Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #77
Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #77
From nature expanding time to rewilding the internet, the war on the young, the order of time, and the shitthropocene
Hi there,
I’m back from my WOOFing week in Switzerland with new energy and one key learning I quickly wanna share with you:
Have you ever thought that maybe you are supposed to be a farmer?
In the 19th century, approximately 80% of people in the US and Europe were involved in agriculture; today, it’s only about 4% in Europe and 10% in the US. Farming is, of course, not for everyone. But there is something very natural about working outdoors in and with nature compared to, for example, writing an impact measurement report on a laptop inside a grey office building. So I can’t help myself thinking that 4-10% of the population working in agriculture is maybe too few. Farming, due to its heavy industrialization, high costs/low margins, and labor-intensive nature has become unappealing to many. But there are new (or new-again) farming philosophies and practices emerging – e.g. permaculture, self-sufficiency, and regenerative farming – that might make it much more appealing to those seeking to rewild and regenerate the world.
So, I want to make the assertion that many of you reading this newsletter might actually become much happier if you were to transition to becoming a farmer. And maybe it doesn’t have to be a full transition: in Rabbit Holes #23, I shared the Japanese philosophy of han-nō, han-X which is about building a life in which one works half the time growing food and the other half pursuing any other, maybe more modern or internet-based, entrepreneurial endeavor. A connection on LinkedIn recently shared a similar “lifestyle” concept in a post that saw lots of support and interesting comments.
THIS WEEK → 🕰️ Nature Expanding Time 🦥 Rewilding The Internet 🚸 War On The Young ➕ The Order of Time 🚿 The Shitthropocene
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 🕰️ Nature Expanding Time
One thing I noticed after spending a week outside in the mountains, in nature, and only looking at my phone early in the morning and late in the evening was how every day somehow felt longer. Here is some interesting new research that highlights how experiences in nature expand our perception of time and perspective.
“In a recent publication, I propose that nature experiences offer a potential solution to the increasingly widespread feelings of time scarcity caused by contemporary urban lifestyles. This emerges from the unique nature of human time perception, which is highly subjective, and moulded by the experiences and environments in which we immerse ourselves. […]
Evidence from psychological experiments suggests that there are at least two ways natural surroundings can have a positive impact on human time perception.
One of these is expanding our perception of temporal duration. For example, one study reports that when people are inquired how long they have been walking in natural or urban settings, they tend to overestimate the time spent strolling in nature, but not in the city. In other words, time feels longer when we are immersed in natural settings in comparison to urban environments.
The other way nature experiences can influence our time perception is by promoting a shift in perspective. In one experiment, participants spent a short period of silence either indoors or outdoors, and were later asked how this experience influenced their temporal orientation towards the past, present and future. People who experienced the natural setting reported feeling more focused on the present, and less on the past. […]
While there is plenty of evidence that nature experiences have various physical and mental benefits, the idea that such experiences can help people uplift their relationship with time is new, and provides a unique perspective on the importance of nature for human well-being.
Further enhancing our understanding of how nature benefits human sense of time can help us design cities and other urban environments in healthier and more sustainable ways.”
» The Conversation | The frantic pace of modern is damaging our sense of time, but nature can help us heal – new study by Ricardo Correia
#2 🦥 Rewilding The Internet
Once you peel away the veil of excitement and glamor, the internet to which we basically hook our brains up (Matrix-style) each day turns out to be this sort of highly industrial monocultural farm run mainly to extract data, from us. “Our online spaces are not ecosystems […] they’re plantations”.
“The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.
Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.
We all know this. We see it each time we reach for our phones. But what most people have missed is how this concentration reaches deep into the internet’s infrastructure — the pipes and protocols, cables and networks, search engines and browsers. These structures determine how we build and use the internet, now and in the future. […]
No wonder internet engineer Leslie Daigle termed the concentration and consolidation of the internet’s technical architecture “‘climate change’ of the Internet ecosystem.” […]
Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta are consolidating their control deep into the underlying infrastructure through acquisitions, vertical integration, building proprietary networks, creating chokepoints and concentrating functions from different technical layers into a single silo of top-down control. They can afford to, using the vast wealth reaped in their one-off harvest of collective, global wealth.
Taken together, the enclosure of infrastructure and imposition of technology monoculture forecloses our futures. […] Whoever controls infrastructure determines the future. If you doubt that, consider that in Europe we’re still using roads and living in towns and cities the Roman Empire mapped out 2,000 years ago. […]
But what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday “hyperobject,” but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? […] Technologists are great at incremental fixes, but to regenerate entire habitats, we need to learn from ecologists who take a whole-systems view. […]
We don’t need to repair the internet’s infrastructure. We need to rewild it. […]
Rewilding the internet is more than a metaphor. It’s a framework and plan. It gives us fresh eyes for the wicked problem of extraction and control, and new means and allies to fix it. It recognizes that ending internet monopolies isn’t just an intellectual problem. It’s an emotional one.”
» Noema | We Need To Rewild The Internet by Maria Farrell & Robin Berjon
#3 🚸 War On The Young
In a forthcoming TED talk, Scott Galloway sort of threads several U.S.-specific (but not US-exclusive) challenges, including climate change, inequality, and the mental health crises, into one: a war on young people. A reframing that I found particularly thought-provoking: Scott writes that the young are basically seen as nutrition instead of the future: e.g. as workers who do the work that props up businesses’ valuations which are owned by seniors, as social media users mined for their attention, or as renters who pay the wealthy property owners.
“The U.S. is the 10th-happiest country in the world for people over 60, and the 62nd-happiest for people under 30. Young people are economically disadvantaged, threatened by climate change, and voiceless thanks to our dysfunctional politics. And they’ve been manipulated from childhood by a toxic cocktail of paleolithic instincts, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.
We have broken the social contract, and younger generations aren’t going to fulfill their end of it. In 1993, 60% of 30- to 34-year-olds had at least one child. Today that number is 27%. Young people aren’t meeting or mating, and the consequences will be dire.
Young people’s labor powers the economy, and their taxes pay for the services consumed by old people. Without robust youth employment, Social Security will go bankrupt, debt service will consume the federal budget, and the commonwealth will collapse.
We’ve created a future so unappealing, youth is opting out.”
» No Mercy / No Malice | War on the Young by Scott Galloway
➕ Extras
“We are no longer creating. We are, in many ways, simply lending our voice to an algorithm. The world, as a result, becomes ever more shaped and optimised according to the goals of our corporate machine overlords.”
Greetings from the future it's really f*cking boring by
“Love is much more than a mere emotion or moral ideal. It imbues the world itself and we should learn to move with its power.”
The Enchanted Vision by Mark Vernon
“We all experience time, but the more scientists learn about it, the more mysterious it remains. We think of it as uniform and universal, moving steadily from past to future, measured by clocks. Rovelli tears down these assumptions one by one, revealing a strange universe where at the most fundamental level time disappears.”
The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli
🚿 Shower Thoughts
That’s it for this week’s Rabbit Holes issue!
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