Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #69
Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #69
From AI-generated crab to rituals as an antidote to dopamine culture, climate humor, girls cycling to school, and content seeking out people
Before we get into this week’s Rabbit Holes issue, a few quick things:
In case you missed last Friday’s piece, I explored how we can improve the way we approach “changing the system” and turn a vicious into a virtuous cycle.
I recently sent a little update to everyone who downloaded my report Alternative Prosperity: Reframing The “Good Life”. The update includes a simple canvas-style tool that will help you reframe the prosperity narrative of a system – e.g. a business, an industry, your life, or a certain project you are working on.
Lastly, a new initiative: You tell me about your project! And I’ll send you a selection of thought-provoking ideas, reframings, and perspective shifts! Simply fill out this form, and I’ll mail you a few interesting bits that relate to your project, for free. 😉
THIS WEEK → 🦀 AI-Generated Crab 🕯️Rituals: An Antidote To Dopamine Culture 😂 Climate Humor ➕ Girls Cycling to School 🚿 Content Seeking Out People
Rabbit Holes 🕳️
How can we build a better world? 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 🦀 AI-Generated Crab (or Losing Reality)
What we’re increasingly experiencing – and AI-generated text, images, audio and video is just the latest accelerator of that – is what the Center for Humane Technology calls reality collapse. But I’d argue not only in terms of being confronted with more misinformation (or deepfakes). What’s much more concerning is that we’re losing touch with reality. We become disconnected.
“Last night I lay down on my couch and started scrolling. In about 4.5 seconds I was looking at an image of two babies staring at a crab [see image below]. The photo had been fed to me because 408,000 people had reacted to it, 12,600 people had left a comment, and a generous 53,300 had shared it on their Facebook timeline. […] When I saw those two babies and a crab my emotions all involved me thrusting my head into wall repeatedly, the overwhelming reality that we’re all fucking doomed felt in every fibre of my body. […]
“Don’t pile on, don’t hate me, I know some kids are born with extra digits and all power to them (please comment below if you’re one of God’s chosen ones). But of course the image is AI generated and our timelines and our lives are increasingly filled with impossible things and impossible realities. […]
There’s a temptation to level the blame at boomers, for those who haven’t grown up with certain technology who are aging out of reality in some way — but this is wrong. […]
At its core, my worry is that we’ve lost the ability to understand reality.
Not to keep coming back to that crab, but amongst the bots there now are hundreds of thousands of humans marching through life believing they saw two tiny babies crouching down, staring at a curious crab. “Who gives a fuck it’s just a crab stop talking about the crab we get it you hate the crab!” I hear you saying and I totally understand that reaction.
But it’s not just a crab, it’s everything.
A giant portion of the human race is having their entire view of reality shaped by things that are objectively not real. People are moving through their lives — increasingly lived online — seeing and believing things that have a metaphorical six fingers. It’s as if reality is being viewed through a heavy fog, eyes unfocussed; staring through things, not at things. […]
None of this is new. The AI taking over social media was found in the touch ups and photoshops that beauty magazines have been doing for decades. We’ve been primed to think a body and a face should look a certain way, and to believe the utter bullshit is the way we ourselves should look.
And yes, humans have always had a propensity to tune out of reality and plug into made-up worlds. […] But the crabs we’re facing — people aren’t searching for the truth, they’re not even looking. They’re not even thinking. They’re just observing whatever blurred reality is in front of them, absorbing it into their world view, and sprinting onto the next thing.
Unfortunately for all 8.1 billion of us, this non-reality informs our reality. Humans brains are fucking great — but unfortunately they’re increasingly filled with mush. And then we go out and do things like vote. We decide on women’s reproductive rights and climate change. We buy guns; we educate our children.
And we wonder why despite being the most evolved species on the planet we’re also the dumbest; becoming willfully blind, ultimately creating a planet that’s so increasingly deranged we’ll have no choice but to retreat even further into the fog.”
» | We've Lost the Ability to See Reality by
#2 🕯️ Rituals: An Antidote To Dopamine Culture
Last week, I shared this image and the accompanying article by with you. Apparently, the article went quite viral and Ted consequently shared a few observations on the topic of ritual in the context of his culture analysis. I like how this aligns with an idea I shared in a previous Rabbit Holes with you which framed ritual as a powerful tool to take control and reshape our lives in the midst of a world that feels increasingly out of control.
“There are many larger ways that rituals provide an antidote to the more toxic aspects of tech-dominated society. Below I share 13 observations on ritual.
[I did not include all 13 here, as it was just a bit too long, but I encourage you to read the entire piece (see link below)]
1. The smartphone cannot be a ritualistic object. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in his book The Disappearance of Rituals, points out that the smartphone embodies restlessness. “It lacks the very self-sameness that stabilizes life,” he explains. “The restlessness inherent in the apparatus makes it a non-thing.” […]
I can imagine a situation in which locking up your phone in a box before an event becomes part of the ritual. But the opposite could never happen—turning on the phone would be the worst possible way to initiate a ritual experience.
