Severin Matusek

closed net cultures such as One Direction fandom do produce a lot of creative work, but it’s basically like the inside jokes you come up with at summer camp rather than innovations that will diffuse into the mainstream.

Oupi Goupi proves our brainrot connects us, and it’s on a deeper level that’s inaccessible to bots, slopists, and even CEOs. It requires an understanding of a universal culture that could forever remain alien to them: meme culture.

Held at the Bradbury Building and the historic Hearst Estate, the Imaginative Assemblies used blindfolded deep-listening, tactile modeling, and facilitated dialogue to probe this central question. This process collected 30 hours of audio (18GB), 4,500+ photos (16GB), and 60+ hours of film (6.7TB) across all sessions. The resultant report documents... See more

Yet as Gavin Mueller writes in Breaking Things at Work , Luddism—born as a revolt by artisan weavers against their proletarianization by manufacturing capital—was far from “a simple technophobia.” The Luddite rebellion, he notes, “was not against machines in themselves, but against the industrial society... of which machines were the chief weapon.”

Influencer culture, self-enhancement medicine, cheatware, min/maxing... the signs were coming for a while, but now we have legit, permanent systems at the heart of everyday life that force the decoupling on all of us.

Most directly the movement of pop-up cities / city founding projects. These are as bald as it gets in terms of developing a new politic through the technologist lens.

One of the keys to NFTs will be portability across mediums. A Twitter blue check can’t exist on Instagram, but the NFT equivalent of a Twitter blue check can — and deliver credible authenticity, thanks to that NFT deed. This is the metaverse vision of interoperability that could help make digital belongings feel similar to physical belongings.

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.