Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #98

From reality hunger to sustainable = beautiful, the hypernormative, slow-simmer awe, from lectures to conversations, squad wealth, and proof of (no) work

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THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: Reality Hunger | Sustainable = Beautiful | The Hypernormative
🌀 Re-Framings: Slow-Simmer Awe | Speculative Materialism | From Lectures to Conversations
🧬 Frameworks: Squad Wealth
🎨 Works: Proof Of (No) Work | A Student’s Guide To Not Writing With ChatGPT

⏳ Reading Time: 9 minutes

🖼️ Framings

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

🎭 Reality Hunger

In a world in which everything feels increasingly fake people are yearning for deeper connections with other humans, for authenticity and originality. We’re yearning for those who managed to stay extremely human when everyone else hooked up even more of their mind to the machines.

“The game (or perhaps even the art) of chess was ‘disrupted’ by artificial intelligence almost three decades ago. Modern AI programmes make the best chess players look like pathetic amateurs by comparison, but this has done little to diminish the appeal of the game. More people play than ever before. And few chess players in history have achieved the fame of the greatest living player, Magnus Carlsen. Online, millions have watched Carlsen’s greatest matches. Games between computers tend to attract much smaller audiences of dedicated nerds. Many more people have heard of Carlsen than have heard of the chess AI AlphaZero, but Carlsen is vastly the inferior player. […]

Our fascination with art is deeply connected to our fascination with the human personality. […] Alan Bennett puts it perfectly in his play The History Boys:

‘The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.’ […]

It is curious that machine art should have arrived at a time when our cultural obsession with the human personality in art is more powerful than ever. The writer David Shields’ useful phrase ‘reality hunger’ describes the 21st-century yearning for the authentic and the real.

As sales of literary fiction decline, the memoir flourishes. As soap opera viewership slumps, reality television booms. Even the novel itself has succumbed to this trend. Writers like Karl Ove Knausgård, Ben Lerner and Rachel Cusk have pioneered the new form of autofiction – novels that acquire their fascination and authority from their connection to life. […]

In a future flooded with machine-produced content we may place a higher value on human art than ever before.”

» Why human creativity matters in the age of AI by James Marriott

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✨ Sustainable = Beautiful

Sustainability without beauty (think cyberpunk-smartphone-on-wheels type EVs) doesn’t make sense! When something is beautiful, people care about it and take care of it. When something emanates beauty, one can almost feel the care and love that went into it. Beauty, in nature, is an expression of harmony, aliveness and love. Sustainability that doesn’t radiate beauty isn’t sustainability.

“Too often, environmentally conscious companies avoid making their brands and products truly beautiful, either because beauty is not something that they consider important, or because they believe that design is superficial and therefore a part of the problem of our materialistic consumer culture. I've always disagreed with this line of thinking, as I believe that the choice between making things sustainable and making them beautiful is a false dichotomy arising from us misunderstanding the nature of beauty.

The nature of beauty is that nature is beautiful.

Whether it be a flower, a fruit, a sunset, a night sky, a river, a bird or a snow capped mountain top, beauty is everywhere in the natural world. It is nature’s way of communicating that there is an underlying harmony, order and love inherent in the cosmos. Nature is not fickle, vain or superficial, and yet it is filled with exquisite beauty. […]

If we remember the truth of true beauty then we can once again embrace it wholeheartedly in everything that we do. It's hard to describe exactly what that truth is in words, but I do believe that we can feel it.

True beauty is an expression of love. […]

All of this is to say that sustainable design should mirror nature not just in it’s engineering genius and circularity of resources, but in the beauty that it contributes to the world.”

» Should sustainability be beautiful? by Tom Greenwood

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😒 The Hypernormative

Is this the type of human that a Filterworld eventually spits out and then queues for six hours to buy a €15 dubai chocolate bar?

“I mean a new kind of person, a neoliberalized self. This sense of walking around and thinking they're not quite human, they don't feel quite human. They're not engaging with other humans, and they all look exactly the same. Their ability to root out any sort of difference that would mark them as individuals is profound, to the point where they have the same skin, the same kind of buttery tan white person skin. It's the same tone. The clothing has no variation on a theme, even. It's got to be exactly the same.

I call them hypernormative, with this very intense need to conform to one another and to have this belonging. I'm fascinated by them. They operate almost by hive mind. I've noticed that it could be a 70-degree cloudy day, and they would not come out of their apartments. The sun has to be shining for them to come out. The weather, the temperature, everything has to be optimal for them to emerge, and then they emerge all at once.

