Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #91
Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #91
From the correlation between attention and enchantment to joy against authoritarianism, vending machines with chairs, and 7 days of garbage
Hey all!
I'm still sending this while traveling, wwoofing, hiking, exploring, and sleeping in a small car in South Tyrol. So similar to last week, this is a slightly shorter rabbit holes issue than usual.
Please note also that for September, as I will still be on the road, I will pause all subscription payments until everything resumes in full force in October! 😉 This is the first time that I am taking a longer break from publishing 1-2 posts per week since I started the newsletter about 2.5 years ago.
One more thing: I recently chatted with
about Creative Destruction, reframings, escaping the content creation rat race, and more. Check it out:
And now, on to this week’s rabbit holes!
THIS WEEK ↓
🕳️ Rabbit Holes: An Enchanted World Requires Quality Attention | Joy Against Authoritarianism | Vending Machines With Chairs
🎨 Creation: 7 Days Of Garbage | Biocreative Index | Hi Ren
Rabbit Holes 🕳️
As always, 3 perspective-shifting rabbit holes to rewild your mind:
#1 👁️ An Enchanted World Requires Quality Attention
I’ve shared quite a few articles by already, as he’s always providing fascinating perspectives. This one is about how we see the world, not necessarily where we put our attention to but how we pay attention. Loved this sentence: “Just because you have looked at something doesn’t mean that you have seen it.”
“Enchantment is just the measure of the quality of our attention.
In other words, what if we experience the world as disenchanted because, in part, enchantment is an effect of a certain kind of attention we bring to bear on the world and we are now generally habituated against this requisite quality of attention?
In suggesting this correlation between attention and enchantment, I am partially endorsing Bennett’s argument that “the contemporary world retains the power to enchant humans and that humans can cultivate themselves so as to experience more of that effect.” Bennett, a political philosopher interested in the ethical dimensions of enchantment, which she treats more like a state of wonder, believes that enchantment is something “that we encounter, that hits us, but it is also a comportment that can be fostered through deliberate strategies.”
One of these strategies is “to hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things.” I would argue that this is another way of talking about learning to pay a certain kind of attention to the world. In so doing we may find, as Andrew Wyeth once commented about a work of Albrecht Dürer’s, that “the mundane, observed, became the romantic”— or, the enchanted. […]
Just because you have looked at something doesn’t mean that you have seen it. Seeing, in this sense, is a form of knowledge arising from a way of being that brings a greater measure of the fullness of reality to consciousness. […]
To speak of attention in this manner, as a patient waiting on the world to disclose itself, recalls how Simone Weil insisted that attention is a form of active passivity. “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them,” she insisted, “but by waiting for them.”
» | If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You're Not Paying Attention by
#2 🕺🏻 Joy Against Authoritarianism
This relates heavily to my post on Reframing How We Come Together and also last week’s post from the archives Pleasure Activism. Authoritarianism is fueled by fear, and to combat it, we need to counter it with joy, pleasure and fun, and with a love song for life.
“Democrats haven’t just recast the lead at the top of their electoral ticket; they’re performing an entirely new show. […] Creating good vibes isn’t just generally effective, it’s critical especially in what may seem the most counterintuitive cases: confronting existing or would-be authoritarian regimes, in other words, MAGA Republicans.
Sami Gharbia once said, “humor is the first step to break taboos and fears. Making people laugh about dangerous stuff like dictatorship, repression, censorship is a first weapon against those fears… without beating fear you can not make any change.” […]
No longer Les Miserables, Harris-Walz have moved us onto Mamma Mia. And Democratic activists, plus previously disaffected base voters, are now loving the dancing queen. This comes just in time because, as her vice presidential nominee, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, rightly declared, “I know I am preaching to the choir. A damn big and beautiful choir. But practice is over, people, the choir needs to sing.”
Malarkey aside, the Biden campaign was a largely serious affair. The stump speech pre-debate was punctuated with policy achievements, second term plans, and reminders that “we’re in a battle for the soul of America.” […] Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, in contrast, are awash in memes — from coconut trees to Midwestern dadisms — and irony-laced clapbacks. People are lining up in the summer heat to see this new production. […]
Elections are made out of grand narratives — storylines that make clear precisely what harms the antagonists have in store and imbue the protagonists — by which I mean the voters — with the agency to select the future they would like. And while this does not come up in issue polling, most people would like that future to be a good time.
Famous for her unbridled laughter, Harris’ campaign has embraced the politics of joy. Not in ignorance of the foe she faces, who is hell bent on taking our freedoms, harming our families, and imperiling our futures. But in full awareness of what it takes to defeat him.”
» Rolling Stone | Why Kamala Harris’ New Politics of Joy Is the Best Way to Fight Fascism by Anat Shenker-Osorio
#3 🪑 Vending Machines With Chairs
This article is about the dehumanization of restaurants. However, it reflects a larger dehumanization trend that got amplified during the pandemic when there was a good reason to introduce tech that limits (or restricts) human contact.
“In my first few years on the job [as a restaurant critic], I thought of restaurants as one of the few places left where our experiences were completely human. We might work silently in our cubicles, rearranging and transmitting zeros and ones. We might walk around with speakers in our ears that played digital music files chosen by an algorithm. We might buy our books and sweaters and toothpaste with a click and wait until they showed up at our door. We might flirt, fight and make up by text. But when we went out to eat, we were people again.
No machine could drink rosé for us, or chew lamb chops, or flirt, fight and make up. And at every critical point in the meal, there were people there to guide us. From the moment we walked in, we talked with hosts, bartenders, captains, runners and bussers. Being served in a restaurant wasn’t passive. We had to participate.
Many of the little routines of dining that we used to handle by talking to a person now happen on a screen. When we go to Shake Shack, we order and pay for our burger and frozen custard on a screen. In some places, we enter our names on the waiting list for tables on a screen. We scan QR codes so we can read the menu on a screen. Restaurants are turning into vending machines with chairs. […]
Many of these technologies spread during the pandemic, when there was a compelling reason to limit human contact. But the use of tech for social distancing hasn’t gone away. One result is that we feel increasingly alienated from the people who cook and serve our food. It’s no wonder we are always hearing about diners acting like entitled jerks — they’ve been trained to expect that everybody who works in a restaurant should be as fast and compliant as a touch screen. […]
Not every restaurant needs to provide an intense emotional experience. I love the quick service of Japanese ramen shops where you pay before you eat. But if we’re going to stay in a restaurant for more than a few minutes, we want to connect.
A server’s little smiles, rehearsed jokes, out-of-nowhere raves for the daily special and so on may be subtle or not-so-subtle efforts to bump up the check and the tip, but they also ground us. Without them, the meal may be faster and cheaper, but it leaves us feeling a little empty.”
» New York Times | I Reviewed Restaurants for 12 Years. They’ve Changed, and Not for the Better. by Pete Wells
🎨 Creations
Some hand-picked, particularly thought-provoking innovations and creations I’ve recently come across:
7 Days of Garbage | Bioremediation | Amsterbarretje | Biocreative Index | Hi Ren
That’s it for this week’s issue!
Thanks for supporting my work! 😊