Severin Matusek

how in a post pandemic world, IRL is the new counterculture.

In 2023, we launched an editorial series about AI called Shades of Intelligence. We learnt a lot about the way creatives were beginning to work with this new tech, harnessing it for tasks ranging from creative direction to project rollout. Since then, the needs have shifted. After two years of rapid change, Light and Shade focuses on the wider... See more

A focus on personal wellness created an unintended side effect: a retreat from the public arena, and a shift in the distribution of power ever since.”

For creative people this hits especially hard as social media’s invention of “personal brands,” “influencers,” and the “Creator Economy” turned the few remaining aspects of life that hadn’t yet been marketized into the last ways we could make a living without working for somebody else. Gradually and then suddenly creative people found themselves... See more

the ‘collaborative play’ (as Default Friend phrases it in the above tweet) aspect of TikTok really becomes apparent.

I’m mostly here in Edge Lanna on a mission myself: To help run a week-long event called Protocol Worlds, a part of the Summer of Protocols program I help run. The event is a simulation focused on the idea of holographic cities — digital city-like social realities (ideally crypto-flavored of course, and preferably Ethereum-flavored) projected onto... See more

Yarvin argued that the institutions of civil society, such as Harvard, would need to be shut down. “The idea that you’re going to be a Caesar . . . with someone else’s Department of Reality in operation is just manifestly absurd,” he said.