Severin Matusek

It’s not just the party that is over. The culture war is over. So...the right won? No, but the liberals’ media empire is over.

A recent Pew Research Center survey finds that roughly one-third of individuals who used chatbots for news found it “difficult to determine what is true and what is not.” AI has created a genuine infrastructure of meaninglessness and disorientation.

Swift's genius status also demonstrates how little tension remains between art and business. In my new book Blank Space , I discuss the rise of what I call entrepreneurial heroism : “the glorification of business savvy as equivalent to artistic genius.” Avant-garde artists never made billions, because ostranie is a bad strategy for securing... See more

The Trump Administration has taken full advantage of this algorithm brain. We’ve entered the pure extraction phase of the economy, where things are created solely for consumption rather than purpose. I don’t mean this as a moralistic argument, it’s purely incentives, but it’s puzzling.

What kind of memetic monsters evolve in a primordial stew made of fractalized identities, multipolar geopolitics and viral media? Conspiracy theories, of course.

Right now AI is fun parlor trick; it’s closer to personal tool than anything that will be deployed reliably enough to do the kind of economic shifting that its investors are betting it will.

According to a draft of an unpublished Substack post, his newest plan is to promote Urbit as an élite private club whose members, he believes, are destined to become “the stars of the new public sphere—a new Usenet, a new digital Athens built to last forever.”

People really desire community, so I’m trying to build a whole community around The Slowdown. In 2023, we celebrated our five-year anniversary and threw this big dinner at Eleven Madison Park, inviting more than 25 former Time Sensitive guests.

Digital belongings exist on the internet, but there aren’t that many types of them. On Fortnite you can acquire guns and outfits. On Reddit you gain badges. Point is: There’s a lot of stuff on the internet, but there isn’t much stuff that’s yours.