Severin Matusek

Reality as we understand it is a phenomenon of social structures, language, and shared processes for engaging with the world. Digital media is remaking all of these in such a way that media consumption more and more resembles the act of playing an alternate reality game.

Once, we made sense of the world with sweeping narratives that provided a comforting sense of mastery. Now, with those narratives shattered beyond repair by a reality too complex for us to fathom, a new kind of coping mechanism is emerging—one where we make peace with the limits of our agency rather than pretending to overcome them. The task is no... See more

About MetalabelAbstracting the concept of a label away from the music industry: it’s a hyperstructure (borrowing the term of Jacob Horne from Zora) that I call the metalabel. It’s a person or group of people creating a common identity for a shared purpose producing public releases that manifests their point of view.

Web3 creates tools where this becomes practical. Allowing us to opt-in and out of value systems that add to our identities and contribute to understanding who we are and what is important to us

Labubu and Fartcoin are the economy people can actually participate in.

“Well, actually, the important part is the creation of the system”. The constraints of the system that produce infinite media are where the action happens. Who’s responsible for the aesthetic regime of Instagram? Is it people using Instagram, or is it the person who shaped the mechanics of the platform who determines that, if you show your face or... See more

It's the perfect crystallization of what America has become: the world's most powerful content creator.

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.