Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #115
From the age of the hyperpundit to worshipping chance, double sell-outs, the uncertainty surge, social currency, the resistance story we need right now, sexual selection, and ask nature
Hello everyone!
After a short hiatus last week due to some Easter travelling, I’m now back with another Rabbit Holes issue for you. And since this is the last one of the month, there's no paywall today. 😉
Also, welcome to the 183 new subscribers who joined us in the last two weeks. We got a massive boost due to one of my LinkedIn posts that was reposted and commented on a ton! This newsletter now has over 6,000 subscribers, and we are steadily climbing Substack’s Climate & Environment bestseller list as more subscribers upgrade to paid. 🥳
Thank you all so much for the support and for sharing the newsletter and my posts on LinkedIn with your friends and network. It does help a lot!!
Also, in case you missed this month’s deep dive about moving from abstraction and alienation toward resonance and aliveness – Toward Life, make sure to check it out:
Alright! Enough intro, promo, and back-patting – let’s get into this week’s Rabbit Holes:
THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: The Age Of The Hyperpundit // Worshipping Chance & Playing With Meaning // The Age Of The Double Sell-Outs
📊 Numbers: The Uncertainty Surge
🌀 Re-Framings: Job Security → Social Currency // The Resistance Story We Need Right Now // Natural Selection → Sexual Selection
🧬 Frameworks: Wendell Berry’s Rules for Technology
🎨 Works: Edge Esmeralda // Ask Nature // Switch-Lit
⏳ Reading Time: 10 minutes
🖼️ Framings
Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.
The Age Of The Hyperpundit
Brief yet quite interesting framing related to the new power of “alternative media,” specifically podcasters and their sphere of influence. I particularly like the observation that the purpose of debating – and I would say discussion at large – has shifted from resolve to generating engagement.
“The game, increasingly, is performance.
Experts used to pick a lane. Walt Mossberg covered tech. He built authority through focus — you trusted his take because he mastered the domain. That model is lost in the Information Space.
In its place: the hyperpundit — platform-native polymaths with hot takes on everything from Gaza to AI to trade to TikTok. Their authority doesn’t come from specialization. It comes from presence. From volume, charisma, and the ability to synthesize just enough to sound smart — on podcasts, on panels, in a thread. […]
Debates, as an age old format twist, are also in vogue, not to resolve, but to reverberate. […] Debates today are structured to circulate. They produce shareable moments, prompt downstream discourse, and give everyone involved a reason to repost the clip. They work because they generate engagement, not clarity. […]
Debate becomes distribution. […]
Maybe there’s even something hopeful here. Maybe the podcast era’s unexpected virtue is a renewal of bipartisan dialogue. Or at least the performative ritual of it.
After all, in the hyperpundit age. You don’t need to win the argument. You just need to exist inside it.”
» The Age of the Hyperpundit by
Worshipping Chance & Playing With Meaning
In a world, as Jasmine Bina describes, where anyone can become a master using AI, anyone can be skinny using GLP-1s, anyone can strike gold betting on the right memecoin, and anyone can have their viral moment on TikTok, actual hard work seems to become increasingly untethered from reward. What’s the consequence? Well, read below:
“There is an incredible decoupling happening at the very heart of our culture, and it will affect brands and people more than anything else over the next decade:
Work is untethering from reward. […]
We're locking into a very different system that dissolves the old moorings of effort and reward, leaving us in a restless current of chance. Chance and randomness are the dominant energies of our time. […]
When we can no longer value ourselves or each other by the "work" or the effort, we have to find other ways to decide who and what is valuable. In the short-term, there will be two concurrent tracks we see culture taking: worshipping chance or playing with meaning. […]
When hard work no longer guarantees reward, our default response is to elevate randomness itself, investing it with a near-spiritual authority. The hustle once revolved around effort, but now it’s about catching lightning in a bottle. The algorithm’s next wave or a stray viral moment can bestow wealth or influence more swiftly than years of honest grind, so chance becomes something to venerate. […]
Once we recognize just how mercurial success can be, we can move beyond passive acceptance of the system’s randomness and begin actively reshaping our notions of value. There will be people who throw themselves headfirst into the glitch in the system and turn it into an art form. If everyone can cheat their way to mastery, wealth, or beauty, they will see it as a giant permission slip to create new ways of finding meaning. […]
When chance so often triumphs over sweat, the real opportunity lies in writing narratives that thrive precisely because they reject old rules, and in doing so, create surprising, life-affirming possibilities that might just become the new mythologies we live by.”
» The Big Decoupling by Jasmine Bina
The Age Of The Double Sell-Outs
This is a great framing of what might also be described as: the creator economy enters late-stage capitalism.
“The 21st century has been the age of the “double sell-out”: Creators who produce market-friendly content to achieve fame — and then use that fame to pursue even more commerce-for-commerce's-sake.
MrBeast is arguably one of the most important "creators" of our times. He dreams up, produces, and directs elaborate and sensational video content, which made him the #1 channel on YouTube. He then used this world-historical level of fame... to open a generic fast food chain. This has also become common amongst established stars: George Clooney worked hard for decades to become a well-respected actor... who could take the lead role in a Nespresso commercial. […]
The 20th century taboo against selling out was, at its heart, a communal norm to reward young artists who focused on craft and punish those who appropriated art and subculture for empty profiteering. Now the culture is most exemplified by people whose entire end goal appears to be empty profiteering. […]
Whether we like it or not, culture operates on norms, and changes in norms have consequences. The old norm was "don't sell out." The new norm is "do sell-out," or maybe more charitably, "don't judge people on selling out." […]
Double sell-outs don't deserve our esteem as "creative" people. They should be content with the reward they chose: the money extracted from fans who snap up their mediocre commodities out of parasocial loyalty.
