Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #81

From interspecies creativity to the relationship economy, digital industrialism, how to live in a digital city, and how dating has changed

THIS WEEK → 🎨 Interspecies Creativity 💑 The Relationship Economy 🏭 Digital Industrialism ➕ How To Live In A Digital City 🚿 How Dating Has Changed

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 🎨 Interspecies Creativity

This one relates to my post about Natural Intelligence and the enormous potential that comes with letting go of the narrative of separation (humans vs. nature) and human exceptionalism. Embracing the interconnectedness of all things could become such a game-changer for creativity and innovation.

“For centuries, we humans have treated the natural world as something to be used up, a pretty background for our selfies, or at best a source of creative inspiration and retreat. But a growing movement is challenging this human-centric view by engaging directly with plants, animals, and environments as creative partners and collaborators.

Shane Mendonsa is part of that shift; a composer who went from scoring Bollywood movies to improvising alongside an unlikely ensemble – living plants. Mendonsa uses sensors attached to leaves to drive synthesizers, allowing the plants' bioelectrical signals to shape the music in real-time. […]

Mendonsa is part of a growing group of artists, designers, and researchers exploring what's being called "more-than-human collaboration" – the act of decentering human perspectives to engage creatively and respectfully with our non-human kin. From visualizing animal "superpowers" to simulating how horses see, this work challenges our assumptions about our human supremacy.

For designer and researcher Alan Hook, this represents "an exercise in empathy" that can reshape how we understand our role on this vibrant, multi-species planet. His "Equine Eyes" project allows humans to briefly experience the world through a horse's panoramic visual field and unique color perception. The prototypes he developed help us better understand how the species experiences the world. Playing with this empathy could inform new ways of building for inter-species inclusivity in the future. […]

At its core, more-than-human collaboration is an act of decolonizing perspective, challenging the narrative of humans being the only main characters of the story of this planet. […] The concept of collaboration with nature is a direct reminder that the natural world is populated by wise, reactive beings with their own coherent sensibilities, as indigenous knowledge systems have long understood.

From this perspective, more-than-human collaboration is not a novelty, but a profound reframing and deep remembering. As Mendonsa's plant music reminds us, creativity arises not from individual genius but from attunement to the plurality of experiences always unfolding around us.”

» Awe Exchange | Think Outside the Human Box: Interspecies Creativity by Laura Francois

#2 💑 The Relationship Economy

The increasing application of A.I. might make us realize the engineering-focused, machine-like structure of today’s world of work and thereby open up space to rethink the following questions: What are our core capabilities? What are we, as a species, uniquely good at or useful for in this world? And how can we build a future that’s less machine and more human, more natural in a broader sense?

“The early signals of what A.I. can do should compel us to think differently about ourselves as a species. Our abilities to effectively communicate, develop empathy and think critically have allowed humans to collaborate, innovate and adapt for millenniums. Those skills are ones we all possess and can improve, yet they have never been properly valued in our economy or prioritized in our education and training. That needs to change. […]

Circling around this research is the big question emerging across so many conversations about A.I. and work, namely: What are our core capabilities as humans?

If we answer that question from a place of fear about what’s left for people in the age of A.I., we can end up conceding a diminished view of human capability. Instead, it’s critical for us all to start from a place that imagines what’s possible for humans in the age of A.I. […] Ultimately, for our society, this comes down to whether we believe in the potential of humans with as much conviction as we believe in the potential of A.I. […]

Almost anticipating this moment a few years ago, Minouche Shafik, who is now the president of Columbia University, said: “In the past, jobs were about muscles. Now they’re about brains, but in the future, they’ll be about the heart.”

The knowledge economy that we have lived in for decades emerged out of a goods economy that we lived in for millenniums, fueled by agriculture and manufacturing. Today the knowledge economy is giving way to a relationship economy, in which people skills and social abilities are going to become even more core to success than ever before. That possibility is not just cause for new thinking when it comes to work force training. It is also cause for greater imagination when it comes to what is possible for us as humans not simply as individuals and organizations but as a species.”

