Severin Matusek

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

AI-made material is itself a waste product: flimsy, shoddy, disposable, a single-use plastic of the mind.

There needs to be serious regulatory thought about dealing with that, if we’re entering into a scenario in which our digital twins are potentially more economically productive than our physical corporeal existence.”

Lorecraft is perhaps a kind of self-soothing behavior in individuals caught up in a highly automated, non-nurturing, and inhuman work environment.

The internet created the false impression that all socializing is authentic and improvisational. We’re discovering social lives are planned once again.

If a technology has emancipatory potential, it is not the would-be feudal lords who will realize it: It is the community of power-users, the weirdos and dreamers—working together—who will bring it to fruition.

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

What’s the difference between what I do and content creation, or advertising myself, instead of advertising for other people? I think these lines that we draw have become so blurry that it creates a very interesting tension between what counts as serious work and not.

In 2021, Ethiopia actually began building its own social media site as a response to Facebook’s alleged incitement of ethnic massacres. And more recently, Japan funnelled taxpayer money into the dating app Tapple, in a bid to fix the nation’s declining marriage and birth rates.