Severin Matusek

In other words, instruments can surprise you with what they offer, but they are not automatic. In the end, they require a touch. You use a tool, but you play an instrument.

Truth is only important relative to the lore object, whether that be fictional media, or the real life of an internet micro-celebrity.

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.

If a technology has emancipatory potential, it is not the would-be feudal lords who will realize it: It is the community of power-users, the weirdos and dreamers—working together—who will bring it to fruition.

About post-individualismWe’re not going back to collectivism. It’s a new state called post-individualism.Post-individuals define their identity by both their own individual traits as well as which groups and ideologies they voluntarily subscribe to.

The TV show The Wire had a phrase about how people navigate the risk of failure inside more traditional institutions: “You can’t lose if you don’t play.” In the tech world, the logic reverses. The drawbacks of a collective fallacy are smaller than not participating in the next innovation, so the rule becomes, “You only lose if you don’t play.”

Another way of gaming the system, which I would argue is more dangerous, is to promise something that you either know you can’t deliver, or you’re not sure that technology can deliver, but by trying to essentially reengineer society around the technology, reengineer consumer expectations, reengineer user behaviors, you and your company are planning... See more

SummaryYancey argues that the way we define our self influence how we value things. As a result of the move from collectivism to individualism, a new form of creating our identities is created called the post-individual. Post-individuals define their identity as much through their individual traits as through the groups and communities they... See more