Severin Matusek

Philip Rieff’s The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966) theorizes how modern societies undergo cultural transformation through moments of “engineered symbolic release”—structured breaks from normative social controls that absorb disruptive impulses rather than confront them. Every culture, Rieff argues, functions by organizing moral demands into... See more

O’Rourke is among a growing group of literary writers who have tried to answer the question in the first person, scoping out artificial intelligence’s encroachments from within the domains it most imperils. Their writing asks what AI-generated writing can or (much less often) can’t do, and how human writers can or (much more often) can’t respond.... See more

The more the world fills with slop, the more human gestures stand out and reverberate with new meaning. Accessing glib simulations of information will have become commoditized, but someone actually telling you something, anything, will seem more important than ever.

For creative people this hits especially hard as social media’s invention of “personal brands,” “influencers,” and the “Creator Economy” turned the few remaining aspects of life that hadn’t yet been marketized into the last ways we could make a living without working for somebody else. Gradually and then suddenly creative people found themselves... See more

What people such as Altman and Andreessen envision is the logical end point of technology itself—a push to eliminate cognitive resistance and bridge the gap between imagination and reality.

Editorial: the community collates notes from our weekly talks and turns them into brief bulletins. These bulletins align the community and helps us build bridges across our community to be inclusive of non-English speakers. Editorial pieces by COLORS also feature calls to participation, which allows us to explore how to create dynamic communities... See more

Emmanuel Macron, J.D. Vance and Berlin artist collectives may seem like unlikely allies, but they all agree that Europe’s “regulate first, build later (maybe)” approach to AI is not working.