Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #79

From the revival of analogue to a language of animacy, introspective captivity, tradwife media and content destroyers

Hi everyone,

As you might have read in yesterday’s out-of-the-ordinary e-mail:

You can now support my newsletter with a paid subscription!

Just to clarify, my Rabbit Holes issues will still be available for free with the usual free subscription, but my Friday deep dive posts will, from now on, only be accessible to paid subscribers. Paying subscribers additionally receive access to a database with all ideas and perspectives shared in all Rabbit Holes so far, neatly tagged and categorized, as well as access to future Q&As and discounts for future reports.

If you have been enjoying this newsletter, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription! Thank you! 😊

THIS WEEK → 📽️ The Revival of Analogue 🐾 A Language Of Animacy 🫣 Introspective Captivity ➕ Tradwife Media 🚿 Content Destroyers

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 Revival of Analogue

Those who embrace new tech are often seen as the innovators, while those slowest to adopt are the laggards. Maybe that’s flipping! Or, more precisely, we are, as I said before, increasingly arriving at the conclusion that A Frictionless World is Boring As F*ck.

“As academics who rarely go a day without playing or making music, we have spent the past decade examining the extraordinary revival of analogue technology. From vinyl records to film cameras, all manner of apparently written-off technologies have been making a comeback, including modular synthesizers – one of the earliest types of this now-ubiquitous electronic instrument. […]

Over the decade or so of our research, explanations for the analogue revival have shifted from nostalgia to the desire for something physical in a digital age, to the sense that analogue technology is creatively preferable. The idea that working within limits, and needing to overcome them, is beneficial to art creation is now accepted by many within the creative sectors.

Is digital technology de-skilling consumers, leading to a sense of alienation? And is this overcome by using more difficult analogue devices? This is the conclusion we have come to. Certain types of "serious leisure", including sports and creative activities, provide us with intrinsic joy even if they are frustrating to engage in until skills are developed. Using analogue technology is another way consumers can feed this desire to re-skill.

In a sense, while analogue users feel they have greater control over their creativity, this occurs through surrendering to the demands of one's device […]. This runs contrary to the promise of most consumer-driven innovation: functional superiority and increased ease of use. […]

The analogue revival is driven by people wanting to be active rather than passive consumers. The more they engage in the work required by analogue technologies, the more control they gain in shaping their desired experiences – first by learning the rules, then in their skilled application, and then, ultimately, in breaking the rules, generating happy accidents to be shared with like-minded others. […]

Cave, like many of our interviewees, highlights the importance of having limits to overcome as part of any human creative process. Because analogue privileges real people in the making of art, it may become ever more culturally important as an antidote to the burgeoning use of AI. Or as Cave puts it:

"This is what we humble humans can offer that AI can only mimic – the transcendent journey of the artist who forever grapples with his or her own shortcomings."

» BBC | Analogue technology can be frustrating – is that part of the appeal? by Michael Beverland & Giana M Eckhardt

#2 🐾 A Language Of Animacy

Last Friday’s piece explored the emergence of a planetary culture, including music, literature, and wellness, helping us cultivate a worldview marked by the interdependence between humans and nature. However, our language, especially the language of commerce, is still very much based on the ideology of human exceptionalism. How can language include more animacy and cultivate planetary (or kinship) thinking?

“Beyond the renaming of places, I think the most profound act of linguistic imperialism was the replacement of a language of animacy with one of objectification of nature, which renders the beloved land as lifeless object, the forest as board feet of timber. Because we speak and live with this language every day, our minds have also been colonized by this notion that the nonhuman living world and the world of inanimate objects have equal status. Bulldozers, buttons, berries, and butterflies are all referred to as it, as things, whether they are inanimate industrial products or living beings.

English has come to be the dominant language of commerce, in which contracts to convert a forest to a copper mine are written. It’s just the right language for the purpose, because the forest and the copper ore are equivalent “its.” English encodes human exceptionalism, which privileges the needs and wants of humans above all others and understands us as detached from the commonwealth of life.

