Severin Matusek

Marshall McLuhan famously wrote that “the 'content' of any medium is always another medium.” In the case of neural media, the content is all of network media. This is quite literally the case with large language models and image generators trained on massive corpuses of text and imagery scraped from the web.

Where do we find the much-needed alternative? While researching my latest podcast, A Sense of Rebellion, I stumbled on a series of debates that took place in the 1970s and pointed in the right direction. Back then, a small group of hippy radicals were advocating for “ecological technology” and “counter-technology”. They weren’t satisfied with... See more

Blockchains are the internet’s native financial layer.

the ‘collaborative play’ (as Default Friend phrases it in the above tweet) aspect of TikTok really becomes apparent.

As fact grows stranger than fiction, we should embrace the surreal and try harder to imagine more outlandish fictions. We might begin by accepting that we are being lied to all the time, that most of what we hear and see is an illusion, misrepresentation, or performance—and that’s fine. Life has in many ways become a fiction, reality is vanishing... See more

The co-opting of “community” into a sales strategy is insidious, not only because it reduces likeminded groups of people to consumer demographics, but because, in an era when we’re all encouraged to cultivate our own “personal brands,” it also reduces each of us to a salesperson , seeking out likeminded people in order to sell them things , whether... See more

Any study of worldbuilding would be remiss without mention of Biosphere 2, the experimental facility constructed in Arizona for studying the feasibility of life in a manmade ecosystem. In 1994, Abigail Alling and Mark Van Thillo broke into the complex – or rather, attempted a break-out, and in the process brought the years-long experiment to an... See more