Their behaviors—and I would hear this from people in different cities—would be the same from city to city. If they move into your building, they're going to behave just like the same kinds of people who came before and take up space in the same kind of way. They're going to sound the same. I'm obsessively fascinated by it. […]

That, to me, is a mind that's been neoliberalized. It is one with capitalism. It has no critique of capitalism, and a lot of people will de-subjectify or dehumanize themselves in order to make space internally for that way of experiencing themselves as a dehumanized product.”

» How the Soul of New York City is Vanishing by Jeremiah Moss

🌀 Re-Framings

A few short reframings that I’ve recently stumbled across:

🥹 From Tech-Vexed To Slow-Simmer Awe

“Today, we are rapidly becoming ‘tech-vexed’ – my word for the gradual yet relentless seduction of computerised life. The COVID-19 pandemic simply accelerated a trend: many of us are now more intimately connected to smartphones than to nonmediated relationships with people. The net result of this insular life is that relationships with ourselves and others take on a new hue. First, we live in a world that is more predictable than the ‘raw’ world of face-to-face relationships. Second, we live in a world that, at least on the surface, is more controllable than the latter; and third, we live in a world that, for many, is far less consequential than a live – physically and emotionally demanding – relationship. […]

So how, from a humanist position, do we approach the tech-vexed, perfection-striving humanity that is fast encroaching right now? What is the antidote to what I’ve called ‘roboticism’, or the transformation of humans into machines?

While there is clearly no antidote as such to this problem, there is a sensibility – also growing in stature – that, in my view, powerfully counters the roboticist trend, and this sensibility is ‘awe’. I think of awe as the humility and wonder, or sense of adventure, toward living. […] It demands we live in the present, spontaneously, and with radical openness. […]

I distinguish between the short-term jolt of awe, or what I call ‘quick-boil’ awe, and the life-changing ‘slow-simmer’ form of awe.

The quick-boil form of awe tends to link with activities such as hiking through woods, falling intensely in love, taking a mind-altering drug, playing a vigorous sport, and travelling to exotic places. The slow-simmer awe, on the other hand, transforms the exhilarating energy of quick-boil awe into something long-lasting – such as staying open to the daunting scenery of every day, making a lifestyle of wonder and discovery, delving deep into a project or craft, and consistently engaging with life’s many-sidedness, whether unveiled in one’s work or love life, in child-rearing, friendships, or the larger community of which one is a part.”

» We need raw awe by Kirk Schneider

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♻️ Speculative Materialism

(via Patrick Tanguay’s Sentiers Newsletter)

“While traditional materialism is rooted in the present, Speculative Materialism – from the Latin ‘speculat’ meaning “observed from a vantage point” – looks to the horizon. Rather than designing materials to last for time immemorial, what about redesigning materials to degrade and be regenerated cyclically over time? […]

Since the 1987 UN report Our Common Future, sustainability has washed into the mainstream, permeating discussions about the environment, production, consumption and disposal. But as waving the green flag becomes an increasingly ubiquitous form of virtue-signalling, sustainability’s potency has become diluted.

Co-author of Cradle-to-Cradle and regenerative designer William McDonough said sustainability often boils down to being “less bad." But Speculative Materialism – underpinned by regenerative design practices – offers a fresh approach, encouraging an imaginative and proactive rethinking of how we can reuse, transform and recycle materials.”

» Speculative Materialism: Redefining Our Relationship With Materials by Alexi Freeman

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💬 From Lectures To Conversations

“Socrates was the last major thinker to rely solely on conversation. After his death, his successors wrote books and gave lectures. That’s what powerful people do. They make decisions. They give orders. They deliver speeches.

But not anymore.

In the aftermath of the election, the new wisdom is that giving speeches from a teleprompter doesn’t work in today’s culture. Citizens want their leaders to sit down and talk. And not just in politics. […]

Now every media outlet is shifting to conversational formats. Podcasting is thriving because of this approach. Many successful YouTubers are doing the exact same thing. Writers (on Substack and elsewhere) are also embracing a more conversational tone.“

» The 6 New Rules of Communicating by Ted Gioia

🧬 Frameworks

Squad Wealth

» Squad Wealth by Sam Hart, Toby Shorin, and Laura Lotti

🎨 Works

Some hand-picked, particularly thought-provoking work:

A Student’s Guide to Not Writing with ChatGPT // Proof of (No) Work (via Marie Dollé) // MOTH (More Than Human Life) Rights

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

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Thomas