provide for. We need to break the rapidly escalating price curves for housing, education, and healthcare, to make sure that every American can realize the dream, and the only way to do that is to build.”
If you have limited time, just read these two. Ezra Klein's (rare Vox appearance on here) and Ben Thompson's are good responses to the Andreessen piece and Thiel's is a review of Douthat that I think bridges the two very well. Andreessen points out the third season of Westworld set its city of the future in Singapore, not an American city (though the Angeleno will recognize several familiar buildings scattered throughout). But it's Douthat that diagnoses the kind of society that Westworld S3 depicts and the one we live in (it's actually remarkable how well the season depicts a thoroughly decadent society, although if you haven't seen, do yourself a favor and don't. It's not very good).
Also here's a good easy-read, blog post looking at Andreessen’s essay point by point (h/t fD reader GJB)
Finally, it read a little too polemical for me too really highlight but if you want to read a strong narrative on this theme check out George Packer's essay.—tk
Why We Can't Build
by Ezra Klein (Vox)
"The absence of creation doesn’t reflect an absence of desire... The institutions through which Americans build have become biased against action rather than toward it. They’ve become, in political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s term, “vetocracies,” in which too many actors have veto rights over what gets built. That’s true in the federal government. It’s true in state and local governments. It’s even true in the private sector."
Usually don't like Vox but this is a thoughtful response to Andreessen's piece. Not a rebuttal so much as looking at government as a key necessary institution required to build and grow, but one that has become sclerotic.—tk
Back to the Future
by Peter Thiel (First Things)
"Every aspect of decadence feeds back into the others. Legal sclerosis is likely a bigger obstacle to the adoption of flying cars than any engineering problem. Poor transportation makes it more expensive to raise a family and so lowers birth rates. Aging brings risk-aversion and arrests creativity."
The Boeing 737 Max scandal that Thiel begins with isn't just an example of technological plateau. As he hints, the dynamics that led to the development of the airplane and its ultimate failure get to the heart of decadence. Shortcuts, financial engineering over actual engineering, covering up problems rather than rooting them out, dyanmics that Ben Hunt over at Epsilon Theory has covered with an abundance of passion. An fD reader makes a similar point in National Review through the history of General Electric.—tk
How Tech Can Build
by Ben Thompson (Stratechery)
"What I also sense in Andreessen’s essay, though, is the acknowledgment that tech too has chosen the easier path. Instead of fighting inertia or regulatory capture, it has been easier to retreat to Silicon Valley, justify the massive costs of doing so by pursuing infinite-upside outcomes predicated on zero marginal costs, which means relying almost exclusively on software as the means of innovation."
Ben Thompson digs deeper into the context of Andreessen's essay, Silicon Valley's role, zero-marginal cost software businesses, etc. Definitely worth the read.—tk
Why They Bulldozed Your Block
by Adam Gopnik (New Yorker)
"Now, however, for the first time in a half century, the people who built the bad stuff are reëmerging as possible models of how we might yet build good stuff... this revival has been pushed forward by the same force that has recently pushed other forms of public neo-progressivism, at least rhetorically: a desire for public action in the face of the obvious impasse of the private, with free-market mechanisms having left city housing so costly that teachers and cops often live two hours outside the neighborhoods they serve."
A bit tangential but not unrelated. It looks at urban development and "building" as well as identifying a rehabilitation of Big Planning and Big Building that, good or bad, I don't think is decadent. I think the impasse of urban development is illustrative of the sclerotic institutions whose active participation is necessary. As always, Gopnik's prose is a pleasure to read, accessibly insightful.—tk
"Though the problem of building new housing is usually discussed in terms of plans and zones and taxes, it is, in some largely unrecognized part, also an aesthetic and architectural one... a central lesson in thinking about building is to think about buildings."
As Gopnik points out, increasing supply is not the same as meeting demand; building tall towers in the West Village would destroy the very reason people want to live there in the first place. It's not just a matter of building more, but building better; creating environments conducive to human flourishing. In Gopnik's phrasing: "We want the project of public housing so long as what we build does not look like a public-housing project."
Here's another quote to segue to our next article:
"At a time when “liberal Catholicism” was a movement, not a contradiction, [Ed Logue's] faith tempered and gave values to his progressivism."
—ai
A Catholic Debate Over Liberalism
by Park MacDougald (City Journal)
A very clearly written exposition of the debates in conservative Catholic circles about the role of the state and temporal power in relation to the Church and the tension between the hegemonic ideology of liberalism with Catholic teachings and ethics. If you read the Vermuele essay below, would be best to read this one first as I think it does a good job of contextualizing that essay in a larger discourse. Also reflagging a good essay by Kevin Gallagher that was in fD a few issues ago—tk
Were the Know-Nothings actually on to something when they feared a "Romanist" plot perpetrated by Papist immigrants? When William Barr (whom John R. Dunne has called "an authoritarian Catholic") bends the Justice Department to his partisan will, is it so far-fetched to think of him or Adrian Vermeule as a modern day Guy Fawkes, piling gunpowder beneath the Constitution? It sounds crazy, reminiscent of the xenophobic hysteria directed at Muslims in the wake of 9/11. No one could reasonably argue that Americans can't be Catholic. And yet this article examines the question of whether or not Catholics can be American, which is to say, could Catholicism, as a primary belief system, be structurally at odds with the American ideology of liberal democracy? (As I've been reading more about the history of Latin America, colonized in the zealous spirit of the Reconquista, that idea strikes me as a possible explanation for the political order of that region.) Ultimately, I don't think so. But it's scary that some do.—ai
Beyond Originalism
by Adrian Vermeule (Atlantic)
On one hand, this essay remarkable for being so frank about its aims and values. On the other, it's fairly banal in its ideas and how it states them, not engaging with fairly obvious objections and counterarguments. That's definitely by design, as it's more of a signal flag to other covert operatives of the common-good constitutional strain. I agree to a degree but Vermeuele doesn't really substantiate a particular view of the common good, although we can safely assume it aligns with the Catholic Church.
Most striking to me is the lack of any discussion of self-rule. I think we can safely assume but it's neglect reflects how foreign this way of thinking is to American and democratic values. It's also an argument that presumes significant homogeneity, to the degree that it's not hard to arrive at scenarios of majoritarian tyranny, and barring secession, oppression and apartheid.
Rod Dreher and Randy Barnett both had good responses to this piece.—tk
So did David French.—ai
Internal Chinese report warns Beijing faces Tiananmen-like global backlash over virus
(Reuters)
"An internal Chinese report warns that Beijing faces a rising wave of hostility in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak that could tip relations with the United States into confrontation...
One of those with knowledge of the report said it was regarded by some in the Chinese intelligence community as China’s version of the “Novikov Telegram”, a 1946 dispatch by the Soviet ambassador to Washington, Nikolai Novikov, that stressed the dangers of U.S. economic and military ambition in the wake of World War Two.
Novikov’s missive was a response to U.S. diplomat George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” from Moscow that said the Soviet Union did not see the possibility for peaceful coexistence with the West, and that containment was the best long-term strategy."
America is awakening to China. This is a clarion call to seize the moment
by Sen. Mitt Romney (WaPo)
Sen. Romney with a good general overview of China's adversarial actions across the board. H.R. McMaster has a piece in the Atlantic that's thorough and a bit long (reads like it was put together paragraph by paragraph by research assistants) but if you want more after reading the Romney piece, it's more in depth.—tk
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