Severin Matusek

What’s most insidious about this is that early-stage atrophy feels like productivity. The person thinks they’re getting so much done. Look at all this output. Look how fast I can turn things around. Meanwhile, they’re actually hollowing out the very capabilities that made them valuable in the first place. The output looks good. The velocity is... See more

At each point between phases, I didn’t know where my next source of funding was going to come from. What I can say is that if you’re writing thoughtfully, in public, about a topic of niche interest to a certain set of people, and getting those people to engage with your work, it’s very likely that someone will come along and offer to pay you to... See more

It’s actually a pretty good time to be a solo operator in media in general, though — there’s a lot of opportunities to build a business with self-publishing and subscriptions, while audiences have adapted to a media diet built around relatable individuals rather than old institutions. Add on the usual revenue streams of speaking engagements,... See more

In another timeline, Yarvin might have remained an obscure and ineffectual internet crank, a digital de Maistre. Instead, he has become one of America’s most influential illiberal thinkers, an engineer of the intellectual source code for the second Trump Administration. “Yarvin has pushed the Overton window,” Nikhil Pal Singh, a history professor... See more

A network of Moving Castles allows us to escape binary thinking of dark forests and clearnets to instead think about many publics as one network.

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The US kept interest rates at near zero from 2009 to 2022. This encouraged business models that promised world-changing outcomes, even if they were completely unrealistic and/or hostile to the public interest (eg the gig economy, self-driving cars, crypto, metaverse, AI). This came at a time of no regulation of tech and an accepted culture in... See more