Severin Matusek

We're all participants in a cognitive economy that trades in attention, belief, and behavior. Shape the feed, shape the future. What happens when everything becomes an attention-speculation machine?

“I think people feel uncomfortable in the world today. They’ve decided that their home is their sanctuary. It’s not easy to get them to leave.”

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.

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

Memetic warfare is not new, but it’s beneficial to contextualise with new zeitgeists to identify new tactics of feed control.

“The model is the art work,”

Today's sincerity is less about saving the world and more about building a world worth saving, starting with your own corner of it.

NFTs offer the promise of scarcity and authenticity for digital goods. NFTs aren’t the only way to create scarcity and authenticity online — trusted, centralized entities such as banks (and platforms such as Twitter and Apple) do it within their verticals, and blockchain tech is evolving to address myriad environmental and security concerns. So the... See more