Severin Matusek

I argued before that “social media” was an alibi for injecting more TV into people’s lives to take advantage of increased network connectivity — that we had to be persuaded that it was a pro-social thing to do to carry little TVs around and watch them at every possible moment. Conflating friendship and entertainment was part of that campaign. Now... See more

A recent Pew Research Center survey finds that roughly one-third of individuals who used chatbots for news found it “difficult to determine what is true and what is not.” AI has created a genuine infrastructure of meaninglessness and disorientation.

When I first saw this, I thought “Did anyone read this?” That’s always the question when encountering something that you think is god awful. But in the AI era, I found myself asking a follow-up question: “Did anyone write this?”

I am experiencing Vibes, a new social network nested within the Meta AI app—except it’s devoid of any actual people. This is a place where users can create an account and ask the company’s large language model to illustrate their ideas.

t’s key to research the need for an idea, not only focus on the solution, but what it actually solves. Get intimate with that problem and its many dimensions, understand how it shows up in people’s lives.

The anti-social century is the result of one such cascade, of chosen solitude, accelerated by digital-world progress and physical-world regress. But if one cascade brought us into an anti-social century, another can bring about a social century. New norms are possible; they’re being created all the time. Independent bookstores are booming—the... See more

Death by a billion likes.

What Altman is describing is a world of creativity without craft.