Severin Matusek

And as I’ve spent more time reporting on Silicon Valley culture this year, one of the trends I’ve been most surprised and disturbed to observe is not merely a shift to the right, but the emergence of a nihilism about whether tech should serve humans at all.

The creative recession is fueled both by diminishing demand for creative work as well as diminishing the margins that once made that work viable. The distance between creation and consumption has been compressed: discovery is automated, and the legacy hallmark of creatives, producing difference, has been flattened into an infinite scroll of... See more

The belief that the Earth is flat is not in and of itself problematic for most people, since most people will never need to circumnavigate the globe. However, the effects on adherents’ social relationships are problematic. The belief both signals and generates frame shear, the lack of mutual intelligibility, with all except those who share... See more

Yarvin argued that the institutions of civil society, such as Harvard, would need to be shut down. “The idea that you’re going to be a Caesar . . . with someone else’s Department of Reality in operation is just manifestly absurd,” he said.

As others have said, influencing the world today is not about writing new manifestos, but instead, developing new protocols for how we operate and determining how things are produced, how they circulate, and in turn, how reality is materially composed.