Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #173

From people not mattering to ressentiment nations, the casino economy, written by AI, gross ecosystem product (GEP), fixing → balancing, community PhDs, the zoöp model, the dream bike, and isleep pro

Hi everyone!

This newsletter has been a bit irregular lately, and that’s simply because I am juggling quite a few life changes right now and some ailments. So, very briefly, a personal update:

As you might already know, I recently moved to South Tyrol (Italy) and I am still in the process of getting settled here. I moved here for a new role as a researcher (focus: futures studies) at the Center for Advanced Studies at EURAC Research in Bolzano (btw: reach out if you are based nearby, let’s have a drink; and if you have any experience with futures governance, message me as well!).

I am super excited about the role and the new, more scientific context, but because it’s a full-time role, I unfortunately have much less time to spend on this newsletter. I do hope, though, that this will change once I get a bit more used to everything.

What makes things more difficult these days is that I’m struggling with some major back pain. Working on the newsletter after a full workday – i.e., sitting for 8 hours plus then for another 3-4 – is a bit tricky right now. But hey, I’m doing lots of recovery exercises to hopefully get better very soon.

If this wasn’t enough, here comes the biggest change of them all: I am about to become a father (actually, any time now). 😊 Fatherhood will probably most definitely change everything, so I’m not even trying to speculate about what my life will be, and feel like soon. But I am very much looking forward to welcoming the little person into the world! 🍼😊

I want to thank you all for continuing to support my newsletter! Everything helps: every share, like, comment, e-mail reply, and of course, the paid subscriptions help me a lot and keep this project afloat! So thank you all so much for that!!!

Alright! Enough of the personal stuff. Let’s get into this week’s Rabbit Holes:

THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: People Don’t Matter // Ressentiment Nations // Casino Economy
📊 Numbers: Written By AI
🌀 Re-Framings: Gross Domestic Product (GDP) → Gross Ecosystem Product (GEP) // Fixing → Balancing // PhDs → Community PhDs
🧬 Frameworks: The Zoöp Model
🎨 Works: The Dream Bike // iSleep Pro // Austrian Power Giants

⏳ Reading Time: 10 minutes

“Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalise; words depersonalise; words make the uncommon common.”
Ian McGilchrist

🖼️ Framings

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

🌐 People Don’t Matter

Whether it’s social media, politics, or even relationships, what seems to be the effect of years of internet enshittification is a sort of relational rupture as we all lose a deep-seated social connection. Said a bit differenty: The death of the follower likewise means the death of one’s own self.

“Over the past few years, I’ve seen people go from posting about their neighbourhoods to making reactionary videos about whatever topic is trending. Their engagement went up. While they didn’t reach their friends and family, they reached someone. And soon they started catering to that audience.

That gave rise to a fair chunk of creators who cater to audiences and topics that don’t hold much debate in the real world. Jubilee and the people you see on that channel wouldn’t exist without the dynamic of algorithms treating people as topics or keywords and pushing them toward other keywords, not toward people who actually care about them.

Those creators, and many others who didn’t grow their audience by accident, are now also facing the harsh reality of feeling like “followers don’t matter,” and they are jumping from one roof to another. It will take them too long to realise they left their own self behind.

We are already seeing this dynamic play out in the political world. People don’t matter. Their views do. It is a by-product of social media treating everyone as another piece of content and a list of keywords.”

» Social media is dying. The internet is dying. Where do we go from here? by Jaskaran

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🙇‍♂️ Ressentiment Nations

Could Nietzsche’s ressentiment accurately frame today’s societies’ sort of emotional breeding ground for authoritarianism?! Definitely an interesting way of framing it. According to the dictionary, ressentiment is “a psychological state resulting from suppressed feelings of envy and hatred which cannot be satisfied”.

