Agalia Tan

The rise of the ‘Luxury Worker’

The luxury worker does not compete on volume.

They do not scale by adding headcount.

They scale by increasing the perceived value of their participation. Their work is expensive not because it takes longer, but because it carries the weight of curiosity, curation, and judgment.

In many ways, this inverts the usual... See more

Light things shape culture, but rarely shape us.

Creation isn’t just about output. It’s a process of becoming. The best work shapes the maker as much as the audience. A founder builds a startup to prove they can. A writer wrestles an idea into clarity. You don’t just create heavy things. You become someone who can.

The main point of concern here is not that an LLM such as GPT-4 is reductionist in its representation of reality per se; it is that various AI models, each reductionist in their own way, are converging. An echo chamber of echo chambers of echo chambers.

We’re allowed to be wrong, have conviction and engage in market making. That’s not the problem. The problem is, without reflection or accountability – top-down or bottom-up – hype trains keep running, no one stops to learn, and nothing ever changes.

That's the thing. We're not a brand. We're not a company. We're human beings. Of course it's going to change every 30 seconds. We're following our lives.

Yet the two versions seemed to be fundamentally different movies. In the first version I saw, much of the discussion explored the way that pop musicians such as Eno and many of his collaborators — like David Bowie and Talking Heads — create and project an identity when they perform, making that persona part of their medium. In essence, it became a... See more