Severin Matusek

Coffee preferences are personal and abundant. The world is big enough for espresso machines and French presses. And which machine the barista uses depends on who they’re serving.

Art preferences are similar. So when I hear talk about how AI is going to replace artists, I think to myself, the world is big enough for both. Or when I see tweets about... See more

but their apparent pervasiveness underlines the consensus that the public internet exists only for the purposes of yelling into the void

As we train our sights on what we oppose, let’s recall the costs of surrender. When we use generative AI, we consent to the appropriation of our intellectual property by data scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. We abet the acceleration of a social media gyre that everyone admits is making life worse. We accept the... See more

When I was 21, the cool thing to be was famous on Instagram. Now the cooler thing to be is a mystery. Anonymity is in.

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

We're witnessing what I call the "labor rebound effect"—productivity doesn't eliminate work; it transforms it, multiplies it, elevates its complexity. The time saved becomes time reinvested, often with compound interest.

“The model is the art work,”