Severin Matusek

This is super fun! Minted (& immediately opened my pack). Pure, good, internet energy. ~80 ppl collaborated (chaotically) to create 45 songs into a collection of ~21k songs (with generative cover art).

Maybe there isn’t much we can do about legislation or swaying big tech shareholder decisions, but there’s a lot of fun to be had on the feed. The feed is not safe, but posting has not been taken away from us yet.

The internet solved distribution for many types of creative work but it never solved monetization. Media was distributed at scale on ad-based platforms and streaming services, so in that sense it was monetized, but not in a way that meaningfully accrued to artists themselves.

Meme coins perform what Wernick identifies as the “double function” of contemporary promotional forms: they serve simultaneously as products and as advertisements for themselves.9 Their appeal rests in the affective atmosphere that they generate across Discord servers, forums, and social posts: the promise of sudden wealth, the pleasure of... See more

As artist and AI collaborator Refik Anadol says, “This is pure collaboration , imagination with a machine.”

As fact grows stranger than fiction, we should embrace the surreal and try harder to imagine more outlandish fictions. We might begin by accepting that we are being lied to all the time, that most of what we hear and see is an illusion, misrepresentation, or performance—and that’s fine. Life has in many ways become a fiction, reality is vanishing... See more

“utopian megalomania.”

I asked Deresiewicz if he felt anything had changed in the 13 years since he wrote the piece. Back then, he says, “I was still in that mindset of ‘selling out is evil.’” When he began research on his next book, however, “I realized that was kind of an outdated, privileged, and intensely unrealistic attitude,” he says. “Now, you don’t have a choice,... See more