Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #101

From our consumption-first culture to age apartheid, cozy tech, rethinking inequality, a walkable internet, learning from echolocation, more-than-human design, paid climate leave and soot.

Hey all,

This is the last Rabbit Holes of 2024, but not the last post of this year. On Friday, I’ll share a brief recap or, let’s say, best-of of this year: my top posts of 2024, the most resonating rabbit holes, the (re-)framings that will help you make sense of and thrive in 2025, and maybe a bit more.

But now, enjoy this Rabbit Holes issue #101:

THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: Consumption-First Culture // Age Apartheid // Cozy Tech
🌀 Re-Framings: Rethinking Inequality // Walkable Internet // Echolocation
🧬 Frameworks: More-Than-Human Design
🎨 Works: SOOT // Paid Climate Leave // Feed The Planet // Oosterworld

⏳ Reading Time: 8 minutes

🖼️ Framings

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

🛍️ Consumption-First Culture

Interesting framing illustrating how consumption has become the go-to for everything in our lives. Faced with a problem, we immediately resort to consumption, filling our brains with all sorts of information and slop, consequently preventing us from thinking ourselves. Being busy with consuming, we’re atrophying our “producing muscles.”

“There is a new lifestyle imposed on almost the entire world, willingly or unwillingly, perhaps by powerful people or by many small people that want to be powerful, which somehow affects all ordinary people: a consumption-oriented life. Fast consumption, constant consumption, more consumption. […]

When I have a problem, technical or other, the first thing I do is research the solution. As a result, I don’t get enough chance to think about my problem, let alone produce a solution, and I don’t fully understand the problem.

I’ve “consumed” what I should do and how I should do it many times from different people. With all this information occupying my brain, I no longer had the energy and resources to produce a tangible output. […]

When I’m focused solely on consuming, my ability to produce naturally decreases.”

» digital consumption keeps me from getting better at my job by sibervepunk

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🔞 Age Apartheid

Apartheid is a strong word, but when you look at how we’ve built systems – often driven by well-intentioned policies (e.g. restricting child labor), of course – which increasingly separated us by age, apartheid actually becomes a quite adequate term.

In 19th century America, every major aspect of daily life was age integrated. Older and younger people worked side by side in the fields of an agrarian economy. Multigenerational households were the norm. Even those one-room schoolhouses of yore frequently found children and adults learning to read together under the same roof. Indeed, there was little awareness of age itself. People didn’t celebrate birthdays. Most would be hard-pressed even to recall how old they were.

But in the early decades of the 20th century, the drive for efficiency and standardization that accompanied industrialization precipitated a radical reshuffling of American life. A new set of laws and institutions began putting young people together with young people, and older people together with other older people. Gradually the generational twains ceased to meet, and by the end of the 20th century, America had come to approximate what economics professor Andrew Scott, co-author of The 100-Year Life, describes as a state of "age apartheid."

This separation by age has left us ill-equipped for today’s world, where people are living longer and society is increasingly multigenerational. It has contributed to widespread social issues like ageism, generational enmity, and loneliness. Just as troubling, we’re missing out on the many opportunities for individuals to support one another, and bring the talents of young and old to the task of improving life for all.

With more Americans over 60 than under 18 for the first time in US history, it’s time to reverse this situation in ways that both blunt the ills of age segregation and better realize the benefits of intergenerational interdependence.

» Overcoming Age Segregation by Marc Freedman & Trent Stamp

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🧸 Cozy Tech

I actually don’t mind things becoming more cozy. However, the problem with this trend is that it’s all about shifting even more inward. Isolation is redefined as coziness, shifting from unhealthy to healthy, weird to cute, and lonely to comfy.

“Meditative video games such as the Sims or Minecraft have long offered players a form of immersive escapism into worlds of their own making. Stardew Valley, with its now famous pixelated barns and crops, was first released in the twenty-tens, a decade that also saw the rise of hygge, a Scandinavian stylized coziness to combat the darker seasons. Luxury candles and weighted blankets became millennial status symbols. But the popularity of #cozygaming represents a new ideal of technologically enabled self-soothing, both onscreen and off. The world-weary pursuit of comfort has filtered from video games to other forms of gadgetry and entertainment, with each new video and accessory designed to foster a sensory environment of unrelenting harmoniousness. As the physical world becomes more alienating, we build ourselves benign parallel universes to burrow into. The archetypal cozy bedroom becomes a form of virtual reality. […]

Social media in its original form reflected an urge to connect with other people living their lives somewhere else in the real world. The coziness trend suggests that the Internet and artificial intelligence can lead us ever inward. In the cozy era, our screens and the related accoutrements of digital life fulfill all of our emotional and sensory needs. […]

#Coziness, in a way, stylizes isolation, making it look desirable.”

