Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #84

From curators slowing down the internet to bioregioning as a new way of thinking and working, the invention of heterosexuality, progressive nostalgia, and the problem with the left-right spectrum

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THIS WEEK → 🐌 Curators Slow Down The Internet 🏞️ Bioregioning As A New Way Of Thinking & Working 👩‍❤️‍👨 Heterosexual Practices Are Universal, The Culture Of Heterosexuality Is Not ✚ Progressive Nostalgia 🚿 Left-Right Spectrum

Rabbit Holes 🕳️

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 🐌 Curators Slow Down The Internet

The internet, or “the information superhighway” as we Germans like to call it 🫠 is overwhelming people while making them addicted to it. In the piece below, Kyle Chayka frames curation as a way to slow down that information autobahn. By slowing down, curation offers people time to breathe and fully take in a piece of “content” instead of mindlessly digesting or “browsing” it. Additionally, people value the personality and context the curator (or connoisseur) attaches to their curations, something impossible to achieve with AI-driven recommendations.

“Digital platforms are largely devoted to making users consume more, faster—think of TikTok’s frenetic “For You” feed or Spotify’s automated playlists. Curators slow down the unending scroll and provide their followers with a way of savoring culture, rather than just inhaling it, developing a sense of appreciation.”

In a previous era of the Internet, we might have thought of figures like these simply as influencers, whose ability to attract large followings online gives them a power that sometimes surpasses that of traditional publications. But the idea of an influencer has, as Reilly put it, become “a little flattened over time,” connoting shallow, uninformed, even misleading content dictated by sponsors. “There’s a distinction between influencing and what I do,” Reilly [author of

Magasin

] insisted. The archetypal influencer produces life-style porn of one form or another, playing up the aspirational glamour of their own home or meals or vacations. The new wave of curators is more outward-looking, borrowing from the influencer’s playbook and piggybacking on social media’s intimate interaction with followers in order to address a body of culture beyond themselves. […]

The job of providing well-informed recommendations once belonged to professional critics employed by newspapers and magazines. As media companies have struggled to adjust to the digital age, the number of full-time criticism jobs has dwindled, leaving a void that [….] others are filling. […]

There’s another word that we might apply to such people: “connoisseurs,” in the art-historical sense of passionate observers who shape a discipline through their judgments. We’ve always had connoisseurs, from the radio d.j. to the bookstore clerk, subtly but vitally informing the culture that the rest of us choose to consume.”

» The New Yorker | The New Generation of Online Culture Curators by Kyle Chayka (via

The Nexialist

)

#2 🏞️ Bioregioning As A New Way Of Thinking & Working

In last week’s deep-dive piece, I looked at new and more democratic ways of coming together. Bioregioning is one of these alternative ways of organizing that could re-sync us with nature and the communities (including their wisdom) around us. It offers a new way to think about growth and scaling, encourages cross-sector collaboration, and encourages more active citizen participation. It also focuses on KPIs centered around relationships. In short, it makes a lot of sense!

“Bioregioning offers an alternative organising principle that could redefine the way we understand material flows, political governance and civil society. Simply defined, it is a form of activity that operates within the natural boundaries of a bioregion – often defined by a watershed or geological area – and that seeks to sustain, or indeed revive, the health of local ecosystems. It uses the bioregion as a form of template for organising and making. […]

While bioregions are landscapes, bioregioning is an attitude or an approach that is less about redefining borders – what is in and what is out – than it is about re-establishing our connections to the local landscape and its cycles. More than that, it is about building the network of local knowledge that would mean critical decisions are made in the best interests of the bioregion, and, crucially, that local citizens have greater agency in those decisions. [….]

Materials are heavy and should stay local. Ideas and people are light and are global.’ This deceptively simple axiom – materials are heavy, ideas are light – suggests that scale is achieved not by exporting materials […] but by exporting the principles of bioregional design instead. […]

The key to local production is to diversify the material palette, drawing on local landscapes and waste streams. Each material is a new set of relationships. The success of a bioregional production system should be measured by the number of connections in the network. Then one can measure the quality of those connections – are they thick or thin? […]

The deep knowledge about a place is most likely held by farmers and engaged locals. But it is not likely to be in a form demanded by policymakers to substantiate calls for spending. It’s not just about quantifying, it’s about qualitative data of the kind that amounts to a form of collective intelligence.”

» Islands of Coherence by the Future Observatory Journal

#3 👩‍❤️‍👨 Heterosexual Practices Are Universal, The Culture Of Heterosexuality Is Not

Super interesting “alternative” look at history and today’s dominant idea of heterosexuality, especially in light of the rise of gender-fluidity, homo-, bi- and asexuality, as well as polyamorous relationships. And also when it comes to the question of what society defines as normal and what it categorizes as abnormal.

“Louis-Georges Tin shows in his book “The Invention of Heterosexual Culture” [that] heterosexuality as a dominant cultural force is a relatively recent development. In premodern Europe, Tin explains, heterosexuality was perceived as an alternative culture, and although the practice was standard, the symbolic primacy of the heterosexual couple was not. […]

[Louis-Georges Tin:] It is clear that heterosexuality is not a dominant feature of animal societies. Some form of instinct is doubtlessly at work between the opposite sexes during ovulation, and this behavior is heterosexual. But in reality, to be precise, only humans have built societies on the basis of heterosexuality. […]

Heterosexual practices are universal, whereas the culture of heterosexuality is not. Although human nature is manifestly heterosexual, which allows the reproduction of the species, human cultures are not necessarily heterosexual — that is, they do not always give symbolic primacy to the man-woman couple and to love in its cultural, literary, or artistic representations, as close study of ancient and archaic civilizations reveals. […]

In other cultures and in premodern Western societies, other subjects have formed the primary material of public culture: celebration of heroic figures or events; reflections on the seasons; observations on the success, failure, or precariousness of agricultural cycles; histories of families (in which romantic love plays a small role, if any); explorations or elaborations of religious or political traditions.

Although heterosexual procreation is the biological basis for human society, heterosexual culture is only one construct among many, and in this sense, it should not be presented as a unique or universal model. What this implies is a need to explore as never before when, how, and why our society began to celebrate the heterosexual couple. What is needed is an exploration of the origins of the sociosexual context in which we live today, a subject that has never been studied in these terms. But to accomplish this requires nothing less than an epistemological revolution, which means taking heterosexuality out of the “order of nature” and putting it within the “order of time” — that is, history.”

» MIT Press | The Invention of Heterosexual Culture by Louis-Georges Tin

✚ Random Reframings

"The key to thriving in our high-tech world, they’ve learned, is to spend much less time using technology." Cal Newport

“Nostalgia need not be conservative, stultifying or sentimental. Rather, expressions of nostalgia are one way we communicate a desire for the past, dissatisfaction about the present, and our visions for the future. My version of nostalgia will be joyful, creative and progressive.” Agnes Arnold-Forster

“here’s my way of thinking about sharing: your website = your home / your garden; email newsletter = birds that carry your gifts; public platforms (social media, podcast) = pop-up booths & tents, your energy going camping elsewhere.” Kening Yhu

“I wrote about the kind of cognitive dissonance between the argument that we need people to have more babies and the argument that we need fewer immigrants. Do you think that having more babies causes people to lose jobs because the babies take the job? No. You want more people because then you have a country that flourishes more.” John Washington

🚿 Shower Thoughts

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

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Thomas