Severin Matusek

Dank memes, deep-fried memes, shitposting, feralposting, goblin mode, doomscrolling, or whatever insinuates seemingly senseless online content consumption were all essentially describing brainrot. The term, however, is iconic because it marks a significant turning point. It aptly describes the beginning of our biological coalescence with the... See more

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

What’s notable is the rhetoric about Sora introducing a Cambrian explosion of human creativity. Liberated from the bottlenecks of charisma, skill and craft, real creativity – i.e ideas – can now flourish and be channeled via text prompt.

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.

But what if there is no underlying logic? Or, more to the point, what if the logic shifts based on the platform's priorities? If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you'll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.

Simon Denny Weirdly, I just mentioned Avery and Jon in a talk I did at a conference where Mat was also speaking, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, at the invitation of Hito Steyerl’s Emergent Digital Media class. I prepared a talk called ‘Vibe Coding the Future’, presenting the context behind my AI plotter paintings. Part of the talk was about... See more

The anti-social century is the result of one such cascade, of chosen solitude, accelerated by digital-world progress and physical-world regress. But if one cascade brought us into an anti-social century, another can bring about a social century. New norms are possible; they’re being created all the time. Independent bookstores are booming—the... See more

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.

Is it clear to you when a trend forecast is coming from amateurs versus the professionals?

ES: I mean, no. I think an amateur and a professional have kind of an equal chance at hitting the nail on the head. True flashes of cultural insight happen where you’re lucky enough to just put the right words against the cultural phenomenon at the right... See more