Severin Matusek

The artists take a pragmatic stance—what Herndon calls the “sexy middle ground”—in debates around A.I. and tech. “We’ve been doing this forever,” her husband adds. “And then the culture war emerged on either side of us.” The pair don’t evangelize for godlike silicon intelligence, nor will they be smashing the machines. They also believe that... See more

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 When he began research on his next book, however, “I realized that was kind of an outdated, privileged, and intensely unrealistic attitude,” he says.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

Robert Shiller coined narrative economics, arguing that stories drive economic behavior. I think we are in a new iteration of all of this where the stories aren't just influencing economic activity, they are the economic activity. Attention is a precursor to wealth (in many ways) and speculation drives it.

ne side effect of the vibe shift is that the media establishment has started to accept that there is, in fact, such a thing as a Silicon Valley intellectual—not the glib, blustery dudes who post every thought that enters their brains but people who prefer to post at length and on the margins.

There needs to be serious regulatory thought about dealing with that, if we’re entering into a scenario in which our digital twins are potentially more economically productive than our physical corporeal existence.”

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

Not a day passes that I’m not reminded of these words from Ric Sluiter, art director of LILO & STITCH. https://t.co/illJ76a41j https://t.co/7jGUzcdLUa

It used to feel really chaotic to me. I used to be like, how do we make sense of all this stuff? There's so much stuff. There's so many different moods, tones, attitudes, no cohesive narrative. But then once you get enough distance and look in the rearview you realize: that's a body of work.

When I was 21, the cool thing to be was famous on Instagram. Now the cooler thing to be is a mystery. Anonymity is in.