Even though I technically lived but a few hours away from them all in Germany. I embrace these moments with tenderness. After all, I am Romanian, I love being Romanian, and I will happily engage in conversations about it. But this is now. Growing up, I had barely any sense of Romania, or of being Romanian at all.

***

For instance, when I was 6, my parents told me we’ll be moving to the capital city of Romania, Bucharest: the BIG city. I’d start school there, and life would be different from what I had experienced so far in my mountainside town, Sinaia.

I remember going to bed that night wondering, But where does this big city of Bucharest fit into Sinaia?! I thought I knew all of Sinaia’s nooks and crannies. Was it maybe beyond Cota 2000m, past where the cable car stops? Or could it be found down past Sfântul Ilie Church, a turn I’d admittedly never taken? Was it perhaps on the hilly side across from the brutalist Mefin factory?

I couldn’t wrap my head around it, and that’s because, to me, Sinaia WAS Romania. So where in my town did this other big city fit?

In school we were taught the national anthem, “Deșteaptă-te, Române!,” (Awaken thee, Romanian!), truly the Romanian Marseillaise: a grim and solemn call to action, referring to 1848 Wallachian revolutions which needless to say hit no nerve for a seven year old in 1995. Later we were introduced to Romanian history and culture, albeit in a very selective way: countless hours spent on questionable Dacian battles from 2nd century AD, or on Romania’s “golden interwar” period, while recent history was often skimmed over, particularly the four decades of nationalist dictatorship that had ended barely a decade before. Then, with very few exceptions, the Romanian novels we’d have to read were dark, heavy, composed of 90% male characters, and overall painfully unrelatable to a bunch of urban kids looking to make sense of their place in the world. No wonder we had no understanding of what it meant to be Romanian, no sense of affiliation, let alone one of national identity.

***

It’s not that I hated being Romanian as a kid—I simply didn’t have a feel for what that really meant. I didn’t have any intuition for what my national identity was, or what it projected, which I imagine isn’t so different from how children generally experience childhood world over, with the exception of those born in war zones, where an awareness of geopolitics is inevitable. But by the time I was a teen, I’d often wonder what would’ve it been like if I were born somewhere else—for instance, a place that imposed itself as a power culture, like France, Italy, the UK. A place whose projected identity I would learn about in school, and passively consume through the Western TV series that entered Romanian broadcasting networks in the 90s. During my first trips abroad, I found that people did know of Romania, but their ensuing questions would often leave me feeling either confused or uncomfortable. Later, my arrival at university in the UK coincided with a wave of denigration narratives around Romanians.

This wasn’t an isolated case. Being Romanian in the West, particularly in the early 2000s, was, perceptionally, a bad thing1. The localized hostility took both public rhetoric and institutional forms, with majority support from the civil societies where it mushroomed. For instance, in 2009, Italian senator Piergiorgio Stiffoni called Romanians “drunkards, violent, murderous, exploiters of minors who go to Italy only to commit crimes,” while Italian Minister of Reforms Roberto Calderoli demanded the “castration of Romanians.” No joke. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy boosted his popularity in 2010 by expelling Romanian Roma from France, framing Roma camps as sources of criminality and threats to French citizens’ security. In Britain, Eurosceptic campaigners petitioned, and successfully pressured the government, to extend labor market restrictions on Romanians and Bulgarians by five years, under headlines like “Get ready for the Romanian invasion!” The Sun tabloid famously ran stories on the “swan-eating Romanians.” In a nutshell: being Romanian was a liability2.

The first weeks of my move to the UK in 2007, whenever people asked me where I was from, I’d play around with identities—mostly, with saying, “I’m Romanian-Russian.” I’d never ever fantasized about being Russian before, save for one brief phase after watching Disney’s Anastasia as a kid, but Russia felt like the perceived “power culture” of Eastern Europe, with the added bonus of relieving some of the attention from the Romanian part. I played this card until the inevitably cringe moment when an English girl I had met in the cafeteria started enthusiastically speaking to me in Russian. It turned out she’d studied Russian at school.

Then I’d be flattered whenever someone would ask me if I’m French, Italian, or American. Phew! I could pass as a Westerner. But it still didn’t rid me of my real identity.

Very quickly, however, I caught on to something: Yes, I’d always be Romanian… but I could be a Good Romanian.

***

A Good Romanian is unlike the other Romanians, which are—apparently—bad.

Firstly, a good Romanian passes as a Westerner. You’d never be able to tell, in fact, you’d think they’re French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, American, etc. You’d be surprised to learn they’re actually born just shy of a few months from the most bloody revolution of the Eastern bloc, and their parents had lived through a crippling dark dictatorship, with limited access to food, basic healthcare, or meaningful employment.

Presentation is important, but it’s the overall vibe of how one carries oneself that is critical in passing as the Good Romanian. For instance, lighter skin and lighter hair helps a lot, and blue or green eyes are a major bonus—but you also don’t want to be too fair-skinned, thus signaling too Eastern European. But the vibe is what truly moves the needle, how you enter a room: entitled enough to grab attention, but humble enough to lay low. You are, after all, Romanian.

A Good Romanian doesn’t really ever talk about themselves, or their country, or their childhood, or poverty, or decrepit healthcare systems—none of that! They never admit to sometimes feeling patronized by Western acquaintances. A Good Romanian will however listen to Westerner’s unsolicited opinions about Eastern Europe, and will nod, trying to showcase gratitude for the consideration. They will listen to their declarations of infatuation with communism and look the other way. They will try to laugh along when jokes are thrown about corruption in Romania, like, “I know, right?! So crazy!!”

A Good Romanian is fully up to date with local news, wise about politics and pop-culture, and liberal, left leaning. They assimilate all Western traditions and take a similar, othering stance when talking about Eastern Europeaners: they are this, and that. They are, after all, different from you.

And, of course, a Good Romanian is different to a Roma.

In order to be a Good Romanian, you have to make the Romanian in you small. The status is, however, fragile: break that flow of cohesion, contradict those ideologies of virtue, ever so slightly, and you risk your seat at the table.

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Cosplaying the Good Romanian came relatively easy. But a year of being the Good Romanian passed, and I was starting to feel an itch.

I’d go home for the summer break and feel SO ROMANIAN, wow, more Romanian than ever! Everything was suddenly showing itself to me in bright, Technicolor, colours. Romanian idioms were suddenly hilarious or heartwarming. The farmer’s market I used to avoid was suddenly a feast for the eyes, the nose—even the ears, with the occasional eavesdrop. The nightlife was cool, edgy and avant-garde. My Romanian friends: so stylish, so fun, so interesting, so worldly. Ahhh, Romania. Pangs of guilt started bubbling to the surface, the way a conscientious kid feels after telling a lie. I was somehow viscerally feeling that my stint as the Good Romanian was betraying not just my culture, my legacy, all Romanians—but myself, too. I wasn’t fully aware of it then, but with every return from Romania, I was, little by little, piecing together a puzzle: Who am I, really, as a Romanian? What makes me Romanian?

I started, for lack of a better phrase, to vibe with being Romanian, and I was in awe at what I was discovering.

What was also contributing to this vibing was that thanks to my studies, I’d been introduced to critical theory—from Edward Said’s Orientalism to Maria Todorova’s Balkanism, a new way of thinking revealed itself to me, giving my experiences new meaning. Todorova famously claimed that while Orientalism “is a discourse about an imputed opposition, Balkanism is a discourse about an imputed ambiguity”3. In other words, unlike the “Orient”, which could be safely othered as distant and exotic, the Balkans are destabilizing precisely because they are proximate: European enough to be implicated, but foreign enough to be feared, and/or blamed. I believe this reflected ambiguity was absorbed by Romanians, in a meta sense, and it had certainly been something I’d had unconsciously taken in for years.

National identity is generally understood as the internalization of two systems: firstly, a system of knowledge and beliefs (geographical territory, common language, kinship, common descent, legacy, national characteristics) and a system of emotions (the subjective importance of the national group). The affective dimension of a national identity is, well, profoundly subjective and it tackles experiences of belonging, identification, validation, solidarity, cohesion, comparison, etc. But one interesting factor often highlighted in socio-psychological studies when exploring the emotional internalization of national identity is that of the national self-esteem: in order to embody it, one needs to be able to emphasize the positive aspects of the national group, while downplaying the negative ones. It’s hard not to consider what decades of relentless negative portrayals of Romanians abroad did to a nation that had barely emerged from the whirlwind of a dictatorship, and to the Romanians who were emigrating straight into that storm.

The distance and tension between my different lives allowed me to start looking at Romanian culture through a different lens, one that I could see through more clearly, for the sole reason that it was my own lens: my own curiosity, my own interests. Turns out we had plenty of fantastic Romanian literature, music, an enviable new wave of filmmakers and artists, all speaking to me on a level that was more profound than anything that had previously been spoon-fed to me as “what it means to be Romanian”. Turns out I could engage with the history of my country in a critical way that would make me better understand the nuance—the ambiguity of what being Romanian feels like, both to myself as well as to others.

**

Two decades of living as a Romanian abroad later, I hadn’t thought much about the Good Romanian/Bad Romanian. Living in Berlin/Germany probably contributed to that too—Germans, in all honesty, don’t think much about Romanians.

Then Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or–winning Fjord came along.

~ to be continued ~

Mindlessly scrolling through LinkedIn—first night in Tokyo, sleep but a distant ambition—I came across a post that actually made me stop in my tracks. It came from someone whose newsletter I’m subscribed to, who declared that upon having reached an enviable number of subscribers one year into their new venture, they decided to ruthlessly remove the emails that showed very little, to no engagement. The reasoning was solid: they noticed that the high uptake in subscribers brought something other than the promise of higher readership; it had in fact translated to lower open-rates. Lower open-rates, in turn, risked losing the interest of potential advertisers. Better to have fewer and genuinely engaged subscribers, than a larger but more diluted readership. Makes sense.

I couldn’t quite remember the last time I had opened their newsletter. Damn, had I also been removed? It felt odd, like an un-invite to a party you didn’t even necessarily have time to attend. I felt a wee guilty, but also a little slighted: what if, at some point, in some utopian future, I actually had time to read their newsletter? I did, genuinely, like it.

Alas! That’s not the point. I went to sleep, still mulling over it.

***

One hour later, I turned the bed lights back on. Why can’t I stop thinking about this!

Why am I aching over unknown emails, removed, expelled, deleted? As far as the current k0nt3nT burnout goes, one could even argue it’s doing people a service: what a blessing, to relieve someone of one recurring email they never got around to opening anyway. I’d be lying if I claimed I could instantly tell whether I’d been removed from certain newsletter lists. And of course this has nothing to do with the quality of the newsletter itself, but rather with the reality of too much of everything, and too little time in a day.

And then, the argument is solid, from a business point of view. This person treats their newsletter as a business, as a product to be monetized. Ironically, just a few weeks ago, I had opened Taylor Lorenz’s popular tech newsletter for the first time in a while, to find slightly different content than usual. The title should have given it away: Burned out doesn’t begin to describe it, a personal appeal on the pressure of the newsletter hamster wheel, and the fact that she’d noticed many readers unsubscribed or canceled their paid subscriptions if she didn’t deliver frequently enough. Lorenz admitted she was exhausted, her extensive research all-consuming, both emotionally and in terms of the hours invested. The expectation that she were to constantly deliver long, thoroughly researched pieces was what was making her crack. She noted:

I’ve also noticed a phenomenon especially here on Substack, where, I think because people feel like they’re paying for a product (the newsletter) rather than to support my work as a whole, they unsubscribe or cancel their paid subscription if I don’t send the newsletter frequently enough. This is totally understandable! But, it also creates this system where the creator can never take a week off or work on larger projects without losing income. This system is a huge bummer.

I felt a lot of sympathy for her, and for all journalists who have left legacy media to go independent, where the promise of broad reach and full ownership of one’s work tends to come at the cost of relentless output expectation and, eventually, burn out. It’s truly the deep malaise of our times, with a wave of individuals leaving contract jobs (whereby you arguably get paid for your time) and moving towards independent, freelance jobs (where you essentially get paid for your deliverables). By taking this step, the creator (read, the writer, the designer, the ceramics maker) whether they like it or not, also becomes the business owner.

Lorenz treats her Substack like a business, in the sense that it is, from my understanding, one of her main sources of income, yet she’s having an opposite experience from that of the person actively removing subscribers from their newsletter. While one essentially optimizes metrics by deleting subscribers, the other burns herself out trying to serve more, and more, content to them. The type of content is different, but I don’t necessarily think that’s what defines the contrast between the two experiences. Lorenz’ income—her business—comes from her paid subscribers. She is delivering a “product” paid for by her readers. The other case runs by a different business model: that of attracting traditional advertising.

It’s interesting because it seems like the two sit at opposite ends of business rationales: the responsibility towards your user, and the responsibility towards your external financial backers. An author like Lorenz chose the independent path precisely as a reaction to the compromised state of mainstream journalism (having previously been the tech reporter at NYT and The Washington Post), where diminishing funding, advertiser and investor dependence, and overall inertia have gradually narrowed what it’s possible to report, and opinion, on, particularly as an investigative journalist. The other end is that of a more start-up-like approach to kicking off a new business—the metric that matters above all else is consistent engagement: has the product embedded itself deeply enough into someone’s routine to become a habit, making it appealing to potential investors?

At 3AM, twisting and turning in my hotel bed, I realized what it was that triggered me about all of this. I understand that some newsletters are run as businesses, which means that they function as products to be refined and optimized. But a systematic removal of unengaged subscribers, on the grounds that they drag down open and click rates and thus render the list less attractive to advertisers, makes me—the subscriber—feel more like a consumer than a reader. A subscriber’s value, in this logic, only exists insofar as it can contribute to a metric used to sell their attention to advertisers; a subscriber, therefore, becomes a unit of attention.

Now, it would be tempting to read all of this as a new, black and white, scenario: the commercialisation of journalism, the blurring line between broadcasting and content marketing, creators struggling to survive without institutional support. But this is a phenomenon that happens in cycles, over and over again, from Guttenberg onwards. Sure, the format changes every now and then, but the capitalist economics certainly don't. The “maverick days of journalism” somehow resurface every 20 years, going in loops. What is perhaps slightly different this time round is that the business developer, the lawyer, the marketer, the editor, the producer: they are now all the same person—in this specific case, the writer. Going independent also implies embodying all of these conflicting roles at once, and this accumulation makes everything considerably more complicated.

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***

Like all of us, I have stacks upon stacks of great-books-I-want-to-read-someday piled all around the apartment. Book ownership is a funny thing: it doesn’t operate by regular use–discard–refill logic, quite the contrary. If anything, judging by the rate at which people buy books they will basically never quite catch up on, one might think the publishing industry must be booming. In packing for the Japan trip, I quickly scoped the book situation in the apartment and grabbed a few according to mood and jetlag-friendliness.

One of the books I grabbed I had forgotten I even owned: a collection of Susan Sontag’s essays, On Women. On this first night in Tokyo, I opened it and was instantly drawn to a piece I hadn’t read before: Fascinating Fascism, on Leni Riefenstahl, the aesthetics of fascism, and sexuality. I read it in one long, unbroken pull, like slurping a noodle. It was a delicious read.

Closing the book, I thought: I am so happy I had this book lying around for years, gathering dust, schlepped from one apartment to another, only to be grabbed at the right moment. It turned out that a trip across the world and a blank jetlag night was what it took for all the stars to align: an essay to be read, and a mind to be blown. Not all newsletters are ever-green Susan Sontag essays, of course, nor should they be. But access to a good newsletter should not have a deadline. It’s in fact one of the things I like about Substack: that all sent newsletters are kept in a format reminiscent of an online publication of sorts.

Moderate Hypocrisy currently has 650 subscribers—more than I ever imagined I’d reach, to be honest. My newsletter’s open rate has been a steady 55-65% for the past years, which, in newsletter-land, seems to be a solid open rate. Yet I cannot stress enough how, even to this day, surprised I am with every open, and how grateful I feel to you, my readers—most of whom I’ve never met—for taking the time, in this economy, to read my lengthy newsletters. I love sharing my thoughts with you, and I don’t take it lightly. You are my readers, not my users, and I hope that whenever you read one of my pieces, something clicks, something shifts, or just lodges itself somewhere.

