The Best Rabbit Holes of 2025
A brief look back at some of the best frames and reframes I've explored in countless rabbit holes issues this year
This year’s Rabbit Holes issues were filled with so many interesting framings. To end the year, I wanted to share my favorite pieces from this year’s issues with you. I tried to put them into a few categories:
Framings That Capture How This Year Felt
“Fake images of real people, real images of fake people; fake stories about real things, real stories about fake things. […] The words blur and the images blur and a permission structure is erected for us to detach from reality—first for a moment, then a day, a week, an election season, maybe a lifetime.”
» My Brain Finally Broke by Jia Tolentino
“My thinking systems have atrophied, and I can feel it–I can sense my slightly diminishing intuition, cleverness, and rigor. […] The irony is that I now know more than I ever would have before AI. But I feel slightly dumber. A bit more dull. LLMs give me finished thoughts, polished and convincing, but none of the intellectual growth that comes from developing them myself. The output from AI answers questions. It teaches me facts. But it doesn’t really help me know anything new.”
» Thoughts on thinking by Dustin Curtis
“We are at a moment in the history of the web in which the link itself – the countless connections made by website creators, the endless tapestry of ideas woven together throughout the web – is in danger of going extinct. […]
The work of making connections both among websites and in a person’s own thinking is what AI chatbots are designed to replace. […] Whether ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, AI synthesises numerous voices into a flat monotone. The platforms present an opening answer, bulleted lists and concluding summaries. If you ask ChatGPT to describe its voice, it says that it has been trained to answer in a neutral and clear tone. The point of the platform is to sound like no one. […]
» A linkless internet by Colling Jennings
“How did we get to a point where it became acceptable to force 24-year-olds to turn themselves into a brand and build a massive network and take three people to coffee per week for “informational interviews” and post on every social media platform and have a website and a blog and a portfolio all for a job that you could probably get in 2005 with an associates degree and a year of work experience at a frozen yogurt shop?”
» WHY ARE THERE NO FUCKING JOBS? by Femcel
“This century does not dehumanize us. It disinhabits us.
Humans abstract themselves from reality, drawn into the mirages of the metaverse. The machine, meanwhile, is learning to walk in our physical world, conquering the space we abandon. We have ceased to inhabit space. […]
This is not an inevitable technological fate. This is not a spontaneous evolution. It is a project. An industry. A colonization.”
» The Great Chiasmus by Marie Dollé
“all my friends and I talk about is
getting rid of our phones—
a dystopian dream
dominating dinner conversation,
our phones on the middle
of the table
like candles
like altars
like tiny gods
we are trying not to worship […]i’m tired and
my window to the world
has no curtains”
» all my friends and i talk about is getting rid of our phones by quirine brouwer
“In this way, I think our common claim of internet overwhelm—that we all take in too much information now due to social media—is wrong, or right in the wrong way. Yes, we all see and process much more information than we once did, but the total effect of our interaction with the internet is to make us see and feel less: to be half on your phone and half in the real-world is to take in nothing fully from either, to not fully understand or contribute to either. Thus it is, in a way, actually a form of information scarcity.”
» Full Presence Is Terrifying by P.E. Moskowitz
Framings That Will Prep You For 2026
» The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction by kyla scanlon
» Late-Cycle Investment Theory by Nicolas Colin
» Electrostates or How Xi sparked China’s electricity revolution by Nassos Stylianou, Jana Tauschinski & Edward White
» From Gaza to LA, the Right to Remain Is Under Attack by Aditi Mayer
» A New Political Compass by Dan Zimmer
» Our Shared Reality Will Self-Destruct in the Next 12 Months by Ted Gioia
» From Statecraft To Soulcraft by Alexandre Lefebvre
» Addiction Economy by Scott Galloway
» The Anti-Social Century by Derek Thompson
» This Is Not Late-Stage Capitalism by John Aziz
» Why we all live in an ‘inheritocracy’ by Eliza Filby
Very Out-Of-The-Box, Creativity-Inducing (Re-)Framings
“The era of the personal computer is mis-named because they weren’t really personal computers - they were family computers. Big chunky things. Yelling up and down the stairs to see if anyone was on the phone before going online. You could feel where the internet came from - the pings and bloops of the dialup sound traveling across the phone lines - the same phone lines you could see criss crossing above you as you walk down the street on the way to school.”
» Family Futures by Tom Critchlow
“Today, dreams are increasingly positioned as commodities to be sold and consumed — less a vehicle of any higher truth than something to be manufactured, optimized, packaged and sold. […] Our confident march into modernity gradually stripped dreams of their privileged status. Where they once carried profound revelations, they were now little more than distorted and hidden desires emerging from restless, solitary minds.”
» Bringing Back The Magic Of Dreaming by Leo Kim
“At a time when “futures” have become the dominant mode of framing the “not here, not now,” at least in design, magic realism might allow us to move beyond the limitations that condemn designers, including us, to forever reimagining variations on a broken reality. It can reveal pathways that lead beyond the projection of objective realities grounded in science and technology to a far larger, richer landscape influenced by literature, philosophy, and art. Unconstrained by “technological reason,” it offers something a little more poetic, which if you are trying to prompt new thinking rather than provide options, seems like a good direction to explore. […]
» What Designers Can Learn from Magic Realism by Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby
An embodied life cultivated with true intentions is a life lived as one act of love. In a life cultivated with passio, all action is a form of lovemaking: cooking with love, gardening with love, writing with love, and, literally, making children with love. When material reality integrates with compassion—when we’re embodied—the heart becomes as much of a sex organ as any other reproductive part of us. Everything we produce could be a labor of love, from babies to books to brunch.”
