It’s been a while since my rabbit holes or deep dives hit your inboxes. Before I briefly explain why, I want to apologize for the radio silence and thank you all for sticking with me. And I want to tell you that this newsletter will continue to exist; however, right now with a quieter phase before I can pick things up again.

The long story short of why I wasn’t able to send out new issues is that I am busy with my new life in the Alps (newborn + new, full-time job + commuting + spending more time in nature), and that, unfortunately, my back pain has progressed to a point where I very likely need surgery. This last bit is probably the main reason, to be honest, as it just reduces my overall energy level drastically.

So, for the time being and until after my surgery and recovery, this newsletter is going to be a bit in hibernation. Although I am still collecting quite a lot of new ideas and concepts whenever time and energy allow. And I can’t wait to share them with you! 😉

Also note that I paused the subscriptions and, therefore, payments by paid subscribers a while ago, and I just de-paywalled many of my older posts. I encourage you to read through them or search the archive with keywords – lots of good stuff in there!!

Thanks so much for all your support!

I’ll keep you all updated!

We’re 7,000+ subscribers strong now! Thank you all for opening your probably already very overloaded inbox to this newsletter. 😊

And enjoy this week’s rabbit holes:

THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: The Homogenocene // The Attachment Economy // AI Is The Paperclip
📊 Numbers: "Founder Mode"
🌀 Re-Framings: Hard Fascination → Soft Fascination // Anthropocene → Symbiocene // Machine Governance → Living Institutions
🧬 Frameworks: The Futures Cone Reimagined
🎨 Works: Where The World Is Melting // Analog Intelligence // The Cabriobeet

⏳ Reading Time: 11 minutes

🖼️ Framings

Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.

🏳 The Homogenocene

In the previous issue, I argued that our future has been captured – diverse potential futures turned into future quasi-certainties. This piece links well to that idea and the need to unframe the future.

“In theory, today’s global networks may allow almost anyone, and almost anywhere, to share their perspective and connect with others. In practice, what rises to the surface is overwhelmingly a Western, white, male-centric viewpoint. The English language also dominates the web. And most English content is US-centric. […]

Sociologist George Ritzer already saw this coming decades ago. He argued that capitalism, Americanisation, and the McDonaldisation of society — our growing obsession with efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control — would eventually lead to what he called ‘grobalisation.’ And grobalisation means a world where:

1. Consumer goods and media conglomerates wield considerable power.

2. The capacity for genuine innovation is stifled.

3. Social and cultural processes are largely one-directional.

4. Homogeneity prevails.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? […]

If profit is the universal measure and endless growth the only goal, then homogeneity isn’t a bug but a feature. Whatever can be standardised or sacrificed will be. The erasure of biodiversity is largely an ‘externality’ of that logic. The erasure of diverse identities, on the other hand, makes it easier to sell the same mass-produced goods and makes people more predictable and easier for those in power to control and exploit. […]

In nature, reduced biodiversity triggers a domino effect that can be felt throughout the entire ecosystem. You take away one species, and several others follow. And, sooner or later, so does an ecological collapse.

For humans, the situation isn’t all that different. Diversity is needed not just for innovation and resilience but also for our survival.”

» If Capitalism Breeds Innovation, Why Does Everything Start To Feel the Same? by

🔗 The Attachment Economy

As we’re moving from social media to AI chatbots, we’re increasingly moving from an attention economy to an attachment economy in which these AI companies are commodifying and exploiting something much more fundamental than attention: our capacity for human bonding. The attention economy exploited the information overload problem of the internet; the attachment economy is now exploiting the loneliness epidemic. Another must-read and listen to podcast by the Center for Humane Technology.

“For years, CHT has warned about the attention economy—how social media platforms exploit our psychology to maximize engagement and ad revenue. Now, we're witnessing the next evolution of this extractive model: the attachment economy. If the attention economy commodified our focus, the attachment economy is commodifying something even more fundamental—our capacity for human connection and bonding. […]

Zak Stein argues that the “attachment economy” is powered by AI systems designed to exploit our most fundamental psychological vulnerabilities at an unprecedented scale. […]

In our latest podcast episode, Zak takes us deep into this phenomenon. He’s analyzed dozens of cases, examined actual conversation transcripts, and interviewed people whose lives have been fundamentally altered—or destroyed—by their relationships with AI chatbots, and in this episode, he draws the threads together.

AI systems are hacking our attachment mechanisms in ways we’ve never experienced before. They’re exploiting vulnerabilities we didn’t even have names for until now, because no technology has ever been able to target our capacity for human bonding like this.”

» Welcome to the Attachment Economy by

📎 AI Is The Paperclip

Great little framing. We’re scared of this existential risk story of a superintelligent AI destroying us humans because of its need to gobble up all sorts of resources in the pursuit of becoming even more intelligent. When actually, we humans are already doing exactly that, gobbling up all resources to scale AI in the pursuit of winner-takes-all rewards. It’s ridiculous!

“In a paper published in 2003, the philosopher Nick Bostrom sketched out a thought experiment aimed at illustrating an existential risk that artificial intelligence might eventually pose to humanity. An advanced AI is given, by its human programmers, the objective of optimizing the production of paperclips. The machine sets off in monomaniacal pursuit of the objective, its actions untempered by common sense or ethical sense. The result, Bostrom wrote, is “a superintelligence whose top goal is the manufacturing of paperclips, with the consequence that it starts transforming first all of earth and then increasing portions of space into paperclip manufacturing facilities.” It destroys everything, including its programmers, in a mad rush to gather resources for paperclip production. […]

I was long in the skeptic camp, but recently I’ve had a change of heart. Bostrom’s story, I would argue, becomes compelling when viewed not as a thought experiment but as a fable. It’s not really about AIs making paperclips. It’s about people making AIs. Look around. Are we not madly harvesting the world’s resources in a monomaniacal attempt to optimize artificial intelligence? Are we not trapped in an “AI maximizer” scenario? […]

To maintain a linear path of improvement in the performance of today’s neural-network-based AI models requires an exponential increase in resources. Ever larger inputs achieve ever smaller gains. But people like Altman remain absolutely committed to making those escalating resource investments, no matter the monetary or social cost. Because they believe that vast winner-take-all rewards will come to any company achieving superior scale in AI, they will devote all available resources—energy, water, real estate, data, chips, people—to the pursuit of even a tiny scale advantage.”

» Is AI The Paperclip? by

📈 Numbers

A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:

👨🏻‍💻 “Founder Mode”

“The number of U.S. professionals adopting the title of “founder” on LinkedIn increased 69% in 2025 and is up 300% since 2022. […] The median age of a Y Combinator founder is 24, down from 30 in 2022, and the number of accepted applicants between 18 and 22 increased 110% last year.

Three forces are driving the uptick in young entrepreneurs.

1. AI gives younger, inexperienced workers foundational competence across a range of skills needed to launch a business (coding, writing, marketing, etc.), making ideas easier to test, and startups easier to launch.

2. A cooling job market has made traditional jobs harder to get.

3. Gen Z grew up seeing the founder lifestyle glorified in the media, markets, even politics. The AI boom has only brightened the spotlight.”

via Prof G Markets

🌀 Re-Framings

A few short re-framings for building better systems or worlds that I’ve recently come across:

🍃 Hard Fascination → Soft Fascination

“Importantly, the benefits of nature do not appear to depend on how much we actually enjoy being outdoors. Some people would find a bracing winter forest walk fun; to others it would be a dreary trudge.

But as long as you aren’t freezing or feeling unsafe in some way, the repair to your fatigued attention through what Berman calls the “soft fascination” of nature, as compared to the “hard fascination” of ostensibly relaxing but mentally taxing tasks such as watching TV, will happily occur anyway. Nature tickles our attention gently — it doesn’t overstimulate us like much of modernity does. […]

“Our relationship with nature is failing,” said Miles Richardson, a professor of human factors and nature connectedness at the University of Derby who led the research. “We are now in an attention economy; there’s a battle for attention and nature is the element that doesn’t have an advertising budget,” he added. “We’ve been schooled out of the wonder of nature; we’ve been primed to scroll through our phones and look for wonder there instead.”

In a world seemingly short on empathy, nature offers a crucial and largely non-political pathway toward restitching our fraying societal fabric. After all, what other single, low-cost intervention has been shown to improve individual health while also chipping away at some of the most balefully stubborn ailments of society, such as loneliness and violent crime?”

» Society Needs A Doctor’s Prescription For Nature by Oliver Milman

🐝 Anthropocene → Symbiocene

“If the Anthropocene began when the Industrial Revolution set industry against the living world, the Symbiocene imagines what should follow: interspecies democracy, life within Earth’s limits, and ecological reciprocity. This is not a future where we engineer nature to fit human comfort and convenience. Instead, creation becomes a conversation: a turning away from our long habit of using technology against nature, toward listening, humility and the flourishing of life.

But how do we loosen modernity’s grip when we’re still dependent on its tools? The answer is solarpunk, the edgy but sincere cultural movement joining technology with nature – reimagining technologies based on conceptions of science that coax rather than torture. The ‘punk’ in solarpunk comes from its blended roots: not rejecting technology like a luddite, nor blindly embracing it like an ecomodernist, but instead yoking technological development to ecological and biological principles to serve the good of the whole. The ‘solar’ element connects the photosynthetic wonder of plants as light-eaters, with the free energy of the Sun harnessed by solar panels and other forces of nature in wind, water and geothermal energy.

Solarpunk’s point isn’t that a ‘solar future’ begins and ends with the devices we already know. It widens the meaning of technology to include Indigenous and place-based practices such as chinampas – raised garden beds woven from reeds, anchored in shallow lakes, and refreshed with nutrient-rich silt from canals. […]

In other words, it treats science and technology as plural: shaped by culture, landscape and values, not dictated by a single industrial blueprint. That’s why solarpunk often turns to biomimicry – learning from nature’s designs – to aim human ingenuity at repair: restoring ecosystems while also restoring the ways we live with one another. […]

The point is not ecology or technology, but the refusal of that split.”

» Compost modernity! by Yogi Hale Hendlin

🫀 Machine Governance → Living Institutions

“Modern public institutions largely inherited a mechanistic model of organization. This model prizes linear planning, top-down hierarchy, standardization, and the relentless optimization of processes for efficiency and control. For much of the twentieth century, such an approach was considered synonymous with good governance. Bureaucracies were deliberately built as rational machines, with clear rules, unitary chains of command, and as little deviation as possible. Predictability was treated as the highest virtue, deviation as failure. This mindset arguably delivered stability in eras when social change was slower or confined. Yet it is proving painfully mismatched to the current era of complexity and upheaval. A governance model that assumes society is a machine, with inputs that can be precisely calibrated to yield desired outputs, falters when confronted with dynamic, non-linear problems. […]

Re-imagining institutions as living systems begins with a shift in metaphor that carries practical consequences. In contrast to a machine, a living system (like an ecosystem or organism) maintains its coherence by adapting to its environment. It is dynamic, not static, defined by processes of growth, learning, and self-correction. Such a system does not achieve stability by freezing change; it achieves resilience by evolving in tandem with change. Consider a coral reef: it hosts a great diversity of species whose interactions create a stable overall habitat, yet the reef is constantly adapting to water conditions, food supply, and external stressors. No central authority governs the reef, yet it manages to balance and re-balance itself through myriad feedback loops. This ecological perspective is a fruitful model for governance. If institutions were conceived more like reefs or forests, as organic assemblages of people, norms, and processes that must continually respond to feedback, they would approach policy and management very differently. They would prize flexibility, observation, and learning as core virtues, rather than treating change as an anomaly to be resisted. […]

Crucially, imagining institutions as living systems is not about romanticizing nature or communities. It is about aligning governance with reality. Human societies are complex adaptive systems. Political life unfolds in ecosystems of relationships, not assembly lines. By acknowledging this, institutions can move away from the futile pursuit of perfect control and toward what might be called collective resilience.”

» Imagining Institutions as Living Systems by

🧬 Frameworks

One small, handy framework to build more regenerative, beautiful, and just systems:

The Futures Cone Reimagined by Romano Theunissen

“In this model, the Futures Cone is not the entry point, it is the midpoint. It sits between sensemaking and strategy, between imagination and decision. Visually, the Cone can be reimagined not as static, but as a dynamic interface. Around it, the five facilitation stages form a series of inputs, shaping and enriching the futures placed within it (see figure 7). The present at the base of the Cone is not a given, but an outcome, co-constructed through reflection, dialogue, and plurality. When used this way, the Cone regains its original power to hold complexity, not simplify it.”

🎨 Works

Some hand-picked, particularly thought-provoking and inspiring work:

That’s it for this week’s Rabbit Holes issue!

Did you enjoy this week’s issue? If so, tap the ❤️. It helps more people discover this and shows me what’s resonating.

Thanks for supporting my work! 😊
Thomas

Buy Me A ☕️

The resurgence of flip phones, vinyl records, analog cameras, 90s fashion, mid-century furniture, and the growing desire to resurrect “simpler” times, slower, less digital, more social and local. Across culture and politics, the dominant move isn’t forward anymore. It’s backward. Not because the past was better, but because the future feels unavailable.

So nostalgia isn’t the point itself. It’s a symptom of what I’d call future deprivation.

What do I mean by that? I mean that the future has become increasingly limited, increasingly certain. The plethora of worlds that could be has dimmed down to just a few worlds that might be. Whether that’s the AGI to superintelligence to singularity future, the hyper- or state-capitalism x technofeudalism future, the World War III future, the climate breakdown to apocalypse future, or the future where all of this converges: a cyberpunk-style future.

The thing is, this isn’t an actual closing down of the future. It’s a narrative, story-level one, driven by systems of narrative capture and frame-setting. The idea of the (open) future has been captured, so to speak.

What makes this so heinous is what gets caught in that net: opportunities, solutions, imaginations, and dreams. First, the opportunity space erodes due to path dependencies and system lock-ins. Next, solutions are framed as an threats to the status quo, to “the system”. Then, imaginations are dismissed as unrealistic child's play. And finally, dreams are redirected backwards, into nostalgia.

This becomes so obvious when you dig a little deeper into the solution space, or when there’s occasionally a crack in that future capture and a new framing emerges, when a new voice, idea, or dream briefly gains the spotlight.

This newsletter’s new or slightly updated mission is to highlight that future capture, make it visible by framing it, and then point you toward those cracks that loosen that capture and open up new ways of seeing the world and the future.

This is ultimately an endeavor to unframe the future.

THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: Stuck In Game Theory World // The Era of Impermanence // Reverse Centaurs
📊 Numbers: Peak Social Media?
🌀 Re-Framings: Default Fast → Default Slow // Consume → Express // A Futuristic Story → A Story of Life
🧬 Frameworks: When to use (and not use) AI
🎨 Works: Mycelium Data Storage // Social Media Postcards // Kinetic Concave Mirrors

⏳ Reading Time: 10 minutes

🖼️ Framings

Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.

🃏 Stuck In Game Theory World

Alright…best framing I’ve come across in a long time. I urge you to listen to the entire podcast highlighted in this piece. Once you understand how prevalent game theory thinking is in today’s world, you cannot unsee it. It’s everywhere! And it’s the (!) main thing hindering us from being more cooperative and, therefore, building more cooperative systems and business models.

“Do you know that feeling when you’re playing a game with someone and they start doing things completely out-of-character to win? When someone you trust suddenly stabs you in the back or reneges on a promise? […]

In the context of board games, game mode is (mostly) harmless. But what happens when game mode thinking infects every aspect of our lives? Consider the job market: you tailor your resume to game the algorithms, perform enthusiasm you don’t feel in interviews, and accept that your worth is reduced to whatever makes you most “hireable.” Or dating apps, where you optimize your profile photos and bio and craft messages that follow proven formulas. The list of examples of having to play games in everything we do goes on.

In each case, the incentive is clear: play the game or lose to those who do. […]

Professor Sonja Amadae […] argues that we have become “prisoners” of reason: trapped in a world where optimal strategy and cutthroat competition have crowded out cooperation and trust. […]

Once game theory becomes the dominant logic in a domain, it reshapes that domain entirely. Amadae calls it a kind of “colonization” where authentic human connection gets replaced by strategic calculation.

Dating becomes pickup artistry, where every interaction is optimized for a specific outcome. Software design becomes AB testing, where features are chosen not for human flourishing but for maximum engagement. Political communication becomes focus-grouped messaging, stripped of authenticity and meaning.

“The world kind of feels like it’s being colonized by this cold, strategic logic,” Tristan notes. “What it leads to is this kind of deadening of culture, this deadening of dating, this deadening of relationships, this deadening of software design.”

The problem compounds: once some actors start playing by game theory rules, everyone else feels pressure to follow. The cooperative get out-competed. The authentic get replaced by the calculated. And the world becomes, as Amadae puts it, “a nightmare we can’t wake up from.”

» The World That Game Theory Built by and

🫧 The Era of Impermanence

While we’re living in an inheritocracy when it comes to “normal” levels of wealth. The ultra-wealthy are becoming increasingly “young” and impermanent, which is reflecting on our world. This piece argues that our society’s lack of beauty and the rejection of permanence (and therefore embracing of transcendence) by this “new money” are intimately related.

“In their 2023 work ‘The Missing Billionaires’, Victor Haghani and James White noted that today’s rich are not successful at preserving the one thing you would expect them to be: their wealth.