…Well, that is, until I hit 10,000 subscribers. Then it’s over for you all!

Welcome to the third instalment of the The Anti-Trend Report. The first part unpacks our historical preoccupation with forecasting, and examines the actual dynamics behind going analog. Part II explores frictionmaxxing, and asks how much friction is enough, and who actually gets to turn the friction dial.

And now, on to what was evidently missing.

3. AI: What’s the matter?

Early in 2022, I had joined a young and ambitious team set on creating a great, and much-needed, product: a human-curated news aggregator. The product would be an antidote to news cycle fatigue, to echo chambers, to algorithmic information bubbles, and to online noise. Every day, experienced editors and industry experts would review the news world over, from legacy and independent media alike, and present users with a small selection of what’s important to read. Just as in any start-up, things moved fast, yet never fast enough. With an ever shrinking runway and growing investor pressure, entropy started creeping in.

In November 2022, ChatGPT was officially launched to major buzz, and by December, it had reached 100 million users. “We’re doing GenAI summaries for the articles from now on,” one of the startup’s founders announced that winter during a call. Polite smiles on camera, but the ever-shrinking team was scratching their heads: Wouldn’t this defeat the purpose of the human-first core mission, value, and USP of the company? Not ready to lose their jobs, experienced journalists took to learning how to prompt GenAI for something they already did well.

In the following year, all but the founders had left the company. The product kept the name, but had done a full 180: it was now an AI content pilot that helped one “scale content creation indefinitely,” illustrated by a robot, bent over a laptop, arduously working.

The early tagline of the initial product was, Here for what matters.

***

Fast forward to 2026. Over the past half year, you’d be hard pressed to not have noticed a series of recurring LLMs adjacent filler phrases in nearly every piece of content online. Stock openers like “In today’s landscape…”, pivots like “But here’s the thing...”, verbs like “foster”, “delve into,” etc.

But there’s one particular filler phrase that caught my attention: “It matters,” “Because that’s what truly matters,” or “...where it matters.” A centering of “to matter” in several turns of phrases, which I reckoned might have been as a result of the widespread use of the term in the wake of Black Lives Matter.

Why not just ask Claude directly?

Claude surprised me with this rather brutal self-reflection1. “It has the shape of meaning,” suggesting it, therefore, is devoid of said meaning.

The more I thought about it, it seemed that few concepts defined this era perhaps as exquisitely as “matter,” in all its forms. Its origin is from the Latin materia, meaning substance, or material. Its affinity to another root word, mater, shaped it to also mean “source”, or “origin”. In the 1200s it evolved to mean “subject” or “theme”—thus the expression, “What’s the matter?” The verb “to matter” surfaced later, in the 1600s, to indicate that something is of importance, or not. By the 19th century, matter took center stage in humanistic thought, spanning knowledge, mind & cognition, object-matter, and other concepts well above my pay grade. Matter is all-encompassing: it can be material, immaterial, and everything in between.

So what matters today? Or, rather, what’s the matter?

***

An alien landing on Earth, reading the news and talking to people, looking for evidence of what matters right now, or what is the matter, will soon reach the conclusion: “AI,” the umbrella term loosely used for anything AI-related, but mostly referring to Large Language Models (LLMs). They (not assuming anything about the alien here) will come to know that the world’s tech goliaths are expected to spend the farcical number of $700 billion combined this year to continue work on their AI initiatives, building data centers, optimizing cloud service providers, etc. Data centers, they’ll learn, take a very heavy toll on the planet, consuming vast amounts of energy and water for cooling while straining power grids, a cost that compounds with every AI query processed—but, hold on, apparently that somehow doesn’t really matter.

They’ll find out the latest news in the wave of mass layoffs: circa 4000 people at Block, as announced by Block CEO and Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey last week—but actually, they figure, that doesn’t matter either. They’ll be rather confused when they’ll find out about OpenAI’s deal with the US Military, as well as their announcement that ads will be incorporated in ChatGPT—wasn’t OpenAI the one founded on an ethical basis that AI should be protected and kept out of opportunistic hands? Well, yes, but that didn’t really matter either. GenAI content, referred to as AI slop, colonized every corner of the internet, leaving viewers in a state of chronic vigilance that turns every image, every sentence, every face, into a potential trap. Is this AI? Is this real? Is this Jim Carrey? Wait—this doesn’t matter either.

So what about AI matters? AI was not born out of a technological necessity. It came from a human fascination with the meaning, and building, of intelligence—something we still can’t really put our finger on. From thereon, AI research continued simply because, well, we can. So, does it matter because it inspires awe in us, humans?

The alien will have a hard time finding any validation of that sentiment today in the general audience. Instead, they’ll offer the facts of what is clearly stated as what matters. For instance, Jack Dorsey’s official statement at the news of the mass layoffs, that led to a jump in Block’s shares by around 23% in after-hours trading: “We believe Block will be significantly more valuable as a smaller, faster, intelligence-native company. Everything we do from here is in service of that.” It’s crystal clear: what matters is maximising profit.

***

My favourite description by far of the current AI bangarang has been WSJ’s Greg Ip who called it the “most joyless tech revolution ever.” It’s grounded in facts: ​​unlike the beginnings of the dot-com era which sparked mostly enthusiastic participation, entrepreneurial optimism, and ultimately created many jobs, sentiment towards AI sits at two extremes: while Wall Street loves it, 70% of Americans report feeling uncomfortable with it. Similar consumer sentiment resurfaced in Europe.

Another stance I came across is, “AI as the tech revolution no one asked for,”2 as a more defeatist, us-against-them stance. I understand, and to a certain degree, empathise with this attitude, although I think, as per history’s receipts, we’re never really asking for technological revolutions. Contrary to how we imagine scientific progress—theory first, application second—history has repeatedly shown us the opposite. Technologies tend to emerge ahead of the theoretical frameworks meant to explain them, driven more by practice and intuition. The steam engine, for example, powered an entire Industrial Revolution before anyone had fully worked out the physics behind it. We’re seeing this “practice first, theory after” in full action now with the state of LLMs: curiosity, intuition, exploration, and a lot of money, is what brought LLMs “to life.” But we still have no idea, really, how AI systems work. What does it mean for the future? Not even Stephen Hawking could tell you, as was evident in his most disappointing chapter of Brief Answers to the Big Questions, “Will Artificial Intelligence Outsmart Us?”3

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Culturally, economically, and emotionally, we’re probably in the most annoying, and critical, timeline of this revolution.

Annoying, because at the core of AI disillusionment is a lack of imagination: we struggle to interpret the proverbial technological tea leaves, and as a result can only decode it through our already existing systems of thought. Nothing captures this better than one of ChatGPT’s most reported uses in 2025—writing, basically generating an infinite amount of unimportant copy for LinkedIn posts. We train agents to automate workflows, only to spend threefold energy supervising them. We, the plebes, remain unsure how to leverage this technology, and therefore default to using it in ways that barely matter, then feel dumbfounded at the news of layoffs quoting AI as a factor.

And critical, because what will define the direction of this historical turning point is not whether we continue entertaining intimate relations with LLMs, or whether kids outsource their university essays to ChatGPT—but rather who controls the terms of interaction between human and agent. And if we are to judge it by this year’s announcements, it’s not looking good. A technology wave as pervasive as GenAI could turbocharge a new era of inequality, when in opportunistics hands, with no governmental control, precisely the trajectory we’re witnessing at the moment. Recent economic analysis in the US shows productivity gains concentrating as corporate profits, while labor’s share of GDP continues to fall, similarly to what happened during the Industrial Revolution: factory owners got filthy rich, whilst worker wages stalled for decades.

In the meantime, companies are desperate to use it to cut corners, to optimize for speed and output, to maximize profit. Creators are told—by the leaders of the platforms that are actively pushing GenAI content, AI influencer clones and deepfakes—that they need to try harder at being human by generating content that feels “raw” and “real”. Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, delivered an impassioned message at the end of 2025, packaged as friendly advice to the creators who want to survive the AI era: “Savvy creators are going to lean into explicitly unproduced and unflattering images of themselves. In a world where everything can be perfected, imperfection becomes a signal. Rawness isn’t just aesthetic preference anymore—it’s proof. It’s defensive. A way of saying: this is real because it’s imperfect.” To me, this was the equivalent of oil execs holding court and urging regular folk to recycle in order to stop pollution, whilst they continue doubling down on fossil fuel extraction: a masterclass in deflection, moving the attention—and responsibility—to the individual, instead of implementing any governance themselves4.

This type of deflection pervades public narratives around AI: endless circling around versions of “Is AI bad?”; does AI have agency and intrinsic motivation (we don’t even truly understand those qualities in humans to begin with); will “raw” content make you survive/stand out in the deluge of GenAI content, etc. Speculate on that all you must, but at the end of the day what actually matters is who owns the infrastructure, and how ruthlessly they’re willing to extract.

***

A quote often mis-attributed to Marshall McLuhan (it belongs to his friend, John Culkin, apparently) defined much of the discourse on technological advancement from the 1960s onward: “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” We will undeniably be changed by the recent wave of GenAI, but one might notice how the tools have become business models first and foremost. That startup I joined in 2022 promised to be Here for what matters, but when the pressure started building up, what mattered was less the earnest mission and more a shortcut opportunity to surviving that is being fundable. They gave in, like many others, to a more mundane here for what scales, obviously not suited for any frontispiece. In that vein, the tool didn’t shape them, but the business model did.

This is a pattern playing out at scale. We should ask ourselves, are we building systems that serve human needs, or are we being reshaped to serve the needs of the systems—and the few who profit from them. Right now, we’re becoming what they behold. Technology philosophers advocate for a reconsideration of human agency and autonomy; Michael Pollen calls for “consciousness hygiene” as necessary resistance, a way of protecting a consciousness “under siege.” Perhaps a good reminder that from time to time, we should take a moment to think about what truly matters for humanity going forward—and what doesn’t.

On to the next liebling trend of 2026.

2. Frictionless friction-maxxing

What you’ve most likely heard:

Convenience and efficiency at scale, the default setting (and praised virtue) of our century’s economy—and, well, culture—peaked the second everything had officially become too frictionless, and therefore, no longer desirable in the eyes of the consumer. Young consumers are resisting the passive consumption spiral they’ve been lulled into since their first smartphone, craving meaning and intention in their existence, which, as we’ve established, still mostly takes place online. Brand trust levels collapsed, with more than half of Gen Z consumers preferring to scrutinise the comments section before making any decisions to buy, sending industries like fashion into their “try-hard era.” All this frictionlessness has created a society that’s bored senseless, and now everyone’s preparing for “friction-maxxing” in 2026. No more single-tap purchases, or predictive algos: 2026 is bringing effort back, and that goes for both brands and customers.

Brands are therefore advised: Stop optimising yourself into invisibility. Introduce intentional friction in your processes, like meaningful speed bumps, instead of focusing on how to convert fast. Work harder to (re)gain your audience’s trust, highlight the depth of craftsmanship and become more “authentic,” more transparent, more invested. Add more friction, and you will stand out.

So what exactly is this friction?

Whenever friction is addressed in reports and cultural pieces, it conveniently evades any concrete definitions. Friction is, most of the time, a total vibe: the assumption is you know it when you feel it, but try to pin it down and it dissolves into many examples that cover too much and explain too little.

I took this vibe to court with my dear philosopher friend, and we essentialised two main interpretations. The first reads friction as plain inconvenience: a bother, a disruption of flow, a nuisance. The inconvenience is usually practical, like the bumps between you and an end goal—say, purchasing goods, or services. Remove these bumps, and everything becomes frictionless, effortless, too convenient, and ultimately undesirable. But add rationing mechanisms back in (limited collection drops, hour-long queues for one-off releases, etc.) and suddenly friction becomes value.

The second interpretation has a more experiential dimension. It reads friction as a necessary struggle, a rite of passage: a nuisance at an emotional level that recenters humans as agents of their lives, and that ultimately delivers meaning and reward. By removing most of life’s inevitable annoyances, we’ve built a frictionless bubble that leaves people increasingly incapable of tolerating, let alone navigating, the disruptions of real life (inability to sit with boredom, cringing at uncomfortable conversations with humans, etc.) Those who do engage with life’s discomfort, come out ahead. Friction, in this reading, becomes a moral good.

Friction-maxxing, then, sits at the crossing between the two interpretations: the deliberate embrace of inconvenience as a lifestyle prompter. It mixes self-improvement logic (effort builds character), with virtue/status signalling (I chose effort, therefore I’m better than you).

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When I first read “friction-maxxing” in the headline of an article, I felt the kind of unease you get when you hear someone close saying something utterly tone-deaf in a room full of people. The article argues that our frictionless online lives have eroded our basic tolerances (“Reading is boring; talking is awkward; moving is tiring; leaving the house is daunting; thinking is hard”) and therefore advocates for “no more UberEats!” and sitting with the discomfort of boredom, and of not having things handed to you. The author recalls an experience of driving from the US down to Mexico with two kids in tow: a long and stressful drive all without smartphones, just books, but one that ultimately made her kids love reading as a form of escapism, therefore a major success.

Reading that story I couldn’t help but be reminded of a friend’s journey back to visit their parents in Ukraine. The journey can take anywhere from 24 to 48 hrs, and includes flying into Kraków, grabbing a train to Przemyśl, then jumping on a bus that brings them close to the border, crossing the border by foot, then taking another bus to Kyiv. There are options to take a bus directly from Kraków, but they’re often not reliable. During this trip, you’re wired into every stop, every control check, hyper-alert to connections you can’t miss and to phone battery you need to constantly feed. Your wish to minimise friction during this journey is irrelevant; you’re entirely at the whim of a process you can’t control.

I know—it’s unfair, and a low blow, to compare someone’s road trip down to Mexico with someone traveling into a country that is at war. But at the same time, the author of the above article and my friend are, as far as digital lives go, really similar, at least from what I deduce from the article. Once back in the Western country where she currently lives, my friend gets UberEats delivered, works entirely remotely, and attempts to numb herself to the grim reality with infinite-scroll TikTok trances. The difference is that one person gets to romanticise friction, while the other can’t escape it, despite everything that the online has to offer. Friction, for some, is a choice that you can opt in, and out, of; for others, it’s the base reality. What separates them is class, race, context—and the sheer random luck of where you were born.

***

Real life is full of friction, regardless of what lengths you go to avoid it. In fact, the more we succeeded at avoiding it online, the more friction we’ve seemed to create offline, and not the kind that can translate to creativity and innovation. For some, the price of frictionlessness has been a “systematic loss of responsibility, reflection, and intuition,” creating a monster: a cushioned society, one that decides consequences are optional, one that has forgotten what it’s like to take risks, make errors, and create out of those experiences. Others argue the deterioration is not just intellectual, but material too: Kyla Scanlon explores how everything that’s made these digital systems so optimised effectively depends on a decaying physical infrastructure, as if we kind of “stopped expecting the real world to work.”

At the same time, it’s absolutely delusional to think that anyone truly wants things to stop being so goddamn convenient, so goddamn cheap, and so goddamn readily available. We might say we do, but that’s only because it’s become impossible to pretend we are unaware of the real cost of our convenience: exploitation and destructive excess. I, myself, am willing to pay good money for anything that will remove friction from critical aspects of my life (one example: German bureaucracy), where the struggle gains me nothing: no moral superiority, no existential fulfilment, no emotional reward.

The idea of purposefully manufacturing inconvenience to our lives in order to feel a semblance of control and aliveness, feels embarrassingly reminiscent of the (not even that ancient) tradition of the staged royal hunt. Royal gamekeepers would spend days manufacturing wilderness, exhausting prey and staging hunts, so that bored, purposeless princes could experience the thrill of the kill and come away feeling like a winner. Friction-maxxing feels like its contemporary equivalent: inconvenience cosplaying as effort and agency, for a cushioned society who’s allegedly had it too easy. Which is ironic, because if you look at the statistics, it’s very grim out there for the young: if anything, they don’t, and won’t, have it easy.

