Severin Matusek

This is not a rewriting of history as much as a DDoS-ing of it—flooding the zone with so much synthetic crap that engaging with reality and humanity becomes just one of many content experiences to choose from.

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

Imagining a world where a metalabel is a common paradigm that people create. Where the output is a little bit slower. Where there is more deliberation, more pairs of eyes on things. I think it’s just a healthier experience.

For me personally, it would have meant the preemptive realization that many of the ideas we theorized at Other Internet had little feasibility beyond the thinkpieces they were contained within, not because they were bad ideas, but because they never had the agency to be implemented.

If you look at any one Substack newsletter in comparison to its peers, it does appear banal and repetitive. But they are not experienced as a landscape; they are experienced individually. Each one is its own tiny world.

The real breakthroughs that enabled the revival of the 1,000 True Fans model are better understood as cultural. The rise in both online news paywalls and subscription video-streaming services trained users to be more comfortable paying à la carte for content. When you already shell out regular subscription fees for newyorker.com, Netflix, Peacock,... See more

Yarvin is calling for something simpler and more libidinally satisfying: to burn it all down and start again from scratch.

The word for world is forest1. The word for world is mother2. The world is made, and remade, through ‘worlding,’3 ‘worldmaking,’4 or ‘worldbuilding’5. The world is rendered by empire, destroyed, and remade forever after. The world is a model, a simulation, an ‘infinite game’ that is open all the way up to its borders. The world is autonomous and... See more