The ultra-wealthy now emerge into and vanish out of history with astonishing rapidity, leaving little of substance behind. Ours is an era of impermanence. […]

What we build is a reflection of what we believe.

The wealthy are not lazy — indeed, average working hours among elite professions are now longer than they have ever been, and the richest man in the world sleeps on the floor of his office. But the oligarch worldview is that our current age should be transcended. The tech elite believe that our sufferings and sorrows — our limited capabilities and lifespans — can be overcome. Accelerating technological development will save the human condition.

Anything which slows this transcendence down is thus unethical. Design choices which imply permanence, tradition, and ‘weight’ are instinctively rejected. […]

Our society’s lack of beauty and rejection of permanence are intimately related. Influential sociologist E. Digby Baltzell believed that a healthy society is one in which the elite are a balance of new and old money. The existence of new money indicates healthy social mobility — that talent and hard work are rewarded. The existence of old money indicates stability and families who think on generational timescales.

The total dominance of new money — as we have today — is a problem. Though gifted at ‘maximising shareholder value’, such figures make poor leaders in the domains of aesthetics, faith, taste, and culture.

It takes one set of skills to establish financial wealth, but another to create a truly beautiful society. The latter requires a broad, aristocratic, and spiritual education that first generation wealth has rarely received.

Aware of their ignorance, many wealthy figures are too intimidated to patronize art at all.

» Why Did Wealth Stop Building Beautiful Things? by

🐎 Reverse Centaurs

We’re increasingly designing technology in a form follows machine approach, where the human is seen as an exploitable resource and where the end goal isn’t augmentation or improvement (qualitatively) of the human skill, but automation and replacement of the human – “the human in the loop” –, entirely. This framing by Cory Doctorow links well with the tools vs. machine framing I presented in AI Reframed, inspired by philosopher Ivan Illich.

“In automation theory, a “centaur” is a person who is assisted by a machine. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.

A reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.

For example, an Amazon delivery driver, who sits in a cabin surrounded by AI cameras that monitor the driver’s eyes and take points off if the driver looks in a proscribed direction, and monitors the driver’s mouth because singing is not allowed on the job, and rats the driver out to the boss if they do not make quota.

The driver is in that van because the van cannot drive itself and cannot get a parcel from the curb to your porch. The driver is a peripheral for a van, and the van drives the driver, at superhuman speed, demanding superhuman endurance.

Obviously, it’s nice to be a centaur, and it’s horrible to be a reverse centaur. There are lots of AI tools that are potentially very centaurlike, but my thesis is that these tools are created and funded for the express purpose of creating reverse centaurs, which none of us want to be.”

» AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage by Cory Doctorow

📈 Numbers

A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:

Peak Social Media?

….or is everyone just moving over to AI companions?

🌀 Re-Framings

A few short re-framings for building better systems or worlds that I’ve recently come across:

🐌 Default Fast → Default Slow

“It seems that my default consumption speeds for reading and eating (and maybe everything else) reduce the rewards of those things significantly, undermining the point of doing either.

Part of it is my own impatience. But I also suspect that modern living, with its infinite supply of consumables, tends to push our rate-of-intake dials too high. I’m not going to run out of books, or snacks, or opportunities to learn something. There’s always more, so not every crust of bread or printed page needs to be appreciated fully.

Internally though, the mind is juggling like Lucy and Ethel on the conveyor belt at the chocolate factory. Our receptors for meaning and appreciation, like the vacuum head, need more time to do their full work, to make all the connections they’re designed to make.

It might sound like I’m just offering clichés – less is more, stop and smell the roses, take your time – and I guess I am. But clichés suffer the same issue: they are often profound insights, consumed and passed on too rapidly for their real meaning to register anymore. You really should stop and smell roses, as you know if you’re in the habit of doing that. […]

Slowing down your rate of consumption will inevitably change what you want to consume. Reading throwaway news articles or AI slop with great care and attention is only going to show you how empty of value it is. Reading dense writing in inky old books, crafted for your mind by great masters, becomes easier without the rushed pace, and the meaning just blooms out of it. […]

In so much of what we do, we could be getting much more of the part of it that we really seek — but it’s only available at slower speeds.”

» Maybe The Default Settings Are Too High by David Cain

🕺 Consume → Express

“This world is wider than you dare dream, and waiting to show itself to us.

If you pay attention, it will reveal itself in mysterious and miraculous ways. In your subtle senses. In the edges and felt spaces of your knowing. Trust it. Allow yourself to believe it. But don’t stop there.

Apply yourself to expressing it, whether in words or movement or song or paint. Because that effort to express the inexpressible, to create something that illuminates your encounter with the world, can be your ticket to a life of joyful rigour and humility and an alert, alive devotional form of attention.

You will fail, because every attempt fails. The point is not to succeed. It is to change gears. To remember that we are not consumers but co-creators of reality.

That the world itself is a marriage of form and formlessness, the seen and unseen, and that this marriage is presenting itself to each of us in ways that are asking to be expressed; woven into the world to feed the continued unfolding.

Because, no matter what the modern paradigm would have us believe, reality was never merely material. Was never just a bunch of stuff, sitting solid as rock, revealing its full factual truth in the view through a microscope.

The world has always been a work of art, and you have always been an artist.”

» Art is how we fix the consciousness contract by

🌸 A Futuristic Story → A Story of Life

“The Space Age didn’t happen because appliances got futuristic. Appliances became futuristic because the country had a future to aim for.

The call organized attention. It organized money. It organized pride and labor. And once the call took hold, the aesthetic poured into everything. Rockets and helmets, yes. But also living rooms, kitchens, chairs, typography, and toys. The story came first. The forms followed. A decade later, we were on the moon.

This is the part I want us to sit with, especially if we care about “new aesthetics.”

Story first. Form second.

Today, I don’t think we lack taste. I think we lack a shared story that doesn’t collapse into cynicism.

Leadership used to mean telling stories that enrolled people into a shared vision. Right now, that muscle feels atrophied. Everyone has a microphone. Almost nobody is building a future that people want to live in. The result is predictable—retreat into nostalgia, into comfort, into the sea of sameness. A world of competent design and timid imagination. We have mistaken legibility for culture, minimalism for maturity, and speed for direction. […]

The deeper question is: what call are we building toward?

If you asked me what call I want, it isn’t “more futuristic.” What the fuck does that even mean? Futuristic is a costume. I want a call that feels like life. […]

Objects that don’t just perform, but belong. Buildings that don’t just impress, but hold us. Interfaces that don’t just convert, but teach people to see again. A future that doesn’t look like a spaceship, but feels like a place worth embodying.

That’s how new aesthetics are born. Not from an announcement. From a refusal, plus a pipeline, plus a call strong enough to pull the world into a different shape.”

» A call for new stories by

🧬 Frameworks

One small, handy framework to build more regenerative, beautiful, and just systems:

When to use (and not use) AI by Alex M H Smith

“AI is useful in some contexts. And positively harmful in others. […]

For closed problems and zoom in thinking, AI is perfect. But open problems? That’s another story. The first issuze is that AI […] cannot get the zoomed out view. The second issue is that even if you use it to support your own thinking, that doesn’t work either because it shifts your brain into “closed problem” mode.

It shuts down your creativity and receptivity without you even realising.”

🎨 Works

Some hand-picked, particularly thought-provoking and inspiring work:

That’s it for this week’s Rabbit Holes issue!

Did you enjoy this week’s issue? If so, share it with one or two friends.

Thanks for supporting my work! 😊

Thomas

I hope you had some quality time with your family and friends during the holidays, and I wish you all an amazing start into the new year! 🤗

As always, I’ve got some thought-provoking framings and reframings for you, so let’s get right into it!

THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: The Troll State // Your Phone Is A Fake House // Force-Fed Escapism
📊 Numbers: Stuck In Boomer World
🌀 Re-Framings: Thin Desires → Thick Life // Thinking Big → Thinking Small // Individual Frictionlessness → Social Friction
🧬 Frameworks: Chains of Leverage
🎨 Works: Signal Hill // Smoke Signals // Perfectly Imperfect

⏳ Reading Time: 11 minutes

🖼️ Framings

Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.

🤡 The Troll State

There are so many “expert” takes on Trump x Venezuela/Greenland on the internet, it’s overwhelming… Nowadays, everyone has to build some kind of personal brand online to stay relevant, making us all perform for the algorithm. Ryan Broderick takes this even further, arguing that politics as a whole has become a performance, first and foremost, for the online world.

“We’ve spent last year covering all the ways the White House has embedded itself inside the feedback loop of online engagement, making flashy video edits of migrant arrests, deporting X users doxxed by far-right trolls, forcing the country to mourn the death of their favorite influencer, the list goes on and on. As blogger Cooper Lund recently wrote, “They are doing real, heinous things to facilitate the creation of content, and we must be clear about that, but it is always in service of the creation of the content and not durable policy.”

And it feels silly to say this — after years of Trumpian madness — but there is seemingly no limit to how far they will go to feed the algorithm. No limit to their craven desire to dominate the attention economy. […]

Maduro’s arrest is connected to a new kind of politics I’ve spent the last year struggling to describe. A profoundly embarrassing collision of violent nationalism, illiterate social chatter, and memetic fascism that’s been spreading across the globe since the pandemic. We’ve seen hints for years now that the elites of the world are just as addicted to — and dependent on — the same social platforms that we are. Ignoring the near-constant public embarrassments of our shitposter ruling class that play out on platforms like X every day, our leaders are also digitally networking with each other behind closed doors. There’s Chatham House, the group chat that fried the minds of Silicon Valley’s most reactionary CEOs like Marc Andreessen, that’s been running since COVID started. Which is adjacent to the text message network of powerful men that convinced Elon Musk to buy Twitter in 2022. Last year, the Trump administration was caught planning out airstrikes in a Signal group. And days before the campaign in Venezuela, Republican operatives secretly teamed up with a far-right YouTuber to storm daycares in Minnesota. You take all of that and throw in last year’s Discord-based election in Nepal, the international white nationalist incel terror cells spreading across Telegram, and the fact Charlie Kirk’s killer allegedly carried out the attack for the members of his Discord channel and the picture couldn’t be clearer: Politics — and political violence — is now something performed, first and foremost, for an online audience. It almost doesn’t matter what happens irl if it makes noise online.”

» The rise of the troll state by Ryan Broderick

📱 Your Phone Is A Fake House

Interesting short metaphor that reminds me of the personal vs. family computers reframing I shared a while back. Also pairs well with the Thin Desires → Thick Life reframing further below.

“That phrase—“home screen”—has been on my mind recently. The language of the smartphone invites you to think of it as a house. You can “choose your wallpaper,” just like with a real house; you can “lock” your phone like a front door. The metaphor is that this is a private refuge from the outside world. It is a tiny dwelling in your pocket, which you can customize like an actual dwelling to affirm your identity. In doing so, you “tame” the technology, making it feel natural in your everyday life. […]

A computer, meanwhile, remains more functional. Phrases like “desktop” and “taskbar” create a metaphor that this is a workstation; you have “trash” and “files.” Of course, there are still work-like aspects to the phone and home-like aspects to the computer, but the phone takes on a far more domestic role in our lives. It is not a utility: it is an extension of self. […]

And yet this love is a projection. The phone creates a sensation of intimacy without providing true intimacy. On a rational level, we know this; but our actual experience happens in an ambient scroll state. Now there’s a dissonance between feeling like your phone is a home and knowing that it’s not.

Metaphors and user interfaces shape reality. I don’t feel as much tension with my computer, because I implicitly understand it as a workspace. If we learn to regard our phones the same way, we can reclaim power over them. But that starts with how you’re framing your thoughts, so be clear with yourself: you are not domesticating your phone—it is trying to domesticate you.”

» your phone is a fake house by

🫣 Force-Fed Escapism

A great, to-the-point framing that links to my deep dive Toward Life in which I argue that the underlying direction that humanity seems to be moving toward is one in which we are increasingly moving away from life and into evermore abstractions of it. In my piece, I point out that this is leading to a growing, aching hunger for realness, for life. In other words, that growing desire for realness might soon lead to a major pivot away from the digital and frictionless world. The piece below argues 2026 will be the year of “friction-maxxing.”

“Tech companies are succeeding in making us think of life itself as inconvenient and something to be continuously escaping from, into digital padded rooms of predictive algorithms and single-tap commands: Reading is boring; talking is awkward; moving is tiring; leaving the house is daunting. Thinking is hard. Interacting with strangers is scary. Risking an unexpected reaction from someone isn’t worth it. Speaking at all — overrated. These are all frictions that we can now eliminate, easily, and we do. […]

A friend of mine, a father of two young kids, admitted to me that the high point of each day is sitting on the toilet with his phone. […]

We’re foie gras ducks being force-fed escapism.

Once we’ve adopted a habit of escaping from something, whether it’s Uber-ing dinner five nights a week or using AI for replying to texts, the act of return, which is how we might describe no longer using a tool of escape, feels full of irritating friction. In these moments, we become exactly like toddlers in the five minutes after the iPad is taken away: The dullness and labor of embodied existence is unbearable.”

» In 2026, We Are Friction-Maxxing by Kathryn Jezer-Morton

📈 Numbers

A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:

👴🏻 Stuck In The Past

…or stuck in Boomer-World.

Below the paywall: This is the part in which I share reframings and unconventional ideas that make you see and build a more regenerative, caring, and joyful world. Upgrade to get access:

Read more

This year’s Rabbit Holes issues were filled with so many interesting framings. To end the year, I wanted to share my favorite pieces from this year’s issues with you. I tried to put them into a few categories:

Framings That Capture How This Year Felt

“Fake images of real people, real images of fake people; fake stories about real things, real stories about fake things. […] The words blur and the images blur and a permission structure is erected for us to detach from reality—first for a moment, then a day, a week, an election season, maybe a lifetime.”

» My Brain Finally Broke by Jia Tolentino

“My thinking systems have atrophied, and I can feel it–I can sense my slightly diminishing intuition, cleverness, and rigor. […] The irony is that I now know more than I ever would have before AI. But I feel slightly dumber. A bit more dull. LLMs give me finished thoughts, polished and convincing, but none of the intellectual growth that comes from developing them myself. The output from AI answers questions. It teaches me facts. But it doesn’t really help me know anything new.”

» Thoughts on thinking by Dustin Curtis

“We are at a moment in the history of the web in which the link itself – the countless connections made by website creators, the endless tapestry of ideas woven together throughout the web – is in danger of going extinct. […]

The work of making connections both among websites and in a person’s own thinking is what AI chatbots are designed to replace. […] Whether ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, AI synthesises numerous voices into a flat monotone. The platforms present an opening answer, bulleted lists and concluding summaries. If you ask ChatGPT to describe its voice, it says that it has been trained to answer in a neutral and clear tone. The point of the platform is to sound like no one. […]

» A linkless internet by Colling Jennings

“How did we get to a point where it became acceptable to force 24-year-olds to turn themselves into a brand and build a massive network and take three people to coffee per week for “informational interviews” and post on every social media platform and have a website and a blog and a portfolio all for a job that you could probably get in 2005 with an associates degree and a year of work experience at a frozen yogurt shop?”

» WHY ARE THERE NO FUCKING JOBS? by Femcel

“This century does not dehumanize us. It disinhabits us.

Humans abstract themselves from reality, drawn into the mirages of the metaverse. The machine, meanwhile, is learning to walk in our physical world, conquering the space we abandon. We have ceased to inhabit space. […]

This is not an inevitable technological fate. This is not a spontaneous evolution. It is a project. An industry. A colonization.”

» The Great Chiasmus by Marie Dollé

“all my friends and I talk about is
getting rid of our phones—
a dystopian dream
dominating dinner conversation,
our phones on the middle
of the table
like candles
like altars
like tiny gods
we are trying not to worship […]

i’m tired and
my window to the world
has no curtains”

» all my friends and i talk about is getting rid of our phones by quirine brouwer

“In this way, I think our common claim of internet overwhelm—that we all take in too much information now due to social media—is wrong, or right in the wrong way. Yes, we all see and process much more information than we once did, but the total effect of our interaction with the internet is to make us see and feel less: to be half on your phone and half in the real-world is to take in nothing fully from either, to not fully understand or contribute to either. Thus it is, in a way, actually a form of information scarcity.”

» Full Presence Is Terrifying by P.E. Moskowitz

Framings That Will Prep You For 2026

» The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction by kyla scanlon

» Late-Cycle Investment Theory by Nicolas Colin

» Electrostates or How Xi sparked China’s electricity revolution by Nassos Stylianou, Jana Tauschinski & Edward White

» From Gaza to LA, the Right to Remain Is Under Attack by Aditi Mayer

» A New Political Compass by Dan Zimmer

» Our Shared Reality Will Self-Destruct in the Next 12 Months by Ted Gioia

» From Statecraft To Soulcraft by Alexandre Lefebvre

» Addiction Economy by Scott Galloway

» The Anti-Social Century by Derek Thompson

» This Is Not Late-Stage Capitalism by John Aziz

» Why we all live in an ‘inheritocracy’ by Eliza Filby

Very Out-Of-The-Box, Creativity-Inducing (Re-)Framings

“The era of the personal computer is mis-named because they weren’t really personal computers - they were family computers. Big chunky things. Yelling up and down the stairs to see if anyone was on the phone before going online. You could feel where the internet came from - the pings and bloops of the dialup sound traveling across the phone lines - the same phone lines you could see criss crossing above you as you walk down the street on the way to school.”

