Severin Matusek

A refusal of AI in creative work begins with a refusal of that product’s ideological packaging.

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.

And AI’s semivisible, infrastructural role in exploiting precarious labor (Uber’s nifty algorithm for suppressing driver wages), landlordism (RealPage’s widely used rent-hiking software), and neocolonial war (Israel’s high-tech civilian-bombing gadgetry) may already be too entrenched to stop. But professional readers and writers: We retain some... See more

The ‘90s version of not selling out meant refusing to play certain spaces or not letting your song be in a beer commercial. The ‘20s version of selling out means making things in limited quantities to play against mass culture. Though different, the responses come from a similar place. They’re both sensing a culture where, to quote Claire L. Evans... See more

Early tokenization efforts had smart ideas; they built new markets and created new ways for artists to make money. These experiments proved particularly valuable for artists with dedicated fan communities but often created parallel economies operating separately from traditional distribution channels.

The US kept interest rates at near zero from 2009 to 2022. This encouraged business models that promised world-changing outcomes, even if they were completely unrealistic and/or hostile to the public interest (eg the gig economy, self-driving cars, crypto, metaverse, AI). This came at a time of no regulation of tech and an accepted culture in... See more

How will these changes filter through to the ways our attention is captured, and where it’s directed, in years to come?

Today, of the labor market, it’s said that AI won’t take your job, someone who’s good with AI will take your job. But that feels only partially true, and only for the next few years. Those of us who’ve got our 10,000 hours, and have graduated to be delegating and being paid to think are likely to be OK.