» Smartphones and lovemaking by Sherry Ning
Framings That Help Us Build A Better World:
“If capitalism is eating itself, you have to get out of the way. You have to reorient your career away from all this now. […] The systems that we expected to govern our lives sanely and stably are now all broken, and they will never be repaired. They are gone, over, finished, done. Perhaps new ones will rise, but we will be long gone by then. So now we must all find paths through their wreckage, and then beyond their ruins.”
» What “Late Capitalism is Eating Itself” Means For Your Life and Career by Umair Haque
“I find myself slowing changing from an agent of change to an agent of care. I’m less confident in the impact my activism might have on policy than I am about the impact my care may have on other human beings, as well as how they might trickle up to the systems that need changing. […] A lot of the activism I did and much of what I see functions more like traditional medicine that’s looking at the organs — at the things — where the care addresses the in between, the interstitial, maybe even the palliative. And radical care, radical compassion may just be a surer path to the kinds of change that activism is trying to create. Even if care is a more subtle, seemingly indirect approach.”
» Everything is In-Between by Douglas Rushkoff
“Utopian thinking is not wishful thinking but, grounded in the realities of the present, it simply allows creativity and imagination to enter discussions about the status quo and its flexibility. […] Utopianism, then, is a sort of resistance to a politics that makes the possibility of transformation appear closed off.”
» We need the toolkit of utopian thinking, now more than ever by Caitlin Rajan
“‘The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that.’ [from the Star Wars TV show Andor]
Our job is to exploit this brittleness to divert resources from the extractive Superorganism toward a regenerative, resilient alternative economy. […]
To join in on this effort, our strategy will fall into three major categories: (1) Escape Surveillance by the Superorganism (2) Drain its Wealth, Test its Resilience, and (3) Create Independent Wealth Outside of the Superorganism.”
» How to Resist Techno-authoritarianism & Grow the Regenerative Alternative by Spencer R. Scott
The political battle Greens currently face is to reclaim their idea of freedom and reinsert it into the broader historical momentum of human emancipation. They need to reframe their message as one of hope, not constraint.”
» What is Green Freedom? by Edouard Gaudot & Natalie Bennett
Proximalism offers a way back to governance that serves human flourishing rather than abstract systems, communities rather than bureaucracies, relationships rather than regulations.”
» Proximalism: Community First by Marnie Khaw
And lastly, my favorite rabbit hole pick of 2025:
🦀 Everything Becomes Crab
In this highly thought-provocative masterpiece, Michael Garfield goes deep into the everything-becomes-crab or the carcinisation of humanity metaphor. Extremely mind-blowing and insightful long read.
“‘Everything becomes crab’ is more than an absurd meme. […] As individuals, we may not have pincers, segmented bodies, chitinous exoskeletons, compound eyes or a dorsal heart that pumps haemolymph (the equivalent of blood) through an open circulatory system. But, as a collective, things look very different.
Firstly, humans do live in something like an intertidal zone: the turbulence and inescapable betweenness of our lives as we move in and out of the ‘virtual’ world. And, secondly, we encase ourselves in exoskeletons more literally every day as we become increasingly supported and defined by our technologies. If we recognise ‘intertidal scavenger’ and ‘skeleton’ to be analogies for our present-day condition in late-stage capitalism, and view civilisation as an ‘extended phenotype’ from which we cannot extract ourselves, we will find that we are already much more like crabs than we might assume. […]
In the past few centuries, human carcinisation has begun to speed up as our collective evolution increasingly mimics the deep-time transformation of crabs. […] Consider how trade and communication ‘carcinise’ our squishy mammal interfaces, pixelating analogue reality into interoperable digital standards. Consider how local languages, currencies and cultures dissolve when pegged to global markets. Consider the banal horror of reducing your identity to state-issued IDs or your occupation. […]
Perhaps crustaceans, with their armour, pincers, eyestalks and high strangeness, help us Homo sapiens make sense of how we wrap our fragile flesh in leverage-enhancing tools. Perhaps they also help us understand how our symbiosis with these tools gradually withers our ancestral human traits. […]
From orbit, a time-lapse of urbanisation looks strikingly like metastasis: a dense, entangled, runaway growth of mutant tissue. In a strange (or entirely expected) turn, humanity’s carcinisation appears to have taken the form of a spreading cancer. […]
In the process of cutting and claiming the world with our symbolic and numerical abstractions, we have become encased within them, and have replaced reality with simulation. […] We are undergoing carcinisation because we have to play a game determined by the grids in which we’ve incarcerated ourselves.”
» Homo crustaceous by Michael Garfield
Everyone! Enjoy the hopefully slower days during the holidays with your family and friends! See you in 2026 and thank you all so much for your continued support!
All the best,
Thomas