Severin Matusek

In today’s post-therapeutic market, irony, detachment, and self-optimization have become substitutes for justice, truth, morality, or political resolve.

If AI is able to suddenly pump slop into our environment it’s only because we already turned on the faucets ourselves.

Unfortunately, advertising has been ingrained into the internet as the basic model for so long and to such an extent that it’s hard to envision online life without the systematic manipulation of attention and all its evils. So we’re bound to wind up here, at the bitter end of “content.” Which is a good excuse to withdraw deeper into books, movies,... See more

The fundamental tension of narrative control in the networked era is that most companies impose a hierarchical brand management model onto what has effectively become a distributed, permissionless process. And when the emergent meme-space of networked media meets censorship-resistant infrastructures, brands take on a life of their own.

The voices that helped shape Light and Shade include: Noman Bashir, computing and climate impact fellow at MIT; James Bridle, artist, writer and technologist; Alex de Vries, PhD candidate at VU Amsterdam’s Institute for Environmental Studies and founder of Digiconomist; Linda Dounia Rebeiz, artist, designer and writer; Shaolei Ren, associate... See more

If Silicon Valley’s Web 2.0 era was defined by founders playing God on their computers by creating social networks and other services, the new era is about founders angling to create ‘superintelligent’ computers that may one day surpass humans and become a kind of ‘God’ in the machine.