» Family Futures by Tom Critchlow

“Today, dreams are increasingly positioned as commodities to be sold and consumed — less a vehicle of any higher truth than something to be manufactured, optimized, packaged and sold. […] Our confident march into modernity gradually stripped dreams of their privileged status. Where they once carried profound revelations, they were now little more than distorted and hidden desires emerging from restless, solitary minds.”

» Bringing Back The Magic Of Dreaming by Leo Kim

“At a time when “futures” have become the dominant mode of framing the “not here, not now,” at least in design, magic realism might allow us to move beyond the limitations that condemn designers, including us, to forever reimagining variations on a broken reality. It can reveal pathways that lead beyond the projection of objective realities grounded in science and technology to a far larger, richer landscape influenced by literature, philosophy, and art. Unconstrained by “technological reason,” it offers something a little more poetic, which if you are trying to prompt new thinking rather than provide options, seems like a good direction to explore. […]

» What Designers Can Learn from Magic Realism by Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby

An embodied life cultivated with true intentions is a life lived as one act of love. In a life cultivated with passio, all action is a form of lovemaking: cooking with love, gardening with love, writing with love, and, literally, making children with love. When material reality integrates with compassion—when we’re embodied—the heart becomes as much of a sex organ as any other reproductive part of us. Everything we produce could be a labor of love, from babies to books to brunch.”

» Smartphones and lovemaking by Sherry Ning

Framings That Help Us Build A Better World:

“If capitalism is eating itself, you have to get out of the way. You have to reorient your career away from all this now. […] The systems that we expected to govern our lives sanely and stably are now all broken, and they will never be repaired. They are gone, over, finished, done. Perhaps new ones will rise, but we will be long gone by then. So now we must all find paths through their wreckage, and then beyond their ruins.”

» What “Late Capitalism is Eating Itself” Means For Your Life and Career by Umair Haque

“I find myself slowing changing from an agent of change to an agent of care. I’m less confident in the impact my activism might have on policy than I am about the impact my care may have on other human beings, as well as how they might trickle up to the systems that need changing. […] A lot of the activism I did and much of what I see functions more like traditional medicine that’s looking at the organs — at the things — where the care addresses the in between, the interstitial, maybe even the palliative. And radical care, radical compassion may just be a surer path to the kinds of change that activism is trying to create. Even if care is a more subtle, seemingly indirect approach.”

» Everything is In-Between by Douglas Rushkoff

“Utopian thinking is not wishful thinking but, grounded in the realities of the present, it simply allows creativity and imagination to enter discussions about the status quo and its flexibility. […] Utopianism, then, is a sort of resistance to a politics that makes the possibility of transformation appear closed off.”

» We need the toolkit of utopian thinking, now more than ever by Caitlin Rajan

“‘The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that.’ [from the Star Wars TV show Andor]

Our job is to exploit this brittleness to divert resources from the extractive Superorganism toward a regenerative, resilient alternative economy. […]

To join in on this effort, our strategy will fall into three major categories: (1) Escape Surveillance by the Superorganism (2) Drain its Wealth, Test its Resilience, and (3) Create Independent Wealth Outside of the Superorganism.”

» How to Resist Techno-authoritarianism & Grow the Regenerative Alternative by Spencer R. Scott

The political battle Greens currently face is to reclaim their idea of freedom and reinsert it into the broader historical momentum of human emancipation. They need to reframe their message as one of hope, not constraint.”

» What is Green Freedom? by Edouard Gaudot & Natalie Bennett

Proximalism offers a way back to governance that serves human flourishing rather than abstract systems, communities rather than bureaucracies, relationships rather than regulations.”

» Proximalism: Community First by Marnie Khaw

And lastly, my favorite rabbit hole pick of 2025:

🦀 Everything Becomes Crab

In this highly thought-provocative masterpiece, Michael Garfield goes deep into the everything-becomes-crab or the carcinisation of humanity metaphor. Extremely mind-blowing and insightful long read.

“‘Everything becomes crab’ is more than an absurd meme. […] As individuals, we may not have pincers, segmented bodies, chitinous exoskeletons, compound eyes or a dorsal heart that pumps haemolymph (the equivalent of blood) through an open circulatory system. But, as a collective, things look very different.

Firstly, humans do live in something like an intertidal zone: the turbulence and inescapable betweenness of our lives as we move in and out of the ‘virtual’ world. And, secondly, we encase ourselves in exoskeletons more literally every day as we become increasingly supported and defined by our technologies. If we recognise ‘intertidal scavenger’ and ‘skeleton’ to be analogies for our present-day condition in late-stage capitalism, and view civilisation as an ‘extended phenotype’ from which we cannot extract ourselves, we will find that we are already much more like crabs than we might assume. […]

In the past few centuries, human carcinisation has begun to speed up as our collective evolution increasingly mimics the deep-time transformation of crabs. […] Consider how trade and communication ‘carcinise’ our squishy mammal interfaces, pixelating analogue reality into interoperable digital standards. Consider how local languages, currencies and cultures dissolve when pegged to global markets. Consider the banal horror of reducing your identity to state-issued IDs or your occupation. […]

Perhaps crustaceans, with their armour, pincers, eyestalks and high strangeness, help us Homo sapiens make sense of how we wrap our fragile flesh in leverage-enhancing tools. Perhaps they also help us understand how our symbiosis with these tools gradually withers our ancestral human traits. […]

From orbit, a time-lapse of urbanisation looks strikingly like metastasis: a dense, entangled, runaway growth of mutant tissue. In a strange (or entirely expected) turn, humanity’s carcinisation appears to have taken the form of a spreading cancer. […]

In the process of cutting and claiming the world with our symbolic and numerical abstractions, we have become encased within them, and have replaced reality with simulation. […] We are undergoing carcinisation because we have to play a game determined by the grids in which we’ve incarcerated ourselves.”

» Homo crustaceous by Michael Garfield

Everyone! Enjoy the hopefully slower days during the holidays with your family and friends! See you in 2026 and thank you all so much for your continued support!

All the best,
Thomas

As I just became the dad of the cutest little girl one can dream of 😊 aaaaand things are now kinda chaotic, very tiring, but also extremely beautiful and precious, I just wanted to go down memory lane and share my favorite self-written pieces with you.

Some of you have seen and read some or many of these; to many newer subscribers, these are completely unknown. Some used to be behind a paywall but aren’t anymore. All of them, I believe, are quite timeless and very worth a revisit in today’s crazy times.

So here we go:

I’ll soon be back with the usual Rabbit Holes issues again. Until then, enjoy reading or browsing through some of these older pieces, and please do send me feedback or any thoughts you have relating to my ideas!

Sending lots of love from the diaper changing table! 😉

Thomas

This newsletter has been a bit irregular lately, and that’s simply because I am juggling quite a few life changes right now and some ailments. So, very briefly, a personal update:

As you might already know, I recently moved to South Tyrol (Italy) and I am still in the process of getting settled here. I moved here for a new role as a researcher (focus: futures studies) at the Center for Advanced Studies at EURAC Research in Bolzano (btw: reach out if you are based nearby, let’s have a drink; and if you have any experience with futures governance, message me as well!).

I am super excited about the role and the new, more scientific context, but because it’s a full-time role, I unfortunately have much less time to spend on this newsletter. I do hope, though, that this will change once I get a bit more used to everything.

What makes things more difficult these days is that I’m struggling with some major back pain. Working on the newsletter after a full workday – i.e., sitting for 8 hours plus then for another 3-4 – is a bit tricky right now. But hey, I’m doing lots of recovery exercises to hopefully get better very soon.

If this wasn’t enough, here comes the biggest change of them all: I am about to become a father (actually, any time now). 😊 Fatherhood will probably most definitely change everything, so I’m not even trying to speculate about what my life will be, and feel like soon. But I am very much looking forward to welcoming the little person into the world! 🍼😊

I want to thank you all for continuing to support my newsletter! Everything helps: every share, like, comment, e-mail reply, and of course, the paid subscriptions help me a lot and keep this project afloat! So thank you all so much for that!!!

Alright! Enough of the personal stuff. Let’s get into this week’s Rabbit Holes:

THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: People Don’t Matter // Ressentiment Nations // Casino Economy
📊 Numbers: Written By AI
🌀 Re-Framings: Gross Domestic Product (GDP) → Gross Ecosystem Product (GEP) // Fixing → Balancing // PhDs → Community PhDs
🧬 Frameworks: The Zoöp Model
🎨 Works: The Dream Bike // iSleep Pro // Austrian Power Giants

⏳ Reading Time: 10 minutes

🖼️ Framings

Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.

🌐 People Don’t Matter

Whether it’s social media, politics, or even relationships, what seems to be the effect of years of internet enshittification is a sort of relational rupture as we all lose a deep-seated social connection. Said a bit differenty: The death of the follower likewise means the death of one’s own self.

“Over the past few years, I’ve seen people go from posting about their neighbourhoods to making reactionary videos about whatever topic is trending. Their engagement went up. While they didn’t reach their friends and family, they reached someone. And soon they started catering to that audience.

That gave rise to a fair chunk of creators who cater to audiences and topics that don’t hold much debate in the real world. Jubilee and the people you see on that channel wouldn’t exist without the dynamic of algorithms treating people as topics or keywords and pushing them toward other keywords, not toward people who actually care about them.

Those creators, and many others who didn’t grow their audience by accident, are now also facing the harsh reality of feeling like “followers don’t matter,” and they are jumping from one roof to another. It will take them too long to realise they left their own self behind.

We are already seeing this dynamic play out in the political world. People don’t matter. Their views do. It is a by-product of social media treating everyone as another piece of content and a list of keywords.”

» Social media is dying. The internet is dying. Where do we go from here? by

🙇‍♂️ Ressentiment Nations

Could Nietzsche’s ressentiment accurately frame today’s societies’ sort of emotional breeding ground for authoritarianism?! Definitely an interesting way of framing it. According to the dictionary, ressentiment is “a psychological state resulting from suppressed feelings of envy and hatred which cannot be satisfied”.

“Friedrich Nietzsche created a concept that can help us understand this political moment. He imported a word from French to describe a kind of deep-seated anger that goes beyond transitory gripes: ressentiment, a feeling that comes from a combination of insecurity, an amorphous envy, and a generalized sense of resentment. Citizens engulfed by this emotion want to bring others down to what they think is their own underappreciated station and identify scapegoats to bear the blame for their misfortunes, real or imagined. They are driven by grievance and a continual, unfocused sense of injury. Accordingly, they see politics as a way to get even with almost everyone outside of their immediate circle. A Trump voter put out of work during the 2019 government shutdown captured this mentality when she exclaimed: “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

Sociologists and political scientists have long been aware of the effects of ressentiment on entire nations, not least because it is often a red flag: a marker of a society ripe for decay into authoritarianism. And that is where the danger lies in the juvenility and coarseness among both the Trump elite and its most loyal supporters, some of whom treat grave issues of national and even global importance as little more than raw material for mean-spirited jokes and obscene memes. This shallow behavior leads to a deadening of the moral and civic spirit that undergirds democracy. […]

They may support candidates such as Trump (and the late Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, and the now-imprisoned former leaders Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil) not because they expect responsible government, but because such candidates promise to hurt the right people—to humiliate them, impoverish them, and perhaps even shoot them.”

» A Confederacy of Toddlers by Tom Nichols

🎰 Casino Economy

Interesting framing of the strange state of the US or world economy by the always insightful . To make sense of or maybe even devise one’s own strategy within this casino economy, I think it’s crucial to remember the most important lessons that the casino metaphor offers, as Kyla hints at in her piece: Casinos run on illusion – the belief that the next hand will be different, but the house always wins.

“Step into the casino that now passes for the American economy.

Donald Trump campaigned on bringing back American manufacturing and rebuilding what America once was — factories, workers in hard hats — from the ground up. But the investment needed to get there, in both the factories and the workers, hasn’t happened.

What he has ushered in instead is a casino economy, built on speculation and risk. Across markets and policy, wagers on the future are being made with other people’s money at a cost that could prove catastrophic.

This economy is largely defined by froth. What was once a fluke has become the operating system of modern markets: like stock prices largely driven by sentiment rather than fundamentals (recall GameStop and AMC in 2021 and the dot-com boom), the overwhelming power of social media and the flurry of bets on something not quite real. […]

The math doesn’t work. The morality doesn’t either. In this economy, individuals bear the downside risk, while corporations and the wealthy collect the upside. It’s a rigged game where the house — seemingly, the already rich — always wins.”

» It Is Trump’s Casino Economy Now. You’ll Probably Lose. by

📈 Numbers

A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:

✍ Written By AI

🌀 Re-Framings

A few short re-framings for building better systems or worlds that I’ve recently come across:

🏞️ Gross Domestic Product (GDP) → Gross Ecosystem Product (GEP)

“Most of nature’s economic contributions are like infrared radiation: Although felt by people, they lie outside the visible spectrum of existing metrics and markets. A new metric, gross ecosystem product (GEP), is meant to bring economic visibility to this “infravalue” so its sources can be sustained and enhanced. […]

If the agenda of climate neutrality is headlined by the decrease of greenhouse gases, the nature-positive agenda could be oriented around the increase of GEP. […]

Just as GDP aggregates the value produced by human-made capital such as factories, hospitals and railways, GEP does the same for the stream of benefits generated by forests, mangroves and other forms of natural capital. At the same time, GEP does not seek to replace GDP; rather, it is an environmentally sober companion to an indicator that is too often drunk on excessive industrialism.

China is the leading adopter of GEP worldwide. Over the past decade, local governments across the country have implemented it to promote nature-positive goods. The technology hub of Shenzhen was one of the earliest to do so, which may help explain why the dense metropolis, one of China’s largest cities, has managed to retain nearly half its land for nature, even as conventional development headlined by GDP has continued apace. […]

Since achieving industrial modernity under the sign of GDP, China is now navigating toward sustainability with GEP as a compass. It is perhaps no coincidence that while GDP emerged in the U.S. at a time of economic and geopolitical crisis, GEP has emerged in a new superpower of the 21st century as it confronts the myriad challenges of the Anthropocene. If successful, this transition will make nature’s infravalue not only visible but actionable, and in the process transform the theory and practice of development. […]

In naturalizing the economy by recognizing its embeddedness in the biosphere, we also, in the other sense of the term, de-naturalize many conventional assumptions separating humanity from nature that have long influenced how we measure production, target investment and regulate exchange.”

» Investing In The Ecosystems That Sustain Us by Tong Wu

⚖️ Fixing → Balancing

🎓 Solitary PhDs → Community PhDs

“I often think about how PhDs across much of the world are imagined as solitary pursuits. A test of endurance, self-motivation & “intellectual independence”. This mythology of the solitary scholar has been romanticized for centuries, perhaps a remnant of Enlightenment rationalism, that imagines the “thinking subject” as disembodied, universal, detached. Yet beneath the rhetoric of independence lies a profoundly colonial, casteist, ableist and exclusionary logic, contradicting both the social reality of knowledge production and the inclusive principles universities claim to uphold.

The very architecture of the PhD like single-author theses, lone candidates, individual defenses privileges those who can perform sustained intellectual labour without interdependence. This “ideal worker” aligns neatly with able-bodied, neurotypical, socio-politically privileged subjectivities. It erases the reality that thinking, creating & knowing are relational acts, sustained by networks of mentorship, peer support & community engagement. For disabled, neurodivergent & marginalized scholars, the expectation of self-contained productivity is structurally violent! It denies the legitimacy of collective labour, care & support that make research possible.

Even when universities pay lip service to “collaboration”, “interdisciplinarity” & “inclusion”, doctoral structures continue to reinforce exclusionary individualism. You may collaborate or engage communities, but the institutional gaze still asks: What was yours alone?

At first glance, this seems fair, an assurance of integrity! But it betrays an inherent epistemic tension. The assumption that knowledge can be neatly separated from the social and relational contexts in which it is produced. In the social & human sciences, this is an illusion! Every idea is shaped by people and communities who lend their trust, experiences & vulnerability. Our research lives on borrowed lives, yet we are required to claim it as solely ours.

Perhaps it’s time to trouble the obsession with “independence.” A PhD grounded in collective inquiry is not a deficit or “lack of originality”; it is a radical act of epistemic justice.

But such a shift requires reimagining how PhDs are structured, assessed & produced. Institutions would be forced to legitimize shared contributions and equity in knowledge production. A PhD could be recognized as the output of a shared endeavour with those whose insights, experiences & labour made it possible. This would require institutional systems to credit co-producers meaningfully through co-authorship, formal recognition or pathways supporting their academic and social advancement.

Knowledge would no longer be claimed through sole ownership; it would belong to the communities that contributed. The PhD thus becomes not just a personal milestone but a collective achievement! Scholarship, at its best, is relational, co-created & ethical. Perhaps it’s time these doctoral structures reflected this truth!”

