Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #88
From a new cloud god to the death of the follower, soul-making productivity, from expert to explorer, indigenous AI and bioregional financing
THIS WEEK ↓
🕳️ Rabbit Holes: All Hail The Cloud // Death Of The Follower? // Soul-Making Productivity
🤯 Reframings: Remembering Love // Life-Centric Biology // From Expert To Explorer
🎨 Creations: CopenPay // Atlas Movement // Bioregional Financing
Rabbit Holes 🕳️
As always, 3 perspective-shifting rabbit holes to rewild your mind:
#1 ☁️ All Hail The Cloud
A fun and super thought-provoking reframing of our smartphone or internet addiction in which the cloud becomes a sort of new deity, a god we worship and serve through our increasingly digital lives. The natural resources that we exploit (and therefore lose) to run and expand the cloud become a sort of literal sacrifice to our new god. It’s wild but I cannot unsee it after reading this piece.
“Think for a moment: where do our photos and texts and emails and tweets and posts and all our other bits of digital drivel end up? They don’t live on our phones. The modern miracle of a twenty-four-seven wireless tether to the world-wide-web of “content” (I shudder at the very word), is powered not by local memory, but by that mysterious, amorphous blob we call THE CLOUD.
We spend every waking moment shovelling packets of data, an endless stream of zeros and ones, up into the sky. Our messages to friends and family? To the CLOUD. Our work emails? To the CLOUD. Our GPS data, willingly given and tracking our every movement? To the CLOUD. Our money — and I mean real, fiat money, not the cryptobro’s wet dream? It’s in the CLOUD. Our photos and TV shows and biometric data and news and banking and memories and the curated exhibitions of our boring lives — all are offered up to the CLOUD. It is He, *Dyēus Himself. He has returned.
After a brief dalliance with false gods, we have returned to our primordial state. The serpent tempted Eve not with fruit, but an Apple iPhone. Indra had not a thousand eyes, but a thousand lenses. Zeus threw not lightening bolts, but 5G download speeds. We are become Homo *Dyēus once more, servants of the great Sky Father, slaves to the CLOUD. […]
We destroy the very earth we stand on, poison the very air we breathe, all to power the CLOUD. If that’s not ritual sacrifice, I don’t know what is. […]
As more and more of us turn to recording every moment of our lives and beaming it up to the CLOUD, it feels like we’re approaching THE END. Why else would we spend so much of our lives feverishly uploading, instead of living?
I understand now. The CLOUD must win Armageddon, or else what was it all for? Our bodies are mortal, soon to be dust. But our digital simulacra? That can live on, and live on it must. Pull out your phones and start recording. There’s nothing else to do.”
» Cosmographia | All Hail The Cloud by M. E. Rothwell
#2 💀 Death Of The Follower?
This is the video that eventually triggered me to write last week's deep dive, Reclaiming Joy In The Creator Economy. In the video, Jack Conte, founder of Patreon, offers an interesting reframing of how the internet, social media, and the creator economy have changed throughout the last 30 years and hints at what’s next.
#3 🤩 Soul-Making Productivity
Older subscribers might remember my article Aliveness: Reframing Productivity. The piece below aligns well with what I wrote back then and is slightly more practical. River Kenna calls it a “process manifesto” that reframes productivity in a way that “stokes the fire” within you. Below are a some of the elements of River’s soul-making productivity concept:
Ambition: “Ambition isn't about getting more money, more goods, bigger houses, greater acclaim from people you don't know or respect. […] Ambition is about the echoes you want to leave reverberating in the world around you.”
Fuel Sources: “Fuel sources like fear and inadequacy have a raw power to them, a quality of being able to push things past the finish line on sheer force alone, mindless of any consequences. Fuel sources like curiosity and devotion lack that raw power — at least at the levels I've been able to access — but they do have a more graceful, sinuous strength to them. Less of a diesel truck, more of a beloved horse. It takes practice and skill to learn how to ride the horse well, but once you do, you can navigate in ways you couldn't with the truck.”
Desire Infrastructure: “I'm playing on the term "desire paths" here, the paths that show up where people actually want to walk, not just where the planners of sidewalks and roads want them to walk. The same way that top-down planning of public spaces so often fails to account for how people intuitively want to navigate that space, our own top-down planning of our time and energy fails to account for how we actually intuitively want to navigate those.”
