Of all the contributions that Lewis Carroll made to the English language—burble, chortle, gimble, galumph—by far the most useful to contemporary culture is “rabbit hole.” Carroll did not, of course, invent the rabbit hole; that distinction belongs to rabbits. But, with the publication of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” he did turn those holes into something that people could fall down—literally, in Alice’s case (or as literally as a fictional fall can be), figuratively for the rest of us. That was in 1865. For most of the ensuing century and a half, the phrase maintained a modest profile, always present but far from omnipresent; you might say it just burbled along. Lately, however, we have begun talking about rabbit holes incessantly. If you set up a Google Alert or open a search window on Twitter, you can watch people plummet into them in real time:
Wait a minute: buying a new mountain bike? Looking for a new knitting pattern? Binge-watching “Friends”? This, it seems, is why we are hearing “rabbit hole” so often: somewhere along the line, we began using it to mean something new.
In the original tale, as you’ll recall, Alice is lazing in the grass on a warm summer day when she spots a white rabbit hurrying past, wearing a waistcoat and consulting his pocket watch. She jumps up, follows him to his hole, tumbles down it, and winds up in an unfamiliar world of talking caterpillars and narcoleptic dormice and disappearing cats: Wonderland, in all its weirdness. In its most purely Carrollian sense, then, to fall down a rabbit hole means to stumble into a bizarre and disorienting alternate reality.
These days, however, when we say that we fell down the rabbit hole, we seldom mean that we wound up somewhere psychedelically strange. We mean that we got interested in something to the point of distraction—usually by accident, and usually to a degree that the subject in question might not seem to merit. Last month, for instance, Grantland ran an entertaining piece called “Going Way Too Deep Down the Rabbit Hole with Nicki Minaj’s Recent Bar Mitzvah Appearance.” In it, the writer Rembert Browne tried to determine the identity of each of four pubescent hands making bodily contact with the rapper Minaj in a photo taken at the bar mitzvah of one Matthew Murstein. So what’s going on with that headline? It doesn’t mean “Deep Inside the Alternate-Reality Weirdness of Nicki Minaj’s Recent Bar-Mitzvah Appearance.” However infrequently they play bar mitzvahs, rappers, like awkward thirteen-year-olds, are very much a part of our own reality. What it actually means is something more like, “Expending Vast Amounts of Time and Energy on Nicki Minaj’s Recent Bar-Mitzvah Appearance in a Way that I Acknowledge Might Seem Unnecessary or Even a Little Insane.” Replace “Nicki Minaj’s Recent Bar-Mitzvah Appearance” with “X,” and you have a working definition of the modern rabbit hole.
How did “rabbit hole,” which started its figurative life as a conduit to a fantastical land, evolve into a metaphor for extreme distraction? One obvious culprit is the Internet, which has altered to an indescribable degree the ways that we distract ourselves. Twenty years ago, you could browse for hours in a library or museum, spend Saturday night at the movies and Sunday at the mall, kill an afternoon at the local video arcade or an evening at its X-rated analogue—but you couldn’t do those things every day, let alone all day and night. Moreover, content-wise, you couldn’t leapfrog very far or very fast from wherever you started, and there was a limit to the depth and nichiness of what you were likely to find; back then, we had not yet paved the road between, say, Dorothy Hamill and a comprehensive list of Beaux-Arts structures in Manhattan, nor archived for the convenience of humankind ten thousand photographs of fingernail art. Then came the Internet, which operates twenty-four hours a day, boasts a trillion-plus pages, and breeds rabbit holes the way rabbits breed rabbits.
Those online rabbit holes, while wildly variable in content, take recognizable forms. One is iterative: you’re settling down to work when you suddenly remember that you meant to look up that flannel shirt you saw in a store but couldn’t find in your size, and the next thing you know, it’s two hours later and you have scrutinized two hundred and forty-five flannel shirts. Another is exhaustive: you go in search of a particular fact—say, when Shamu debuted at SeaWorld—and soon enough you are well on your way to compiling a definitive account of captive killer whales. A third is associative: you look up one thing, which leads to looking up something distantly related, which leads to looking up something even further afield, which—hey, cool Flickr set of Moroccan sheep. Thus have I have gone from trying to remember the name of a Salinger short story (“Last Day of the Last Furlough”) to looking up the etymology of “furlough” (Dutch) to wondering whether it had any relationship to “furlong” (no) to jogging my memory about the exact distance represented by that unit of measure (an eighth of a mile), to watching approximately every major horse race since the development of the movie camera.
