Agalia Tan

It comes down to the difference between post-rationalising and pre-rationalising. Right now, we live in a moment of pre-rationalising: we won’t commit to anything unless we can justify it in advance. “Do I have the dashboard? The metric? The deck? The support?” If the data doesn’t say yes, nothing happens. Post-rationalising is the opposite: you... See more

you’d assume that in moments like this, people would seek stability and comfort in their media. Instead, you see the opposite: let’s dial that shit up. It’s not always about escape. So sometimes it’s about translation – making the chaos palatable, survivable.

Protein This connects to something Protein has been thinking about recently. A report on chaos versus control uncovers how brands are splitting between hyper-controlled, tightly managed identities and others that openly embrace chaos. It made me think about what you’ve said before about discordianism – chaos not as a breakdown of reality, but as a... See more

Culture isn’t coded – it’s lived. Pattern recognition here is a practice. And it’s also longitudinal: how do these ideas mutate year after year? That immersion gives you something no AI can replicate.

The real internet is where you can be yourself because you trust who's watching. Where we talk and text instead of scroll and consume.

The status signal is circular: you can afford to be selectively online because you have capital, and being selectively online signals you have capital. The rest of us are still grinding for algorithmic visibility because we don’t have another choice.

There’s a darker reality beneath camouflage culture that Klein and Carlioz identify: its invisibility surrenders any chance of mass influence. While the privileged can afford to go dark - retreating to private Substacks and exclusive dinners - marginalised communities still have to suffer the consequences of disappearing. Visibility, for all its... See more

What Actually Signals Status

Without an algorithm shoving recommendations down your throat, can you still know the right places to eat, the right authors to read, the right music to listen to? It means you have genuine proximity to power. You live at the source, not the feed.

This requires:

1. Broad networks, engaged differently. Not parasocial

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Coined by seventeenth-century Swiss physician Johannes Hofer, who attributed soldiers’ mental and physical ailments to their longing to return home, “nostalgia” combines the Greek nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain). Nostalgia is the pain of an old wound—being cut off from something profoundly meaningful. It is not merely a longing for a bygone... See more