Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #106

From the death of "I don't know" to a world full of megaphones, nobody caring, shaping narratives, retribution → restoration, measureship → leadership and a universal basic nutrient income

THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: The Death of "I Don't Know" // Attention As The End Itself // Nobody Cares
🌀 Re-Framings: Responding to Narratives → Shaping Narratives // What Do You Do? → What Do You Like To Do? // Retribution → Restoration
🧬 Frameworks: Measureship → Leadership
🎨 Works: Solarpunk Island // Universal Basic Nutrient Income // Go-Op

⏳ Reading Time: 10 minutes

🖼️ Framings

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

🫤 The Death Of “I Don’t Know”

Have you seen the ridiculous movie Idiocracy? I'm not sure if Idiocracy is our future, but what I know is that we are increasingly dehumanizing ourselves. Technology and its cultural implications (e.g. acceleration, optimization, alienation) lead to a severe loss of what it means to be human!

“My sense is that we are witnessing an extinction—not of a species, but of a concept. The phrase “I don’t know” is vanishing. Ask an AI any question, and it will deliver an answer—polished, articulate, and brimming with confidence. No hesitation, no uncertainty, just a seamless flow of knowledge.

But here’s the paradox: Does this newfound access to instant, hyper-fluent information actually make us smarter—or just more certain?

Socrates believed wisdom began with admitting ignorance. But what happens in a world where we never have to admit ignorance at all? Where we outsource uncertainty to machines designed to sound right—even when they’re not?

The deeper question isn’t just what we know, but how we know. If intelligence is no longer measured by the depth of our understanding but by the speed of our retrieval, are we truly expanding our cognitive potential—or simply surrendering to the illusion of knowing? […]

The original Google Effect—sometimes referred to as cognitive offloading—taught us that when information is readily available, we remember where to find it rather than the content itself. Now, AI is evolving this phenomenon—moving beyond facts and into the realm of interpretation, synthesis, and analysis. […] We risk outsourcing the cognitive process itself, not just the retrieval of knowledge. […]

What happens when an entire generation grows up in a world where uncertainty is rare, where every question is met with an immediate, confident answer? […]

If we trade the struggle of deep thinking for the convenience of instant knowledge, do we risk replacing wisdom with mere fluency? […]

Perhaps our challenge is not just learning how to use AI, but learning when not to.”

» The Death of "I Don't Know" by John Nosta

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📢 Attention As The End Itself

This is a very insightful article about today’s attention economy. The problem is that most of us still don’t get this. The media, journalists, researchers, and all sorts of people still don't fully understand that attention and spectacle beat argument every time (unfortunately). However, as I’ve pointed out in my latest deep-dive post, The 2025 Stack, we are entering a slightly new phase of this, what I call Hyperreality. 

“The reality is that everywhere you look, there is no longer any formal set of institutions to force public attention on a topic, no basic rules for who will speak when and who will listen.

Under these conditions, the need for attention becomes exclusive; it swallows debate, it swallows persuasion, it swallows discourse whole. Attention ascends from a means to an end to the end itself. If you can’t be heard, it doesn’t matter what you say. And right now it’s both easier than ever to shout and harder than ever to be heard. The incentives of the attention age create a new model for public debate in which attention is its own end, to be grabbed by any means necessary. […]

In competitive attention markets, amusement will outcompete information, and spectacle will outcompete arguments. The more easily something attracts our attention, the lower its cognitive load, the less friction there is for us to be drawn to it. […]

As the old models for how to win attention and how to use it erode, we are left with a struggle for attention itself, a war of all against all, in every moment. Despite being embedded in the attention age, despite our lamentations of its effects, and our phone addictions, and our addled, distracted mental states, I think we all still retain an outdated model of how public conversation happens. We are still thinking in terms of “debate” – a back-and-forth, or a conversation, or discussion. […]

We have a country full of megaphones, a crushing wall of sound, the swirling lights of a 24/7 casino blinking at us, all part of a system minutely engineered to take our attention away from us for profit. Under these conditions anything resembling democratic deliberation seems not only impossible but increasingly absurd, like trying to meditate in a strip club. The promise of the information age was unparalleled access to every single last bit of human knowledge at every moment, and the reality is a collective civic mental life that permanently teeters on the edge of madness.”

» The loudest megaphone: how Trump mastered our new attention age by Chris Hayes

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😎 Nobody Cares

This is an excellent rant about a growing careless-less in our societies that reminds me of Accountability Sinks, Care, Not Control, and last week’s Agent of Change → Agent of Care. Maybe, behind all the different major crises that we’re facing lies only one foundational crisis: the care crisis and the subsequent rise of antisociality and narcissism (screams deep dive…🧐).

“Why does nobody care about anything? The world is full of stuff that could be excellent with just 1% more effort. But people don't care. […]

Ever used a piece of software that's buggy as hell, looks bad, but still costs money, presumably because the company behind it has found some regulatory capture to justify their existence? The programmer who wrote it probably doesn't care. Their manager definitely doesn't care. The regulators don't care. […]

The McDonald's touch-screen self-order kiosk takes 27 clicks to get a meal. They try to up-sell you 3 times. Just let me pay for my fucking burger, Jesus Christ. The product manager, the programmer, the executives. None of these people care. […]

People don't pick up after their dogs. The guy at the gym doesn't re-rack the weights. The lady at the grocery store leaves the cart in the middle of the parking lot. They. Do. Not. Care.

