Severin Matusek

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.

Such people have come to be known as the “dissident right,” a loose constellation of artists and strivers clustered around the Bay Area, Miami, and the Lower East Side micro-neighborhood Dimes Square. The milieu was drawn together by a frustration with electoral politics, Covid lockdowns, and the strictures of “wokeness.” Vice signalling has been... See more

A sponsored Instagram ad leads me to schedule a demo with a health-tech startup selling a headband that will stimulate my brain with little electrical pulses to make the worries disappear. It’s marketed as a life hack for people who are too busy to meditate.

First I’d argue that the digital world and the physical world are already deeply interconnected and getting more so everyday. The internet is a global brain that increasingly orchestrates the global body. One of the myths around Jetsons-like robots is that automation happens visibly, with a 1:1 correspondence between the thing replaced and the... See more

Participation. The token gives me permission to participate in the project and/or its culture, in whatever way that may be defined.

Spawning is different. Instead of lifting fragments, you train a model on an artist’s entire body of work and generate new material in their style. Clear lineage, but fuzzy origins. Sampling dealt in citation. Spawning touches the DNA. This distinction matters because spawning raises the stakes in ways that sampling never did. When your work trains... See more