Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #126

From perceived obsolescence to the post-reality era, the flatlining of thought, "alternative" media, unnatural disasters, scaling → deepening, art as the guiding paradigm, and glacier funerals

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Alright! Enough of this, let’s get into this week’s Rabbit Holes:

THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: Perceived Obsolescence // The Post-Reality Era // The Flatlining of Thought
📊 Numbers: "Alternative" Media
🌀 Re-Framings: Natural Disaster → Unnatural Disaster // Empathy = Attention // Scaling → Deepening
🧬 Frameworks: Art As Our Development Paradigm
🎨 Works: NYC's Urban Textscape // Glacier Funerals // Dust Slippers

⏳ Reading Time: 10 minutes

🖼️ Framings

Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.

🆕 Perceived Obsolescence

This is a super interesting perspective on why things are worse (products and services) and generally shitty. Yes, it’s because of scale and efficiency above all else, late-stage capitalism and all that, but it’s also – as this piece points out – because we’ve imprinted a consumerist identity into our brains. We, ourselves, have lost “quality”. (related: Nobody Cares)

“It’s as if the smell of burnt plastic from a dollar store has permeated the world. Things are worse: chipboard furniture, T-shirts unrecognizable after a second wash, packaged foods with more preservatives than ingredients. Airplane seats turned into backrests. Automatic restroom lights that turn off at a whim. But also newspaper articles shamelessly written with ChatGPT and its algorithmic prose. Nothing is made to be loved. Only to be bought. […]

While it’s only natural to blame multinational corporations for maximizing profit margins at the expense of consumers, and governments whose budget cuts have strangled already depleted public services, market logic is hard to dispute: things aren’t necessarily worse — they’re, to a large extent, exactly what we want them to be, or what we’ve been made to want. Put another way: it’s not the quality of things that’s declined — it’s us.

There’s a YouTube documentary about “planned obsolescence” with over a million views. It explains how some companies design certain products — especially household appliances — stop working after a certain period of time. This isn’t a conspiracy theory, but a proven fact. However, there’s another, lesser-known but even more effective method: convincing consumers that a product is outdated for aesthetic or symbolic reasons, even if it still works. This phenomenon is called “perceived obsolescence.” […]

“Advertising and subliminal messages have turned human beings into zombies with no other goal than consumption,” says Juan Villoro in No soy un robot (I Am Not a Robot) (2024). […]

Paradoxically, this overabundance of things makes us poorer: “Like our objects, interactions and ways of thinking have become mediocre: superficial, ephemeral, and degraded.”

» The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality by Daniel Soufi

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🤯 The Post-Reality Era

Ever since I heard the excellent Center for Humane Technology warn about what they called reality collapse (which I also shared with you two years ago), I have been quite frightened about what this would do to our societies. Seems like we’re now entering this world. From post-truth to post-reality, from AI-curated to AI-created.

“I believe we are stepping into a post‑reality era, where reality is determined by how you feel about it. […]

This is distinct from the post‑truth era we’re still free‑falling through. Post‑truth meant arguing over facts inside a loosely shared stage—often delusional, but still shared. Most people agreed COVID‑19 existed (come on, folks!), but the debates were about masks, data points, and motives.

In a post‑reality era, reality may be AI-generated, but it’s stamped as “real” based on how it felt and what it moved you to do and believe, not by who or what produced it. […]

Social media already fragments perception. My feed is not yours. AI algorithms rank and repeat what keeps each of us engaged: AI‑curated realities. This curation phase spins up echo chambers and conspiracy ecosystems (QAnon, etc.) out of a shared pool of posts we can still, in principle, open and audit. You can search a hashtag, view the comment section, see what’s trending. There are shared artifacts to point to.

Now the shift from AI curated to AI created happens inside private AI chats. Instead of selecting from that common shelf of public posts, the AI system generates the narrative, the examples, the “context,” the emotional framing just for you. A belief can congeal around outputs that exist only in your chat history. There is no public post to label or challenge until after you have acted.”

» The Post-Reality Era by

Sinéad Bovell

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🤔 The Flatlining of Thought

First, techno-solutionists made us forget our bodies. Now, with AI, they’re making us forget our minds. First, they colonized our attention; now, they’re colonizing our brains. The result? A flatlining of thought and a lifeless way of being.

“I came to feel that large language models like ChatGPT are intellectual Soylent Green — the fictional foodstuff from the 1973 dystopian film of the same name, marketed as plankton but secretly made of people. After all, what are GPTs if not built from the bodies of the very thing they replace, trained by mining copyrighted language and scraping the internet? And yet they are sold to us not as Soylent Green but as Soylent, the 2013 “science-backed” meal replacement dreamed up by techno-optimists who preferred not to think about their bodies. Now, it seems, they’d prefer us not to think about our minds, either. […]

Once, having asked A.I. to draft a complicated note based on bullet points I gave it, I sent an email that I realized, retrospectively, did not articulate what I myself felt. It was as if a ghost with silky syntax had colonized my brain, controlling my fingers as they typed. That was almost a relief when the task was a fraught work email — but it would be counterproductive, and depressing, for any creative project of my own. […]

One of the real challenges here is the way that A.I. undermines the human value of attention, and the individuality that flows from that.

What we stand to lose is not just a skill but a mode of being: the pleasure of invention, the felt life of the mind at work. I am a writer because I know of no art form or technology more capable than the book of expanding my sense of what it means to be alive.

Will the wide-scale adoption of A.I. produce a flatlining of thought, where there was once the electricity of creativity?”