» The Fantasy of Cozy Tech by Kyle Chayka

🌀 Re-Framings

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

⚖️ From Production To Consumption Inequality

“Our views about inequality are stuck in the previous century. In the 20th Century, income distribution was a function of productivity. And since individual productivity was constrained, so was inequality. […]

In our world, the distribution of productivity is no longer normal. Someone can come up with a billion-dollar idea in five minutes, while a team can spend a whole year coding a project that ends up completely worthless. Even worse, the prevalence of network effects means that two people can produce exactly the same thing, but one will become a huge success while the other will remain obscure. Across more professions and industries, the distribution of productivity is becoming increasingly skewed, with a few individuals or teams producing outsized results while the majority contribute more modestly.

Does this mean we should accept extreme inequality? No. However, we need to start thinking about inequality in a new way. Currently, too many of our efforts are still focused on pushing everyone back to the 20th Century and making everyone equally productive. […]

Instead of focusing on the inequality of production, we need to focus on the inequality of consumption. We can't make everyone equally productive, but we can ensure everyone has access to good housing, education, healthcare, entertainment, and opportunities for self-fulfillment.”

» It's Time to Rethink Inequality by Dror Proleg

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🚶 Walkable Cities Internet

“Instead of subdividing into smaller communities and fiefdoms, the way real cities do, the internet has actually coalesced since its early days. A few sites (Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, WeChat, TikTok, etc) each serve over a billion users. Smaller communities like forums and blogs have largely been absorbed into platforms like Reddit, Discord, and Medium. In this way the internet has expanded vertically instead of horizontally. As more people arrived it did not sprout new human-scale neighborhoods — instead it became a megalopolis where billions of people spend their lives within a small handful of corporate mega-towers. […]

The problem isn’t the algorithm that dictates what you see. It’s not about shadow banning or free speech or wokeness. No, the problem is that the virtual world outside of Social Media’s mega-malls is so barren that it’s hardly worth planting one’s own flag in the sand. In a city without public spaces or public services, benign capitalism starts to look a whole lot like fascism. […]

I’m fascinated by Urban Planning. On the surface it’s just a pile of zoning codes and sewer maps, but behind all of that is a dastardly plot to improve the lives of residents by simply tweaking their surroundings. And it works! Well-designed walkable cities have been shown to make people healthier, wealthier, more independent, more social, more upwardly-mobile, and happier overall.

Good urban planning doesn’t always require fancy new tech (ie. gadgetbahn). Some of its best tools are decidedly primitive: concrete bollards for bike lanes, wooden shelters for outdoor dining, flashing lights at crosswalks, literal trees. The trick is to be strategic, to look broadly at the needs of a community and identify simple ways to strengthen it.

I believe it’s possible to do the same with the internet, but only if it’s treated like the public space it is. Only if individuals, non-profits, and governments step up to improve it.”

» The Internet’s Lonely Urban Design by Keaton Brandt

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🧏‍♀️ Echolocation As Mindfulness

“The dominant way of understanding mindfulness seems to center on the individual — referring to a heightened sense of awareness of someone being and moving in/as their body. So I love how Alexis speaks of echolocation as a more expansive mindfulness — becoming more tuned in to how the sounds we put out, and the actions we take, then “bounce” and ripple back to us.

‘It’s a way of understanding space through echo — the ways that the sounds we make bounce back to us. Then we have a sense of the shape, of how far it is to the nearest stone formation, of how deep a certain area in the water might be.

It helps marine mammals, most of whom at some point have a reason to find each other and create a shared map of space.

If I could be more mindful of the space I'm in, physically, but also in every other way, the very sound I make could help teach me in the way it comes back to me: How quickly to move, whether I should slow down, who else is here.

That's a very different way of relating to life than what I've been socialized into in my colonial education, which is to say, ‘Just go forward. If there's something in your way, you're going to just have to knock it out of the way.’ It's not about mindfulness of space. It's not about listening to our impact. It's just this kind of linear drive towards… what?

So, I do think that there's a lot of listening that we need to do.’ – [Alexis Pauline Gumbs]”

» Echolocation as a practice of collective care, ft. Alexis Pauline Gumbs by UPROOTED

🧬 Frameworks

A Manual For More-Than-Human Design

by Future Observatory Journal & Studio Ossidiana

🎨 Works

Some hand-picked, particularly thought-provoking work:

SOOT // Paid Climate Leave // Feed The Planet // Oosterworld

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

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Thanks for supporting my work! 😊

Thomas