Tanner Greer writes essays on history, geopolitics, Chinese and Asian affairs, culture, and the intellectual world of the American right and tech elite.
HN links it as an excellent source on questions of history and politics, citing "History Is Written by the Losers" and his responses to other commentators.
Well said; I agree with you (and Augé). Another place I've seen this discussed is this fantastic blogpost on Scholar's Stage: https://scholars-stage.org/the-problem-isnt-the-merit-its-the-ocracy/
In the post, Tanner Greer excerpts from Andrew Yang's book The War on Normal People — here's the relevant quote in full, but I recommend clicking through and reading the whole post:
> In coming years it’s going to be even harder to forge a sense of common identity across different walks of life. A lot of people who now live in the bubble grew up in other parts of the country. They still visit their families for holidays and special occasions. They were brought up middle-class in normal suburbs like I was and retain a deep familiarity with the experiences of different types of people. They loved the mall, too. > In another generation this will become less and less true. There will be an army of slender, highly cultivated products of Mountain View and the Upper East Side and Bethesda heading to elite schools that has been groomed since birth in the most competitive and rarefied environments with very limited exposure to the rest of the country. > When I was growing up, there was something of an inverse relationship between being smart and being good-looking. The smart kids were bookish and awkward and the social kids were attractive and popular. Rarely were the two sets of qualities found together in the same people. The nerd camps I went to looked the part. >…
Worth quoting this passage from an insightful article[1]
People fought in Afghanistan, and people died, but not always in the obvious way. They had been fighting for so long, twenty-three years then, that by the time the Americans arrived the Afghans had developed an elaborate set of rules designed to spare as many fighters as they could. So the war could go on forever. Men fought, men switched sides, men lined up and fought again. War in Afghanistan often seemed like a game of pickup basketball, a contest among friends, a tournament where you never knew which team you’d be on when the next game got under way. Shirts today, skins tomorrow. On Tuesday, you might be part of a fearsome Taliban regiment, running into a minefield. And on Wednesday you might be manning a checkpoint for some gang of the Northern Alliance. By Thursday you could be back with the Talibs again, holding up your Kalashnikov and promising to wage jihad forever. War was serious in Afghanistan, but not that serious. It was part of everyday life. It was a job. Only the civilians seemed to lose.
Battles were often decided this way, not by actual fighting, but by flipping gangs of soldiers. One day, the Taliban might have four thousand soldiers, and the next, only half that, with the warlords of the Northern Alliance suddenly larger by a similar amount. The fighting began when the bargaining stopped, and the bargaining went right up until the end. The losers were the ones who were too stubborn, too…
Excellent text and Winner's "Cyberlibertarian Myths And The Prospects For Community" is a milestone.
Further reading:
1) Barbrook, Richard, and Andy Cameron. ‘The Californian Ideology’. Science as Culture 6, no. 1 (1996): 44–72.
2) Harvey, David. Spaces of Neoliberalization: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005.
3) Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press, 2006.
4) Mirowski, Philip. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. Verso, 2013.
5) Brown, Wendy. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. The Wellek Library Lectures. Columbia University Press, 2019.
6) Greer, Tanner. ‘The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the American Tech Elite’. The Scholar’s Stage, 21 August 2024. https://scholars-stage.org/the-silicon-valley-canon-on-the-paideia-of-the-american-tech-elite/.
7) Stevens, Marthe, Steven R. Kraaijeveld, and Tamar Sharon. ‘Sphere Transgressions: Reflecting on the Risks of Big Tech Expansionism’. Information, Communication & Society 27, no. 15 (2024): 2587–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2353782.
8) Lewis, Becca. ‘“Headed for Technofascism”: The Rightwing Roots of Silicon Valley’. Technology. The Guardian (London), 29 January 2025.…
History is very often written by the losers, provided they're still alive. The "winners" are often too busy doing other things to write the history.
https://scholars-stage.org/history-is-written-by-the-losers/
> Had Thucydides defeated Brasidas, he would be known today not as a historian, but as a military strategist, a strategist who never had the time to travel the world and collect the material needed to write his history. Even winning historians need time in defeat to write their histories—had Churchill’s party not been kicked out of power by British voters after the Second World War was over, Churchill’s famous account of that war would never have been written.
> When high position is stolen from you, and access to the heights of wealth and power denied, there is little one can do about it—except write. History is thus rarely a “weapon of the weak.” The judgments of the historian do not serve the margins. They do not even serve the masses. They are a weapon in the hand of defeated elites, the voices of men and women who could be in power, but are not. What was true in Thucydides day is true in our own.
WWII history was also in many cases literally written by defeated German generals.
Unfortunately, I think the probability is pretty significant. Metaculus currently predicts a 1-in-3 chance of invasion by 2035, which sounds about right to me, maybe even a little low. A whole lot of signs/incentives pointing in that direction:
- China's grim demographic trends mean that there will never be a better time than now: it only gets harder, with fewer fighting-age men available, the longer they wait.
- The "decade of concern" [0] means that the U.S. armed forces will be uniquely unprepared to defend Taiwan in the 2020's and early 2030's because of a generational equipment overhaul, but will be better-positioned after that.
- China is very aware that America's huge industrial mobilization for WWII is what pulled it out of the Great Depression.
- The years of 10% annual economic growth are gone - not even necessarily because of mismanagement (although there's been plenty of that too), but because growth eventually taps out to developed-country levels. War is excellent for shoring up stagnating support with both the general public and hardliners.
[0]: https://scholars-stage.org/welcome-to-the-decade-of-concern/
this is the first post i've seen on reconstruction of an already ailing now disaster-struck russian economy. real cultural victory is finding a non-zero sum solution, is moving beyond retribution & zeal over wrongs. this nation was suffering & is about to be suffeing horribly. how we start to the next chapters both feels super premature, but also, is of core character & essence. reconciliation, forgiveness, brotherhood must be possible for this nation (if not it's oligarchs). good post.
scholar-stage's Pausing at the Precipice was another good call for de-zealing, beginning to consider our values & long term response. https://scholars-stage.org/pausing-at-the-precipice/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30502860 (3 points, 8 hours ago, 0 comments)