Severin Matusek

We're witnessing what I call the "labor rebound effect"—productivity doesn't eliminate work; it transforms it, multiplies it, elevates its complexity. The time saved becomes time reinvested, often with compound interest.

I love that summary, particularly how it catches the message of hope. Filterworld isn’t a wholesale complaint about social media; it’s a quest to figure out how we can have something better than our self-reinforcing and flattening algorithmic feeds. That is what I want people to get from reading the book, in the end. Even though digital platforms... See more

Our information system has split into an endless number of micro communities, from group chats to online fandoms, all learning about news and major events through increasingly bizarre digital formats.

When I polled a group of friends, one person heard the news in the comment section of a bird's Instagram account, another learned of it in a Discord... See more

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

The study’s authors warned that habitual AI use could lead to “cognitive debt,” a condition of LLM dependency whose long-term costs include “diminished critical inquiry,” “increased vulnerability to manipulation,” and “decreased creativity.” It turns out your brain, like love or money, can be given away.

I was motivated to write Antimemetics in part because I felt dissatisfied with how we’ve unthinkingly glommed onto memetic warfare as a terminal explanation for why people do what they do. Memes and mimicry might explain some of our behavior today, but they aren’t an excuse to roll over and accept things exactly as they are.

Creative work by inspiration is seen as unpaid and without value. Creative work for commercial purposes is worth compensation if it meets the brief. Institutions remain the primary mediators of payment, whether they're museums, corporations, or technology platforms.