The Lost Art of the Rabbit Hole
We used to look things up for fun in the pursuit of ourselves
Introduction
A few weeks ago, I found myself lost on the internet.
In an effort to get inspiration for my wardrobe, life, and general ideas, I had headed over to Pinterest—the mecca for life’s motivational and creative visual needs. While there, I got an ad for these regal journals that I had previously looked into online. I chased this thread by clicking on non-ad posts with similar journal patterns, and ended up on a post about gorgeous vintage book covers.
From there, I scrolled down and saw several other beautiful book covers that led to me convincing myself that I wanted to inquire about purchasing one of these books. I go on a separate adventure and add some of these vintage books (priced between $120 and $300+) to my wishlist on Etsy and continue my newfound rabbit hole on Pinterest. I now begin researching vintage book cover designs on Pinterest.
In my research, I found these stunning vintage art nouveau graphics of a pear, and research deeper and find this style depicting an array of different fruits and flowers. I reverse Google search these graphics and find that they are scans from a 1909 art workbook called L’ecolier décorateur 2, which was originally utilized as an art workbook for primary school students. The book is only 10 pages total, and features the art of M. Chevry who describes themselves as an “artiste, peintre, professeur”.
This rabbit hole lasted several hours and to be quite honest, it brought me back to when I was a kid, during the peaceful days of the early internet when all I did was play online games, do my homework, and go down deep rabbit holes where I learned so much about history, culture, and the world we live in. It also stumped me in a way, as I couldn’t quite pinpoint when I stopped this practice of diving deep into my topics of interest and began viewing the internet as an entertainment station versus the beacon of information it once was.
As I thought more and more on this topic, I realized that this issue goes further than it all simply being because of our phones, and is more due to modern social media platforms and how we engage with today’s internet.
The Death of Internet Wonder
As examined in a prior Messy Dialectic post, the algorithms on social media platforms work to keep you engaged, scrolling, and sharing, but how does this keep us from investigating and digging deeper into the topics that we are interested in?
Well, data from several investigations notes that 402.74 million terabytes of data are created each day (“created” meaning any data that is is newly generated, captured, copied, or consumed). Social media contributes to 12.69% of this generated data, with 1.7 million pieces of content shared on Facebook alone every single minute.
When looking at the data supplied above, it is no wonder that we all don’t go down rabbit holes like we used to. Where are we to turn when we consistently rely on algorithms to provide us with all the information we could ever need? And secondly, why would we turn elsewhere when there is more information than we could ever need in the present day?
In David Perell’s short essay The Never-Ending Now, he says:
The structure of our social media feeds place us in a Never-Ending Now. Like hamsters running on a wheel, we live in an endless cycle of ephemeral content consumption… Even though on the Internet, we’re just a click away from the greatest authors of all time, from Plato to Tolstoy, we default to novelty instead of timelessness.
We’re trapped in a Never-Ending Now — blind to our place in history, engulfed in the present moment, overwhelmed by the slightest breeze of chaos.
Here’s the bottom line: How can you prioritize the accumulated wisdom of humanity over the impulses of the past 24 hours?
This all gives me pause as I think back to my rabbit hole adventure and the fact that I uncovered a gem from 1909. It makes me think of the last time I consumed a work that wasn’t highlighted on social media or from a time before I was born, and the best I could come up with was around my college days where, of course, professors continuously feed students works from the greats of older times.
We, as a collective, are so tapped into the present. We have unfettered access to our friends, our friends’ friends, and even random strangers we have never met. We know what everyone is eating, thinking, and doing. We have incredible technology that keeps up up to date with everything happening in our home countries and all of the other ones across the world. We know about all of the incredible happenings and creations of the present day and keep ourselves glued to our devices that keep us glued to the present.
So then how can we possibly even begin to define ourselves outside of the confines of the everything that is happening in the present moment, and delve into a curiosity and deepness that transcends the “never-ending” now?
Some social media users seek to combat this by curating listicles of liminal spaces on the internet that allow users to experience the crafty and creative websites that defined the internet user experience of the past (before the social media boom), however, this becomes a double edged sword as users rely on these posts to direct them to the “places to be” rather than taking their own time to find the places that they would like to venture off to. Even in this way, users are relying on others to venture down rabbit holes so that they themselves do not have to put in the effort to create their own discoveries.
We Have Forgotten How to Do What We Would Like to Do
Diving beneath the surface into a rabbit hole relies on the desire to sink deeper into oneself: deeper within what makes us tick, what makes us curious, and what makes us who we are. Not having the will to delve deep into our curiosities (let alone if we are developing curiosities to begin with) is akin to us drifting further from ourselves. Then, if we are not doing any of this work the develop our relationship with ourselves, then where are we getting the information necessary to make our daily decisions, curate our daily habits, and create our “dream” lives?