The Western Gen Z and Alpha have been born into this convenience consumerist lifestyle, it’s pretty much all they’ve ever known. But I suspect their reported resistance is not so much against the frictionless online, but rather to being treated as a data-point target. Everyone knows the frustration of simply glancing at a product online and then never hearing the end of it for weeks on end, harassed with “You left something behind…” targeted emails. No wonder Gen Zers, put off, turn to the comments section, where they feel more seen, more understood, and treated as a human (most of the time).

But the idea that by adding more friction to one’s life, one returns to a more meaningful, morally good life, is completely out of touch with today’s realities: it presupposes the luxury of choosing your struggles, only possible when the regular-folk ones have already been solved for you—which is a dangerous misconstrue of our times. Culturally, this trend is riding the same wave as that of the performative analog: it’s driven by the valid need to feel alive, to be intentional about your choices, and to reclaim some degree of control over how your attention and personhood get commoditised and optimised for profit.

Commercially, it’s a gift to marketers: “struggle” becomes a selling point. Just enough friction to feel earned, without it being fully inconvenient: this is how you sell manufactured effort as if it were real effort.

To soothe the annoyance of a flight delay announcement at Berlin’s airport last week, I impulse-bought Brief Answers to Big Questions, an anthology of Stephen Hawking’s recorded answers to the burning, recurring questions he would get from general audiences. I reckoned it would make for a good liminal-space browse, and once I got over my dismay at discovering that the foreword was by… British actor Eddie Redmayne1, I moved on to the first question that caught my eye: “Can we predict the future?”

Hawking didactically walks us through the scientific history of the question: at first, we thought, yes we can! Scientific determinism indicated that if we knew the position and speed of all particles in the present moment, we could theoretically calculate their positions in the past, and in the future. It was only a matter of time until the property of chaos—unrepeteable, impredictable, chaos—entered the chat, proving it’s not so easy. Then came Max Planck’s quantum mechanics, and it was only in the late 1920s that something called the Uncertainty Principle was formulated: the no-win situation of realizing that one could, in fact, never simultaneously measure both the position and the speed of a particle, because to identify a particle, one has to shine light on it. According to quantum mechanics, the light (quanta) will disturb the particle, and inevitably change its behaviour.

The long and short of it: we could in theory, but the calculations are so complex that it’s basically impossible to account for all the factors.

In practice, as historical records embarrassingly demonstrate over and over again, we’re actually pretty crap at forecasting the development of things, with a particular hopelessness at anticipating timelines. Humans are especially bad at understanding the significance of their own creations: Morse didn’t believe in the telephone, dismissing it as an electric toy. Thomas Edison saw no future for this phonograph beyond businessmen dictating correspondence. The engineer who co-founded one of American’s most successful computer companies held his strong belief that “there’s no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home” long after Microsoft and Apple demonstrated otherwise. Why are we so bad at interpreting the proverbial technological tea leaves?2 Because we are held back by prevailing paradigms, or systems of thought.

***

This condition, however, doesn’t even come close to slowing down our obsession for forecasting trends, and I’d argue that the last few years have seen the biggest rush yet. This tracks, for a few reasons. First, there’s simply more happening, faster, at a destabilizing pace. This is Kurzweil’s law of accelerating returns, whereby technological progress makes paradigm shifts happen exponentially, rather than linearly: stone tools took tens of thousands of years; the printing press, two centuries; the telephone, half a century; AI chatbots, a couple of years. Same thing happens with cultural and consumer trends, which are changing four times faster since 2018, and are 14 times more volatile, according to recent research by Signoi Social Analytics.

Secondly, trend reports and year-ahead predictions are no longer solely the product of big and small creative agencies, business consultancies, NGOs and industry-leading companies. With the creator economy, we’re all forced to consume and produce content, or else. This decentralisation of knowledge forecasting means the vast majority of these reports are no longer based on longitudinal research or market data analysis, as was traditionally implied. Fantastic development on the one hand, as it removed the gate-keeping of knowledge monopolies and, with it, their potential to manipulate outcomes according to their own biases. Tragic development, on the other, as said decentralisation lead to the watering down of knowledge into mere echo chambers and TikTok oracles.

Third, well, everyone needs to sell more, more, and more! Trend forecasts are, by nature, a tool invented to help predict buying habits since the 1970s: how can we better anticipate market changes and behaviours, to stay one step ahead of the consumerist curve?

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As it happens, I’m in the middle of it all (sorry). And after reading, and delivering, many a cultural trend report this year, you become hyperaware of the echo chamber of predictions and the contractions embedded in them. This year, the most recurring forecast themes revolved around the ideas of analog, friction, intention, and AI. Inevitably, all that scrutiny overexposed these tired angles until the photograph bleached out, leaving us with little more than a washed-out negative.

Enough preamble. Let’s begin.

I The performative analog

What your algo most likely served you:

2026 will be the year of the analog, “aspirationally offline,” unplugging as luxury currency, slow living: young people are redefining their relationship with technology by rejecting being chronically online and opting for a more analog lifestyle. The FT announced social media usage is declining, following a GWI global survey showing average daily time spent on socials down 10% since 2022. The New Yorker touted that it’s cool to have no followers now. Analog also refers to embracing nostalgic expressions of the physical world. The TikTok Analog 2026 Haul, amassing a quarter million videos and counting, includes: Trader Joe tote bags, Moleskine journals, CD players, vintage point-and-shoot cameras. In theory, this trend commends less consumerism—that’s after the purchase spikes in… Trader Joe bags, Moleskine journals, CD players, vintage point-and-shoot cameras, of course.

Brands are therefore advised: be more physical, organize IRL events, keep pushing those running-clubs, community-driven hiking trips, Mahjong nights, physical merch. Create spaces off the regular grid, and into DMs, encrypted chats, Discord channels. The dogma is, “touch is a premium people will pay for.”

Here’s a different way to look at it:

There’s no doubt Gen Z and Alpha are going through the motions of nostalgia (for 2016! Mein Gott…) partly as a natural generational dynamic3 and partly as a result of being utterly digitally burnt out. And there’s no doubt that analog is really good for the body, mind, and soul—though I was amused to come across page-long reports solemnly proving what everyone already knows, as if we’d collectively forgotten how to be human. But as much as we’d want to believe in this logical equation (being chronically online, it’s bad → we know it’s bad → we stop!) in reality, this blatant awareness is unlikely to translate into immediate behavioral change. At this point, the analog move is purely performative.

Why? Well, the long and short of it is that being online is, to paraphrase anthropology’s favourite quote, the web of significance we have spun ourselves into4. This is, until further notice, our century’s context, our century’s paradigm, our Matrix. There is no escape, unfortunately, unless, of course, you go completely off grid, which is… a choice. But not even The Luddite Club members in New York will withstand the reality of post-graduation employment, where being online isn’t optional.

Moreover, in a dark plot twist, we unfortunately kind of really need young people to stay online.

Because what are the potential socio-politico-economic consequences of the younger generations removing themselves from the online? Matt Klein and Remi Carlioz define the two pulling forces of our current context superbly: Camouflage Culture as the refusal to be algorithmically legible, resisting online surveillance through encrypted chats, paywalled content, niche subreddits, IRL events, etc. Then you have Dashboard Culture, the metrics-obsessed sensationalism: cheap, immediate, grotesque. A Camouflage Culture’s exodus risks leaving Dashboard Culture to colonize all visible digital space: a literal cultural wasteland, with horrendous political implications.

In the meantime, who will benefit from this rushed desire for a digital detox? Opportunistic fad products jumping in to capitalize: for instance, Brick, a $60 plastic square that blocks access to certain apps, or apps that promise digital wellness for just $40/year. And where will you find these products? Online, naturally.

A year ago, during an uneventful walk on a spectacularly grim Berlin winter day, I found myself randomly remembering the British magpie superstition nursery rhyme:

One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy,
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven for a secret never to be told.

Was it triggered by the sight of a magpie, you might ask? A definite no, as I had no memory of what a magpie might look like. I get home and I look up magpies. Ah, yes. They are beautiful creatures: slender, white chest, black tux and blue tail. They are extremely intelligent (they pass the mirror test). Apparently they have a fancy for shiny things (don’t we all). They mate for life (ambitious). And they are, in most cultures, regarded as an omen for ill fortune. Beautiful, smart, loyal? Must be the devil!

As it happens, you cannot un-think a superstition. You’re aware of its nonsense, you laugh it off, you admire the lengths folks go to in order to find some sense of meaning and control in life. Yet part of you keeps an eye out. Was that a magpie?

In any case, I was safe. I couldn’t think of the last time I had seen a magpie IRL, let alone in the urban jungle that is Berlin.

***

Fast forward to a few months later, and I’m in talks with a company about a big project. As discussions with the founders deepened, doubts started seeping in about potentially joining the project, it didn’t feel right. One of my closest friends, an activist by training and by passion, was adamant I collaborate with them in any way.

In this limbo state of questioning how far can one afford to go with moral stances when it comes to well-paid work, I take a breather on my then tiny, corner balcony to catch a glimpse of the sky before the early evening darkness takes over. I hear an unfamiliar chalking, scratching sound to my left. I turn, and there it was. Sitting on my windowsill, a gorgeous magpie stares me dead straight in the eyes for a moment, then takes flight.

One, for sorrow. I look around frantically—where’s the second one? Two for joy, isn’t that how it goes? Maybe it wasn’t a magpie afterall.

I Google it again: 100% magpie validation. I knew it! I knew it deep down. It was a bad omen. I wouldn’t have taken the project in the end, but I’d be lying if I said the omen didn’t strengthen, or validate, my intuition.

***

2025 has been an interesting year. As someone in her late thirties, I now experience every new year slightly differently: with the self-awareness of someone who no longer takes time for granted, and the constant recalibration of someone who understands there’s no blueprint for life—both fortunately, and unfortunately. Because, frankly, every new year I find it increasingly difficult to predict what will come ahead. I’m sure this might resonate with many of you, even those who may have followed more conventional routes, and are now reaching the point where those roads inevitably end and you’re left looking out, unsure of where to go next.

But here’s one ~fun~ thought for you to consider for the new year: Would you rather your best days were ahead of you, or behind you? There’s a famous thought experiment from Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit that goes something like this: you need to undergo a painful surgery, for which you cannot have an anaesthetic. The only solution is that once the surgery ends, you will be given a pill that will remove all memory of the pain. And so, you wake up in the hospital bed, confused, with no memory of the past day, and ask the first nurse you see, “Was I already under surgery?” The nurse replies that she knows of two patients, not sure which case is yours: one patient indeed already had the surgery yesterday, which was 10 harrowing hours long, but over now. And the other patient is due to enter the surgery later today, and it’ll be only two hours of the same pain. Which case would you hope is yours?

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Most people will say, “I’d hope the surgery’s over and done with.” Which, if you think about it, means that you’d rather have eight hours more of harrowing pain in your overall life, simply because it’s already in the past. Philosophically, and rationally, speaking, this otherwise instinctive choice doesn’t make sense. Pain is felt the same whether it’s yesterday, or tomorrow. What this thought experiment shows is that we’re biased towards the future, in a way that in fact works against our best interest: choosing more pain overall in our lifetime, for instance. “Our lives in time are shot through with asymmetries: nostalgia, relief that something painful is over, fear that something painful is yet to come,” says philosopher Patrick Stokes in a short piece in The New Philosopher.

I do wonder if we’d ask the same question with regards to wars: ten years of destruction versus two years of destruction, would we still choose the ten years just because it’s over? I’m not so sure. When faced with considering the aftermath of pain and destruction, and perhaps focusing more on emotional pain, well, then we might not be so biased anymore.

I love this idea that our lives are “shot through with asymmetries.” We need, for the sake of our species’ survival (and our mental health) to imagine life as an onwards-and-upwards graphing line. But we know, at this point, that it’s all a zigzag, with pockets of great days, dreadful days, and days we just take for granted.

***

Earlier this year I moved to a new neighbourhood in Berlin. A small, but cosy, top floor apartment, nestled by a huge ash tree which I hold in great respect as it inexplicably not only survived, but thrived, for what must have been something close to a century, in a narrow courtyard, by reaching all the way up, up, up.

The first morning there, I was sipping my coffee while leaning against the balcony door frame and looking at the blooming tree. Out of the blue, a magpie flew to sit on a branch right in front of me. You’ve got to be kidding me…

But before the omen could take hold, a second magpie joined her.

Two for joy…

Happy New Year everyone!!

I was intrigued by this tinkering of human ambition first and foremost through the lens of the concept of “unstable equilibrium.” Fascinating that what I would deem as lack of equilibrium is in fact still considered… equilibrium. “People in the West asked, ‘What about it?’,” the creators of Gömböc, Gábor Domokos and Péter Várkonyi recalled as the first public reactions. “But people in the East understood the metaphor.” The metaphor they referred to was that, in a way, it’s only a matter of time “until you regain your balance.”

Unclear if my Eastern roots biased my interpretation of the Gömböc, but that was, indeed, what resonated: that ultimately, all lack of equilibrium can, eventually, be brought back to a state of stability. What a hopeful metaphor for our times. But do we still believe that there is an ability for self-righting today? For returning, even for a brief moment, to a state of stable equilibrium? After all, “peace is when they are shooting somewhere else,” as spelled out in a painting in Ustia, Moldova.

***

Generally speaking, conversations around humanity’s future prognosis tend to focus on ideas of physical eradication.

After the Cold War and the fall of the Communist regime, Francis Fukuyama famously described what was to come as “the end of history,” by which he meant a boring time of calculated rational decisions that would replace the chaotic pizzazz of previous times dictated by “courage, imagination and idealism.” I guess one could say he imagined the end of history as a state of stable equilibrium. Needless to say, a momentary glance at today’s news gives that statement a run for its money.

Because in lieu of the boring, calculated future Fukuyama envisioned, our times threw in some curveballs. Some are era-specific: climate crisis, pandemics, nuclear threat, AI weaponisation. “Existential catastrophe”, as one philosopher, Tony Orb, put it. Orb, for instance, anticipated that with all the risks of a naturally-occurring extinction, humanity would still be looking at around 100,000 years ahead. However, the existential catastrophe that we’ve brought upon us with technological advancements raises the likelihood of humanity wiping itself out at one (1) in six (6) within the next hundred years.

The other curveballs, however, are anachronistic — as old as civilisation itself. Fukuyama, and many academic minds post-WWII, considered traditional geopolitics a thing of the past. That is, fight over resources, major power competition, let alone imperial ambitions. And yet, here we are.

So, climate disasters, nuclear destruction, tech roulette, wars: the physical existence at risk. But what about the death of the soul? The dimming of the mind? The crumbling of human empathy? The dissolution of human bonds? I’m thinking emotional numbing, doomscrolling dissociation, quiet cracking, “OMG you people can’t do anything”.

A different perspective, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman deliberated at length on modernity as being defined by a state of liquid fear and precariat (read: there are no solid structures upon which we can rely on, no firm ground under our feet), but I’m also reminded of something he said shortly before passing a decade ago: the eternal swing of the pendulum, from one extreme to another, from peak control to peak freedom. Once an extremity is reached, the swinging weight will react to a restoring force (I like that it’s called that) that will trigger it to oscillate, once again.

The state of equilibrium is transient.

***

The other day I watched Agnes Varda’s touching The Gleaners and I for the first time. The film is a poetic documentary on the act of gleaning, which is the ancient practice of gathering leftovers after a harvest, an activity that was usually done in groups of women from neighbouring farmlands. With industrial farming, you’d think less is left behind a harvest, which is partly true. But in fact, more is disposed of: tons of heart-shaped potatoes, for example, that do not fit the distributor’s requirements, dumped back into the land; vineyards filled with rotting grapes because of harvest quota limits if wines are to keep their “vintage” rank. And, most relevantly, limitless waste and trash. Varda follows and interviews contemporary gleaners who glean out of necessity, out of activism, or out of artistic imperatives, framing the diversity of the precariat class of our times.

I’m touched by the subjects she finds: a former truck driver living in a desolate land; an eccentric hoarder artist who is on a strict daily-hoarding schedule; a rubber-boot-wearing character warning of catastrophes. These simple people, I’m thinking to myself, are immortalised in an Agnes Varda film! Agnes Varda, godmother of the French New Wave, iconoclast, chronicler of l’air du temps — and also night time fellow trash rummager.

