Severin Matusek

I don’t think it’s a coincidence we’re so fiercely protecting our intellectual property in an era when it’s harder and harder to purchase physical property.

I keep thinking about something Ezra said in our conversation - Trump embodies the attention economy so completely that he's become indistinguishable from it.

And AI’s semivisible, infrastructural role in exploiting precarious labor (Uber’s nifty algorithm for suppressing driver wages), landlordism (RealPage’s widely used rent-hiking software), and neocolonial war (Israel’s high-tech civilian-bombing gadgetry) may already be too entrenched to stop. But professional readers and writers: We retain some... See more

I argued before that “social media” was an alibi for injecting more TV into people’s lives to take advantage of increased network connectivity — that we had to be persuaded that it was a pro-social thing to do to carry little TVs around and watch them at every possible moment. Conflating friendship and entertainment was part of that campaign. Now... See more

When I first saw this, I thought “Did anyone read this?” That’s always the question when encountering something that you think is god awful. But in the AI era, I found myself asking a follow-up question: “Did anyone write this?”

Le Guin and Butler use the world-building capacities of the speculative and science fictions as a cypher into the complex social, cultural, and ecological conditions of life here on Spaceship Earth[2]. In their work, Butler and Le Guin established a more empathetic kind of world-building, using the genres as a way to think critically about society... See more

Writing, more visibly and unquestionably today than ever, is inherently networked. It begins and remains connected to its subject, and to everything else, becoming part of it. It acts. It does work. It lives. When we write, we reconfigure the world.

n the vacuum of this interim period we're offered up a brief window of reflection. Before another cycle of froth and evangelism sets in (cough cough AI), perhaps it's a good time to ask ourselves about what we just went through?