Experiences like these are so common today that, if Carroll had never written “Alice in Wonderland,” we would have needed to invent some other way to describe them. (We might have been aided in that quest by the fact that both nets and webs connote capture and entanglement. Or maybe by analogy to sinkholes we’d have linkholes, or perhaps we’d all get stuck in hypertraps.) But why, one wonders, was “rabbit hole” such a natural appropriation? Granted, Alice, too, accidentally wound up in a convoluted environment, spent more time there than she anticipated, couldn’t find a way out, and emerged, when she finally did, rather dazed. But much the same could be said of Dorothy in Oz, and of a great many others characters transported—by cyclone, wardrobe, mirror, or tollbooth—to mysterious lands.
As a metaphor for our online behavior, however, the rabbit hole has an advantage those other fictional portals lack: it conveys a sense of time spent in transit. In the original story, Alice falls for quite a while—long enough to scout out the environment, grab some food off a passing shelf, speculate erroneously about other parts of the world, drift into a reverie about cats, and nearly fall asleep. Sounds like us on the Internet, all right. In the current use of “rabbit hole,” we are no longer necessarily bound for a wonderland. We’re just in a long attentional free fall, with no clear destination and all manner of strange things flashing past.
For us Alices, these journeys into the rabbit hole can feel accidental and out of our control; thus do we describe them as “falling,” rather than leaping. That’s a somewhat disingenuous take, since there’s no such thing as digital gravity, but it’s true that many Web sites are deliberately designed to function as rabbit holes, and the most successful are routinely described as such. Google “YouTube” and “rabbit hole” and you will get three million hits. That company has company, in the form of all the other big-name sites:
All but one of those comes from Twitter, which, I am here to tell you, is definitely also a rabbit hole. I can likewise say from experience that it is possible to fall down a Craigslist rabbit hole, a Reddit rabbit hole, and the rabbit hole of TV Tropes, a collaborative encyclopedia of the storytelling conventions used in television and other creative works. On TV Tropes, you can enjoy a kind of rabbit recursion, since one of the tropes is_ _“down the rabbit hole.” Visit that page, and you will find links to, among other things, “Threshold Guardians,” “Fair Folk,” “Nightmare Fuel,” “Coming of Age Stories,” “The Hero’s Journey,” Cirque du Soleil, the Nutcracker, young girls, bizarre creatures, Gwen Stefani, David Bowie, and Freud. See you in 2016.
By the standards of fossorial animals—those that burrow or live underground—rabbit holes are not particularly impressive. The average groundhog displaces nearly two tons of soil while building its home. Badgers can dig tunnels a thousand feet long. Prairie-dog homes are known as towns (and divided, like New Orleans, into wards), but could more aptly be called nations. In 1901, scientists found one such town in Texas that covered twenty-five thousand square miles and contained some four hundred million prairie dogs, making it, population-wise, almost twenty-five per cent larger than the United States.
The typical rabbit hole, by contrast, is between four and six inches wide at the opening and slants downward several feet at a shallow angle: a challenging environment for a free fall, even for someone as small as Alice. Such holes are also known as burrows—the word shares a root with “borough,” as in the five boroughs—and a bunch of interconnected burrows form a warren: a rabbit New York City. That usage is fairly recent. In medieval England, when all the bounty of the land belonged by default to the throne, a warren was a license granted to the common people to hunt in a specified area. Thus a rabbit warren was originally more like a rabbit warrant (those words, too, have a common root), and only later came to refer to an enclosure built to pen rabbits in—and, later still, to the holes dug by rabbits themselves.