The Gleaners and I depicts the inequality of excess and has been praised as a seminal work of ecological consciousness in cinema. But beyond that, it’s a profoundly humanist piece of unadulterated love for everyday people, that shows the continuity of it all, the wheel of civilization, so to speak. “It’s always the same humble gesture,” Varda’s voiceover observes: people, bent over, or kneeling, picking up what others have thrown away. One can’t help but think there’s a strange equilibrium at hand.

***

I’m not surprised there was no Gömböc to be found in a natural state. The closest thing mathematicians got to finding IRL was a specific species of tortoises that have developed Gömböc-like shells which help them get back on their feet, if they were flipped over in an angry turtle confrontation: an act of evolutionary survival.

The emotional and psychological self-righting dynamic, however, exists in nature, in humanity, in civilisation — and we have no shortage of proof of these circular pendulum swings from left to right. I should know, I grew up in a country that resuscitated itself after four decades of dark socialist dictatorship, only to now swing further and further right. Just as we self-right, we can also self-wrong, over and over again.

“And the year 2000 is just around the corner!” One gleaner in Varda’s documentary laments, as a way of saying, “I can’t believe it’s the new millennium and we are still doing this”. The 2000s that came, and yet little changed. Apart from, as Agnes points out, the fact that people glean alone these days.

Unstable equilibrium is a great way to look at the world today. Things are still going, somehow, despite debilitating, systemic, and, you’d think, irreversible imbalance and injustice. Things that are so beyond awful are happening in the world, that you’d think someone would just turn off the lights and call it a night, once and for all. But life prevails, somehow. In this vein, maybe the “restoring force” of the pendulum this era might just be the restoration of the soul, the expansion of the mind, the rekindling of connection… Until then, we need more Agnes Vardas.

A few (many) years back, I interviewed the late Magnum photojournalist Thomas Hoepker. Hoepker brought many iconic images into the world: you might be familiar with the 1960s shots of Muhammad Ali, punch-first perspective, or the one of him jumping with the Chicago skyline behind him; and from a different era, you might recall one of the first images of 9/11. At the time of our interview, Hoepker was a cheeky 80-year old man; he had started his career in the 1950s, worked for esteemed German publications such as Stern and Kristall, joined Magnum in 1989 and even presided over Magnum Photos in the 2000s.

As you can imagine, he had a story or two to tell. But from the various recollections he shared, there is one thing that really stuck in my mind, I have it recorded:

“The first big assignment I did, my editors sent me and another young reporter named Rolf Winter, to America for three months. Our editor said to us, ‘You’ll fly to New York, you’ll rent a car, and then you drive west—all the way west, west, west until you come to the ocean. Then come back and show me what you saw.’ We had this open ticket to drive from coast to coast and do whatever we wanted.”

Three months.

THREE MONTHS!! Can you imagine? I couldn’t get over it. I was familiar with the ways of creative work back in the day, given all my interviews with older, established creatives that came of age in the 1960s-1980s: journalists that traveled with The Rolling Stones for 12-month global tours, artists that retreated for years somewhere in New Mexico to create new work, actors steeping themselves in a life of Method Acting and becoming their character for months before shooting a film. Of course this reality co-existed with exploitative, time-stamp-dependent, industrial jobs. But the act of creating existed in a context that translated to time to explore, to discover.

I know what you’re thinking: Well, the times of media empires a la Citizen Kane are long gone, with the mass layoffs affecting journalists world over; cultural budgets are slashed left right and center; content creation has been irreversibly altered and content consumption has dramatically changed. The empires are now built on consumerism, technocrats and attention economies. Basically, ain’t nobody got time, money, nor interest, for a three month long work assignment, in this economy.

But beyond the time-aspect, what struck me was this sense of discovery.

“You’ll rent a car, and then you drive west—all the way west, west, west until you come to the ocean. Then come back and show me what you saw.”

One the one hand, sure, it was a time before travel opened to the world, so the sense of discovery was a natural imperative of the time. But I think it goes beyond that: the imperative of curiosity and the inevitable discovery—this, I’d argue, is the nature of creating. Embarking on this process of discovery means, by default, that you don’t really know what you’ll come across in the end. But in this process, which takes time and commitment, the creator has control over the end output: you decide when something is finished, when it “feels right.” And one thing is clear: you cannot force, nor fast-forward, the discovery process.

***

Anyone who creates knows that you need to be in the flow, or simply, a flow. You could get ideas in your shower, a moment of clarity after hours on end in a loud club, sudden inspiration while on a crowded bus. But the act of bringing those thoughts to life, whether in written, audio, or visual form, usually takes an investment, the currency being: headspace, and time. And these two presets allow for a crucial tenant of creating: critical thinking. Having the time and mental presence to invest in delivering a creative output usually comes hand in hand with ensuring the necessary distance to kill your darlings, really pruning the weeds and separating the truly original from the self-indulgent.

I know most of us working in journalism, communications, or all sorts of content jobs, are short on all of these currencies. I have seen it getting progressively worse over the past decade, to the point of utter giga-fry today. Pressure to deliver high output fast, to navigate the AI slop, to context switch: compression culture. Focus? A distant memory. Time to focus? Lol. The other day my eyes glazed over the words “content velocity” and I knew it was game over for those of us in creative jobs.

All the more, I imagine most of you reading this are working remotely, with Slack as the main point of contact in your teams, so I can assume you are also distracted on average every two minutes.

Depressing fact: a grand total of 90% of the submissions I receive today are AI generated entirely: the literal definition of AI slop. The same mediocre bullet points, recycled to eternity, with the same handful of resources used. In this economy, people are desperately looking for shortcuts, but all shortcuts lead to dead ends. The end of discovery. In classic Baudrillardian fashion, you are your own terminal.

***

To earn a living as a creative today has concomitantly become a privilege (having time and headspace), while at the same time a taxing mandate (you must create, fast, and a lot, to ensure a living). I never thought I’d say this, but I do feel grateful to have been born into the millennial generation. If I were born just fifteen years later, I would have entered the world at a time of a double whammy disruption: institutional instability AND AI-driven technological pressure. A time where, ultimately, the act of creative discovery is an unfamiliar concept. Gen Zers, growing up seeing that “a main path to financial security comes through the algorithmic gods, rather than institutional advancement, like when a single viral TikTok can generate more income than a year of professional work,”1 are more likely to employ one of the two edge strategies: keeping it safe, or go full digital risk-gamblers. Gen Z is living under the despotic enforcement of, “Everyone can create” at a very steep price. Meanwhile, the generations before are stuck in, “Everyone can create, but no one has headspace or capacity because we’re too giga-fried” mode.

I feel this way with this newsletter. I miss writing, but the reality is I have none of the necessary currencies to do so: lately, I have had no headspace, and no time. Any thoughts I have are written on scattered Post-its, shoved in mental compartments, misplaced in scrambled laptop notes. The heartbreak comes from knowing that having ideas is not enough, and feeling them slip away as the window of opportunity to jump on that discovery track becomes narrower and narrower.

I work in an environment where GenAI is king and the pressure to optimize and automatize is the driver, and I’m sure this is a reflection of many workplaces in the rat race to survive today. But content in these environments (read: pretty much all environments from a newsdesk to a climate tech startup) is a means to an end, a potential wealth generation machine, not an act of discovery or value creation. It’s controlled, optimised for quantity, strategic, manipulative.

***

When Thomas Hoepker set out on one of his many, enviously long, work trips, he went to the Olympics held in Rome in 1960, where he by chance met a young boxer called Cassius Clay. He felt an instant pull towards this young, unknown American and started spending time with him, taking photos of him. This moment arguably defined and propelled Hoepker’s life and career, with the young boxer becoming Muhammad Ali, one of the world’s most famous boxers: Hoepker followed Ali’s journey to the very end.

Going on that journey of discovery (time-costly, unpredictable, inevitably frustrating) is an inherent part of the act of creating, but it also lies in stark opposition to the lives we live today, and the work we carry out. How will an entire generation of giga-fried creatives carve their space to breathe through this? I’m not sure. It’s an easier feat when you’re younger, you have more stamina, more junior positions. But what will happen once creative Gen Z’ers reach 40? I really don’t know. Meanwhile even the yoga instructors and work coaches I know, who have been preaching mindfulness for the last few years are burning out, because that is simply the reality of our economy: too much, of the same thing; all shortcuts, same destinations, no discovery.

A kind reminder:

"The Internet merely simulates a free mental space, a space of freedom and discovery. In fact, it merely offers a multiple but conventional space, in which the operator interacts with known elements, pre-existent sites, established codes. Nothing exists beyond its search parameters. Every question has an anticipated response assigned to it. You are the questioner and, at the same time, the automatic answering device of the machine. Both coder and decoder: you are, in fact, your own terminal." Jean Baudrillard

Nothing about Wicked: Part One, the musical fantasy film directed by Jon M. Chu, as a loose adaptation of the Broadway juggernaut created by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, is relaxing. Overloaded with constant action, dizzying camera work and what seems like an army of moving bodies every living second, there is no time to take anything in.

I feel suspended in a state of constant overstimulation. The only moment I catch my breath and feel remotely invested in the story is probably the only slow scene in the film — when Elphaba arrives at the Ozdust Ballroom party and does her cooky Miranda July’esque dance in front of a speechless crowd of brats. The rest of the time I feel like in that state known as saccadic masking, the rapid eye movement phenomenon that happens when you’re looking out the window of a moving train: your eyes are sending snippets of images to your brain, but since things are moving too fast to collect any valuable data worth storing — your brain discards them. For a visually maximalist fantasy film, I struggle to remember anything much of the world building of Wicked, which is to say, of Shiz University (the most unfortunate name) where most of the action takes place.

And then there’s Emilia Pérez. Emilia Pérez is a story directed by the otherwise iconic French director behind Rust and Bone (loved), The Prophet (loved) and The Beat that my Heart Skipped (I remember loving it, but I was 15, so, who knows) etc. Unlike his other films, Emilia Pérez is billed as a “genre bending” musical thriller comedy, which I feel is a way of saying: “we have no idea what this is”. It follows the story of a Mexican cartel kingpin, Manitas del Monte, who transitions to a woman called Emilia Pérez and becomes an activist, alongside her trusted lawyer side-kick, Rita. Importantly, the story was not developed with Mexican writers, the film was not shot in Mexico, and none of the main characters are, in fact, played by Mexican actors. Visually: very stylized, great lighting, very French, camp but not quite camp enough. Acting: okay. But the film overall? Odd.

I guess Emilia Pérez is meant to be fun and campy, like a telenovela, but I struggled with the storyline (are drug wars fun?), the lack of character building and motivation, the singing, and, frankly, what feels like a total free-ride on a Mexican and transition story, as told by cis white French men. What do the Mexicans make of it? As a Romanian, I certainly know the pain of having to watch Romania butchered and exoticized in Western cinema and pop culture cliché’d representations.

My question is, why are we trying so hard? Wicked banks on an already existing fanbase as Broadway’s 4^th all-time longest running musical, boasts incredible songs, and taps into an almost archetypal American nostalgia when it comes to The Wizard of Oz story — it really doesn’t need more pizzaz than that. As for Emilia Pérez…just, why.

Both Emilia Pérez and Wicked have received countless nominations at this years’ Golden Globes and Oscars — so I guess the “trying too hard” part worked its magic. But should we really celebrate this?

***

Fast forward to January 15^th and on the final Instagram scroll before bed, I see the news of David Lynch’s passing. I rarely feel particularly sad, or surprised, when I hear of dead Hollywood regalia, but this news hit differently. It’s hard to explain. Is David Lynch my all-time favourite director? I can’t say that’s the case. Was I particularly obsessed with him? Not really. I’m here to confess I didn’t even get to watching Twin Peaks: The Return yet, although I heard it’s great. But has David Lynch left a profound and formative mark on my understanding of cinema and its potential? Absolutely. And I think this is exactly what triggered the incredible wave of sadness and nostalgia around the news of his death world over. I related to Joshua Rothman’s words in his tribute to Lynch: “It was hard to say what his films were about, or why you liked them; what you knew, mainly, was that they moved you. You were as mysterious as Lynch was.”

I’d confidently say that David Lynch is one of the era’s most original and visionary artists, but I think what truly sets him apart from his equally great Hollywood contemporaries (he’s of the same generation as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola etc.) is that he kept a sense of contemporariness all throughout, whereas there’s something about the others that feels almost historical.

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Mulholland Drive1 was the first Lynch film I was allowed to see in the cinema with my parents. I had never seen a film quite like that. I remember many late evenings afterwards, pretending to go to sleep, but instead sneaking up to my desk, switching my detective lamp on, and scrawling all the Mulholland Drive story clues I could remember onto sheets of A4, trying to figure out the enigma (cute). I eventually gave up, although many of the haunting images stay with me to this day. This then opened the door for me to watch Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Eraserhead, and so on.

What I find interesting is that contrary to the perceived high-barrier-to-entry typical of arthouse films, Lynch’s oeuvre holds more of a B-movie legacy, making them more easily accessible. Mystery, plastic, doppelgängers, dreams, melodrama, bleeding chickens — somehow Lynch’s films manage to occupy the niche space in between high brow surrealism and “just roll with it” kitsch. In many contradictory ways, however, there’s nothing forced about his films. Lynch is never trying too hard.

This is cinema that keeps you in the moment. It kidnaps you, it pulls you in — you’re there, wrapped in plastic, you have time to take it all in, and you stay in this moment trying to figure out, what is going on. It’s what I think David Lynch meant when he talked about the language of cinema, and what you can tell through images that you can’t through words. (“I don’t necessarily love rotting bodies,” Lynch once said, “but there’s a texture to a rotting body that is unbelievable.”) I feel this sits in stark opposition to the direction of commercial films today: there are A LOT of words churned out, a lot of personal emotions spelled out and facts laid out, and too little subliminal cinematic language.

You’re never more present than when watching the first Red Room scene in Twin Peaks. All it takes is three characters of which two speak backwards, a red room, three couches, two lamps, and some jazz music.

***

In the Decay of Cinema, Susan Sontag referred to commercial, lightweight films as disincarnated and I couldn’t stop thinking about that while watching Wicked. I felt so removed, so disincarnated from what was happening on screen, despite the incredible singing and otherwise good performances by Ariana and Cynthia. I feel we’re increasingly encouraged to becoming passive consumers of culture — just consuming snippets and, well, merch. And when we’re actually consuming the “entire” thing, we’re only half present, not out of our own volition but because blockbusters no longer even expect full attention — as if it were almost too expensive to do that.

A.O. Scott said it best, in a piece on the state of criticism today:

“As consumers of culture, we are lulled into passivity or, at best, prodded toward a state of pseudo-semi-self-awareness, encouraged toward either the defensive group identity of fandom or a shallow, half-ironic eclecticism. We graze, we binge, we pick up and discard aesthetic experiences as if they were cheap toys. Which they frequently are.”

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Why is that? Blockbuster films have never been more expensive to produce — but not because of the budgets that go into the making of film itself; we know all too well of the exploitative salaries of scriptwriters and film crews at large, and it’s not even a case of ludicrous sums demanded by celebrity actors. In fact, they’re expensive to produce because the marketing budgets are well over the film production budgets. The films are, in fact, no longer the main product, so you don’t necessarily have to make them good and worthy of attention. The main product is the generated fandom, and attention paid to said generated fandom.

Case in point: Wicked: Part One’s global promotional campaign cost $150 million — partnering with over 400 brands to make it virtually impossible to miss it. “Just short of obnoxious,” to quote Universal Studios CMO, Michael Moses. The production of the film itself cost $145 million. This is not a film, this is a business. I’m ready to bet that all you’ll remember of Wicked: Part One will be the press tour snippets that spammed your socials — holding space for defying gravity, Ariana holding Cynthia’s finger, potentially the Mattel scandal of the porn site linked on the packaging of the Wicked Barbies.

