Severin Matusek

This universalism of meme-feels is almost as resilient as the cheesy “unbreakable” human spirit itself. One can even draw parallels along the late David Lynch’s Transcendental Mediation* chart. Oupi Goupi, again, attests to this. Lakaka’s TikToks transcended language and cultural barriers because beneath all those layers of irony, it tapped into... See more

The structural focus of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ science fiction alike – science fiction that accounts for scientific accuracy and logic in the first instance, and for social or political systems in the second – is more easily translated to policy or innovation than any other genre of media. It provides a ready-made framework that runs all the way from... See more

The thousand true fans thesis builds on the original ideals of the internet: users and creators globally connected, unconstrained by intermediaries, sharing ideas and economic upside. Incumbent social media platforms sidetracked this vision by locking creators into a bundle of distribution and monetization. There are, correspondingly, two ways to... See more

But what if there is no underlying logic? Or, more to the point, what if the logic shifts based on the platform's priorities? If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you'll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.

According to a draft of an unpublished Substack post, his newest plan is to promote Urbit as an élite private club whose members, he believes, are destined to become “the stars of the new public sphere—a new Usenet, a new digital Athens built to last forever.”

The startup was called Tlon, a name I later learned came from a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” tells of a secret society that conjures a new world by describing it.

This is a chance to bring warmth and fun into an increasingly lonely and isolated world.

Then it hit me: lorecraft is a natural and adaptive intellectual response to the automation of vast swathes of managerial/leadership functions, and organizational processes. You end up doing more of what the machines don’t.