Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #100

From ecotrauma to everything is a selfie, mechanized minds, beyond offline, lo-fab, from users to choosers, a self-owning house, nyc garbage and calm tech

Dec 11, 2024

We’ve got something to celebrate:

This is the 100th edition of Rabbit Holes! 🥳

It’s crazy! Since April 2022 I’ve been sending out a rabbit holes issue almost every week. And even right after sending out the first ones, this format became a subscriber favorite. At some point, people even referred to the newsletter as the Rabbit Holes newsletter instead of calling it Creative Destruction 😅.

With so many interesting ideas in all those issues, the archive (coupled with Substack’s search function) has become an invaluable database for me whenever I do research for my deep dive posts, reports, and my freelance work. If you also want to use it that way, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Here are a few notes of some of my paid subscribers:

Alright, without any further ado, let’s get into this week’s Rabbit Holes – this one is 🔥:

THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: Ecotrauma // Everything Is A Selfie // Mechanized Minds
🌀 Re-Framings: Beyond Offline & Wilderness // Lo-Fab // From Users to Choosers
🧬 Frameworks: Free House
🎨 Works: Visualising AI // NYC Garbage // CalmTech

⏳ Reading Time: 10 minutes

🖼️ Framings

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

😓 Ecotrauma

There are so many great lines in this piece by philosopher and ecologist Timothy Morton that you should definitely read the entire thing. Below is his very unique framing of ecotrauma.

“Think about the biggest trauma of all, the one called Universe, otherwise known as the Big Bang. Everything around you, your hands, the door, the smell of dust after rain, is the current state of that explosion. Everything around you right now is, among other things, the wavefront of the Big Bang. To exist is to inhabit overlapping ripples of trauma. An event is a splash or an explosion, not a dot. It’s in motion. What is shocking about trauma is the damage it does to an idea that is itself damaging, the idea that time is a line made up of a succession of points. This idea of time as a line, indeed as an arrow, is very much embedded in the colonialist narrative of historical progress, embodied (for example) in the idea of the dialectic of Hegel — history moves forward — and destroyed in the idea of Darwinian evolution based on random mutation.
So, in a sense, the biosphere as such is itself a trauma. Oxygen is a trauma if you are an anerobic bacterium, an explosion that is still continuing. It began about three billion years ago. Do you breathe oxygen? It means that this, the Great Oxygen Catastrophe, is not just a dot on a line on Wikipedia. It’s happening now. So, in a sense, ecotrauma is simply the awareness that we inhabit a biosphere. They don’t call a geological period the Cambrian Explosion for nothing.
Ecotrauma, then, is the shock felt by people who have lived according to lines and arrows realizing that time and events and being alive isn’t about lines and arrows at all, and that lines and arrows have done a lot to destroy the biosphere and to summon the very trauma that is now haunting them.”

» On Ecotrauma by Timothy Morton

🤳 When Your Phone Is A Mirror, Everything Is A Selfie

The title of the piece is just 😚🤌. Filterwold, echo chambers, age of average, everything is a remix….whatever you wanna call it. This perception is as present in the zeitgeist as it has ever been, which makes me think that we’ve reached a peak that will ultimately (or finally) result in a ravenous hunger for the original, the different, the novel, and the innovative….the stuff that un-selfies us.

“Things have become inextricable from each other. Not only is everything a reference to something else but something can be a thing only because its relation to a previous thing. […]
Maybe artists repeat themselves not because they can no longer innovate. Perhaps it’s because we, the consumer, can no longer metabolize innovation. We are turned off by change. The edges of novelty are too tough on our tummies and we’d rather have something we can easily digest.
The internet operates this way, too. We are served things not because they are great but because it is believed that we will enjoy them from our previous engagements. On Twitter/X, I like one image of Drew Starkey at the Queer premiere and all of a sudden my whole feed is pictures of Drew Starkey. […]
It’s all reference, zero novelty. It’s kinda like the thing but it's not. We blend like the days, a mashed potato of online puppetry. […]
Another risk to the duplication of the internet is that you can become walled in by mirrors of your own engagement. Your thoughts become reconfirmed a zillion times and suddenly you’re filled in a room stuffed with a thousand Drew Starkeys. What a dooming scenario, isn’t it? This, of course, creates a false scale where you believe the world reflects the circular references of your algorithm. […]
Life can be so quiet when you don’t have something available to numb your thoughts with voices that sound like your own. When you have to rawdog the world around you, listen soberly and use your own voice. I hear the rattle of pipes above my head. I hear the garbled tow of car tires on the pavement outside of my house. And I hear the voices of the neighbours, for once and for all, and the days begin to look different.”

