Severin Matusek

When someone’s political leanings begin to change, most of the time it is because they have fallen into new circles, not because they have learned something new from personal experience about how the government or the economy works.

If the visual rhetoric of meme coins trades in irony, nostalgia, and populist spectacle, their deeper logic might reveal an even more profound dynamic: the transformation of speculation itself into a mode of promotional and ideological production.

My friend Chris Beiser says that social forms are a kind of capital that is essential to the structure of society and production. To put it a bit differently, the repertoire of forms dictates the kinds of lives that are available to us.

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

Kelin’s students are already power users. “I had one student who has three Claude subscriptions because they keep hitting the rate limits,” she says. “They get timed out of one, switch to the next. Timed out again, switch to the third.” By the end of the semester, several students told Kelin that her AI course was the most practical class they’d... See more

I don’t think it’s a coincidence we’re so fiercely protecting our intellectual property in an era when it’s harder and harder to purchase physical property.

Enshittification truly is how platforms die. That's fine, actually. We don't need eternal rulers of the internet. It's okay for new ideas and new ways of working to emerge. The emphasis of lawmakers and policymakers shouldn't be preserving the crepuscular senescence of dying platforms. Rather, our policy focus should be on minimizing the cost to... See more

the ‘collaborative play’ (as Default Friend phrases it in the above tweet) aspect of TikTok really becomes apparent.

The co-opting of “community” into a sales strategy is insidious, not only because it reduces likeminded groups of people to consumer demographics, but because, in an era when we’re all encouraged to cultivate our own “personal brands,” it also reduces each of us to a salesperson , seeking out likeminded people in order to sell them things , whether... See more