From conversation as the medium of our moment to neural media, sex without women, the shift to neutrality, the nonlinear economy, loving bureaucracy, re-invented marketing and stoop coffee
Hello and welcome to the 25 new subscribers who have joined us since last week.
Two small updates:
Today’s Rabbit Holes is without a paywall. 🙌 I will try to continue having 3 half-paywalled and 1 completely free Rabbit Holes issue every month.
I’m almost done with my Deep Dive into Reframing AI in the new, more keynote-style format (teaser below). I’m super excited about it and am very much looking forward to your feedback! These Deep Dives are for paid subscribers only – click here to become one and join over 120 strategists, creatives & impact-seekers leveling up their thinking with my Reframing Deep Dives.
But now, let’s get into this week’s Rabbit Holes:
THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: The Conversation Era // Neural Media // Sex Without Women
📊 Numbers: The Shift To Neutrality
🌀 Re-Framings: When They Dehumanize → You Humanize // Linear Economy → Nonlinear Economy // Abolishing Bureaucracy → Loving Bureaucracy
🧬 Frameworks: Re-Invented Marketing
🎨 Works: Strava + Climate Activism // Pre-Owned Rimowa // Stoop Coffee
⏳ Reading Time: 10 minutes
🖼️ Framings
Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.
🎙️ Conversation As The Medium Of Our Moment
An interesting conversation about conversation being the medium of our times 😅. It’s easy to say that podcasts are the thing right now, this piece explores why that might be the case. This aligns with
’s ‘From lectures to conversations’ which I shared here previously.
[Kyle Chayka:] “Hey Tope, the other night at dinner you brought up this really interesting idea that conversation is the medium of our moment. There's Joe Rogan influencing the election, video podcasts going viral, even Google's NotebookLM turning any text into a two-way conversation. California governor Gavin Newsom recently launched a podcast to try to gain clout with audiences / voters. What made you realize this is going on and why do you think conversation is so compelling?”
[Tope Folarin:] “I've been thinking about this idea for a while, actually. Initially I was simply trying to understand why podcasts have become such an essential, ubiquitous medium. […] A conversation provides a way for you and your interlocutor to co-create meaning, to achieve understanding (of a kind, anyway) of complex issues, and to impose order on chaos, simply by talking things through.
Set against this backdrop, it's no surprise that conversations have become so important — and commodified — in recent years. We all have to contend with so much information, from so many sources, and it's really comforting to sit with someone and work your way through various kinds of evidence and impressions (or vibes) toward some notion of the truth. […]”
[Kyle Chayka:] ”That makes me think about how conversations are inherently social. They’re not just solo scrolling on your phone. […] There's an authenticity (a tough word obvs but still relevant here) to conversation that doesn't exist in more linear forms of consumption, maybe because you're always seeing something from multiple perspectives, two or more sides of a conversation.”
This is a very original, thought-provoking, and intellectual look into how media shapes us. There is a lot in here, but I particularly liked the overall framing of being statistical or how statistical self-identification shapes culture. I found this gem via
“We are now, in 02025, 15 years into neural media, halfway through its maturation cycle. That is to say, neural media are still relatively malleable. Given that they will have profound effects on every aspect of culture and subjectivity, it’s imperative that we address them as a psychosocial force, before their structures become fixed. How we do this will determine neural media’s influence on 21st century identity. […]
One need not look far for examples of embedded and statistical self-identification in culture today. Dating app users describe themselves in terms of percentiles and distributions. ("I'm in the top 20% for height.”) Social media platforms provide statistical metrics for one’s online profile. ("My engagement rate is in the top 10%.”) Personality systems, like the MBTI, Big Five, or Kegan scale — not to mention popular astrology and derivatives like Human Design — encourage people to discuss their own traits within statistical distributions. (“INTJs make up about 2% of the population, while manifestos make up 9%.”) Fitness tracking via biomarkers and wearable devices provides a statistical frame for both physical and social identity, and new psychological theories describe states of mind in topological terms.”
This is a super thought-provoking article about porn addiction, distorted masculinity, the loneliness epidemic, and how the internet impacts society. This links to my recent post about code and efficiency mediating matchmaking.
“Plenty of women, of course, consume and enjoy or create and profit from porn—people of every sexual orientation and gender identity do. But the force that through the green fuse drives the flower (and the money) is heterosexual male desire for women. And here was porn so good, so varied, so ready to please, so instantly—insistently—available, that it led to a generation of men who think of porn not as a backup to having sex, but as an improvement on it. They prefer it.
Where would this take us? Well, now we know. The heterosexual man can now have what many see as a rich sex life without ever needing to deal with an actual woman. […]
Sex has the ability to create or strengthen a bond between people, and—no matter how many precautions you might take against this terrible outcome—you could find yourself emotionally attached to a person you have sex with. Before online porn, men had an obvious incentive to put up with the stress of dating, and they developed the social skills necessary to close the deal: enough resilience to ask a woman out, and then a second woman, if the first one rejected them; the drive to locate a clean shirt; and the skill to make conversation over two orders of chicken piccata. It could be awkward; it could be a nightmare. But whether the resulting attachment lasted half a century or a single week, one thing was certain: While the relationship was going on, they were not a statistic in the loneliness epidemic. They were humans in a world made for humans. […]
When straight men don’t need women for sex, a question starts to form: What do they need them for?”
