Severin Matusek

Internet people like to talk about “the stack,” or the layered architecture of protocols, software and hardware, operated by different service providers that collectively delivers the daily miracle of connection. It’s a complicated, dynamic system with a basic value baked into the core design: Key functions are kept separate to ensure resilience,... See more

The thousand true fans thesis builds on the original ideals of the internet: users and creators globally connected, unconstrained by intermediaries, sharing ideas and economic upside. Incumbent social media platforms sidetracked this vision by locking creators into a bundle of distribution and monetization. There are, correspondingly, two ways to... See more

but their apparent pervasiveness underlines the consensus that the public internet exists only for the purposes of yelling into the void

Le Guin and Butler use the world-building capacities of the speculative and science fictions as a cypher into the complex social, cultural, and ecological conditions of life here on Spaceship Earth[2]. In their work, Butler and Le Guin established a more empathetic kind of world-building, using the genres as a way to think critically about society... See more

As Bogost himself puts it in a 2024 update on the state of social media: the rise of Bluesky “is a relapse, not a fix”.

Something that troubles me is the idea that maybe everything is becoming financialized because financial markets are the last remaining system capable of aggregating distributed information and enabling coordination at scale.

As the rest of the internet gets overtaken by bots and AI-generated content and oligarch-owners livestreaming megalomaniacal presidential candidates, the self-contained publications controlled entirely by professional humans win out.