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Rabbit Holes š³ #33
From irritation as a tool to quantitative aesthetics, food diversity, the resurgence of unions and re-mapping our worldview
Rabbit Holes š³
As always, here are five perspective-shifting ideas that Iāve come across lately, plus some fun extras. Enjoy, and donāt forget that you can now support my work by āļø Buying Me A Coffee:
#1 š Irritation As A Tool
Why donāt we transform ourselves, and the world, more disruptively? Maybe itās because many of us, despite living in a world of permacrisis, merely feel irritated. Anger makes us do something, or at least lets us break open and express our emotions. Irritation, on the other hand, is unfocused and just annoying, āa feeling thatās expressed only through being inadequately expressed.ā But what if irritation is more useful than we think?
āUnlike anger, irritation has neither glamour nor radicalism on its side. Yet it might just be the mood we need right now.ā
āThe everyday experience of irritation conceals a paradox. When one is suitably attuned, virtually anything is liable to provoke it: a telephone left to ring or a phone call taken, people who walk too slowly or drive too quickly. Running late is irritating but so is arriving early. Impudence is irritating but obsequiousness even more so. Yet, however various its incitements, irritation is also an empty and tautological feeling. The irate know their claims against the world to be baseless or at least wildly exaggerated, and this, too, annoys them.ā
āSomething about this ordinary, negligible feeling seems to make it inaccessible to critical reflection. Perhaps because, when irritable, we tend to be at our least reflective ā preoccupied with those diminutive miseries whose oversize effect we know would not stand up to criticism.ā
āFor Aristotle, irritation was closely related to anger. You might say that irritation is angerās meaner little sibling ā what, in Ugly Feelings (2007), the scholar Sianne Ngai calls āinadequateā anger. One loses oneself in a rage ā that is one of angerās seductions: it offers a holiday from the self, that licenses acts ordinarily proscribed. [ā¦] Communicated by huffs and sighs but rarely through more drastic measures, irritation is a feeling thatās expressed only through being inadequately expressed. One is not moved to commit appalling acts due to irritation.ā
āIndeed, there seems to be nothing one can do with oneās irritation; and the usual solutions ā breathe, count to 10, relax ā have the unfortunate quality of being themselves very irritating. It is this ongoing and helpless quality that makes irritation so frustrating. [ā¦] Where public anger can forge solidarity and social change, irritation seems unable to make the move from the individual body to the body politic.ā
āMight it be that our superficial, free-floating experiences of irritation provide a special form of insight, a kind of (Heideggerian) environmental awareness? In Cruel Optimism (2011), the scholar Lauren Berlant argued that the contemporary world is beset by harms that tend to manifest not as discrete events but in the ongoing, managed and complexly mediated forms of ācrisis ordinarinessā.ā
āToday, more than nine-tenths of the worldās population breathe unsafe air, which is responsible for as many as 6.7 million deaths each year. [ā¦]
Might irritation become a politicised affect in an age of climate emergency ā an age when a sense of crisis permeates the very atmosphere but, across much of the world, generally fails to make itself concretely apparent?
When something ā everything ā is clearly wrong and yet nothing quite interrupts the steady flow of ordinariness?
Perhaps irritation ā hazy and unfocused ā invites us to think about the atmospheric, overdetermined and interconnected nature of contemporary political harms, and of the psychic and somatic costs exacted by living under such conditions.ā
āStaying with oneās irritation [ā¦] and accepting that one does not always know why one feels how one feels, might present us with the possibility of learning to tell new stories about the world, and about ourselves.ā
Ā» aeon | In praise of irritation by Will Rees
#2 š¢ Quantitative Aesthetics
By giving numbers so much weight and importance, what aspects of life, what elements of inquiry are we ignoring? And how can we create new frameworks that help us re-focus on what has been ignored as a result of our stats-fetish?
