Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #68

From intellectual obesity to nurturing internal sustainability, a culture of immediacy, natural asset companies, and forward or backward

Before you head into this week’s Rabbit Holes, two quick things:

1. If you haven’t read Friday’s issue yet, in which I explore how a new worldview that fills the spiritual void of humanity is emerging, then do check it out! Writing it was quite an eye-opening experience for me; maybe it will be for you, too. 😉

2. ‘Sharing is caring’, so don’t forget to share the Creative Destruction newsletter (or issues you particularly enjoyed reading) with your network! I’d love to build this out into a platform for frame-shifting ideas, but for that, I need more subscribers… 😬 Help me achieve that! 😊

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THIS WEEK → 🍟 Intellectual Obesity 🌀 Internal Sustainability ⏱️ A Culture of Immediacy ➕ State of Culture 2024 🚿 Curiosity x Creativity

Rabbit Holes 🕳️

As always, here are three perspective-shifting ideas to rewild your mind and help you create a better world, plus some extras below. Enjoy!

#1 🍟 Intellectual Obesity

This piece frames the problem of information overload in today’s age in such a super clear and eye-opening way. “Curiosity, which once focused us, now distracts us.” The more we participate in the info feed, the more we bloat our minds with “a cacophony of half-remembered gibberish that sidetracks your attention and confuses your senses”.

“We evolved to seek out sugar because it was a scarce source of energy. But when we learned how to produce it on an industrial scale, suddenly our love for sweet things went from an asset to a liability. The same is now true of data. In an age of information overabundance, our curiosity, which once focused us, now distracts us. And it’s caused an epidemic of intellectual obesity that’s clogging up our minds. […]

Since low-quality information is just as effective at satisfying our information-cravings as high-quality information, the most efficient way to get attention in the digital age is by mass-producing low-quality "junk info"— a kind of fast food for thought. Like fast food, junk info is cheap to produce and satisfying to consume, but high in additives and low in nutrition. It's also potentially addictive and, if consumed excessively, highly dangerous.

Junk info is often false info, but it isn't junk because it's false. It's junk because it has no practical use; it doesn't make your life better, and it doesn't improve your understanding. […]

Market forces and social pressures have caused junk info to dominate the web because it's cheap, easy to produce, and good at stealing your attention. Its ubiquity means it's always within easy reach of netizens, and as a result, millions of people are now hooked on it. […]

But despite being "empty calories," junk info still tastes delicious. Since your dopamine pathways can't distinguish between useful and useless info, consuming junk info gives you the satisfaction of feeling like you're learning—it offers you the illusion of getting smarter—even though all you're really doing is shoving virtual popcorn into your skull.

Eventually, the addiction to useless info leads to what I call "intellectual obesity." Just as gorging on junk food bloats your body, so gorging on junk info bloats your mind, filling it with a cacophony of half-remembered gibberish that sidetracks your attention and confuses your senses. Unable to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant, you become concerned by trivialities and outraged by falsehoods. These concerns and outrages push you to consume even more, and all the time that you're consuming, you're prevented from doing anything else: learning, focusing, even thinking. The result is that your stream of consciousness becomes clogged and constipated; you develop atherosclerosis of the mind. […]

And when you notice the myriad holes that all this junk has left in your memory, then it’ll finally be clear that you weren’t consuming it as much as it was consuming you.”

» The Prism | The Intellectual Obesity Crisis by Gurwinder

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#2 🌀 Internal Sustainability

The sustainability movement is too focused on the external world and thereby misses the problem at the root of the crisis: how we relate to ourselves, others, and nature. This article, which I found while writing last Friday’s issue, explains the vicious cycle of mind and climate change and explores how to break out of it.

