Sophie Oddo

“I think blind boxes reintroduce useful friction to the consumer experience. When something comes too easily, we tend to value it less,” says Kwok. “Intentional friction combined with surprise make the experience and what’s inside more valuable and memorable.”

Photography didn’t kill painting. It reconfigured what painting was for. The camera took over documentation and painting became something else - expression, abstraction, impressionism. Things it couldn’t have become while it was busy recording reality. The technology didn’t destroy the art form. It liberated it into new territory.

Nobody says “I wish I could generate more options faster.” The hard part is knowing which option is right. The hard part is having a point of view in the first place. The hard part is seeing what everyone else is missing, or holding complexity without flattening it, or making a decision when you can’t possibly know how it’s going to land.

Fear does something to your thinking. It narrows you. It makes you defensive. When you’re scared, you focus on survival - on protecting what you have, on not losing ground, on keeping your head down and hoping the predator doesn’t notice you. You don’t invent new things when you’re scared. You don’t reimagine what’s possible. You cling to what... See more

Mental fog comes not from lack of insight but from an excess of it. Smart people are uniquely vulnerable to mistaking complexity for insight (... the ten page memo that could be one). Complexity drugs us with the illusion of wisdom.

writing about the luxury of being offline requires being extremely online. The status symbol of disconnection can only be signaled through connection. But perhaps that’s the point: the real flex is navigating the network with enough grace that no one can tell you’re performing at all.

So the status signal isn’t actually in being offline. It’s in having the capital - social, economic, cultural - to be selectively online in ways that benefit you without feeding the machine more than necessary.

Kyle Chayka has observed that having no followers has become its own form of status. It’s here we observe the curdling of resistance into luxury: as invisibility becomes desirable, it becomes a marker of privilege. Those who can afford to opt out, who have offline networks robust enough to sustain them, whose careers don’t depend on algorithmic... See more