Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #116
From an opaque reality to ultra-processed reading, the friction economy, ai vs collage graduates, reframing "degrowth" as "less, but better", collective intelligence, matereality, and a social bench
Hello and welcome to the 110 new subscribers who joined us since the last Rabbit Holes issue.
THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: Opaque Reality // Ultra-Processed Reading // The Friction Economy
📊 Numbers: AI vs College Graduates
🌀 Re-Framings: Degrowth → Less, But Better // Constraints = Creativity // Artificial Intelligence → Collective Intelligence
🧬 Frameworks: Matereality
🎨 Works: A Neighborhood Uber // Collaborative Park Bench // Oilwell
⏳ Reading Time: 11 minutes
🖼️ Framings
Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.
😶🌫 Opaque Reality
Probably the best piece I’ve read this year so far, describing this blurriness, the reality-detachment feeling we are all increasingly experiencing. This links well with what I called the shift to Hyperreality in my The 2025 Stack post from February and my recent deep dive Toward Life.
“I feel a troubling kind of opacity in my brain lately—as if reality were becoming illegible, as if language were a vessel with holes in the bottom and meaning was leaking all over the floor. I sometimes look up words after I write them: does “illegible” still mean too messy to read? […] Even the words that I might use to more precisely describe the sensation of “losing it” elude me. There are sometimes only images: foggy white drizzle, melted rainbows in a gasoline puddle, pink foam insulation bursting between slats of splintered wood.
Possibly, I should be writing this on the intake form at a neurologist’s office. Maybe the fog never cleared after my third round of COVID. Maybe it’s the self-severance of having two young children but pretending for half of the day that I don’t. Maybe this is exactly what my mother warned me about twenty years ago when she discovered my passion for marijuana. But I get the sense that quite a lot of people are feeling like this all the time now, too.
At the root of this opacity might be whatever strange thing is currently happening with time. I mostly keep track of it on my phone, a device that makes me feel like I am strapped flat to the board of an unreal present: the past has vanished, the future is inconceivable, and my eyes are clamped open to view the endlessly resupplied now. More than a decade of complaining about this situation has done nothing to change my compulsion to induce dissociation anew each day. And, though there was once a time when my physical surroundings felt more concrete than whatever I was looking at on my phone, this year has marked a turning point. […]
I suspect that the opaque feeling in my head can also be traced to a craven instinct: it’s easier to retreat from the concept of reality than to acknowledge that the things in the news are real. […]
Fake images of real people, real images of fake people; fake stories about real things, real stories about fake things. […] The words blur and the images blur and a permission structure is erected for us to detach from reality—first for a moment, then a day, a week, an election season, maybe a lifetime.”
» My Brain Finally Broke by Jia Tolentino
🍟 Ultra-Processed Reading
This piece argues that in a world where articles, posts, comments, and even books are increasingly AI-generated and/or made to please the search or social platform algorithm, what we read is increasingly stripped of its vital nutrients and ultimately becomes ultra-processed. The metaphor here reminds me of the Intellectual Obesity piece I shared in Rabbit Holes #68.
“We live in an age of lexical abundance. More words, more access, more content than at any time in human history. And yet something essential is slipping away. Not reading itself, but the kind of reading that once shaped minds and formed character: slow, immersive, reflective, and richly human. […]
The reading brain, once forged by sustained attention and deep engagement, is now adapting to an environment built for speed, distraction, and artificial fluency. What we are witnessing is not the end of reading, but rather the end of the essential consolations that reading affords us. Reading, but in ultra-processed form.
Not all reading is created equal. Just as not all food nourishes, not all content feeds the mind. In the age of platforms and prompts, of AI authors and infinite feeds, we are reading more but understanding less. What we consume is increasingly pre-digested cognition: engineered for ease, stripped of its vital ambiguity, void of risk. Ultra-processed reading is syntactically smooth, cognitively shallow, emotionally inert. This isn’t just about TikTok or Twitter. It’s about how the medium reshapes the mind, how digital habits dull our appetite for complexity, and how a civilisation that forged itself through the long-form written word might forget what it means to think.
» Ultra-Processed Minds: The End of Deep Reading and What It Costs Us by
🥤 The Friction Economy
This is a super thought-provoking look at our modern economy through the lens of friction – how it defines and moves through our worlds. In essence, we’re really just pushing friction like a can on the road, away from the digital and affluent worlds to the physical world and those exploited at the bottom.
“Friction has become a defining feature across the economy, with huge consequences for everything from education to infrastructure. And it's created three distinct worlds that operate by entirely different rules:
The digital world has almost no friction.
The physical world is full of it.
And in certain curated spaces - like the West Village, or your AI companion -friction has been turned into something you can pay to remove. […]
While the digital world has removed all friction, the physical world is where the friction still lives. Not the good kind, the effort of doing something hard, the kinetic potential of possibility, but the bad kind: the exhaustion of trying to hold together systems that no one’s willing to invest in anymore. […]
When systems that were designed for resilience are optimized instead for efficiency, they break. […] What's interesting is how our digital systems actually depend on this decaying physical infrastructure, yet provide no visibility into it. […] When the physical backbone collapses, the digital outlet layers instantly evaporates, revealing how thin that tiny veneer of frictionlessness really is. […] We’ve stopped expecting the real world to work. We assume it will be slow, broken, or possibly on fire. That’s just the baseline. […]
So the digital world has removed friction and the physical world is drowning in it - but there’s the third space. The curated world. […] Life [in this third space], in a sense, is not about reducing friction, it’s about styling it and that’s the value proposition here. […] The boutiques are selling the appearance of effort without its substance. Hand-crafted aesthetics at mass-production prices. Rustic cafés with lighting fast WiFi. This illusion of locality with the convenience of globalization (pre-tariffs, at least). […] Wealth has always helped smooth over bumps - but when the physical world is such a mess and the digital world is so easy, it’s simple to curate the digital into the physical if you have money. […]
What's important about these three worlds - digital, physical, and curated - isn't just that they exist in parallel but that they actively feed off each other. They operate like a closed economic system, where friction isn't eliminated so much as transferred from one domain to another.”
» The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction by
📈 Numbers
A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:
🤖 AI vs College Graduates
Below the paywall: 3 thought-provoking re-framings, 1 handy framework, and 3 inspiring examples that help you reimagine and build systems that feel more alive. Used weekly by 100+ creatives, strategists, and system-shapers moving beyond the extractive default.