Severin Matusek

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.”

Lorecraft is perhaps a kind of self-soothing behavior in individuals caught up in a highly automated, non-nurturing, and inhuman work environment.

The new technologies that we’ve been seeing over the past 20 to 30 years in particular are dependent on a cycle of funding from multiple sources. Notably, sometimes really significant funding from venture capital sources. They almost by necessity have to sell themselves as more than what they feasibly are. They’re selling a fantasy, which in some... See more

Seu has spent her young career straddling the meticulous world of academia and her desire to write, speak, curate, and create for a public audience.

What’s most insidious about this is that early-stage atrophy feels like productivity. The person thinks they’re getting so much done. Look at all this output. Look how fast I can turn things around. Meanwhile, they’re actually hollowing out the very capabilities that made them valuable in the first place. The output looks good. The velocity is... See more

It’s not just the party that is over. The culture war is over. So...the right won? No, but the liberals’ media empire is over.