Severin Matusek

Generative AI is disruptive, is transformative, and is reducing friction, but the economic incentives for using it are geared far less toward supercharging human potential and much more toward producing abundant slop.

Meme coins perform what Wernick identifies as the “double function” of contemporary promotional forms: they serve simultaneously as products and as advertisements for themselves.9 Their appeal rests in the affective atmosphere that they generate across Discord servers, forums, and social posts: the promise of sudden wealth, the pleasure of... See more

The biggest reason that the last two hundred years have seen a series of conflicts between the employers who deploy technology and workers forced to navigate that technology is that we are still subject to what is, ultimately, a profoundly undemocratic means of developing, introducing, and integrating technology into society.

Show up with your head a little low, show enthusiasm. That’s how culture works.

Cyberfeminism—a capacious term the Index seeks to both bring into view and complicate—asks us to consider how the integration of technology into our lives should affect our understanding of the gendered self and how technology itself can serve as a tool of liberation, oppression, and intellectual dissemination.

Looking at memes from the outside, we see an ever-evolving meta-language dynamic hypercontextual structure, but at its core, it simply operates on a single energy source: empathy.

The internet solved distribution for many types of creative work but it never solved monetization. Media was distributed at scale on ad-based platforms and streaming services, so in that sense it was monetized, but not in a way that meaningfully accrued to artists themselves.