Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #123
From the future can't keep up to depersonalization, AI as dumbwaiter, AI saturation, futures → magic realism, communal luxury, writing = walking, rehabilitating humanity, relooted and refugeoly
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Alright, that’s it! Let’s get into this week’s Rabbit Holes:
THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: The Future Can't Keep Up // Depersonalization // AI as Dumbwaiter
📊 Numbers: AI Saturation?!
🌀 Re-Framings: Futures → Magic Realism // Individual Luxury → Communal Luxury // Writing = Walking
🧬 Frameworks: Rehabilitating Humanity
🎨 Works: Earth vs Humans // Relooted // Refugeoly
⏳ Reading Time: 15 minutes
🖼️ Framings
Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.
🥵 The Future Can’t Keep Up
Love how this article explains late-stage capitalism in a very simple way. There are several interesting framings in this one, like: “capitalism is a mechanism for borrowing from the future” or “inequality is what’s keeping capitalism on life support.”
“Under capitalism, we cannot make ethical, sustainable products affordable. This is because capitalism is a mechanism for borrowing from the future: you take out a mortgage today on the basis that your future self will be able to pay it back, with interest; you cut down a tree today, on the basis that the forest will grow another one, and another one, and another one.
For a while, the speed at which we were expecting the forests to grow back was okay. The trees could keep up and so we could keep up our metaphorical and literal mortgage payments. But more recently, we've been racking up tree-OUs like nightmarish ever-growing credit card debt, and we're running out of no-fee balance transfer deals. […]
That ethical, sustainable things are too expensive is a canary in the coal-fired industrialised capitalism machine.
If you're earning minimum wage or even an average wage (about £37,500 per year in the UK), you probably can't afford dining chairs at £1,000 each. Similarly, if you want to make £50 dining chairs and you can make one a day, then you're earning less than minimum wage before even taking off material costs. We are locked in to higher so-called "productivity" than that. In other words, we're reliant on mass production or off-shoring labour costs to where minimum wage is lower, or both. This inequality is what's keeping capitalism on life support, maintaining a supply of eyewateringly cheap labour.
Technology gave us big boosts in productivity through allowing ever more massive mass production, but this has pushed us beyond the pace that nature can regenerate, so the ecosystem is screaming. […]
Capitalism borrowed from the future until the future couldn't keep up. This is where we live. This is why ethical sustainable things are too expensive.
This is not a design problem that can be fixed at a product scale, this is a design problem that needs to be fixed at a societal scale. The design solutions are things like unconditional basic income, complementary currencies, non-monetary exchange, radical co-living, and all that utopian dreaming that is no longer naive, but necessary.”
» "Under capitalism, we cannot make ethical, sustainable products affordable" by Smith Mordak
😶🌫️ Depersonalization
First, industrialization divided us into individuals. Then, urbanization made us anonymous. Now, the growing gig economy, too much screen time, mechanized work, scripted and standardized interactions, and AI-driven automation (all for the sake of productivity) are depersonalizing us and making us unseen. Tech-elites’ (non-)solution to this? AI-enabled personalisation 😒… which the author of this piece aptly reframes as “mechanized recognition.”
“Pundits and policymakers are applying the word ‘loneliness’ to address a real and growing problem, but they are applying the wrong diagnosis. What they might call ‘loneliness’ is actually a different sort of crisis, one of depersonalisation.
Depersonalisation is what happens when people feel not exactly lonely, but rather profoundly invisible. What is missing here is what scholars call ‘recognition’, ‘mattering’ or ‘being seen’ – the notion that you are seen and heard, even emotionally understood, by the people around you, as opposed to feeling insignificant or invisible to others.
