Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #99

From being collapse aware to the economy as a planetary superorganism, real-life NPCs, creativity tools, the gift economy, imaginology and living infrastructure

Nov 27, 2024

THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: Collapse Aware // Planetary Superorganism // NPCs
🌀 Re-Framings: Productivity ➜ Creativity // Cannibal ➜ Gift Economy // The Internet As A Forest
🧬 Frameworks: Imagination as the Foundation of Knowledge
🎨 Works: Living Infrastructure // Digital Pluriverse // Dignity Index // Big Mike's

⏳ Reading Time: 8 minutes

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Thumbnail of ESTRATIJIRONES Vol 156. — From The Art of Stillness by Pico Iyer

🖼️ Framings

~~Naming~~ Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.

💥 Collapse Aware

Rosie Spinks hits the nail again with this piece – the last paragraph here resonates a lot with me (and maybe you, too). I encourage you to read the entire, quite long piece, though, in which Rosie also explores a helpful way of approaching modern life with this collapse-aware mindset.

“It’s a nagging sense that has hung over modern life since 2020, or 2016, or 2008, or 2001 — pick your start date — that things are not working anymore. And that waiting for them to get better after the next Most Important Election of Our Lives, or another war to end, or a new economic recovery cycle doesn’t seem to be having the desired effects. […]
Making space for the idea that the progress we were raised on is not guaranteed requires a lot of time and space. It requires grieving, uncertainty, and sitting with difficult feelings. These are things, in western culture at least, we studiously avoid.
Which is why the idea of collapse — which you may have seen referred to by the more palatable terms metacrisis or perma-crisis — has interested me. To be collapse aware is to live with the sense that something about the way we live is coming to an end. And then to ask the next obvious question head on: If the incrementalist approach of our existing political and economic structures is not up to the task of improving things — climate, society, inequality, injustice — what comes next? […]
Seeing the world change so quickly in such a short amount of time in 2020 jolted something awake in me. Collapse, though I may not have called it that at the time, felt breathtakingly close. It no longer made sense to me to pursue the same version of success I had up to that point. Even though I was covering the travel industry critically and aggressively, the entire premise of friction-free, carbon-intensive travel started to feel like a relic. No matter where I worked or who published my work, I wasn’t sure I would ever be allowed to fully articulate what I believed the problem was.”

» How I became ‘collapse aware’ by Rosie Spinks

🦠 The Economy As A Planetary Superorganism

What if we accepted that the economy has become a fundamental organizing force of the planet? How would that change our approaches? Or as Indy Johar added: “In this frame - what is democracy, representation, governance.. ?”

“Traditionally, we have understood the planet as a cascading system of interconnected “spheres”/capacities/resources: lithosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, social sphere, technosphere, and economic-spheres. Within this framework, the economy has been politically conceived as a subset of society and the biosphere, constrained by social norms and environmental boundaries.
However, this perspective may structurally fail to understand the reality we are operating: the economy has systemically expanded and, has closed the cascading fields into loop, becoming a superset—one that not only structures the preferences and bias of society and the biosphere but also now structurally shapes the technosphere, atmosphere, and lithosphere. This marks a transformative reconfiguration, where the “economy” now functions as a planetary-scale organising force, a fundamental building block of planetary consciousness, actively and auto poetically reshaping itself. […]
Rather than denying or attempting to reverse this trajectory, maybe we must now confront the structural challenge of adapting and evolving to this new reality and evolution - of living as part of this emerging super organism.”

» Provocation (LinkedIn post) by Indy Johar, founder of Dark Matter Labs

👤 NPCs

This quite catchy framing is along the lines of our increasingly machine-like existence, which I’ve been writing about extensively. Also, it aligns with last week’s framing of ‘hypernormative’ people in New York City (the signals are piling up 🕵🏼‍♂️).

