Severin Matusek

systems of moral demand no longer hinge on obedience, guilt, or inherited belief—but instead center emotional relief and self-optimization.21 Rieff identifies a profound shift in the symbolic order of the therapeutic age in which “controlling symbols”—those that once upheld communal order—have been displaced by “releasing symbols,” which prioritize... See more

A confusing contradiction is unfolding in companies embracing generative AI tools: while workers are largely following mandates to embrace the technology, few are seeing it create real value.

The caveat to that is that writing is just one format of many in the information landscape (hence the notes, video and podcast feeds on Substack). If you ask me, the real business is ideas (Brian Morrissey, who I referenced a while ago, has a very helpful explainer on this here) . There are more opportunities to make money from writing, but don’t... See more

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

We are not undergoing a crisis of culture but rather a crisis of epistemology.

Because brands are constrained by the number of people who come in contact with them, they are directly affected by the accessibility and velocity of information.

Author Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" to describe the gradual decline of services as they prioritize value extraction over value creation for users, a process he views as an inevitable consequence of platform capitalism.

The word for world is forest1. The word for world is mother2. The world is made, and remade, through ‘worlding,’3 ‘worldmaking,’4 or ‘worldbuilding’5. The world is rendered by empire, destroyed, and remade forever after. The world is a model, a simulation, an ‘infinite game’ that is open all the way up to its borders. The world is autonomous and... See more