How do I know all this? Because I fell down the rabbit-hole rabbit hole, of course. While there, I also found this handy flow chart, which you can use to identify any mysterious openings in the earth you may chance to encounter. (Rabbit holes are recognizable not only by their size and angle but also by the presence of hair, droppings, and cropped grass near their entrances. Other features suggest other creatures: “If there is no hole and just a groove present, consider armadillos.”) I learned about the Ditsworthy Warren House, built centuries ago in Dartmoor, England, to accommodate the local rabbit keeper, and lately used as the setting for War Horse. I learned of this pleasing URL: . I learned, via a short stroll from the history of warrens, about pannage, the practice of releasing domestic pigs into a forest. I learned that a digitigrade is an animal that stands or walks on its toes. I learned the term “laurices”: rabbit fetuses, once considered a delicacy, and always used in the plural, because a single laurice wouldn’t even amount to a snack. I learned that raising rabbits for meat and fur is known as cuniculture, that the place where one does so is called a cunicularium, and that these became extremely popular at monasteries in the Middle Ages, after Pope Gregory declared laurices acceptable to eat during Lent and other fast days. Oh, look, an abbot hole. Could there really be enough fast days to foster a bunny-fetus industry? Yes: on the medieval ecclesiastical calendar, food intake was restricted in one way or another for more than a hundred and eighty days per year.
Consider armadillos. Consider digitigrades. Consider all of this, and I don’t see how you can regard rabbit holes as anything other than boundlessly interesting and terrifically fun. And yet, as the phrase has grown more popular, it has acquired a largely negative undertone. By far its most famous post-“Alice” use appears in “The Matrix,” in a context that is unmistakably dystopian. (Morpheus, on offering Neo the red pill: “You stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”) Conspiracy theorists, likewise, love rabbit holes, for the suggestion of a hidden reality beneath the semblance of things, and even the cheery and the sane increasingly use the phrase to describe anything that is dark, unpleasant, or byzantine. The American criminal-justice system is sometimes characterized as a rabbit hole, as is U.S. health insurance, Verizon tech support, and anything having to do with United Airlines. The phrase has even evolved an off-label use to describe a downward spiral in mental health. In 2012, Taylor Swift cautioned against going “too far down the rabbit hole of what people think about you,” and an article on depression refers to people thinking, “ ‘I’m worthless,’ and off down the rabbit hole they go.”
In all of these cases—dystopia, conspiracy, bureaucracy, despair—the salient feature of the rabbit hole is that you cannot find your way out. That can also seem true of our semi-accidental online excursions, but the rabbit hole as metaphor for distraction is not a purely negative thing. Unlike “time sink” or “time suck” or just plain “waste of time,” “falling down the rabbit hole,” when used in this sense, suggests not a total loss but a guilty pleasure. Sure, we could have spent those hours reading Thomas Mann—but go tell that to Alice. When her story begins, she is terribly bored: not just in general, by the prospect of a slow summer day, but in specific, by what we would today call long-form writing. “And what is the use of a book,” she wonders, after glancing over her older sister’s shoulder, “without pictures or conversations?”
Of many uses, this book critic would hasten to tell her. But I would say much the same thing about rabbit holes and the headlong, hopscotching, borderline-random encounters they enable. And I wouldn’t be the first. In “Tristram Shandy,” Laurence Sterne wrote, “Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine—they are the life and soul of reading.” In “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” Robert Burton described his mind as “like a ranging spaniel, that barks at every bird he sees.” That’s the happiest image of intellectual appetite I’ve ever encountered, and I suspect that Burton—and Sterne, too—would have appreciated the current proliferation of rabbit holes. The common charge against our online habits is that they are shallow; but, in keeping with the metaphor, rabbit holes deepen our world. They remind us of the sheer abundance of stuff available to think about, the range of things in which it is possible to grow interested. Better still, they present knowledge as pleasure. The modern rabbit hole, unlike the original, isn’t a means to an end. It’s an end in itself—an end without end, inviting us ever onward, urging us to keep becoming, as Alice would say, curiouser and curiouser.
