Network Legibility & Status | #125

I think it’s the same with social networks like Facebook and Instagram, everything. At the level of scale that they’re at now, the status game and the sense of progression is going to be way different than it was when they were just starting out.

If I think back to those corporate meetings I was part of early in my career, it’s easy to see today’s decision-making. A decade ago cultural criticism was a sparkly pixie dust you could spread over a business to give it a veneer of prestige. But in a world where TikToks dwarf all over forms of consumption and a video that someone spent a day makin... See more

The most important shift may be that credentials matter less than they have, and proving that you can do the work matters more. Between YouTube, Udemy, Replit, Optilistic, and a wide range of online educational resources, anyone smart and motivated enough can learn practically anything they want.

We’re caught in this Schelling point, this coordination point for the institutions: How do I know if I should hire you? Will you have a diploma from Harvard? I know it’s not as good as it used to be. I know a Harvard humanities diploma’s probably nonsense at this point, but I don’t have any other credibility metric to filter you and I need to

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