Severin Matusek

Like two loving siblings caught in an eternal tug-of-war, technology and culture are not separable.

I asked Deresiewicz if he felt anything had changed in the 13 years since he wrote the piece. Back then, he says, “I was still in that mindset of ‘selling out is evil.’” When he began research on his next book, however, “I realized that was kind of an outdated, privileged, and intensely unrealistic attitude,” he says. “Now, you don’t have a choice,... See more

If you try to make your online presence more lore-worthy in order to be legible to these platforms, you could end up falling asleep at thewheel of the algorithm. You might even wake up one morning to find that the fancamyou liked to imagine watching you has suddenly become real.

Now ask yourself: How much physical stuff is yours? Think of every item in your house: books, paintings, photos, CDs, heirlooms, trophies, etc. What’s the market value of all that? As our lives move further online, so will our stuff, and we’ll need some sort of infrastructure that allows us to own it.

“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.

They recast speculative investment as a valorized form of cultural participation—transforming economic risk into a mode of self-expression, and volatility into a kind of gamified solidarity.