Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #80
Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #80
From screen time contradictions to questioning capitalism's legitimacy, AI is like McKinsey, the hidden realms around us, and wheel invention consequences
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THIS WEEK → 📱 Screen Time Contradictions 🤨 Questioning Capitalism’s Legitimacy 🤖 AI Is Like McKinsey ➕ The Hidden Realms Around Us 🚿 Wheel Invention Consequences
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 📱 Screen Time Contradictions
Whenever a bigger cultural contradiction is forming, I get interested because that usually signals an imminent zeitgeist shift. And in today’s world, there are lots of contradictions forming. One recent one is that we are getting more serious about restricting smartphone (and social media) use for kids and teens, while adults’ lives – especially their work lives – are increasingly dependent on a lot of screen time.
“Maybe the pressing question is not, “How do I get my kid off her phone?”, but rather, “How can I get off my own phone so that my kid doesn’t see that as normal?” […]
When the problem is framed in this way, it almost looks more serious and alarming than ever. Adults are supposed to be role models, voices of reason, exemplars of balance. But when they spend most of the day staring at their phones, it is hypocritical to yell at their kids for doing more or less the same. […]
“In every culture, young children want the objects of grown-up desire,” Sherry Turkle wrote in Reclaiming Conversation. Can you think of an object that is more coveted in the average adult’s life right now than their phone? It’s taken everywhere and consulted constantly.
To an adult, this may seem logical and inescapable. Work and social engagements are all planned using smartphones, and countless other daily tasks rely on apps, from banking and paying for stuff to booking appointments to tracking fitness goals to ordering food to playing music, not to mention communicating with friends, family, and work colleagues.
But from a child’s perspective, the adult is just on their phone all day long. The child doesn’t know what tasks the adult is accomplishing. The child observes how the adult’s facial expressions and demeanour are affected by whatever he or she sees on the screen, how it induces sadness or laughter or anxiety. The child may feel sidelined by the device while it dominates the parent’s focus. […]
It's not unlike diet. If a kid grows up in a house where the parents eat healthy food at every meal, they are going to do the same by default. In fact, it would be hard for that kid to have a bad diet because junk food is not readily accessible. Screen habits are not that much different. In a home where adults are rarely on phones and always present for conversation, prioritizing eye contact and in-person, physical activities, a child will learn to do the same.”
» | It's the Adults, Not the Kids! by
#2 🤨 Questioning Capitalism’s Legitimacy
Someone still needs to explain to me why democracy is (rightfully) held high in politics while the economy and its business world are organized in an extremely autocratic manner – and that this is somehow considered totally normal. Some of us spend 5 days a week working for autocratic organizations (i.e., corporations) and then, on Saturday, go to a protest against autocratic regimes – again a contradiction.... As Marjorie Kelly writes below, once we see capitalism for what it is – i.e. wealth supremacy and capital extraction within an autocratic context – and then withdraw legitimacy from it, we turn “its cultural foundation to sand.” This is the way!
“The economy is simply not working for the majority. A May 2023 Harris poll found, half of Americans—across generations and races—believe capitalism is headed in the wrong direction. This suggests we are at an important moment, one where capitalism’s legitimacy is beginning to be open for debate.
This moment provides an important opportunity to challenge our economic system, one that goes beyond building alternatives that capitalism promptly absorbs or marginalizes. We need to help each other recognize how our own mindset helps hold the system in place, and thus how a change of our collective mind could itself be the foundation of deep change. My point is this: We begin to change the system when we change our minds. How can this be?