“I’ve been refining my theory of the urban NPC over the last year or two. Waiting in these long lines—for restaurant pop-ups or retail drops or regular baked goods—is a pillar of NPCism, which I defined last year as “a predictable pattern of public space usage” […].
In video games, an NPC or non-player character is one whose essential quality is predictability, their behavior scripted or crudely randomized, responding to external cues in deterministic ways. In digital space, NPC behavior flourishes not just in games but in gamified environments like social media, where legible incentives shape users’ already-constrained behavior.
Offline, it’s a bit more complex: Meatspace has its own set of incentives, which are less legible, but IRL behavior is increasingly mediated by digital forces: algorithms, interface design, networked sociality. Your appetite is physically embodied but the TikTok or Instagram content that informed you of a specific restaurant is not; the interaction of the two is what gets you queued up for limited-edition tacos or whatever. Responsiveness to marketing is a core NPC behavior and the marketing is getting more sophisticated—so deeply embedded in online logic that it’s often not even considered marketing at all.”

» NPCs in Slop Mines by Drew Austin

🌀 Re-Framings

A few short reframings for creating a better world that I’ve recently stumbled across.

🎨 From Productivity to Creativity

“We live in a culture that venerates productivity above all else. For centuries, success—particularly in the West—has hinged on a simple dictum: “Do more, faster.” As AI commoditizes speed and output, however, this pursuit will lose its value. […]
When it comes to AI, we need to aim higher than the question: “What if you could press a button to generate an essay?” AI can produce infinite amounts of content; quantity is its game. Quality, intention, taste, originality, vision—that’s where we come in.
Our interfaces should facilitate prose-sculpting, meaning-architecting, memory-augmenting, and inspiration-harvesting—all grounded in sources we love and trust. Just as calculators shifted math from rote computation to conceptual exploration, AI can nudge creative work toward the things humans are uniquely good at: thinking and feeling deeply. […]
Ultimately, moving away from productivity and toward creativity isn't just an economic necessity, something we need to stand out in the marketplace; it's about reclaiming our humanity and building more fulfilling lives. The goal can’t just be making more stuff. It has to be making something wonderful.”

» The End of Productivity by Sari Azout

🎁 From Cannibal to Gift Economy

“While modern economics treats nature as a resource to be exploited, The Serviceberry [a new book by Robin Wall Kimmerer, renowned for the bestseller Braiding Sweetgrass] offers a different vision – one where nature is a gift to be shared. Through a blend of storytelling and careful scientific observation, Kimmerer makes a powerful case for gift economies as an alternative to our market-driven society. […]
To embrace a “culture of gratitude”, as she suggests, is not merely to say thanks but to actively reciprocate, ensuring that the gift continues. […] By exploring alternative systems like gift economies, Kimmerer invites us to rethink what wealth means and what we are truly taking when we consume. […]
[The book] offers a way out of what Kimmerer calls a “cannibal economy”, where endless consumption depletes the world around us. Instead, she imagines a system where resources circulate through communities, creating webs of independence that nourish both humans and nature.”

» The Serviceberry: this Indigenous understanding of nature can help us rethink economics by Sam Illingworth

🌲 The Internet As A Forest

“The social internet should be a forest—not The Dark Forest, but something much more like a real one: Interconnected from the densely mycelial underground to light-filtering overstory but also offering infinite niches and multi-scale zones of sheltered exchange and play. Deeply human in the way that real forests are the result of human and other-than-human collaboration running back into unrecorded time. Balanced, neither extracting too much from its component organisms nor pretending that a pantomime of a return to a pristine and ungoverned state will solve any problems at all. (Predation is inevitable in any system, but a working ecosystem starves out the ones who overfeed and provides cover for growth and for the long, continuous experiment of evolutionary change.)
The obstacles to these life-sustaining internet forests are fundamentally the same forces that threaten the real forests and our whole living world: unbounded extraction; unaccountable leadership; societal refusal to take on the responsibilities of governing our increasingly complex commons, instead of burying them deeper and deeper in pretenses to action.
I no longer think that it's possible to mount an effective defense of the physical world—and of each other, in our fleshy vulnerability—without unfucking our networks. I find this both terrifying and clarifying.”