Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #109

From soulcraft to dispossession, the digital mind, a lot less IT jobs, making heavy things, entanglement, from how to why, regenerative innovation, and remodeling the internet

Mar 12, 2025

∙ Paid

Hello to the 102 new Creative Destruction subscribers who have joined us since last week, and welcome to another issue of Rabbit Holes.

From now on, there will be a new section called Numbers in every issue of Rabbit Holes. This section showcases one jaw-dropping, thought-provoking chart that perfectly frames a zeitgeist topic or shift.

To access the entire Rabbit Holes issue, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription:

THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: Soulcraft // This Century Disposses Us // The Digital Mind 
📈 Numbers: A Lot Less IT Jobs
🌀 Re-Framings: Light Things → Heavy Things // Separation → Entanglement // How? → Why?
🧬 Frameworks: Regenerative Innovation
🎨 Works: New_ Public // MAPS // Remodeling The Internet

⏳ Reading Time: 10 minutes

🖼️ Framings

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

🪬 Soulcraft

This is a super interesting, unconventional framing of the rise of authoritarian regimes. Through the concept of soulcraft, Alexandre Levebvre explains how the world’s illiberal powers, such as Russia, China, and increasingly the U.S., rule through their visions of the good life.

““Soulcraft” is not an established term in political philosophy or political science. Yet this idea is at the heart of one of the oldest traditions of Western political thought, stretching back to Plato’s “The Republic.” There, Plato seeks to understand the concept of justice and introduces an idea that profoundly shaped the trajectory of Western political thought: Political regimes shape not only laws and institutions but also the character and personality of their citizens. […]
Soulcraft is the concept we need to understand our times. Both words — soul and craft — are essential. Soul speaks to spirituality and fulfillment, revealing how political regimes today either fill the void left by the retreat of religion (as in the secular West) or merge with religion to create theological-political hybrids (as in Iran, Israel and increasingly, India). It also conveys how deeply these regimes seek to shape their subjects, transforming not just their opinions or behaviors but their very selfhood. Craft, on the other hand, addresses the methods and resources used to shape souls, whether through political or civic institutions, media strategies or education systems.”

» From Statecraft to Soulcraft by Alexandre Lefebvre

💀 This Century Dispossesses Us

Again, a masterpiece by

Marie Dollé

that has so many great nuggets (e.g. “politics leaves the agora for the algora”) and is all in all extremely thought-provoking. Definitely read the entire piece as it ends on a more optimistic note! And in case you missed it or are a new subscriber, I’ve explored similar concepts in a deep dive in December: Forgotten Bodies In A Headspace World.

“This century does not dehumanize us. It disinhabits us.
On one side, humans are redefining their relationship with their own bodies. From germ theory (1860) to GLP-1 drugs (2023), we have moved from understanding to administration.
The body is no longer a temple; it’s a startup chasing optimization, hacking itself for efficiency.
Meanwhile, Atlas, Figure-01, Clone Alpha, and Protoclone are all androids in pursuit of flesh. Their synthetic tendons contract like ours, their mimicry verges on illusion. Their proprioceptive sensors—those receptors that grant them spatial awareness—perceive what we are desensitizing ourselves to, absorbed by our screens. […]
Humans abstract themselves from reality, drawn into the mirages of the metaverse. The machine, meanwhile, is learning to walk in our physical world, conquering the space we abandon. We have ceased to inhabit space.
A world where education prepares us for a future that no longer exists. Where work produces nomadic bodies, minds evaporated into the cloud. Where intimacy is within reach, yet out of reach of the soul. Where politics leaves the agora for the algora, that algorithmic space where the people's voice dissolves into the noise of the screen. […]
Robots are learning to walk with their heads held high. They are taught posture, balance, the gaze toward the horizon. And us? We walk with our heads down, eyes glued to our screens. […]
This is not an inevitable technological fate. This is not a spontaneous evolution. It is a project. An industry. A colonization.
Who benefits from humanity’s evaporation? The GAFAM. The biotechs. The technocrats. The ideologues of performance.
This century does not dehumanize us. It dispossesses us. And we let it happen.”

» The Great Chiasmus by
Marie Dollé

🧠 The Digital Mind

Trends such as unplugging or digital minimalism marked only the early beginning of a new phase of digital tech reflection in which we reassess the benefits of our modern-day devices and tools. The short piece below looks at how today’s communication technologies condition human sensemaking.

“I’m doing some reading about uploading human minds to the cloud—aka mind digitization—for a short story, and I found a research paper called ‘The Digital Mind’ by Brian L. Ott.
To my surprise, it wasn’t about the future. It was about how computers are restructuring human consciousness… today.
The paper argues that by using technology, we’re repeatedly exposed to unconscious computational patterns that alter ‘not so much what we think, but how we think and, subsequently, how we act’.
Because of the technological revolution, our brains are evolving at a speed like never before. The computer logic imposed on our biological brains results in a digital mind characterized by intransigence, impertinence, and impulsivity.
Here’s how computer logic shapes our habits of the mind:
Digitization (binary code) = Intransigence: Things lose nuance. They’re either black or white, 0 or 1, on or off, no or yes.
Algorithmic (input/output model) = Impertinence: Like axioms, computer programs return only what’s already known. This makes us close-minded and insensitive to new perspectives.
Efficiency (machine logic) = Impulsivity: When we try to be as fast and efficient as computers, we act rashly. The stress of an ever-faster life makes us hyper-reactive, even hysterical.
In a nutshell, ‘technologies extend their structural logics into various spheres of life through human use.’
‘Technologies use us not the other way around.’”