Severin Matusek

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.

A number of recent studies, while small in scale, have suggested that we grieve the loss of friction that comes from skipping over time-intensive or frustrating tasks, particularly in creative scenarios.

By volume alone, slop may be the most visible and successful by-product of the generative-AI era to date. It is also a hallmark of what I’ve previously described as a collective delusion around artificial intelligence—where the breathless hype and imagined future of building a godlike superintelligence and curing cancer collides with the dull... See more

This report, which will drop over the course of five days, also marks the launch of Season 1 of $STREAM — our new research token designed to incentivize and reward collaborative research, knowledge-sharing and community-building in music and technology.

The "checks and balances" no longer come from Congress or the courts, but from the feed.

What’s the difference between what I do and content creation, or advertising myself, instead of advertising for other people? I think these lines that we draw have become so blurry that it creates a very interesting tension between what counts as serious work and not.

These refugees have labored to build an informational and communicative infrastructure that isn’t so overwhelming, one that can be bootstrapped in private or semi-private spaces where a level of trust and good will is taken for granted, and conflict can be productive and encouraging instead of destructive and terrifying. As she puts it, “If the... See more