Severin Matusek

Peloponnesian War of Robot Overlords

Put simply, a network state is an online community that materializes in the physical world with the goal of achieving meaningful collective action.

“It’s unsurprising that ketamine has taken over as the ‘drug of choice’ for young people, because of its disassociating effects, which allow you to be close to one another, while being isolated in your individual k-holes. It also makes it harder to look at your phone.” Plus, let’s face it, it’s hard to look all cool and serious while K-holing.

In other words, to be authentic is to be without outside influence and to commit to a way of being.

In fact, this points to something deeper than a mere recession, i.e. a cyclical downturn. Perhaps we’re looking at a secular change: a structural reordering of what “creative work” even means. The trad creative economies of ideas, taste, and differentiation are being replaced by economies of scale, prediction and synthesis. In this regime,... See more

Author Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" to describe the gradual decline of services as they prioritize value extraction over value creation for users, a process he views as an inevitable consequence of platform capitalism.