Severin Matusek

Delivering real utility outside the crypto bubble means matching the user experience consumers and businesses already get from traditional solutions. And yes, that requires building a bridge between old and new rails—often through compromises that look downright irrational to crypto purists.

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

closed net cultures such as One Direction fandom do produce a lot of creative work, but it’s basically like the inside jokes you come up with at summer camp rather than innovations that will diffuse into the mainstream.

Is it clear to you when a trend forecast is coming from amateurs versus the professionals?

ES: I mean, no. I think an amateur and a professional have kind of an equal chance at hitting the nail on the head. True flashes of cultural insight happen where you’re lucky enough to just put the right words against the cultural phenomenon at the right... See more

If AI is able to suddenly pump slop into our environment it’s only because we already turned on the faucets ourselves.

With an aggressive rollout on the calendar, we’ll soon see whether crypto can break into the mainstream—particularly if Worldcoin can prove that cryptography means privacy and convenience.

With the platform era now coming to a close (partially due to AI slop’s overreach) and AI supposedly driving cognitive costs to zero, counterintuitively, our institutional structures will enter a growth phase in response to a new demand for shared narratives.

Now our President, along with his lieutenant content-generator Elon Musk, is working at the pace of an internet that has been relentlessly accelerating for eight years.