A few short reframings that I’ve recently stumbled across:
🤗 When They Dehumanize → You Humanize
“It’s tempting to think that the opposite of authoritarianism, of this nightmare we are living through, is an opposite politics. And, indeed, the ongoing hijacking of the United States by broligarchs and MAGA minions requires a ferocious political response. But everyone I talk to is drained by this responding, drained by the burden of constant vigilance, drained by the always-on coup, drained by the ping-ping-ping of executive actions and court orders and protests and town halls and threats and disappearances. […]
The best revenge against these grifters and bigots and billionaires and bullies is to live well, richly, together. The best revenge is to refuse their values. To embody the kind of living — free, colorful, open — they want to snuff out.
So when they dehumanize, you humanize. When they try to fracture and divide people, you connect with people. When they try to curtail the freedom to associate, you gather. When they try to make it harder to speak your mind, you find your voice. When they try to make you cynical, you double down on hope. When they try to drown you in reacting to each little thing, you remember the far-off “beautiful tomorrow” you are fighting for. When they try to consume you night and day, you reserve time for your garden or cooking or the feeling of your kid’s breath on your cheek as you cuddle. […]
And so living well, and living in community, and living with others, and taking care of your people, and even not your people, is not just self-care in order to keep fighting. That was the 2016 idea. It is actually inseparable from resisting their big project. […]
They are waging a war on living. The more fully you live, the harder their job will be.”
“There has been a fundamental change in the nature of our economy. Fifty years ago, most businesses dealt with physical things. 90% of the assets on the S&P500 balance sheets were tangible assets like car parts, soap bars, and raw materials. Today, the opposite is true: Around 90% of the assets are intangible things like intellectual property, code, content, relationships, and knowledge. […]
We already live in a completely (truly, completely) different economy than the one our parents lived in. We are playing a completely different game. And yet, we insist on playing by the old rules, rely on old assumptions, and maintain physical structures and mindsets that are no longer fit for purpose.
Our economy does not just produce different things; it produces things differently. Producing software and content and ideas is more akin to producing a hit song than to producing a bar of soap or an automobile. The production process of intangible assets is nonlinear: unpredictable, disproportionate, and volatile. The same inputs and efforts can produce wildly different outcomes. The same recipes produce different results. This is true for both production and marketing: In the 20th Century, both of these functions were linear: What you put in had a big impact on what came out on the other side. There were still surprises and competitors, but the range of outcomes was contained, and there was a discernible relationship between effort and reward, quality and value, input and output. […]
There is a mismatch between our economy and the world we built around it. Our cities, companies, and management methods were shaped by linear assumptions. They were shaped by answers that are no longer true and by the constant pursuit of new answers that will likely be wrong as well.”
“Bureaucracy is often (and rightly) regarded as overbearing and dehumanizing—just ask Kafka’s Josef K. One can gasp at the dismal customer experiences associated with bloated structures and inert mindsets, the abundance of good intentions that have been muffled by administrative grind, and the countless deaths by a thousand cuts.
And this is not to mention how bureaucratic thinking has pervaded so many other—some would argue all—aspects of our lives, including even our feelings. Referring to the work of the late David Graeber, João Sevilhano calls this “emotional bureaucracy,” and observes that “the emotional bureaucrat lives not just in organizations but within ourselves.” This leads him to conclude that “bureaucracy isn’t merely an organizational problem—it’s an existential one.”
Yes—except, bureaucracy is not an existential problem. It is existential. And the antidote to the bureaucratization of emotions is not to abolish bureaucracy; it is to emotionalize bureaucracy and make bureaucrats and citizens fall in love with it.
To do that, we must start by distinguishing bureaucracy from a purely mechanistic mindset, appreciating that “rule by the desk” (bureaucracy), if serving democratic goals, is far superior to the crude mix of “rule by one” (autocracy) and “rule by tech” (technocracy).
Bureaucracy is designed to apply rules and processes to facilitate certain legal outcomes. It is not meant to have any discretion or mercy. It is not supposed to care. But what if it did? What if it took the freedom to deviate from perfectionism? What if it cultivated what psychologists call “tolerance for ambiguity”?
A perfect, unambiguous bureaucracy is indistinguishable from the merciless, AI-based total surveillance machine of the kind Musk & Co. dream. Bureaucracy that can afford to be imperfect, ambiguous, and useless, however, is bureaucracy that can be humane. […]”
“Clearly the challenges and opportunities facing companies are complex. Here is framework, the ABCDE of Re-invented Marketing, that attempts to simplify without dumbing down the key issues that we all have to face.”
Happy #111 issue ✨