I could continue in this vein for another few pages, but it would be boring and you get the point. We are surrounded by antisocial bastards.

Some of them like the people who don't pick up after their dogs are legitimately just assholes. Others, like the bureaucrats in the city who mess up our lives in more indirect ways are more victims of The System. But they are still guilty of lacking the personal agency to fight it or leave in protest, and I still — potentially unjustly — condemn them. […]

But I don't think this is a full explanation. Most people aren't assholes, they merely won't go out of their way to add to the world. And I can feel myself getting pulled in that direction.”

» Nobody Cares by Grant Slatton

🌀 Re-Framings

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

🏗️ Responding to Narratives → Shaping Narratives

“Fascism offers a clear, emotionally compelling narrative – a return to "law and order," a scapegoat for every crisis, a vision of power and domination. The Left, in contrast, often struggles to articulate a bold, unified alternative, falling into reactive, defensive, or utopian messaging that fails to connect with the daily struggles of working-class people. We cannot afford to remain on the defensive. Too often, we face a false choice between pragmatism and radicalism, between incremental wins and transformative demands. We must reject this binary. Our task is not to water down our vision but to make it irresistible.

When communicating, ask yourself: What immediate, material demand can people rally behind? How does this connect to a larger systemic shift? What is the long-term vision we are working toward? […]

Rather than staying on the defensive, we must set the terms of the debate, shaping public consciousness instead of responding to right-wing attacks. Above all, our messages must be emotionally compelling – because facts alone don’t move people, stories do.

This is not just a communications challenge – it is a power struggle. We are in an ideological contest for the future. Every day, we navigate a landscape saturated with competing narratives – messages designed to shape our perceptions, define our possibilities, and dictate the limits of social and political change. To remain worthy competitors in this fight for the interests of future generations, we must do more than react to the moment; we must actively and radically shape the social norms and rules that govern our lives across all domains of power. To defeat fascism and build a mass politics of liberation, we must control the story.”

» The Left’s Rhetorical Assignment by Shanelle Matthews

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💂‍♂️ What Do You Do? → What Do You Like To Do?

Simone Stolzoff explores the problem with defining yourself by your job — and shows what it takes to reclaim your time and sense of meaning beyond the office, beyond the economic value, and beyond the status games.

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❤️‍🩹 Retribution → Restoration

“Under [retributivism], justice is served when proportionate suffering is imposed on the offender, which essentially takes the form of exclusion from society. Prison is not just a place where offenders are secluded to keep society safe; it also carries the symbolic meaning of deserved social rejection. The whole process of achieving justice through punishment involves little or no real communication between wrongdoers and victims, who are instead required to delegate the management of their conflict to third parties (professionals, state institutions and so forth). […] A wrongdoer must pay for the harm caused, and our culture assumes that the only way to achieve that end is through imposing suffering. As a matter of fact, traditional criminal justice expresses the human drive for revenge. It is indeed institutionalised revenge. […]

There is no place for punishing wrongdoers in the restorative paradigm, because the very idea of crime takes another meaning: it is not the result of an evil mind freely choosing to commit evil actions. Rather, it is a damaged relationship. As a result, justice itself is understood as relational and implies restoring social connections, healing social wounds. RJ seems also to be the bearer of an opposing idea of human nature, in which people are seen as essentially capable of healing relationships and willing to get things right, and justice is achieved when enabling this to happen. So, advocating for RJ also means supporting and expressing a more optimistic view of human nature. […]

This ‘counterintuitive’ and idealistic nature of RJ has long fuelled scepticism about it. But what if we’ve got it all wrong? What if human psychology is more in line with the restorative approach to justice than the retributive approach to justice? Would this make RJ ethically preferable? […]

Howard Zehr, one of the pioneers of restorative justice, argues that crime is essentially a disruption of balance, and that justice should restore that balance, thus bringing harmony back to the community.”

» Restorative justice fits human nature more than retribution does by Flavia Corso

🧬 Frameworks

Measureship → Leadership

“If you’ve ever stood in line at the supermarket waiting forever because only one in twenty checkout lines is working…If you’ve ever been asked to hit a smiley face button in the public restroom after taking a pee…If you’ve ever had to click away a million buttons and pop-ups asking for your email address on a single website…If you’ve ever watched Uber double its price in real-time…If you’ve ever had an app randomly interrupt your day to ask if you love it…If you’ve ever had a bossware-infected laptop demand you click your keyboard to prove you are working…Congratulations. You’ve experienced “measureship,” the management philosophy du jour that’s replacing leadership across the economy.” – Paul Worthington

🎨 Works

Some hand-picked, particularly thought-provoking work:

Solarpunk Island // Universal Basic Nutrient Income // Go-Op, Britain’s First Cooperative Railway

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

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Thomas