Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #174
From the troll state to your phone is a fake house, force-fed escapism, being stuck in boomer world, thin desires → thick life, thinking small, social friction, chains of leverage, and smoke signals
Hello everyone!
I hope you had some quality time with your family and friends during the holidays, and I wish you all an amazing start into the new year! 🤗
As always, I’ve got some thought-provoking framings and reframings for you, so let’s get right into it!
THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: The Troll State // Your Phone Is A Fake House // Force-Fed Escapism
📊 Numbers: Stuck In Boomer World
🌀 Re-Framings: Thin Desires → Thick Life // Thinking Big → Thinking Small // Individual Frictionlessness → Social Friction
🧬 Frameworks: Chains of Leverage
🎨 Works: Signal Hill // Smoke Signals // Perfectly Imperfect
⏳ Reading Time: 11 minutes
🖼️ Framings
Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.
🤡 The Troll State
There are so many “expert” takes on Trump x Venezuela/Greenland on the internet, it’s overwhelming… Nowadays, everyone has to build some kind of personal brand online to stay relevant, making us all perform for the algorithm. Ryan Broderick takes this even further, arguing that politics as a whole has become a performance, first and foremost, for the online world.
“We’ve spent last year covering all the ways the White House has embedded itself inside the feedback loop of online engagement, making flashy video edits of migrant arrests, deporting X users doxxed by far-right trolls, forcing the country to mourn the death of their favorite influencer, the list goes on and on. As blogger Cooper Lund recently wrote, “They are doing real, heinous things to facilitate the creation of content, and we must be clear about that, but it is always in service of the creation of the content and not durable policy.”
And it feels silly to say this — after years of Trumpian madness — but there is seemingly no limit to how far they will go to feed the algorithm. No limit to their craven desire to dominate the attention economy. […]
Maduro’s arrest is connected to a new kind of politics I’ve spent the last year struggling to describe. A profoundly embarrassing collision of violent nationalism, illiterate social chatter, and memetic fascism that’s been spreading across the globe since the pandemic. We’ve seen hints for years now that the elites of the world are just as addicted to — and dependent on — the same social platforms that we are. Ignoring the near-constant public embarrassments of our shitposter ruling class that play out on platforms like X every day, our leaders are also digitally networking with each other behind closed doors. There’s Chatham House, the group chat that fried the minds of Silicon Valley’s most reactionary CEOs like Marc Andreessen, that’s been running since COVID started. Which is adjacent to the text message network of powerful men that convinced Elon Musk to buy Twitter in 2022. Last year, the Trump administration was caught planning out airstrikes in a Signal group. And days before the campaign in Venezuela, Republican operatives secretly teamed up with a far-right YouTuber to storm daycares in Minnesota. You take all of that and throw in last year’s Discord-based election in Nepal, the international white nationalist incel terror cells spreading across Telegram, and the fact Charlie Kirk’s killer allegedly carried out the attack for the members of his Discord channel and the picture couldn’t be clearer: Politics — and political violence — is now something performed, first and foremost, for an online audience. It almost doesn’t matter what happens irl if it makes noise online.”
» The rise of the troll state by Ryan Broderick
📱 Your Phone Is A Fake House
Interesting short metaphor that reminds me of the personal vs. family computers reframing I shared a while back. Also pairs well with the Thin Desires → Thick Life reframing further below.
“That phrase—“home screen”—has been on my mind recently. The language of the smartphone invites you to think of it as a house. You can “choose your wallpaper,” just like with a real house; you can “lock” your phone like a front door. The metaphor is that this is a private refuge from the outside world. It is a tiny dwelling in your pocket, which you can customize like an actual dwelling to affirm your identity. In doing so, you “tame” the technology, making it feel natural in your everyday life. […]
A computer, meanwhile, remains more functional. Phrases like “desktop” and “taskbar” create a metaphor that this is a workstation; you have “trash” and “files.” Of course, there are still work-like aspects to the phone and home-like aspects to the computer, but the phone takes on a far more domestic role in our lives. It is not a utility: it is an extension of self. […]
And yet this love is a projection. The phone creates a sensation of intimacy without providing true intimacy. On a rational level, we know this; but our actual experience happens in an ambient scroll state. Now there’s a dissonance between feeling like your phone is a home and knowing that it’s not.
Metaphors and user interfaces shape reality. I don’t feel as much tension with my computer, because I implicitly understand it as a workspace. If we learn to regard our phones the same way, we can reclaim power over them. But that starts with how you’re framing your thoughts, so be clear with yourself: you are not domesticating your phone—it is trying to domesticate you.”
» your phone is a fake house by Adam Aleksic
🫣 Force-Fed Escapism
A great, to-the-point framing that links to my deep dive Toward Life in which I argue that the underlying direction that humanity seems to be moving toward is one in which we are increasingly moving away from life and into evermore abstractions of it. In my piece, I point out that this is leading to a growing, aching hunger for realness, for life. In other words, that growing desire for realness might soon lead to a major pivot away from the digital and frictionless world. The piece below argues 2026 will be the year of “friction-maxxing.”
“Tech companies are succeeding in making us think of life itself as inconvenient and something to be continuously escaping from, into digital padded rooms of predictive algorithms and single-tap commands: Reading is boring; talking is awkward; moving is tiring; leaving the house is daunting. Thinking is hard. Interacting with strangers is scary. Risking an unexpected reaction from someone isn’t worth it. Speaking at all — overrated. These are all frictions that we can now eliminate, easily, and we do. […]
A friend of mine, a father of two young kids, admitted to me that the high point of each day is sitting on the toilet with his phone. […]
We’re foie gras ducks being force-fed escapism.
Once we’ve adopted a habit of escaping from something, whether it’s Uber-ing dinner five nights a week or using AI for replying to texts, the act of return, which is how we might describe no longer using a tool of escape, feels full of irritating friction. In these moments, we become exactly like toddlers in the five minutes after the iPad is taken away: The dullness and labor of embodied existence is unbearable.”
» In 2026, We Are Friction-Maxxing by Kathryn Jezer-Morton
📈 Numbers
A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:
👴🏻 Stuck In The Past
…or stuck in Boomer-World.
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