But I wonder if it was always that way. […] It is said that we are known by the company we keep, and I wonder if English sharpened its verbal ax and lost the companionship of oaks and primroses when it began to keep company with capitalism. […]

Wendell Berry […] writes, ‘People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love, and to defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.’ […]

Maybe now, in this time when the myth of human exceptionalism has proven illusory, we will listen to intelligences other than our own, to kin. To get there, we may all need a new language to help us honor and be open to the beings who will teach us.”

» Orion Magazine | Speaking of Nature by Robin Kimmerer

#3 🫣 Introspective Captivity

Reflecting and introspecting can be quite helpful, but is our culture encouraging too much introspection and self-care? Therapy is great, but let’s not forget what comes after therapy: going outside and living life!

“We live in an age of therapy speak, in an age of seemingly every song and TikTok and book using the language of introspection and healing and self-care, because we live in an age of increased isolation, of detachment from the messiness and joy and danger of the real, physical world. A culture of excessive introspection is not a sign of collective or personal growth, but a sign of disconnection from the outside world and each other. And even more depressingly, we have accepted that this is good and moral and correct; we are lauded for living alone within four white walls, and lauded for the imagery and thoughts we produce under these conditions. 

Take, for example, the spate of albums released in the last few years by many of pop’s main girls: Lorde’s Solar Power, Miley Cyrus’s Endless Summer Vacation, Dua Lipa’s Radical Optimism, Ariana Grande’s Eternal Sunshine. All of these albums portray isolation and introspection as keys to happiness. “I can buy myself flowers,” Miley sings. “Talk to myself for hours.” We’re better off alone, as long as we can talk to ourselves, like a mental patient trapped in a padded cell.

Social media is filled with similar encouragements—who needs friends or lovers or the outside world when we can create self-care cells in our homes and journal and go to therapy. Cut everyone off who is “bad” for you. Prioritize your mental healing over everything else, even if it means being alone. As Rayne Fisher-Quann points out, this leaves us not only alone, but in a mental state in which we are more prone to buy stimuli and social interaction from corporations (via social media).

And this creates a cycle—the more we encourage ourselves and each other to live lives of reflective isolation, the more scared we become of stimuli that cannot be controlled. No wonder everyone is addicted to their phones. No wonder everyone is depressed. No wonder people are having so much less sex these days. No wonder so many insane people on TikTok are convinced they will be kidnapped from a Target parking lot. […]

Therapy should be, and often is, a way to realize this—to realize that you must enact your desires before they turn inward and wreak havoc on your psyche. But these days, I believe, we have forgotten what comes after therapy—that we must then act on these desires, not just understand them, for our energies to be released, and thus for us to feel healthy and happy.”

» Mental Hellth | A Culture of Introspective Captivity by P.E. Moskowitz

➕ Extras

“Every year, capitalism produces tons of goods that go right to waste. Mining, deforestation, social inequalities, racism, extractivism, and hyper-consumption add to this fantastic amount of waste. How is their disappearance and invisibility organized? Who cleans the world? Upon whose bodies rests bourgeois and white cleanliness?Making the World Clean looks at the masses who daily clean the world to make it livable and comfortable for a few.”
🧹 Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism by Françoise Vergès

“To this end, tradwife media understands the allure of the end of alienated labor while promising men, implicitly, a prosperous future in which they do not compete with women for work.”
👰‍♀️ From Scratch by Sarah Brouillette & Astrid Lorange

“Certain ancient practices could mitigate the deleterious effects of global warming. From building seaside gardens to water management in desert terrain, these time-honored practices work with the natural world’s rhythms. Some might even hold the key to a more resilient future and a means of building security for both Indigenous communities and other groups disproportionately impacted by climate change.”
🌱 Nine practices from Native American culture that could help the environment by Samuel Gilbert

🚿 Shower Thoughts

via Pearl Rose

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

Please support this newsletter by sharing it with your friends and colleagues, thereby helping me gain more reach!

Thanks for supporting my work! 😊

Thomas