Severin Matusek

Has the use of AI tools allowed her to speed through the tedious parts of her work, freeing up time to focus on the more stimulating aspects? “Speed isn’t really the point,” she replies. “That discourse usually comes from people who don’t really use the tools in interesting or meaningful ways. There’s so much clickbait content, like: ‘How I set up... See more

“Like we’ve created a really positive space on the internet,” Wylie added. How many people can really say that? A place where earnestness was a function not a bug, while managing to retain its cool. An almost impossible task, in other words, which Blackbird Spyplane continues to make look easy.

Now ask yourself: How much physical stuff is yours? Think of every item in your house: books, paintings, photos, CDs, heirlooms, trophies, etc. What’s the market value of all that? As our lives move further online, so will our stuff, and we’ll need some sort of infrastructure that allows us to own it.

Executives, meanwhile, increasingly believed that they’d found their best bet in “IP”: preexisting intellectual property—familiar stories, characters, and products—that could be milled for scripts. As an associate producer of a successful Aughts IP-driven franchise told me, IP is “sort of a hedge.” There’s some knowledge of the consumer’s interest,... See more

Yet as Gavin Mueller writes in Breaking Things at Work , Luddism—born as a revolt by artisan weavers against their proletarianization by manufacturing capital—was far from “a simple technophobia.” The Luddite rebellion, he notes, “was not against machines in themselves, but against the industrial society... of which machines were the chief weapon.”

When chance so often triumphs over sweat, the real opportunity lies in writing narratives that thrive precisely because they reject old rules, and in doing so, create surprising, life-affirming possibilities that might just become the new mythologies we live by.

There have been studies that suggest this AI-productivity hypothesis may check out. In 2024, researchers analysed the output of over 53,000 artists and 5,800 AI adopters on a major art-sharing platform and found that generative tools do, in fact, boost the number of works users post per month. Similar studies across other sectors have made... See more

This is Vibe Theory: an expression of elite anxiety masquerading as a politics of resistance. It is also exemplary of what the tragic ur-European philosopher Walter Benjamin once called the “aestheticization of politics,” which in this case is the result of the odd incentives that ensue when the art world makes the invitations, pays the speaker... See more

And a random Lana Del Rey review I stumbled across on Pitchfork a while ago said the job of the writer is “to whittle the raw material of life into meaning, worth preserving