“It’s clear that—despite the high profile of sustainability as a concept, and the goals and targets that have been set since the 1980s—the dominant approaches have not catalyzed the necessary change. […]

One important reason for the current situation is that the vast majority of sustainability scholarship, education, and practice has, so far, only focused on the external world: ecosystems, socio-economic structures, and technology. Much of this work originates from modern societies’ mechanistic paradigm and the associated biophysical discourse, which frames climate change as an external, technical problem. This view drives the nature of our actions.

In search of solutions, I naively set out to explore sustainability from not only an external, but also an internal lens. I dared to ask if and why our mind, and innate capacities, such as mindfulness and compassion, could play a role. […]

In short, my work shows that the mind is: 1) a victim of increasing climate impacts, 2) a barrier to adequate climate action, and 3) a key driver, or root cause, of the climate crisis, as it determines how we relate to ourselves, others, and nature. The net result is a vicious cycle of deteriorating individual, collective, and planetary well-being.

Effective climate action thus demands that we understand the vicious cycle of mind and climate change and comprehend it as a crisis of relationships. This allows us to actively consider the role of the mind in stemming this existential threat.”

Christine Wamsler

» Mind & Life Institute | What the Mind has to do with the Climate Crisis by Christine Wamsler

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#3 ⏱️ A Culture of Immediacy

This one aligns with my recent piece called A Frictionless World Is Boring As F*ck. Anna Kornbluh argues that immediacy, or the collapse of mediation (the middle ground), is a (or the) powerful and destructive underlying driver in our modern world. It’s interesting how this links to rabbit holes #1 – this flood of unfiltered (!), mass-produced junk info – and #2 – mediation as “the active process of relating” and going “beyond the self” as Kornbluh describes it.

“If you came to this excerpt while scrolling on your phone, congratulations—you’ve just gotten a bit of an object lesson in immediacy. Or something like it. You can now see information, images, personalities, and narratives forming and circulating in real time, without filter, without mediation. Mediation, as scholar Anna Kornbluh writes in Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism, is “the active process of relating—making sense and making meaning by inlaying into medium; making middles that merge extremes; making available in language and image and rhythm the supervalent abstractions otherwise unavailable to our sensuous perception—like “justice” or “value.” Mediation requires something from us. When we look at, say, a Rothko painting, we return to the work as much as it gives to us—this middle ground where we meet is the ground of thinking, of aesthetic analysis, a movement, however slight, beyond the self.

But, as Kornbluh argues, we are moving beyond mediation towards a style of Immediacy—”It is what it is. Self-identity without representation…the inness or onness of immersion, intensity, and identity”—which not only collapses this middle ground, this distance between us and the object, but also genre and medium themselves. Beginning with an analysis of the transition from production to circulation as the predominant mode of capitalist profit accumulation, Kornbluh proceeds to assert through a series of arguments concerning writing, video, and theory itself, that immediacy is the style, par excellence, of “too-late capitalism.””

» protean | Immediacy

Crowd Out in Tank Magazine // Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh // Against Anti-Theory by Anna Kornbluh

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➕ Extras

“Rewilding as an ecological conservation concept is about restoring natural processes and wilderness areas with an emphasis on recreating an area’s natural uncultivated state. Beyond Domestication takes it further by looking at how people live and to use rewilding tenets to provide beneficial effects on their lives.”
Beyond Domestication: Empowering your physical, mental, emotional & spiritual well-being through rewilding by George Knight

“‘Natural asset companies’ would put a market price on improving ecosystems, rather than on destroying them.”
Nature Has Value. Could We Literally Invest In It? by Lydia DePillis

“Our world is losing its humanity. Too many developers care more about their shareholders than society. Too many politicians care more about power than the people who vote for them. And too many cities feel soulless and depressing, with buildings designed for business, not for us. The time has come to put human emotion back at the heart of the design process.”
Humanise: A Maker’s Guide To Building Our World by Thomas Heatherwick

Ted Gioia

“I want to tell you why entertainment is dead. And what’s coming to take its place.”
The State of Culture 2024 by Ted Gioia

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🚿 Shower Thoughts

“Forward or Backward?”

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

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Thomas