Severin Matusek

Last year @ibraaz_london, I had the privilege of inviting one my favourite thinkers in the world — @jaya.papaya — to curate an ongoing series about perhaps the most pressing emergent topic today: the vexed and violent relationship between technology and power. Jaya’s series examines what it means to inhabit a world of extreme contradictions and to... See more

Williams also wrote that to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing. Despair right now is extremely convincing and extremely profitable. Hope would be the opposite - something that doesn't need you to feel desperate in order to work.

But just as individuals use various things to simulate control, institutions are increasingly using spectacle to simulate stability they can no longer guarantee. Spectacle is the solution9, because seriousness requires accountability and accountability requires consequences and consequences require institutions that are willing to enforce them.... See more

Is there that much difference between the (1) manosphere playbook of extracting value from people weaker than you, taking no responsibility for the damage, and moving to the next target and the (2) private equity model of identifying undervalued assets and extracting operating efficiencies and returning capital to shareholders?

But it’s not. As Benjamin Fogel wrote about Andrew Tate, leader of the Manosphere:

He is a symptom of a new brand of capitalism unencumbered by any illusions about progress. For Tate and his followers, the whole system is a scam and the only way to succeed is by pushing others down and clawing your way to the top.

Our tools are also heavily focused on the individual. As Raymond Williams wrote in his 1975 book Television: Technology and Cultural Form:

The earlier period of public technology, best exemplified by the railways and city lighting, was being replaced by a kind of technology for which no satisfactory name has yet been found: that which served an at

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It’s a version of Ivan Illich’s Limits to Medicine, where he argues that the medical establishment itself produces illness by making people dependent on professional intervention rather than building health. That effect carries across all these optimization tools, creating dependency on the fix rather than addressing the cause. The optimization... See more

The existing institutional landscape tends to silo relevant areas of expertise. There are few organizations set up to provide opportunities for integrated projects that include broad philosophical inquiry and the production of code. Existing work that has passed through all three stages is often not fully recognized as having done so, since the... See more

Blackbird Spyplane: That might have been the last time when a majority of us still saw technology as liberatory. Now technology feels mostly like the prerogatives of capital working through us, looking for new markets, annexing us, making everything worse.