Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #107

From the appistocracy to digital hoarding, losing the web, poly-capital, posting → releasing, algo-rithm → ego-rhythm, presencing vs. absencing, sacred forests, and the dam(n) beavers

Feb 19, 2025

Hello!

A little update before we get into this week’s Rabbit Holes issue:

Creative Destruction is now a bestseller newsletter on Substack and we secured that little red checkmark badge. Whoop! 🥳 Thank you all so much for supporting my work, I appreciate it more than you can imagine! All of you, and especially the paid subscribers, are making this thing work! So, “ein herzliches Dankeschön” as we would say in German! 😊

To celebrate, I’m offering a 20% discount on my latest report, Business-As-Un-Usual, for those who haven’t downloaded it yet (see feedback from early readers below). Click here to get the report with the discount already applied. (If you are a student or are simply struggling financially right now, e-mail me, and I’ll share the report with you for free)

Now, on to this week’s Rabbit Holes:

THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: The Appistocracy // Digital Hoarding // Losing The Web
🌀 Re-Framings: Mono-Capital → Poly-Capital // Posting → Releasing // Algo-rithm → Ego-rhythm
🧬 Frameworks: Absencing vs. Precensing
🎨 Works: Sacred Forests // Beavers, Dam(n) // Noisy Dates

⏳ Reading Time: 8 minutes

🖼️ Framings

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

👑 The Appistocracy

This is a useful framing that perhaps better suits today’s world than the ancient term “oligarchy.” It also relates to Yanis Varoufakis’ concept of Cloud Capital, which I mentioned before in this newsletter.

“The media has tended to focus on the net worth of this half dozen, using rusty words like “oligarchy,” in homage to their vast wealth. But their power penetrates much deeper than that. It is literally in my pocket as I write this: their host of apps that dominate our every waking hour, their dominance and control over the very appliance that most now get their news and entertainment from, where they do their banking, receive their advertisements, connect with their friends, date and buy stuff.
Oligarchs are nothing new, but these six men have a power over us that is more intimate than other billionaires. They collectively build, run, and control what can only be likened to an appendage of our own human bodies, a new organ that most can’t imagine losing or losing access to.
I call them the appistocracy. […]
Though we don’t understand the consequences yet, the entire world economy is reforming around the appistocracy. It isn’t a coincidence that these are the richest men on the planet. And yet consider this about the appistocracy economy: despite its enormous valuation, most of its products don’t exist in any physical sense. It also doesn’t create anywhere near as many jobs as conventional industries.
The robber barons of yesteryear, the Carnegies, the Fords and so on, at least employed a lot of people. At least they manufactured something tangible and of use to people’s lives. The appistocracy doesn’t do anything to improve health care, housing, or education. Their contribution to infrastructure amounts to building more energy facilities to power their data centers and fuel their artificial intelligence empires.
Like jealous gods, these apps demand constant sacrifices: of our time, our attention, even our relationships.”

» The Appisocracy Inaugurates Trump by
Ken Klippenstein

🐿 Digital Hoarding

This is so interesting. Hoarding applied to the digital world. It’s a refreshing framing and an alternative to the well-known concepts of information overload or doomscrolling. Does having hundreds of tabs open in my browser already count as digital hoarding? Asking for a friend…. 😅

“Hoarding is also part of the experience of digital culture today—again, I realize I’m risking false equivalency for this metaphor. Digital hoarding is often why we download new apps, set up profiles on new platforms, and keep finding new trends and accounts to follow. It's why we buy domain after domain. Why we start podcasts and abandon them after publishing the first episode. Why we produce more and more and more content.
While IRL hoarding focuses on consumption, accumulation, and an inability to move on from possessions, digital hoarding can encompass both digital consumption and digital production. We produce—or take baby steps toward producing—more and more because it feels safer than doing otherwise. Frenzied production acts as a buffer against platform-imposed scarcity. The more we say, the more we can rest assured we must be saying something meaningful. Making stuff online takes on the same affective characteristics of buying and amassing stuff in the material world. […]
Digital hoarding, we might say, marks the threshold at which control over one's digital identity cedes to a sense of helplessness before the digital world. We once exercised control over the stuff of our digital identities; now, we submit to the feed, the algorithm, even the follower or subscriber. We once possessed an online presence; now, the online world possesses us—something ever more salient amidst the ascendant tech broligarchy.”

