Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #104

From jobless-ness to inheritocracy, reification, slumping into stressful lives, from brain rot to brain poisoning, a framework for building the resilience and photos of parallel universes

THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: Jobless-ness // Inheritocracy // Reification
🌀 Re-Framings: Slumping Into Speed & Stress // Brain Rot → Brain Poisoning // Europe’s Blessing
🧬 Frameworks: Building The Resilience
🎨 Works: Parallel Universes

⏳ Reading Time: 11 minutes

🖼️ Framings

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

💼 Jobless-ness

Every person should read this post! That’s it! I had to restrain myself from reposting the whole thing here. So, make sure to click on the link below and read the entire post!

“There are no fucking jobs. WHY ARE THERE NO FUCKING JOBS?

Don’t tell me to go on LinkedIn, Indeed, or my university’s alumni network. Fuck your “job finding resources” links and master docs. Do not tell me to email a million people for “coffee chats” and “informational interviews” where I make a thinly veiled attempt at letting some Gen X person know that I am totally unemployed via bullshit questions about what they like about their industry, what advice they have for breaking in, what is required to succeed. Do not tell me to put all the key phrases of the job description in some invisible-colored text on my resume so the AI bot reading my resume will boost it to the top of my pile. Do not tell me to reach out to former employers, family friends, blah blah blah.

I have done all of this and more. There is nothing you can tell me that I do not know. I’m 24. […]

What I mean is — I am young enough to know all the AI and tech tricks, all the websites (yes, I know about ZipRecruiter), the temp agencies, the recruiting agencies, the stuff about reaching out to everyone for a job. I know about all the industries — advertorial, assistant work, sales, yadda yadda yadda. […]

The only “job finding resource” or “tip” I want at this point is an actual job offer. Or an interview somewhere that isn’t also interviewing 50 other people and probably ultimately just choosing whoever has a “connection” via bloodline/birthright. […]

My other main point is this: we are in such late stage capitalism that even the people, perhaps especially the people, who have done everything right by interning, getting a good degree from a top university, networked, worked hard, are screwed. The only way to get a job now is through a connection, and much of that is timing, luck, and class. […]

Plus I don’t think any of this is morally right. I don’t think I should have to spend my weekend going to “mixers” at different film festivals or screenings just to get a job that barely pays enough for me to make end’s meet. I do not believe in paying thousands of dollars for skills people used to get on the job. I do not believe in having to self-promote myself on five different platforms and work for free and take people out for coffee and email and Zoom chat and schmooze nine hours per day for a job that doesn’t even come with benefits. […]

It feels like every job now expects you to be an expert and perfectly trained, only to pay you $23 per hour. […]

Anyway — all of these thoughts generally bubble up every time I go to apply for a job. Which is not great for my nervous system regulation, or all of humanity.

All of this is to say, and to ask, why there are no jobs. It’s really mind-boggling. And I also want to know:

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

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👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Inheritocracy

Despite what many politicians say and many (especially older) people still believe, we don’t live in a meritocracy anymore in which a degree and hard work (+ that firm handshake) pay off. No, we live in an inheritocracy now! Realizing that narrative clash is crucial to understanding young people’s frustrations and many other things.

“You know the Bank of Mum and Dad when you see it: it’s your friend who seems broke, but always has a safety net, or who suddenly (but discreetly) acquires the deposit for a home. It’s those who stayed with their parents while they saved for a flat, or stuck it out in a profession they were passionate about even though the wages are chronically low. It’s those who do not need to consider the financial costs of having children. It’s those whose grandparents are covering nursery or university fees, with the Bank of Grandma and Grandad already driving an economic wedge between different cohorts in generations Alpha (born between 2010 and 2024) and Z (born in the late 1990s and early 2000s). […]

One academic investigation into the Bank of Mum and Dad found that its beneficiaries tend to frame this considerable financial support not in terms of their own individual privilege, but as evidence of their parents’ hard work and upward mobility. Whereas once parents lived vicariously through their children’s successes, now it seems their kids live vicariously through their parents’ struggles. And there lies the problem.

In recent years, we have rightly widened the conversation about privilege in society. And yet how honest are we about one of the most obvious forces shaping anyone under 45: the presence or absence of a parental safety net? The truth is that we live in an inheritocracy. If you’ve grown up in the 21st century, your opportunities are increasingly determined by your access to the Bank of Mum and Dad, rather than by what you earn or learn. The economic roots of this story go back to the 1980s, but it accelerated after the 2008 financial crisis, as private wealth soared and wage growth stalled. In the 2020s, rather than a meritocracy – where hard work pays off – we have evolved into an inheritocracy, based on family wealth.”

» Bank of Mum and Dad: why we all now live in an ‘inheritocracy’ by Eliza Filby

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🪄 Reification

Reification = ‘The act of changing something abstract (= existing as a thought or idea) into something real’. This framing aligns well with a framework I shared before about the need to move from abstractions from life (the focus of our current paradigm) to expressions of life.