āBetween 2011 to 2020, not just literature but almost everything humanities-related is down by double-digit percentages. The corresponding growth of the S.T.E.M. fields was even more pronounced. Most dramatically, ācomputer and information technologyā more than doubled its share of degrees.ā
āWhatās going on? Weāre talking about the period since 2011, the first college class since the introduction of the iPhone, and it is logical that mass adoption of such seductive and pervasive consumer technology has changed peopleās relationship to culture. But 2011-12 is also the first full college class since the financial crisis of 2008, and the other obvious culprit is the greater ruthlessness of the economy post-Great Recession, the flight away from the āsoftnessā of the humanities in a time when studying anything not directly seen as useful is viewed more and more as an unsustainable luxury.ā
ā[ā¦] as the balance between the humanities and the sciences has shifted, the ālanguage of statisticsā has more clearly cemented itself as the default code for being a serious person.ā
āAs one student says in the article, āEven if Iām in the humanities, and giving my impression of something, somebody might point out to me, āWell, who was your sample?ā I mean, statistics is everywhere. [ā¦] Which, in some ways, is for the good. There are real benefits to asking, āwhoās your sample?ā If you looked at art auction prices, youād think that one set of artists are the most influential in the world. But if you try, by contrast, to count which artists appear the most in biennials, you get a different set of artists, representing different values.ā
āNevertheless, thereās something called the McNamara Fallacy, a.k.a. the Quantitative Fallacy. It is summarized as āif it cannot be measured, it is not important.ā The Heller article made me reflect on how a version of it is now very present, and growing, at the grassroots of taste. On one level, this is seen in a rise of a kind of wonky obsession with business stats in fandoms, invoked as a way to convey the rightness of artistic opinionsāwhat I want to call Quantitative Aesthetics.ā
āIt manifests in music. As the New York Times wrote in 2020 of the new age of pop fandom, ādevotees compare No. 1s and streaming statistics like sports fans do batting averages, championship, wins and shooting percentages.ā [ā¦] The same goes for film lovers, who now seem to strangely know a lot about opening-day grosses and foreign box office, and use the stats to argue for the merits of their preferred product. [ā¦] indie director James Gray, of Ad Astra fame, recently complained about ordinary cinema-goers using business stats as a proxy for artistic merit: āIt tells you something of how indoctrinated we are with capitalism that somebody will say, like, āHis movies havenāt made a dime!ā Itās like, well, do you own stock in Comcast? Or are you just such a lemming that you think that actually has value to anybody?āā
āBut where Quantitative Aesthetics is really newly intense across societyāin art and everywhereāis in how social-media numbers (clicks, likes, shares, retweets, etc.) seep into everything as a shorthand for understanding status. Thatās why artist-researcher Ben Grosser created his Demetricator suite of web-browsing tools, which let you view social media stripped of all those numbers and feel, by their absence, the effect they are having on your attention and values.
āVisible metrics donāt just draw our attention, but I argue that we are compelled by this deeply ingrained desire for moreāa desire to make them larger simply because we can see themābased in an evolutionarily developed need for esteem,ā Grosser told Slate. āIt intersects with capitalism in the way that capitalism treats value as a quantifiable thing, and thereās this endless need for growth.ā
Ā» artnet news | How We Ended Up in the Era of āQuantitative Aesthetics,ā Where Data Points Dictate Taste by Ben Davis
#3 š Losing Our Food Diversity & Resilience
This extremely interesting deep dive into food diversity and resilience by The Guardian highlights very well the consequences and problems of mass scaling, globalization and homogeneity. The good news is that people are becoming increasingly aware of these fragile and unhealthy system.
āAll our food systems ā agriculture, forestry, fisheries and aquaculture ā are buckling under the stress of rising temperatures, wildfires, droughts, and floods.Ā
Even in the best-case scenario, global heating is expected to make the earth less suitable for the crops that provide most of our calories. If no action is taken to curtail the climate crisis, crop losses will be devastating.ā
āNature has a simple way to adapt to different climates: genetic diversity.Ā
Even if some plants react poorly to higher temperatures or less rainfall, other varieties can not only survive ā but thrive, giving humans more options on what to grow and eat.ā
āBut the powerful food industry had other ideas and over the past century, humans have increasingly relied on fewer and fewer crop varieties that can be mass produced and shipped around the world.Ā āThe line between abundance and disaster is becoming thinner and thinner and the public is unaware and unconcerned,ā writes Dan Saladino in his book Eating to Extinction.ā
For example:
āMaize or corn is now grown in greater volume than any crop in history, and is still the staple food for about 1.2 billion people in Latin America, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa. But the maize most of us eat today is quite different from what our ancestors consumed.
Maize spread around the world because of its ability to evolve and adapt to different climates, altitudes and day lengths. Left to mother nature in an open field, diversity flourishes as wind carries pollen from one plant to a female flower of another plant, creating a slightly different maize baby every time. [ā¦] From there, farmers would save and replant the seeds of the best plants ā the hardiest, tastiest, and easiest to harvest ā to create locally adapted varieties, which are called landraces or heirlooms. By the early 20th century, there were thousands of distinct landraces being cultivated from Canada to Chile, each one adapted to the local ecosystem with its own good and bad quirks.ā
āThis story is true for most of our staple crops.
