Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #113
From exploitation going full circle to liquid content, everything is computer, the substack age, how to optimize → what to optimize, imagination as foundational asset and communication that connects
Hello and welcome to the 35 new subscribers who have joined us since last week.
THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: Full Circle Exploitation // Liquid Content // Everything Is Computer
📊 Numbers: The Substack Age
🌀 Re-Framings: How To Optimize → What To Optimize // Imagination As A Foundational Asset // Universities As Innovation Ecologies
🧬 Frameworks: Communication That Connects
🎨 Works: Why Is Migration A Test? // Future of Making // UNA Watch
⏳ Reading Time: 10 minutes
🖼️ Framings
Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.
⭕ Full Circle Exploitation
We optimized everything in the name of convenience until the margins were razor-thin and the people inside the system were too burned out, underpaid, or disconnected to care about quality anymore. While that wasn’t such a big problem so far (you just bought a new thing when the old broke), what we’re seeing now is that the cracks are showing up everywhere, all the time. There is no more ignoring or escaping the exploitation – away living is over.
“Sometimes the product is just weird — or, as we used to say about certain cars, a lemon. But we’ve had enough experiences with people in bad jobs that it sure feels like everyone, no matter the industry, is doing bad work. We blame it on lack of ambition, lack of pride, laziness, rudeness, whatever, because it’s always easier to blame the individual who made our life difficult, instead of the systems that don’t just foster but incentivize bad work.
As a society, we have decided that we want more for less: more convenience, more purchases, more technology, but none of it at prices that render it out of reach. For years, we allowed immediate gratification to blind ourselves to the reality that making something cheaper and more accessible almost always makes it worse. It didn’t matter if the shirt fell apart or the couch collapsed — you could always buy a new one and survive on the glow of its novelty until it had to be replaced as well.
The exploitation (of workers, of natural resources) that made that abundant cheapness possible was largely invisible and thus ignorable. […]
A badly made pair of sandals is annoying but survivable. But people being bad at their jobs in your everyday life is far more difficult to ignore. It adds unanticipated rupture. It blows up your carefully planned day. It exacts a stiff time tax — and while you have money (in part because everything is so cheap!) your time has become far more precious. […]
But I do think it’s worth wondering: what would happen, how might the paradigm shift, if we continue normalizing paying far more for far less?”
» Are People Bad At Their Jobs....or Are The Jobs Just Bad? by
🚰 Liquid Content
This framing aligns with the insights I shared in my recent AI Reframed deep dive. I’m not a fan of hype-y or buzzwordy phrases like Liquid Content or Vibe Coding, but what I do think we’re seeing is that Generative AI has the potential to make creation through a computer much more fluid and natural.
“For most of human history, storytelling was fluid, shaped by both the narrator and their audience, and evolving with each retelling. The invention of writing allowed stories to scale across time and space, but at the cost of adaptability. With mass media, creative output and storytelling solidified to even more static forms. What’s fluid became solid – and is now being liquified once more.
It started with algorithms and social media, which allowed the automatic and responsive tailoring of any kind of online content to individual preferences. With generative AI, the output itself is reduced to its fundamental components and remixed into something else. […] Increasingly, AI becomes ‘multimodal’, allowing multiple types of input and enabling multiple forms of output as well.
What these tools suggest is that formats will no longer bind expression – a piece of writing becomes a podcast; an image becomes a video game. Length can be adjusted to audience preferences – from feature film to highlight reel. Audiences can provide feedback in real-time, making the process of media creation much more iterative. Art direction becomes fluid as well, transitioning seamlessly from bleak cyberpunk to bubbly children’s cartoon. Finally, story customisation becomes nearly endless; instead of Emily in Paris, a viewer in Spain might experience Paolo in Barcelona, with adaptations to locations, cultural references, and even character arcs.”
» The Anything-To-Everything Future by Sofie Hvitved
🖥️ Everything Is Computer
A simple, slightly stupid, yet still very to-the-point framing by the orange guy.
“With AI trampling through every aspect of life, from music streaming to warfare, and the global tech industry throwing billions at whitepapers explaining “multi-modal generative AI systems” or exploring “the intricate landscape of AI-related liabilities,” Trump summarised our relationship with technology in three simple words. During a car show outside the White House (a sentence we will have to deal with another time), he hopped behind the wheel of a Tesla, reached into the primordial soup of the human experience, and remarked, “Everything is computer!”
Everything is computer. The fear that technology is eating the world at such an alarming rate that you will wake up one day and find it completely unrecognisable to the one you were born into: that’s computer. The frustration that you can’t make a reservation or pay for parking without giving your life story away to an obtuse third party app: that’s also computer. The reason why you feel constantly tired and alienated no matter how much “mindfulness” you practise, or experience a dark, sickly feeling in the back of your head after zoning out on TikTok for too long: oh you know that’s computer. “Everything is computer!”, then, encompasses the full spectrum of emotions flooding into these uncharted waters we find ourselves navigating. The awe, the horror, the excitement, the trepidation, the overwhelming ambivalence. Computer is good, yes, but computer is also bad.”
» Donald Trump says that “everything is computer” – does he have a point? by Emma Garland
📈 Numbers
A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:
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