Emilia Pérez is a different story, but with pretty much the same business intention. Compared to Wicked, Emilia Pérez was peanuts to produce, at an estimated mere $26 million — and a worldwide box office of barely $11 million. However, Netflix acquired Emilia Pérez at Cannes and reportedly spent $24 million on its awards campaign baiting. With bad reviews pretty much across the board, and criticism from trans activists and Mexicans alike, film industry experts have summarized this situation as the Oscar contender that aims to benefit one ecosystem only: Netflix, and Netflix streaming. Again, not an artistic choice — a business choice.

We’re trying too hard, and for the worst reasons. So when the Oscars come, I suggest you save yourself the dismay and instead grab some popcorn and watch any of the truly genre bending exquisite films out by young directors all around: Martine Syms’ The African Desperate, Kristoffer Borgli’s Sick of Myself, Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Emma Seligman’s Shiva Baby, Luis de Filippis’ Something You Said Last Night, Rose Glass’ Saint Maud, Sean Baker’s Anora, Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline, Zia Anger’s My First Film, and the list goes on.

Let’s take note of the fact that reputation is a major currency in the world we’re living in today. Whether you like to admit it or not, reputation matters. It brings about opportunities; it supports businesses; it creates and grows networks; it invites discovery.

What’s more, the year 2024 was certainly the year of online reputation — if we are to cut through much of the noise, we’re left with an overwhelming push of both individuals and corporate entities to build reputation online. What appears is the lottery ticket all gamble on today. Individuals spend hours on end churning out pieces of vapid content on Linkedin in a desperate attempt to remain top-of-mind online — and you can’t really blame them.

What’s more is that character, or the reality, the deliverable, seem to be of little importance nowadays. In fact, over the past decade, we’ve learnt that when the two — character and reputation — collide and crash, it is of rather insignificant consequence. To name some 2024 such collides: Pope Francis’ casual homophobic slurs didn’t stop people from venerating and idolising the Vatican; people world over didn’t stop streaming P.Diddy’s music upon uncovering more and more of his monstruosities; Jacquemus’ use of synthetics and lack of supply chain transparency didn’t stop it from continuing to secure its place as a zeitgeist brand.

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This is the era of digital demagoguery — from the heights of mass political manipulation to the shadows of individuals throwing everything but the kitchen sink at attempting to nail the reputation algo online. We’ve learnt what to say, how to behave, when to post, what visuals to use, in an attempt to control public perception. I know this very well, as I make my living helping others build reputations and communicate complex situations. I also know this intimately, as I have spent more time than ever before this year, learning how to best talk about my reputation, about my achievements — how to best package myself for others to recognize.

Myisha Cherry speculates that today, we might spend more time investing in “appearing more honest than we actually are, at the cost of honesty itself.” This reminded me of political hobbyism, coined by political scientist Eitan Hersh, an interesting perspective to describing the leading form of political engagement of our time: “Many of us think we’re politically active — but in fact, we’re doing little more than signalling who we are to other people. We may be emotionally invested in politics, but we’re not actually committed to solving problems,” Hersh rips in a VOX interview. Read, see yourself called out, and weep.

People, however, eventually catch on to pretence, to performativity, and the contradictions between the real and the presentation are starting to be sanctioned.

Pope Francis’ favourability ratings amongst Catholics world over are, in fact, lower today than they were at the beginning of his papacy a decade ago, Pew Research reported in 2024 — reasons being the backwardness in addressing matters of contraception, priesthood rights and sexuality. Jacquemus might have built up to becoming a cultural arbiter independent fashion brand, but the vast reports of customer dissatisfaction with quality have resulted in unsold stock and stagnating growth, forcing Simon Porte Jacquemus to look for a minority investor end of 2024. P.Diddy’s bump in streaming numbers over the past year is not an usual phenomenon of headline-driven curiosity according to music historians — particularly as streaming is free and anonymous (it’s unlikely that people would have walked into a shop and paid for his records). His source of income, however, typically coming from tours, music licensing and reputational brand endorsements, has become a black hole and will likely remain a black hole.

And so on.

I smell a change in the air. People’s character radar is becoming more attuned. They’re starting to question, to look beyond the status quo, to ask for transparency. It feels like reputation has never been more temporary, more fragile.

Frankly, I doubt I’ll remember any aspect of someone’s reputational digital footprint in the long run — and yet I’ll never forget moments when I really saw someone’s character reveal itself through key situations, whether in professional or social setups. I’m talking about integrity, empathy, courage, moral fibre, compassion; but also hypocrisy, cowardice, bigotry, jealousy. This goes for people, for brands, for employers — and it leaves a visceral mark.

I want to leave you with a consideration I read in the transcript of historian, activist and composer Bernice Johnson Reagon’s 1983 speech called Coalition Politics. “Throw yourself into the next century,” Reagon urges, “but the thing that must survive you is not just the record of your own practices, but the principles that are the basis of your practice.” What principles are we leaving for future generations?

So, would you rather have character or reputation? Choose character, 2025, and you won’t regret it.

xx Ana

The play largely focused on ideas of home, heimat, stretching between the nostalgia of the Romanian diaspora to the longing of the adopted main character for the motherly love he never experienced.

At one point, they project a photo album to the wall: the photographs were iconic snapshots of communist Romania, starting with Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania’s nationalist dictator. The actors look through the crowd and ask a woman in her late 50s, who we learn was Romanian, and had been living in Germany since 1990, “What is this photograph of?”

Obviously, the photograph’s of Ceaușescu, evident to all Romanians in the crowd and to anyone remotely informed about the looks of 21^st century dictators. But we were not ready for what followed.

“He’s our beloved leader,” the woman confidently answers.

I get instant goosebumps. The actors are stunned, they start stuttering, and a heavy silence engulfs the venue. Shook, my friend and I turn to each other, with our faces dropped, mouthing, WHAT THE…!? We were seated front row, and I turn my head back slowly, probably compelled by some sadistic desire to see the person talking. I see all the other faces too: Romanians, equally shocked, ill at ease, looking straight ahead, nervously shifting in their chairs.

I still get goosebumps remembering this moment. The woman went on to talk about how much better her life was during communism (so good that she decided to leave to Germany as soon as it was possible.)

The actors politely, but swiftly, moved on to the next photo. My friend and I left the play and the first thing we blurted out once we had reached a reasonable distance from the theater was along the lines of, “WHAT WAS THAT?! WHO WAS THAT PERSON?? WHO BELIEVES THAT A DICTATOR IS BELOVED?!” We were shocked, but we also laughed it off. My friend mentioned that she knows plenty of people in her small town that might still feel this way. “WILD!” we shouted one last time, as we waved our goodbyes.

***

Fast forward to the first round of Romanian presidential elections in November, and it seems like the joke was on us.

Călin Georgescu, an ultranationalist candidate that was not registered by pollsters, running independently, that neither I nor any of my friends and family ever heard of before (this election round there were 14 candidates in the run-up), wins the first round of presidential elections, with 22.9% of votes.

I noticed Georgescu’s name the night of the elections, fourth in line. “Who’s that guy?” I ask my friend. She had only seen his name once in some comments on Romanian TikTok algos. We focus our energy, instead, on stressing that the candidate of the rising right-wing party AUR remains put in the third place, so that he won’t be running in the second round of elections.

But then we wake up to shocking news. Overnight, after counting all diaspora votes as well, the mysterious Călin Georgescu is first place, followed by center-right candidate, Elena Lasconi.

Mysterious to us, but an “avenger sent by God to serve Romanians” (his words) to many Romanians abroad, domestic, and on TikTok algos. We look him up, and realize, oh, it’s bad. My theater-going friend and I, my other like-minded Romanian friends, our families and friends of friends — we all live in a bubble.

***

The misinformation Georgescu and his thousands of TikTok accounts (official investigation from the Romanian intelligence Services claim there were over 25,000 accounts, activated two weeks before the first round of presidential ballot) spread are both the classic anti-EU, anti-NATO, ultranationalist, Russian propaganda as well as mystic, imaginative conspiracy theories, such as: the Romanian language does not originate in Latin, but the other way around; there is only one science, and that is the science of Jesus Christ; fizzy drinks like Pepsi and Fanta contain nanochips which control those who drink them; supporting Ukraine in the war means supporting the West’s plan to destroy and take over the riches of Russia — the madness is endless.

His mystical touch comes as an add-on to the ultra right-wing parties’ anti-EU and (stupidly-called) sovereign discourses (mostly embraced by those willing to surrender their countries’ sovereignty to Russia) that go along the lines of: “Romanians everywhere are slaving away for Western corporations”, “The EU did nothing but take from us Romanians”, “The EU destroyed our economy and intends to keep Romania underdeveloped.” Most imaginative one was that the EU forces us, Romanians, to eat insect flour — which would actually be amazing, by the way? Wellness fanatics would actually kill for this luxury. Insect (read: cricket) flour is incredibly rich in protein, a luxury afforded by the few.

Georgescu’s strategy was on point. His campaign targeted discontented and dispirited Romanians, abroad and domestically. He tells them he will offer them money, 2000EUR monthly, to be more precise.

This struck a chord. Most diaspora votes came from the Romanians living in Great Britain, Italy, Germany, and Spain, with overwhelming preference for the ultra-ring wing candidates. For the first round of the presidential elections, 57.81% voted for far-right wing Georgescu in Germany; in the UK, 49.5%, in Italy, 48.86% and in Spain, 47.04%.

After the shocking news of the first round of elections, a record number of Romanians world over activated themselves to vote in the ensuing parliamentary elections — many in a desperate move to push away right-wing parties from holding seats in the Parliament. To little avail — ultra right wing, anti-EU parties now hold over 30% of seats in the Parliament, making the subsequent potential election of an ultranationalist candidate an even more tragic outcome. In the diaspora, 55,5% Romanians chose right wing parties.

None of the smaller progressive parties made the 5% cut necessary to gain seats in the Parliament.

Here’s the real “WILD” catch, conveniently overlooked by us all, certainly by the corrupt leading political parties that eroded Romania post 1989. The most recent survey carried out by INSCOP, a Romanian statistics research platform, reveals that 46.4% of Romanians believe that life was better during the four decades of communism than today. A relative percentage of former-authoritarian-regime-nostalgics is not unusual for societies transitioning from authoritarian regimes and struggling to find their footing in a new setup (also the case of the former GDR, by the way). The percentage in Romania is, however, painfully high, revealing how deep the sense of instability, discontentment and disorientation runs, spilling over to the next generation of post-1989 Romanians.

There’s a lot of investigation currently channeled into Kremlin’s involvement in the elections and TikTok’s wrongful promoting of misinformation on their platform. Both certainly have had a major impact — but both were also preaching to the converted, clearly. It’s wrong to continue to be blind at the realities of the masses of dejected, disappointed, and traditionalist Romanians, living both in and abroad.

***

In a tragic way, history repeats itself. World over, for sure, but Romania’s historical cycles are so incredibly telling about its complicated, contradictory relationship with Occidental values versus nationalist, traditionalist values.

For instance, Romanians glorified interwar Romania as the golden years of the country: while it’s true that interwar Romania saw the development of a European-facing elite (that was not free from the era’s specific nationalistic and antisemitic prejudices, by the way) and the formation of modern cultural institutions, the same was true of the high percentage of underdeveloped rural Romania that was ranking first in infant death in Europe and saw half of its population illiterate. This was the perfect breeding ground for mass manipulation and exploitation, allowing for authoritarian deviations.

First, the antisemite Legionari, a fascist military and mystic movement organized around the extremist party The Iron Guard (Garda de Fier) — of which Georgescu is an outspoken fan — that terrorised and murdered whoever begged to differ. Then, after WWII, the first round of soviet communism in Romania sweeped in, and wrecked havoc. The foundations of the “traditional Romanian values“ based society were dismantled, the existing elite left to rot in prisons, and the rural and farmer class — at that point in time considered the fundamental class in Romania — dismembered. The fast industrialisation filled the urban spaces with uprooted, and easily manipulable masses. This round saw the literal re-writing of Romanian history.

Badabing, badabong, and next thing you know, semi-illiterate Nicolae Ceausescu, comes into power preaching “humane communism” (comunismul de omenie), a cruel irony for the harsh dictatorship years that ensued.

Romania is a low trust society. Distrust and suspicion, fear of deception and exploitation, are not unexpected after-effects of a society that lived in fear for decades. But Romanians at large have always been profoundly susceptile to anti-Western ideologies. Sociologists and historians talk about the Kosovo Effect, for instance — which sharply divided Romanians between pro-Slobodan Milošević and pro-NATO, revealing that for every pro-Western, pro-democratic values Romanian, there is another Romanian ready to defend traditionalist, Christian, nationalist and, utlimately, authoritarian values. Or, we can speculate on a third type of Romanian, which might reflect best what’s happening today: the Romanian that embraces the idea of the West, with its consumerism, freedom to travel and freedom to work, yet somehow cannot find the alignment between that idea and the reality of profoundly traditionalist, conservative and nationalist personal values.

“This is happening everywhere,” my Western friends tell me, pointing at the alarming growth in support for the far right everywhere else in Europe. It’s true. But I believe, and correct me if I’m wrong, that the immediate impact is incredibly destructive in a situation like Romania’s, with Russia’s encroaching presence like a Nazaré huge wave, ready to crash unto Romania. Romania not only is set to be the location for NATO’s largest military base in Europe, but it also plays a critical role in the West’s strategy on defending Ukraine — one factor also being that it also borders Ukraine. A pro-Russian president, with a divided parliament, means disaster in military spending decisions and foreign policy, and disaster for those Romanians hoping for a better life back in their heimat. Moreover, as a famous historian once said with regards to Romanian resistance, “In Romania, we have no Solzhenitsyn, and we have no Havel.” (Lucian Boia)

* * *

At the end of the play at Volksbühne, the actors ask the spectators to imagine that we’re transported 30 years into the future and Romania’s one of the best countries in the world; all of us Romanians living abroad therefore decide to return. They ask us, “What is it specifically that made us return?” This was touching, and heartbreaking alike. The Romanians in the audience answer:

“Romania’s got one of the most efficient, safe, patient-centered, effective healthcare systems in the world!”

“Romania has one of the best educational systems in the world. Its universities attract the best professors from the world-over, and the best talents.”

“I had an incredible career opportunity in Romania that I would have never had anywhere else!”

“I returned because Romania has one of the most equitable systems. I want to bring my children up in a fair society.”

“Romania is one of the most open-minded societies today. As a queer person, I feel safe and accepted.”

I leave you with that.

“You’re of your era,” Fran Lebowitz says in response to a question that was addressed to her from the audience last Sunday, in Berlin. I can’t actually remember the question, but it’s beside the point the anyway, as Fran takes the essence of every question from the crowd and answers it by talking about whatever she wants to talk about — admittedly, more interesting than the initial inquiry.

With her signature grouchiness and comedic timing, many of the things Fran says in her sold-out show in Berlin are opinions and stories she’s told before, in the myriad of interviews, TV shows and public appearances she’s had since the 1980s. This is fairly common to public figures. The one thing I had never noticed before, however, is her Slavoj Žižek’esque throat tic, which I assume is more the result of her lifelong commitment to smoking, rather than a nervous tick. But who knows?

For an avid Fran-fan like myself, attending the show was exciting in a, “when will I ever get to see Fran live again” kind of way. But, for an avid Fran-fan like myself, the show was also a sad reminder of how fame reduces an individual to a number of traits that ultimately become a narrow, entertainment persona; a caricature.

***

First question from the audience is about Andy Warhol and The Factory. Fran says what she’s said several times before: Andy was not exactly her favourite person, but they tolerated each other — and, of course, his hiring of Fran at Interview magazine indisputably propelled her career. “A genius, he was not,” Fran laughs dismissively. I wonder what it’s like to have had an encounter with someone who will define the outcome of your entire life moving forward — and this someone happens to be a person you couldn’t stand on a personal level. That’s what I’d ask her.

Second question from the audience: how was Studio 54? Fran says, “Well, it was a club.” After a brief, disappointed silence, she indulges the question by offering a few more details. “With a lot of drugs. And some cute people!” She laments how it had become a money-making machine towards the end of its time, making it less fun of a place.

