Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #171
From a volatility regime to the small organizations gap, a disembodied world, extreme narratives, organizing imagination, marriage commerce, indigenous knowledge protocols and crying glaciers
Hello everyone!
Before you dive into this week’s issue, I wanted to, very quickly, draw your attention to my friend Inez Aponte’s upcoming (Oct 21) online course. If this is something that interests you and comes at the right time, definitely consider signing up:
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More info and sign up here: www.beautifuleconomies.com
Alright then, let’s get into this week’s Rabbit Holes:
THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: A Volatility Regime // The Small Organizations Gap // A Disembodied World
📊 Numbers: Extreme Narratives
🌀 Re-Framings: Organizing Efficiency & Growth → Organizing Imagination // One-Night-Stand Commerce → Marriage Commerce // More → Better
🧬 Frameworks: Indigenous Knowledge Protocols
🎨 Works: Crying Glacier // Last Year's Phone // The Nettle Dress
⏳ Reading Time: 10 minutes
🖼️ Framings
Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.
🎢 A Volatility Regime
Super interesting way of looking at the volatile reality we are facing by Indy Johar. This reminds me of Alex Steffen’s work (which I shared here before) around unpatterning, meaning that the discontinuity we will face in the years and decades to come is not a problem we can solve, but the context in which we will solve problems.
“For decades, our collective maps of the future have been drawn around end-state scenarios: 1.5 °C, 2 °C, or 3–4 °C worlds, each with projections of sea-level rise, food system collapse, and economic disruption. These scenarios were useful for mobilising action, but they carried a hidden assumption: that our political, economic, and civic institutions would remain stable enough to deliver whichever pathway we selected.
That assumption no longer holds. The defining condition of the 21st century is not which end-state we reach, but the volatility of the path itself. Compound shocks—climatic, geopolitical, technological, financial—are already destabilising foundational systems faster than they can be rebuilt. Even small increments of warming or disruption produce extremes that exceed institutional capacity.
Volatility has another consequence: it generates accelerating fragilities. Baseline erosion, inequality, and systemic interdependence make societies progressively more brittle. In a resource-constrained environment, these fragilities do not remain latent; they become strategic assets, liable to be weaponised in zero-sum competition over energy, food, minerals, cognition, or compute. Volatility thus multiplies threat vectors—undermining not only resilience but also security.
The central challenge of transition, therefore, is not simply to chart destinations but to hold coherence through turbulence: to govern within a probabilistic field, to anticipate and buffer accelerating fragilities, and to embed legitimacy in how thresholds and trade-offs are managed.”
» Governing in a Volatility Regime: Five Claims by
⌞ ⌝ The Small Organizations Gap
Interesting, brief piece that argues for the importance of small organizations as agency-, relationship-, and therefore meaning-boosting. As small organizations decline and large organizations, as well as a few extremely wealthy individuals, take up the space that used to be inhabited by small organizations, we’re building this synthetic world full of artificial substitutes or abstractions of meaning.
“My tentative theory is that the systems, incentives, and technologies in modern world have managed to slightly empower (many) individuals, and massively empower large organizations, but at the significant expense of small organizations, whose role in the human societal ecosystem has thus shrunk significantly, with many small organizations either weakening in influence or transitioning to (or absorbed by) large organizations.
While this imbalanced system does provide significant material comforts (albeit distributed rather unequally) and some limited feeling of agency, it has led at the level of the individual to feelings of disconnection, alienation, loneliness, and cynicism or pessimism about the ability to influence future events or meet major challenges, except perhaps through the often ruthless competition to become wealthy or influential enough to gain, as an individual, a status comparable to a small or even large organization.
And larger organizations have begun to imperfectly step in the void formed by the absence of small communities, providing synthetic social or emotional goods that are, roughly speaking, to more authentic such products as highly processed “junk” food is to more nutritious fare, due to the inherently impersonal nature of such organizations (particularly in the modern era of advanced algorithms and AI, which when left to their own devices tend to exacerbate the trends listed above).
Much of the current debate on societal issues is then framed as conflicts between large organizations (e.g., opposing political parties, or extremely powerful or wealthy individuals with a status comparable to such organizations), conflicts between large organizations and average individuals, or a yearning for a return to a more traditional era where legacy small organizations recovered their former role.
While these are valid framings, I think one aspect we could highlight more is the valuable (though usually non-economic) roles played by emerging grassroots organizations, both in providing “softer” benefits to individuals (such as a sense of purpose, and belonging) and as a way to meaningfully connect with larger organizations and systems; and be more aware of what the tradeoffs are when converting such an organization to a larger one (or component of a larger organization).”
» Mastodon post by Terence Tao
💆🏻♀️ A Disembodied World
Christine Emba frames the renewed romanticization of smoking as an antidote to an increasingly disembodied world. I am not a smoker, and I, like Christine Emba, would rather warn against it, but what’s interesting here in observing this renewed presence of smoking is the countercultural approach to an otherwise increasingly disembodied life.
In her 2024 book “The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World,” Christine Rosen (my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute) describes how our contact with the physical has receded as our lives have become increasingly mediated by technology. “It has transformed many human experiences not by banning them, but by making certain kinds of embodied experiences such as face-to-face communication and other unmediated pleasures less and less relevant to daily life.” Heartfelt conversations take place through text messages; we stream church services to our living rooms. This is not a good thing. “Many of these experiences are what, historically, have helped us form and nurture a shared reality as human beings.
Younger generations are perhaps the most affected by this transformation, having come of age in an almost entirely digital world. During the Covid pandemic, formative experiences took place at a remove; today even more of life happens online. An epidemic of loneliness and a rise in mental health problems has crested in tandem with the increase in time spent on mediated platforms.
It’s not hard to imagine, then, that smoking might serve as an antidote — or at the very least, a refutation of an existence lived at a remove from the real.
Cigarettes are unavoidably analog; smoking is an embodied task. The handling of a cellophane-wrapped pack, the flick of a lighter — or better yet, the strike of a match — the deliberate draw and release of breath and the heady nicotine buzz all engage the senses in a way that can’t be replicated on a screen. Many smokers describe the ritual of lighting up, the tangibleness of the particular task. And unlike a bulbous, plasticy vape, they seem real; not just another thing to plug in.
Plus, in a time of persistent distance between individuals, cigarettes are often social — a connective experience. […] And they are symbolic. Smoking has always signaled a certain devil-may-care mood; in our nihilistic times, haunted by fears of apocalypse — A.I., climate, institutional, other — it’s a celebration of being alive by way of chipping away at it, treating the body casually in service of a life fully enjoyed. […]
I don’t smoke. In fact, for the record, I would warn against it. But I do approve of giving in to the allure of the analog and of attempts, even if misguided, to live a more embodied life.”
» Coming to Terms With Embodied Pleasures by Christine Emba
📈 Numbers
A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:
😱 Extreme Narratives World
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