“A decade and a half ago, the ultimate status symbol was the BlackBerry. Owning a BlackBerry meant that you didn’t have to be stuck at a desk in a strip-lit office to remain connected. It meant you carried the office around with you at all times. If you had a BlackBerry, you were signalling to the world that you were busier than most people. It meant you were needed. (Heritage, S. 2023)”
Today, the flex has inverted entirely: the greatest privilege is to be chronically offline.
This is connected privacy, part 1 of 6 post-luxury status symbols, a series where I dive deep into the shift of status being derived from products to behaviours.
Life Under Panoptic Surveillance
We’re not just the product anymore; we’re the labour, the market, and the marketing department. Every element of your individuality is harvested as data to feed an algorithmic ecosystem that has no end, no ground, no ceiling. You give your data, that data is used to design products tailored to your desires, you buy them, and then - because they reflect your identity - you promote them yourself, for free, to your network. The machine runs on our own behaviour.
With 70% of the world’s population carrying a mobile phone, we are both the resource and the reward. The internet is the first perfectly circular business model. In this culture of overexposure - it’s only natural that it becomes desirable to opt out.
Strategist Nick Susi has argued that big tech’s hegemonic scale is birthing new forms of countercultural expression, with users’ relocating into the web’s “dark forest” - areas hidden from algorithmic extraction.
Matt Klein and Remi Carlioz delivered perhaps the most comprehensive account of this shift in their excellent essay on camouflage culture, a growing movement based on secrecy and exclusivity:
“It’s the dinner party you’re not invited to, Substack paywalls, algo-speak, double meaning emojis, linguistic drift and slang, Chatham House rules, ephemerality, vibes, off-off-Broadway, niche subreddits, printed zines.”
Meanwhile, Kyle Chayka has observed that having no followers has become its own form of status. It’s here we observe the curdling of resistance into luxury: as invisibility becomes desirable, it becomes a marker of privilege. Those who can afford to opt out, who have offline networks robust enough to sustain them, whose careers don’t depend on algorithmic visibility, are signaling something the rest of us cannot. The counterculture becomes the status symbol.
This creates a fundamental contradiction. A status symbol only functions as a status symbol if others can perceive it. But the moment it becomes perceptible, it ceases to be private. You cannot signal that you’re unreachable without, by definition, being reachable enough to signal it.
Hence, connected privacy.
The Problem With Going Dark
There’s a darker reality beneath camouflage culture that Klein and Carlioz identify: its invisibility surrenders any chance of mass influence. While the privileged can afford to go dark - retreating to private Substacks and exclusive dinners - marginalised communities still have to suffer the consequences of disappearing. Visibility, for all its extractive violence, remains a prerequisite for political power. You cannot organise in the shadows. You cannot shift the Overton window from a dinner party no one’s invited to.
Going dark ultimately serves power instead of negating it. The ability to opt out of visibility is itself a privilege that reinforces existing hierarchies. The truly powerful don’t need to perform their status online because their status is already legible in rooms that matter. The rest of us are left performing our way toward legitimacy on platforms designed to extract value from that performance.
So the status signal isn’t actually in being offline. It’s in having the capital - social, economic, cultural - to be selectively online in ways that benefit you without feeding the machine more than necessary.
What Actually Signals Status
Without an algorithm shoving recommendations down your throat, can you still know the right places to eat, the right authors to read, the right music to listen to? It means you have genuine proximity to power. You live at the source, not the feed.
This requires:
Broad networks, engaged differently. Not parasocial relationships with influencers, but actual friends with actual taste. This is basically an analogue algorithm - people curating for you, and trusting in their curation. You need to ask the one who knows.
Constant curation. Trying many things, refining over time, trusting your own judgement rather than waiting for someone to digest trends into bullet points. You have to become a constant curator yourself.
Intergenerational friendship. Young friends keep you proximate to what’s emerging, before it’s codified. Older friends provide historical context that prevents you from mistaking a retread for an innovation.
Multi-perspectival research. You have to be either very sociable or very nerdy. If talking isn’t your thing, research what the “authorities” in certain topics are saying online. And don’t research only in your own country. If you like fashion, don’t just read your local Vogue. What are Tokyo, the US, the UK, and Latin America saying? Seeing many perspectives on the same topic helps you build your own heat map of where we stand.
What unites all of this is selective friction. You’re deliberately making information harder to access. Adding friction back in - asking a friend instead of Googling, reading a print zine instead of scrolling, hosting the dinner party despite the mountain of dishes that ensue - is how you reclaim agency.
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But let’s be clear about what this requires. Time. Disposable income to try things that might not work out. Geographic proximity to cultural centres or the resources to travel to them. Social capital to get invited in the first place. These aren’t democratically accessible tactics. They’re the behaviours of people who already have enough security to refuse optimisation.
The status signal is circular: you can afford to be selectively online because you have capital, and being selectively online signals you have capital. The rest of us are still grinding for algorithmic visibility because we don’t have another choice.
The irony, of course, is that writing about the luxury of being offline requires being extremely online. The status symbol of disconnection can only be signaled through connection. But perhaps that’s the point: the real flex is navigating the network with enough grace that no one can tell you’re performing at all.
Real privacy, in the end, might be the privilege of meeting your friend in a park and speaking mouth to ear, with no microphones, no sensors, no background data collection. But we’ll get to that in the next post-luxury status symbol.
Read the next post in the Post-Luxury Status Symbols series:
Echoing what others have said, this is a great reflection on the online/offline conundrum.
The offline -> online -> offline reversal reminds me of the historical anecdote that pale skin used to be a class status symbol indicating wealth and freedom from manual outdoor labor. As the story goes, sunbathing rose to popularity in the 1920's as western societies moved from agricultural to factory labor and the working class was now indoors, while the upper class gained time for travel and a tan!
Has being chronically online burnt us and we're now looking for respite in the digital shade?
This reminds me of how a few years ago, the uncurated and nonchalant "photo dump" became a thing. Suddenly, after years of very intentional, stylised posts, it was cool to throw together a seemingly random, imperfect selection of photos to show that you, indeed, did not care and need not show up for your online audience. I feel like the first ones to do so have no graduated to trying to be offline.