Severin Matusek

That Silicon Valley is now mostly ancient history. Today, the tech has become harder, the perks are fewer and the mood has turned more serious. The nation’s tech capital has shifted into its artificial intelligence age — some call it the “hard tech” era — and the signs are everywhere.

There’s a sense of omnipotence: where Talos was powered by “divine ichor”, the blood of the immortal gods”, AI is powered by vast amounts of data collected from billions of (non-consenting) internet users which is then processed and stored in vast facilities such as OpenAI’s Stargate I in Abilene, Texas.

Second, there are early cohorts of founders who will aim to find vibe-alignment with their capital. This is the bull case for more opinionated or smaller firms at the early-stage. I’m talking my own book here, but as the mission actually starts to matter again (not in the “wink-wink” sense), if a core value-add of VCs has been “brand halos”, then... See more

. I did marketing there, which basically amounted to drafting tweets that promoted a hypothetical product in unflinchingly positive terms. I remember on several occasions being reprimanded for not using enough emojis in my tweets.

One significant thing these organizations and social technologies share is that they all seek to create new social paradigms, to stand apart from legacy institutions of finance and care.

Indigenous futurism and Afrofuturism, for example, raise the query, what would science, technology, and industry look like if it did not depend—as it does now—on environmental extraction and human subjugation? Yet others, such as Sinofuturism and Gulf Futurism, simply ask, how would we see the future if the core concepts of “progress” arose from... See more