Severin Matusek

Right now, it’s really easy for us to just constantly say AI will make you better. AI will give you superpowers. AI will do the grunt work in your day-to-day job to free you up for higher-order thinking. We’ve become evangelical about it. In our rush to augment everybody, we’re pushing out Copilot licenses like they’re going out of fashion. We’re... See more

The creative recession is fueled both by diminishing demand for creative work as well as diminishing the margins that once made that work viable. The distance between creation and consumption has been compressed: discovery is automated, and the legacy hallmark of creatives, producing difference, has been flattened into an infinite scroll of... See more

There's a very brief window of time. In this moment, right here and right now, some folks are eagerly starting projects, building assets and creating values. Others, in a pattern we've seen again and again, are waiting, fearfully, ignoring what's happening and hoping for the best.

Social knowledge is thus more epistemically fraught than personal knowledge. However, it is critical to our ability to function and coordinate and, furthermore, it is what gives that ever elusive quality of “meaning” to our lives.

And as I’ve spent more time reporting on Silicon Valley culture this year, one of the trends I’ve been most surprised and disturbed to observe is not merely a shift to the right, but the emergence of a nihilism about whether tech should serve humans at all.