The depersonalisation crisis reflects changes in both the supply and demand for this kind of attention. Anonymity has long been the curse of modernity, given enduring trends like industrialisation and urbanisation, but even contemporary developments such as the spread of standardisation in service work – like when the grocery checkout clerk asks ‘paper or plastic’ or the call-centre worker races through their closing spiel to get it in before you hang up – can make us feel like a number. […] When Paul [a food delivery worker] talks wistfully about not being a robot or about having customers just point out where he should put his delivery, he is talking about depersonalisation. […]
There is ample evidence that being seen is in too short supply, that many are like Paul […], the walking wounded beset by depersonalisation. A sense of feeling invisible clearly animates working-class rage in many countries, and may have powered Donald Trump to victory in the US presidential election last fall. One study analysing his speeches found that he systematically aimed to appeal to this group by affirming their worth as workers; in the 2024 election aftermath, an op-ed in The New York Times declared: ‘Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?’
Research finds that low-income people are more likely to feel isolated and depressed, and stigmatised due to their socioeconomic status, with some choosing to isolate themselves because of their feelings of self-doubt. But while the working-class and poor may endure more invisibility, the spread of being subject to someone else’s data collection, of scripted and standardised interactions with chatbots and AI agents, affects people up and down the class ladder. Depersonalisation has come for us all. […]
Seeing others is how we experience connection, forge community, and even conduct democracy. Among the myriad human activities that we might ‘disrupt’, it is not clear why we would want to mechanise the relationships that give life meaning. The depersonalisation crisis is a social malady that begs for human intervention.”
» The unseen by Allison Pugh (author of the book The Last Human Job)
🛎️ AI As Dumbwaiter
This article is a lot to take in because it really uncovers and perfectly illustrates a repeating cycle of technological revolutions: from commons (the invention leads to explosion of ideas and small players) → enclosure (growth attracts capital(ists), firms seek moats like IP or network effects) → extraction (deskilling & standardization enable profitable scaling) → regulatory capture (locking the moat by buying politicians) → revolt (labor or people have had enough, antitrust laws by new political players, or the next tech takes over) → new commons…
“The dumbwaiter, my favorite industrial age invention — that little elevator for food — had nothing to do with saving Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved servants the labor of walking up the stairs with the trays. It was about sparing Jefferson’s Monticello dinner guests the discomfort of interacting with the enslaved people. With each supposed technology revolution, labor is hidden further, pushed further down the hierarchy. People are deskilled as the elite monopolize the tech and prevent a true renaissance, or any real change at all.
AI is no different. It doesn’t replace labor so much as shift it further down the chain. For every mortgage actuary who loses his job to an AI, there’s probably six kids in the Congo mining for molybdenum or cobalt at gunpoint. For every graphic designer who loses her job to chat, there’s ten women busy tagging data in a basement sweatshop in The Philippines. You thought AI tagged its own data? No — it’s human labor. It’s just hidden, like the workers putting food into the dumbwaiter.
We don’t use AI algorithms to foster human creativity or nuance, but to autotune producers, and consumers alike. Nuance is noise. Everything is quantized to be machine readable. And the age of large language models, we are quite literally reverting everything to the mean. Each prompt returns the most probable completion. Not even businesses are helped in the long run. They’re reduced to consumers of AI tech, outsourcing their competencies to the same tech companies as their competitors — and commodifying themselves in the process.
For their part, the tech companies just do what the biggest players always do. They go “meta” on the whole thing, leveling up to be the real monopolies behind everyone else. How many streaming channels are really just selling Amazon Web Services? Netflix, Disney, HBO Max, Peacock…basically all of them. This isn’t innovation, but the same playbook used by British East India Company to prevent anyone — small merchants or indigenous people — from creating any value, themselves.
The tech bros may seem like change agents because they are so hell-bent on exponential growth. Because they argue for total deregulation to fuel their AIs with data and energy. They act as if they are the advocates for runaway progress, but they’re not! They’re actually reactive. They want to preserve their monopolies before the rest of us figure this stuff out or, better, use their AIs to actually innovate. Get it? Their demand for unbridled growth is reactionary — a way of doubling down on the same old colonizing way of doing things.”
» Is AI the next Dumbwaiter? by
📈 Numbers
A thought-provoking chart or stat that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:
🙄 AI Saturation?!
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