The questions continue, mostly gravitating around the US and good ol’ New York. The fame of Andy Warhol and Studio 54 seem to define what makes Fran interesting in front of a wide audience in Berlin that has paid to come see her speak. In a sense, to the public, Fran is seen as embodying an era in itself; a survivor of a time that’s highly idealized and romanticized across the board, perhaps even more so in Europe: the New York of the 1970s and 1980s.

There’s no question that this time was formative for Fran’s life and career alike.

Hell, she’s probably the last famous culture critic this world will get to know across all generations — quick, tell me the name of another contemporary influential critic, with great style. No Joan Didion, no Susan Sontag, no Harold Bloom. The truth is contemporary critics like Alexandra Schwartz, Vinson Cunningham, or Naomi Fry are hardly known outside of literary and intellectual circles. Slavoj Žižek is perhaps the only one to come close in mainstream fame.

Despite not having actually written a book in forever, Fran has a lot of interesting things to say beyond Andy Warhol and Studio 54. Thankfully, she’s come of age in a time where print media was all the sh*t, and her stories and opinions are recorded for posterity.

Here are some of my favourite bits.

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What actually makes up Fran’s era?

Fittingly, Fran picked up on the youth’s obsession with the New York of the past:

We live in an era where people are nostalgic for eras they didn’t even live in… Now, kids say to me, ‘Fran, I wish I had lived in New York in the 1970s.’ This is someone who was born in the 1990s. I never thought, I wish I were in the 1940s when I was young. That is very bad for the culture. 

Fran arrived in New York from New Jersey in the late 1960s, which meant she was there for arguably some of the most exciting, and equally agitating, times for New York. The social and political context: the Civil Rights Movement, the height of the Vietnam War, second wave feminism, AIDS, and, alas, Studio 54 and Andy Warhol.

Yet Fran often dispels the popular romantic ideas about New York of the 1970s:

1. That it was so much cheaper: “New York has always been more expensive than any other place. Even when the city was bankrupt in the ’70s it was still too expensive for most people I knew.”

2. That people lived decadent lives: “I think another element of constantly going out for me — and I think for all the people I knew at the time — was we had such awful apartments. No one wanted to stay in them. It never occurred to me that staying home could be pleasurable, because it wasn’t.”

3. That it was simply the best time ever, when the city was in fact being torn to shreds by the AIDS epidemic and the impact that had on culture at large: “The effect of AIDS was like a war in a minute country. Like, in World War I, a whole generation of Englishmen died all at once. And with AIDS, a whole generation of gay men died practically all at once, within a couple of years. And especially the ones that I knew… The New York Times, they gave me the topic: What was the effect of AIDS on the culture? Which, in my opinion, was: What is culture without gay people? AIDS completely changed American culture. People always say ‘pop culture.’ As if we have some high culture to distinguish it from. The first people who died of AIDS were artists. They were also the most interesting people. I know I’ve said this before, but the audience for the arts—whether it was for writing or film—the knowing audience also died and no longer exists in a real way… And it allowed people who would be fifth-rate artists to come to the front of the line. It decimated not just artists, but knowledge.”

   

4. Studio 54, by the way, was not Fran’s no.1 favourite place — she talks about her favourites, Max’s Kansas City, 12 West, Le Jardin, in this great interview in The Paris Review, Max’s being the all time favourite: “The great thing about Max’s was that it wasn’t sexually delineated in any way, so you could be with a bunch of people of wildly varying sexual tastes, and you would have someone to talk to. You could talk to your friends, have actual fun, and then everyone could get laid. What way would you prefer to spend an evening? That was to me the greatest place.”

5. That everyone had sex, all the time — well, that’s actually true: “During the time that I went out every single night of my life, it wasn’t that you had sex every time you went out, but that’s why you went. That’s what propelled you out the door. So at least if you didn’t actually have sex, it was sexy. There was a sexual atmosphere.”

6. That it was a great time for being gay: “When I was young, it was actually illegal to be homosexual. You had to pretend to be straight to find a job. And they always said what was dangerous about homosexuals was that they’d convince kids to be homosexual. It was this second-hand homosexuality they were afraid of. And there was tremendous contempt expressed for homosexuals that was totally allowed, totally encouraged. You can’t do that anymore. People still hate homosexuals, but they can’t say that.”

Fran is of her era, and she has lived to tell the tale. Martin Scorsese referred to Public Speaking, his 2010 documentary on Fran, as an ode to a “vanishing breed of New York celebrity”. And, kind reminder, she didn’t have it easy, as a gay, woman, writer, in the 1970s and 1980s — despite this being her calling card now. She embodies a specific personality, of a specific zeitgeist, simmered to its quintessence. Unapologetic, unfiltered, occasionally tactless, overflowing with definitive maxims — no wonder her shows are always sold out, with us, people of a different era, desperate to experience a different worldview, a different way of voicing opinions.

Fran is well aware of this:

This is not an age where any type of intellectual harshness is welcome in our culture. There are two reasons for that. The first one is that most expression has become so personal. Even politics have become so personal. Things that really should be more abstract have become really personal. People respond personally to everything, and people are encouraged to be really solipsistic.

Secondly, our culture has become immensely democratic, but the society has become much less democratic. For me, I would prefer the opposite. I’m not saying it used to be perfect; it didn’t. I’m saying that the way it is now, where there’s this idea that everybody’s expression is as good as everyone else’s, is absolutely not true. It’s a lie. You can pretend it’s true, but some people are just simply better writers, better artists, and musicians than others. The idea that everyone is an artist is an absurd idea, by the way. 

So who, I ask you, will be the next Fran Lebowitz? Who will represent the quintessence of our era?

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Fun pieces with Fran:

“Have Tux, Will Travel” Vanity Fair, 1985

“The Voice: Fran Lebowitz” Interview Magazine, 2016

“Fran Lebowitz Doesn’t Dance Anymore” The Paris Review, 2018

“In Conversation: Fran Lebowitz with Phong Bui”, Brooklyn Rail, 2014

“Julia Gets Wise with Fran Lebowitz”, Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus Podcast, 2023

What makes these interviews great? Sometimes, it’s wonderful, caring, captivating questions — Terry Gross is great at that; Debbie Millman too. Other times, it’s a level of familiarity and trust that automatically opens up the interviewee — some interviewers have actively built this environment, with Oprah at the forefront, and talk show hosts like Graham Norton, who is known and loved for his light-hearted, fun interviews. You can tell his guests genuinely enjoy themselves. For TikTok fans, you have Amelia’s Chicken Shop Date.

And then sometimes it’s just a high level of respect: I’m not a fan of Charlie Rose’s formal and uptight style, for instance, but I cannot argue against the level of access he gets with his interviewees. In his case, the questions were often basic, predictable, but given the prestige of the show, the interviewees opened up, voluntarily offering insights into their work and personal thoughts.

***

Interviews often have an air of ease and spontaneity that makes them seem casual (plebejische Kunst, as they’re sometimes referred to) — when in fact, a one-on-one interview with a successful individual, whether artist, Hollywood actor, Nobel Prize winning author, etc. takes on average months of planning, research, and editing.

At The Talks we had a very specific approach: we wanted to tell a story, or perhaps several stories, that are genuine and speak true of the people we showcased on the website. We researched the hell out of the interviewee and then prepared a number of potential angles, or themes (usually three), each with animated and creative questions that were intended to flow naturally. The themes were supposed to be loosely connected, so that they could still be worked together into a narrative if that were the case, but at the same time, they had to be different enough to allow you to move from one cloud of questions to another, if a particular theme was not hitting home with the interviewee. Researching what had already been covered in other interviews and coming up with questions that make the individual sitting across from you feel like their thoughts and life experiences were valuable — that was vital in preparing for the interview.

But perhaps the perception that interviews are easy (read: casual) to do might come from the Q&A style often used in the context of promotional interviews — typically press junkets, or roundtable interviews. The interviewing context at those types of events is almost purely transactional — you are surrounded by tens of other journalists who are there for that one quote or soundbite they can publish. With an evidently minimal level of investment, these environments are abundant in, “What was the inspiration behind…” questions at best, and painfully sexist, “What’s it like to be a mother and an actress” at worst. These types of interviews potentially represent all that’s shitty about the evolution of new media and the exploitation of celebrity culture.

Now imagine that back in the day, the process of interviewing journalistically was completely different. Photographers and journalists would be sent out to spend months on end with celebrities (think Harry Benson with The Beatles) or with the subject at hand (think Hunter S. Thomson cohabitating with Hells Angels’ motorcyclists for a year). It was a trend and fantasy epitomised in the 2000 film Almost Famous, where a 15-year-old (not weird at all!) is sent out to tour with a famous band to write a piece on them for the Rolling Stone magazine.

***

I often fantasized about how wonderful it’d be to spend even just a single day with the people I interviewed. Sometimes it felt we were only scratching the surface: if so much goodness came out in “just” 45 minutes, imagine what you could get in a day? And yet, there’s something about the pressure and intensity of the time-limited, condensed bubble of a one-on-one interaction, as well as the general anonymity, that creates this unique context for someone opening up perhaps more so than over the looseness of a day. German author Alexander Kluge, glorified buddy of Theodor Adorno and Fritz Lang, and veteran conversationalist, likens the time limitations of interviews to water in the desert; he says, “Wasser ohne Begrenzung ist ein Sumpf. Mit Begrenzung wird es ein Fluss—” Water without boundaries is a swamp. With boundaries, it becomes a river. There’s something about the scarcity of time that is a fertile ground for the creation of the flow, if one releases the ego and truly shows up in the moment to guide this flow.

***

Ah, one on one interviews. To me, they’re still one of the most wonderful, and at the same time, strangest setup for something that ultimately is meant to have a professional outcome.

Because there is little to no control over how a dynamic exchange between two human beings will unfold. Firstly, it’s an extremely subjective experience, all things considered. As a journalist, you walk into a scheduled meeting, you sit down next to a complete stranger that you happen to know a lot about already, and try to earn their trust in a matter of minutes. Similarly, the interviewee has to show up in the same artificial setup and open up to a complete stranger whose perceived intentions as a journalist are often muddled with years’ worth of bad experiences with vulture media. As an interviewer, you put your ego aside, and try to slide inside the headspace of the person in front of you. I’d often come out of interviews with a mix of exhaustion and delirious joy and inspiration.

***

I remember my interview with Jeff Goldblum. We had great banter — he is so charismatic and gregarious that it’s easy to talk to him about pretty much anything. But once you read everything there is to read about celebrities online, you do pick up on formulas they regularly use to deliver an idea, the same idea, over and over again (the inevitable consequence of forcing these artists to promote! Promote! Promote! Incessantly, killing all spontaneity, turning them into marketing machines).

For a few questions, though, I felt him take a moment to think — I loved that. I thought, okay, my job here is done. He tells me at the end, “Hit me up when you’re coming to Los Angeles, I’m doing a jazz show in two weeks! Come tap me on the shoulder.” For a second I feel incredibly flattered and special — am I… besties with Jeff Goldblum?! But I had read enough previous interviews with him to know that this was exactly what he’d say to all journalists at the end of his interviews.

“I’d love to,” I said, and we never talked ever again.

During one of his dispassionate replies, I scan my questions, and try to strategize: I have 20 minutes left with him, and before my time is up, I need to deliver an engaging, timeless interview. No pressure.

I know I need to make this happen, somehow, but part of me is distracted by the low-key disappointment that inevitably seeps in when you finally meet one of your “idols” and they don’t live up to your expectations. Interpol was one of my favourite bands as a teen, and I traveled far and wide to see them live several times. When the opportunity to interview Paul Banks came up at The Talks, my colleague and editor-in-chief were kind of neutral about it — we’d been getting a lot of big names for the publication and Interpol seemed almost niche in comparison. HOLD THE PRESS! I’ll do it! I tried to keep it cool but I couldn’t believe it. My absolute teen dream coming true.

Needless to say I did A LOT of research and spent a significant amount of time trying to come up with the perfect questions: questions that would help me bring to life the best interview with Paul Banks E-VER. But, as is often the case, things don’t quite turn out as you expect.

Then, just as I’m beginning to lose my hope, he suddenly mentions a book he’s just finished. I see the tiniest ray of light coming in through a crack in the door, and I slide my leg in: “Wait, which book? Tell me about it.”

This is it. He perks up. We finally hit it off and the ensuing conversation led to an interview that had an incredible reach amongst Interpol fans and beyond. We talk about Henry Miller, lyric-writing and heartbreak. About streams of consciousness, hip hop as a lyrical genre, and how to bring old songs back to life.

***

The other day I received a The New Yorker tote bag in the mail. It reads, “The Right Question Changes Everything.” Considering that I am no longer subscribed to The New Yorker, and therefore shouldn’t be getting their mail, I consider this a sign from the universe (also, love me a freebie!).

I like signs from the universe and I love the postulate. I do think it’s true, but perhaps not in the way you’d initially think.

Yes, no doubt about it — the right question can change everything. But as someone who’s carried out hundreds of interviews, I can tell you that the real game changer is rather asking that right question, at the right time. In other words, the golden key to a good interview is listening. And I mean, truly listening to the individual sitting in front of you, or at the other end of the landline, on the other side on the world. Listening deeply, you can get a feeling for the mood, the intention, the places where cracks in the door might lead to a spark; and in turn, the ability to follow those sparks might lead to that particular conversation, that particular story that you can tell together. Sometimes that means abandoning those (no doubt deep! no doubt brilliant!) original questions and making peace with the fact that it won’t be that — but it will be uniquely this.

***

I’ve told this story before, because it was such a formative experience, but if you would indulge me, I’d love to add more details. Years back I had the privilege of interviewing the founding father of American conceptual art, Lawrence Weiner. Lawrence's rep demanded my questions in advance, something we normally never agreed to, but that one time, given his legacy, we rolled with it. Research was done, themes were chosen, questions were created, sent and approved, and days later, I jump on the call with Lawrence. He picks up the phone, and the first thing he says is, “So, I just had a look at your questions, and you know what? Let’s talk about something else.”

Oh, God. What? Why?! I froze. I am by no means an expert in American conceptual art, and whilst it might sound incredibly cool to be able to just chat to a luminary artist, it’s a little bit different when your job depends on its outcome.

But Lawrence was in the mood to philosophise about gesture, language, and the meaning of art in life, and there was simply nothing I could do but go along with him. The conversation that ensued was bumpy and wonderful at the same time.

Lawrence had the relaxed manner of a 75-year-old who gave absolutely no damns anymore. He was happy to look back at how things were when he was young and talk about how he sees the world now. All I could do was listen closely, get a feel for his mood and his passions, and build on the spontaneous conversation one brick at a time. I had obviously done a lot of research on him and his legacy, so I tried to sprinkle in questions on his iconic pieces whenever it made sense.

I didn’t pick up on this in the moment, but later on, as I transcribed and edited the interview, I realised something. “You have to look at something as what it is in the moment,” Lawrence told me. It dawned on me, then, that he was not only referring to his philosophy on art — this was indicative of the way he lived his life: no pre-set questions, just right here, right now.

That’s when it hit me: an interviewer is a vessel for the right question, at the right time.

Bonus:

• An Incomplete List of What the Cameraperson Enables, by Kirsten Johnson

How lucky we are to have access to stories that explore desire, gender, vulnerability, aging, love, motherhood, womanhood — all in a brutally truthful, honest, weird, funny, fearless and life-affirming way. It’s the kind of energy that makes me want to put on my craziest outfits, scrunch my hair into the most awkward bun, go out loud into the world and do whatever I want to do; take up space, write, smell the flowers, pet all the dogs, take photos of all the shit left on the streets of Berlin, dive head-first into the lake, eat eat eat, listen to the birds and cicadas, listen to humans, hate the internet, love the internet, be shy, be rude, be sexy, be childish, drink a martini and smash the glass, hai noroc!

I’m not a literary critic, and it frustrates me that I don’t have the tools to eloquently review All Fours, but I guess I can talk about how it made me feel: refreshed, inspired, curious about the world and curious about what my life is yet to bring.

And then I opened Instagram.

I’m only human, so when I wasn’t reading, otter-ing about in the crystal waters, or stuffing my face with fried calamari, I’d, of course, be online.

