Agalia Tan

Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie will this year publish his own book, How to Save the Media . It will likely re-examine topics he has already covered on his newsletter Disjointed. It may well even include reworkings of that content. It will almost certainly be, according to my definition above, a Substack Book.

This is the ultimate trapdoor in the hall of fame; to become a prisoner of one’s own persona

The key part for me here is the characterisation “internet writing”. I would argue that the Substack Book is not always literally Substack posts sewn together (though that can be an element of it), but books written with the affect of Substacking: piecemeal, personal, presumptive of the audience’s pre-existing interest in the author.

It occurred to me while reading it that what I was holding belonged to a new genre: the Substack Book. Like the blogs of the aughts, Substack has already become its own thing: it incentivizes a certain mood, feel, and style; it has brought into being a recognizable literary form. You know it when you see it.

Then there's the platform that's facilitated much of this idealization, China's fiercely defended export, TikTok. When Americans feared they'd lose access to the app ahead of an impending sale or ban, the Chinese alternative, RedNote, soared to the top of Apple's App Store. Some Americans joked about hand-delivering personal data to the Chinese... See more

the strategic question of the next decade isn’t the one most boardrooms are asking.

It isn’t how do we use AI?

It’s: what happens to an institution that adopts a technology designed to make every institution it touches look like every other institution it touches?

Heartwood is the dense inner wood of a tree. It forms slowly, over decades. You can’t see it from outside. And once it’s cut out, you can’t grow it back on any useful timescale.

In an institution, heartwood is the accumulated judgment, relational memory, ethical stance and tacit knowledge that distinguishes one organisation from another. It’s what... See more

The only thing that distinguishes one organisation from another, in a world of identical intelligence, is what your organisation knows that the model cannot. Not what’s written in the documentation. The things that aren’t in any document.