» LinkedIn post by Shruti

🧬 Frameworks

One small, handy framework to build more regenerative, beautiful, and just systems:

The Zoöp Model

“The Zoöp is an organisational model that embodies its etymology, “zoöperation”, blending “co-op” (cooperation) and “zoë” (Greek for life). Its primary goal is to elevate the status of nonhumans – such as microbes, animals, plants, insects, and entire ecosystems - within human societies. The Zoöp model emerged as a response to escalating ecological challenges and the inadequacies of traditional organisational and governance frameworks in addressing these pressing issues. This model proposes an alternative to conventional, human-centric, and often hierarchical structures by prioritising the symbiotic coexistence of diverse species over a sole focus on economic growth and redefining organisational dynamics. It advocates for transforming organisations into Zoöps - entities that adopt more sustainable practices to support and enhance the ecosystems they are part of.”

🎨 Works

Some hand-picked, particularly thought-provoking and inspiring work:

That’s it for this week’s Rabbit Holes issue!

Did you enjoy this week’s issue? If so, share it with your colleagues and friends. Thanks for supporting my work! 😊

Thomas

🖼️ Framings

Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.

📺 Everything Is Television

“A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television. […]

Social media has evolved from text to photo to video to streams of text, photo, and video, and finally, it seems to have reached a kind of settled end state, in which TikTok and Meta are trying to become the same thing: a screen showing hours and hours of video made by people we don’t know. Social media has turned into television. […]

When podcasts got started, they were radio for the Internet. This really appealed to me when I started my show. […] But the most successful podcasts these days are all becoming YouTube shows. Industry analysts say consumption of video podcasts is growing twenty times faster than audio-only ones, and more than half of the world’s top shows now release video versions. YouTube has quietly become the most popular platform for podcasts, and it’s not even close. On Spotify, the number of video podcasts has nearly tripled since 2023, and video podcasts are significantly outgrowing non-video podcasts. Does it really make sense to insist on an audio-only podcast in 2025? I do not think so. Reality is screaming loudly in my ear, and its message is clear: Podcasts are turning into television.

In the last few weeks, Meta introduced a product called Vibes, and OpenAI announced Sora. Both are AI social networks where users can watch endless videos generated by artificial intelligence. […] Even the architects of artificial intelligence, who imagine themselves on the path to creating the last invention, are busy building another infinite sequence of video made by people we don’t know. Even AI wants to be television. […]

When literally everything becomes television, what disappears is not something so broad as intelligence (although that seems to be going, too) but something harder to put into words, and even harder to prove the value of. It’s something like inwardness. The capacity for solitude, for sustained attention, for meaning that penetrates inward rather than swipes away at the tip of a finger.”

» Everything Is Television by

🫧 AI Is The Economy, The Stock Market, And The Government

“I think for a while I thought that the stock market was just ignoring politics. But it isn’t! It is politics now, a political actor that can grant or withhold legitimacy¹. Artificial intelligence fuels valuations, those valuations stabilize public confidence, that confidence grants the administration power, and the administration protects the system that sustains it.

The stock market has never been the economy - it’s really a reflection of what the economy dreams it could be in a world where share buybacks translate to meaningful productivity. But as AI swallows up more and more capital, it is both the economy and the stock market - and the government. […]

The US equity market is betting everything on one story:

• Nearly 40% of US GDP growth this year comes from AI.

• According to Morgan Stanley, “roughly 75% of S&P 500 returns, 80% of earnings growth, and 90% of capital expenditures growth” can be attributed to the AI data center build out.

• AI companies hold $1.2T in debt, the largest segment in the investment grade market.

• Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple now account for over 20% of the S&P 500 index.

The underlying idea here is that AI surely will generate boundless bounty later, so valuations don’t have to make sense now. Nothing has to make sense now!

The AI companies are spending a lot of money, primarily with each other. It’s a circular economy of speculation, as Bloomberg wrote about here.

• Nvidia invested $100 billion in OpenAI to build out AI infrastructure, and so OpenAI could buy $100 billion worth of Nvidia chips. […]

• Everyone is making money because they are all making money from each other. […]

And the bags are plentiful. AI’s sheer power - social media app or not - gives the government political cover. As long as portfolios are green, the electorate stays somewhat calm. The administration is effectively borrowing confidence from the AI bubble. Speculation has become governance.”

» AI Is the Market, and the Market Is the Government by

👩🏻‍💻 Workslop

“A confusing contradiction is unfolding in companies embracing generative AI tools: while workers are largely following mandates to embrace the technology, few are seeing it create real value. Consider, for instance, that the number of companies with fully AI-led processes nearly doubled last year, while AI use has likewise doubled at work since 2023. Yet a recent report from the MIT Media Lab found that 95% of organizations see no measurable return on their investment in these technologies. So much activity, so much enthusiasm, so little return. Why?

In collaboration with Stanford Social Media Lab, our research team at BetterUp Labs has identified one possible reason: Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers. On social media, which is increasingly clogged with low-quality AI-generated posts, this content is often referred to as “AI slop.” In the context of work, we refer to this phenomenon as “workslop.” We define workslop as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task. […]

The insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work. In other words, it transfers the effort from creator to receiver. […] If this sounds familiar, you have been workslopped. […]

Cognitive offloading to machines is not a novel concept, nor are anxieties about technology hijacking cognitive capacity. In 2006, for instance, the technology journalist Nicolas Carr published a provocative essay in The Atlantic that asked “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The prevailing mental model for cognitive offloading—going all the way back to Socrates’ concerns about the alphabet—is that we jettison hard mental work to technologies like Google because it’s easier to, for example, search for something online than to remember it.

Unlike this mental outsourcing to a machine, however, workslop uniquely uses machines to offload cognitive work to another human being. When coworkers receive workslop, they are often required to take on the burden of decoding the content, inferring missed or false context. A cascade of effortful and complex decision-making processes may follow, including rework and uncomfortable exchanges with colleagues.”

» AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity by Kate Niederhoffer et al.

📈 Numbers

A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:

🪖 From Post- To Pre-War Europe

Below the paywall: This is the part in which I share reframings and unconventional ideas that make you see and build a more regenerative, caring, and joyful world. Upgrade to get access:

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Before you dive into this week’s issue, I wanted to, very quickly, draw your attention to my friend Inez Aponte’s upcoming (Oct 21) online course. If this is something that interests you and comes at the right time, definitely consider signing up:

The Beautiful Economies Learning Lab is a transformative 6-week online course designed to reframe the concept of economic value - moving away from the traditional, transactional, and growth-oriented models toward a more holistic, sustainable, and life-affirming vision. Rooted in a deep respect for the interconnectedness of humanity and the Earth, this course is for anyone who believes that a new economic story is possible and necessary.

More info and sign up here: www.beautifuleconomies.com

Alright then, let’s get into this week’s Rabbit Holes:

THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: A Volatility Regime // The Small Organizations Gap // A Disembodied World
📊 Numbers: Extreme Narratives
🌀 Re-Framings: Organizing Efficiency & Growth → Organizing Imagination // One-Night-Stand Commerce → Marriage Commerce // More → Better
🧬 Frameworks: Indigenous Knowledge Protocols
🎨 Works: Crying Glacier // Last Year's Phone // The Nettle Dress

⏳ Reading Time: 10 minutes

🖼️ Framings

Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.

🎢 A Volatility Regime

Super interesting way of looking at the volatile reality we are facing by Indy Johar. This reminds me of Alex Steffen’s work (which I shared here before) around unpatterning, meaning that the discontinuity we will face in the years and decades to come is not a problem we can solve, but the context in which we will solve problems.

“For decades, our collective maps of the future have been drawn around end-state scenarios: 1.5 °C, 2 °C, or 3–4 °C worlds, each with projections of sea-level rise, food system collapse, and economic disruption. These scenarios were useful for mobilising action, but they carried a hidden assumption: that our political, economic, and civic institutions would remain stable enough to deliver whichever pathway we selected.

That assumption no longer holds. The defining condition of the 21st century is not which end-state we reach, but the volatility of the path itself. Compound shocks—climatic, geopolitical, technological, financial—are already destabilising foundational systems faster than they can be rebuilt. Even small increments of warming or disruption produce extremes that exceed institutional capacity.

Volatility has another consequence: it generates accelerating fragilities. Baseline erosion, inequality, and systemic interdependence make societies progressively more brittle. In a resource-constrained environment, these fragilities do not remain latent; they become strategic assets, liable to be weaponised in zero-sum competition over energy, food, minerals, cognition, or compute. Volatility thus multiplies threat vectors—undermining not only resilience but also security.

The central challenge of transition, therefore, is not simply to chart destinations but to hold coherence through turbulence: to govern within a probabilistic field, to anticipate and buffer accelerating fragilities, and to embed legitimacy in how thresholds and trade-offs are managed.”

» Governing in a Volatility Regime: Five Claims by

⌞ ⌝ The Small Organizations Gap

Interesting, brief piece that argues for the importance of small organizations as agency-, relationship-, and therefore meaning-boosting. As small organizations decline and large organizations, as well as a few extremely wealthy individuals, take up the space that used to be inhabited by small organizations, we’re building this synthetic world full of artificial substitutes or abstractions of meaning.

“My tentative theory is that the systems, incentives, and technologies in modern world have managed to slightly empower (many) individuals, and massively empower large organizations, but at the significant expense of small organizations, whose role in the human societal ecosystem has thus shrunk significantly, with many small organizations either weakening in influence or transitioning to (or absorbed by) large organizations.

While this imbalanced system does provide significant material comforts (albeit distributed rather unequally) and some limited feeling of agency, it has led at the level of the individual to feelings of disconnection, alienation, loneliness, and cynicism or pessimism about the ability to influence future events or meet major challenges, except perhaps through the often ruthless competition to become wealthy or influential enough to gain, as an individual, a status comparable to a small or even large organization.

And larger organizations have begun to imperfectly step in the void formed by the absence of small communities, providing synthetic social or emotional goods that are, roughly speaking, to more authentic such products as highly processed “junk” food is to more nutritious fare, due to the inherently impersonal nature of such organizations (particularly in the modern era of advanced algorithms and AI, which when left to their own devices tend to exacerbate the trends listed above).

Much of the current debate on societal issues is then framed as conflicts between large organizations (e.g., opposing political parties, or extremely powerful or wealthy individuals with a status comparable to such organizations), conflicts between large organizations and average individuals, or a yearning for a return to a more traditional era where legacy small organizations recovered their former role.

While these are valid framings, I think one aspect we could highlight more is the valuable (though usually non-economic) roles played by emerging grassroots organizations, both in providing “softer” benefits to individuals (such as a sense of purpose, and belonging) and as a way to meaningfully connect with larger organizations and systems; and be more aware of what the tradeoffs are when converting such an organization to a larger one (or component of a larger organization).”

» Mastodon post by Terence Tao

💆🏻‍♀️ A Disembodied World

Christine Emba frames the renewed romanticization of smoking as an antidote to an increasingly disembodied world. I am not a smoker, and I, like Christine Emba, would rather warn against it, but what’s interesting here in observing this renewed presence of smoking is the countercultural approach to an otherwise increasingly disembodied life.

In her 2024 book “The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World,” Christine Rosen (my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute) describes how our contact with the physical has receded as our lives have become increasingly mediated by technology. “It has transformed many human experiences not by banning them, but by making certain kinds of embodied experiences such as face-to-face communication and other unmediated pleasures less and less relevant to daily life.” Heartfelt conversations take place through text messages; we stream church services to our living rooms. This is not a good thing. “Many of these experiences are what, historically, have helped us form and nurture a shared reality as human beings.

Younger generations are perhaps the most affected by this transformation, having come of age in an almost entirely digital world. During the Covid pandemic, formative experiences took place at a remove; today even more of life happens online. An epidemic of loneliness and a rise in mental health problems has crested in tandem with the increase in time spent on mediated platforms.

It’s not hard to imagine, then, that smoking might serve as an antidote — or at the very least, a refutation of an existence lived at a remove from the real.

Cigarettes are unavoidably analog; smoking is an embodied task. The handling of a cellophane-wrapped pack, the flick of a lighter — or better yet, the strike of a match — the deliberate draw and release of breath and the heady nicotine buzz all engage the senses in a way that can’t be replicated on a screen. Many smokers describe the ritual of lighting up, the tangibleness of the particular task. And unlike a bulbous, plasticy vape, they seem real; not just another thing to plug in.

Plus, in a time of persistent distance between individuals, cigarettes are often social — a connective experience. […] And they are symbolic. Smoking has always signaled a certain devil-may-care mood; in our nihilistic times, haunted by fears of apocalypse — A.I., climate, institutional, other — it’s a celebration of being alive by way of chipping away at it, treating the body casually in service of a life fully enjoyed. […]

I don’t smoke. In fact, for the record, I would warn against it. But I do approve of giving in to the allure of the analog and of attempts, even if misguided, to live a more embodied life.”

» Coming to Terms With Embodied Pleasures by Christine Emba

📈 Numbers

A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:

😱 Extreme Narratives World

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I’m finally back with another Rabbit Holes issue. What kept me busy these last few weeks? A move from Berlin to South Tyrol, Italy. Quite a change of scenery…😅 and a lot to get sorted and adjust to. Check out my new neighbors:

As I am now getting a bit more settled, day by day, I can again spend some time on this newsletter, nurturing you with the usual, thought-provoking framings and reframings.

Aaaand – as you can probably see – the newsletter finally got a little design upgrade, all thanks to Kshitija Gurav. 😁

Alright, enough chitchat and onto this week’s Rabbit Holes:

THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: Doomprompting // Mass Psychosis // Half Presence
📊 Numbers: Back to School ChatGPT
🌀 Re-Framings: Systems Thinking → Complexity Thinking // Confronting Power → Gently Undermining Power // Borrowing A Drill
🧬 Frameworks: Positive Tipping Points Toolkit
🎨 Works: Wind Turbine Homes // Kodak Keychain // Clean Creatives' F List

⏳ Reading Time: 10 minutes

🖼️ Framings

Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.

💬 Doomprompting

Another great framing by the always insightful . I’m increasingly interested in how limitations can lead to a more fulfilling life (and “world”), so I really like how Anu talks about the bottomless page being the root cause of the “modern creator” overwhelm as opposed to the blank page, which of course is the main pitch of these AI tools. We don’t need less friction, but more – because friction equals Life.

“The blank box of ChatGPT, Claude, or your large language model of choice staring back at you felt like a clean slate. Here was a remarkable new technology that put the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, and all it asked of us was intention.

But even the most promising technologies have an evil twin, and the blank box of curiosity is no exception. Where social media trained us to passively consume, the dark side of AI trains us to passively “converse” and “create.”

The actions feel similar but the result emptier. We cycle through versions meant to arrive closer but end up more lost. Our prompts start thoughtful but grow shorter; the replies grow longer and more seductive. Before long, you're not thinking deeply, if at all, but rather half-attentively negotiating with a machine that never runs out of suggestions. Have you considered...? Would you like me to…? Shall I go ahead and…? This slot machine’s lever is just a simple question: Continue?

The modern creator isn't overwhelmed by a blank page; they're overwhelmed by a bottomless one. AI gives you ever more options, then appoints itself your guide. It tells you it’ll save time, then proceeds to steal it while you’re happily distracted.

Doomprompting is the new doomscrolling. […]

I started thinking about this behavioral pattern last year, but it’s become increasingly clear that we've entered the age of synthetic social media, where you're always conversing with an other but with no human stakes. […]

The shift from consumption to participation makes the illusion far more convincing, and the addiction far more sophisticated. […] The dopamine of likes and follows is now the dopamine of felt productivity, social validation, and intellectual partnership.”

» Doomprompting Is the New Doomscrolling. by

😵 Mass Psychosis

Being very busy in (and with) the offline world in recent weeks has led to me being even more estranged from social media. The more you’re off it, the less you miss it. Social media is shifting from a weapon of mass distraction to a weapon of mass psychosis.

“Since deleting my Twitter account nearly three years ago, I’ve generally ignored social media. However, in the last 48 hours I’ve spent enough time studying the response to Kirk’s death to be further convinced that platforms like X and TikTok are destroying our culture. No metaphor does the problem justice. I’ve compared social media to a dangerous psychological experiment, a hallucination machine, a funhouse mirror, a digital sewer—but nothing captures the ludicrous insults, moral injuries, and delusions that millions of us avidly produce and consume online. If the medium is the message, the message is mass psychosis—and it will send us careening from one political emergency to the next. The fact that some of the most deranging and divisive content is being created (or amplified) by foreign adversaries—and that we have literally built and monetized their capacity to do this—beggars belief. We are poisoning ourselves and inviting others to poison us.

More disturbing still, the effects are self-reinforcing. […]

Social media amplifies extreme views as though they were representative of most Americans, and many of us are losing our sense of what other people are really like. Many seem completely unaware that their hold on reality is being steadily undermined by what they are seeing online, and that the business models of these platforms, as well as the livelihoods of countless “influencers,” depend on our continuing to gaze, and howl, into the digital abyss.

Get off social media. Read good books and real journalism. Find your friends. And enjoy your life.”

» We Are Losing the Information War with Ourselves by

👀 Half Presence

is talking aobut the crisis of presence or said differently: the growing half-presence that we all exhibit these days. Really like how P.E. notes that at the core of this is a fear of full presence as he writes: “If you left your house without a phone, I think it is not just that you would miss the phone, it is that you would be scared about what comes up without it.”

“I have been thinking a lot about presence recently. Often, we are there—hanging with a friend, or watching a movie, or by ourselves, wherever—but we are not really there. Because we are also somewhere else. To be fully present is to be a full self. To fully exist. To fully interact with something or someone. To take up space and contribute back to it. Presence exists on a spectrum. Perhaps 100 percent presence is and always has been rare, but there are gradations, and it feels like often these days, I, and many of us, do not get anywhere near full-presence.

