Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #73

From the end of the extremely online era to sustainable violence, de-atomization, dual power and mind stretching

Every week, I try to make this Rabbit Holes issue as thought-provoking and imagination-expanding as possible. Today’s issue is particularly mind-blowing!

This requires preparation! A little warmup of your mind in which you get ready for new perspectives, unconventional ideas, and thoughts. In which you turn off the narratives and ideologies that have built up within you and embrace true newness.

Ready?! Then let’s get into it! 😉

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THIS WEEK → 🛜 The Extremely Online Era Ends 🏹 From Guns To Bows ⚛️ De-Atomization ➕ Dual Power 🚿 Mind Stretching

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 🛜 The Extremely Online Era Ends

People today spend a crazy amount of time tethered to their phones and the online world. I’d argue that we’ve reached a sort of closed crossroads at which it seems both unimaginable that we would turn our backs on the online world but also that the future is even more phone- and digital-heavy. However, I agree with what the article below suggests: The extremely online era will soon be over! Simply because the internet is becoming more and more boring, and Generative AI will only exacerbate that.

“I think that this whole smartphone scrolling, content consuming, ubiquitous posting, Extremely Online thing is going to go the way of the Fedora, or the Marlboro smoked at cruising altitude in economy class. In the end it is all going to fade. This may not happen for a good number of years, but I truly believe it will happen. I think we’ll look back on this time decades hence and shake our heads at how ignorant and naive we all were to collectively torpedo our attention spans, our social lives, our decision making, our childcare, our dopaminergic reward systems and our environment with these pocket-sized touch screen pacifiers and all that they contain and imply.

Crazy, I know. But it’s what I believe. I can see the signs. Because let’s face it the only thing crazier than a huge sea-change like that would be if things continued on and on just as they are right now. […]

Nobody, I would argue, is having a great time at this moment and many (if not most) people are burnt out by the perpetual agitation that comes from the fear-mongering news cycle, by their feeds filled with posts they didn’t ask for, by the algorithmic interference and the nudging and the fact that nothing that they see on their screens can even be trusted. […] And this is before you throw A.I. into the works which is an amplifier and accelerator of fakery. […] This is just not sustainable. Hence my prediction. […]

The consequences of life lived online have bled through into the real world and this has happened because we have allowed them to. It’s a cliché to say that real life is now a temporary reprieve from the online, as opposed to the other way around. We pay the price for all of this via boarded up shops, closing pubs, empty playgrounds and silent streets as each individual stays at home each night, enchanted by the blue flicker of their own little screen feeding them their own walled in world of news and content and edutainment.

I believe it will end, this so-called way of life. Not through the Silicon Valley oligarchs spontaneously developing a conscience or being legislated into acting with a modicum less sociopathy. I don’t believe people will be frightened into changing how they act or suddenly shamed into putting their phones down for once in their lives. Such interventions don’t work with most addicts and more and more people are legitimately hooked on their devices than we are currently willing to countenance. No, I think this will all end, as T.S Eliot said, with a whimper. People will simply lose interest and walk away. Because the internet now is boring. People spend all day scrolling because they are trying to find what isn’t there anymore. The authenticity, the genuinely human moments, the fun. […]

Half an hour or so a day is ample time to catch up with my online community of people and read the thoughts of those writers who I have personally verified to be human. Beyond that the wider internet just strikes me as a sad place. There is no energy there. The cracks in the wall are beginning to show. […]

When no one is using their phone and is not mindlessly filming and photographing everything in sight (above all themselves front and centre) to decide to then do so seems weird. Vulgar. Almost shameful. It’s only the current ubiquity of our devices that makes us not feel this way. And I suspect in their hearts plenty of people have always known that there’s something fundamentally not right with all of this and have simply not said anything for fear of ridicule or being seen as out of touch. Well, slowly but surely the mimetic tide is turning. […]

My prediction may be too early, but I think it is directionally correct. The centrality of the internet in our lives will fade. Sure, we will still use it for banking, for sending off quick missives and for looking things up and so on. But the current culture of all day, every day screen time will fade. It will become passé, spurious, and something only an obsessive bore would waste all of their free time on.

The zeitgeist is shifting. And I welcome it.”

» The Commonplace | The End of the Extremely Online Era by Thomas J Bevan

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#2 🏹 From Guns To Bows

When it comes to transitioning to a sustainable and just world, people often focus on the low-hanging fruits, the convenient sustainability solutions, so to speak. What if we instead focused on the most difficult and controversial sectors? Sustainable violence – the topic of this article – surely raises eyebrows, but as the author of this piece notes: “If we cannot imagine low-tech warfare, we cannot imagine a low-tech, sustainable, and fair society.” I told you this week’s issue is particularly thought-provoking. 😜

“The bicycle and the bow are both highly efficient, human-powered technologies that could substitute for two very harmful alternatives: the car and the firearm. Why do we promote one but not the other?

Advocating for a revival of the bow and arrow – at the expense of the firearm – sounds absurd and unrealistic. But is it? Reintroducing the bow would only bring us benefits. It follows the same sound thinking behind other low-energy strategies, such as switching from cars to bicycles. The bike and the bow are both highly efficient, human-powered technologies that would be advantageous to human and planetary health. […]

Even if you agree that reverting to the bow and arrow would bring advantages, you probably find it unrealistic. That may well be true, but in that case, it’s also unrealistic to make a transition to a more sustainable society. We cannot combine a low-tech lifestyle with high-tech weapons for several reasons.

