Rabbit Holes via Stimpunks

LivingCommonplace NotebookQuotes

There is a name for the version of this that most of us do daily. Wikipedia calls it the wiki rabbit hole and defines it as a learning pathway — the route a reader travels by navigating from topic to topic, each one further from where they started than the last. Not a distraction with a cute name. A pathway, with a shape, that people deliberately go looking for.

one thing leads to another

The tab behind the tab. One citation leads to another, one article becomes seventeen, and the door you find was not on the wall a minute ago.

from the outside

This is what a monotropic attention system looks like to somebody standing in the doorway. From in there it does not feel like this at all; it feels like flow.

A recommendation engine tuned to keep you in the tunnel is not serendipity, it is somebody’s revenue, and the tunnel it builds runs somewhere specific. Monotropic attention is not a vulnerability to be patched — but it is worth knowing that it is valuable to people who do not have your interests at heart.

The counterculture that produced that song also produced the personal computer, and the book that traces the second out of the first takes its title from the same place