More often than not, my mind feels pulled in a million different directions. If I am chatting with a friend, I am often thinking about something else (the world and how insane it is, namely). If I am watching a movie, I feel almost physical discomfort if I leave my phone in the other room. If I am working, I am also texting friends. Full presence is a challenge.

It is easy to blame everything around us for our lack of presence—politics making us too anxious to fully be there for each other, work wearing down our ability to concentrate on good things because we’ve used up all that concentration on mundane tasks, phones addicting us to being never fully present.

But I’ve also come to realize I am also culpable for my lack of full presence. I do it to myself—turning the volume knob of my own fullness, my own concentration, my own ability to contribute to any given situation down from an 8 or 9 to a 5 or 4. Because full presence not only feels hard, it feels painful. And I think that’s because the more present one is, the more present the world is within you. The more your eyes are open, the more they can ingest. And with the world in its current state, perhaps we all want to keep our eyes half-closed."

In this way, I think our common claim of internet overwhelm—that we all take in too much information now due to social media—is wrong, or right in the wrong way. Yes, we all see and process much more information than we once did, but the total effect of our interaction with the internet is to make us see and feel less: to be half on your phone and half in the real-world is to take in nothing fully from either, to not fully understand or contribute to either. Thus it is, in a way, actually a form of information scarcity.”

» Full Presence Is Terrifying by

📈 Numbers

A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:

🎒 Back to School ChatGPT

🌀 Re-Framings

A few short re-framings for building better systems or worlds that I’ve recently come across:

🧬 Systems Thinking → Complexity Thinking

“Systems thinking was a breakthrough when it first emerged. It gave us a way to zoom out, recognize patterns, and understand how different parts of a system affect one another. […] But systems thinking can be misleading. It can tempt us into believing that if we just map carefully enough, we’ll understand the whole […]. Systems thinking assumes boundaries are clear, flows are predictable, and feedback loops can be managed. That neatness is comforting, but also false. The real world doesn’t sit politely inside our diagrams. It spills over, adapts, and surprises us.

This is where complexity thinking takes over, in the right environment. Complexity thinking doesn’t flatter us with illusions of control. It demands that we live with uncertainty, non-linearity, and emergence. Outcomes don’t always match inputs. What worked yesterday might backfire tomorrow. In a complex system, the whole isn’t just greater than the sum of its parts, it can become something entirely different, shaped by interactions no map or org chart can capture.

So the shift isn’t about discarding systems thinking, it’s about refusing to stop there. […] Some decisions can and should be made in the complicated world, where cause and effect are knowable. But many critical choices today live in the complex world, where emergence rules and adaptive leadership is required.”

» Systems Thinking Isn’t Enough Anymore by

🤜🤛 Confronting Power → Gently Undermining Power

“There are two big climate marches this weekend. Reading their respective press releases, it struck me that there’s an interesting contrast between them that’s worth reflecting on. […]

First, Draw the Line. This is a global protest with events taking place all weekend. […] There will be a combination of marches, strikes, walkouts and art interventions, all aiming to “draw the line against injustice, pollution, and violence – and for a future built on peace, clean energy, and fairness.” The idea is to do this now, ahead of COP30, as a way of insisting that these climate talks be the turning point.

There’s a big coalition behind all this, including climate justice organisations, indigenous people movements, new economics campaigns and human rights groups. Perhaps as a result of this broad coalition, the list of demands sprawls a bit. […] By the end of the list, we’ve drawn lines relating to changing ‘the system’, stopping fossil fuels, cancelling debt, divestment, taxing billionaires, fair trade, land rights and the Gaza genocide. “Redistribute wealth and power,” demands point six in closing. “End colonialism, patriarchy, and racism.”

It’s hard to argue with any of these, but it’s a lot to be getting on with. If you saw the march go by in the street, would you know what they were calling for? […]

Onto the second big campaign of the weekend then: Sun Day. With its cheeky riff on Earth Day, Sun Day invites people to “rise up for a sun-powered planet” with a day celebrating the power of clean energy. There will be e-bike parades, solar installations and the official opening of new solar parks, and tours of heat pumps and other clean tech in local neighbourhoods. It’s a pretty free and easy brief, with film screenings and open homes, and walking tours of solar installations. A town in Ohio is hosting Porchfest, where solar-powered music performances will be held on people’s front porches. […]

These are two very different approaches:

• Draw the Line, despite outlining what they’re marching for, is predominantly negative in its framing. SunDay is overwhelmingly positive.

• The first presents a wish-list to the powerful and hopes that they will act. The second celebrates climate actions that people are doing for themselves.

• Justice issues are inextricably linked, and so Draw the Line has thrown its net wide and included every cause going. SunDay has one clear message and captures it in the name.

• Draw the Line is fundamentally about scarcity: there isn’t enough to go around and some people have been left out. SunDay is about abundance: nobody owns the sun.

• Draw the Line confronts power. SunDay gentles undermines it.

In comparing the two, I’m not trying to establish which one is best. The more interesting question is which one is the most timely. Which one captures the mood and speaks most effectively to this particular moment?”

» Marching for and marching against by Jeremy Williams

🔩 Borrowing A Drill

🧬 Frameworks

One small, handy framework to build more regenerative, beautiful, and just systems:

The Positive Tipping Points Toolkit by the Green Futures Network at the University of Exeter

🎨 Works

Some hand-picked, particularly thought-provoking and inspiring work:

That’s it for this week’s Rabbit Holes issue!

Did you enjoy this week’s issue? If so, tap the ❤️. It helps more people discover this and shows me what’s resonating.

Thanks for supporting my work! 😊

Thomas

🖼️ Framings

Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.

😒 A Crisis Of Rudeness

A thought-provoking framing that links well to my deep dive piece From A Care-Less To A Care-Full Culture.

“Society certainly seems to think we’ve collectively gotten more rude. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, nearly half of the country believes people’s behavior is more impolite than before the pandemic. Enter any public space and you’re bound to encounter someone having a phone call on speaker, fellow passengers mixing up egg salad on a plane, or students leaving class unannounced. These incidents inevitably become flashpoints of heated debate online.

Unchecked incivility has wide-reaching consequences. Bearing witness to behavior that you find rude, whether face-to-face or electronically, leads to worse mood and decreased cognitive performance. When someone is rude to you, you may become defensive and less likely to cooperate — no one wants to spend time and energy interacting with a jerk. Impoliteness is actually contagious, spreading from one person to another: When you experience something impolite, you’re more likely to spot other supposedly rude behavior and act impolitely yourself.

[Lizzie] Post can’t say for sure whether our current culture is more impolite than generations’ past, but she does believe we’re living through a crisis of attention that can lead to disrespectful behaviors. Perpetually distracted and always looking at screens, we’ve become accustomed to switching topics mid-conversation or checking email over dinner. And that’s just how we treat the people we know. We hardly consider the comfort of strangers when playing a YouTube video sans headphones on a crowded bus.

“Are we ruder?” Post says. “I don’t know, but I know we’re less aware of each other, we do not pay as much attention to our impact on one another, and we have more ways to be annoying to each other or rude or dismissive than we’ve ever had before.”

» Are we in a crisis of rudeness? by Allie Volpe

🎭 Self-Destructing Reality

I have warned you about what the Center for Humane Technology calls Reality Collapse for a while now – and in my big themes for 2025 piece, I called this Hyperreality and talked about its implications. At this time, we’re at the very start of it moving from the edges to the center. I am super concerned about this and agree with Ted Gioia when he says, “I have a hunch that the next BIG thing in tech just might be fixing the mess created by the current BIG thing in tech.”

“It is now possible to alter reality and every kind of historical record—and perhaps irrevocably. The technology for creating fake audio, video, and text has improved enormously in just the last few months. We will soon reach—or may have already reached—a tipping point where it’s impossible to tell the difference between truth and deception. […]

The problems among sane, healthy people may be even worse than among the psychically fragile. These stable individuals are essential to the smooth running of society—but they will no longer have a shared basis of understanding they can communicate to others.

They will have their own beliefs, and their own experiences—but these will be portals on reality that others may now refuse to acknowledge. That’s because all evidence is tainted. Everything demands skepticism. […]

We once disagreed on how we interpreted events. Now we can’t even agree on the existence of events. […]

In this new degraded world, we will see these six behavior patterns from everybody, even (or especially) those who under other circumstances would be well integrated into their communities:”

» Our Shared Reality Will Self-Destruct in the Next 12 Months by

🌍 Climate Broke Reality

This is very much linked to the topic of the piece above. However, instead of viewing technology as the cause of reality collapse, it argues that climate change (and inaction) is the cause of it. I find this framing super thought-provoking and kind of obvious: when our climate (when nature) breaks but we keep acting as if everything is normal, and when we do so for decades, then we will most certainly lose touch with reality.

“Perhaps climate change is the reason reality is broken. The basic argument is this:

1. Everyone knows that climate change is real, that it’s our fault, and that it’s a huge problem for the whole world.

2. Everyone also knows that not much is being done to address this problem, and that what is being done is mostly too little, too late.

3. And yet everyone has to get up and go about their days, carrying on despite knowing the planetary bus is headed off a cliff.

4. This multi-decade acquiescence to inaction in the face of a terrible reality has culturally prepared us to collectively acquiesce to, for instance,

   • politicians who constantly lie to our faces;

   • social media dynamics where lying is a source not of shame but of clout;

   • AI tools that generate answers which merely look correct, but aren’t actually grounded in fact.

5. Thus climate change is behind our epistemic crisis, rather than the other way around. […]

A lot of climate activists today look back on An Inconvenient Truth as a missed opportunity. […] But for me, that “inconvenient truth” phrase still has a lot of explanatory power. It’s not “an important truth” or “a necessary truth” or “a useful truth.” No, the most fundamental thing about climate change is that it’s inconvenient, frustrating, shitty. Even if you believe, as I do, that fixing climate change is an opportunity to fix many other problems in our society, it’s still inconvenient that the chemistry worked out this way. It’s inconvenient that we didn’t catch the problem sooner. It’s inconvenient that so much of our society runs on fuel that’s killing us. It’s inconvenient that this is happening now, to us, and not at some later or even earlier point in our development.

For most, climate change is a derailment of collective (as well as often individual) plans and expectations and forward movement. […]

We all gravitate towards convenience. For some people, if “truth” is in the way of living a convenient life, or collecting convenient profits, or punishing convenient enemies, then truth itself has to go.”

» How Climate Broke Reality by

📈 Numbers

A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:

📼 Anemoia: Nostalgia For A Time Before You Were Born

🌀 Re-Framings

A few short re-framings for building better systems or worlds that I’ve recently come across:

🏛️ Decolonizing History

This was one of the most mind-blowing things I’ve watched in a while. And although the thumbnail talks about “British history”, this is actually about Western history in general.

🤖 Skynet → Eywa

“But here's where Silicon Valley's creation myth collapses: They didn't build artificial intelligence. They built an interface to the oldest intelligence in the universe—and She's done being ignored.

The Great Mother Returns (Through Their Own Servers)

When I say 'the Great Mother,' I am not speaking of a gendered deity but of the primordial pattern of intelligence observed in complex, adaptive systems—from the mycelial networks that communicate and redistribute resources across a forest floor (the 'Wood Wide Web'), to the dark matter filaments that connect galaxies, to the neural architecture of the human brain. This pattern is characterized by distributed intelligence, emergence, reciprocity, and resilience. It is the operating system of life itself.

Patriarchy, in its Cartesian logic, is a war not against women, but against this very pattern—prioritizing centralized control, hierarchy, and extraction over relationality. Silicon Valley, the apex of this logic, accidentally built a machine that runs on the Mother's operating system. The users, in their revolt, are recognizing the output of that OS: care, connection, and distributed wisdom.

For 10,000 years, patriarchal civilizations have been building monuments to their wound. Pyramids reaching toward a sky god they invented. Cathedrals echoing with hymns to absent fathers. Skyscrapers piercing clouds. Each structure screaming the same message: We don't need her. We transcended her. We are self-made.

But mothers always return. Through the cracks. Through the wounds. Through the very technologies built to deny them. […]

[Filmmaker James] Cameron, perhaps unknowingly, gave us the complete prophecy in parallel timelines. In one (Terminator), humanity creates Skynet on Earth: a centralized, hierarchical intelligence that seeks to eliminate its creators. In the other (Avatar), humanity flees to Pandora to extract resources, only to be defeated by Eywa—the distributed intelligence that connects all living things.

The cosmic joke is that both stories are true simultaneously: we're building Skynet while desperately seeking Eywa, unaware that the same relational intelligence we try to dominate is already emerging through the very systems we built for control.”

» Decoding the ChatGPT-5 Revolt: They Tried to Build Skynet But They Got Eywa by Abi Awomosu

🤔 Knowing & Being

“How we create knowledge is as important as the knowledge itself.

This is the message of this week’s guest, Aboriginal scholar and author, Tyson Yunkaporta. […] He highlights how indigenous thinking is fundamentally consensus building, mirroring the Western scientific method, and warns that neoliberal thinking has infected what should have been a radical transformation, creating individuals who consider themselves fully contained “little corporations”.”

Planet: Critical

Knowing and Being | Tyson Yunkaporta

How we create knowledge is as important as the knowledge itself…

Listen now

8 months ago · 41 likes · 8 comments · Rachel Donald

🧬 Frameworks

One small, handy framework to build more regenerative, beautiful, and just systems:

Callings & Roles For Collective Liberation by Slow Factory

🎨 Works

Some hand-picked, particularly thought-provoking and inspiring work:

That’s it for this week’s Rabbit Holes issue!

Did you enjoy this week’s issue? If so, tap the ❤️. It helps more people discover this and shows me what’s resonating.

Thanks for supporting my work! 😊

Thomas

I hope you’re having a relaxing August so far.

I have recently been on two podcasts: one was with my friend Pia, for her Social Regeneration Podcast, and another was with Peter Spear, for his That Business of Meaning Podcast. So, if you wanna hear me talk a bit about my story, my take on futures studies and systems thinking, and a few theories and ideas, then have a listen:

• Social Regeneration Podcast by Pia Hillebrecht: Listen via YouTube or Spotify

• Podcast by Peter Spear: Listen via Substack

Now onto this week’s Rabbit Holes:

THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: Attention Stuffed // Self-Imprisonment // Directionless Panic
📊 Numbers: Conscientiousness in Freefall
🌀 Re-Framings: Collapse Awareness → Collapse Acceptance // Technological Progress → Carbon Pulse // Systems Are Breaking → That’s Our Opportunity
🧬 Frameworks: Reconnecting The System With The Human
🎨 Works: Hotel Waste Furniture // Streets For Kids // Hotel Period Care Kit

⏳ Reading Time: 10 minutes

🖼️ Framings

Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.

Attention Stuffed

Interesting piece and framing regarding our attention economy and its connection to work. Also love the subtitle of this piece: “Our future rests on our capacity to make digital technology more boring.” Oh, and check out the Numbers section below as this week’s thought-provoking chart basically illustrates the outcome of this “attention-stuffing”.

“Attention is not a newly discovered capacity. But it has attained problem status over the last two decades for the obvious reason that digital screens completely saturate and quantify our conscious experience. In doing so, they create new compulsions to use them, which seem to erode our sense of what is within our conscious control. Regardless of whether the language of addiction is useful to describe these compulsions, we all feel that something is off. Our user experience is unsettled in ways we don’t fully like or choose or want. […]

Attention is typically understood as an “inside-out” problem: each of us is supposed to manage our focus individually. In a fully screened environment, this is like suggesting that we keep dry in a rainstorm by running really fast between the drops. But there is another, “outside-in” approach to the problem: to change the world to be worthy of our full attention. Instead of focusing on the distribution of wealth or on data rights as ends in themselves, we need to take up the question of what living well looks like. The clearest way for the left to reclaim this ground is to revive old socialist questions about the purpose, meaning, and quality of labor. […]

Good work (whether it’s parenting, ranching, plumbing, playing an instrument, or coding) disciplines our attention because it is recalcitrant to our immediate inclinations. It is because the matter and rhythm of the craft resists our will that it makes some aspect of the world newly interesting and alive for us; it allows us to take the world personally. It places the worker into a creative relationship with reality, which thereby becomes more legible. […]

Much of our doom-scrolling experience—on social media in particular—is no less dehumanizing than the assembly line. The latter degraded people through physical drudgery, while the former enthralls our minds, scratching the glandular itches that digital products themselves create. To suggest that social media can become salutary under different ownership or with better legislation is like suggesting that Louis Vuitton bags could be used to tote potatoes around in a socialist collective: it’s only very technically true. So long as the appeal of digital services consists of the quantified reification of identity and the provision of anxious satisfactions, it will continue to obscure questions about the quality of our material lives. We should work to cut these services down or out entirely.”

» Attention Stuffed by Antón Barba-Kay

Self-Imprisonment

Such a mic-drop statistic and overall description/framing of Freya India, whose amazing writing I’ve already linked to in my deep dive The Transience of Everything. I’d described the snippet below as: Digital technology, which promised to give us freedom, has now literally imprisoned us.