One of the first things that jumped at me was an IG story from an it girl; it was a reshare of a reshare of a reshare, an endless mirror-in-a-mirror effect, of a quote coming from the said it girl (can you keep up?).

The quote was a sort of value judgement issued by the it girl’s affinity for “discreet women,” which she went on to detail: she preferred it when women either didn’t wear make-up, or only when they knew how to wear it and how much of it to wear. She appreciated when femininity was not understood as styling your hair into big curls, or having your nails done. Finally, she wished more women would proudly wear their natural hair and flaunt their wrinkles. Out of curiosity I went to the original post, which was captioned as “quotes that celebrate women and womanhood.” Of course, it’s Instagram, so the tens of comments on the post are limited to heart and fire emojis.

As you can probably already imagine, the quote professing the proclivity for discrete, preferably natural women, is issued by a conventionally attractive, former model, privileged, white woman.

I sighed, took a screenshot, shared it with my friends and ripped it to shreds in the group chat.

We wondered why, in 2024, after countless waves of feminism, a reckoning with the reality of intersectionality, and with the notion that womanhood and gendered experience can be whatever you want it to be — we still feel the need or entitlement to issue opinions on how we think women should be, how much space they should take, or what would make one human being a better woman than another.

Because, however unintentional, the subtext of the statement reads that exact way. “I like discreet women” — ie., women who take up little space, who are low-key. “I like women who keep it natural or know how to use make up” — this on the one hand accurately defines the obsession with “natural” that the privileged take serious ownership over, from Mallorca linens and minimalism, to investment in prohibitively expensive beauty care products and services that keep that collagen plump. Natural is healthy, natural is tasteful — but only when it is rich. No one cares for a scruffy, bag-eyed, exhausted yet natural working-class mother. Secondly, the opposite value statement here would be, presumably, “wearing too much make up, in a tasteless manner” — which would bring us to a discussion of taste, and social class: more make up, or, make up worn ostentatiously, would be tacky, tasteless, kitsch, therefore discarding the value of the woman wearing it.

In fact, “natural” and “healthy” have been the key selling points in the surge in beauty, self-care and wellness consumerism that is populating our timeline and our headspace. A very specific type of individualist health has become a status symbol, fuelling the Erewhon-ification of everything — because as it turns out, natural and healthy are extremely profitable aspirations to sell. The idea of “natural beauty” in particular, according to a quick review online, is “clear and bright skin” (retinoids, chemical peels, microneedling, red light therapy), “big, white smile” (teeth whitening), “healthy, shinny hair” (you get the idea, etc.), “fit body” (etc.) — clean girl aesthetic, in other words. Historian and artist Nell Irvin Painter talks about how, ultimately, “a lot of the things we consider beautiful are actually just proxies for wealth.”

Natural beauty is also, by and large, understood as youth. Online, we love talking about natural aging and authenticity, but the reality is that Gen Z is already worried about looking old, boosting the proliferation of anti-aging products and procedures like never before. Preventative ageing or, “prejuvenation” routines as they’ve been called, are officially the most popular beauty content on IG and TikTok. The previously unsexy terminology of “skin barrier” used by dermathologists has become a legitimate obsession, with 400% increase in online searches which led to an instant integration of the concept in marketing speak; CeraVe, a brand that jumped on the boundary train early on, is now responsible (as in, paid for) for over 80.9% of its mentions on TikTok. Our skin is healthy, only insofar as it’s plugged in to the consumerist Matrix.

The are a few ironies at hand here. First is the belief that professing alignment with the superiority of the Natural Woman as opposed to any other type of woman that is somehow not natural, is a progressive and enlightened thought. I understand the confusion — there is the sense that everything that is natural is uncompromised,  uncorrupted, pure (cyanide and cancer are, surprise surprise, also natural, but that is a different story). By all means, I think we can all agree that the freedom and ability to carry ourselves “naturally” (read: authentically) into the world is generally something to aim for.

But there are cracks in the aspiration: firstly, its obvious, primary focus on the appearance and appearance only (I see nothing about equitable employment, body ownership, fulfilling experience of life) and secondly, because the natural standard is set by very clear Eurocentric-only criteria.

“Natural beauty” is experienced completely different when you are not part of the privileged cohorts, and there are plenty of great pieces by historians and scholars such as Noliwe Rooks who write about the politics of race and beauty. Rooks, for instance, explores how “attempts to decolonize one's beauty routine often lead to pushback from the outside world — especially for black and brown people.” Writers like Ling Ling Huang recently released a novel on the fetishization and appropriation of Asian cultures in beauty wellness fittingly titled, Natural Beauty.

To be Eurocentrically natural is a privilege, and decolonising said perceptions of natural beauty and womanhood come at a cost for those underrepresented, as well as for those not meeting its criteria. In fact, as I’m writing this piece, I’m witnessing the absolutely insanity that is the scandal over Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and the questioning of her natural make as a woman at the Paris Olympics. The (baffling) abusive narrative was ignited by questions of strength and ambiguous discussions of hormones, and instantly fired up to appearance. The tragic part is that it’s not unprecedented and Black and brown women who defeat white opponents are often targeted — Serena Williams has been called a “man” her whole career, Simone Biles too.

To quote Haley Nahman, who wrote a thought-provoking essay two years ago that rings truer than ever: “We need to think bigger than normalizing beauty labor. As a vision for the future, that’s a pretty bleak one…. However comforting we may find beauty practices, however creatively we commune around these traditions, I think we have a responsibility to return again and again to the ideology underpinning this industry: who it targets, who it punishes, who it pays.”

***

Don’t get me wrong. I, too, am investing stupid amounts of money buying all sorts of AHA & BHA acid exfoliators over which I have but a modicum of real understanding, and asked my friend the other day if she thinks I might have a moustache. I am far from immune to the beauty labor pressure. Moreover, I have benefitted from my conventional “prettiness,” fair skin and lighter hair in ways that skirted xenophobia both in and out of Romanian borders — there’s few things that Romanians adore more than a fair look, contrasting with the darker skins of the “undesirables” (this is super interesting, by the way, as the stereotype of the Eastern European is befitting mostly to north-eastern European/Russian looks: extremely fair, blue eyed, tall, pencil-thin. Central and Southeastern Europeans are, well, different). Coming from a profoundly sexist and misogynist society, it takes a long while to unpack all that internalised misogyny. But some critical distance goes a long way. 

Womanhood and how that ties with external appearance and consumerism, are, needless to say, a collective wound that runs deep. We are confronted with it over and over again, inescapable — we’ve tried to fix it, but as long as appearance is profitable (hello, infinity!), nothing really helps us stitch up the wound and allow it to heal. We applaud natural! But when you look at it it’s a very narrow and misleading understanding of natural. We applaud the destigmatisation of invasive & non-invasive cosmetic procedures! But when you think critically about the real reason behind the urge to make cosmetic modifications and the toxic industries and perceptions you are perpetuating, it’s a bit more complicated. The personal is political, and the personal choice is not always progressive. There’s no win! The sheer concept of femininity is a battlefield.

British art theorist John Berger noted in Ways of Seeing, in his exploration of the imagery of women in European oil painting: “A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. (…) From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.”

I was reminded of one of the stories in If These Walls Could Talk 2, featuring the most delicious Chloë Sevingy and Michelle Williams. Michelle Williams plays a hippie, Romanian blouse wearing, committed queer feminist activist in the 1970s, fighting for equal rights for women, and she falls for Chloë Sevigny’s character, a tie-wearing, motorcycle-rider, masc presenting lesbian. The problem, we soon realize, is that Michelle’s and her friends’ idea of feminism, queerness, freedom and equality, was not exactly allowing any space for Chloë’s idea of freedom and equality — namely, for her “butch” appearance. “We fought hard so you don’t have to wear men’s clothes,” one of Michelle’s friends says with disdain. Their inflexible ideas of “femininity” and gender binary representation were actually impeding on the freedom of someone who just dressed however she wanted to dress — which happened to be decoded as more masculine.

In a critical moment, just before storming out to make sweet love to Chloë, Michelle tells her friends: “You want to know why you don’t like her (Chloë)? It’s because you’re scared of anyone who’s not just like you!”

What one woman might identify and celebrate as progressive, might come at the expense of another’s freedom.

***

Ochuko Akpovbovbo noted in one of her recent Substack newsletters, “One of the weird things about the internet is that it can make us feel like content other people make is in direct conversation with our lives.” That’s not far from the truth — in many ways, that’s exactly what the internet sets up to do. We are stuck in filter bubbles online, in the glass dome I mentioned before, where we are relentlessly sold ideas, particularly about womanhood, that might seem enticing in theory, or even comforting. Yet we should not lose the responsibility, as Nahman pointed out, of taking a step back and questioning said ideas: who they target, who they punish, who they pay.

But if one wants to take a break from it all, reading something like All Fours feels like a breathe of fresh air. In such a story, your life as a woman is not bound to your looks — your body, yes, it exists and plays a major role. MA-JOR! The natural experience of womanhood is, across all histories and ethnicities and experiences of life, a truly wild ride. But not in the ways that consumerism makes you think. In profound ways that ultimately, have little to do with external perception and validation, or fitting in external set criteria.

It can be life-affirming to be reminded of that.

For anyone coming from the journo or literary world, this is a curious and, at the same time, bizarre sorcery of a message. Because for every post-graduate who’s laboured away in academia for 10 or so years only to find themselves utterly unemployable, and every journalist toiling for weeks on end over an article that will be compensated with 150EUR (if they’re lucky!), there is, allegedly, a whole new category of individuals that have figured out how to make a lot more money writing online. This premise of learning how to make money online has also taken over Substack, leading some of the more romantically inclined to pray for relief from this onslaught: “please can we not turn this platform into a circle of writers who teach writers who teach writers… how to make money writing?”

Writing to make money is a curious proposition. Because writing in itself is not traditionally, historically, and certainly not perceptually, associated with the end goal of tapping into wealth — quite the contrary. Unless you’re J.K. Rowling, Stephen King or Sally Rooney, or one of the other big names whose books are displayed in every bookstore, being a writer is associated with toil, endless rejection, and very low pay (if you’re getting paid at all). So when I hear someone describe themselves as a writer I usually think one of two things. Either: lucky you, living your best trust fund baby life, and writing despite not earning any money, or — what have you written to feel that you have earned the right to identify yourself as such? And: if you’re actually making money writing, then where, what, and for whom on earth are you writing?

But the truth is that writing has shape shifted so far from its traditional format over the past decades, that it has become a mouldable Play-Doh harnessed by online media for a wide range of purposes. This very specific type of ubiquitous writing became known as content.

Everything is content!

When I started out in journalism — and I promise this won’t turn into a, “BACK IN MY TIME” drag — there was still quite a clear line between journo/literary and commerce, with the occasional bickering between the writers in the advertorial departments and the O.G. self-proclaimed “unbiased” journalists at the newsdesk.

You could, of course, also be writing “commercially” — usually as a copywriter in advertising, branding or marketing agencies, in PR or communications, or for the myriad e-commerce platforms that were popping up in the mid-2000s, where you’d tweak product descriptions and review SEOs optimisations. But then I witnessed something interesting.

With social platforms flooding every inch of human existence, a new trend seeped into brands’ online presence: “storytelling” and “authenticity” became the new currency. In true meta fashion, by the 2010s you’d be more likely to hear talk about “authentic storytelling” than actual stories told. “Storyteller” became a serious job title, and its function? Well, to bridge the gap between writing, business and commerce.

Then, in what felt like an overnight move, storytelling became “content”, and content became so dominant that it was proclaimed “king”. Ironically, “Content is King” was not coined by some digital agency hotshots, but by Bill Gates, in an essay from… 1996! It low-key breaks my heart to imagine Bill Gates, the ultimate nerd, witnessing some loud, obnoxious marketing kids getting worked up about something he anticipated nearly two decades ago.

But before we could catch our breath and make sense of how best to engage with the amount of data that was being generated every second through social media, marketers started shouting the new motto of this storyteller world: “Everything is content!”

Things moved fast.

Everything is content marked the beginning of a new economics of online media: social commerce. If consumers were once considered passive receivers of marketing tactics, they were now actively contributing through what is, at the end of the day, user generated content. Social media clearly played a major part in this shift, but so did the last decade of the ZIRP growth-at-all-costs start-up era, and its impact on creativity and writing, fixation on growth-hacking and the cult of entrepreneurship. Paul Jun has a great piece on this specific topic in his Substack.

Online content traditionally refers to a range of media products that include videos, stills, and, lastly, words. Content can be aesthetic, satirical, journalistic, confessional, motivational — and more often than not, voyeuristic. But the mushrooming of start-ups and start-up founders generated a new type of spoken and written content which I’d argue makes up a big chunk of what “content” is expected to be today, and that is:

• quantifiable

• optimised for consensus

• predictable

• bullet-point (see what I’m doing?)

• driven by KPIs

• geared towards lead generation and last but not least,

• reputation building.

Content that mirrors the same content and the same audience backwards and forwards, in a never-ending loop.

Don’t hate the player, hate the game

When all content starts becoming the same, the challenge of commanding attention becomes paramount. In a world overflowing with entrepreneurs, how can that be done? Cue the birth of Linkedin’s confessional post. When Linkedin-ers realised that values, personal experiences, and, well, portraits, can be sold for attention, the phenomenon began rearing its (decidedly ugly) head, marking Linkedin’s transition towards peak commodified personality culture.

Pressured by quantity and algorithms, there is no shame as to what might constitute the content of said post. “Here’s an embarrassing confession,” begin some of these posts, then proceeding to confess something that is not remotely embarrassing, and that I am embarrassed to be writing about now. Linkedin peaked for me when the first post preview on my feed read, “If you have to eat shit, don’t nibble.”— alas, a post about resilience.

Like natural-born sales people, they are ready to broach any topic that will capture their audience’s attention for a few seconds, and reiterate. The logic of pushing content today has the primary intention of successfully colonising the Venn diagram of attention, business intention, and self-promotion. Operating in the same framework as ZIRP start-ups, it’s set out to do a lot of nothing, hoping that in the process something will hit the right nerve.

The commodification of “Self” writing

The pressure of having a constant online presence has turned everyone into a writer — but of course, not everyone is one. It’s only fitting, then, that this became the “gap in the market” targeted by the proliferation of generative AI and ChatGPT content providers. Timing wise, the opportunistic alignment is excellent, leading to this very moment, both terrifying and interesting: the commodification of writing.

Where’s the problem? God knows I wish I had had something like ChatGPT when I had to do months on end of quantitative research back in university. But it’s not the writing of complex scientific lab results or longitudinal sociological studies or reviewing qualitative research that’s being commodified. No, there is a new kind of writing about the self that’s being commodified in a very specific way.

What we’re seeing is a way of writing that mirrors a certain human profile back to itself, more efficient, more sterile, more devoid of meaning with every rendition. It reminds me of a scene in Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent (2015) where the Amazonian shaman, upon seeing a photograph of himself for the first time, tells the German ethnographer: “He’s a chullachaqui. He looks just like you, but he’s empty, hollow.” If a decade ago brands were desperate to show up online in the most human way (to talk like humans, storytell like humans), it seems that the human is now striving to show up as a chullachaqui, a hollow brand of themselves.

Iconic French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard said that we are living in the ecstasy of communication, which means we have become both the coder and the decoder: in essence, we’ve become our own terminal. It’s easy to see modern “content” in this way: endless quantities of the (Consensus optimised! Predictable! Lead-generating!) content which we want and don’t want; which keeps coming at us because we apparently want it, whilst more deeply, we seem to be losing touch with what it is that we actually want.

Everything we put out, we reflect back to ourselves. We are ultimately suffocated by the excess of all this, and its accumulation. Baudrillard stated (long before he could witness the scale of social media!) that "We (will) wear ourselves out feeding this ghost of a representation of ourselves. We are overwhelmed by this pretension." Sound familiar?

There is, of course, a lot of great writing — and there is still good content, too. Knowledge creators such as Ana Andjelic, Lenny Rachitsky and Alec Leach for instance are producing meaningful work that aims to inform and motivate rather than simply exist for the sake of existing, alongside many journalists and writers on platforms like this one. Meaningful content, just as meaningful writing, defines itself by straying away from the obvious, the relatable, the sentimental, the accommodating, even the inspiring — all tactics employed in marketing. Meaningful content demands something more from the reader: our full presence, and, well, our intellect.

