Clicks & Clout: How We Seek Status In the Digital Age

What the internet and social media have done essentially is increase the surface area of status seeking to the digital realm and virtual realm, and vastly expanded that surface area.

That’s where status comes in.

In our conversation, Nadia mentioned the classic piece “Status as a service” by Eugene Wei that details how Twitter functions (or functioned) as a giant status-seeking engine. This piece, Nadia proposed, crystalized the era of the internet when people were optimizing for likes and cultural cache in a game that felt novel and exciting. Something ess... See more

Now that digital ownership is exploding by way of NFTs, people are seeing bigger financial and status opportunities online than offline. This is the biggest catalyst for living online we’ve seen to date. Individuals are building status and identity in the virtual world the way that they do in the physical world. Why own a Gucci bag to impress a few... See more

instead of seeking to maximize status — which some of us still do — more of us find ourselves seeking safety and context online instead.