“Postmodernism essentially argued that there are no grand narratives, that each person’s subjectivity holds a different perspective on the world. This is true to an extent. But while postmodernism shifted our perspectives on what constitutes truth, it failed to dismantle power, resulting in a world in which rather than chorus together, society splintered into dissonant calls of “my truth”. Truths which, seemingly, are expected to undermine any collective sense of objectivity. When transmuted from hardcore French theory into mainstream politics, it served to underscore the individual’s right to speak, not our collective duty to listen.

This only served the neoliberal paradigm in which everyone is at odds with everyone else to hoover up limited resources, and the state is expected to stay out of the way because the markets will handle it. It’s like we handed over our collective reasoning to said markets, forgetting that they are nothing more than a construct. There is a word for this in fancy theory: reification. Postmodernism, in its alleged bid to deconstruct material narratives, paved the way to reify concepts, thrusting us all into a world of words where definitions are less important than what we feel about them. […]

Going forward, the fight cannot just be linguistic. It has to be material, relationship-building and grounded. It has to be connected to the many, not just to the self, and has to reveal the world for what it is, not cast spells to make it as we wish it were. It has to be a fight which goes beyond individual identity and “my truth” subjectivities, and towards cohesion, community, and a plurality which weaves together many worlds. […] Until we do that, we are kites in the wind, lost without the ties that bind us.”

» Our world and its postmodern makeover by Rachel Donald

🌀 Re-Framings

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

🫠 Slumping Into Speed & Stress

“A significant chunk of what we call technological ‘progress’ is just a process of slumping. What do I mean by this?

It takes energy to hold posture in the face of gravity, so when I slump in a chair, I’m releasing resistance to gravity. This might be fine in the short-term, but if I stay there for long enough, I’ll get stuck, with my spine warping and my muscles atrophying

Similarly, the gravity of a capitalist system always defaults to acceleration and automation, and the truth is that it takes presence of mind and energy to go against that. Most people don’t have the energy to hold posture like this, so they just release resistance and slump into the latest thing

But here’s the real kicker. Unlike a soft couch, where slumping might bring relaxation, when we collapse into the latest tech, we not only atrophy, but our lives get faster and more stressed.”

» Note by Brett Scott

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☠️ Brain Rot → Brain Poisoning

“Brain rot” was just announced as the 2024 Oxford Word of the Year. Why now, and not any of the last ten years or so? I prefer “brain poisoning,” as the preceding discussion should support—it feels more precise. We are not decaying online so much as being incrementally loaded up with heavy metals like tuna in the ocean over the course of a lifetime, carrying this accumulation inside of us wherever we go.

The “slop” phenomenon suggests that AI could help to euthanize the version of the internet we’ve lived with for decades, turning social media and Google into the wastelands they’ve already started to feel like. At best, this will turn it all into something that runs in the background while we engage in more worthwhile pursuits, away from our screens. But even if that happens, most of us will still effectively be online. We already have too much internet inside of us.”

» The Meme Fossil Record by Drew Austin

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This meme, shared mostly by US techno-optimists, went viral on X. As a European, I felt pissed. The below is, IMO, the best response to it.

🙌 Europe’s Blessing

“Here is an invitation to Europe to stop for a moment, catch its breath and ask: is the AI race really one that Europe should run, at least on Silicon Valley’s terms? Are we sure that what Europe needs to thrive is more AI everywhere, and now?

I don’t think so. US-style digitalization is not a desirable model to follow. It has concentrated untold power in the hands of a few men—the most extreme of which, Musk, abuses his riches and media platform to push authoritarianism both at home and in countries like Germany and the UK. Expect more to follow.

Musk-style excess is not a bug of US tech capitalism, but a feature. The delusions of grandeur, boundless techno-optimism, a competitive-aggressive spirit, and oligopolistic tendencies are all built into it. The last thing Europe should want is to copy that model. […]

Up until now it was considered a European weakness that we don’t have our own version of US Big Tech. Watching how the most powerful men from politics and business in America have now conspired to unleash profit-driven digitization on the United States, we should think again. Maybe the absence of European Big Tech along American lines is a blessing, not a curse. […]

Seen that way, the US is not a tech leader to catch up with, but a cautionary tale that shows Europe why a fundamentally different approach to digitization is necessary. Maybe Big AI isn’t Europe’s future, and shouldn’t be.”

» Losing the AI race may be a blessing by Daniel Mügge

🧬 Frameworks

✊ Building The Resilience

“‘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

by Spencer R. Scott

🎨 Works

Some Today, only one hand-picked, particularly thought-provoking work by Uğur Gallenkuş: Parallel Universes of War and Peace

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

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Thomas