Severin Matusek
@severinmatusek
Writer and strategist, founder of co—matter
co-matter.comSeverin Matusek
To try to “tell the news” as it needs to be told: poetically. From project to project, to swing between extremes, the soberingly real and the wildly imaginative – something I think our generation does with great skill.
Hans Ulrich Obrist and ISOLARII's Sebastian Clark Discuss Fashion, Commerce, and Publishing
Like any new technology, crypto is far from inevitable—no matter what its boosters claim. More precisely, decentralization—crypto’s core principle and its most significant contribution to reshaping markets—is far from a sure thing.
What Everyone Gets Wrong About Crypto Adoption
A social currency is a tokenized asset that represents value within a specific community, often used to incentivize engagement, reward participation, and strengthen brand or community loyalty. It operates similarly to traditional currency but derives its worth from social interactions, reputation, and influence.
Luca Schnetzler • Luca’s Substack
This is Vibe Theory: an expression of elite anxiety masquerading as a politics of resistance. It is also exemplary of what the tragic ur-European philosopher Walter Benjamin once called the “aestheticization of politics,” which in this case is the result of the odd incentives that ensue when the art world makes the invitations, pays the speaker... See more
Is European AI A Lost Cause? Not Necessarily. | NOEMA
Institutions embody the collective agreement and fabric of meaning that, above any external forces, builds, as opposed to extracts from, cultural and social value. In the age of platforms, the challenge is to reconfigure and revive institutions, employing “intra-institutional technology” that augments their missions without cannibalizing them,... See more
Mike Pepi • This Utopia Does Not Exist: My talk @ MIT
With institutions, the material support for production is separated from its consumption, audience, and transmission. On the platforms, all of those need to be operating on the same rails to enable the totalizing optimization for the growth of the platform itself.
Mike Pepi • This Utopia Does Not Exist: My talk @ MIT
21% of 1272 freelancers surveyed reporting that the rise of generative AI has negatively impacted the demand for their services 25 but without appropriate legislation it is incredibly difficult to demand compensation. Whilst change is certainly fear-inducing in and of itself, navigating these changes with no safety net in place to ensure basic... See more
Live, Laugh, Love… and LLM | AND ORS
Layoffs. Side hustles. Freelancers everywhere. Elaborate new titles.
What even is a “career path” now?I don’t think this is just a downturn
It's not a glitch, it’s a whole new operating system
“market but also all risk borne on individuals not orgs and with that the loss of expertise building, domain knowledge, and institutional knowledge. It means everyone will eventually be starting from scratch with every process on ever project, ending up in the same problem crypto people have where they are constantly "inventing" things that have existed for centuries.”
But what we’re not talking about, what we’re not worrying about nearly enough, is the other side of the coin. If we’re running at speed at this, if we’re pushing everyone to use AI because we think it’s some sort of panacea to every business challenge we have, what about atrophy? What about the erosion of expertise, of knowledge, of critical... See more