Environmental Cognition: “A spider's web is a part of its mind. Its cognition is extended not just through its own body, but through the vibrations and structure of its web. Messing up its web can make a spider act cognitively impaired until it's fixed. Humans aren't so different: our minds are shaped by our environments. […] Your environment can either work in your favor or against you — ignoring that fact feels not just silly, but harmful to any project you want to bring the fullness of yourself to.”
Animism: “Remember that whatever idea you're trying to bring into the world, that idea is a living creature, with its own wants, needs, desires, and drives. I'm not even saying you have to actually believe this is true — just that the more deeply you can act as if it's true, the more fruitful your relationship with your work can become.”
Archetypal Resonance: “If you dig really deep into your core drives and deep values, you may notice they start to feel very powerful, but a bit shapeless. They trade cohesive direction for raw power. Working with archetypes can be a helpful way of giving them back some shape and direction again. That's what archetypes are, really. They're form, not content. If you can fill up the form with energy and the content of your life, it takes on life and direction of its own.”
Somatic Resonance: “Your body knows when your work is disconnected from your soul. It knows when your action isn't in line with your drives and values. […] When you lose all the energy to do something that you insist must be done; when your deadline was a week ago, but you still can't bring yourself to do anything more than vague brainstorming; when you keep getting mysterious pains and injuries whenever you turn towards a particular project; when you get angry or irritable at the mention of a specific task — dozens of things like this can be clear signals that something's off between you and the project. Maybe it's about the way you're doing it, maybe it's about the project itself. Either way, the body is the outward expression of the soul, it knows when your vocation isn't being respected.”
Trust the Timing: “So many times, I've been working on a project and gotten it to 70%, 80%, 95% finished — and then come up against a near-total block. Entirely unable to finish off the next chunk. One part of me said to push through, hack away at the last bits until I got it across the finish line. Another part of me said to wait.
Usually I'd wait, and maybe 1 week later, maybe 2 months later, I'd be out for a walk or talking to a friend, and suddenly — it all falls into place. THAT'S WHAT WAS MISSING! […]
There's a gap here between working by chronos or working by kairos — working by linear clock-time, versus working by the sensed patterns of Time. Learning to attend to the quality of the moment, to when patterns complete themselves, versus simply following the quantity of moments, scrunching and stretching existence to fit a pre-fabricated deadline.”
» Inner Wilds | Soul-Making Productivity: A Process Manifesto by River Kenna
🤯 Reframings
A few short reframings that I’ve recently come across:
“Love isn’t something we fall in or out of, but something we remember we are part of —much like we are part of nature. Remembering how to love one another and our planet again is what we are all tasked with. Losing sight of that love might just be the only crisis there is.” Willow Defebaugh in ‘Loving Nature’
“Productivity is most important for things you don’t want to be doing. Most people want to increase productivity so they can spend less time on the task.
But before you worry about being more productive, think about being more selective. Rather than focusing on increasing productivity, it may be worth asking, “What would I be delighted to spend time on, even if it went slowly?”
Direct your energy toward figuring out how to start what you want to do rather than thinking about how to shorten what you don’t want to do.” James Clear
“The best narratives and metaphors for thinking about how life works come not from our technologies (machines, computers) but from life itself. [….] For what, after all, is extraordinary […] about living matter is not its molecules but its aliveness, its agency. It seems odd to have to say this, but it’s time for a biology that is life-centric.” Philip Ball in ‘We Are Not Machines’
“We live in societies around the world where “experts” run the show. Given the profound changes that are unfolding in our global economies and societies, we need to shift to explorers who can help us craft new pathways that can create far more value for all of us.” John Hagel in ‘From Expert To Explorer’
🎨 Creations
Some hand-picked, particularly thought-provoking innovations:
The Scoop // Arc’teryx Design Platform for Indigenous Voices // CopenPay // Internet Phone Book // The Atlas Movement // Indigenous Frameworks for AI // Bioregional Financing Facilities
That’s it for this week’s Rabbit Holes issue!
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📒 Report: Alternative Prosperity - Reframing The “Good Life”
As there are quite a few new people reading this newsletter, I wanted to re-share my report “Alternative Prosperity” with you.
This report explores the foundational narratives that shape our current, destructive mode of living and proposes counter-narratives aimed at cultivating a much more enjoyable, fulfilling, communal, and regenerative way of prospering.
It spans 41 pages, includes several visual explorations (you know I like these 😉), and introduces a framework that will help you (re)imagine products, services, campaigns, and organizations in a way that reclaims joy, fulfillment, nature-embeddedness, and well-being.
Ah, thank you so much for including my post! It was very fun to write!