Severin Matusek

One significant thing these organizations and social technologies share is that they all seek to create new social paradigms, to stand apart from legacy institutions of finance and care.

Susan Leigh Star, a sociologist and theorist of infrastructure and networks, wrote in her 1999 influential paper, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure”:

“Study a city and neglect its sewers and power supplies (as many have), and you miss essential aspects of distributional justice and planning power. Study an information system and neglect its... See more

Rather than advancing financial or technical solutions, meme coins operate primarily through the hyper-visual and social logics of internet culture. They inherit the self-referentiality and sarcasm characteristic of memes more broadly, understood here by Limor Shifman’s definition as “units of popular culture that are circulated, imitated, and... See more

The new technologies that we’ve been seeing over the past 20 to 30 years in particular are dependent on a cycle of funding from multiple sources. Notably, sometimes really significant funding from venture capital sources. They almost by necessity have to sell themselves as more than what they feasibly are. They’re selling a fantasy, which in some... See more

Optimising the personal well-being of the creator vs the creator listing in the algorithm.Making things that feel like they matter vs something that grabs people’s attention.

Citarella noted that he’s been warning, for more than half a decade, that too many people remain under the mistaken impression that “what happens on the internet isn’t real.” He added that “the professional commentary class” has been particularly insulated from the power of digital discourse, because “they pay attention to the legacy sources of... See more

In fact, this points to something deeper than a mere recession, i.e. a cyclical downturn. Perhaps we’re looking at a secular change: a structural reordering of what “creative work” even means. The trad creative economies of ideas, taste, and differentiation are being replaced by economies of scale, prediction and synthesis. In this regime,... See more

SummaryYancey argues that the way we define our self influence how we value things. As a result of the move from collectivism to individualism, a new form of creating our identities is created called the post-individual. Post-individuals define their identity as much through their individual traits as through the groups and communities they... See more