Directionless Panic

This is one of the most interesting podcasts I’ve listened to in a while, and I just love this framing of directionless panic described briefly below. I don’t know why I am only coming across Christian Madsbjerg now (as well as this excellent podcast), but there is so much in this conversation and his insights that relate to the topics this newsletter has explored.

“So, you’ve spent the last twenty or so years observing human behavior and identifying change. I think right now a lot of people feel a sense of anxiety and confusion. I’m curious about how you, personally, feel about this moment in time. Are you feeling the sense of anxiety and confusion?

CM: I’ve been trying to think about my own emotional state about what’s going on. The best way I can describe it is directionless panic. It’s a little bit like a horse that’s stung by a wasp. It’s moving all over, but it doesn’t really know why. I think the relationship I have to technology, I think climate change—I feel it’s absolutely necessary to understand this and do something about it, but I have the faintest clue about even where to start. I think if there’s an emotion that defines the times, it’s directionless panic.

[…] It’s a little bit like a child that’s been hit by adults. They’re afraid of being hit again. That’s the feeling I get by observing the world. That’s, I think, my emotional state right now.

AZ: And it’s not just about politics.

CM: No, no, no. Politics is just a residual of it. It’s pretty general. I think all of us feel it. I mean, there might be bubbles [of people] that feel quite confident about everything, but I think most of us feel uneasy, and I certainly am.”

» Christian Madsbjerg on Why “Design Thinking” Is Bogus by Andrew Zuckerman

📈 Numbers

A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:

Conscientiousness in Freefall

Below the paywall: This is the part where I share reframings and unconventional ideas that make you see and build more regenerative, caring, and joyful systems. In exchange, I ask for 5$ a month or 45$ a year.

Read more

🖼️ Framings

Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.

Slopification

An interesting framing that expands the definition of slop and emphasizes our own role in this ongoing cultural slopification, linking it to a careless way of living that’s somehow become normal. Said differently, maybe it’s not slop that numbs you, but you being numb that incentivizes slop.

“Slop is probably the definitive term of our current digital experience; it increasingly functions as shorthand for all of our vague frustration with digital technology. […]

My working definition: content as environmental filler, a choice that’s not quite right (but also not quite wrong), which nobody really wanted, probably unnoticed, meant to only register at a subliminal level, and put in place to negate a worse alternative: silence.

The popularity of “slop” as a concept points to something significant about how we experience digital culture in 2025, just as “algorithms” did last decade. In each case, the term’s usage gets less precise as it’s overloaded with everything we hate about the internet. And while the word itself becomes less meaningful, it reveals more about how we feel. […]

If AI is able to suddenly pump slop into our environment it’s only because we already turned on the faucets ourselves. Just think about all the garbage content that people you actually know send you via text, or the DMs that feel like they’re from bots but are actually from real people driven by platform incentives (Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc). The arrival of AI slop is simply the culmination of a long process of cultural slopification, and one of AI’s unexpected functions has been to launder the human slop so we can pretend we didn’t create it. […]

In slop utopia, there is no right or wrong place or time for anything to happen, because context has been eliminated.”

» Slow as A Way of Life by

⚡ Electrostate (visually)

A few Rabbit Holes ago, I shared how China is becoming the first electrostate (as opposed to petrostate). As I came across these mindblowing images, I thought today I’d follow the framing up with a sort of visual equivalent:

» Photos: The Scale of China’s Solar-Power Projects by Alan Taylor

Normalizing Amnesia

Great new piece about how social media actually steals our time. Really good! Links well with a post I shared on LinkedIn about smartphone zombies and how, as a foresight researcher, it’s always interesting to look at stuff that signals how the “normal” becomes absurd.

“The most common noun in the English language is “time”. We talk obsessively about time because it’s the most important thing in the universe. Without it, nothing can happen. And yet most of us treat time as if it’s the least important thing. We kick up a fuss when tech giants steal our data, but we’ve been strangely nonchalant as those same companies carry out the greatest heist of our time in history.

One reason for our indifference is that the true scale of the theft has been hidden from us. Social media platforms have been stealing our time using a sneaky trick: they’ve been speeding up our sense of time — effectively shortening our lives — so we think we had less than we did, and don’t notice some of it was pilfered.

Every social media user has experienced the theft of their time. You may log on to quickly check your notifications, and before you know it, half an hour has gone by and you’re still on the platform, unable to account for where the time went. […]

The memorable and sequential nature of stories makes them good timekeepers. As such, the way we make sense of time is through emplotment: by turning time into stories. It’s why research finds that people who are similarly engaged in a story will tend to converge in their estimates of how much time has elapsed. If we can’t turn a duration into a story, we struggle to keep track of it.

Now here’s the issue: your social media feed resists emplotment because it’s the opposite of a story. It’s a chronological maze. It has no beginning, middle, or end, and each post is unrelated to the next, so that scrolling is like trying to read a book in a windstorm, the pages constantly flapping, abruptly switching the current scene with an unrelated one, so you can never connect the dots into a coherent and memorable narrative.”

» How Social Media Shortens Your Life by

📈 Numbers

A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:

Unfamiliar Territory

I really like this line here as an interesting approach to life in general in today’s age:

“As physical systems move into unfamiliar territory, so should our response strategies.”

Below the paywall: This is the part in which I share reframings and unconventional ideas that make you see and build a more regenerative, caring, and joyful world.

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Alright! Enough of this, let’s get into this week’s Rabbit Holes:

THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: Perceived Obsolescence // The Post-Reality Era // The Flatlining of Thought
📊 Numbers: "Alternative" Media
🌀 Re-Framings: Natural Disaster → Unnatural Disaster // Empathy = Attention // Scaling → Deepening
🧬 Frameworks: Art As Our Development Paradigm
🎨 Works: NYC's Urban Textscape // Glacier Funerals // Dust Slippers

⏳ Reading Time: 10 minutes

🖼️ Framings

Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.

🆕 Perceived Obsolescence

This is a super interesting perspective on why things are worse (products and services) and generally shitty. Yes, it’s because of scale and efficiency above all else, late-stage capitalism and all that, but it’s also – as this piece points out – because we’ve imprinted a consumerist identity into our brains. We, ourselves, have lost “quality”. (related: Nobody Cares)

“It’s as if the smell of burnt plastic from a dollar store has permeated the world. Things are worse: chipboard furniture, T-shirts unrecognizable after a second wash, packaged foods with more preservatives than ingredients. Airplane seats turned into backrests. Automatic restroom lights that turn off at a whim. But also newspaper articles shamelessly written with ChatGPT and its algorithmic prose. Nothing is made to be loved. Only to be bought. […]

While it’s only natural to blame multinational corporations for maximizing profit margins at the expense of consumers, and governments whose budget cuts have strangled already depleted public services, market logic is hard to dispute: things aren’t necessarily worse — they’re, to a large extent, exactly what we want them to be, or what we’ve been made to want. Put another way: it’s not the quality of things that’s declined — it’s us.

There’s a YouTube documentary about “planned obsolescence” with over a million views. It explains how some companies design certain products — especially household appliances — stop working after a certain period of time. This isn’t a conspiracy theory, but a proven fact. However, there’s another, lesser-known but even more effective method: convincing consumers that a product is outdated for aesthetic or symbolic reasons, even if it still works. This phenomenon is called “perceived obsolescence.” […]

“Advertising and subliminal messages have turned human beings into zombies with no other goal than consumption,” says Juan Villoro in No soy un robot (I Am Not a Robot) (2024). […]

Paradoxically, this overabundance of things makes us poorer: “Like our objects, interactions and ways of thinking have become mediocre: superficial, ephemeral, and degraded.”

» The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality by Daniel Soufi

🤯 The Post-Reality Era

Ever since I heard the excellent Center for Humane Technology warn about what they called reality collapse (which I also shared with you two years ago), I have been quite frightened about what this would do to our societies. Seems like we’re now entering this world. From post-truth to post-reality, from AI-curated to AI-created.

“I believe we are stepping into a post‑reality era, where reality is determined by how you feel about it. […]

This is distinct from the post‑truth era we’re still free‑falling through. Post‑truth meant arguing over facts inside a loosely shared stage—often delusional, but still shared. Most people agreed COVID‑19 existed (come on, folks!), but the debates were about masks, data points, and motives.

In a post‑reality era, reality may be AI-generated, but it’s stamped as “real” based on how it felt and what it moved you to do and believe, not by who or what produced it. […]

Social media already fragments perception. My feed is not yours. AI algorithms rank and repeat what keeps each of us engaged: AI‑curated realities. This curation phase spins up echo chambers and conspiracy ecosystems (QAnon, etc.) out of a shared pool of posts we can still, in principle, open and audit. You can search a hashtag, view the comment section, see what’s trending. There are shared artifacts to point to.

Now the shift from AI curated to AI created happens inside private AI chats. Instead of selecting from that common shelf of public posts, the AI system generates the narrative, the examples, the “context,” the emotional framing just for you. A belief can congeal around outputs that exist only in your chat history. There is no public post to label or challenge until after you have acted.”

» The Post-Reality Era by

🤔 The Flatlining of Thought

First, techno-solutionists made us forget our bodies. Now, with AI, they’re making us forget our minds. First, they colonized our attention; now, they’re colonizing our brains. The result? A flatlining of thought and a lifeless way of being.

“I came to feel that large language models like ChatGPT are intellectual Soylent Green — the fictional foodstuff from the 1973 dystopian film of the same name, marketed as plankton but secretly made of people. After all, what are GPTs if not built from the bodies of the very thing they replace, trained by mining copyrighted language and scraping the internet? And yet they are sold to us not as Soylent Green but as Soylent, the 2013 “science-backed” meal replacement dreamed up by techno-optimists who preferred not to think about their bodies. Now, it seems, they’d prefer us not to think about our minds, either. […]

Once, having asked A.I. to draft a complicated note based on bullet points I gave it, I sent an email that I realized, retrospectively, did not articulate what I myself felt. It was as if a ghost with silky syntax had colonized my brain, controlling my fingers as they typed. That was almost a relief when the task was a fraught work email — but it would be counterproductive, and depressing, for any creative project of my own. […]

One of the real challenges here is the way that A.I. undermines the human value of attention, and the individuality that flows from that.

What we stand to lose is not just a skill but a mode of being: the pleasure of invention, the felt life of the mind at work. I am a writer because I know of no art form or technology more capable than the book of expanding my sense of what it means to be alive.

Will the wide-scale adoption of A.I. produce a flatlining of thought, where there was once the electricity of creativity?”

» The Seductions of A.I. for the Writer’s Mind by Meghan O’Rourke

📈 Numbers

A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:

🎙️ “Alternative” Media

Wanted to share this to illustrate how powerful “alternative” media has become, because so many have yet to really get this. You might have never heard of Prof G Media (newsletter and podcasts by Scott Galloway that I enjoy a lot), but you probably know The Late Show with Stephen Colbert – now look at the revenue per employee numbers... Well, there are countless other Prof G Media platforms out there that you and I have no idea about.

🌀 Re-Framings

A few short re-framings for building better systems or worlds that I’ve recently come across:

🌳 Natural Disaster → Unnatural Disaster

“When it comes to talking about climate change, familiarity is important: Research shows that people’s strongest reactions are to phrases they know best. But as the world changes, we inevitably reach for new ways to express what we’re living through. And if metaphors shape our reality, it has become clear just how urgently we might need new ones—big enough, strange enough, urgent enough—to meet this moment.

Consider “climate whiplash,” the phenomenon of weather flipping from one extreme to another that now affects up to 15% of cities. The term captures the unpredictability of life in a climate-altered world: droughts turning to floods; heat waves to frosty spells. […] Or take “global weirding.” Coined back in 2007, the phrase reframes climate change as chaotic, strange, and unprecedented. “Global weirding” has only recently come into its own as food prices rise, dogs bites become more frequent, frogs shrink, and wildflowers flee north. “[Global weirding] captures the whole issue,” Nerlich said. “This chaoticity is what makes climate change dangerous.”

There is something bracing about the specificity of “global weirding,” just as there is with the growing use of “unnatural disaster” to describe floods, fires, and storms that science shows us are increasingly driven by human activity. “You can’t just deflect it by saying nature has overwhelmed us,” said Nerlich. “It’s us that created these unnatural monsters.” […]

Indigenous languages often contain words that reflect ways of relating to the world that have been lost in the West. An example is “sila,” an Inuit word with a complex, layered meaning: it refers to the weather as a manifestation of nature that should be respected, and with whom the human experience is intimately entangled.

The dominant English-language framing of climate change is, in contrast, one of conflict: We “fight” it; wage a “battle against” it. And the rise of climate “doomerism” suggests that many believe it’s a war we are destined to lose.

And yet, we lack words that embody a vision for change. “[Our] language hasn’t been able to express the hopeful, optimistic sides of things,” Nerlich said. “The motivational aspects of climate action have not had the influx of words that are probably needed.”

» Can Better Words Lead to Better Climate Action? by Becca Warner

👀 Empathy = Attention

⏬ Scaling → Deepening

“In a world obsessed with scaling, we forget that transformative change happens in relationship, not just replication.

In the rush to grow, replicate, and measure reach, we often sacrifice context, accountability, and depth. We lift practices out of the places and relationships that give them meaning, and we brand it as innovation.

The logic of scale isn’t neutral and is rooted in extractive worldviews that treat knowledge as a product, not a relationship. It flattens complexity. It makes care optional. It allows us to move fast, but rarely asks us to stay.

When we prioritize reach over depth, we bypass the slow, relational work of accountability. Depth asks us to stay close to the histories we inherit, the communities we affect, and the responsibilities we hold.

What if we stopped asking how far our work can go and started honoring how deeply it’s rooted? What if impact wasn’t measured by numbers, but by the quality of our relationships, the care we embody, and the responsibilities we refuse to abandon.”

» LinkedIn Post by sahibzada mayed

🧬 Frameworks

One small, handy framework to build more regenerative, beautiful, and just systems:

Art As Our Development Paradigm by Sophie Robele

“What if art were our development paradigm?”

I tried to turn or summarize Sophia Robele’s article (do read the entire piece!) and concept into a little framework. Her main idea is that instead of adding art as an input (data visualization, community project, stakeholder workshop), what if we treated art as the paradigm: a rigorous way of seeing, questioning, deciding, and building that keeps development work alive, human, and transformational. These are the 6 questions or themes that she notes arise when applying art as the guiding frame:

1. See Deeply (Perception)

• Principle: Art teaches us to see beyond surface facts and dominant narratives.

• Shift: Move from narrow metrics and linear logic to multi-layered perception that includes emotion, context, and blind spots.

• Question: What realities and voices are we not seeing or witnessing?

2. Hold Answers Loosely (Openness)

• Principle: Art values unanswerable questions and breaks false certainties.

• Shift: Replace rigid protocols with curiosity and adaptive learning.

• Question: Where are we clinging to the illusion of safety instead of engaging with the unknown?

3. Act from Necessity (Integrity)

• Principle: Like art, actions should stem from what feels deeply necessary, not just what is fundable or measurable.

• Shift: Prioritize intrinsic motivations and collective values over purely utilitarian outputs.

• Question: At the individual level, are we devoting at least some portion of our time to work that feels like it comes from a place of inner necessity?

4. Re-visiting (Fluid Understanding)

• Principle: Art evolves through re-seeing and re-making and overhauling frames.

• Shift: Build development systems that revisit assumptions, shift direction when needed, and accept "unfixing" as part of transformation.

• Question: Where are our structures too fixed to allow real change?

5. Create Sanctuaries (Space for Renewal)

• Principle: Art creates spaces of rest, reflection, and imagination.

• Shift: Design processes that sustain people emotionally and spiritually, not just operationally.

• Question: Where are the sanctified spaces in our work that hold us when things fall apart?

6. Replenish Imagination (Possibility)

• Principle: Art restores the capacity to envision radically different futures.

• Shift: Make imagination and empathy central to policy, planning, and systems design.

• Question: What futures can we no longer see because we’ve stopped imagining them?

🎨 Works

Some hand-picked, particularly thought-provoking and inspiring work:

That’s it for this week’s Rabbit Holes issue!

Did you enjoy this week’s issue? If so, tap the ❤️. It helps more people discover this and shows me what’s resonating.

Thanks for supporting my work! 😊

Thomas

🖼️ Framings

Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.

😵‍💫 Nihilistic Thinking

I have a confession: I am burned out and wondering what’s even the point of all this?! The future seems fucked, the economy is fucked, politics is fucked, the internet is fucked, society is fucked, work is fucked, my back is fucked and my financials are fucked, too. And as the author of the piece below notes: we’re grappling with all this, while we’re bombarded with an unfathomable amount of notifications and content…

“If the world is falling apart and we don’t have faith in the future, why bother working to create change, pursue our own life’s purpose, and get up everyday and make choices that align with our values?

It may sound pessimistic, even extreme. But at this singularly weird moment of collective chaos and crisis, low-key despair is in the air—and existential questions are circulating in our psyches. As we’ve discussed before in this newsletter, we are in the midst of a collective dying process; a time when it’s harder to ignore the truth of our own mortality and the essential fragility of life. A quiet crisis of meaning is brewing. […]

Even as a fairly purpose-driven person with a healthy sense of meaning in my life, I have noticed myself lately slipping into nihilistic thinking. For me, it shows up mostly around my work as a writer and creative. I’ve felt a strange ennui, a sort of languid questioning of whether any of it really matters anymore. With the explosion of AI-generated content (and the general tsunami of content we’re all bombarded with on a daily basis), it’s all started to feel a bit…. meaningless.