First, military technology is one of the main drivers of technological progress. Many products that are destroying our environment were originally developed for military purposes. Second, the global supply chain that underpins modern firearms is at the heart of economic growth and all environmental problems. We cannot keep it working only for manufacturing weapons and dismantle it for all other purposes. Third, the capitalist system needs rising levels of military spending as an outlet for growing amounts of accumulated surplus capital. The global economy invests heavily and increasingly in warfare, conflict, and repression – high-tech weapons are big business.

For all these reasons, rather than keeping weapons out of the sustainability discussion – they should be our focus. If we cannot imagine low-tech warfare, we cannot imagine a low-tech, sustainable, and fair society. Switching to low-tech weapons sounds unrealistic because it would require global cooperation, but the same holds for lowering the emissions from fossil fuels. Switching to low-tech weapons sounds unrealistic because it involves “uninventing” things, but this also applies to many other problematic everyday products.

Indeed, military technology is one of the few domains in which we have collectively decided not to use certain technologies. Humanity has banned many types of weapons in warfare, such as chemical and biological weapons, blinding laser weapons, and poisoned bullets. Meanwhile, no country has succeeded in outlawing SUVs, although their danger to other road users and the environment is well-known. As weird as it sounds, military technology leads by example.”

» Low-Tech Magazine | What If We Replace Guns And Bullets With Bows And Arrows? by Kris De Decker

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#3 ⚛️ De-Atomization

The more we try to optimize everything in our lives, the less rich our experiences become. One reason for this, as this article argues, is the so-called over-atomization of certain aspects of our lives for the sake of productivity. For example, food went from being a communal, celebratory, crafty/artisanal experience to either ordering food delivery with a touch on a screen and then eating in front of a screen or to a data-driven “nutritional intake” that optimizes body performance. It sort of got stripped bare of its vivid richness.

“Life and fitness used to be deeply intertwined. You could not live without fitness. Now they are separate: fitness is a cute thing rich people do in their Lululemon after work or while jiggling their mouse to keep the Slack bubble green. You don’t do it to stay alive, you do it to get laid or not resent yourself or maybe if you’re particularly enlightened to “feel good.”

Fitness has been atomized: it is no longer part of a cohesive whole life. It’s a separate thing you have to try to “find time for.” […]

Where else do we see over-atomization? Food comes to mind. A meal should be about more than just food. Relaxation, spending time with your friends and family, fun, maybe joy. If you looked at an Italian neighborhood dinner and said “wow what a waste, don’t they know they could just drink a Huel and get back to work?” then, well, oof.

But atomization encourages us to reduce multivariate experiences, often the most important parts of life, to their single most obvious element:

Biking is about exercise, and scheduling with friends and planning a route and inflating your tires all get in the way of that. Eating is about sustenance, and inviting friends and getting groceries and cooking all get in the way of that. Relationships are about talking, and meeting up in person and leaving the house and scheduling are all inconveniences. Work is about checking off tasks, so spending time commuting to an office where you might goof off and socialize all get in the way of that. 

Then when we feel lonely, painfully isolated by our atomized life, we schedule some atomized social time like going to a bar or coffee to see friends in between our lonely work and lonely dinner because we’ve removed most of the natural socializing elements from all of the other parts of life. Atomization turns an integrated day of socializing, eating, exercising, and working into discrete hurried chunks of trying to move from one thing to another, wondering why we never seem to have time for everything. […]

The solution to the atomization curse that both gives us significantly more time back, and makes us much happier, is to seek to reintegrate these various foci of life as much as possible. […]

The challenge is that these “Type 1,” or Atomized, versions of activities are the most immediately appealing. Booting up my computer to play a video game is way easier and sounds more immediately fun than texting some friends to play pickleball. […] But I know I’ll feel better afterward with the latter, and that’s what we have to try to optimize for. Integrated living is more satisfying than atomic living.”

» Nat Eliason's Essays | De-Atomization is the Secret to Happiness by Nat Eliason

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➕ Extras

“Dual power is a two-part strategy that consists of public resistance to oppression (counter-power) and the building of alternative democratic, participatory institutions (counter-institutions). In other words, one part fights the existing systems by mobilizing against them while the other builds resilient, people-led institutions to take their place.”
Our Way Out: Dual Power and the Future of Organizing by Breadchain Cooperative

“Today, the imagination behind the internet is dominantly shaped by militarization, consumerism, and surveillance. Given the options, I understand the desire to log off and dream in greener places.”
On Digital Gardens: Tending to Our Collective Multiplicity by Annika Hansteen-Izora

“Imagining a better future is at the heart of development. But mainstream development models are driven by a very narrow, Western-centric set of ideas about what it means to be human. What could be possible if we let ourselves imagine differently?”
Development Reimagined: Bold Directions Towards a Thriving World by Peter Sutoris & Uma Pradhan

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📒 A Handbook For Building A Post Growth Business

I’ve been following Marcus Feldthus and Oscar Haumann, the co-founders of Post Growth Guide and authors of this new handbook, for a few years now. I really love their work and dedication to advancing post-growth concepts within business, so this is very worth checking out!

Their new handbook walks you through a 12-step method for building a post growth business: A business with limits to growth that prioritizes sustainability and resilience over financial extraction and growth. It's 171 pages, spread across 12 chapters, and a list of 60+ recommended readings. Included in the bundle are 6 digital tools for decision-making.

The two gave us a special 20% discount for all Creative Destruction subscribers. Simply follow the link and use the discount code below:

SETTING LIMITS TO GROWTH
by Marcus Feldthus & Oscar Haumann

⚠️ Discount Code: CREATIVE

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🚿 Shower Thoughts

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

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Thomas