Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #92

From everyone being a data worker without realizing it to taste eating silicon valley, a pandemic of othering, the importance of vibes and a decelerator program

I’m back!! 🕺🏻

After two months on the road, exploring Northern Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Czech Republic and a tiny bit of France, I’m finally back home in Berlin for another season of Creative Destruction.

Thanks for staying subscribed and patient, and welcome to all the new people who joined the newsletter while I was away! The show is finally back! 🥳

Before we dive into the popular weekly Rabbit Holes, I wanted to quickly stay in this transition phase I’m currently in after having had the privilege to sort of step out of the rat race for a while and look at society with fresh eyes. So here are a few insights I got during or right after coming back from this slightly longer summer break:

• Internet-Driven Monoculture: The offline world has become mono-fied through the online world, particularly during the last 5 to 10 years in which algorithms and social networks became so popular. I was far less online than usual during my trip. Still, even in the streets, in different countries and regions, when you look at how restaurants and shops present themselves or when you see what clothes people wear and how people act, you can still see the algorithm-pleasing that’s happening across culture and its result: monoculture (or at least a flattening of culture). Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld is as visible as ever it has been, and originality – even in the offline world – is ever more scarce. This also means that those who are still truly original or can escape the Filterworld become increasingly more interesting.

• From Research To Connections: Finding originality and alternative culture requires a new research method, or overall approach. This insight is something I’ve been pondering over for a while now due to my goal of sharing original and thought-provoking ideas with you. But it’s become even more apparent as I researched places to explore, dine at, and see while traveling through Europe. The coolest things I discovered didn’t really come from doing research but rather from giving up researching and embracing connecting. Whether that means directly connecting with locals or connecting with once surroundings in a more metaphysical sense – like the kind of connecting that William Butler Yeats hints at when he says that “the world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

• Winner Takes All Vibes: Late-stage capitalism is….everywhere! Everything is inflated and people everywhere are getting priced out while a small group of people becomes wealthier and wealthier. The gains at the top are juicier than ever, but the fight to get to the top is becoming harder, uglier, and increasingly immoral. In short, inequality has become so much more visible! I can’t track this insight down to something particular I observed while traveling, it’s just a general feeling that arose while taking a short break from playing this game. Because the game, with all its various characteristics, somehow becomes very bizarre when you take a break from it. I do think, however, that this bizarreness is a new “vibe” that is slowly but steadily revealing itself to more people.

• Virtually Nobody Likes This Game: The current game, “system” or whatever you wanna call it has no real winners. Virtually everyone is interested in a reframing of “the good life”. There’s a sort of “when does this rat race, this constant acceleration, this constantly intensifying competition finally stop (or at least slow down)” question looming in the air, everywhere… There’s intuition and hope within that question that things could be much better, for everyone. And there is a growing interest in alternative ways of prospering while we’re slowly approaching a “I can’t take this anymore” level for many!

All right, that’s it for my insights during the summer break! Ready for some reframings now?! Let’s get right into this week’s Rabbit Holes:

THIS WEEK ↓ 
🕳️ Rabbit Holes: We Are All Data Workers // Taste Is Eating Silicon Valley // A Pandemic Of Othering
🤯 Reframings: Systems Literacy // Vibes // More Than Unplugging 
🎨 Creation: A Decelerator Program // Dad Shift // Digital Divinity

“Memories”, a shop I came across in Vienna

Rabbit Holes 🕳️

As always, 3 perspective-shifting rabbit holes to rewild your mind:

#1 🧑‍💻 We Are All Data Workers

A sobering framing of how life has become quantified through and through. In today’s age, everything we do somehow gets captured by algorithms and the logic of “the market”.

“Thirty years after Agre coined the capture model, workforce management technology can track every moment at work as a production target. Amazon’s Units Per Hour score, Uber’s and Lyft’s (constantly shrivelling) base fares, and Domino’s Pizza Tracker have made it possible to time all time, even in the break room or toilet stall. These are extreme examples, but they’re echoed across the work world, with the datafication of parts of performance that used to be too baggy or obscure to crunch and so were ours to keep. “Wellness” apps provided as health benefits by corporate management that track fob swipes for office workers; case management software that counts advice by the piece for legal workers; shares, hover rate, and time on site that measure media workers; leaderboards for tech employees, ranking who worked longest.

There must exist professions that are free from capture, but I’m hard pressed to find them. Even non-remote jobs, where work cannot pursue the worker home, are dogged by digital tracking: a farmer says Instagram Story views directly correlate to farm subscriptions, a server tells me her manager won’t give her the Saturday-night money shift until she has more followers. Even religious guidance can be quantified by view counts for online church services, Yelp for spirituality. One priest told the Guardian, “you have this thing about how many followers have you . . . it hits at your gut, at your heart.”

But we know all this. What we hardly talk about is how we’ve reorganized not just industrial activity but any activity to be capturable by computer, a radical expansion of what can be mined. Friendship is ground zero for the metrics of the inner world, the first unquantifiable shorn into data points: Friendster testimonials, the MySpace Top 8, friending. Likewise, the search for romance has been refigured by dating apps that sell paid-for rankings and paid access to “quality” matches. Or, if there’s an off-duty pursuit you love—giving tarot readings, polishing beach rocks—it’s a great compliment to say: “You should do that for money.” Join the passion economy, give the market final say on the value of your delights. Even engaging with art—say, encountering some uncanny reflection of yourself in a novel, or having a transformative epiphany from listening, on repeat, to the way that singer’s voice breaks over the bridge—can be spat out as a figure, on Goodreads or your Spotify year in review.

