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.

I describe us not as a media company, but as a culture-forward media company, meaning that we view culture as the most important thing that’s feeding the planet.

Right now AI is fun parlor trick; it’s closer to personal tool than anything that will be deployed reliably enough to do the kind of economic shifting that its investors are betting it will.

As awful as all this is, the workarounds themselves are often delightful and clever, testaments to the wit and grace of marginalized communities. For example, sex-workers call themselves "accountants." Homophobia is called "cornucopia" and "LGBTQ" becomes "Leg Booty."

This creativity isn't limited to people I admire or agree with: anti-vaxers have a... See more

In Web1, because of our age and because of the technical skills that were needed, we couldn't really participate in it.

That's the interesting thing about AI: it is based on historical data sets, on the entire corpus of human creation. This is an opportunity to examine our past: Who are we? What does this data represent? How can we prevent ourselves from repeating the same problems? Sure, the amount is overwhelming – but much like with our history, we can analyse it... See more

In the face of a monolith-in-the-veldt-level era-heralder, what surfaces is an earnest, almost midcentury humanism, interested in charting the distinctions between man and machine.