Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #114
From the comfort class to the supply chains are us, "views", un-travel USA, small solutions, making advertising illegal, communal dreams, relations of care, and living near friends
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Alright! Let’s get into this week’s issue:
THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: The Comfort Class // The Supply Chains Are Us // "Views"
📊 Numbers: Un-Travel USA
🌀 Re-Framings: Big Solutions → Small Solutions // What If We Made All Advertising Illegal? // Commodified Dreams → Communal Dreams
🧬 Frameworks: From Relations of Domination to Relations of Care
🎨 Works: Pioneer Park // Organizmo // Live Near Friends
⏳ Reading Time: 12 minutes
🖼️ Framings
Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.
💆🏻 The Comfort Class
This is a great framing and very useful for making sense of the so-called vibecession and voting patterns of the so-called middle class. As we’re increasingly moving towards an inheritocracy, new framings of social class are very much needed.
“America is not just suffering from a wealth gap; America has the equivalent of a class apartheid. Our systems—of education, credentialing, hiring, housing, and electing officials—are dominated and managed by members of a “comfort class.” These are people who were born into lives of financial stability. They graduate from college with little to no debt, which enables them to advance in influential but relatively low-wage fields—academia, media, government, or policy work. Many of them rarely interact or engage in a meaningful way with people living in different socioeconomic strata than their own. And their disconnect from the lives of the majority has expanded to such a chasm that their perspective—and authority—may no longer be relevant. […]
What we have is a compounded problem, in which people with generational wealth pull the levers on a society that they don’t understand. Whether corporate policies or social welfare or college financial aid, nearly every aspect of society has been designed by people unfamiliar with not only the experience of living in poverty but the experience of living paycheck to paycheck—a circumstance that, Bank of America data shows, a quarter of Americans know well. […]
As a result, the very term middle class has become a meaningless catchall for a disparate range of lived financial experiences. No wonder so much policy and rhetoric geared toward this group fails to stick. Who are these policies actually for? And what theoretical problems do they aim to address? Those of the third-generation college-educated social worker, whose parents helped her with a down payment on a house? Or those of the first-gen woman with student loans who holds the same job and lives in a rental apartment? Technically they earn the same wage and both likely see themselves as middle class, but they have extremely different lives because only one is a member of the comfort class.
Members of the comfort class are not necessarily wealthy. Perhaps one day they will earn or inherit sums that will put them in that category. But wealth is not the marker of the comfort class. Security is. An emergency expense—say a $1,200 medical bill—would send most Americans into a fiscal tailspin; for the comfort class, a text to Mom and Dad can render “emergencies” nonexistent.”
» What the Comfort Class Doesn’t Get by Xochitl Gonzalez
🚚 Supply Chains Are Us
I thought this framing was quite fitting, given all the talk and craziness about tariffs these days. It also links back to the Full Circle Exploitation piece from last week and the idea that the away land – the emerging markets, unethical factories, and poorly paid food delivery workers (to name just a few examples) that uphold our convenience and affluence – can no longer be ignored or brushed away. It’s all coming full circle now!
“Once one understands what is involved in just a single overseas shipment to a consumer’s home,” writes MIT supply chain guru Yossi Sheffi in his book “The Magic Conveyor Belt,” “the question is not why the item does not make it on time but rather astonishment and wonder that such a thing can be completed in the first place.”
In their heyday, department stores created dream worlds that you would walk through and peer into the edges of supply chains as windows to an apparently better life. Today the internet does a great job of abstracting away those systems, hiding this enormous complexity behind a simple friendly interface to replace the plush showrooms.
But your clicks have impacts in the human and physical worlds nonetheless. When you log on to an Amazon website, or any other e-commerce site for that matter, you are controlling a global supply chain. When you click “buy,” you initiate a series of financial, information, and human events that result in a product appearing at your door. […]
Throw out a moldy strawberry? Imagine the vast distances (and fossil fuels) that got it to your kitchen, only to miss being edible by a few hours. And of course the journey isn’t over when you throw it in your trash. Nor is it over if you eat it; your digestion is part of the chain. Your body turns the energy stored in the strawberry into work. Our act of consumption is just a brief moment in these ever-flowing systems.
And yet that moment brings with it some level of ethical responsibility for the systems that support it. How much do you want to know about the working conditions at every stage of the supply chain? How much are you morally obligated to know, with what consequences? Few of us would likely condone every moment of every supply chain for every product we consume. Yet to fully ethically withdraw from that participation would involve a renunciation of modern life. To paraphrase the cartoon character Pogo, we have seen the supply chains and they are us.”
» The Supply Chains Are Us by David A. Mindell
👁️ “Views”
Everything in our lives has become quantified and gamified. Said differently, we’re being played! Reading the below makes me remember this line from a piece I shared a few months ago: “We have turned competition into connection because it’s the only way we’ve learned that we can get attention.”
“Views are the most visible metric on the internet. You can see, in more or less real time, how many views something got on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and most other video platforms. X tracks views for every single thing you post, as does Threads. A view is the universal currency of success — more views, more fun.
But it’s all nonsense. Views are nothing. Views are lies. […]
A “view,” in reality, is not a universal metric. It’s not really anything. It is whatever a platform wants it to be, which usually has no actual correlation to whether someone actually encountered and experienced a piece of content. You can just make the views whatever you want! And if you don’t like the way the numbers look, make views something else! […]
The reason so many companies have embraced such stupid metrics is both simple and self-reinforcing. If you’re the platform that counts views in a way that actually reflects reality, your numbers will be lower. Creators might see that, decide your platform doesn’t have the juice, and start posting somewhere they’ll ostensibly get more eyeballs. Advertisers might worry that they’ll be broadcasting to dead air. On the social web, momentum is everything, and sometimes you have to lie about the size of your party to get the first people in the door. […]
We’ve been doing this whole internet thing for a while now, and it’s pretty clear that just about all the metrics are bad. They’ve turned the internet into a game to be won, a system to be gamed, a race to the biggest numbers even when the numbers don’t mean anything. Maybe we’d all be better off without the numbers, but they’re not going anywhere. So all we can do is remember: “views” are not views. Views are lies.”
» ‘Views’ Are Lies by David Pierce
📈 Numbers
A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:
Un-Travel USA
“In just two months [Trump] has destroyed the reputation of the US, shown one way by diminished travel from the EU to the US,” said Paul English, co-founder of travel website Kayak. “This is not only one more terrible blow to the US economy, it also represents reputation damage that could take generations to repair.”
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