Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #172
From everything is television to AI is the economy, the stock markert and the government, to workslop, pre-war europe, green freedom, media as infrastructure, scalind deep and renaissance plastic
THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: Everything Is Television // AI Is The Economy, The Stock Market, And The Government // Workslop
📊 Numbers: From Post- To Pre-War Europe
🌀 Re-Framings: Green Restrictions → Green Freedom // Friction = Agency To Create // Media As Inventory → Media As Infrastructure
🧬 Frameworks: Scaling Deep
🎨 Works: Renaissance Plastic Waste // Paloma Wool Snaps // Cartography of Generative AI
⏳ Reading Time: 9 minutes
🖼️ Framings
Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.
📺 Everything Is Television
“A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television. […]
Social media has evolved from text to photo to video to streams of text, photo, and video, and finally, it seems to have reached a kind of settled end state, in which TikTok and Meta are trying to become the same thing: a screen showing hours and hours of video made by people we don’t know. Social media has turned into television. […]
When podcasts got started, they were radio for the Internet. This really appealed to me when I started my show. […] But the most successful podcasts these days are all becoming YouTube shows. Industry analysts say consumption of video podcasts is growing twenty times faster than audio-only ones, and more than half of the world’s top shows now release video versions. YouTube has quietly become the most popular platform for podcasts, and it’s not even close. On Spotify, the number of video podcasts has nearly tripled since 2023, and video podcasts are significantly outgrowing non-video podcasts. Does it really make sense to insist on an audio-only podcast in 2025? I do not think so. Reality is screaming loudly in my ear, and its message is clear: Podcasts are turning into television.
In the last few weeks, Meta introduced a product called Vibes, and OpenAI announced Sora. Both are AI social networks where users can watch endless videos generated by artificial intelligence. […] Even the architects of artificial intelligence, who imagine themselves on the path to creating the last invention, are busy building another infinite sequence of video made by people we don’t know. Even AI wants to be television. […]
When literally everything becomes television, what disappears is not something so broad as intelligence (although that seems to be going, too) but something harder to put into words, and even harder to prove the value of. It’s something like inwardness. The capacity for solitude, for sustained attention, for meaning that penetrates inward rather than swipes away at the tip of a finger.”
» Everything Is Television by
🫧 AI Is The Economy, The Stock Market, And The Government
“I think for a while I thought that the stock market was just ignoring politics. But it isn’t! It is politics now, a political actor that can grant or withhold legitimacy1. Artificial intelligence fuels valuations, those valuations stabilize public confidence, that confidence grants the administration power, and the administration protects the system that sustains it.
The stock market has never been the economy - it’s really a reflection of what the economy dreams it could be in a world where share buybacks translate to meaningful productivity. But as AI swallows up more and more capital, it is both the economy and the stock market - and the government. […]
The US equity market is betting everything on one story:
Nearly 40% of US GDP growth this year comes from AI.
According to Morgan Stanley, “roughly 75% of S&P 500 returns, 80% of earnings growth, and 90% of capital expenditures growth” can be attributed to the AI data center build out.
AI companies hold $1.2T in debt, the largest segment in the investment grade market.
Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple now account for over 20% of the S&P 500 index.
The underlying idea here is that AI surely will generate boundless bounty later, so valuations don’t have to make sense now. Nothing has to make sense now!
The AI companies are spending a lot of money, primarily with each other. It’s a circular economy of speculation, as Bloomberg wrote about here.
Nvidia invested $100 billion in OpenAI to build out AI infrastructure, and so OpenAI could buy $100 billion worth of Nvidia chips. […]
Everyone is making money because they are all making money from each other. […]
And the bags are plentiful. AI’s sheer power - social media app or not - gives the government political cover. As long as portfolios are green, the electorate stays somewhat calm. The administration is effectively borrowing confidence from the AI bubble. Speculation has become governance.”
» AI Is the Market, and the Market Is the Government by
👩🏻💻 Workslop
“A confusing contradiction is unfolding in companies embracing generative AI tools: while workers are largely following mandates to embrace the technology, few are seeing it create real value. Consider, for instance, that the number of companies with fully AI-led processes nearly doubled last year, while AI use has likewise doubled at work since 2023. Yet a recent report from the MIT Media Lab found that 95% of organizations see no measurable return on their investment in these technologies. So much activity, so much enthusiasm, so little return. Why?
In collaboration with Stanford Social Media Lab, our research team at BetterUp Labs has identified one possible reason: Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers. On social media, which is increasingly clogged with low-quality AI-generated posts, this content is often referred to as “AI slop.” In the context of work, we refer to this phenomenon as “workslop.” We define workslop as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task. […]
The insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work. In other words, it transfers the effort from creator to receiver. […] If this sounds familiar, you have been workslopped. […]
Cognitive offloading to machines is not a novel concept, nor are anxieties about technology hijacking cognitive capacity. In 2006, for instance, the technology journalist Nicolas Carr published a provocative essay in The Atlantic that asked “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The prevailing mental model for cognitive offloading—going all the way back to Socrates’ concerns about the alphabet—is that we jettison hard mental work to technologies like Google because it’s easier to, for example, search for something online than to remember it.
Unlike this mental outsourcing to a machine, however, workslop uniquely uses machines to offload cognitive work to another human being. When coworkers receive workslop, they are often required to take on the burden of decoding the content, inferring missed or false context. A cascade of effortful and complex decision-making processes may follow, including rework and uncomfortable exchanges with colleagues.”
» AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity by Kate Niederhoffer et al.
📈 Numbers
A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:
🪖 From Post- To Pre-War Europe
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