For thousands of years, families and communities relied on these local landraces which over time had developed helpful traits for their particular ecosystems. [ā¦] Different crops like maize, beans and squashes were planted in the same field to help control pests, fertilize the soil and provide a nutritionally balanced diet.ā
āFor maize, this changed radically around the 1920s, after scientists discovered they could take a landrace and self-pollinate the plant, creating a genetically identical inbred, and if they did this several times its characteristics would change ā perhaps the plant would be taller or have a big ear of corn. These inbreds were then crossed with each other, again and again, to create hybrids.ā
āAs a result we lost countless varieties of grains, fruits, vegetables and spices better equipped ā thanks to their genetic makeup which evolved over generationsĀ ā to withstand certain pathogens, drought, heat, and humidity.ā
Ā» The Guardian | Our food system isn't ready for the climate crisis by Nina Lakhani, Alvin Chang, Rita Liu, and Andrew Witherspoon
#4 ā The Resurgence & Potential of Unions
I feel like unions are becoming an increasingly important puzzle piece to solve a variety of urgent problems. However, they need a new brand, a new story thatās more in tune with younger generationsā values and work reality.
āāUnions are the best tools or vehicles ordinary people have for achieving any kind of social justice or tackling any kind of inequality,ā Livingston [, author of the new book Make Bosses Pay: Why We Need Unions,] explains. āTheyāre a mechanism for moving the dial in society at large. It might seem like unions are a niche topic, but I actually think theyāre central to the conversations weāre having about equality and social justice and how we want society to look like.āā
Livingston: āWhen unions were first built, they were built on the model of a white male breadwinner: men going off to work in manual industries and earning enough money to look after their whole family. Thatās a generalisation, of course, because there have always been working-class women who have worked, but certainly unions were built on that understanding that collective bargaining was to secure men a family wage. I think unions have long recognised that that canāt be the model anymore ā but I think theyāre still in a state of transition to something that encompasses more liberatory politics.ā
āWe have it in our heads that HR is there for us; theyāre your champions in the workplace. But when you start to think about what their actual role is, itās not even hidden, itās on the surface ā their name is āHuman Resourcesā ā so itās about you, as a resource, for the organisation youāre working for. HR exists to utilise workers in a way that meets the organisationsā strategic aims. To me, thatās always going to be in conflict with the interests of workers.ā
āThere is a huge conversation happening around work and young peopleās dissatisfaction around capitalist work. You see things like burnout in headlines, and issues like the Me Too scandal which was, at its core, about working conditions and women facing sexual harassment in the workplace. [ā¦] So you get books about how to cope at work and be productive and Instagram influencers posting graphics about how to negotiate with your boss, but they never talk about trade unions or collective action. To me, collective action is the only counter to the power of your boss and capitalist work.ā
āI think there are reasons to be optimistic, not just in terms of the union increase weāve seen during the pandemic, but also because there are these great case studies of the existing union movements doing this work already. If you believe itās powerful for people to come together and make a commitment to each other and speak as one voice, you canāt really be pessimistic ā itās just a big challenge! But if the work gets done, the potential is huge.ā
Ā» huck | How Unions Could Transform Work Under Capitalism by Katie Goh
#5 šŗļø Re-Mapping Our Worldview
A fun one! By now, itās common knowledge that the usual world maps are biased, showing us a westernized or europanized view of the world. The curation below, however, gave me some new aha moments and perspective shifts. Have a look:
āMaps twist our perception of the world.
Countries closer to the equatorāwhich happen to be poorerāseem smaller than they are.ā

āThis is because the world is a 3D sphere, but maps are 2D projections on a plane. That means distortion!ā
āWe should be wary of flattening balls!ā
āThe biggest loser is Africa, which is humongous:
āIf you compare the most affected regions, you realize that Africa is about as wide as Russia!ā
āThe island of New Guinea, which appears to be about the size of Great Britain, reaches in fact from London to Moscow.ā
āSo the Mercator projection clearly distorts our perception of the world. But itās not the only way itās distorted.
We center our map around the equator and the reference meridian, which goes through London.ā
āConversely, if you center the map around Alaska, you can see why it has the 3rd biggest airport in the world in terms of cargo: itās the most central point to all the big markets in the northern hemisphere.ā
āThese projections make us miss lots of quite striking relations between regions. For example:ā
āBrazil is brutally big. Its northernmost point is closer to Canada than to its southernmost point! In fact, its northernmost point is closer to any American country than to its southernmost point! Itās so big that its easternmost point is much closer to Africa than to its westernmost point.ā
āHereās one that broke my head: Chinaās westernmost point is closer to Germany than to its easternmost point!ā
Ā» | Maps Distort How We See The World by
ā Extras
The EU Beyond Growth Conference is happening this week (today is already the last day, but there are still some great panel discussions happening that you can tune in to, like this one)
Special edition of the Green European Journal with amazing articles by the smartest de- and post-growth thinkers: Imagining Europe Beyond Growth
Detailed, clear descriptions of 15 green skills for a green economy
Great childrenās book: The car that wanted to be a bike by Lior Steinberg
šæ Shower Thoughts
Thatās it for this week! Thanks so much for making it to the end. If you want to support me and help me invest more time and energy into this newsletter, consider āļø Buying Me A Coffee.
Thank you,
Thomas