First, consider the fact that we will never win against extractive capitalism if it’s a matter of raw power. But we the people wield a more subtle power—in the end, the ultimate power—which is legitimacy. When we withdraw legitimacy, we fatally weaken the system, turning its cultural foundation to sand. […]
The very heart and soul of the system is the idea that our economy exists to serve the wealthy, to allow them to extract limitless, maximum amounts from the rest of us, and from the planet. Protecting and growing their financial wealth—called “capital”—is the aim of the whole system. As such, it is contrary to our democratic values. It means in a democratic society founded on the truth that all persons are created equal, we have permitted an economic system based on a directly contrary principle: that the wealthy matter more than the rest of us. […]
The bias of capital is built into the economic system at every level, yet its destructive force is hidden by language. We valorize so-called investing and the way it “creates wealth,” as if wealth can be created out of nothing. But much “investing” is really extraction; it’s a form of taking that undermines the resilience of families and communities. […]
We’re not connecting the dots yet. When big tech firms’ share prices are lofty, we don’t conclude that this is linked to a post-truth society or the corruption of democracy. When we hear about the rising number of billionaires, we don’t think about the opioid crisis or local firms shut out by chains. We could, because these outcomes are the result of root causes found in the structures and practices of our capital-centric economy and in the power that this system creates for a wealthy elite. […]
To continue its dominance, capital extraction requires that we accept its normality, its technical necessity, its inevitability. Where we begin to transform this system is in our own minds. This is where we stop accepting it as legitimate. This is where the system begins to lose its grip. This is where we begin to win.”
» Yes Magazine | Breaking Up With Capitalism by Marjorie Kelly
#3 🤖 AI Is Like McKinsey
One of the best articles I’ve read lately. It’s such a mic-drop article that I won’t bore you with my own take or commentary – I just want to encourage you to read the whole thing.
"I would like to propose another metaphor for the risks of artificial intelligence. I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company. Firms like McKinsey are hired for a wide variety of reasons, and A.I. systems are used for many reasons, too. But the similarities between McKinsey—a consulting firm that works with ninety per cent of the Fortune 100—and A.I. are also clear.
Social-media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic.
Just as A.I. promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America.
A former McKinsey employee has described the company as “capital’s willing executioners”: if you want something done but don’t want to get your hands dirty, McKinsey will do it for you. That escape from accountability is one of the most valuable services that management consultancies provide. Bosses have certain goals, but don’t want to be blamed for doing what’s necessary to achieve those goals; by hiring consultants, management can say that they were just following independent, expert advice. Even in its current rudimentary form, A.I. has become a way for a company to evade responsibility by saying that it’s just doing what “the algorithm” says, even though it was the company that commissioned the algorithm in the first place. […]
Is there a way for A.I. to do something other than sharpen the knife blade of capitalism? […]
As it is currently deployed, A.I. often amounts to an effort to analyze a task that human beings perform and figure out a way to replace the human being. Coincidentally, this is exactly the type of problem that management wants solved. As a result, A.I. assists capital at the expense of labor. There isn’t really anything like a labor-consulting firm that furthers the interests of workers. Is it possible for A.I. to take on that role? Can A.I. do anything to assist workers instead of management?
Some might say that it’s not the job of A.I. to oppose capitalism. That may be true, but it’s not the job of A.I. to strengthen capitalism, either. Yet that is what it currently does. If we cannot come up with ways for A.I. to reduce the concentration of wealth, then I’d say it’s hard to argue that A.I. is a neutral technology, let alone a beneficial one.”
» The New Yorker | Will A.I. Become The Next McKinsey by Ted Chiang (archived version)
➕ Extras
“The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world. In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us.”
🪼👀 An Immense World: How animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us by Ed Yong
“We’re hoping that people will begin seriously thinking that our short-term well-being is best served by thinking about our long-term survival.”
⏳🤔 The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt? by Peter Watts & Dan Brooks
“Today, the superrich control a greater share of America’s wealth than during the Gilded Age of Carnegies and Rockefellers. That's partly because taxes on the wealthy have cratered. In 2018, America's top billionaires paid just 23 percent of their income in taxes [compared to 56% in the 1960s].”
🤑☝️ It’s Time To Tax The Billionaires by Gabriel Zucman
🚿 Shower Thoughts
That’s it for this week’s Rabbit Holes issue!
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