“Friedrich Nietzsche created a concept that can help us understand this political moment. He imported a word from French to describe a kind of deep-seated anger that goes beyond transitory gripes: ressentiment, a feeling that comes from a combination of insecurity, an amorphous envy, and a generalized sense of resentment. Citizens engulfed by this emotion want to bring others down to what they think is their own underappreciated station and identify scapegoats to bear the blame for their misfortunes, real or imagined. They are driven by grievance and a continual, unfocused sense of injury. Accordingly, they see politics as a way to get even with almost everyone outside of their immediate circle. A Trump voter put out of work during the 2019 government shutdown captured this mentality when she exclaimed: “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

Sociologists and political scientists have long been aware of the effects of ressentiment on entire nations, not least because it is often a red flag: a marker of a society ripe for decay into authoritarianism. And that is where the danger lies in the juvenility and coarseness among both the Trump elite and its most loyal supporters, some of whom treat grave issues of national and even global importance as little more than raw material for mean-spirited jokes and obscene memes. This shallow behavior leads to a deadening of the moral and civic spirit that undergirds democracy. […]

They may support candidates such as Trump (and the late Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, and the now-imprisoned former leaders Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil) not because they expect responsible government, but because such candidates promise to hurt the right people—to humiliate them, impoverish them, and perhaps even shoot them.”

» A Confederacy of Toddlers by Tom Nichols

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🎰 Casino Economy

Interesting framing of the strange state of the US or world economy by the always insightful kyla scanlon. To make sense of or maybe even devise one’s own strategy within this casino economy, I think it’s crucial to remember the most important lessons that the casino metaphor offers, as Kyla hints at in her piece: Casinos run on illusion – the belief that the next hand will be different, but the house always wins.

“Step into the casino that now passes for the American economy.

Donald Trump campaigned on bringing back American manufacturing and rebuilding what America once was — factories, workers in hard hats — from the ground up. But the investment needed to get there, in both the factories and the workers, hasn’t happened.

What he has ushered in instead is a casino economy, built on speculation and risk. Across markets and policy, wagers on the future are being made with other people’s money at a cost that could prove catastrophic.

This economy is largely defined by froth. What was once a fluke has become the operating system of modern markets: like stock prices largely driven by sentiment rather than fundamentals (recall GameStop and AMC in 2021 and the dot-com boom), the overwhelming power of social media and the flurry of bets on something not quite real. […]

The math doesn’t work. The morality doesn’t either. In this economy, individuals bear the downside risk, while corporations and the wealthy collect the upside. It’s a rigged game where the house — seemingly, the already rich — always wins.”

» It Is Trump’s Casino Economy Now. You’ll Probably Lose. by kyla scanlon

📈 Numbers

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

✍ Written By AI

🌀 Re-Framings

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

🏞️ Gross Domestic Product (GDP) → Gross Ecosystem Product (GEP)

“Most of nature’s economic contributions are like infrared radiation: Although felt by people, they lie outside the visible spectrum of existing metrics and markets. A new metric, gross ecosystem product (GEP), is meant to bring economic visibility to this “infravalue” so its sources can be sustained and enhanced. […]

If the agenda of climate neutrality is headlined by the decrease of greenhouse gases, the nature-positive agenda could be oriented around the increase of GEP. […]

Just as GDP aggregates the value produced by human-made capital such as factories, hospitals and railways, GEP does the same for the stream of benefits generated by forests, mangroves and other forms of natural capital. At the same time, GEP does not seek to replace GDP; rather, it is an environmentally sober companion to an indicator that is too often drunk on excessive industrialism.

China is the leading adopter of GEP worldwide. Over the past decade, local governments across the country have implemented it to promote nature-positive goods. The technology hub of Shenzhen was one of the earliest to do so, which may help explain why the dense metropolis, one of China’s largest cities, has managed to retain nearly half its land for nature, even as conventional development headlined by GDP has continued apace. […]

Since achieving industrial modernity under the sign of GDP, China is now navigating toward sustainability with GEP as a compass. It is perhaps no coincidence that while GDP emerged in the U.S. at a time of economic and geopolitical crisis, GEP has emerged in a new superpower of the 21st century as it confronts the myriad challenges of the Anthropocene. If successful, this transition will make nature’s infravalue not only visible but actionable, and in the process transform the theory and practice of development. […]

In naturalizing the economy by recognizing its embeddedness in the biosphere, we also, in the other sense of the term, de-naturalize many conventional assumptions separating humanity from nature that have long influenced how we measure production, target investment and regulate exchange.”

