Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #168
From attention stuffing to self-imprisonment, directionless panic, a decline in conscientiousness, collapse acceptance, systems breakdown as our opportunity, and hotel period care kits
Hello everyone!
I hope you’re having a relaxing August so far.
I have recently been on two podcasts: one was with my friend Pia, for her Social Regeneration Podcast, and another was with Peter Spear, for his That Business of Meaning Podcast. So, if you wanna hear me talk a bit about my story, my take on futures studies and systems thinking, and a few theories and ideas, then have a listen:
Social Regeneration Podcast by Pia Hillebrecht: Listen via YouTube or Spotify
Podcast by Peter Spear: Listen via Substack
Now onto this week’s Rabbit Holes:
THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: Attention Stuffed // Self-Imprisonment // Directionless Panic
📊 Numbers: Conscientiousness in Freefall
🌀 Re-Framings: Collapse Awareness → Collapse Acceptance // Technological Progress → Carbon Pulse // Systems Are Breaking → That’s Our Opportunity
🧬 Frameworks: Reconnecting The System With The Human
🎨 Works: Hotel Waste Furniture // Streets For Kids // Hotel Period Care Kit
⏳ Reading Time: 10 minutes
“The things you do badly are as much part of your style as the things you do well.”
– Martin Scorsese
🖼️ Framings
Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.
Attention Stuffed
Interesting piece and framing regarding our attention economy and its connection to work. Also love the subtitle of this piece: “Our future rests on our capacity to make digital technology more boring.” Oh, and check out the Numbers section below as this week’s thought-provoking chart basically illustrates the outcome of this “attention-stuffing”.
“Attention is not a newly discovered capacity. But it has attained problem status over the last two decades for the obvious reason that digital screens completely saturate and quantify our conscious experience. In doing so, they create new compulsions to use them, which seem to erode our sense of what is within our conscious control. Regardless of whether the language of addiction is useful to describe these compulsions, we all feel that something is off. Our user experience is unsettled in ways we don’t fully like or choose or want. […]
Attention is typically understood as an “inside-out” problem: each of us is supposed to manage our focus individually. In a fully screened environment, this is like suggesting that we keep dry in a rainstorm by running really fast between the drops. But there is another, “outside-in” approach to the problem: to change the world to be worthy of our full attention. Instead of focusing on the distribution of wealth or on data rights as ends in themselves, we need to take up the question of what living well looks like. The clearest way for the left to reclaim this ground is to revive old socialist questions about the purpose, meaning, and quality of labor. […]
Good work (whether it’s parenting, ranching, plumbing, playing an instrument, or coding) disciplines our attention because it is recalcitrant to our immediate inclinations. It is because the matter and rhythm of the craft resists our will that it makes some aspect of the world newly interesting and alive for us; it allows us to take the world personally. It places the worker into a creative relationship with reality, which thereby becomes more legible. […]
Much of our doom-scrolling experience—on social media in particular—is no less dehumanizing than the assembly line. The latter degraded people through physical drudgery, while the former enthralls our minds, scratching the glandular itches that digital products themselves create. To suggest that social media can become salutary under different ownership or with better legislation is like suggesting that Louis Vuitton bags could be used to tote potatoes around in a socialist collective: it’s only very technically true. So long as the appeal of digital services consists of the quantified reification of identity and the provision of anxious satisfactions, it will continue to obscure questions about the quality of our material lives. We should work to cut these services down or out entirely.”
» Attention Stuffed by Antón Barba-Kay
Self-Imprisonment
Such a mic-drop statistic and overall description/framing of Freya India, whose amazing writing I’ve already linked to in my deep dive The Transience of Everything. I’d described the snippet below as: Digital technology, which promised to give us freedom, has now literally imprisoned us.
Directionless Panic
This is one of the most interesting podcasts I’ve listened to in a while, and I just love this framing of directionless panic described briefly below. I don’t know why I am only coming across Christian Madsbjerg now (as well as this excellent podcast), but there is so much in this conversation and his insights that relate to the topics this newsletter has explored.
“So, you’ve spent the last twenty or so years observing human behavior and identifying change. I think right now a lot of people feel a sense of anxiety and confusion. I’m curious about how you, personally, feel about this moment in time. Are you feeling the sense of anxiety and confusion?
CM: I’ve been trying to think about my own emotional state about what’s going on. The best way I can describe it is directionless panic. It’s a little bit like a horse that’s stung by a wasp. It’s moving all over, but it doesn’t really know why. I think the relationship I have to technology, I think climate change—I feel it’s absolutely necessary to understand this and do something about it, but I have the faintest clue about even where to start. I think if there’s an emotion that defines the times, it’s directionless panic.
[…] It’s a little bit like a child that’s been hit by adults. They’re afraid of being hit again. That’s the feeling I get by observing the world. That’s, I think, my emotional state right now.
AZ: And it’s not just about politics.
CM: No, no, no. Politics is just a residual of it. It’s pretty general. I think all of us feel it. I mean, there might be bubbles [of people] that feel quite confident about everything, but I think most of us feel uneasy, and I certainly am.”
» Christian Madsbjerg on Why “Design Thinking” Is Bogus by Andrew Zuckerman
📈 Numbers
A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:
Conscientiousness in Freefall
Below the paywall: This is the part where I share reframings and unconventional ideas that make you see and build more regenerative, caring, and joyful systems. In exchange, I ask for 5$ a month or 45$ a year.