Agalia Tan

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

Lots of people worry that AI will replace human writers. But I know something the computer doesn’t know, which is what it feels like inside my head. There is no text, no .jpg, no .csv that contains this information, because it is ineffable. My job is to carve off a sliver of the ineffable, and to eff it.

(William Wordsworth referred to this as... See more

Most writing, of course, isn’t exclusive in terms of access, but in terms of time . There’s something special about every word written by a human because they chose to do this thing instead of anything else. Something moved them, irked them, inspired them, possessed them, and then electricity shot everywhere in their brain and then—crucially—they... See more

This is why it’s very difficult to teach people how to write, because first you have to teach them how to care. Or, really, you have to show them how to channel their caring, because they already care a lot, but they don’t know how to turn that into words, or they don’t see why they should.