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.

Over the past 13 years, Swift has perfected the pop culture feedback loop: Sheshares updates about her life and drops hints about new music, which fans thengobble up and re-promote with their own theories, which Swift then re-shares on herTumblr or incorporates into future clues. [...] "I've trained them to be that way," shesays of her fans' astute... See more

At each point between phases, I didn’t know where my next source of funding was going to come from. What I can say is that if you’re writing thoughtfully, in public, about a topic of niche interest to a certain set of people, and getting those people to engage with your work, it’s very likely that someone will come along and offer to pay you to... See more

Instead of dismissing all technology, the Amish adopt only those innovations that support their religious and communal values.

Still, a synthetic feed is theoretically much simpler—an endless scroll of dopamine-triggering engagement for users and grist for other social networks and group chats. As the Bloomberg writer and podcaster Joe Weisenthal mused on X recently, there’s a poetic coherence to this evolution: “The emergence of ‘slop’ was foretold as soon as we started... See more

GPT-4o image gen is going nuts. People are cooking ads, UIs, album art & more. 10 wild examples + prompts & how-to: https://t.co/NtNzz3nFlB

No topic—not the genocidal war and famine in Gaza, not Trumpian authoritarianism—has magnetized bien-pensant attention this year in the way that AI has. Writing on AI thus comes in every mode: muckraking (“Inside the AI Prompts DOGE Used to ‘Munch’ Contracts Related to Veterans’ Health”), scholastic (“Deep Learning’s Governmentality”), polemical... See more