As John Washington notes in Stop letting algorithms tell you what music you like:
We’re conditioned to rely on algorithms in enough facets of life now, whether it be in our news, shopping or social media use; it shouldn’t be the case in art.
When everything becomes specially curated “for you,” you become pedestrian in this relationship. You never escape your comfort zone. Anyway, even if you ended up wanting to experiment, you wouldn’t know where to start. An overreliance on algorithms making choices for you leaves you a little less independent.
And, as Muriel Leuenberger notes in an excerpt from "AI Morality" (Oxford University Press, 2024):
Ultimately, relying on AI to tell you who you are and what you should do can stunt the skills necessary for independent self-creation. If you constantly use an AI to find the music, career, or political candidate you like, you might eventually forget how to do this yourself. AI may deskill you not just on the professional level but also in the intimately personal pursuit of self-creation. Choosing well in life and construing an identity that is meaningful and makes you happy is an achievement. By subcontracting this power to an AI, you gradually lose responsibility for your life and ultimately for who you are.
If you are happy with the ideals that the algorithmic overlords are feeding you, then maybe you won’t see a problem with going on autopilot and following the whims of every bit of advice you see on social media. The notions of purchasing this, going to that, or using this app or that may not make you feel as though there is anything wrong with your relationship with the identity that the internet now tells you to become.
In a way, we are a first-of-its-kind generation for what social media and algorithms are doing to us. We are mere guinea pigs who won’t know the lasting effects and deeper implications of allowing our identities to be fine-tuned by technology. This, even more so, when we consider Gen-A and today’s iPad kids whose childhoods have become completely molded by today’s internet.
Only time will tell how these things have impacted all of our minds and ways of showing up in the real world, but for now, I wonder how we can combat the systems that are currently in place. I wonder what we lose by unsubscribing and tapping out of the present day internet content mill, and instead tap deeper into the relics of the real world or even of the internet. I wonder how we can go back to treating life like one big antique shop, seeing opportunities for our next great find at every bookshop (without seeing giant "#BookTok” signs everywhere), through an album (not found through a trending sound), or even in our own closets (with new fits made with old garments), without the interjection of what an algorithm desperately wants us to do.
What then, could we learn about ourselves and the world around us if we made our own personal listicles of things that we enjoy exploring or diving deeply into?
Bringing Back the Deep Dive
There are many websites that we can use now that can help us to tap back into the “good old days” of curiosity that used to prevail on the internet. Because, as we know, we all not-so-secretly yearn for many elements of the past, there are already many communities and tools that are helping us to reconnect and provide a sense of familiarity to the old days of collecting our favorite digital objects. There is of course, Pinterest or even Tumblr, the holy grails for roaming the web and saving random images that spark joy, but there is also Cosmos which is a more robust and elegant Pinterest alternative for finding visual inspiration.
But maybe you want to go deeper. Maybe, you don’t want to just be on the surface of a rabbit hole, maybe you want to seek deeper and deeper as a reflective practice that can send you back to your deepest self.
For this, you may envision yourself collecting links/images and attaching various notes or thoughts or even building your own personal wiki from your findings. For this, the kind gardeners at r/digitalgardens highlight tools like Obsidian, Fabric.so, Are.na, Notion, Milanote, or Raindrop.io. I myself am currently building my own gardening personal wiki on Notion called the “Gardening Compendium” where I an digitally storing all of the information I am learning about gardening, and am also leaving space to record my personal gardening log of experiences. For more coding heavy digital gardens, you can always use Neocities which allows for full creative control for your digital garden masterpiece.
Or, maybe you would even choose to use Substack for this, and to be honest I would say that Messy Dialectic in itself is its own version of a digital garden as I discuss, link, and highlight all of the topics that I’m interested in delving deeper into as an extension of myself.
If you would prefer to go low tech, then there is always the humble Commonplace book which of course can have a digital form, but is based on an analog form featuring a journal, notebook, or even a deck of cards that stores any collection of knowledge and reflections. It’s meant to be a catch-all for your thoughts and ideas, and works great conceptionally to store your digital and physical findings.
But even without the use of tech or fancy websites, you can always take a moment to look something up, and engage in research on any topic that helps you to learn more about what the topics you’re interested in. You can always go deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole of curiosity, knowing that exploring your curiosities will always allow you to learn more and more about the fullest extensions of yourself.
This practice, forever allowing you to connect deeper with the world around us.