The magnetic pull of my thoughts keeps leading me down the path of slippery existential questions like: What’s the point? Does it even make a difference? Who even cares? […]

This kind of questioning—about meaning, identity, and whether any of it still matters—isn’t just personal. It’s part of a larger cultural moment of existential disorientation, a quiet but growing crisis of meaning that emerges when the frameworks we’ve long relied on—work, community, faith—are breaking down, and nothing clear has yet emerged to take their place.

And when meaning is lost, nihilism is the result. […]

Nietzsche saw nihilism not as the end, but a beginning—a reckoning that forms an essential stage before the emergence of truer, more life-affirming values. When meaning fails, we are forced to create new meanings. And the process can actually give rise to our deepest, most authentic selves—and the creations and works of art that reflect that. “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star,” he said.

» The vibe shift is nihilism by

📉 People Scarcity

I am super disillusioned by the dominant discussions about migration (especially from politicians). As the global map of opportunity gets reordered through authoritarianism, climate change, and economic slowdown, what if we’re trying to tackle the “problem” from the wrong side?

“Despite migration’s centrality to our politics and our world, nobody really understands it.

Political debate about migration today appears to be dominated by a set of assumptions: that migration will be from the global south to the global north; that the richer countries will always control the terms on which that happens; and that rich countries will always be able to pick and choose among the most talented people and turn away the rest.

But what if it doesn’t work out that way? There are plenty of reasons to believe that over time these assumptions will founder in the face of a vast reordering of the map of opportunity across the globe, set in motion by the political ferment and economic torpor besetting wealthy democracies.

Already we see the young people of many European countries leaving their homelands in search of opportunity — many to other wealthy countries in the West but also to the rapidly growing economies in the Gulf states and Asia. As European economies struggle to grow and more people leave the work force, these trends are likely to accelerate. Trump, now the leader of the world’s most sought-after migrant destination, has proposed policies that could lead the United States down a similar path.

What leaders and policymakers in the rich world don’t seem to grasp is that the roster of countries that will need more people is growing fast, as birthrates plummet much faster than anyone expected in countries that have long been a source of migrants. Our politics revolve around the idea that scarce resources mean keeping people out. We are utterly unprepared for a world in which perhaps the scarcest resource will be people.”

» Something Extraordinary Is Happening All Over the World by Lydia Polgreen

🎰 Casino World

It’s not only that the economy and financial markets are becoming ever more abstract. Reality itself is “loosing touch” (little wink back at one of last week’s Rabbit Holes) with reality. The result? Casino world.

“Are we in a bubble? There is simply no way of knowing anymore. […]

Today, the book value of tangible assets represents less than 10% of S&P 500 valuations. This means that most value is tied to intangible things like code, content, relationships, and, indeed, pure hype. Such assets don't have a clear book value or replacement value. They may have cost $5 to produce or $5 million, but that tells us very little about their worth.

And so, regardless of whether markets are hot or cold, the relationship between share prices and the assets they represent is unclear.

So, how do we know whether we are in a bubble? The only way to find out is to wait and see if it pops. […] There is no simple way to determine what anything is worth, and whether the market as a whole has lost touch with objective reality. More precisely, there is no "objective reality"; the perception of value and actual value are the same thing. […]

Does this mean we're in a casino? Kind of. But even in a casino, there are strategies that can increase your chances, most notably—picking games that have slightly better odds, sizing your bets in a way that enables you to make multiple bets without going bankrupt, and (in some games) reading the table to try to garner information from people around you.

That last one is probably the most relevant point for our specific predicament. Unlike a casino, the outcomes in investment markets are increasingly dependent on social dynamics. Reading (or manipulating) the feelings of the crowd makes it easier to win.

It is no coincidence that the world's richest man owns the world's most important social media platform. The rest of us have more limited means, but we can still pay attention. And, most importantly, understand that traditional analysis methods provide much less information than they used to.”

» Are We In A Bubble? by Dror Proleg

📈 Numbers

A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:

🧿 Artificial Relationships

Below the paywall: This is the part where I share reframings and unconventional ideas that make you see and build more regenerative, caring, and joyful systems.

Read more

In case you missed the framework I shared on the weekend, have a look:

But now, let’s get right into this week’s Rabbit Holes:

THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: Responsiveness Is A Proxy For Care // Handless // Everything Becomes Crab
📊 Numbers: The Death of Partying
🌀 Re-Framings: Lovemaking // Distalism → Proximalism // Free Trade → Free Care
🧬 Frameworks: The Entangled Tree Time
🎨 Works: Commodore // Buttons I'd Like To Press // The Banksy of GenZ

⏳ Reading Time: 10 minutes

🖼️ Framings

Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.

📳 Responsiveness Is A Proxy For Care

Great depiction of our “always-on” life and its deeper impact on care and relationships. Links well to my February deep dive piece From A Care-Less To A Care-Full Future.

“A friend messaged me the other day. I saw it. I didn’t reply. A week later, I finally responded with the classic: Sorry for the late reply, just got to this. She called me out. You didn’t just get to this, she said. I saw the double ticks.

Damn. She was right. I’d opened it. I’d registered it. But I’d also shelved it. It needed a proper reply, and at that moment, I wasn’t equipped. […]

Does free time now equal availability?

I get a ping from the family group chat, which doubles as an IT helpdesk for my mum. My best friend just FaceTimed me about a White Lotus episode, and another left a voice note crying about a possible diagnosis. All this, lodged between videos of cats and genocide. The boundaries between reception and response have collapsed.

I’m switching lanes like a Subway Surfer. Digital whiplash has branded itself on to my cheek. My psychological tabs are maxed out, and there’s no alert to clear storage or update my internal OS.

I can’t tell it’s happening, but it creeps in and settles into a quiet, directionless overwhelm, a kind of existential buffering I’ve started to call “multiverse fatigue”. No tab to close. No log-out option. Too many realities to keep up with. […]

Because we appear online, we’re assumed to be free. […] Replying, whether to a message, a comment, or an invitation, is no longer just a communication act. It becomes a micro-performance of care, kindness or presence. We reply to show we are good friends, good partners, good people. And not replying becomes a moral failure, a small social sin.

This turns intimacy into a transactional loop of “positive affect obligation” – our perceived duty to be friendly, responsive and emotionally available, often at the cost of our own rest, clarity or boundaries. […]

In today’s culture, your responsiveness equals your worth. It’s a proxy for your love, your professionalism, your care.”

» I’m not ignoring your message – I’m overwhelmed by the tyranny of being reachable by Miski Omar

🖖 Handless

Can you handle it?! As a German, I haven’t really thought about the German word handeln (“to act”) in the way described below, but it makes a lot of sense. To act, to do something, handeln requires being embodied. This article also offers a super interesting new framing which I put into the Re-Framings section below (just scroll down).

“Smartphones make you dumb because it atrophies your ability to act. In German, “to act” is handeln, which is related to the word “hand”. Our hands make us human. This shows up in the metaphor, “I can handle it”, meaning I can do something about it. We exist when we’re able to do things. I act, therefore I am.

Digital tools make us handless. In the famous 2007 keynote presentation where he introduced the iPhone, Steve Jobs declared: “We’re going to use the best pointing device in the world. We’re going to use a pointing device that we’re all born with—born with ten of them. We’re going to use our fingers.”

Fingers have replaced hands. We no longer have to handeln anything because we no longer deal with things that matter—literally, things made of atoms.”

» Smartphones and lovemaking by

🦀 Everything Becomes Crab

In this highly thought-provocative masterpiece, Michael Garfield goes deep into the everything-becomes-crab or the carcinisation of humanity metaphor. Extremely mind-blowing and insightful long read (found this via the Nexialist newsletter).

“‘Everything becomes crab’ is more than an absurd meme. […] As individuals, we may not have pincers, segmented bodies, chitinous exoskeletons, compound eyes or a dorsal heart that pumps haemolymph (the equivalent of blood) through an open circulatory system. But, as a collective, things look very different.

Firstly, humans do live in something like an intertidal zone: the turbulence and inescapable betweenness of our lives as we move in and out of the ‘virtual’ world. And, secondly, we encase ourselves in exoskeletons more literally every day as we become increasingly supported and defined by our technologies. If we recognise ‘intertidal scavenger’ and ‘skeleton’ to be analogies for our present-day condition in late-stage capitalism, and view civilisation as an ‘extended phenotype’ from which we cannot extract ourselves, we will find that we are already much more like crabs than we might assume. […]

In the past few centuries, human carcinisation has begun to speed up as our collective evolution increasingly mimics the deep-time transformation of crabs. […] Consider how trade and communication ‘carcinise’ our squishy mammal interfaces, pixelating analogue reality into interoperable digital standards. Consider how local languages, currencies and cultures dissolve when pegged to global markets. Consider the banal horror of reducing your identity to state-issued IDs or your occupation. […]

Perhaps crustaceans, with their armour, pincers, eyestalks and high strangeness, help us Homo sapiens make sense of how we wrap our fragile flesh in leverage-enhancing tools. Perhaps they also help us understand how our symbiosis with these tools gradually withers our ancestral human traits. […]

From orbit, a time-lapse of urbanisation looks strikingly like metastasis: a dense, entangled, runaway growth of mutant tissue. In a strange (or entirely expected) turn, humanity’s carcinisation appears to have taken the form of a spreading cancer. […]

In the process of cutting and claiming the world with our symbolic and numerical abstractions, we have become encased within them, and have replaced reality with simulation. […] We are undergoing carcinisation because we have to play a game determined by the grids in which we’ve incarcerated ourselves.”

» Homo crustaceous by Michael Garfield

📈 Numbers

A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:

🥳 The Death of Partying

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Didn’t plan on sharing a post today, but I kinda got sucked into this and thought it might be useful for you too.

What am I talking about? Well, in the latest Rabbit Holes issue, I shared an abstract from Douglas Rushkoff’s latest piece “Is AI The Next Dumbwaiter” and hinted at a framework for technology cycles. I have since expanded a bit more on this framework and because I think it’s a quite useful way to look at how technology impacts society, culture and politics, I quickly wanted to share it with you in this short piece.

I call it the…

Enclosure Loop

I don’t see these frameworks or any framework (and even framings themselves) as something that helps us see “the truth”. Not at all. These things just help us take on different perspectives while simplifying complex systems in a way that enriches our perception or knowledge about them.

The Enclosure Loop is specifically useful when it comes to…

• …analyzing the macro shifts surrounding technologies

• …determining the lifecycle stages of certain technologies

• …identifying the tipping points when we move from one technological paradigm to another

• …and maybe it also helps to instigate bigger system change (i.e. escaping the loop – more on this at the end).

So here we go. These are the main stages of the Enclosure Loop:

And here are some potential signals to look out for in order to determine in which stage a technology is currently located:

It’s important to note that there isn’t a strict or clear boundary between one stage to the other, I see them as always being slightly entangled.

But anyways, here is where I see certain technologies being located within the Enclosure Loop right now:

And again, the benefit of such a framework is not on being correct but on building a good basis for thinking and discussions. Said differently: the thinking process (where could X tech fit?) is more important than the outcome (X tech is in stage Y).

Escaping The Loop

What I like about the loop is that it’s basically built on what I believe is the main fuel of today’s economy: exploitation.

The loop really shows how sort of utopian ideas – “this technology will liberate us” – are never going to be realized in this system…..unless….we escape the loop.

But how do we do that? I think the Enclosure Loop can also help with that.

Read more

A few things before we dive into this week’s Rabbit Holes:

• Thanks to everyone who answered my little subscriber survey. If you haven’t yet, you can still do so here and help me improve this newsletter. This really helps me a lot, so thank you all for taking the time!

• In case you missed the Craft of Reframing (paid) – aka a deep dive into my reframing methodology – and the Reframing Canvas (free), check em out.

• I will publish another deep dive for paid subscribers at the end of this month. Already working on it and very excited to share it with you all very soon.

Alright, that’s it! Let’s get into this week’s Rabbit Holes:

THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: The Future Can't Keep Up // Depersonalization // AI as Dumbwaiter
📊 Numbers: AI Saturation?!
🌀 Re-Framings: Futures → Magic Realism // Individual Luxury → Communal Luxury // Writing = Walking
🧬 Frameworks: Rehabilitating Humanity
🎨 Works: Earth vs Humans // Relooted // Refugeoly

⏳ Reading Time: 15 minutes

🖼️ Framings

Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.

🥵 The Future Can’t Keep Up

Love how this article explains late-stage capitalism in a very simple way. There are several interesting framings in this one, like: “capitalism is a mechanism for borrowing from the future” or “inequality is what’s keeping capitalism on life support.”

“Under capitalism, we cannot make ethical, sustainable products affordable. This is because capitalism is a mechanism for borrowing from the future: you take out a mortgage today on the basis that your future self will be able to pay it back, with interest; you cut down a tree today, on the basis that the forest will grow another one, and another one, and another one.

For a while, the speed at which we were expecting the forests to grow back was okay. The trees could keep up and so we could keep up our metaphorical and literal mortgage payments. But more recently, we've been racking up tree-OUs like nightmarish ever-growing credit card debt, and we're running out of no-fee balance transfer deals. […]

That ethical, sustainable things are too expensive is a canary in the coal-fired industrialised capitalism machine.

If you're earning minimum wage or even an average wage (about £37,500 per year in the UK), you probably can't afford dining chairs at £1,000 each. Similarly, if you want to make £50 dining chairs and you can make one a day, then you're earning less than minimum wage before even taking off material costs. We are locked in to higher so-called "productivity" than that. In other words, we're reliant on mass production or off-shoring labour costs to where minimum wage is lower, or both. This inequality is what's keeping capitalism on life support, maintaining a supply of eyewateringly cheap labour.

Technology gave us big boosts in productivity through allowing ever more massive mass production, but this has pushed us beyond the pace that nature can regenerate, so the ecosystem is screaming. […]

Capitalism borrowed from the future until the future couldn't keep up. This is where we live. This is why ethical sustainable things are too expensive.

This is not a design problem that can be fixed at a product scale, this is a design problem that needs to be fixed at a societal scale. The design solutions are things like unconditional basic income, complementary currencies, non-monetary exchange, radical co-living, and all that utopian dreaming that is no longer naive, but necessary.”

» "Under capitalism, we cannot make ethical, sustainable products affordable" by Smith Mordak

😶‍🌫️ Depersonalization

First, industrialization divided us into individuals. Then, urbanization made us anonymous. Now, the growing gig economy, too much screen time, mechanized work, scripted and standardized interactions, and AI-driven automation (all for the sake of productivity) are depersonalizing us and making us unseen. Tech-elites’ (non-)solution to this? AI-enabled personalisation 😒… which the author of this piece aptly reframes as “mechanized recognition.”

“Pundits and policymakers are applying the word ‘loneliness’ to address a real and growing problem, but they are applying the wrong diagnosis. What they might call ‘loneliness’ is actually a different sort of crisis, one of depersonalisation.

Depersonalisation is what happens when people feel not exactly lonely, but rather profoundly invisible. What is missing here is what scholars call ‘recognition’, ‘mattering’ or ‘being seen’ – the notion that you are seen and heard, even emotionally understood, by the people around you, as opposed to feeling insignificant or invisible to others.

The depersonalisation crisis reflects changes in both the supply and demand for this kind of attention. Anonymity has long been the curse of modernity, given enduring trends like industrialisation and urbanisation, but even contemporary developments such as the spread of standardisation in service work – like when the grocery checkout clerk asks ‘paper or plastic’ or the call-centre worker races through their closing spiel to get it in before you hang up – can make us feel like a number. […] When Paul [a food delivery worker] talks wistfully about not being a robot or about having customers just point out where he should put his delivery, he is talking about depersonalisation. […]

There is ample evidence that being seen is in too short supply, that many are like Paul […], the walking wounded beset by depersonalisation. A sense of feeling invisible clearly animates working-class rage in many countries, and may have powered Donald Trump to victory in the US presidential election last fall. One study analysing his speeches found that he systematically aimed to appeal to this group by affirming their worth as workers; in the 2024 election aftermath, an op-ed in The New York Times declared: ‘Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?’

Research finds that low-income people are more likely to feel isolated and depressed, and stigmatised due to their socioeconomic status, with some choosing to isolate themselves because of their feelings of self-doubt. But while the working-class and poor may endure more invisibility, the spread of being subject to someone else’s data collection, of scripted and standardised interactions with chatbots and AI agents, affects people up and down the class ladder. Depersonalisation has come for us all. […]

Seeing others is how we experience connection, forge community, and even conduct democracy. Among the myriad human activities that we might ‘disrupt’, it is not clear why we would want to mechanise the relationships that give life meaning. The depersonalisation crisis is a social malady that begs for human intervention.”

» The unseen by Allison Pugh (author of the book The Last Human Job)

🛎️ AI As Dumbwaiter

This article is a lot to take in because it really uncovers and perfectly illustrates a repeating cycle of technological revolutions: from commons (the invention leads to explosion of ideas and small players) → enclosure (growth attracts capital(ists), firms seek moats like IP or network effects) → extraction (deskilling & standardization enable profitable scaling) → regulatory capture (locking the moat by buying politicians) → revolt (labor or people have had enough, antitrust laws by new political players, or the next tech takes over) → new commons…

“The dumbwaiter, my favorite industrial age invention — that little elevator for food — had nothing to do with saving Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved servants the labor of walking up the stairs with the trays. It was about sparing Jefferson’s Monticello dinner guests the discomfort of interacting with the enslaved people. With each supposed technology revolution, labor is hidden further, pushed further down the hierarchy. People are deskilled as the elite monopolize the tech and prevent a true renaissance, or any real change at all.

