Severin Matusek

“The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology.”

The fundamental tension of narrative control in the networked era is that most companies impose a hierarchical brand management model onto what has effectively become a distributed, permissionless process. And when the emergent meme-space of networked media meets censorship-resistant infrastructures, brands take on a life of their own.

It’s not just the party that is over. The culture war is over. So...the right won? No, but the liberals’ media empire is over.

The problem isn’t that the mean has decreased. It’s that the variance has shrunk.

If you try to make your online presence more lore-worthy in order to be legible to these platforms, you could end up falling asleep at thewheel of the algorithm. You might even wake up one morning to find that the fancamyou liked to imagine watching you has suddenly become real.

The magic of the internet is that it lets us build whole new societies on top of the existing one. These new, internet-led societies have repeatedly shown the power to evolve, push, and even overtake the physical society that created them (for good and for ill).

Still, a synthetic feed is theoretically much simpler—an endless scroll of dopamine-triggering engagement for users and grist for other social networks and group chats. As the Bloomberg writer and podcaster Joe Weisenthal mused on X recently, there’s a poetic coherence to this evolution: “The emergence of ‘slop’ was foretold as soon as we started... See more

When I was 21, the cool thing to be was famous on Instagram. Now the cooler thing to be is a mystery. Anonymity is in.