Severin Matusek

“I think we've entered a space now in the world where technology has become political and basically every one of us is conflicted,” Moss said at the beginning of the discussion.

“The hunger for something shared is going to increase,” writes Stratechery’s Ben Thompson about the solipsism of the AI era.

While people want borderless money in principle, what they really want is to be a part of something.

Something that troubles me is the idea that maybe everything is becoming financialized because financial markets are the last remaining system capable of aggregating distributed information and enabling coordination at scale.

Both represent a form of aspirational displacement . This is the idea that when you can't afford a house, you buy mystery boxes that might contain a rare variant and then that’s good enough. It’s a way to perform relationship to consumer culture.

Labubu and Fartcoin are the economy people can actually participate in.

I was motivated to write Antimemetics in part because I felt dissatisfied with how we’ve unthinkingly glommed onto memetic warfare as a terminal explanation for why people do what they do. Memes and mimicry might explain some of our behavior today, but they aren’t an excuse to roll over and accept things exactly as they are.

The last three decades of being online have shown us over and over again that lasting culture cannot be automated and meaningful creativity cannot be manufactured. Both must be given the proper time, space, and tools needed to blossom organically and of their own accord. From cavemen to hippies, the core of our cultures have revolved around shared ... See more

But I’m into the new kids who are trying to make the internet how they want it, like Zane with Silk. The future has to look like something, after all...