» Investing In The Ecosystems That Sustain Us by Tong Wu

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⚖️ Fixing → Balancing

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🎓 Solitary PhDs → Community PhDs

“I often think about how PhDs across much of the world are imagined as solitary pursuits. A test of endurance, self-motivation & “intellectual independence”. This mythology of the solitary scholar has been romanticized for centuries, perhaps a remnant of Enlightenment rationalism, that imagines the “thinking subject” as disembodied, universal, detached. Yet beneath the rhetoric of independence lies a profoundly colonial, casteist, ableist and exclusionary logic, contradicting both the social reality of knowledge production and the inclusive principles universities claim to uphold.

The very architecture of the PhD like single-author theses, lone candidates, individual defenses privileges those who can perform sustained intellectual labour without interdependence. This “ideal worker” aligns neatly with able-bodied, neurotypical, socio-politically privileged subjectivities. It erases the reality that thinking, creating & knowing are relational acts, sustained by networks of mentorship, peer support & community engagement. For disabled, neurodivergent & marginalized scholars, the expectation of self-contained productivity is structurally violent! It denies the legitimacy of collective labour, care & support that make research possible.

Even when universities pay lip service to “collaboration”, “interdisciplinarity” & “inclusion”, doctoral structures continue to reinforce exclusionary individualism. You may collaborate or engage communities, but the institutional gaze still asks: What was yours alone?

At first glance, this seems fair, an assurance of integrity! But it betrays an inherent epistemic tension. The assumption that knowledge can be neatly separated from the social and relational contexts in which it is produced. In the social & human sciences, this is an illusion! Every idea is shaped by people and communities who lend their trust, experiences & vulnerability. Our research lives on borrowed lives, yet we are required to claim it as solely ours.

Perhaps it’s time to trouble the obsession with “independence.” A PhD grounded in collective inquiry is not a deficit or “lack of originality”; it is a radical act of epistemic justice.

But such a shift requires reimagining how PhDs are structured, assessed & produced. Institutions would be forced to legitimize shared contributions and equity in knowledge production. A PhD could be recognized as the output of a shared endeavour with those whose insights, experiences & labour made it possible. This would require institutional systems to credit co-producers meaningfully through co-authorship, formal recognition or pathways supporting their academic and social advancement.

Knowledge would no longer be claimed through sole ownership; it would belong to the communities that contributed. The PhD thus becomes not just a personal milestone but a collective achievement! Scholarship, at its best, is relational, co-created & ethical. Perhaps it’s time these doctoral structures reflected this truth!”

» LinkedIn post by Shruti

🧬 Frameworks

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

The Zoöp Model

“The Zoöp is an organisational model that embodies its etymology, “zoöperation”, blending “co-op” (cooperation) and “zoë” (Greek for life). Its primary goal is to elevate the status of nonhumans – such as microbes, animals, plants, insects, and entire ecosystems - within human societies. The Zoöp model emerged as a response to escalating ecological challenges and the inadequacies of traditional organisational and governance frameworks in addressing these pressing issues. This model proposes an alternative to conventional, human-centric, and often hierarchical structures by prioritising the symbiotic coexistence of diverse species over a sole focus on economic growth and redefining organisational dynamics. It advocates for transforming organisations into Zoöps - entities that adopt more sustainable practices to support and enhance the ecosystems they are part of.”

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🎨 Works

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

Dream Bike by JAJA Architects

Austrian Power Giants (concept)

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

Did you enjoy this week’s issue? If so, share it with your colleagues and friends. Thanks for supporting my work! 😊

Thomas