And those ascetics who disavow all socials? They are still caught in the network. Acts of pure leisure—photographing a sidewalk cat with a camera app or watching a video on how to make a curry—are transmuted into data to grade how well the app or the creators’ deliverables are delivering. If we’re not being tallied, we affect the tally of others. We are all data workers.”

» The Walrus | The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age by Thea Lim

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#2 🧐 Taste Is Eating Silicon Valley

I’ve written before about our limited definition of productivity and the need to reframe productivity into aliveness. What Anu Atluru predicts here could potentially be a trend in the right direction, in which aesthetics, art, playfulness, and deeper resonance are finally becoming part again of our definition of productivity, of making stuff.

“In 2011, Marc Andreessen famously declared that software was eating the world. For a time, that was the undeniable reality. Software was the engine of transformation, revolutionizing everything from tech to finance and retail to healthcare. […]

It’s a different story today. Software has been commoditized — the result of technological advancement, decreasing cost and complexity, and democratization of coding as a skill. AI’s push into the mainstream has supercharged this shift. The lines between technology and culture are blurring. And so, it’s no longer enough to build great tech. […]

Whether in expressed via product design, brand, or user experience, taste now defines how a product is perceived and felt as well as how it is adopted, i.e. distributed — whether it’s software or hardware or both.

Technology has become deeply intertwined with culture. People now engage with technology as part of their lives, no matter their location, career, or status. […]

Code is cheap. Money now chases utility wrapped in taste, function sculpted with beautiful form, and technology framed in artistry. […]

Taste is some combination of design, user experience, and emotional resonance that defines how a product connects with people and aligns with their values and identity. None of these things alone are taste; they’re artifacts or effects of expressing taste. At a minimum, taste isn’t bland — it’s opinionated. […]

In this new era of Silicon Valley, taste isn’t just an advantage — it’s the future. The most compelling startups will be those that marry great tech with great taste. Even the pursuit of unlocking technological breakthroughs must be done with taste and cultural resonance in mind, not just for the sake of the technology itself. Taste alone won’t win, but you won’t win without taste playing a major role.”

» Working Theorys | Taste Is Eating Silicon Valley. by Anu Atluru

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#3 🤏 A Pandemic Of Othering

The following reframing helps understand that the solution to the loneliness epidemic isn’t merely about establishing new communities, new groups of belonging, but is rather, and much more importantly, about (re-)training the muscle of interconnectedness so that we can see again and strengthen the complex inter-relationality between all of us. Simply said, it’s about learning to connect with the stranger working at the bakery you sometimes buy bread from rather than joining a running club with like-minded people your age.

“There is an epidemic of loneliness. The U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, says, “If we fail to build more connected lives…we will continue to splinter and divide until we can no longer stand as a community or a country.” As we try to understand this societal illness, I think we need to ask whether we are sick from loneliness or from not belonging — to each other and ourselves. […]

john a. powell, Director of the Othering and Belonging Institute, says that we create “othering” to create belonging. Think about this for a moment. In order to feel at home in ourselves and with others, we rally around contempt, prejudice, oppression, and exclusion. If we want to understand this epidemic, it seems that this may be a source of sickness. Could it be that our need to belong took a misguided route and fueled a pandemic of othering? […]

A grateful orientation to life is in opposition to othering. Rather than unifying around exclusions, a practice of grateful living challenges us to seek, observe, and understand the many ways in which we are never fully alone, never independent or separate from others. The practice of grateful living helps us address the origin of our societal ailments because it illuminates our interconnectedness by focusing on and acknowledging the details of every lived moment and the network of people required to sustain our lives. This perspective understands that when we lose sight of our inter-relationality we can trust that everything will quickly go sideways, making us sick with fear, greed, violence, exploitation, loneliness, despair, and war. These and other detriments to our well-being fill the enormous cavern where belonging should live and thrive. […]

If loneliness is a malady born from a plague that is unraveling our interconnectivity, then gratefulness is the only remedy large enough to treat an illness that is pulling us apart when life requires us to put love into action and remain in relation.”

» Grateful Living | Radical Belonging In An Age Of Othering by Joe Primo

🤯 Reframings

A few short reframings that I’ve recently stumbled across:

“Change is difficult for many reasons—but chief among them is any change we want to make is embedded in a system. We're not just changing a habit, telling a new brand story, or adopting a new project management routine. We're attempting to reorganize or redirect a powerful system, which is likely part of other powerful systems.” Tara McMullin in 3 Ideas for Rethinking Systems

“Vibes alone won't cure climate change. Climate change is real. The threat to us is real. The ongoing extinction of our friends and partners, it's real. But when we understand these challenges purely through the metrics and the flat machine data, we end up reducing ourselves to probable outcomes. And I hate to say it, but given the data, our probable outcomes are not good. What we need to reach for instead are the possible outcomes. And the only way to unleash possible outcomes is by unleashing the human. We must break the string of the kite and fly into the magic, the compassion, the allegory, and the approaches that only an unfettered, freely thinking, independent, creative human society can imagine together. So that's why I'm becoming more positive, more embodied, more vibey, compassionate, connected, and juicy.” Douglas Rushkoff in The Shift is Real

“When our “tech issues” are no longer contained to a device and spill out into our streets affecting us physically, our solutions must not just revolve around the technology itself (i.e. removing it), but addressing the human conditions first and foremost.” Matt Klein in Unplugging Is Not The Solution

🎨 Creations

Some hand-picked, particularly thought-provoking innovations and creations I’ve recently come across:

Downshift Decelerator // Thrive Lot // The Dad Shift // Digital Divinity

That’s it for this week’s issue!

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Thomas