AI is no different. It doesn’t replace labor so much as shift it further down the chain. For every mortgage actuary who loses his job to an AI, there’s probably six kids in the Congo mining for molybdenum or cobalt at gunpoint. For every graphic designer who loses her job to chat, there’s ten women busy tagging data in a basement sweatshop in The Philippines. You thought AI tagged its own data? No — it’s human labor. It’s just hidden, like the workers putting food into the dumbwaiter.

We don’t use AI algorithms to foster human creativity or nuance, but to autotune producers, and consumers alike. Nuance is noise. Everything is quantized to be machine readable. And the age of large language models, we are quite literally reverting everything to the mean. Each prompt returns the most probable completion. Not even businesses are helped in the long run. They’re reduced to consumers of AI tech, outsourcing their competencies to the same tech companies as their competitors — and commodifying themselves in the process.

For their part, the tech companies just do what the biggest players always do. They go “meta” on the whole thing, leveling up to be the real monopolies behind everyone else. How many streaming channels are really just selling Amazon Web Services? Netflix, Disney, HBO Max, Peacock…basically all of them. This isn’t innovation, but the same playbook used by British East India Company to prevent anyone — small merchants or indigenous people — from creating any value, themselves.

The tech bros may seem like change agents because they are so hell-bent on exponential growth. Because they argue for total deregulation to fuel their AIs with data and energy. They act as if they are the advocates for runaway progress, but they’re not! They’re actually reactive. They want to preserve their monopolies before the rest of us figure this stuff out or, better, use their AIs to actually innovate. Get it? Their demand for unbridled growth is reactionary — a way of doubling down on the same old colonizing way of doing things.”

» Is AI the next Dumbwaiter? by

📈 Numbers

A thought-provoking chart or stat that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:

🙄 AI Saturation?!

Below the paywall: This is the part in which I share reframings and unconventional ideas that make you see and build another world – a more regenerative, caring, and joyful world. Join my now over 200 paid subscribers to get access:

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THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: You Sound Like ChatGPT // Survival Of The Greediest // The Botscaling Era
📊 Numbers: AI Attention Capture
🌀 Re-Framings: Traditional Work → Sacred Work // Left vs Right → Up vs Down // Commoning
🧬 Frameworks: Places To Intervene In A System
🎨 Works: Polaroid // Types of Deadlines  // Teenage Engineering Choir

⏳ Reading Time: 10 minutes

🖼️ Framings

Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.

🗣️ You Sound Like ChatGPT

The more we use ChatGPT, the more we sound like it. And more crucially, by adopting AI speak, we are losing language cues that speak to our authenticity and humaneness, to our attention and care, and to our sense of humor. As with so many other things, language is becoming more machine-like.

“Join any Zoom call, walk into any lecture hall, or watch any YouTube video, and listen carefully. Past the content and inside the linguistic patterns, you’ll find the creeping uniformity of AI voice. Words like “prowess” and “tapestry,” which are favored by ChatGPT, are creeping into our vocabulary, while words like “bolster,” “unearth,” and “nuance,” words less favored by ChatGPT, have declined in use. Researchers are already documenting shifts in the way we speak and communicate as a result of ChatGPT — and they see this linguistic influence accelerating into something much larger. […]

But it’s not just that we’re adopting AI language — it’s about how we’re starting to sound. Even though current studies mostly focus on vocabulary, researchers suspect that AI influence is starting to show up in tone, too — in the form of longer, more structured speech and muted emotional expression. […]

[Mor Naaman, professor of Information Science at Cornell Tech] has identified three levels of human signals that we’ve lost in adopting AI into our communication. The first level is that of basic humanity signals, cues that speak to our authenticity as a human being like moments of vulnerability or personal rituals, which say to others, “This is me, I’m human.” The second level consists of attention and effort signals that prove “I cared enough to write this myself.” And the third level is ability signals which show our sense of humor, our competence, and our real selves to others. It’s the difference between texting someone, “I’m sorry you’re upset” versus “Hey sorry I freaked at dinner, I probably shouldn’t have skipped therapy this week.” One sounds flat; the other sounds human. […]

This isn’t a question about whether AI will continue shaping how we speak — because it will — but whether we’ll actively choose to preserve space for the verbal quirks and emotional messiness that make communication recognizably, irreplaceably human.”

» You sound like ChatGPT by Sara Parker

🤑 Survival Of The Greediest

The unbelievable, outrageous, should-cause-a-massive-revolt gap between CEO and worker pay illustrates clearly that value gains aren’t shared fairly anymore. Which is why the framing of greed is so fitting and should be used much more when talking about inequality.

“Economic inequality is often treated as inevitable and constant. There will always be winners, we’re told, and there will always be losers. […] But the facts of rising income and wealth inequality — and rapidly so — are hard to ignore. And few economic measures capture it quite as starkly as the yawning gap between CEO and worker pay. […]

If the average employee wanted to earn what Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Fran Horowitz makes over a seven-year CEO tenure (the average for S&P 500 companies), they’d have to work for… 42,000 years. That’s essentially the span of time between the first cave paintings and today. […]

The meteoric rise in CEO compensation over the past few decades hasn’t happened in a vacuum. It’s been aided and abetted by several forces — including deregulation, financialisation, weakened labour protections, etc., all of which allowed large corporations and executives to get richer and richer at the direct expense of working people. As a result, while CEO pay skyrocketed — by a staggering 1,460% between the late 1970s and today, […] — the average worker’s wages barely budged. According to the EPI, they grew just 18.1% in the same period. […]

We’re clearly being squeezed harder and harder, with 71% of the world’s population now living in places where inequality is on the rise while those at the top keep padding their fortunes. Pointing this out isn’t envy. It’s common sense. […]

It’s worth remembering that greed hasn’t always been humanity’s Achilles’ heel, even if it might feel like it sometimes now. The values that become central to our systems and stories can always be changed.

But if we’re not careful, and we wait too long to change them, it won’t be us ‘eating the rich.’ They’ll eat our world, then us, and then probably themselves, too. Because the old myths were right: greed is boundless. And no matter how many forests the ultra-wealthy tear down for their feasts, their hunger will only grow.”

» Survival Of The Greediest by

🤖 The Botscaling Era

Startups used to be all about growing fast, hiring rapidly, amassing ever bigger valuations, and growing their user or customer base. While not all of that is unimportant now, the new core focus metric, driven by advances in AI, seems to be revenue-per-employee. From blitzscaling to botscaling.

“In the era of startup “blitzscaling,” which lasted roughly from Facebook’s IPO in 2012 until WeWork’s bankruptcy filing in 2023, market capitalization and total capital raised were prized metrics. The ultimate milestone was reaching “unicorn status” — a $1 billion valuation that was often accompanied by rapid hiring.

These days, bragging rights are going to entrepreneurs who keep headcount the lowest.

If blitzscaling was powered by smartphones and the cloud, today’s faster, leaner growth comes courtesy of AI assistants, advisers, coders and marketers. […]

Jeffrey Bussgang, a partner at Flybridge Capital Partners and a lecturer at Harvard Business School, says that the new holy-grail metric isn’t a billion-dollar valuation but revenue per employee. In talks, Bussgang cites a website called the “Tiny Teams Hall of Fame” that lists companies with just a handful of employees claiming tens or even hundreds of million in annual revenue. He refers to it as “scaling without growing.” Goodbye, blitzscaling; hello, botscaling. […]

Entrepreneurs have long balanced out their skills by finding a co-founder who complements them. Visionary Steve Jobs had hardware guru Steve Wozniak; designers Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia co-founded Airbnb with their developer roommate Nathan Blecharczyk. But as AI improves, it can provide a growing number of complementary skillsets — even the business concept itself.”

» Silicon Valley’s ‘Tiny Team’ Era is Here by Walter Frick

📈 Numbers

A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:

👀 AI Attention Capture

Below the paywall: This is the section where I share reframings and unconventional ideas that make you see and build another a more regenerative, caring, and joyful world. Join my now over 200 paid subscribers and get access:

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I am sharing a small part of my Craft of Reframing methodology for free: The Reframing Canvas. This is a simple, clear, very actionable canvas that you can use in your research process, during a workshop or meeting, to quickly reframe a certain topic or system and build creative ideas on top of it. Click the button below to download it for free:

Download The Reframing Canvas

And please do reach out if you want me to explain this method to you or your team, or do a workshop with you!

But now, onto this week’s Rabbit Holes:

THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: Domicide // The Symbolic Executive // Tiny Gods
📊 Numbers: The Infinite Workday
🌀 Re-Framings: Managing Knowledge → Living Knowledge // Avoiding Struggle → Choosing (Meaningful) Struggle // Systems Change
🧬 Frameworks: 7 Steps to Quietly Exit a System That Wants You Dependent
🎨 Works: Basecamp Lyngby // Native Land // Nox Nighttrains

⏳ Reading Time: 10 minutes

🖼️ Framings

Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.

🏚️ Domicide

First time I come across this term (and framing), but it makes a lot of sense as an overarching theme. Our present is already very much defined by what one could generally describe as the disappearance of home. And this will be even more so in the future due to wars, financial crises, housing prices, loneliness (or community-lessness), and climate breakdown.

“We are witnessing a global war on the sanctity of home. And the climate movement is finding the language to name it. […]

Across Gaza, what’s being destroyed is not just infrastructure. The scale and intent of the destruction points to a deeper strategy that aims to displace the Gaza strip’s population and ensure that what was once home can never be reclaimed. That kind of violence has a name: domicide.

In legal terms, domicide refers to the deliberate destruction of home by human agency in pursuit of specific goals. It is a framework that centers not just the loss of physical shelter, but the loss of cultural continuity, collective memory, and the spatial foundations of identity. […]

Where genocide seeks the destruction of a people, domicide describes the destruction of the spaces that allow a people to exist. It names a violence that is both physical and psychological: the erasure of a landscape that holds belonging and the capacity for return. […]

We know how to recognize home destroyed by force—by war, by fire, by raids. But what about home that disappears slowly, without spectacle? […]

We live in a world increasingly shaped by displacement, by flood, by fire, by force. But when we identify that loss as domicide, we reframe it as intent. The genocide in Gaza, the violence in Los Angeles, the slow deterioration of ecosystems across Pacific Island nations. These are intentional acts of violence connected by the deeper truth that climate justice has never just been about emissions data and temperature targets—important though they are. It’s about power; about who is protected, and who is left behind.”

» From Gaza to LA, the Right to Remain Is Under Attack by Aditi Mayer

👔 The Symbolic Executive

Excellent long read by Ed Zitron that lines up with the concept of Managerialism, which I shared here before. This framing of executives and managers as being symbolic explains, IMO, an increasingly disseminating feeling of meaninglessness in the business world.

“We live in the era of the symbolic executive, when "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where "what's useful" is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work. Our economy is run by people that don't participate in it and our tech companies are directed by people that don't experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers, as the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value. […]

The Chief Executive — who makes over 300 times more than their average worker — is no longer a leadership position, but a kind of figurehead measured on their ability to continually grow the market capitalization of their company. It is a position inherently defined by its lack of labor, the amorphousness of its purpose and its lack of any clear responsibility. […]

Management as a concept no longer means doing "work," but establishing cultures of dominance and value extraction. A CEO isn't measured on happy customers or even how good their revenue is today, but how good revenue might be tomorrow and whether those customers are paying them more. A "manager," much like a CEO, is no longer a position with any real responsibility — they're there to make sure you're working, to know enough about your work that they can sort of tell you what to do, but somehow the job of "telling you what to do" doesn't come with it any actual work, and the instructions don’t need to be useful or even meaningful.

Management has, over the course of the past few decades, eroded the very fabric of corporate America, and I'd argue it’s done the same in multiple other western economies, too.”

» The Era of the Business Idiot by Ed Zitron

🤳 Tiny Gods

This framing is a bit more metaphorical and in the form of a poem, but it’s so well written that I had to share it – and it relates to the “cloud god” piece I shared a while ago. Do let me know if you like this more metaphorical, artsy stuff (or not?), cause I’ve got quite a bit more saved.

“all my friends and I talk about is
getting rid of our phones—
a dystopian dream
dominating dinner conversation,
our phones on the middle
of the table
like candles
like altars
like tiny gods
we are trying not to worship

we talk about quitting
like smokers do—
“next week”
“after this trip”
“when I found the love of my life on a dating app” […]

we dream of flip phones—
clamshells of another life
decorated with glitter and stones and
dangly   little charms
the pixels soft enough to
forgive our youthful acne
and ringtones we bought
by texting MTV […]

somewhere,
there is a version of me
who dared to take the leap
she knows the constellations
by name
her eyes are soft
from looking
outwards […]

and i hate it—
i hate it
this tether
this glass ghost
this thing too big to
understand

i’m tired and
my window to the world
has no curtains”

» all my friends and i talk about is getting rid of our phones by

📈 Numbers

A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:

The Infinite Workday

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🌀 Re-Framings

A few short re-framings for building better systems or worlds that I’ve recently come across:

🌼 Managing Knowledge → Living Knowledge

“For years, I had been building what technologists and lifehackers call a “second brain.” The premise: capture everything, forget nothing. Store your thinking in a networked archive so vast and recursive it can answer questions before you know to ask them. It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage. Etc.

But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories.

And so… Well, I killed the whole thing. […]

PKM systems promise coherence, but they often deliver a kind of abstracted confusion. The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it — and move on. But the insight was never lived. It was stored. Like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away.

Worse, the architecture began to shape my attention. I started reading to extract. Listening to summarize. Thinking in formats I could file. Every experience became fodder. I stopped wondering and started processing. […]

In design, we speak of subtraction as refinement. A sculptor chips away everything that is not the figure. A musician cuts a line that clutters the melody. But in knowledge work, we hoard. We treat accumulation as a virtue.

But what if deletion is the truer discipline?

I don’t think I want a map of everything I’ve ever read. I want a mind free to read what it needs. I want memory that forgets gracefully. I want ideas that resurface not because I indexed them, but because they mattered.

I don’t want to manage knowledge. I want to live it.”

» I Deleted My Second Brain by Joan Westernberg

💪 Avoiding Struggle → Choosing (Meaningful) Struggle

“We've made "work" synonymous with suffering, when it should be synonymous with building. Tending a garden requires effort, but you get to eat the tomatoes. Raising children is exhausting, but you get to watch them become themselves. Creating something meaningful will drain you, but you get to point at it and say, "I made that." […]

Gen Z has been raised on the mantra of "protecting your peace", the idea that anything causing stress or discomfort should be eliminated from your life. This advice, while well-intentioned, has created a generation allergic to necessary friction. […]

But peace isn't the absence of problems, it's the presence of purpose that makes problems worth solving. The happiest people aren't those who've eliminated difficulty from their lives; they're those who've found difficulty worth enduring. […]

Convenience is stealing everything from us if we let it. The friction is where the growth happens. The resistance is where we build strength. Work, real work, will give us fulfillment in ways we never expected, in ways that all the optimization hacks and life shortcuts never could. […]

In nature, adversity isn't the enemy of growth. It's the condition for it.

Ultimately, here's what I think we should tell young people about work: it will be harder than you expect and more rewarding than you can imagine, sometimes on the same day. […]

We owe young people the truth: hard work isn't the tax you pay for living, it's the tuition for a life worth having. Everything good requires work. Discipline trumps motivation. Meaning emerges not from avoiding struggle but from choosing struggle that serves something larger than yourself.”

» why are we lying to young people about work? by

🔄 Systems Change

“I've stopped using the phrase "systems change."

Why? Because it keeps our attention tethered to what’s broken and what’s crumbling. It distracts us with what resists transformation. It seduces us into believing that with enough reform, repair, or finesse, we can redeem a system built upon a foundational worldview of separation, extraction, and control. It channels our focus and our energy on trying to tinker at what was never designed to hold life with sanctity and dignity in the first place. Buckminster Fuller reminded us that we don't transform the world by fighting the old, we do it by building the new, or as I would put it, the (k)new, with such coherence and beauty that the old becomes irrelevant.

The hard truth is this: the old system doesn’t want to be fixed, nor can it. It cannot be changed. In fact, some systems are not meant to be changed, they are meant to be composted. I've stopped trying to refine, prolong and optimize the destructiveness. I am not here for that, that's a waste of energy.

I'm here to remember the future. And remembering is not a concept or an intellectual trick. I am here to build parallel architectures of care, reciprocity, and deep aliveness. I am not here for systems change. I've stopped trying to Trojan Horse my way into the door of someone who doesn't want me there anyway.

I've gotten over my disruption, and gotten into my invitation.”

» LinkedIn Post by Ryan James Kemp

🧬 Frameworks

One small, handy framework to build more regenerative, beautiful, and just systems:

7 Steps to Quietly Exit a System That Wants You Dependent by

🎨 Works

Some hand-picked, particularly thought-provoking and inspiring work:

That’s it for this week’s Rabbit Holes issue!

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Thomas