Rabbit Holes 🕳 #17

I’ve been thinking about the ways that capitalism organizes time. Notice its undercurrents in language: “How are you spending your time?” “Don’t waste your time.” “Let’s save time and go this way.”

It’s a fascinating evolution of status... and I’m here for it... for as long as these luxurious buys are additive to our environment — not extractive. Let anyone feel like a hero for as long as it’s to the collective’s benefit.

Consumption and sustainability are paradoxical — we can’t buy our way out of this — but some rebranding won’t hurt. Positio... See more

South Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han has developed a useful approach to think about different ways of spending and thinking about time online. Han outlines 3 distinct understandings of time: mythical time, historical time and atomised time.

Mythical time

For Han, mythical time is a time that is full of meaning that transcends the present m... See more

The more monetized society is, the more anxious and hurried its citizens. In parts of the world that are still somewhat outside the money economy, where subsistence farming still exists and where neighbors help each other, the pace of life is slower, less hurried. In rural Mexico, everything is done mañana. A Ladakhi peasant woman interviewed

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In a western culture that’s obsessed with fast time, quick turnarounds and immediate results, can you and I refuse? Can we slow down?

A more recent discovery in my journey into digital psychedelia has been a complete reappraisal of my interpretation of “progress” and “productivity”. Traditional interpretations of progress define it as something like a self-fulfilling prophecy resulting in an infinite growth. A precondition of the scientific method is that as new knowledge is disc... See more