The challenge for our times is to locate and elevate the artists using their platforms for art and other social goods rather than just securing further personal profit. Every time we don't condemn the double sell-outs, we're insulting those in pursuit of what used to be the clear goal: to move culture forward.”
» The Age of the Double Sell-Out by W. David Marx
📈 Numbers
A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:
The Uncertainty Surge
🌀 Re-Framings
A few short re-framings for building better systems that I’ve recently stumbled across:
Job Security → Social Currency
“Almost everyone I know is worried about work: finding a job, keeping the one they have, or what will happen when the work they do no longer exists. […] The natural impulse in response to all this precariousness is what we’ve been trained for: double down on accumulation, stay employable at all costs, find the highest paying job you can, and cling on for dear life. […] But I am starting to accept that maybe I can’t, and that maybe a different source of security has to emerge in its place. […]
We put all our stock in the idea that specializing in one field, industry, or competency — one that almost always occurs within the confines of a screen — in exchange for a steadily-increasing paycheck was the smart move to make. We accepted that we better get really, really good at it if we wanted to command the kinds of salaries that keep us afloat in this system, so we worked until the point of burnout to deliver to companies we thought would love us back. Or at the very least, not fire us the very moment there was a marginally cheaper way of doing things.
Meanwhile, as we did that, we became increasingly dependent on the kinds of supply chains, income brackets, and lifestyles that we know are deeply unsustainable. […]
When you accept that the future’s security may not come only in the form of a steady ascent up a pay scale, something shifts. You may not quit your job, but you reorient your time and professional priorities around independent people and relationships, not prestigious companies or brands. You may adjust your lifestyle, outgoings, consumption patterns, and sources of meaning so that they aren’t so reliable on a certain compensation package. You see the value of expanding your abilities and skills beyond merely looking employable online.
Not being able to afford full-time childcare — and yet still having to earn a full-time living — has been the bane of my life for nearly three years. But it’s taught me something important. All of this time I’ve spent doing things that don’t impress people on LinkedIn adds up to something else: social currency. It’s a currency you can’t spend in a one-way transaction, but rather give and receive in turns.
» Everyone I know is worried about work by
Andor: The Resistance Story We Need Right Now
“Stories shape our political imagination.
Science fiction is a genre where we see narrative at work because people are trying to create something new, and so we can see what ideas and stories they draw on, subconsciously or otherwise. When you tell a story of a made-up or future world, you have to decide what aspects of humanity to draw on and enlarge, and which ones to ignore.
That is why it is so wonderful to see Andor, like Black Panther before, draw on a wider palette of human experience for its storytelling […]. […]
Most of Star Wars is essentially a family drama about the Skywalker clan: heroes predestined for greatness. Andor is an origin story for the Rebellion that is about the everyday people who make up the resistance. […] The story of how change happens in Andor is that people need to unite and work together, rather than waiting for an elite space monk to come and rescue us. […]
You can see how resistance grows out of community in Andor. These are characters who would rather not fight. They just want to live. Even when they face repression, their instinct is to run and hide rather than confront injustice. It is love and care for each other that eventually drives them to act. […]
And the resistance themselves are not angels. They have to make hard moral choices. The shady leader of the resistance makes this clear in a powerful monologue: “I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see.”
People often think thinking about the future with hope is about imagining a perfect world. Andor shows that it is actually about imagining how we can get better at working together to face the challenges the future will bring: with more care, community and compassion.”
» Star Wars show Andor is the story about resistance we need right now by
Natural Selection → Sexual Selection
“What if we were to view ourselves and other forms of life as products of beauty rather than survival?
Reductionist sciences focus on natural selection, inheritance and genes as the essential elements of life, but it is the far more wily forces of attraction that govern all beings while they breathe. The sciences have tended to look at life from the gene’s point of view, but sexual selection can only be understood from the outlook of the organism itself. Of life itself.
The apple, the lemon cucumber, the carnation: Every organism has a vital impetus toward beauty and self-expression that is related to its genetic fitness but which cannot be reduced to it. To call the taste of an apple an “evolutionary strategy” is to miss most of the pleasure and fuss about apples. A Red Delicious is still delicious if it is forever cloned. More profoundly, beauty, as Darwin used the term, doesn’t limit itself to gene pools: The traits that attract organisms to each other also attract them to other plants and animals. […]
Our culture spends a lot of time thinking about natural selection — red in tooth and claw — but even a cursory glance at our world shows the power of beauty. Beauty offers an alternative intelligence in nature, a nature shaped by creativity and attraction, an old and impulsive desire that isn’t categorizable.”
» The Sex Lives Of Vegetables by Leah Zani
🧬 Frameworks
One small, handy framework to build better systems:
Wendell Berry’s Rules for Technology by
🎨 Works
Some hand-picked, particularly thought-provoking and inspiring work:
That’s it for this week’s Rabbit Holes issue!
Did you enjoy this week’s issue? If so, please share it with your network!
Thanks for supporting my work! 😊
Thomas