Agalia Tan

“If you want a new world, start making it right now, in whatever you are doing.” This is the best advice I ever had, it came from Brian Eno. If you imagine the world you would like to be in and start making objects, systems and collaborations that belong to that world, that world comes into being.

it’s just getting harder for brands, particularly new brands, to achieve and sustain that kind of fame because there are fewer opportunities for them to send messages that everyone sees, due to the way media has shattered into a million tiny pieces. Thus common knowledge is rarer, more valuable and more expensive than ever. The price of Super Bowl... See more

But the real dance will continue. Artists will continue to need context. It's what brings value and understanding to their work. People — many of them also artists — will continue to delight in interpreting and helping other people understand creative work. It's what brings us joy. This is the dance that matters. It hasn't stopped and it won't... See more

It also means that increasingly the real value or trick won’t be in blowing up, though of course, it will only get harder and harder to do so as we continue to exponentially increase our output of content, but rather in holding on to the 15 seconds of fame once we have it.

“They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no

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Algorithmic recommendations dictate genres of culture by rewarding particular tropes with promotion in feeds, based on what immediately attracts the most attention.

In 2018, the writer Liz Pelly identified "streambait" as one such genre: the "muted, mid-tempo, melancholy pop" characteristic of Spotify. In 2019, the writer Jia Tolentino similarly

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Yet to admit as a woman that you’re lonely is, in a way, a failure of status. To admit to loneliness is to confess that you are not “chosen,” that you are not seamlessly integrated into the right microcultures. To be a lonely woman violates the expectation that women are naturally relational and socially fluent. Unlike male loneliness, female... See more

The path of “get into a top firm, learn the craft, exit into something interesting” is narrower than it’s ever been.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is eating the bottom of the value chain. The tasks that used to be given to juniors - desk research, competitive audits, first-draft decks, trend reports - are increasingly being done by tools. Not... See more