Severin Matusek

At one point I was struggling to connect the dots and our moderator, the science fiction scholar Sherryl Vint, made the very astute observation that what seems to capture my interest is the gap between models and reality.

In another timeline, Yarvin might have remained an obscure and ineffectual internet crank, a digital de Maistre. Instead, he has become one of America’s most influential illiberal thinkers, an engineer of the intellectual source code for the second Trump Administration. “Yarvin has pushed the Overton window,” Nikhil Pal Singh, a history professor... See more

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?”

In practice, this devotion to luck reveals itself everywhere from retail trading frenzies to viral overnight success stories. Instead of following predictable career ladders or carefully planned investments, people chase sudden gains, hoping to decode the next market upswing or social media glitch.

The first recorded use of ‘worldbuilding’ was in an issue of the Edinburgh Review , December 1820.

In 2024, an online experiment with 36 ChatGPT users found that use of AI can expand how many creative ideas an individual user has, but at a group level, “users tended to produce less semantically distinct ideas”. That same year, another study reached similar results; this time it was a group of short-story writers who each managed to independently... See more

Systems Ultra goes beyond narratives of technological exceptionalism to explore how we experience the complex systems which influence our lives, how to understand them more clearly, and, perhaps, how to change them.

Vibing a project – in which you simply speak the thing you want into existence by prompting – is now a popular approach.