Agalia Tan

now, the trope about loving what you do and it not feeling like work? I think that was actually a myth sold to us — probably by Blackrock or Deloitte. but I am a firm believer that, like Alysa Liu, the people having the most fun are the ones who are winning.

a shared belief that prediction markets' "wisdom of the crowd" ethos can illuminate truths faster and more accurately than media, polls and other traditional institutions.

That environment doesn’t produce “nihilism.” It produces rational repositioning.

If the expected value of the traditional path collapses, people move further out on the risk curve. Not because they’re delusional, but because they can do basic math.

he’s also like a thought experiment: what if all you cared about was content? What if you didn’t give a fuck about anything or anyone, totally disregarded the future, and just “maxxed”? How far could you go? I am, perhaps to an unproductive degree, darkly fascinated to see how far he can go because the distance he travels will be an exact... See more

Clavicular is a performance artist. His body is a canvas and the medley of drugs and mutilations he does are the paint. The picture he’s creating is one of the modern man under algorithmic ideology: a creature surrounded by suffering on all sides, who feels so out of control of his life that he seeks to inflict suffering upon himself as a... See more

Each man is a kind of martyr. They inflict suffering on themselves to prove devotion to something immaterial. Like the mystic self-flagellating, or the stigmatic continually reopening the wounds on their hands so they remain gory for the faithful to see, Clavicular and Fuentes turn their lives, their bodies, into material proof of an abstract... See more

This is not to say that influencers such as Clavicular deserve no blame for their choices—only that they have come of age in a media environment where fealty to an audience and online performance seem so second nature that they adopt the logic of the attention economy by default. Making content becomes one’s only belief structure. The Claviculars... See more

We’ve written a lot about AI’s impact on work over the past few months, but I liked an example Derek Thompson wrote about last week. Excerpt here:

One way to think about AI’s effect on workers is asking the question: Is artificial intelligence a tractor or a spreadsheet?

When we invented tractors, the population of horses on farms plummeted, because

... See more

New technologies open up new avenues to earn an income (with often unbounded upside). New cultural shifts make people want to pursue these avenues for wealth creation, often at the expense of “old school” work. These forces are creating the biggest shocks to labor and capital that we’ll see in our lifetimes.