Rabbit Holes 🕳 #10
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Rabbit Holes 🕳 #10
From automated creativity to care work, degrowth visions and fans becoming creators
We’re hitting a little milestone today as this is already the 10th edition of Rabbit Holes. Whoop! 🥳
Before we get into it, I just quickly wanted to share that I am currently working on a lot of new ideas for Creative Destruction 👀. All in all, I want to make this thing even more exciting and useful for all of you. Going forward, Creative Destruction will become even more the (!!) place for new narratives and perspective-shifting ideas that help you build a better world. Sorry, but I’m just super excited about what’s to come! 🙃
But now, let’s get into this week’s Rabbit Holes:
Rabbit Holes 🕳
👗 AI Fashion Using DALL-E
👁️ Automated creativity doesn’t mean that AI will make artists or designers obsolete. Rather, these tools will empower artists and designers to become even more important and effective. 👁️
Two weeks ago, I highlighted how DALL-E can be used for urban design, then I came across the following tweets showcasing DALL-E’s potential for fashion and entertainment.
More examples → Paul Trillo’s Twitter
👵 The Rise of Care Work
👁️ How can we adequately value and reward ‘caring’, whether that’s caring for children, aging parents or oneself? 👁️
“But remote work could also empower. Our aging population, the spread of technology that’s depressing our youth, and increased economic stress on young families all need significant investment in one thing: care.
I believe we need a new classification of employees: care workers. People who are caregivers for children or aging parents, or who find themselves in circumstances where they need to provide self-care. People struggling with mental health issues or unable to find affordable housing near work might also qualify. Companies should make a forward-leaning investment in workers fitting this new classification to ensure their career trajectory holds steady while they’re providing care. The option of remote work makes these arrangements more feasible.”
Switzerland’s time bank system might be an interesting approach here:
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Read More → Scott Galloway
🔮 Five Visions of Degrowth
👁️ Degrowth becomes powerful when it transforms from a critique to a solution, proposing practical, quick-and-easy to implement ideas that are better than the status quo. 👁️
We’ve looked at degrowth already in my post Degrowth As A Business Model?. This here is a nice overview of five degrowth visions from the recently published book The Future is Degrowth:
“The institution-oriented current ‘aims to overcome the political fixation on growth and the transformation of previously growth-dependent and growth-driving institutions through reforms and policies of sufficiency.’
The sufficiency-oriented current aims ‘to radically reduce resource consumption through the creation of local and decommercialized subsistence economies, do-it-yourself initiatives, and ‘voluntary simplicity’ and thus focuses on practices outside the consumer-driven capitalist market in the here and now.’
The commoning or alternative economy current focuses on ‘the construction of alternative infrastructures, cooperatives based on solidarity, and non-capitalist forms of collective production and livelihood.’
The feminist current seeks ‘to place reproductive activities and care – which form the basis for society and life in general – at the centre of the economy and economic thinking and aims to overcome the separation between production and reproduction.’
The post-capitalist and alter-globalization currents strive ‘to undo the domination of the market, socialize key sectors of the economy, and reduce social relations of domination.’”
Read more → A Guide To A World Beyond Capitalism
👨💻 The Future Of Work? Cooperative Work!
👁️ With all that’s happening out there, and with the future being so gloomy, it actually becomes easier to imagine a world without work, or at least a world defined by cooperative work. 👁️
“What if we abolished the institution of work? […] What if society was not organized around wage labor, but something else? And what would that something else be?”
“We have been manipulated into maintaining capitalism—and correlating this maintenance with our own survival—for so long that the idea of people working to help each other survive sounds improbable and impossible.
[But] what would we get in exchange for our selfless efforts to maintain each other’s existence? What would be the trade-off, if not money?
Self-sustaining societies—such as the Zapatistas in Mexico, who have organized their own cooperative economy; developed autonomous justice, education, and health care systems; and created a bottom-up political decision-making process—are proof we can lasso the abolition of work to the possibilities of reality.”
“It’s interesting that removing work from the equation makes a lot of our current definitions of success and happiness quite meaningless. It could be very powerful to imagine what happiness could be if it’s not just survival, success, capital. If we didn’t have to fight for the basics, I really have no idea what we should or could do instead, but I would love to find out.”
Read more → Yes Magazine
🧑🤝🧑 Fans Are The New Creators
👁️ There is lots of bullshit happening within web3 but it also holds so many opportunities for creating better community structures and thereby kinda links to the idea of a more cooperative-driven economy. 👁️
“The distinction between fan and creator is fading in relevance in web3. Fans are creating derivative works that become just as widely recognized as the original, or even creating work that becomes officially recognized as part of the canon.”
“In web3 creative projects, underlying ownership of tokens gives fans a built-in business model and incentivizes derivative creation. In contrast to web2 fans doing work for free, in web3, fan-owners have exposure to the success of their labor through tokens: as the digitally scarce thing they hold becomes more well-known, its value increases.”
Read more → Li Jin
That’s it for this week!
Thomas