» Broken Links by Tara McMullin

🕸️ Losing The Web

We used to “surf the internet” or use a “web browser” to search the “world wide web.” Social media has already turned a lot of that into scrolling. And now, AI chatbots, or LLMs, might herald the end of the “web” and its “links.” Super interesting way to look at it!

“In the late 1990s, Google demolished the competition of other search engines because of an extraordinary innovation developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page: the PageRank algorithm. […] PageRank succeeded because it recognised that language isn’t made in a vacuum. Patterns of words depend upon other forms of affiliation: the social and physical connections that make the web a representation of the real world. […]
But now Google and other websites are moving away from relying on links in favour of artificial intelligence chatbots. […] We are at a moment in the history of the web in which the link itself – the countless connections made by website creators, the endless tapestry of ideas woven together throughout the web – is in danger of going extinct. […]
The work of making connections both among websites and in a person’s own thinking is what AI chatbots are designed to replace. […] Whether ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, AI synthesises numerous voices into a flat monotone. The platforms present an opening answer, bulleted lists and concluding summaries. If you ask ChatGPT to describe its voice, it says that it has been trained to answer in a neutral and clear tone. The point of the platform is to sound like no one. […]
The web made the investigative process […] possible by preserving trails of association. When we navigate the web via links, we are in a sense travelling through the series of connections made by someone else, not unlike reading something they wrote. […] The shape of a medium’s form communicates its content, and the interaction between form and content is how it produces meaning. This is of course what Page and Brin recognised in implementing the PageRank algorithm. The links matter as much as the text. […]
The web represents the largest assembled repository of collective memory, both in the individual web pages hosted and in the links that allow users to traverse them. How will this repository be supported and developed if users rarely make it past the homepages of Google or ChatGPT?”

» A linkless internet by Colling Jennings

🌀 Re-Framings

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

🌈 Mono-Capital → Poly-Capital

“At Davos, investment, impact, and sustainability were central themes. However, discussions were primarily confined to a mono-capital mindset, where financial returns define value. In a world facing multiple crises—climate breakdown, social inequities, and systemic fragility—this approach is not only insufficient; it exacerbates the crisis.
To transition towards a regenerative, equitable future, we must broaden our value understanding and incorporate poly-capital frameworks into our economic and governance systems. […] A regenerative economy actively restores and sustains life, it is an economy of care. It transcends financial capital to create multi-dimensional value.
To shift from extraction to regeneration, we must:
✔ Redefine ROI – Investments should generate social, ecological, and human capital, not just profits.
✔ Adopt New Metrics – Develop well-being indicators and ecological balance sheets.
✔ Shift from Scarcity to Abundance – Foster circular, self-sustaining bioregional economies that promote regeneration.
✔ Integrate Nature’s Logic into Finance – Learn from systems that thrive on reciprocity, diversity, and resilience.”

» Rethinking Value in a Poly-Capital World by Luis Alberto Camargo

📬 Posting → Releasing

“After years of turning everything into social media, this was the year we and others learned the difference between posting and releasing.
Posting operates on a social media metabolism — chasing metrics, feeding algorithms, optimizing for immediate attention. This approach can drive short-term engagement, but it often traps us in an exhausting cycle of constant content production (we’ve been there).
Releasing treats creative work as a lasting cultural contribution. When you release work, you:
Frame it with intentional context
Create meaningful ceremony around its launch
Price it according to its value
Invite the public to own and participate in it
Releasing encourages you to operate on your own clock. You release what you want, when you want. Not because you think you have to.
Releasing doesn’t mean abandoning posting or the market entirely. The most resilient creators know when to play the algorithm's game and when to create on their own terms. A releasing mindset helps open up this dual path.”

» Creative work is changing in ways you can feel good about by
Yancey Strickler
&
Rayna Holmes

🎶 Algo-rithm → Ego-rhythm

“If you base your content strategy around the algorithm, you will quickly get trapped in a loop of having to find more and more things to say. You’ll get exhausted, your content will get exhausted, and your audience will get bored.
Instead, create your own rhythm. If people love what you do, give them a way to subscribe to you directly, outside of their algorithmic feeds. There are still platforms - like email and podcasts - where your audience can directly subscribe to you, and you can be sure they will get your content when you send it, not when an algorithm decides to show.”