Severin Matusek

As a more right-leaning crowd of tech elite and terminally online Gen-Z founders emerged, they turned against politics in the workplace and globalism. Sharing technology globally had put Silicon Valley’s tech leadership at risk of being overtaken by China, some said.

What appealed to me wasn’t the monetary use of blockchains but the idea that they could provide the basis for a more user-centric alternative to the unpleasant state of affairs known as Web 2.0.

Most directly the movement of pop-up cities / city founding projects. These are as bald as it gets in terms of developing a new politic through the technologist lens.

what I’m interested in is not only how we set the stage, but what makes a performance so good that we all end up believing it.

Something that troubles me is the idea that maybe everything is becoming financialized because financial markets are the last remaining system capable of aggregating distributed information and enabling coordination at scale.

Executives, meanwhile, increasingly believed that they’d found their best bet in “IP”: preexisting intellectual property—familiar stories, characters, and products—that could be milled for scripts. As an associate producer of a successful Aughts IP-driven franchise told me, IP is “sort of a hedge.” There’s some knowledge of the consumer’s interest,... See more

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