Severin Matusek

The TV show The Wire had a phrase about how people navigate the risk of failure inside more traditional institutions: “You can’t lose if you don’t play.” In the tech world, the logic reverses. The drawbacks of a collective fallacy are smaller than not participating in the next innovation, so the rule becomes, “You only lose if you don’t play.”

Thinking of AI as an instrument recenters the focus on practice.

In Mythologies , Roland Barthes discusses how wrestling (and now, politics) uses kayfabe, the convention of presenting staged narratives and spectacles as real to capture attention and elicit a desired response from an audience.

Lorecraft is clearly a strikingly millennial school of management thinking. All the thinkers who belong in this tradition are, as far as I can tell, between about 28-35 or so. They are firmly middle-of-the-pack millennials. Founders of startups who seem to practice a sort of management by lorecraft, such as Conor White-Sullivan of Roam Research,... See more

Another way of gaming the system, which I would argue is more dangerous, is to promise something that you either know you can’t deliver, or you’re not sure that technology can deliver, but by trying to essentially reengineer society around the technology, reengineer consumer expectations, reengineer user behaviors, you and your company are planning... See more

It’s like eating macaroni and cheese every single night forever: it may be comfortable, but eventually you’re going to get scurvy. 

These refugees have labored to build an informational and communicative infrastructure that isn’t so overwhelming, one that can be bootstrapped in private or semi-private spaces where a level of trust and good will is taken for granted, and conflict can be productive and encouraging instead of destructive and terrifying. As she puts it, “If the... See more

Today’s great-power competition is unfolding in the digital era, with the focus shifting to innovation in digital technology rather than ideological competition. The U.S. government has increasingly recognised that ideological intervention yields little practical value and does not substantively enhance its technological competitiveness. This... See more