» The Seductions of A.I. for the Writer’s Mind by Meghan O’Rourke

📈 Numbers

A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:

🎙️ “Alternative” Media

Wanted to share this to illustrate how powerful “alternative” media has become, because so many have yet to really get this. You might have never heard of Prof G Media (newsletter and podcasts by Scott Galloway that I enjoy a lot), but you probably know The Late Show with Stephen Colbert – now look at the revenue per employee numbers... Well, there are countless other Prof G Media platforms out there that you and I have no idea about.

🌀 Re-Framings

A few short re-framings for building better systems or worlds that I’ve recently come across:

🌳 Natural Disaster → Unnatural Disaster

“When it comes to talking about climate change, familiarity is important: Research shows that people’s strongest reactions are to phrases they know best. But as the world changes, we inevitably reach for new ways to express what we’re living through. And if metaphors shape our reality, it has become clear just how urgently we might need new ones—big enough, strange enough, urgent enough—to meet this moment.

Consider “climate whiplash,” the phenomenon of weather flipping from one extreme to another that now affects up to 15% of cities. The term captures the unpredictability of life in a climate-altered world: droughts turning to floods; heat waves to frosty spells. […] Or take “global weirding.” Coined back in 2007, the phrase reframes climate change as chaotic, strange, and unprecedented. “Global weirding” has only recently come into its own as food prices rise, dogs bites become more frequent, frogs shrink, and wildflowers flee north. “[Global weirding] captures the whole issue,” Nerlich said. “This chaoticity is what makes climate change dangerous.”

There is something bracing about the specificity of “global weirding,” just as there is with the growing use of “unnatural disaster” to describe floods, fires, and storms that science shows us are increasingly driven by human activity. “You can’t just deflect it by saying nature has overwhelmed us,” said Nerlich. “It’s us that created these unnatural monsters.” […]

Indigenous languages often contain words that reflect ways of relating to the world that have been lost in the West. An example is “sila,” an Inuit word with a complex, layered meaning: it refers to the weather as a manifestation of nature that should be respected, and with whom the human experience is intimately entangled.

The dominant English-language framing of climate change is, in contrast, one of conflict: We “fight” it; wage a “battle against” it. And the rise of climate “doomerism” suggests that many believe it’s a war we are destined to lose.

And yet, we lack words that embody a vision for change. “[Our] language hasn’t been able to express the hopeful, optimistic sides of things,” Nerlich said. “The motivational aspects of climate action have not had the influx of words that are probably needed.”

» Can Better Words Lead to Better Climate Action? by Becca Warner

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👀 Empathy = Attention

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⏬ Scaling → Deepening

“In a world obsessed with scaling, we forget that transformative change happens in relationship, not just replication.

In the rush to grow, replicate, and measure reach, we often sacrifice context, accountability, and depth. We lift practices out of the places and relationships that give them meaning, and we brand it as innovation.

The logic of scale isn’t neutral and is rooted in extractive worldviews that treat knowledge as a product, not a relationship. It flattens complexity. It makes care optional. It allows us to move fast, but rarely asks us to stay.

When we prioritize reach over depth, we bypass the slow, relational work of accountability. Depth asks us to stay close to the histories we inherit, the communities we affect, and the responsibilities we hold.

What if we stopped asking how far our work can go and started honoring how deeply it’s rooted? What if impact wasn’t measured by numbers, but by the quality of our relationships, the care we embody, and the responsibilities we refuse to abandon.”

» LinkedIn Post by sahibzada mayed

🧬 Frameworks

One small, handy framework to build more regenerative, beautiful, and just systems:

Art As Our Development Paradigm by Sophie Robele

“What if art were our development paradigm?”

I tried to turn or summarize Sophia Robele’s article (do read the entire piece!) and concept into a little framework. Her main idea is that instead of adding art as an input (data visualization, community project, stakeholder workshop), what if we treated art as the paradigm: a rigorous way of seeing, questioning, deciding, and building that keeps development work alive, human, and transformational. These are the 6 questions or themes that she notes arise when applying art as the guiding frame:

1. See Deeply (Perception)

• Principle: Art teaches us to see beyond surface facts and dominant narratives.

• Shift: Move from narrow metrics and linear logic to multi-layered perception that includes emotion, context, and blind spots.

• Question: What realities and voices are we not seeing or witnessing?

2. Hold Answers Loosely (Openness)

• Principle: Art values unanswerable questions and breaks false certainties.

• Shift: Replace rigid protocols with curiosity and adaptive learning.

• Question: Where are we clinging to the illusion of safety instead of engaging with the unknown?

3. Act from Necessity (Integrity)

• Principle: Like art, actions should stem from what feels deeply necessary, not just what is fundable or measurable.

• Shift: Prioritize intrinsic motivations and collective values over purely utilitarian outputs.

• Question: At the individual level, are we devoting at least some portion of our time to work that feels like it comes from a place of inner necessity?

4. Re-visiting (Fluid Understanding)

• Principle: Art evolves through re-seeing and re-making and overhauling frames.

• Shift: Build development systems that revisit assumptions, shift direction when needed, and accept "unfixing" as part of transformation.

• Question: Where are our structures too fixed to allow real change?

5. Create Sanctuaries (Space for Renewal)

• Principle: Art creates spaces of rest, reflection, and imagination.

• Shift: Design processes that sustain people emotionally and spiritually, not just operationally.

• Question: Where are the sanctified spaces in our work that hold us when things fall apart?

6. Replenish Imagination (Possibility)

• Principle: Art restores the capacity to envision radically different futures.

• Shift: Make imagination and empathy central to policy, planning, and systems design.

• Question: What futures can we no longer see because we’ve stopped imagining them?

🎨 Works

Some hand-picked, particularly thought-provoking and inspiring work:

© The Pudding & Yufeng Zhao

A story about Glacier Funerals from around the world

Slippers made from dust by Rahat Rai

That’s it for this week’s Rabbit Holes issue!

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Thomas