⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🧪 Tiny Experiments: What if, instead of following a rigid path, we embraced curiosity to discover our most authentic ambitions? Written by neuroscientist and entrepreneur Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments challenges the traditional, linear approach to life and encourages readers to see life as a series of experiments. Learn more.

🙂 How To Like Everything More: On the skill of enjoyment. Read it here.

👁️ Are minds made of wonder? Oshan Jarrow is beginning to suspect it's strangely plausible that awareness is something like wonder incarnate. Read it here.

💌 Want More? Down The Rabbit Hole readers also enjoy these awesome (and completely free!) newsletters. Explore

🎇 Image of The Week

From Andrew McCarthy: “I proudly present my most detailed photo ever of an extragalactic object: a 400 megapixel photo of the Andromeda Galaxy. Captured over a period of 3 months using 2 telescopes and thousands of photos.” Here’s how it was constructed.

☄️ Redirecting The Social Meteor

The explosion of major social media apps terraformed the internet from a landscape of small huts and hard-to-find villages into massive, brutalist apartment buildings with windows the size of pocket screens. The internet once felt like open air. Now, you can hear the shouting and thumping of neighbors from all sides.

It began with "social networking," where our physical relationships were mirrored in an online context, facilitating easier interaction with those we already had pre-existing, flesh-and-blood bonds with. Now, parasociality reigns supreme. With the TikTokification of everything, we all have the promise of attaining micro-celebrity status. You are always just one post away from going viral.

At times, this technology has felt like a meteor hurtling toward Earth, destroying our ability to collaborate and connect as a polite society.

But what if we could expand how we use these powerful tools? It feels like we've been unimaginative in envisioning what they could be, inheriting the addictive, ad-revenue-maximizing monoliths that exist today. What if they were designed with more life-affirming purposes in mind?

Here are a few back-of-the-napkin, harebrained ideas:

The Ancestral Archive

The concept: At the end of each calendar year, you are allotted the space to make one post in this social network, capped at 1,000 words. Only those in your family tree can see what is posted. Your contribution is stored digitally on the platform, and it’s also mailed to you as a platinum-palladium print. To ensure its longevity, each post is additionally engraved onto an HD-Rosetta disk that accumulates family members’ posts yearly.

The hope: Today, posts are lobbed into the void. We live in a never-ending 24-hour news cycle, always chasing the latest outrage. This context encourages people to strive to be "good ancestors," providing a way to communicate across deep time.

The Truman Network

The concept: This platform creates the illusion of a social network, but all posts are generated by identity-based large language models. If that sounds like French to you, imagine a cluster of interacting ChatGPTs, each with its own personality, interests, and biases. The user can adjust the "temperature" of their feed, changing the level of hostility or harmony they experience.

The hope: This would help people recognize how AI-generated content is infiltrating human-based social networks while providing a contrast in experience. If a high-temperature feed makes them feel like trash, they might become more aware of similar dynamics in real networks—and choose to engage less with them.

The Voice Lottery

The concept: Every quarter, each user is selected once to make a single network-wide post with viral distribution. No followers. No digital identity. The focus is on sharing the most meaningful insight you can. Inspired by the prompt: “If you could leave a voicemail for humanity, what would you say?”
Each user is also given an allowance of 100 replies per quarter to encourage high-quality, thoughtful conversation.

The hope: This breaks users free from digital identity constraints and eliminates the status games of follower counts. It incentivizes depth over outrage-bait since there’s no way to gain followers or clout. It could also activate the voices of the legions of lurkers whose valuable perspectives go unshared because they’re repelled by online vitriol. They know the loud shouters can’t hear the whispers of the wise, so they stay silent.

Rewilding the Internet Forest

Most web traffic is swallowed by a handful of major websites. Some days, I want to get lost again. I want to stumble upon a far-flung niche interest oasis, untouched by algorithms. Perhaps this is just nostalgia for a bygone era. But I know I’m not alone.

And while buzzards belch over that day's fallen tree, I’ll be searching for the others who sense the generativity in the silent, still-standing forest.

I’ll meet you in the woods.

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🙌 True Friendship

Sit with these words from C.S. Lewis:

🤓 Learn This Word

Cryptomnesia: A memory bias that causes people to mistake a recalled memory for their own original idea.

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked link from a previous edition of 🌀🐇

The Anonymous Ones, by Margaret Dulaney

“There is a tribe of South American Indians, indigenous to the mountains of Columbia, that the Spanish never managed to conquer. They are called the Kogi, and over the years they have traveled farther and farther up into the mountains, where they remain untouched by their Hispanic neighbors. They are secretive and isolated by nature and, until recently, have maintained a policy of unblemished anonymity.

They refer to themselves as the Elder Brothers and consider the people of the industrialized world their younger siblings. Only recently have they broken their silence, in order to warn us that we may be very close to destroying our planet.

They claim to be able to communicate telepathically with other members of their population, on other, distant mountains, an innate ability that they have been practicing for centuries.

The Kogi’s powers of telepathy are most pronounced among their spiritual leaders, wise ones who are carefully singled out early in life and raised to be spiritual guides for the community. These chosen Elders say that there is a council of souls from around the world with whom they regularly consult with their thoughts. And, it is the Kogi, along with this coalition of connected souls, who are hoping to reach out to the Younger Brothers (those of us who are busily causing the destruction of our planet) to beg us to turn the situation around.

The Theosophists from the turn of the last century believed in a similar anonymous brotherhood of spirits that was responsible for the progress of love and goodwill for the world. This was a sort of fellowship of adepts, on earth and in the hereafter, who prayed and otherwise aided in the development of the human race.

I am intrigued by this notion, partly because of the romance of it—imagine meeting one of these enlightened souls—but also because of what it implies about our collective thoughts and prayers. It gives hope to those of us who wish to be of use, through prayer, to the advancement of love and harmony for our earthly home.”

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