Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #124
From responsiveness as a proxy for care to handless, everything becoming crab, the death of partying, lovemaking, proximalism, free trade → free care, the entangled tree time and the banksy of GenZ
Hello and welcome to the 25 new subscribers who joined us since last week.
In case you missed the framework I shared on the weekend, have a look:
But now, let’s get right into this week’s Rabbit Holes:
THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: Responsiveness Is A Proxy For Care // Handless // Everything Becomes Crab
📊 Numbers: The Death of Partying
🌀 Re-Framings: Lovemaking // Distalism → Proximalism // Free Trade → Free Care
🧬 Frameworks: The Entangled Tree Time
🎨 Works: Commodore // Buttons I'd Like To Press // The Banksy of GenZ
⏳ Reading Time: 10 minutes
🖼️ Framings
Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.
📳 Responsiveness Is A Proxy For Care
Great depiction of our “always-on” life and its deeper impact on care and relationships. Links well to my February deep dive piece From A Care-Less To A Care-Full Future.
“A friend messaged me the other day. I saw it. I didn’t reply. A week later, I finally responded with the classic: Sorry for the late reply, just got to this. She called me out. You didn’t just get to this, she said. I saw the double ticks.
Damn. She was right. I’d opened it. I’d registered it. But I’d also shelved it. It needed a proper reply, and at that moment, I wasn’t equipped. […]
Does free time now equal availability?
I get a ping from the family group chat, which doubles as an IT helpdesk for my mum. My best friend just FaceTimed me about a White Lotus episode, and another left a voice note crying about a possible diagnosis. All this, lodged between videos of cats and genocide. The boundaries between reception and response have collapsed.
I’m switching lanes like a Subway Surfer. Digital whiplash has branded itself on to my cheek. My psychological tabs are maxed out, and there’s no alert to clear storage or update my internal OS.
I can’t tell it’s happening, but it creeps in and settles into a quiet, directionless overwhelm, a kind of existential buffering I’ve started to call “multiverse fatigue”. No tab to close. No log-out option. Too many realities to keep up with. […]
Because we appear online, we’re assumed to be free. […] Replying, whether to a message, a comment, or an invitation, is no longer just a communication act. It becomes a micro-performance of care, kindness or presence. We reply to show we are good friends, good partners, good people. And not replying becomes a moral failure, a small social sin.
This turns intimacy into a transactional loop of “positive affect obligation” – our perceived duty to be friendly, responsive and emotionally available, often at the cost of our own rest, clarity or boundaries. […]
In today’s culture, your responsiveness equals your worth. It’s a proxy for your love, your professionalism, your care.”
» I’m not ignoring your message – I’m overwhelmed by the tyranny of being reachable by Miski Omar
🖖 Handless
Can you handle it?! As a German, I haven’t really thought about the German word handeln (“to act”) in the way described below, but it makes a lot of sense. To act, to do something, handeln requires being embodied. This article also offers a super interesting new framing which I put into the Re-Framings section below (just scroll down).
“Smartphones make you dumb because it atrophies your ability to act. In German, “to act” is handeln, which is related to the word “hand”. Our hands make us human. This shows up in the metaphor, “I can handle it”, meaning I can do something about it. We exist when we’re able to do things. I act, therefore I am.
Digital tools make us handless. In the famous 2007 keynote presentation where he introduced the iPhone, Steve Jobs declared: “We’re going to use the best pointing device in the world. We’re going to use a pointing device that we’re all born with—born with ten of them. We’re going to use our fingers.”
Fingers have replaced hands. We no longer have to handeln anything because we no longer deal with things that matter—literally, things made of atoms.”
» Smartphones and lovemaking by
🦀 Everything Becomes Crab
In this highly thought-provocative masterpiece, Michael Garfield goes deep into the everything-becomes-crab or the carcinisation of humanity metaphor. Extremely mind-blowing and insightful long read (found this via the Nexialist newsletter).
“‘Everything becomes crab’ is more than an absurd meme. […] As individuals, we may not have pincers, segmented bodies, chitinous exoskeletons, compound eyes or a dorsal heart that pumps haemolymph (the equivalent of blood) through an open circulatory system. But, as a collective, things look very different.
Firstly, humans do live in something like an intertidal zone: the turbulence and inescapable betweenness of our lives as we move in and out of the ‘virtual’ world. And, secondly, we encase ourselves in exoskeletons more literally every day as we become increasingly supported and defined by our technologies. If we recognise ‘intertidal scavenger’ and ‘skeleton’ to be analogies for our present-day condition in late-stage capitalism, and view civilisation as an ‘extended phenotype’ from which we cannot extract ourselves, we will find that we are already much more like crabs than we might assume. […]
In the past few centuries, human carcinisation has begun to speed up as our collective evolution increasingly mimics the deep-time transformation of crabs. […] Consider how trade and communication ‘carcinise’ our squishy mammal interfaces, pixelating analogue reality into interoperable digital standards. Consider how local languages, currencies and cultures dissolve when pegged to global markets. Consider the banal horror of reducing your identity to state-issued IDs or your occupation. […]
Perhaps crustaceans, with their armour, pincers, eyestalks and high strangeness, help us Homo sapiens make sense of how we wrap our fragile flesh in leverage-enhancing tools. Perhaps they also help us understand how our symbiosis with these tools gradually withers our ancestral human traits. […]
From orbit, a time-lapse of urbanisation looks strikingly like metastasis: a dense, entangled, runaway growth of mutant tissue. In a strange (or entirely expected) turn, humanity’s carcinisation appears to have taken the form of a spreading cancer. […]
In the process of cutting and claiming the world with our symbolic and numerical abstractions, we have become encased within them, and have replaced reality with simulation. […] We are undergoing carcinisation because we have to play a game determined by the grids in which we’ve incarcerated ourselves.”
» Homo crustaceous by Michael Garfield
📈 Numbers
A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:
🥳 The Death of Partying
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