Content is, in fact, in the room with us, right now. Even when we aren’t in a room, it’s there – almost everywhere we look. But the blending of the online, the personal, and the consumerist has made content as we used to understand it a shell of itself — a proverbial glass dome, with its seeming transparency and interactivity, in fact reflecting everything back to itself. 

Some call this the age of (media) convergence. Others, like NYU professor Clay Shirky, “the new cultural logic emerging out of 21^st century media chaos.” And who makes money out of this chaos?

I have bad news. It’s most certainly not you, my friend. Certainly not the writers, the journalists, the content managers. Not the social media copywriters, the SEO optimisers, the PRists. Statistically, not even the grand majority of start-up founders, despite all that peddling. But put something of worth and meaning out there in the world, and you might just crack the system.

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If you’re keen, some things to read, to digest:

Baudrillard, Jean (2005). The intelligence of evil or the lucidity pact. New York: BERG, available here.

Baudrillard, Jean & Violeau, Jean-Louis (1965). The Ecstasy of Communication. Semiotext(E).

Castells, Manuel (2001). The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press

McLuhan, Marshall, Fiore, Quentin (1967). The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. Random House

Mead, Rebecca (2014) The Scourge of “Relatability" in New Yorker, available here.

The premise of this genre of articles is something I’m very familiar with by now: author struggles in Godforsaken country. It is ugly. It is dangerous. It is dirty. People eat “lamb’s brain” here! But through sheer will power, the author ends up tolerating it — then, lo-and-behold, even ends up liking it.

The article ends with a (rather reluctant) recommendation to visit Bucharest, although I’m not sure who in their right mind would visit a city after reading said author’s experience of finding the police in her AirBnB (if anyone knows what went on there… I’d love to know).      

Of course this particular experience is extreme, but the overall conclusion of the piece is arguably positive. It comes with a good intention. So why can’t I just be happy with a positive overall recommendation from a foreigner encouraging other travellers to visit my country? Reader, the answer is obvious. These kinds of articles deal in backhanded compliments, finding oblique ways of saying, “my GOD, this place is awful!” and “despite it all, I found some good in it!”

You might be thinking, “Oh, come on: there was no bad intention here,” “It’s gonzo journalism!” “Isn’t any publicity good publicity?!”

But if you’re coming from pretty much anywhere that is not western Europe, odds are you will know exactly how this feels.

Romania: A History of Disastrous PR

Let’s call it what it is. If there were ever an awards show for worst soft power national representations, Romania would be leading the way, with its long history of messed up PR. It wasn’t enough that the country barely survived four decades of communist dictatorship which burned right through its culture and heritage, ravaged the intellectual ranks, and indirectly killed tens of thousands of women through illegal abortions.

No, after 1989 Romania was resurfacing in the Western media’s attention as the ultimate scapegoat for a number of key themes that included the Roma, petty theft, human-trafficking, stealing jobs, and, of course, swan cuisine.

The pervasive negative Western European media focused on Romanians, the Roma and Bulgarians has been studied at length in the academic sphere (list of recommended reads below for those of you interested) — the explanation is, as always, textbook socio-politico-economic: a result of European Romaphobia, a resistance to Balkanism, a form of Orientalism, and, in the early 2000s, a reaction against the overwhelming migration movement that resulted from the EU’s largest round of country accessions in 2004 called the Eastern Enlargement of the European Union. Be careful what you wish for?

The “freedom of movement” of EU migration meant that the West could no longer hold on to the prerogative of observing the East “from afar and, so to speak, from above” (the one, the only, Edward Said). The old EU member states were suddenly grappling with having underestimated the numbers of labour migrants coming in waves from Poland, Romania and Bulgaria and gradually started implementing what is referred to as “securitization” tactics in the media.

Without getting into too much detail, securitization of migration is a classic technique that reframes migration as a threat to the existing status quo; it’s a process not only of other’ization, but of portraying immigrants as agents of social instability. You don’t need me to tell you that these tactics are traditionally employed by populist and/or wide-circulation broadsheets such as BILD, Sun, Telegraph, La Repubblica, La Razón, etc.

But here’s the thing. There’s something crucial about how social representation is enacted in media, in social and political discourse alike, anthropologically speaking. There’s two processes that come together, one of objectification — simplifying information which allows you, the reader/ listener/consumer, to engage with an otherwise intangible concept; and one that has been referred to as anchoring: classifying the unfamiliar within a system of familiar categories to make it more “palatable”.

Of course conservative, right leaning publications will use straight forwardly negative objectification and anchoring techniques — but what’s interesting is noticing the more nuanced, indirect social representation in center/center-left media and messaging: the anchoring is still subtly in the familiar categories of perception when it comes to Eastern Europe, Romania more specifically (poverty; backward; dirty; dangerous) but the objectification swings the opposite way (“It’s actually great!”)

“BUT WHAT ABOUT CONSTANTIN BRÂNCUȘI! TRISTAN TZARA! NADIA COMĂNECI! PALME D’OR FOR OUR CINEMA!” Romanians would shout, desperately trying to cling on to the few externally validated sources of pride and fame for Romania.

The truth is that all this is too little, too late, with almost no voices truly representing Romania’s cultural treasures on the outside. In the unspoken hierarchy of Eastern European countries, Romania is certainly far from the top — Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia or the Baltic countries, all fare higher in national brand perception.

Where was I? Romania’s post-1989 generation

Born just in time for the 1989 Revolution and the infamous transition from communism to capitalism, the “tragedy” of my generation was that we were brought up with peak western pop culture on TV: MTV, VH1, Seinfeld and M.A.S.H.

Before moving to the capital city, Bucharest, where I started school, I lived like a literal Romanian Heidi in a small mountain side town called Sinaia. There was no cable TV during that time — the TV would only be switched on by my granddad to watch the evening news and I couldn’t think of anything more boring than watching TV. When I moved to the city I was stunned — TV was amazing: Cartoon Network! Animal Planet! Sailor Moon! And a daytime retrospective on the national channel on Alfred Hitchcock that in hindsight left me with a debilitating fear of crows.

My generation grew up consuming, romanticizing, and idealising the West. The West was MTV, it was the Spice Girls, it was Steve Irwin and it was Polly Pocket. It was Nouvelle Vague, Radiohead, Converse All Stars and Twin Peaks. It was popstar culture, consumerism, and opportunity.

So when we rocked up at the gates of the West, in our own minds fully ready to become an integral part of the culture we had so devotedly absorbed, we realised that no amount of western pop culture embodiment could, or would, hide the fact that we were not westerners. To our great surprise, we realised we were the Other. Imagine our stark disillusionment — what do you mean, “Do we have TVs back home?” 

During my first years abroad as a student, I found myself expressing gratitude for backhanded compliments about Romania. It’s not a particularly good feeling. It’s one of those cognitive dissonance moments, when it can feel nauseating, smiling and waving; when you sense you’re agreeing and validating something that doesn’t feel fully right with you.

Who’s the hypocrite here?

Of course, we’re all guilty of this “backhand compliment” in some way, myself included. I have no doubt that at some point I have sounded utterly annoying talking about my trip to North India with my besties (one happens to be Indian, ok). No doubt someone listening to me will have thought, “Here’s this privileged white girl, rambling on about how much she loved traveling across India with her privileged friends” — and, the pièce de résistance, “Here she is, talking about that special mix of poverty, beauty and kindness”.

I remember when I started traveling to Southeast Asia with my parents, kids at my school bullied me about it. “Don’t you have money to travel to the West?” “Why would you go to Asia?” they’d shout. All to show that, in Romania, as much as elsewhere, the same rules of ethnocentrism, xenophobia and downright racism apply.

In the same vein when it comes to social representation in media and beyond, Romanians objectify and anchor those “unfamiliar” further eastern entities not far from how Romanians themselves are categorized in Western Europe: as undesirable.

In Romania, the Westerner (“expat”) is accommodated to, welcomed and even lowkey adored. The Easterner (“immigrant”) is tolerated, blamed, and closely observed. In fact, the “securitization of migration” is activated in full speed in Romanian press as we speak, against the wave of Asian workers that moved to Romania in record numbers over the past years to work in industries short of labour force. And, of course, the focal point of Romanian racism and discrimination enacted throughout centuries and with no end in sight: the Roma community.

The flywheel spins Eastwards. Eastern Europeans will never experience the entitlement that naturally comes from having been born in a ruling power nation — because they are not one to the West. Yet they will, unintentionally or totally intentionally, jump at the chance to exercise power over those that are “Eastern” to them.

But in this flywheel of ethnocentrism and backhanded compliments, I would argue that being a visitor from the East means you get better at listening, even though that’s sometimes just a byproduct of not being given the space to speak — but still. When you listen, you’re more likely to learn more, and then more likely to love more. And that is, in my books, the whole point of traveling to foreign lands.

Listen, I get it — writing about foreign countries is hard. But an article like the one just published in Der Spiegel belongs to a different time and age, and I’m not sure I can find much of an excuse for it being published in today’s climate. I feel we’ve come so far with woke culture, we’ve learned about exercising curiosity and empathy. It’s time to implement.

Is Bucharest a gorgeous city? For the sake of the comedic twist, I should have said, Hell no! But you know what? On its good days — it kind of is gorgeous. Are parts of it dirty? For sure, but have you ever been to Whitechapel, or to Neukölln, or to Marseille as a whole?

People talk about Bucharest in terms of nostalgia, and I’m not sure this is the right word for it — nostalgia for what? For the lost opportunities? For the lost desirability? The lost artists and great thinkers that could have given Romania more of a name? 

If anything, Bucharest is a survivor. This city is the embodiment of all the crazy events that have slowly ripped it to parts over four decades of communism, and another three decades of headless capitalism. It is made up of contrasts and contradictions, between old and new, bourgeois and tacky, rich and poor, ugly and beautiful. These all make Bucharest, and Romania, what it is. 

Have I managed to give my own country a non-backhanded compliment?

***

Some reads:

Todorova, M., (2009) Imagining the Balkans. Oxford University Press.

Wolff, L. (1994) Inventing Eastern Europe: the map of civilization on the mind of the enlightenment, Stanford University Press.

Van Baar, H., (2011) Europe's Romaphobia: problematization, securitization, nomadization. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29(2): 203-212.

Van der Dussen, J. and Wilson, K. eds., 1995 (2005). The history of the idea of Europe. Routledge.

Wodak, R. and M. Reisigl, (1999) Discourse and Racism: European perspectives. Annual Review of Anthropology, 28: 175–99.

Wodak, R. and Meyer, M. eds., (2009) Methods for critical discourse analysis. Sage.

van Dijk, T.A. (1984) Prejudice in Discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins

Tileagă, C. (2006). Representing the ‘Other’: A discursive analysis of prejudice and moral exclusion in talk about Romanies. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 16, 19–41.

Wodak, R. & Matouschek, B. (1993). ‘We are Dealing with People Whose Origins One can Clearly Tell Just by Looking': Critical Discourse Analysis and the Study of Neo-Racism in Contemporary Austria. Discourse & Society - DISCOURSE SOCIETY.

von Rosen, J. (2019). The Securitization of Migration as a Threat to Liberal, Democratic Societies. Sicherheit Und Frieden (S+F) / Security and Peace, 37(1), 35–40.

Bello, V. (2020). The spiralling of the securitisation of migration in the EU: from the management of a ‘crisis’ to a governance of human mobility? Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 48(6), 1327–1344.

And I’m not “old”. I promise! At age 35 I think I strike the perfect balance between youthful appetite for pop culture and chronically online behaviour, as well as the jaded and cynical nature of someone who’s experienced what it’s like to patiently sit in front of a massive personal computer (PC, baby!) and wait throughout the full length of the dial-up internet connection tune (spoiler: it didn’t always connect.)

I didn’t know it back then, but those two questions, perhaps more elegantly phrased, were what drove me to study social anthropology abroad — a move that was unheard of in an Eastern European society that only rewards hard science careers (understandably, and more on that later). I never did become a professional anthropologist, mostly because no one really knows what, how or where professional anthropologists would exist outside academia and in what capacity. But it certainly, and irreversibly, formed my “intellectual discipline,” to quote good ol’ Claude Levi-Strauss, and set me up for a lifetime of not being able to not see through the bullshit.

Anthropology is a discipline that constantly reinvents and questions itself — it’s a study that has been canceled over and over again throughout its history, and constantly had to cut through epoch-specific hypocrisies, from colonial evolutionism and ethnocentrism to accusations of exoticising the other. It’s a study that, at the end of the day, shows us how flawed we are as humans trying to understand other humans. Its most salient dictum is that we should accept that 1. we know nothing, and 2. we should be open to trying to understand something — by listening (tough ask today), by seeing, by observing, by engaging. Anthropology questions everything — and this critical stance is a great muscle to exercise, especially today.

What’s Moderate Hypocrisy?

Hypocrisy permeates all timelines, of course. People love to think that we are living in a unique time marked by unique challenges — and while it’s true that every generation comes with its very own peacock characteristics, things are in fact always kind of bad and, yet, better than before (you win some, you lose some!). That’s never stopped people from proclaiming the “death” of things every goddamn couple of decades though. The death of cinema! The death of criticism! The death of publishing! The death of music! The death of civilization! 

In reality, we are but at the beginning of our history, and apparently we have some 700,000 years ahead of us according to the average mammal species stats — so better keep that cinema alive.

Every era has its personality, and I would argue that moderate hypocrisy is one of the defining personalities of ours. The behavioural inconsistency enabled by the internet, the perception of open access knowledge, the speed and turn-over of said knowledge, and the urgent need for self-presentability and self-visibility create the perfect cocktail for dissociation. Dissociation between what is said, believed, claimed, and reported, and what is actually acted upon. The fact that a large chunk of our lives is spent online is the breeding ground for this. It’s not for nothing that the word “performative” has experienced its peak Broadway moment in the last decade.

Whether we want to admit it or not, none of us are immune to this — unless you’ve gone off grid somewhere in some mountains in which case you wouldn’t be reading this, so I can get away with not factoring you in. We all embody moderate hypocrisy by default, as a result of the world we live in, and — most importantly — the lifestyles we consume. So then, why not embrace accountability and call it out?

Moderate hypocrisy is a trend I’ve noticed in journalism, arts and culture, relationships and, biensûr, in consumerism and the wave of purpose-driven businesses, too. Surrounded by so much noise, visual and verbal attention vertigo, and trapped by our own addictive natures — pulling your head out of the whirlwind is the only way to go. More than ever, this is the time to exercise critical judgment, which is, behold, possible without the intellectual arrogance de rigueur. 

Over the past decade I’ve worked as a journalist for publications like Monocle Magazine and The Talks, and been carving a career as a strategist working with both young and established brands alike. Experiencing the overlap of what was once heralded as the “creative industries” with start-up culture allowed me even further scrutiny. 

I see, and I judge. To quote Rihanna, I “quietly troll.” And there’s another layer to my “quiet trolling” — I can’t help it, as an Easterner living in the West. There’s a sort of critical duplicity radar that I carry within me and will probably do so for the rest of my life. I am sure many coming from non-Western backgrounds will know exactly what I mean; it’s a kind of inbuilt radar for double standards; a sixth sense if you may.

Why is everyone suddenly a narcissist? How did we end up putting so much content into the world whilst absorbing so little of it? Why are we the most open and progressive we’ve ever arguably been, yet the most populist and right wing in recent history? Why is there a woman called Pinkydoll doing Lives behaving like a human slot machine — gang! gang! Does the world really need any pyjama networking parties? Why are grown professionals pontificating on the link between the death of their grandmother and their B2B business strategies on platforms like Linkedin? Why is Julia Fox so damn delightful? Why is every single new company shouting about saving the world when they are clearly not? How did we come to be so obsessed with self-actualisation? 

So here we are. I am just a girl, standing in front of an online audience, asking them to join me on this trip as we try to look at the all the spicy facets of our zeitgeist with a few more words than can fit into a one-line Twitter joke. 

Come for the Eastern European sass, stay for the deep dives.

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