Severin Matusek

This is where the labor issues of new media dovetail with those of warehouse workers and delivery drivers. Amazon's planned worker chat app, "Shout Outs," bans a long list of worker-friendly words, including "union," "harassment," "grievance," and "injustice."

The first recorded use of ‘worldbuilding’ was in an issue of the Edinburgh Review , December 1820.

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his is how it feels to live

in the golden age of slop, a catchall word used to describe the spammy quality of easy-to-generate AI material. I’ve begun to think of it as the digital equivalent of an invasive species. Just as the introduction and replication of a novel plant or animal usually results in some form of ecological harm and threatens... See more

With the platform era now coming to a close (partially due to AI slop’s overreach) and AI supposedly driving cognitive costs to zero, counterintuitively, our institutional structures will enter a growth phase in response to a new demand for shared narratives.

What appealed to me wasn’t the monetary use of blockchains but the idea that they could provide the basis for a more user-centric alternative to the unpleasant state of affairs known as Web 2.0.

There is a clear pattern for all four companies [Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google]: each controls, to varying degrees, the entry point for customers to the category in which they compete. This control of the customer entry point, by extension, gives each company power over the companies actually supplying what each company “sells”, whether that be... See more

To me, it’s very important to think about speculative fiction and worldmaking as two approaches for better orienting ourselves to the present, rather than conjuring escapist utopian futures that will never arrive.

With institutions, the material support for production is separated from its consumption, audience, and transmission. On the platforms, all of those need to be operating on the same rails to enable the totalizing optimization for the growth of the platform itself.