Rabbit Holes #1

From nametagging (👁👄👁) to physical-remote jobs, dandelions and futurephobia

This week, I am very excited to introduce a new format to this newsletter that will become quite common from now on. I call it Rabbit Holes.

Rabbit Holes will be quite short and snappy issues in which I’ll share a curation of 5 content pieces I’ve spotted lately. These could be articles, podcasts, tweets, videos, or just a stat or quote. All will however link to the core idea of Creative Destruction, namely, to explore new worlds and perspectives in order to build a better world.

So let’s go down the rabbit holes!

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Rabbit Holes

📛 The Power of Nametagging (📜,📜), 👁👄👁

“We yearn to be part of something bigger than ourselves. In an age of pandemic isolation, remote work, secularization, fraying local community ties, and a common sense of powerlessness, affiliation affords security and purpose.”

“By adding the emoji emblems of your movement to your name on social media, every action and even your very existence serves to grow its membership. You could define this as “nametagging”, like hashtagging for the namespace.”

“I expect that nametagging will increasingly permeate mainstream organizations. I’ve taken to abbreviating the venture fund I work for SignalFire as 📶🔥, and I’ve seen Alexis Ohanian use 7️⃣7️⃣6️⃣ to denote his fund Seven Seven Six. Perhaps the whole concept will lose its cool if brands like 🎯, 🧘‍♀️🍋, and 🍔👑 corporatize the tactic.”

🔨 Now Physical Jobs Are Going Remote Too

“…the continued challenges posed by the virus and a deepening labor shortage—combined with advances in technologies such as AI and virtual reality—are allowing a small but growing number of physical jobs to go remote as well.”

“‘There's just no way this isn't going to explode as a category,’ says Matt Beane, an assistant professor at UC Santa Barbara who studies human-robot workplace collaboration. As industrial machines become more capable and connected, Beane says, the number and variety of these jobs will grow. Beane says new forms of remote physical work may involve supervising multiple autonomous machines, similar to how one person oversees several AI chatbots simultaneously.”

💉 TikTok = Digital Crack

Andrej Karpathy @karpathy

TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack. First time I feel attacked by AI in the brain.

Keep in mind that Andrej is the Director of AI at Tesla and probably one of the leading AI experts in the world. Also, in 2018, the average user spent 6 hours per month on TikTok. In 2021, it was 26 hours 🤯…

💾 Peak Nostalgia: When Gen Z Are Becoming Futurephobic

“The prevailing narratives [about the future] aren’t about the opportunity to build a better world, but about trying to reverse the damage we’ve already done, not something that inspires a good deal of hope and optimism.”

“…when you step back and take stock of the options available to Gen Z about the type of future they want to subscribe to, they are not only limited, but profoundly uninspiring. It’s either:

1. Embark on a grueling losing battle with pandemics, climate change, and social and political inequality;

2. Give up on earth in pursuit of limitless growth in new worlds, while lining the pockets of billionaires; or

3. Put your fingers in your ears, get dressed up in butterfly clips and lowrise jeans, and listen to Britney”

🌼 Dandelions = Sustainable Rubber

New shoes from Cole Haan and tires from Goodyear have one thing in common: They are partly made out of dandelions! More specifically, they are made out of the milky white substance—which is actually latex—inside a dandelion.

“Inside a lab at an Ohio State University research center, scientists are genetically engineering a dandelion that could soon be grown in large amounts in hydroponic farms. The goal: to harvest latex from the plant’s roots, which could help supply rubber for tires, flooring, toys, and tens of thousands of other products that currently use rubber from plantations that displace tropical rainforests.”

“….Rubber plantations have been among the greatest drivers of deforestation. Between 2000 and 2016,  land dedicated to rubber plantations doubled to 12.9 million hectares. […] The neat thing about dandelions [is that] they’re a renewable resource that grows dense and fast,” Maddocks says. “They grow in areas where you couldn’t farm other products. You don’t need to cut down big groves of trees to grow them.”

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That’s it for this week!

Enjoyed this?! Then don’t forget to like and share! 😉

Thomas