Jasmine Sun’s Project of Self-Transformation
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Jasmine Sun’s Project of Self-Transformation<br>Postscript No. 23 | The tech reporter on Sontag, Stanford, and Silicon Valley
Jasmine Sun and The New Critic<br>Aug 19, 2026<br>∙ Paid
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POSTSCRIPT
Kit Knuppel<br>*Jasmine Sun is the author of the popular Substack “Jasmine’s Substack.” She is a contributing writer to The Atlantic, has published multiple pieces in The New York Times, and was recently interviewed by Ezra Klein. Her beat is the technologies and social mores of Silicon Valley. In her writing about Chinese peptides, the “permanent underclass,” and the furor over the construction of data centers, she has become the go-to “anthropologist of disruption.” She is 26.<br>“I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation,” Susan Sontag wrote in her journals. Jasmine connected with that quote immediately upon reading it: she has been engaged in that project for a long-time. She joined the 826 writing seminars at 8-years-old, and was a champion high-school debater. At Stanford, she realized that the start-up world was a matter more of knowing the language than anything else, so she read the Silicon Valley canon. When she couldn’t get a job as a journalist, she started work at Substack, eventually becoming a project manager leading the core product team, before resigning to write full-time.<br>In her advice to college graduates of the class of 2026, Jasmine writes: “The old world was bad. Those staid institutions and rigid hierarchies are not worth mourning.” We can no longer expect that going to the right schools and checking the right boxes guarantees a life of wealth and flourishing; that world is gone. In this world where Substack, San Francisco, and AI all determine our future, we all have something to learn from Jasmine Sun.*
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TESSA What was the process of becoming a public person like for you?<br>JASMINE I am better at public speaking than I am at private speaking, I think, by quite a lot. I think it’s possible to be an introvert, and to be very socially anxious, and to be bad at parties and unpleasant to talk to in person, but to still be able to do public speaking, podcasting, and performance. Because I think public speaking is performance. I joke to people that most panels are so dry because people treat them as panels instead of stand-up comedy, and you should actually pretend that every conference panel you are at is a stand-up comedy show. Everyone is so bored at these things. The bar is very low — it’s a stand-up comedy show where your opponents work at banks, right? Even pseudo-intellectual stuff, like these podcast conversations — it’s all actually entertainment, with substance to it. I hope everyone learns something at the end of the day, but I see my duty a bit more as to entertain along the way.<br>I, unfortunately, did a lot of competitive debate growing up, so this is probably a big part of why I feel reasonably comfortable speaking on podcasts. I spent a lot of time doing the kind of debate in high school where you talk about critical theory at 300 words per minute. I feel like everybody in that community senses an affinity with others — I can name all of the other writers who used to be policy debaters off the top of my head. Ben Lerner did Policy, Sally Rooney did British Parliamentary, Nate Silver was a Policy debater, Jay Caspian Kang was a Policy debater, Kelsey Piper was a Policy debater, and Jerusalem Demsas debated, too.<br>That probably helped a lot with getting good at making arguments orally without having everything written down and thought-through beforehand — it’s bullshitting, frankly. You just learn to be really good at bullshitting when you’re 14 years old. One skill that I’m unusually good at relative to other people, which is not a very interesting superpower, is cross-examination. I love being asked hard questions. Before I was a writer, I worked at Substack, and I loved doing town hall events where everyone was angry and asking, “Why are you ruining my app? Why would you introduce video to Substack? Why would you introduce a social feed?” It was super fun to think about hard questions and try to get good answers.<br>I always really enjoyed being cross-examined, and a podcast is just a very long cross-examination.<br>ELAN I’ve noticed a lot of mention of Susan Sontag in your writing. Sontag seems the closest figure to a tech founder in the literary canon. Is that what attracted you to her?<br>JASMINE That’s an extremely good question. One of my favorite quotes is a Sontag line I read in the Benjamin Moser biography, “I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.” I’m attracted to her confidence, her contrarianism, her delusional self-belief. It is about personal agency, more than anything. She has this...