2. Genuine ritual is always embedded in a time and place, and cannot be uploaded or downloaded. Go ahead, get married online, or conduct your graduation ceremony via Zoom, but these experiences will feel hollow. The virtual world creates a hunger for real ritual in an actual physical community of human beings. No website or app can satisfy this hunger on its own. […]
4. The largest companies today are obsessed with generating content in a completely de-ritualized context. But content always exists in tension with form. Ritual is the form we have abandoned in our relentless quest for content. […]
6. In an overly digitized world, people embrace with intensity the few remaining ritualistic activities available to them. Halloween gets turned into something extravagant—not just for children anymore, but adults too. The same is true of Valentine’s Day or Mardi Gras and other ritualized occasions. They are pushed to extremes because people have so few embodied rituals in the digital age. […]
9. Economic interests fear genuine ritual, because it is not about consumption. Some ritual objects last for thousands of years. They are loved all the more because they are old and have never been replaced. How can you make a buck from that?
It’s not impossible to monetize ritual—many people scheme endlessly over ways of doing this—but the profit motive coexists uneasily with it.
10. When deprived of rituals, people are driven to create their own. Family rituals or daily rituals become sources of joy and stability. Even the simple aspects of our daily routine can serve as a kind of ritual—but we also need and deserve larger communal rituals. […]
12. Even science originates as ritual. The essence of ritual, notes René Girard, is “that things be mixed together and that something be done with them”—and the goal is always transformative and empowering. This is where the scientific method starts. “If you look at techniques of winemaking, cheesemaking, metallurgy, all of the great Neolithic techniques, you will see they are all associated with the ritual,” Girard points out. […]
13. When technology truly empowers life and promotes human flourishing, the results are ritualistic. When the goal is mere innovation and disruption (two words that are increasingly used in tandem by technologists), the exact opposite happens—science destroys ritual and hence destabilizes life.
The prudent society (or individual) recognizes the profound difference between these two types of technology, and chooses accordingly.”
» | 13 Observations on Ritual by
#3 😂 Climate Humor
I have already been sharing quite some notes on the problem with our climate communication: It’s often too scientific or complex, too homo oeconomicus-focused and rational, depressing, paralyzing, elitist, and most importantly, it uses language that got us into this mess in the first place. A language that’s intertwined with a worldview that sees us as separate from and superior to nature.
“From Hollywood movies like Adam McKay’s “Don’t Look Up” to independent sketches on YouTube and TikTok, comedians — no strangers to tackling difficult subjects — are increasingly looking for punchlines in one of the greatest existential threats ever to the planet.
Many people find the topic of global warming tiresome or depressing because of the apocalyptic stakes at play. But even some scientists and activists agree: Climate change has a messaging problem.
“Academics are trained to write in their own language, sending you to the dictionary every three words,” said Sarah Finnie, the founder of the 51 Percent Project, an initiative at Boston University that aims to help people communicate better about climate change. “Humor is a really great way to kind of calm the Doomerism and the panics that can paralyze people.” […]
For Mr. McKay, humor provides a way to get at the truth of climate change, instead of resorting to slick language. “The problem with communicating the scale and immediacy of the climate crisis is there’s a tendency to want to use the approaches developed by ad agencies, PR firms, corporate news and commercial entertainment,” he said. […]
Humor hasn’t just helped with messaging around climate change but has often been an essential ingredient in many societal movements or transitions, said Caty Borum, the executive director of American University’s Center for Media & Social Impact.
“Comedy played a significant role in the U.S. civil rights movement, and the use of memes on social media was very important in the Arab Spring uprising,” Ms. Borum said, giving two recent examples. […]
In his new book, “I Want a Better Catastrophe,” Mr. Boyd applies the five stages of grief to climate change, adding a sixth one: gallows humor. “We are facing an impossible situation, and that’s exactly what gallows humor was designed to handle,” he said. […]
Mr. Williams hopes that his comedy can do more than persuade people to sign petitions or forward links, he said. “My ultimate goal is to inspire people to make systemic changes, rather than to try to recycle extra hard.”
» New York Times | Climate Change Is Not Laughing Matter. Or Is It? by Hilary Howard
➕ Extras
“Her fantasy project: design a new set of ‘cornerstone’ indicators for the wellbeing economy. One of her favourite ideas: Why not get countries to measure the number of girls who bicycle to school? What clearer yardstick could convey so much about progress in women’s education, green transport, health and poverty alleviation in a single number? Better yet — it’s the kind of data point that you don’t need an economics degree to grasp.”
Instead of GDP, Let’s Measure The Number of Girls Who Bike To School by Katherine Trebeck
“ChatGPT rejects any notions of creative struggle, that our endeavours animate and nurture our lives giving them depth and meaning. It rejects that there is a collective, essential and unconscious human spirit underpinning our existence, connecting us all through our mutual striving.”
Why strive? Stephen Fry reads Nick Cave’s letter on the threat of computed creativity
“What if our understanding of capitalism and climate is back to front? What if the problem is not that transitioning to renewables is too expensive, but that saving the planet is not sufficiently profitable?“
The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet by Brett Christophers
🚿 Shower Thoughts
That’s it for this week’s Rabbit Holes issue!
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