» The Washington Post | When Your Technical Skills Are Eclipsed, Your Humanity Will Matter More Than Ever by Aneesh Raman & Maria Flynn

#3 🏭 Digital Industrialism

The following text could have easily come from myself – and probably from many other fellow “creators” out there. Internet platforms that operate in the context of an economic system that demands more growth each year cannot create a healthy, natural pace and environment because content production eventually becomes a slave to the algorithm that wants more, more, and more. And what ends up happening is that “creators”, in the pursuit of keeping pace, end up becoming machine-like themselves.

“I can’t do this anymore. Oh, I’m happy to write and podcast and teach and talk. That’s me, and that’s all good. What I’m finding difficult, even counter-productive, is to try to keep doing this work at the pace of the Internet. […]

If I really wanted to live off a Substack writing career, I would have to ramp up to at least three posts a week. That might work if I were a beat reporter covering sports, but - really - how many cogent ideas about media, society, technology and change can one person develop over the course of a week? More important, how many ideas can one person come up with that are truly worth other people’s time? […]

Making matters worse, the pace of the Internet actually increases with the growth of the platforms. Where print or television may have been a regular grind, the Internet is an accelerating grind. No sooner do you get used to one pace of production then the platforms seem to demand more. More posts, more microcontent to support those posts, and more networks on which to post and cross-post all of that content. A platform’s profits can’t grow exponentially without accelerating the hamster wheels on which its users run. […]

Where freelancers like me used to internalize the mean boss, now our technologies do that for us. […]

Most ironically, perhaps, the more content we churn out for all of these platforms, the less valuable all of our content becomes. There’s simply too much stuff. The problem isn’t information overload so much as “perspective abundance.” We may need to redefine “discipline” from the ability to write and publish something every day to the ability hold back. What if people started to produce content when they had actually something to say, rather than coming up with something to say in order to fill another slot? […]

What I value most and, hopefully, offer is an alternative to the pacing and values of digital industrialism. That’s what I’m here for: to express and even model a human approach to living in a digital media environment. So I’m getting off the treadmill, recognizing this assembly line for what it is, and trusting that you will stay with me on this journey in recognition of the fact that less is more.”

» Rushkoff | Breaking from the Pace of the Net by Douglas Rushkoff

➕ Extras

“While the vibrance, innovation, and cacophony of online life can feel completely unlike anything humanity has ever created before, its newness isn’t wholly unprecedented. Humans reckoned with many similar challenges to life as they knew it while navigating a different kind of social web: the city.”
How to Live in a Digital City by Megan Garber and Andrea Valdez

“We’ve now had four decades of the neoliberal “experiment,” beginning with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The results are clear. Neoliberalism expanded the freedom of corporations and billionaires to do as they will and amass huge fortunes, but it also exacted a steep price: the well-being and freedom of the rest of society.”
Time is up for neoliberals by Joseph Stiglitz

“In a culture that constantly tells us to do more of everything but simultaneously pressures us to do nothing, Permission to Rest is a passionate cry for a more regulated, resourced, and rested life. Neese examines common beliefs around rest and offers support and guidance to challenge the shame, guilt, and discomfort that often arise when we attempt to slow down.”
Permission to Rest by Ashley Neese

“Could we define progress perhaps as this ‘capacity to make things disappear’, which is to say – there’s a wildly uneven condition across the globe and across time, one in which some people have been able to hide the externalities that allow them to live in comfort, others have not.”
Buildings Born Ruins: Philosophy and Architecture After the Apocalypse by Nuria Ribas Costa (if this resonates, check out last Friday’s piece In A Land Far, Far Away)

🚿 Shower Thoughts

@kylenutt117How dating has changed.. #shortfilm

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

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Thomas