Severin Matusek

As we train our sights on what we oppose, let’s recall the costs of surrender. When we use generative AI, we consent to the appropriation of our intellectual property by data scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. We abet the acceleration of a social media gyre that everyone admits is making life worse. We accept the... See more

I love that summary, particularly how it catches the message of hope. Filterworld isn’t a wholesale complaint about social media; it’s a quest to figure out how we can have something better than our self-reinforcing and flattening algorithmic feeds. That is what I want people to get from reading the book, in the end. Even though digital platforms... See more

The caveat to that is that writing is just one format of many in the information landscape (hence the notes, video and podcast feeds on Substack). If you ask me, the real business is ideas (Brian Morrissey, who I referenced a while ago, has a very helpful explainer on this here) . There are more opportunities to make money from writing, but don’t... See more

“The model is the art work,”

Geopolitical power once flowed through armies and treaties, but today it courses through silicon wafers, server farms and algorithmic systems. These invisible digital infrastructures and architectures shape every aspect of modern life.

Personal storyAfter leaving Kickstarter started Yancey started to investigate the system of valueWhich led him to publish a book called This Could be Our Future.

My secret, cynical theory is that we are so completely numbed and overwhelmed by information these days that we simply don’t think in these more abstract terms anymore (and I think it’s that numbness that I want to capture in this piece somehow). Or maybe we still do, but it all gets lost in idle musings on Twitter or in group chats or messages to

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