If they applaud you, maybe you’re not radical.

I often find myself reflecting on words we use casually, as if they were neutral, almost innocent. But then they reveal themselves to be dense with ideology—like small linguistic landmines. One of those words is talent. The other, seemingly distant, is radicality.

In the capitalist system, talent has been trained to express itself in terms of performance, visibility, monetization. It’s the ability to play the game, to stand out without breaking the circle. Talent is no longer just what you do well, but what you can sell well. Not only what you produce, but how you make it marketable. And so talent shifts from inner drive to extractive resource—something that must yield, and yield quickly.

And radicality? It too has been domesticated. Aestheticized, made trendy, marketable. Being “radical” has become a style, a pose. It’s no longer measured by how forcefully a thought can dismantle a system, but by how slightly it can bend the rules without disrupting the game. A kind of radicalism that doesn’t disturb too much, that risks nothing—except perhaps a few already-fractured certainties.

But I believe true radicalism is not compatible with this system. There will never be space, nor time, nor algorithm that can truly host it. Radical thought is not a variant of capitalism—it’s its refusal. It is ontological disobedience, not a communication strategy. And for that reason, it is destined to remain on the margins—to be expelled, distorted, or worse: ignored. But maybe it is precisely there, in that space of exile, that talent regains its meaning. Not as a resource to be extracted, but as a tension to be protected.