» When Your Phone Is A Mirror, Everything Is A Selfie by Brendon Holder

⚙️ Mechanized Minds

Wow! Reading this piece is essential if you’re into AI or the debate between re-humanization and trans-humanization. What it’s done for me is to weave various thoughts I had together into a bigger theory, one that I might soon share with you in a deep dive. 😉

“‘If the machine can take over everything man can do, and do it still better than us, then what is a human being, what are you?’ [- Jiddu Krishnamurti] […]
To him [Jiddu Krishnamurti], the idea that machines could mimic human thought wasn’t just intriguing — it was a revelation with deep psychological and spiritual punch. If our minds can be recreated by a machine, then maybe our thinking is more robotic than we’d like to admit. And that’s a reality that shakes us right down to our human core.
It’s not that Krishnamurti saw the mind as anything close to a computer. […] But he worried we were selling ourselves short, letting our minds get stuck in mechanical routines like memory and knowledge-crunching. A mind that only works this way, he warned, would be easily copied, even replaced by a machine.
So, the real question isn’t whether AI will develop humanlike minds — it’s whether we’re slipping into machinelike minds ourselves.
“The computers are challenging you,” he said, “and you have to meet the challenge.” To him, meeting it meant doing everything we could to make our minds different from artificial intelligence — a call to rise above the routines that risk turning us into reflections of our own machines. […]
Understanding the machine-like quality of thought, he says, is the “very source of intelligence,” the spark of a unique, deeper awareness.”

» Mechanized minds: AI’s hidden impact on human thought by Shai Tubali

🌀 Re-Framings

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

📴 Beyond Offline & Wilderness

“True disconnection, like true wilderness, is an empty goal. Whether we have shunned social media or not, the internet does not cease to exist as a driving force in the world, any more than ecological systems cease to shape our lives the minute we reach the end of the forest trail and hop back in the car. […]
In fact, abandoning the idea of the online-offline binary is the only way to meaningfully engage with the question of how we can build a world that is fairer, more conducive to more happiness for more people.
As Cronon writes, the idea of “wilderness” corners us into a deep pessimism: By telling ourselves humans have no place in nature, we relinquish the possibility of living harmoniously with wider ecological systems. We’ll never tackle the global ecological crises we face by preserving a few little pockets of “undisturbed nature” when some of the biggest drivers of ecological damage — climate change, biodiversity loss — don’t respect spatial or temporal boundaries. […]
The most exciting aspect of giving up mega-narratives like “the offline” or “the wilderness” is the promise of what might rush in to fill their place. By doing away with binary understandings of escape and retreat, connection and disconnection, we edge toward a much richer, more complex picture, in which human, ecological and technological systems are mutually co-determined, and in which everyone and everything is a bit responsible for everything else.”

» The Great Offline by Lauren Collee

📍 From Global Supply Chains to Lo-Fab

“At its most basic, Lo-Fab is a model for local fabrication anchored in bioregions. Its core principles, as developed by MASS, are to hire locally, source regionally, train where you can and invest in human dignity.
It is this final principle of ‘human dignity’ that propels Lo-Fab from supply chain management into a proposition for reorganising society at large. Dignity here speaks of our universal human rights; to live in a sustainable environment, to have access to a flourishing life.
MASS projects begin by asking: who lives here, how do they build, what materials and skills are abundant in this landscape? The construction materials and methods for a project are then drawn from the specifics of a place and its people. This results not only in a physical building, but a network of bioregional livelihoods bound together around a structure. The success of Lo-Fab is measured using MASS’s design metric of handprint/footprint which weighs minimised carbon footprint against maximised hand-built materials and methods – be that in the context of Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) or the United States. […]
By rooting a project within a landscape and its communities, ‘projects move beyond just issues of energy use and efficiency, to holistically design the project ecosystem, including an entire supply chain that is sustainable, resilient, and regenerative’.”

» Lo-Fab by Cher Potter

🤔 From Users to Choosers

“Do you see your software? Do you see how it influences how you run meetings, brainstorm ideas, fulfill your responsibilities, and communicate with others? Do you see how its text boxes, radio buttons, tabs, search results, and menus train you to think? Do you see it, or do you just use it? […]
We largely see software as tools of our own agency. The onboarding instructions, help docs, and customer support seem to exist to help us do what we want to do. In reality, they exist to shape our behavior to fit the tool. If we can't change the code, we must change ourselves or our aims. […]
These apps are tools of power that masquerade as tools of agency. […]
If we want to experience the positive impacts of software more often and resist its harmful ones, then we need to see it. We must be consciously aware of what it enables and what it disables. We must be intentional about the norms we establish with its use. Most importantly, we need to ask what's best for us and the people we work with before we consider software and its features. […]
There is no "right" or "best" software for X, Y, Z tasks. There is software that enables you to work the way you want to work and do the things you want to do. And there is software that doesn't. If I start with cultivating awareness of my own needs and desires, I’ll have an easier time choosing software that works for me. […]
Whenever possible, we need to see the software for what it is and decide whether its assumptions, biases, and incentives are the ones we want to incorporate into our lives and work. We need to be choosers more often than users.”