Severin Matusek

Rather than building tools that compete with them, the smarter strategy is to create incentives for their participation.

See, the good news about the culture war is the values did change. You can be trans, gay, etc. The bad news is not everyone has to like it. Wanting legal protections is one thing. Wanting consistent representation in the media until your group or lifestyle attains universal acceptance is childish. You know that will never happen.

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.

Perhaps one way to motivate and encourage regulators and enforcers everywhere is to explain that the subterranean architecture of the internet has become a shadowland where evolution has all but stopped. Regulators’ efforts to make the visible internet competitive will achieve little unless they also tackle the devastation that lies beneath.

I asked Deresiewicz if he felt anything had changed in the 13 years since he wrote the piece. Back then, he says, “I was still in that mindset of ‘selling out is evil.’” When he began research on his next book, however, “I realized that was kind of an outdated, privileged, and intensely unrealistic attitude,” he says. “Now, you don’t have a choice,... See more

Emmanuel Macron, J.D. Vance and Berlin artist collectives may seem like unlikely allies, but they all agree that Europe’s “regulate first, build later (maybe)” approach to AI is not working.

In the 21st century, those who control digital infrastructure control the conditions of possibility for democracy itself. Europe faces a choice: build sovereign technological capacity or accept digital colonization.

The collaboration thing is always: how do I talk to someone one lunch table over and learn their thing? I don’t like going to a music industry event and talking about marketing because I already know that conversation. I want to talk to Abe Burmeister from Outlier about how they do drops, how they run their website. Why don’t you do wholesale? Why... See more