FIELD NOTES - Edition 01
when silence does the work. quand le silence fait son travail.
Field Notes is my new research-driven essay series. Not trend reports. Not hot takes.
Short studies on how culture, attention, and power actually move (once you stop looking at outputs and start looking at structure).
This first one started with something small.
I keep seeing SZA everywhere.
Not in a rollout way. Not in a “new era” way.
Just… around.
She’s not flooding the feed. She’s not disappearing either.
She shows up enough to stay felt.
And that’s what made something click.
We keep treating silence as distance, when sometimes it’s paired with access. Less output, more signal. Fewer drops, more weight.
Presence doesn’t behave like it used to. It’s not a stream you keep feeding until it dries up. It’s closer to mass. It accumulates, or it doesn’t.
That’s why silence sharpens relevance for some and erases others. It only works when something underneath is already doing the work. Without that, restraint doesn’t create anticipation. It creates a vacuum.
That tension is what this edition of FIELD NOTES explores. Not as advice. Not as a manifesto. Just a way to understand when absence creates pull, when hyper-presence builds scale instead of gravity, and why presence increasingly lives outside campaigns.
The full report is only available to subscribers and is also available in French. Would love to know what y’all think. :)
Loved it.