Severin Matusek
@severinmatusek
Writer and strategist, founder of co—matter
co-matter.comSeverin Matusek
It’s 6:52AM, coffee is brewing, we’re on page 666, Jon Baskin is reading, it’s a sunny day, we’ll be here at EARTH for the next 12 hours or so, everyone’s welcome:
49 Orchard/ https://youtube.com/@earth_net49/streams…
The rise of Onlyfans can be interpreted as a “commodification of intimacy” where, unlike porn, adult creators can now provide lonely men intimacy at scale over DMs.
The Loneliness Economy: How can technology help us belong?
The canonical example of the 2010s was probably the trend-forecasting agency K-HOLE, which was formed by four art-school friends who, while grifting fashion-industry jobs in New York, became ‘interested in the total collapse that comes with being the thing itself’. As it turned out, they were exceptionally good at ‘the thing itself’ – publishing... See more
Gary Zhexi Zhang • The Artist of the Future
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
Ava Kofman • Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America
In Lanier’s telling, this digital landscape shifted once the success of Google’s ad program revealed that you could make a lot of money on user-generated creative output, which led to the rise of social-media companies such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Initially, these companies emphasized their simple, elegant-looking interfaces and their... See more
Cal Newport • The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class
Layoffs. Side hustles. Freelancers everywhere. Elaborate new titles.
What even is a “career path” now?I don’t think this is just a downturn
It's not a glitch, it’s a whole new operating system
“market but also all risk borne on individuals not orgs and with that the loss of expertise building, domain knowledge, and institutional knowledge. It means everyone will eventually be starting from scratch with every process on ever project, ending up in the same problem crypto people have where they are constantly "inventing" things that have existed for centuries.”
With institutions, the material support for production is separated from its consumption, audience, and transmission. On the platforms, all of those need to be operating on the same rails to enable the totalizing optimization for the growth of the platform itself.
Mike Pepi • This Utopia Does Not Exist: My talk @ MIT
Technologist tended to view their world as somewhat insulated, despite having mass impact on culture and society at large. But over the past decade, at minimum, there’s been far more collisions of scenes. Both production oriented and deeply intellectual.
Reggie James • Political Expectations
How do projects, headless or not, find product-market fit in the Web 3 era? Well, in some senses they don't. In a highly decentralized system, these operations invert such that the community finds product solutions themselves: "market-product fit."