Severin Matusek

If you try to make your online presence more lore-worthy in order to be legible to these platforms, you could end up falling asleep at thewheel of the algorithm. You might even wake up one morning to find that the fancamyou liked to imagine watching you has suddenly become real.

Yet as Gavin Mueller writes in Breaking Things at Work , Luddism—born as a revolt by artisan weavers against their proletarianization by manufacturing capital—was far from “a simple technophobia.” The Luddite rebellion, he notes, “was not against machines in themselves, but against the industrial society... of which machines were the chief weapon.”

Rather than building tools that compete with them, the smarter strategy is to create incentives for their participation.

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

The way that we engage with media on the internet has become laden with fandom energy. All narratives on the internet have become subsumed under the umbrella of‘content’, no matter their scale or veracity. They all have the potential to gather lore, because they can all be read the same way—like fictional media franchises. Thisincludes everyday... See more

A focus on personal wellness created an unintended side effect: a retreat from the public arena, and a shift in the distribution of power ever since.”

All that it means to be a brand is to have a disposition and an attitude toward the world, which people trust you to deliver on. And to build a brand is to follow your intuition, and find your disposition.